Forever Home :: Susan Rooke

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Seeing Things. Again. And sigh Again.

February 1, 2018

Posted by Susan Rooke

As I’ve written in previous posts, hallucinations are kind of a normal thing for me. Ever since experiencing high fevers as a child, I’ve seen and heard things that I later learned weren’t real. Or, at least that’s true of much of what I hallucinate, but other times I’m not so sure. For example, I’m willing (eager!) to believe that the black, hairy spiders the size of dinner plates streaming down my bedroom walls in the first light of dawn are mere illusion. Since I’m in a transitional, hypnopompic state when I see them, I’m completely paralyzed in bed and at their mercy. If they were real, they could easily wrap me in silk and snack on me at their leisure. The fact that they fade from view as soon as I’m able to move again is reassuring, so I’ve learned not to be too fussed when I see them. They’re just the figments of a wandering brain.

But I’ve had other hallucinations, particularly of the auditory sort , that were frightening. There’s been at least one that I’m certain was caused not by me, but by some outside, malevolent force. Thankfully, that kind is very rare. But despite my history of life in the illusory lane, no hallucination I’d ever experienced—harmless or otherwise—prepared me for what happened when Glen and I moved into our “forever home” in February 2017.

Soon after we set up the larger furnishings in the new house, Glen moved the rest of the boxes and smaller items into the garage. Among them I noticed one of my favorite pieces, an antique brazier that my mother had bought when I was a little girl. She passed it on to me many years ago, and I probably ruined its value as an antique by promptly having it polished and lacquered to preserve the copper finish. She’d always told me it was Persian, but after seeing this similar Turkish one pictured below, I have my doubts.

In any case, I’ve always treasured it, and I wanted to find a good place for it in the forever home. And every day when I saw it in the garage amidst all those unpacked boxes, I felt guilty that I hadn’t.

Then one day last April, I went in the garage to fetch something. Again I looked toward the brazier, angry and upset with myself for having neglected it. (Yes, I tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.) Instead, there was an empty spot on the concrete floor where the brazier had stood for weeks.

I turned the house inside out looking for it. I searched every room, every closet, every dim corner of the attic. So did Glen, and so did Katie when she visited soon after. Nothing. I grew increasingly upset over the next few months, unable to account for its disappearance. The Husband and The Daughter both reassured me that it would turn up, and Glen even suggested it must be packed away in a moving box. I dismissed that ridiculous theory out of hand. How could it be in a box? I’d seen it every day for six weeks running!

By Thanksgiving I’d lost hope of ever setting eyes on it again, but the garage had cooled off from summer’s heat by then, so I got to work on finishing the last of the unpacking. Books and family memorabilia were most of what remained, marked as such by the movers. One box, however, was a mystery, unmarked. It was larger than the rest and surprisingly light. When I cut it open, I saw a mass of packing paper cushioning the contents. And I unwrapped it to find this:

Hunh. What do you know? Glen and Katie were right . . . again.

That was two months ago. Now that much of the astonishment has worn off, the first thing that strikes me about this latest hallucination is that the duration alone makes it highly unusual. But there’s something else about it that I can’t put my finger on. As if it wasn’t the product of an annoying trickster brain, but originated instead from something outside of my own psyche. As if something—or someone—asked for my attention. It’s just speculation for which I’ll probably never have an answer, and I suppose it doesn’t matter. The happy outcome is that the brazier was never lost. Thank heavens.

Welcome to your new home, brazier. It’s good to see you. For real, this time.

p.s. While proofing this post just now, I received an email advertisement from Best Buy. Guess what was in the subject line? “Experience sounds like never before.”

Pffffft. Amateurs. I could tell them a few things about experiencing sounds.

Blog, family, Featured Post, Forever Home, Hallucinations

The Snail and I

March 23, 2017

Posted by Susan Rooke

6 Comments

The vernal equinox has come and gone. Glen and I have been in our forever home a month now. And how’s this for a sobering thought? Nearly one-quarter of 2017 is behind us. Already.

And here I am without having prepared snails in garlic butter once this year.

Have you ever eaten snails? Okay, fine; let’s be French . . . escargots? If you have, do you remember your first time? I do. As with any true love affair, I will never forget my first time. All it took was one bite to set off that euphoric shiver in my brain. If we’re calling them “escargots,” we can call it a “frisson.”

