in your heart

Perfect Chocolate Cake with non-Newtonian Frosting

I made this cake for my birthday party a few weeks ago.  It came out a bit funny looking and I’ve been reluctant to blog about it.  In the brigade de cuisine I am more of a pâtissier, a pastry chef, than a boulanger, a baker, and definitely not a décorateur, a maker of show pieces and specialty cakes.

The thing was though, that everybody loved it.  Once they closed their eyes and opened their mouths, they were transported to that place a moist, luscious, not-too-sweet chocolate cake takes you. Anyhow, my lovely friends are the types of people who see beneath the surface.

I think of the chapter from The Little Prince where the fox asks to be tamed and they become friends. In our lives we ‘tame’ many people. And people also ‘tame’ us. . . At the beginning a person is indifferent for us, but when we ‘tame’ someone things completely change. We start thinking on that person, we are expecting their arrival, we remember them when we see something related to them, and so on. It is really great to be ‘tamed’, to have people who really care for us, and people to care about.

But, as the Little Prince had to say goodbye to the fox, we all say goodbye to each other. Our paths don’t walk together any longer, we have to live different lives and our beloved creature is not with us anymore. Only his or her memory lasts, the good times we spent together.

When it came time for the Little Prince and the fox to say ‘Goodbye’ the fox made a present of a secret.

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This cake that I made was a recreation of a favourite childhood birthday party cake that came from the local bakery in West Covina, California.  Chocolate sponge, filled with sliced bananas and freshly whipped cream and frosted with chocolate buttercream.  The recipe is from New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant

Perfect Chocolate Cake

• 1 cup/140 grams cocoa (unsweetened)
• 2 cups/500 mls boiling water
• 2 ¾ cups/385 grams plain flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup/225 grams butter
• 2 ½ cups/350 grams sugar
• 4 eggs
• 1 ½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C.  Butter and flour three 9-inch round cake pans.  This is where I made my first fatal mistake.  I should have lined them with parchment paper.  So you do this. Line them with parchment paper.

Combine the cocoa with the boiling water, stirring until smooth.  Cool completely.

Sift together the dry ingredients.  In a large bowl beat together the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla.  Add the dry ingredients alternately with the cocoa mixture to the creamed mixture.  Blend just enough to moisten the dry ingredients.

Pour the mixture into the cake pans.  Bake for 25 to 30 minutes.  Cool in the pans for 10 minutes and then remove the cake from the pans to cool completely before frosting.  Parchment paper will make this so much easier and the cake won’t have to be patched back together when it comes out in bits.

Luscious Filling

• 1 cup/250 mls heavy (double) cream
• ¼ cup/35 grams powdered sugar
• 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

Whip all of the filling ingredients together until stiff.  Chill.

Non-Newtonian Chocolate Butter Cream Frosting

When I was in Digbeth this past weekend, I met Steve Coxon, writer and dabbler in non-Newtonian fluids.  In recent experiments at the Spotted Dog Laboratory*, Steve assisted in the making of a substance that seems to conform to the laws of a solid whilst in a bowl. However when it is lifted from the bowl in either one’s hand or a spoon, the substance becomes semi-liquid!  This explains my butter cream frosting.  What I thought was a mistake is a non-Newtonian frosting.

For a full explanation, including what do do if you fall into a pit of quicksand.

• 6 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate or 7/8 cup/140 grams unsweetened cocoa powder and 6 tablespoons/90 grams of butter
• 1 cup/225 grams butter
• ½ cup/125 mls heavy (double) cream
• 2 ½ cups/350 grams powdered (icing) sugar, sifted

Sift the sugar (along with the cocoa powder if you are substituting for the baking chocolate).

In a medium saucepan, melt the baking chocolate and the butter.  If you don’t have baking chocolate, just melt all of the butter. Stir in the cream until smooth.

Remove the pan from the stove and place it in a large bowl filled with ice.  Using a whisk or an electric mixer, beat in the powdered sugar until the frosting holds a stiff shape.  Chill.

Contruct the cake when all the parts are cool.  Spread the filling between the layers, adding sliced bananas, and the frosting on the top and sides.

At this point I was hoping that my butter cream frosting would save the day and patch everything together, however, its non-Newtonian properties presented some, shall we say, design and aesthetic problems.

