In lieu of poetry - a blueberry bundt cake

I am remembering who I was. I lie awake and am awash with impressions of the past. Ten years ago feels so unbearably different to now. To who I am, to what I encounter, to how I live. Mostly I am so grateful for the stability and love that I have no complaints about the present. Being older grants the serenity to just do the work that needs doing, to chop wood, carry water, so to speak, without needing the blazing epiphanies that marked my youthful quests for enlightenment.

But at the moment, I feel as if something crucial is begging to be brought forth. Is it that the chaos that I had in my 20's was somehow vital to my creativity, and in that, my soul? I got the idea of that aphorism from an article I read, my four year old on my lap, as I carefully sipped coffee at a Saturday morning cafe and didn't even have the trace of a hangover.

My husband and I both lived chaotic creative lives before marriage and family - although he had the benefit of great self belief and I was more prone to oscillating between hope and despair.

We both obstinately lay no material foundations: to work just for money for security was in some way to surrender to the fear, to the forces that wanted to control and keep us small. We studied and made art (in Gareth's case) and wrote and meditated (in mine) and made enough money to get by. I moved all the time. Packing my room of things down into boxes and bags and piling them into my car to drive the vast east-coast highway between Sydney and Melbourne, the Gold Coast and Byron Bay. I used deep optimism and a sense of fate to land the job I needed, to find a house of friends to live in, to meet the right person at the right time.

There was however a need in me to meet someone who would love me enough to want to marry me, to have children with, and perhaps my wandering was not just to find myself, but to find him. In my late 20's I once again trusted my instincts and flew to England on a one-way ticket ready for adventure and secretly sure I would find my husband.

And here we are.

Now, as an on-call, grounded mother with school runs and bedtime cuddles and nutritional lunch considerations, as a reliable worker, a commercial artist (of sorts - food styling has it's freedoms and thrills but is mostly firmly rooted in reality) I have to find ways of making sure that I stay attuned to intuition and a more poetic, animistic essence that was once my greatest ally and defining talent. I can not court chaos. I can not pack my life down on a whim. I must find the extraordinary in the ordinary and keep a sense of magic in the mundane.

So, I am  a keen observer. I keep an eye out for coincidence, the ludicrous, the ludicrous coincidence: like the two women in the exact same full-length faun coloured mock shearling jackets standing outside the off-licence lighting each others fags as I waited at the traffic lights.

I remind myself each morning to stay present and grateful, I stay quiet for a while upon waking and chat to my version of God, I try to remember my dreams. I have an inner dialogue that is so prolific I am shocked to discover sometimes that there is this huge part of me that is rarely shared and acutely edited for the general public.

Music and poetry can touch this secret part and helps me move outwards of sorts from the small but incessant demands that take up my time. Joni Mitchel is one such artist who sang the song of my own. I over-did Joni a while back, and haven't been able to listen to her for a while, but the other day I saw a book of her complete lyrics in the charity shop window and knew it was a gift for me. Small epiphanies. I am enjoying reading her lyrics without the music, letting her poetry remind me of why I loved her so much. It reminds me of who I was, who I still am.

Cooking is a daily poem that needs composing and seems to be the fitting synthesis of the inner and outer worlds: the necessity and desire to nurture, practical alchemy.

So here's a recipe:

Blueberry and blood orange bundt cake
(the blood orange lends it's crimson juice to make a lovely sunset-coloured frosting, but any orange will do. I ALWAYS rush ahead and put my icing on too early when the cake is too warm, hence it has not stuck but slithered off  or been absorbed in these pics, also, my cake stuck to bottom of the tin, and that nice undulated top bundt cakes get was ruined. If anyone knows how to sucessfully extract a cake from a bundt tin, please tell me! It did, however, tastes fabulous!)

165g butter, softened
1 1/2 c castor sugar
3 large good eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
zest of one blood orange (save juice for glaze)
2 cups fresh blueberries
3 c plain flour, sifted
1 tbsp baking powder
1 pinch salt
1/2 c milk with a squeeze of lemon in it or buttermilk

for the glaze:

juice of one blood orange
approx 1 cup icing sugar


Method:


Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius and grease a bundt tin with some butter.

In a large bowl beat the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy - at least 5 minutes.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating in between to combine, then add the vanilla and zest.

In alternate stages, add a third of the flour (mixed with the baking powder and salt) and then some of the milk, then the flour, the milk etc. Beat for a further 30 seconds - try not to beat the mix too much once the flour is in, just enough to combine, then fold the blueberries through the batter and pour into your bundt tin.

Bake for about 1 hour, or until set, and while cooking make the orange glaze. In a bowl add icing sugar to the orange juice and whisk with a metal hand whisk, adding more icing sugar if the mixture looks too watery - it should be about the density of honey.

Cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn the cake out onto a wire rack, pouring the glaze over with random abandon once the cake is room temperature.