I was in Hong Kong. It was 1965. My mother and I were eating dinner in a restaurant called Jimmy’s (which is still serving up escargots today. Find the website here). And for some reason, I was dressed as a British schoolgirl. God only knows why, but let’s say it was my mother’s fault. Because it was.

It was early in our year of traveling and living in Asia. Hong Kong, still under British Crown rule at that time, was one of our first stops. My mother had put it on the itinerary because her lifelong passion for exotic locales was matched by her passion for beautiful clothes (not to mention jewelry). Hong Kong, that densely populated, polyglot cosmopolis, was known for its bespoke tailors and shoemakers, custom jewelers, and just generally fabulous shopping of all kinds. And of course, restaurants. Anything legal—and possibly illegal, too—that we could ask for was within walking distance of our hotel.

Soon after we arrived in the city, my mother found a dressmaker. For herself, she ordered a couple of suitcases full of lovely dresses and separates in luminous silks. For me, she ordered the garb of . . . a British schoolgirl. Or BS, for convenience (and accuracy). Why did she do this? I think it was due to some idealized notion of British customs. She was an insatiable reader of British mystery novels, and a confirmed Anglophile.

As I said, it was the mid-1960s. I had hopes of wearing something fun, something Carnaby Street. Something mini-skirted, especially. No. What we picked up from the dressmaker’s that summer day was a bland white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and a drab, shapeless, almost ankle-length houndstooth skirt. She could have saved her money and bought me a wool sack.

The finishing touch? Custom-made shoes. Big ones. Sturdy, black polished leather, lace-up, with rigid, extra-wide square toe boxes. To be worn with ankle socks, of course. I looked like I was wearing huge, hard-shelled black beetles on my feet.

That evening we walked from the hotel to Jimmy’s for dinner: my mother in one of her new dresses, I disguised as a BS and feeling like BS through and through. My shoes were so stiff and unyielding that I had blisters by the time we reached the restaurant.

But then those snails came to the rescue.

They were unforgettable. My first taste hooked me for life. The bubbling-hot, garlicky butter they bathed in; the silken resistance of the flesh when I bit down, the mild, loamy earthiness of the flavor . . . Sopping up the garlic butter from the empty shells with crusty bread was lovely too, but it couldn’t hold a candle to eating the snails themselves. I have no idea what else I ate that night, and no clue what my mother had. I’d ordered the snails at her urging, but not before she taught me how to pronounce the word they were called on the menu: “escargots.” Which, of course, just added to the glamour of the occasion. At that magical moment, the snails overshadowed everything else. BS outfit? What BS outfit?

Too soon, however, dinner was over, and we had to walk back to the hotel. That’s when the night sky over Hong Kong opened up, dropping buckets and buckets of water on our heads and flooding the streets. Guess what? My mother made me take off my shoes.

“No! They can’t get wet—they’ll be ruined!”

So I took them off and carried them by their laces back to the hotel. It was a relief, actually, as I was limping pretty badly from the blisters by then. Heaven only knows, though, what was in that water pouring over the pavement, washing my raw feet in its toxins. (If we’d been in Bangkok at the time, I might have suffered consequences.) I’m just lucky she didn’t make me take off my clothes. My wool skirt was starting to smell like wet dog.

If it hadn’t been for the snails, the evening would have been a disaster. Leaving aside the risks of being forced to slosh on bare, wounded feet through the gushing streets of Hong Kong, there was the red-faced humiliation I felt, the shame to be seen in public wearing that deeply hideous BS ensemble. Honestly, if Jimmy’s had dropped into the harbor between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon during dinner and taken me down too, I would have been fine with it. (Assuming I’d already eaten the snails.)

All of this raises a question: Why are the snails at Jimmy’s on the blog menu today? Because I just came across these treasures in a moving box. And you know what it means, don’t you? Now this forever home kitchen is really open for business!

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The Space Between: A Taste

March 2, 2017

Posted by Susan Rooke

4 Comments

Before I begin I’d like to say how grateful I am for all my readers. To everyone, whether you’ve been here from the start, or whether you’ve joined us more recently, I appreciate your support! Thank you for discovering this page, and for reading!

This week marks the event that Glen and I have been anticipating for the last two years: We’re moving into our “forever home.” I’ve written about that subject several times before, once devoting an entire post to it (find it here). Living in a small farmhouse for all that time brought consequences I hadn’t intended or foreseen. Probably the most harmful one was that, in 550 square feet, neither humans nor pets moved around as much as we were accustomed to, and as a result, we all gained weight. Some of us *ahem* more than others. Phoebe alone seemed quite comfortable with her increased heft, earning herself a new nickname: “Jabba the Catt.”