Keep the cake cool until it is served.

Pretty good with strawberries and why not some more cream?

* pronounced lə-ˈbär-ə-t(ə-)rē – we are in the UK after all.

Procrastination

I procrastinate for various reasons and there are different issues depending on what I am putting off. I know why I procrastinate when I need to do something like vacuum the house or organize paperwork. Sheer boredom and lack of interest.

When I was in college I had a conversation with a friend about waiting until the deadline to turn in a paper or application. That has to do with control. Until I actually submit whatever it is, I have control over it; I can still make changes to it or fantasize about what grade I’ll get or if I’ll get the job, but once it’s turned in, there’s no going back. That’s what it is about for me anyhow. I still see a deadline as the time it gets turned in. It’s a stretch for me to turn something in a few days in advance. Maybe I also like the thrill of working to a deadline!

There’s another more sinister procrastination that happens to me though. When I am working on a new piece of art like I’ve never made before or on a new technique, I can get paralysed with an insidious, grabs-me-by-the-wrists procrastination.

I feel like I have to figure it all out in my head and make it come out the right way before I can begin the work. So it will come out perfect. Which is nuts. Because a) there is no such thing as perfection, and b) it is the trial and error, the very imperfect process which creates the work. Duh! Why do I keep forgetting that?

I think this is one of those lessons that keeps circling back around from time to time.

These past few days, I’m working on my final entry into the Festival of Quilts and have been doing everything but working on my final entry into the Festival of Quilts.

Last week, I came face to beak with my inner critic. I sat with my bogged down, wrists-tied feeling and became aware of a big black, clawed, sharp-beaked bird sitting on my right shoulder. This guy actually looks a bit goofy, but note the sharp claws and beak.

Earlier this week, I was dithering around and not working and I consciously picked him up from my right shoulder, plucking his claws out of my skin and set him down in the corner of the room and said, ‘You can watch, but if I hear one peep out of you, I’ll put you in a cage and out a cloth over it. You’ll have to go to sleep like a canary”.

And I was able to get on with my work.

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, suggests that an artist draw or make their Inner Critic and put it in their studio. I think it’s a really good idea. It gets that destructive voice out from the depths of the subconscious and into the light of day. Somehow that lessens the power it can have over our creative process.

Right now, I am taking a break after a three hour stretch of work in which I’ve figured out how to make the border on my Manhattan Angel quilt.

I’ve been wanting to work in 3D some more and I think my next project will be my inner (now outer) critic.

“The maxim ‘Nothing but perfection’ may be spelled ‘Paralysis’” buddhabuddhabuddha- Winston Churchill

What is True Peace?

Last Thursday at lunchtime, an explosive device was partially detonated in a restaurant in Exeter’s Princesshay shopping centre. The device only caused facial injuries to the man who had carried it into the restaurant. However, it and another bomb found at the scene would have caused damage to the building and restaurant patrons if they had been detonated properly.

The suspect, a 22-year-old convert to Islam has a history of mental health issues and police say that he may have been preyed upon and radicalised because of his vulnerability. A key strand of the investigation is whether the attack was the work of a “loner”, with questions being asked over what the authorities knew about him before his arrest. Sources stress the investigation remains at an early stage, but say the suspect does not seem to be part of a wider terrorist cell, a feature that has been a hallmark of past terrorist attacks and plots in Britain.

I suppose that I and everyone who lives in the Southwest and the UK are waiting to hear the full story. Is it a ‘one off’ incident undertaken by a vulnerable and disturbed person or is it the tip of an insidious iceberg?

This incident has raised some thoughts for me. When I hear in the news about bombs or suicide bombs, it is usually ‘over there’, eg Baghdad or Palestine. How would my life and my relative sense of safety change if . . . . . . it comes here? Racism is an issue in the Southwest, especially ‘hidden’ rural racism. I hope that there will not be a backlash against people of colour or other religions due to this incident. And, if the suspect was preyed upon and manipulated by others, it adds a much more dire dimension to the evil that can lurk in all of our hearts.

