Cake Love

I don't mean to plagiarize, so I must give credit for the title of this blog entry to the reformed lawyer in D.C. who traded a law career for a baking dream. He quit his job and opened up a bakery in Washington, D.C. called "Cake Love". He had no bakery experience. Just a love of baking and a cache of gumption. The best part is that the gamble worked! I hear from friends that his business is growing and expanding!

I like the name "Cake Love." Not just because I think of it as fighting words for breaking one's professional chains. I like it because cake really is a manifestation of love. Especially where, as in my current little hovel on stilts, it can take some planning to find the ingredients and there is no electronic mixer to relieve one's arms from the various stages of creaming butters, and whipping in sugars, and mixing in flours.....Under such conditions, baking a cake requires many of the same ingredients for maintaining a relationship: time, concentration, patience, tenderness, preparation, anticipation, goals, appreciation.....

Okay. That was the sentimental start. Here's the practical blog entry: After the fiasco of the hyper-sugared power-ranger-frosted-to-be-a-snowmachiner birthday cake, I decided to cake love J. with a gingered pear upside down cake.

It took a bit longer, I think, than it would have if I had a mixer handy. But it was a fine opportunity to get a little workout for the arms (without venturing out in the freezing cold to the teen center where I understand one can pay $3 to use the weights), and a fine opportunity to listen to the one radio station. And there is a lot of fine entertainment in watching the ecstactic reaction of one's boyfriend when he enters a home perfumed in the aromas of gingerbread late in the evening after having spent an entire day preparing for his first trial ever, which is scheduled (as luck would have it) in the same week as his 16 other trials.

Credits to Macrina Bakery in Seattle, for the recipe and for that post-collegiate year in Seattle when when I used to sneak out of my p.r. job to enjoy Macrina's rocket muffins and potato loaves, and to Molly, of Orangette, for inspiring me to dig out the box in which the Macrina cookbook was packed.

http://orangette.blogspot.com/2005/11/seattlest-macrina-true-love-and-ginger.html