In retrospect, though, I think she may have been more “Marlon Brando, the later years.”

So the move, for all our sakes, couldn’t have come sooner. And I’m ecstatic that the day has finally arrived. Honest. I’m just not sure how I developed a limp, a hitch, a hunch and a slouch all in the space of three days. I feel 1,009 years old. (That would make Glen a mere pup of only 1,004.)

We used to move from city to city, from house to house, all the time. On a whim. Just for fun. But now when I walk out to the garage of the forever house and face this (and trust me; this isn’t all of it) . . .

. . . I feel like a whoopee cushion that’s been sat on too many times. (I just googled “whoopee cushion” to be certain I was spelling “whoopee” correctly, and was somewhat astonished to see the zillions of entries that popped up—a Wikipedia entry??—along with the “related searches” of such imponderables as “whoopee cushion terraria,” “whoopee cushion costume” and “self inflating [sic] whoopee cushion.” And why are most whoopee cushions so pink? If I didn’t have six rail cars full of boxes to unpack, I’d have to investigate “whoopee cushion history” further.)

Clearly, I have enough unpacking to keep me busy for some time. So while I’m working on that, what I’d like to do here today is share with you the prologue from The Space Between, the forthcoming first book in my fantasy series. Its publication is drawing closer each day. In fact, by the time you read this, the final copy edit should be complete, and I’ll be considering cover designs. (Eep!) I intend to share more of the book here in the future, but for now, just a little taste.

First, however, a little background on the story, without giving anything away:

As my “Works” page describes, the books are based on the folk legend that faeries are the descendants of fallen angels. The Space Between tells the story of Mellis, a courageous and resourceful young woman stolen from the human world by a tribe of faeries known as Penitents. Of all the faery tribes, the Penitents are the only ones who regret their fall from grace, and out of a profound sense of guilt, they’ve cursed themselves with afflictions, some quite terrible. They kidnap Mellis because they believe she can help them return to their ancestors’ state of divinity. Living beside them, Mellis comes to appreciate their kindness and humility, but then is deeply alarmed to be drawn into a deadly conflict between the Penitents and a former member of their tribe: a murderer who takes Satan as his lover and ally.

From The Space Between:

Prologue: Before the Beginning

The fall seemed to go on forever. Sometimes plunging through clouds of icy shards, his flesh burning, scraped raw. Slowing sometimes, or seeming to, in the firmament’s cold hollows. Once he thought he glimpsed the rim of eternity. A fiery radiance shimmered there, crackling at the farthest reaches of his sight. So empty were the heavens. Nothing to cling to. And thus he continued to fall—faster, slower—until he thought he would fall for the rest of time.

He understood the emptiness was not complete. The only true void had existed in an age before his own. But in these infinite distances, the few bodies were a sparse scattering of tiny specks of light, so removed as to have no relevance. Like his shattered heart, a vast emptiness dotted with rocky, sterile hopes. The darkness he saw upon the face of the deep frightened him. It was like the darkness growing within himself.

As he fell he had time to ponder. Why such fury, this ultimate punishment?

He had acted boldly, with imagination and daring, and for that he should have been rewarded. Instead he had come to this. Great and manifold his blessings had been—and then were stripped away. How far he had come from the first light of morning, the light that brought day out of night!

Ice crystals flayed him, searing with a chill fire. His single comfort as he fell was the thought he held close to him in the measureless universe.

I did not fall alone.

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2017: Over the Rubicon

January 12, 2017

Posted by Susan Rooke

7 Comments

Well, well. Mid-January, anyone? At this rate 2017 will be done in 3 months. And of course it kicked 2016 to the curb with what I feel was unseemly haste. In fact, nearly everything seems to come upon me with unseemly haste these days. (Especially colonoscopies and property taxes.) Time slows down only when I’m lying awake, bored spitless, in the middle of the night. Can’t turn on a light to read, can’t get up to make coffee, can’t go outside to look at the stars and listen to the owls hoot. Any sound, light, or movement wakes Glen up in our tiny house. And heaven knows he’s done more than his share of lying awake in bed, bored spitless for me. (How do light sleepers in true “tiny houses”—let’s say 400 sq. ft. or fewer—manage this? With earplugs and sleep masks?

