Monday 31 August 2015

LIQUORICE BAKED DOUGHNUTS



The Book of Cake is the book I should have written in the past two weeks or so as I was once again unconsciously sliding my way to self-sabotage, one mouthful of fried plantain at a time, and it should have been a sacred book with an austere but not too daunting cover and vintage-looking brownish pages because we have decided that’s in fashion this season (even in the UK), and you would find it inside drawers in bed side tables in hotel rooms.
In this book of cake, it is written that it’s completely fine to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown as you spot a metaphor being translated into a simile in a learning session guide in Brazilian Portuguese and to take a day off work just so that you can go for lunch with someone from work and so is to burst into tears right in the middle of Regent Street on a Sunday afternoon because you’ll be turning thirty in a second but your mum and dad still sponsor all your clothes and drain unblockers and maple syrup; because The Book of Cake suggests that whatever happens, you eventually get a grip and bake your life away and make those liquorice doughnuts that you had decided to bake on that one night out with the other two musketeers; and put to good use the precious liquorice root powder that your mamma hunted down for you in Italy (and chocolate. There’s got to be chocolate); and why not, consider patenting and marketing them as ‘Pontefract Doughnuts’ or ‘Rough Doughnuts’ or ‘David (Francis Wilson) Doughnuts’, as they may well make you rich and famous and people would want to own a 1% share of your baking business.
What The Book of Cake in essence teaches you, is that sometimes you’ve got to allow yourself to help and be helped; to take two lemon sweets from the meeting room (one for Dave); to let the boys wait in an orderly queue, although not for unreasonably long; to pay bills and use vouchers; to treat someone with overpriced organic pizza squares; to be treated with Indian samosas, lunch-packed especially for your cab ride home; and to make cake for people that are all special like that and may not even realise it; because as it turns out, sometimes you can be quite difficult to read, kind of like a book that was never written.
The Book of Cake was also never written (neither was The Book of James for that matter), but if it ever will be, the very last verses would read something very pregnant and introspective, such as, 
‘Create a little bit of havoc
but then make cake
share it with loved ones
and go fix your stupid head’.
Amen.

Monday 17 August 2015

PEANUT MUDDY BUDDIES



Life sometimes assumes the form of a weird tragicomedy in multiple acts, one of those ones where the characters are impeccably dressed but wear funny shoes and constantly use puns and say the word amazing one time too many and compliment each other’s hair (not yours).
In cases like this, it may happen that you more or less suddenly just lose the plot.
Whether this is irreversible or not, it’s too early to say; but warning signs in no particular order include having three-and-a-half-hour motion graphics tutorials on Thursday nights to learn how to bring into existence videos of hand-drawn badgers performing an eternal dance on the screen of an anachronistic Victorian cinema, saving them as looping GIFs named ‘badgerLove5’ (it did take 5 attempts. After Effects wouldn’t accept the fact that it had to be forever), and finally publishing them on a vegan baking blog because it makes perfect sense to feature a dancing badger called James side by side with ninety-one respectable recipes of egg-and-dairy-free cake (fine, no honey either); also going food shopping for the week and coming back with two monster jars of peanut butter, a pack of gum and a box of cereal; and spending sunny Saturday afternoons handcrafting heart-shaped peanut butter chips from cocoa butter because who gives a duck about having a pool.
But then again, when the aforementioned jars of peanut butter and the aforementioned box of cereal and last but not least the homemade peanut butter chips with an embarrassing shape are finally put to good use (on a sunny Sunday afternoon) and they turn into some badass nutty Muddy Buddies, you just end up munching on them peacefully sitting on your sofa and secretly imagine their name being pronounced condescendingly with an upper middle class accent, and you also come to the conclusion that after all you don’t really mind having lost the plot, if this means that you get to write your own new one, where at this one unforeseen point in the story two people wake to find each other on the very same page.

Thursday 13 August 2015

Monday 10 August 2015

BLACK BEAN CHOCOLATE CAKE



A cake for that one time I stopped drawing because I was filling paper with weird shapes and not trees and the sun and the birds; for the novel I wrote when I was eight; for the most terrible nightmares of snakes and monsters (and for waking up from them on command); for the curliest hair; for not listening to my mum; for having thought for half a second that someone who undervalues invisibility could be a better version of me; a cake for master plans and for not having one; for making someone coffee without a reason, for things that happen in due course, for illusions, robots, badgers, business cards, birthday cards, ellipses.

A cake for James and me.


Wednesday 5 August 2015

APRICOT SANDWICH CAKE



When you find yourself sliding more or less gracefully along a path consisting of new flats, new working-week catastrophes, new friends and new definitely-not-friends, new routes home through the park (or around it, when it’s dark), new and annoyingly smaller Clippers, new (?) bastions of human progress that go under the name of gift cards, new accents, new motion graphics teachers at the University of Life (please, if that’s ok), new pens and candle holders, and new perspectives on what is real and what is not; when all this happens, you have to stop for a minute and take time to celebrate an old ally. Who, in fact, today gets even older (but we don’t mind because we like him greatly). With a double-decker apricot cake all frosted up and covered in dinosaur sprinkles and popping candy, because that's how we roll. Haaappaay Birthday Adam.