According to psychologist Carl Jung, the Cold War was the outer collective form of the lack of unity within the human psyche. And so what happened with the fall of the Soviet empire? A new enemy had to be created, a new war or rivalry or hatred. And Muslim extremists rose to fill the bill! The War on Terror has replaced the Cold War. Thus each side hates the other, each side wants to destroy the other, each side is full of bigotry and intolerance and refusal to listen to the moderates and peace makers in its own camp.

Carl Jung: “If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that “They do this” or that, “They are wrong, and they must be fought against”. He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day”.

Last night I read these words by the Bhuddist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh and they somehow helped.

True peace is always possible. Yet it requires strength and practise, particularly in times of great difficulty. To some, peace and nonviolence are synonymous with passivity and weakness. In truth, practising peace and nonviolence is far from passive. To practise peace, to make peace alive in us, is to actively cultivate understanding, love and compassion, even in the face of misperception and conflict. Practising peace, especially in times of war, requires courage.

All of us can practise nonviolence. We begin by recognising that, in the depths of our consciousness, we have both the seeds of compassion and the seeds of violence. We become aware that our mind is like a garden that contains all kinds of seeds: seeds of understanding, seeds of forgiveness, seeds of mindfulness, and also seeds of ignorance, fear and hatred. We realise that at any given moment, we can behave with either violence or compassion, depending on the strength of those seeds within us.

When the seeds of anger, violence and fear are watered in us several times a day, they will grow stronger. Then we are unable to be happy, unable to accept ourselves; we suffer and we make those around us suffer. Yet when we know how to cultivate the seeds of love, compassion and understanding, those seeds will become stronger and the seeds of violence and hatred will become weaker and weaker. We know that if we water the seeds of anger, violence and fear in us, we will lose our peace and our stability. We will suffer and we will make those around us suffer. But if we cultivate the seeds of compassion, we nourish peace within us and around us. With this understanding, we are already on the path of creating peace.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

Peace rose

May Day

May Day celebrations have their origins in the Roman festival of Flora, goddess of fruit and flowers, which marked the beginning of summer. Floralia was held annually from April 28th to May 3rd. There are also links to Beltane, a Celtic fire festival that celebrates of the coming of summer and the fertility of the coming year.

May Day was especially popular in Medieval times. Activities centered around the Maypole, a tree collected from the woods and brought to the village to celebrate the upcoming summer. There were often temporary “greenwood marriages” of young men and women who spent the entire night in the forest, staying out to greet the May sunrise, and bringing back boughs of flowers and garlands to decorate the village the next morning.

It’s May! It’s May!
The lusty month of May!…
Those dreary vows that ev’ryone takes,
Ev’ryone breaks.
Ev’ryone makes divine mistakes!
The lusty month of May!

- Lerner & Lowe

The Puritans reacted with pious horror to most of the May Day rites. One angry Puritan wrote that men “doe use commonly to runne into woodes in the night time, amongst maidens, to set bowes, in so muche, as I have hearde of tenne maidens whiche went to set May, and nine of them came home with childe.” And another Puritan complained that, “Of forty, threescore or a hundred maids going to the wood over night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled.”

By the late 1500′s the Puritans considered that the Maypole was associated with paganism and immorality and were against May Day on the grounds that its celebration was Papist, not founded in the Bible and tended to lead to public rowdiness. Parliament banned Maypoles altogether in England in 1644

… the prophanation of the Lord’s Day by May-poles (a heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness) …all and singular May-poles that are and shall be erected, shall be taken down and removed by the constables, bossholders, tithing -men, petty constables, and church-wardens of the parishes where the same be, and that no May-pole be here-after set up, erected, or suffered to be set up within this kingdom of England or dominion of Wales; the said officers to be fined five shillings weekly till the said May-pole be taken down.

Afer the Restoration in 1660, Maypoles were also restored and May Day was once again celebrated throughout England, though the celebrations did not ever regain their former popularity. The Maypole dance of plaiting ribbons around the pole did not begin until the nineteenth century.

Lustleigh Maypole

May Day has been a traditional day of festivities throughout the centuries. It is most associated with towns and villages celebrating springtime fertility and revelry with village fetes and community gatherings. Traditional English May Day rites include Morris dancing, crowning a May Queen and celebrations involving a Maypole.