Since lying awake in bed is not a feasible way to slow time for the entire year, I’m going to focus on 2017’s bright prospects rather than its speedy and inevitable demise. In fact, I’m more excited about this year than any other in recent memory.

For one thing, my debut novel, The Space Between, will be published. Not sure when yet, but it won’t be too much longer. I dropped the ball on it in early January due to focusing too much on the other thing I’m really excited about: Glen’s and my forever home. Which is almost done. That’s especially excellent in light of what just happened today. This wreckage used to be a garment rack that stored some of Glen’s clothes out in the laundry room/storage shed:

So maybe as much as for the house itself, I’m excited to have a real closet again. Not a farmhouse closet like this:

And not temporary garment racks like the ones here, still courageously hanging on to their structural integrity:

Did you know that the reason garment racks like these are temporary is because they disintegrate over time? Literally disintegrate? Yep. The fabric enclosing them deteriorates and turns to powder. The process begins in much less than a year. And then the dirt dobbers and the mice and the lizards move in.

In the shambles of this particular garment rack, Glen lost three shirts and a pair of Wranglers to mice. So far.

In the mouse nest I found brown cloth that came from an article of clothing I haven’t identified yet. There may be surprises in the other racks. And I can’t wait to see what awaits us in the rest of our earthly possessions currently stored in the garage. But hey. If this is the worst thing that happens this year, I’ll consider myself quite fortunate.

Could this the Universe’s way of telling us we have too much stuff? Probably. Are we listening? Yes. The message hasn’t sunk in all the way yet, but we’ve made progress in that direction just since moving out to the country. Simplifying hasn’t been an option. It’s been a necessity.

It seems fitting that I’m writing this on January 10th, which is the anniversary of the day that Julius Caesar and his army crossed over the Rubicon River in 49 B.C. (also known as B.C.E., or Before Common Era). That act embroiled the Roman Republic in a civil war. Even so, I can’t tell you why an incident more than 2,000 years ago became so thoroughly entrenched in history that the expression “crossing the Rubicon” became part of the Western world’s vernacular and its pop culture—and is still in common usage today—but it did. Essentially, Caesar went viral.

I’ve always liked the saying “crossing the Rubicon.” Not because I enjoy the study of history (because, to be truthful, I really don’t), but because of the feeling it creates in me. Crossing the Rubicon. It’s the point of no return. It’s no going back, it’s burnt bridges, it’s eyes looking to the future because the past is beyond reach. Scary, exhilarating concepts. Concepts that form the springboard for countless thousands of stories. Including some of mine.

We’ve all recently crossed that metaphorical Rubicon River together, wading into 2017. And now we’re here. Scary and exhilarating indeed. Not all of what the year holds will be good, of course. We will have our share of woe. Some more than others. Scary may outweigh exciting, although I pray not. But in my usual optimistic fashion (have I mentioned that my mother used to call me Pollyanna?), I’m going to do my best to keep my eyes on the good things. In the case of 2017, that means completing projects that are important to me.

So 2017, I’m glad you’re here. I think there’s real adventure in store. But whatever you did with 2016’s body, I don’t want to know. My eyes are on the future.

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Christmas in an Empty Nest

December 22, 2016

Posted by Susan Rooke

10 Comments

The title of this post may sound like I’m going to whine, but I surprised myself. Turns out the experience isn’t bad at all.

From the time I was 11 years old until Katie was born two decades later, I viewed the Norman Rockwell-ized ideal of Christmas with cynical amusement. I can pinpoint it with such exactitude because that was the year my mother and I celebrated Christmas in a beachfront hotel in Pattaya, Thailand. I remember the locale as tropical and lush, with our very nice room overlooking the body of water still known in those days as the Gulf of Siam. I see that now in Pattaya they cater to tourists by putting up Christmas decorations, but when we stayed there, there was nothing like that. Why should there be? Thailand was, and is, a largely Buddhist nation.

My mother, however, took genuine pleasure in Christmas, and was dismayed that we had no decorated tree for the holiday. Her solution was creative. We scrounged in the hotel courtyard and found a leafy green stalk of vegetation 20 or so inches tall, took it to our room and propped it up in the ice bucket. Then we combed the beach for a pretty seashell to top it with, but were even more thrilled when we turned up a dead starfish. How perfect was that? It was very limp, though, and surprisingly heavy. When we draped it atop the Christmas “tree,” it made our construction sag to one side. Undeterred, we admired it for a couple of days anyway, until it began to smell so awful we had to pitch the whole mess in the trash. I’d never before associated the festive season with rotting echinoderms. We were able to put Christmas behind us so much more easily that year.

