We’re spending a lot of time on our little jungle balcony. Plants in Canada are so happy when the weather turns that they grow in such an exuberant style that we never know what will await us from one day to the next. It reminds me of a line from Marian Engel’s Bear where she writes about Canada, noting “In this country … we have winter lives and summer lives of completely different quality.”
I came home from class feeling like cake. There’s a bag of poppy seed in the fridge that I’ve been meaning to work my way through for a while, so I decided to make the poppy seed torte I wrote about here. Always looking for ways to grind the poppy seeds, which makes for a flavourful and generally more successful cake, I followed the advice of someone on the internet and tried hand-grinding it in our Hario coffee grinder. You should never fucking try that. After ninety minutes of grinding I had poppy seed all over the floor, and only enough fine poppy seed for a tiny cake. I had also broken the grinder.
So I baked a tiny cake, and frosted it with the dark chocolate and melted butter. We ate it on the balcony. Johannes fixed the grinder.
CAKE AND DECAY 