On unwinding

At the end of a long and exhausting day, when your body is battered and shattered, sometimes you just want to flop into bed and close your eyes on the world.

Right?

But sometimes it’s necessary to unwind a little. Let the day’s happenings trip gently through your mind, so you can pick them up with ease, turn them over, mull over them.

I like to do this by thoroughly cleaning my kitchen so it gleams, and then getting my old baking bowl out that my grandmother had in her kitchen for a good forty years. I get my whisk, the spoon, and my measuring cups. The ingredients needed for something warm and sweet and delicious.

Turn the oven on.

And I measure out the ingredients and as I do so, my mind stops racing. It slows down to a jog. Looks behind it. Nobody. Looks in front. Nothing to catch up on. Just flour in a nice soft mound in an old baking bowl. A whisk catching glints of light from the warm spotlights above. An egg cracking into the bowl, running in a little hydrophobic river down the jagged edge of the flour mountain and settling itself in a small valley on the edge.

As I mix and pour and whisk and lick the spoon, my mind stops racing and some sort of grounding happens.

I think and stir, I plan and pour, I contemplate and scrape.

How do you unwind after a particularly stressful and exhausting day?

This is the result of my unwinding baking session.

Taking pictures of food.

Someone once said to me, when we were eating burgers in a restaurant, watching people at another table stand in every position imaginable to take photos of their own burgers, that over half of millennials don’t get to eat hot food, because by the time they’re done taking photos of their food, it’s cold!

Wow. That was a whopper of a sentence.

Anyway. By the time I munched this chocolate cake, it was still warm, thankfully. Although my arm has cramped from trying to take a good photo of a mediocre cake!

This cake is deceiving. It looks tasty but it actually has a strong olive oil taste to it. I think I added too much. Next time I will use less!

Why do we do it, though? Why do we take photos of our food? Why do we share it on social media? What is the psychology behind it? What do we hope to gain from it?

I admit, I do take photos of my food from time to time. When it looks good, when I am especially proud of it, or when I just am enamoured by the deliciousness of it all. I don’t always share it on social media, and when I do, I insert it into a blog. It is not informative at all. I have not shared the recipe (I will leave a link to it, however!), I am not posting to talk about its contents or reveal the decadent history of cake.

I am just posting to say, ‘Hey! I made cake! Check it out!‘

Is that so bad?

Is it so deplorable that an entire generation of people just want to share what their food looks like, to other people who will double tap that photo and nod to themselves, thinking, ‘I want me some of that burger. I wonder where they got it from.’

But whoops, they won’t need to ask, because the location is geotagged! Some great advertising right there! I will admit, all the restaurants I have been to in the past six months (well, three, to be exact) have been because one or other of my friends had posted a photo of what the food looked like there, along with a comment on the taste.

And because I am a glutton, I thought, ‘hey, I want me some of that burger.’

 

Inspirational Cake

Here is a statement.

Cake is inspirational.

I say this as I lick the last remnants of the strangest and perhaps the most delicious cake I have ever eaten from my lips.

It was small, and arrived in a box. It was coated in a soft, luxurious film of glossy chocolate, and on top lay five single curls of the same, arranged to deceive my eyes. When the sharp knife slid down right into its core, and a small slice was gently pulled out of the whole, a golden brown substance oozed from the middle.

Once on my place, a cup of cinnamon and apple tea steaming beside me, I examined it. It was very brown, and I realised the little moist smudges within the cakey texture were dates. A date cake, then, coated with chocolate and filled with…?

I let my fork sink into the cake, taking a sizeable chunk along with some of the golden cream, and closed my lips over it.

An explosion in my mouth. Sweetness, solid cake, my mouth enriched.

First the dates. Not bad at all. Then the chocolate. Finally, swirling its fingers over my tongue, caressing my tastebuds, a surge of.. salted caramel?!

What an odd combination of flavours, but how well they worked together.

Immediately the exhaustion evaporated, I settled back to really enjoy this slice. Immediately my brain fizzled into action. I no longer felt lethargic. I washed my cake down with the deep warm cinnamon tea, the perfect balance to the overwhelming sweetness of cake.

Cake.

The perfect high note to a day filled with lows.

Levi Wells Prentice (1851-1935)

Stop Motion Malteser Cookies

Maltesers are delicious any time, right? But what about if they were stop motion baked malteser cookies?

Here is a small video I made demonstrating the baking process. Check it out if you are interested! It is my first ever video, and the beginning, I hope, of my dabble with the visual arts. If I can tell stories via words, then why not also via images?

 

Let me know what you think!

Nutelloissants

Here is something cheerful..

Chocolate croissants made with puff pastry and Nutella! I mean, what could be better? Well, I could think of a wild variety of things that are infinitely better (hugs on a cold morning, fluffy socks, summer fields, churros, cheese melts, surprise flowers, comfy house scents, parents who are happy… the list is endless). I tried to fold them nicely into croissant shapes and croissant twists. That didn’t work out too well for me, ha!

Anyway here are my Nutelloissants!

 

They do look rather messy, I grant you, but they taste delicious.