Soon after that I embarked on my phase of brittle cynicism. I still enjoyed Christmas—it’s a pretty holiday, and we had some terrific cutthroat rounds of charades when the family got together each year—but I felt no compulsion to maintain an idealized view of it. Until Katie was born, and at that point I morphed into a steaming bowl of indulgent mush.

But eventually Katie went off to college. And once she did, for several years the advent of another Christmas would make Glen and me a bit melancholy. While she was growing up, we had formed and embraced our own family traditions, all because of her. We would have a traditional Christmas breakfast. Traditional mimosas accompanied the breakfast once we judged her to be old enough. There would be a scavenger hunt for presents, with clues left on the tree. Yes, she came home from college for the holidays, but we always knew the holidays would be over soon. Then she’d go back for the spring semester and there we’d be, up a creek without her oddball, snarky, hilarious companionship to steer us.

College was good practice, though. It got us over the hump, so that by the time she married Wesley (who is equally oddball, snarky and hilarious, so he fits right in), Glen and I were used to being by ourselves again. I can’t deny that a little empty-nester gloom still creeps in from time to time, but for the most part, we’ve discovered we have a lot of fun. Kind of like the first four years of our marriage, but with loose skin and arthritis. (Hey. At least I didn’t say “loose teeth.”)

A few years ago we even began our own tradition: a low-key celebration, just the two of us, except for the occasional uninvited guest.

Now we spend our Christmases in a 270 sq. ft. cabin in the middle of West Texas nowhere, on a ranch belonging to good friends Richard and Michelle. The cabin is short on a few modern conveniences. There’s no TV, and only spotty telephone and internet service. (Glen has plenty of music on his iPhone, though.) When it’s bitterly cold outside, we bundle up and go hiking and birdwatching anyway. In the evenings, after a plain but satisfying dinner, I beat him at poker. Unless he beats me. (That sounds wrong, but you know what I mean.)

We enjoy wintry scenery

and sunsets like this.

In other words, it’s perfect.

This Christmas, though, for the first time in several years, we didn’t get to go. But that’s okay; it’s because we’re building our forever home. And it’s almost done.

As for next year, we’ll just have to see what it brings.

I hope everyone reading this has a wonderful holiday, whatever your traditions are. As the song says, “May your days be merry and bright.” Bright’s good. Merry’s good too. But for me, being silly may get me through the holidays best of all.

Yes, I did buy the smiling poop pillow. ^_~

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The Family Pound Cake

December 1, 2016

Posted by Susan Rooke

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For years I called it Miss Mary’s Pound Cake, though I have no idea who Miss Mary was. I have a very faint recollection of an approximately 5-year-old me eating dinner at a table that gleamed with sterling and crystal, in a stately old home in Mississippi. I associate that occasion with a woman named Miss Mary, who was . . . a much older friend of my mother’s? A relative? I can’t really say. Mother was a genealogy enthusiast, known for driving across the South to search for courthouse documents, make tombstone rubbings, and visit with people she was related to, no matter how distantly. Upon returning home after a visit to this Miss Mary, my mother typed up the recipe on a 3×5 index card, heading it “Miss Mary’s Pound Cake,” and that was that. Thenceforth all other pound cakes were judged by Miss Mary’s. And came off second-best.

If I could get my hands on that ancient, stained, scribbled-on recipe card right now, I’d have a picture of it here. But, like most of Glen’s and my belongings, it’s packed away in a box in our garage. In a very boneheaded move, I didn’t think to pack ANY of my cherished recipes for living in the farmhouse while we waited to build our “forever home.” Luckily, this recipe is in my head. I’ve made the cake a couple hundred times over the years, and tweaked it from Miss Mary’s original version to be even better. I started making it when I was pretty small (it’s a good starter recipe for children just learning how to bake), and by the time I was 16 or so, I’d taken over the job of making it for family gatherings. When I grew up and moved away from home, it became the contribution I brought to our Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. That . . . and the champagne.

