guest list

 

Dear Celebrants,

It's weird, but for the first time, the Naked Ladies were late for my birthday!  They are so late, that I had given them up for lost.  I have been out under the window looking, prodding at their swollen bulbs, for weeks!  Nothing.  Last week, I stopped bothering to look- and I know you know where this is going- and today, I looked at them quite by accident, the way you might glance at an unwatched pot, and, there were the buds!  They bloomed at my Mother's a few weeks ago, right on time, and along the road at the place where there used to be a house, and in ditches, yards, and gardens for 300 miles, but the ones here, the ones I call 'mine' were late; I mean, they are late.  We will have a cake anyway, I think, to celebrate their arrival!  This cake, which I call Valerie's Vanilla Cake, because it is based on Valerie Gordon's recipe from her fine cookbook Sweet.

Valerie's Vanilla Cake

7.5 ounces of butter (if you use salted, and you can, don't add the salt in the recipe)

1 cup of granulated sugar

1 tablespoon of golden syrup (or light corn syrup, or honey, or just skip it anyway, this isn't rocket fuel!) 2 tablespoons vanilla extract (or the fabulous vanilla paste)

Beat it all up to fluffy.

2 tablespoons sour cream (or crème fraîche*, or heavy cream, or yogurt)

3 whole eggs

1/3 teaspoon salt (or not, see butter above)

Whisk the eggs and cream together, in a separate bowl.

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/3 teaspoon baking powder

Mix that up a bit, in a separate bowl, and then add the dry ingredients and the eggy mix to the fluffy butter/sugar in three or four alternating batches.  Once it is combined, smooth it down into a 9 inch diameter, 2 inch deep greased and floured pan.  Bake it for 28 to 35 minutes, at 350, rotating it halfway through the baking.  Let it cool in the pan, then unmold the cake and frost it, or eat it.  

I put a cream cheese icing on this one; and you can too, by beating up some butter and cream cheese with confectioner's sugar and adding vanilla.  I use a lot of vanilla, the lovely paste kind, about a tablespoon, and I am not at all measuring in my proportions of the rest, but, say 3 ounces of cream cheese, and 2 or 3 of butter, a pinch of salt, and then maybe 2 to 3 cups of confectioner's sugar?  Add the sugar in 1/2 cup increments, and stop when you think it tastes right.    

* Make your own, if you like: a video, a written recipe.

Black Birthday Cake

Dear Baking,

For Emily Dickenson's birthday today, bake this cake:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/emily-dickinsons-black-cake

a fruitcake.

If you don't want to mix 22 eggs (and why not?  Will you go to your grave a 'small batch only' kind of baker??!) then you can read this poem by Ms. Dickinson instead:

       How happy is the little stone
       That rambles in the road alone,
       And doesn't care about careers,
       And exigencies never fears:
       Whose coat of elemental brown
       A passing universe put on;
       And independent as the sun,
       Associates or glows alone,
       Fulfilling absolute decree
       In casual simplicity.




In choosing this particular poem, I read a great many from my big Collected volume of Dickinson, and every first line is stellar, and some of the second lines are too.  I loved the first lines clipped from their remainders, and strung together randomly.  I like them this way so much I typed them up on thin, translucent paper, and then sewed them onto vaporous dollops of ink

I love very much the idea of Emily Dickinson; so much that I visited her house, the place she spent her 'recluse' days.  It was a fine pilgrimage.  I object somewhat to the word recluse which is always associated with her- It smacks of a belittling tendency towards female poets of any age. 

Still, I love the idea of her holing up and writing from her windowsill, and I will revere that notion of her for a while longer.  I expect Emily Dickinson's lack of interest in certain things would come under this writer's definition of resistance (explicated in this excellent article) which she calls 'just not.'

découpé

Dear Fans,

It's David Bowie's birthday today; I have been celebrating it since I was 14.  Have a slice of cake, a glass of champagne, and this song, Blackout.  The image above is the "cut up" lyric for the song; for more Bowie-ana, look here.









PS 
A demonstration:


Dear David Bowie,

Happy Birthday Blackout.  Since today, I have been fourteen.  Celebrating the lyrics for the song, cut up a slice of cake and look here: Above, fans demonstrate découpé in this glass image of Bowie-ana and champagne.