FIG GINGER NUT CHEESECAKE

It’s good practice to write handover notes when you leave for a more or less significant period of time, even when flying eight hours behind and then back feels like you’ll only be gone for the night, and when the state of you in the limbo of the pre-departure is not too dissimilar to when you pour a cheesecake mixture into the tin before going to bed and think, duck knows if this will ever set.

To those who are left to spend the night time all by themselves in my absence (and to stare at the fridge like lunatics), I wish to pass on the following words of wisdom.
:

- If the thing doesn’t set, you can always have fig soup. Or just accept it’s a disaster (there’s beauty in every stumble), and start a baking blog about cheesecake disasters. It might take off, James says.

- Write stuff. If you’re too shy, invisible-write stuff.

- Masquerades are a necessary evil, but that doesn’t justify dressing up for the best part of twenty-five years just because it so happened that you forgot to take your costume off (you got there eventually).

- Royal Mail may also be a necessary evil, but even when they get confused and send your Italian dad’s parcel off to India (I’m known for not holding grudges), it doesn’t mean you are authorised to disrupt the continuum of space and time on the entire office floor shrieking like a banshee at customer service employees.

- Escape as and when deemed needed, but make sure you reserve every bit of your anxiety for what you’re escaping to.

- Foxes are underrated. Walk with them.

- Sit in cafes with the most serious expression in your repertoire and type on your laptop with the solemnity of manner you’d have when applying for a programme manager job. No one needs to know you are secretly creating cute animations out of hand-drawn badgers, photos of Birmingham and vintage trumpets.

- Five-storey buildings with a sinking-ship feel are not suitable for the emotionally unstable. Stick to orphanages, cafes in art galleries, edit suites and coffee shops that sell custard tarts whenever possible.

- Winter is cold. Summer can also be cold. Sometimes there is no summer. Wear jumpers; allow yourself to be hugged. This will keep you warm.

- Eat fried plantain, appreciate double entendres, and try not to demolish Persian cafes with your outstanding gracefulness, as this may result in getting banned from Peckham and sent back the other side of the river in eternal exile.

- Work is a sentence.

- Things fall from the sky onto your head. Most times you wish they didn’t. But they can make for nice stories. Have your notebook ready.

- Things fall from the sky onto your head. And right into place after that. Be astounded, smile.

:

It would be nice if this was finally my journey to the end of the night; and if that’s the case for you, and someone’s enlightened notes help you make it through to the morning (even if it’s the darkest, rainiest Monday morning and your eyes are all puffy), you may also wake up to find that the cheesecake you made has set during the night.

That officially gives you the right to this wonderful thing known as, cake for breakfast; and it’s a sign that not all is lost.

I may be back in time for a slice, but bye for now.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF

JAMES & ME

act II

'symphonies'

GOLDEN OREO BANANA PUDDING

There should be a master Process Document in place, which states that Oreo desserts like this are a skeleton key to escape mazes of rainy days, sad songs in loop, Dave-lessness, Dom-lessness, and old habits (the bad ones).

It’s been covered at length already that Oreos are the food of gods; they constitute a perfectly acceptable dinner party gift (if accompanied by banana bread beer) and there’s absolutely no evidence to date that they will not make you part-divine. As for the golden side of it, I woke up one morning knowing that opulence is not for me (I’m a dolphin after all); but you’ve got to be grateful for the yearly availability of special edition biscuits, even when this means dealing more or less maturely with this worrying tendency of theirs to go all sold-out in half a second (like I even give a duck now, because did you know, Morrisons: CANADA). And when a five-storey office space makes it so difficult to be a freegan and feast to your heart’s content on beetroot crisps, lemon sweets and over-ripe fruit, the addition of bananas is simply a legal requirement.

It’s soon to be disclosed whether I shall be the chosen that gets to write a Document so crucial for the whole of humanity (or perhaps just me. If so, may I please add: a slot in the diary of a busy working professional and part-time choir singer. Vegan banana cake. Art galleries. Animation tutorials. Vegan banana cake in art galleries after animation tutorials. Blue eyes, and the fine art of making peace with them), and in the meantime, I’m reminded that sunny days and disco music and shiny happy people don’t necessarily make for good stories, and most definitely don’t turn Oreos into gold.

PEANUT PUMPKIN CREAM BISCUITS

It’s ever so tiring to play the part of the child prodigy for half a week and to dress up in rotation in all the different best versions of yourself that people kindly plan on turning you into (it must be on the top 5 list of mankind’s charity goals for 2015); especially when you have since the very start taken an oath to not wear leggings as trousers in the outside world, thanks for trying, and the only thing you can possibly share with Kim Kardashian is olaplex, because your hairdresser Sam is a star like that.

In such cases, the recommended course of action is as follows:

1) do pick one of these bragged-about best-version onesies to try on, even if it’s just in the fitting room. You’ll know which one you like best when it’s a smiley one (and when someone sings a song and you can sing along cause you remember the lyrics from your childhood);

2) partake in this special-child pantomime, fine; but only if you are rewarded with couscous, sticks of rock, peanuts and/or other types of valuable goods.

This point is least painful to follow if there is some sort of vague evidence of you actually being all prodigious like that – perhaps a metaphysical entity called Ninety-Nine Jam Jars; or just James;

which leads us to point number three:

3) keep writing humourous handover notes at work, as someone may read them on the train home and secretly smile; speak Italian; daydream about Canadian raw vegan restaurants and shoe shops between a sales training PowerPoint slide and the next; jump on a bus to Hackney like the old times just to get hold of a pack of peanut flour, to go join the other forty-five types of flour you already have in your cupboard (this also means you’re entitled to cake for dinner, and a decaf-almond-milk-latte-please, and some puzzled looks from the barista); sip coffee in the park and talk about dolphins whilst people dismantle the office; and bake. Bake some peanut pumpkin cream sandwich biscuits, because you woke up one morning to find that autumn was there, and got all inspired by a place you can’t wait to visit. They will also provide you with all the energy you need to make your best prodigy child impression. Tried and tested.

ANPAN - JAPANESE RED BEAN BUNS

My baking destination of choice this week just had to be Japan, and as I wait for a Reykjavik guide book to be delivered to the office (if they don’t knock it down before then) and secretly, or not-so-secretly, go back over my steps and stare in a mixture of shock and excitement at tickets for a plane that instead will take me half a world away in under three weeks’ time, I kind of see a pattern there.

This time, your favourite escape (and bake) artist (that would be myself. Hi) is sharing a recipe for some fluffy vegan Japanese bread buns that are filled with sweet red bean paste, and do not contain any traces of maple syrup, dates (that’s probably for the best), nor Atlantic halibut (definitely for the best).

Two mouthfuls and you can forget other people's sinking ships and perhaps also your ones, and let your compass (head?) spin again for a little while.