In Devon today, probably the most famous May Queen celebrations can be found at the Dartmoor village of Lustleigh. Here the May Day traditions had lapsed until in 1905 when Cecil Torr revived them. They have been held on the first Saturday in May ever since. The May Queen is escorted through the village beneath a flower-bedecked bower by her consorts and crowned in the town orchard where she watches over the Maypole dances. Her granite throne sits atop May Day Rock which has the names of all of the May Queens from 1954 to 2007 inscribed on it.

Then came fair May, the fairest maid on ground,
Deck’d all with dainties of the season’s pride,
And throwing flowers out of her lap around.
~Edmund Spenser~

May Queen

Consorts

The Maypole dancers are accompanied by a live folk music band and they dance for about two minutes at a time and alternately weave and unweave patterns with the maypole ribbons.

Weaving a pattern

Fibre art-in-motion

After the dance

There was a little fete set up in the orchard with raffle tables, games for kids and of course cakes, cream scones and cups of tea in the Village Hall. Even though I am an ‘outsider’ it was really nice to observe a centuries-old tradition and be part of a community event that wasn’t brought to me by Verizon Wireless or Coca-Cola.

Past and future May Queens

Lustleigh

Apple Blossoms

Art as Story

I tell stories with my art work. The story can be as simple as ‘This is how I see a flower’ or as deep and complex as the history of my Muscogee ancestors.
Likewise, I look to visual art – paintings, photography, sculpture, fibre art, etc; literature and poetry; film or music to hear another person’s story. Sometimes through another artist’s work, I remember or find my own stories.

Somehow it is the most personal, idiosyncratic stories in art that have the most universal appeal. Maybe because we realize how we are all connected as human beings in this life and that another person might not be so different after all.

“We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.” ~ Konrad Adenauer

It’s a risk and takes guts to tell it like it is. I’ve had some good conversations about this with two of my artist friends over the past few weeks. Why is it so hard?

“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” ~ Salvador Dali

There’s the technical/skill side of making art to be mastered, to become proficient in one’s chosen medium. But, sometimes an artist can be so focused on perfection, that they don’t show their work or destroy their work or don’t complete their work or worst of all, don’t even start making the work. Where does this addiction to perfection and fear of making a mistake come from? School, art school, a critical teacher, parent or sibling? Some or all of the above or somewhere else? Plus, so often when viewing art, we see the just finished product and aren’t privy to the blood, sweat and tears that went into the making of it or the uncertainties and false starts of the artist.

“To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing” ~Elbert Hubbard

I don’t have a problem with criticism and I can step back from my art work with a critical eye and can accept feedback on my technique; I just feel that a harsh, perfectionistic critique is unnecessary and can damage an emerging or fledgling artist’s confidence, whatever their age.

“Always be a first-rate version of yourself rather than a second-rate version of somebody else” ~Judy Garland

In addition to learning the technical side to art making there is ‘finding one’s voice’. Now that you know how to say it, what do you want to say? That involves a different kind of risk. Not just putting one’s technical skills to the test, but saying with the art work, ‘This is how I see it’ or opening up and revealing one’s thoughts, feelings, experience . . . one’s humanity. This is where originality comes in. It’s safe to follow in another artist’s footsteps and make something ‘in the style of . . . ‘, but the risk is to make something in your style and to say what you want to say.

“Love art, love yourself, do what you have to do and what only you can do. Utter honesty is the only path to originality.” ~ Roberta Smith

My friend Suzanne Ahmed, a painter, tells about when she used to ‘hide her art under the bed’. I can relate to that. I found my medium (fibre & textiles) about 11 years ago when I took my first quilt class. My partner and close friends, of course, knew that I was making quilts and I entered some in quilt shows, but that felt anonymous and safe. I wasn’t standing there next to my quilt!

I remember the first time I showed someone outside of my close circle my fibre art and I picked a work colleague that I could really trust and felt comfortable with. It felt like a big risk.

That was about 8 years ago and since then I’ve gradually opened up more and more to the point that I now have a blog and a website and feel fairly confident about myself as an artist in many different media – fibre, video, haiku, print making and who knows what is next? But with every new creation, there is risk.

So I want not only to show what I am making, but to share some of my process and uncertainties and false starts. It always encourages me to find out that I am not the only artist to feel unsure about trying something new and to keep going with the process of exploration, discovery, making mistakes and ultimately finding my way to telling a new story, my story.