Before I get to the recipe, a recommendation: If you plan to make the cake, I urge you to buy or borrow an angel food cake pan, if you don’t already have one. The two-piece kind: The central tube and base is one part, and the outer ring is the other. Like this one by Nordic Ware:

It’s by far the best choice of bakeware for this cake. You can use two 9×5 loaf pans instead (or cut the recipe in half and make it in a single loaf pan), but the surface area exposed to the heat (from the dry oven air and the sides of the pan) is different with a loaf pan. I wouldn’t really recommend an ordinary one-piece tube pan (like a Bundt pan), especially the decorative ones. It can be too hard to extract the cake successfully at the end.

So. Did I make the cake for today’s post in my own angel food cake pan, which is as old as I am? Of course not. It’s packed away in the garage with all my recipes.

THE FAMILY POUND CAKE

1 lb. sweet butter, softened
1 t. salt (leave out the salt if you’re using salted butter)
3 ½ c. sugar
3 ½ c. flour, unbleached all-purpose
10 x-lg. eggs
2 t. vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
2. With the softened butter in the mixing bowl, add the sugar to the butter about ¼ c. at a time, creaming thoroughly as you go. Scrape down the mixing bowl with a rubber spatula periodically.

3. Next add the eggs and flour, alternating between the two, beating in a portion of flour along with a single egg, scraping down the bowl as necessary. Be careful to incorporate the eggs, but don’t overbeat, or you might end up with a tougher cake. Before you get to the end of the eggs and flour, go ahead and add the vanilla. When you’re done, the mixture should look like this:

4. Bake in a buttered and floured pan, preferably an angel food cake tube pan, at 325 degrees. (Set the tube pan on a sheet pan for baking, to prevent oven spills.) If your oven is fast, start testing with a toothpick after 1 hour, but it will likely take at least 1 hour 15 minutes. OR divide batter into two loaf pans, and bake for about the same amount of time. (After about 45 minutes, rotate the loaf pans and turn them front to back as you would for cookies.) For the toothpick test: You don’t want wet batter on the toothpick, but you do want a moist crumb.
5. Allow the cake to rest in pan(s) for AT LEAST 20 minutes before turning out onto a rack. Longer is fine; it won’t hurt anything.
6. Store on a covered cake plate, or wrapped in plastic wrap. For humid climates, if it isn’t all gone in 3 days, I’d refrigerate the rest, or wrap it thoroughly for the freezer.

Some things to remember:

• You can definitely use a hand mixer (which is what I did for this one). I prefer a stand mixer, because it seems to produce better results when it comes to beating the eggs and flour into the mix. Less risk of overbeating, I think.
• For this post I cut the recipe in half and baked it in a single loaf pan. It makes an excellent pound cake. But I want to reiterate that, one loaf pan or two, it won’t be as rich and unctuous as the pound cake baked in an angel food cake pan.
• Don’t skip the buttering and flouring of the pan. Even for nonstick bakeware.
• Don’t use margarine. Not for making the cake; not for buttering the baking pan.
• This cake induces its most blissful state of consciousness when it is very slightly underbaked. But be careful. You have to get it out of the pan without it falling apart. This is why I say to leave it cooling in the pan for at least 20 minutes. I’ve sometimes underbaked more than I meant to and had to leave it in the pan an hour or more, until it was completely cool. At that point it settles into itself a bit, which helps the removal process. Cake recipes often tell you to bake until the cake starts to pull away from the sides of the pan. You need to remove this one from the oven just before that point.

Right now you might be thinking, “What’s she going on about? It’s a pound cake, for Pete’s sake. How hard can it be?” It’s not; it’s super easy. But when I was in my 20s, and had already made this cake many times, I decided that, while it was wonderful, it wasn’t quite the cake I knew it could be. So I reduced the flour content by ½ c., which makes its structure a tad more delicate.

Too many pound cakes are dry, their only real purpose to serve as a base for toppings like crème anglaise, chocolate sauce, lemon curd, or sliced sugared strawberries (with a healthy splash of Grand Marnier!). All of those accompaniments are delicious on this cake, but no one’s sensibilities are offended if you serve it plain, perhaps warmed up a bit in the microwave. In fact, that’s my second favorite way to eat it. But for me, the best way is half-sweet, half-savory: warmed up, with a slice of very sharp aged cheddar melted over it. That, Dear Readers, is Heaven.

Enjoy, and a big hug and a thank you to my dear friend Claire M. for requesting this recipe!

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Archive for Forever Home

Seeing Things. Again. And *sigh* Again.

The Snail and I

The Space Between: A Taste

2017: Over the Rubicon

Christmas in an Empty Nest

The Family Pound Cake

Seeing Things. Again. And sigh Again.