Today, In Cake.

First, let me say, Happy Birthday to Jasper!

I am so incredibly lucky to be the mom of such a thoughtful, loving, curious, and fun creature as my son Jasper. We had a great birthday party yesterday with friends and family at the fair! I love you, Jasper. I'm so happy that, for the rest of my life, even when you are grown, these earliest of fall days, when the leaves are still green and the sky is still blue and the first sharp cool breezes of autumn come in, will remind me, first and foremost, of you, your sweetness, and your birthday. Ahem. And, in other news, I have so much to tell you about the Cake Shop! First: The Shelves.

We now have these awesome shelves, built by my dear friend Peter Parpan!

We've been putting things on them, to sell! Like these Short Street Cakes T-Shirts, that my friend Tubbs printed up so excellently! We're selling them in Ladies, Youth and Mens Sizes, for $15 each.

We're also putting Hannah Dansie's artwork and magnets, and when my Cake Ladies book is out in just a few short weeks, we'll have those on the shelves, too. And here's a little photo essay I did today of the most recent rearrangement of furniture in the Shop, along with bonus shots of Anna and Lucy ruling:

How To Make Blueberry Fig Tarts in 16 Easy Steps.

(Or: On Baking with Two Five-Year-Olds and a Puppy)
Step 1: Steal figs from your neighbor's yard:


Step 2: Go try to buy a lemon from Tod's Tasties, because you can't bear to get in the car on your day off:

(Tip: if you are accompanied by two adorable children and a puppy, they might just give you the lemon)

Steps 3-6:
Make the dough. I used a recipe from a cookbook my bank teller gave me, Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters:
Whisk together:
1 egg
1 Tablespoon Apple Cider Vinegar

Combine in Food Processor:
1/3 cup sugar
3 cups flour
1 cup cold butter

process until mealy; add liquid and process just until mixture comes together. Knead, wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour.


Step 7:
Take an arty picture of your ingredients:


Steps 8-10:
Make the filling:

I used my tried-and-true filling method:
4 cups fresh fruit (in this case it was contraband figs and some blueberries that had been in my fridge for a little too long)
1/2 cup sugar
zest of one lemon

juice of one lemon
generous pinch of salt
Stir together and let sit.

Step 11:
Now back to your dough.
Cut your dough into 6 even sections, and roll each one out, on a floured surface, into a square shape of even thickness.


Step 12:
Place a good sized dollop of filling in the center of your rolled out dough.


Step 13:
Fold and press the edges of your dough to seal in the filling.


Step 14:
Egg Wash.
Gently beat one egg in a bowl and coat the dough with a pastry brush dipped in the beaten egg. Now, say, for example, that you own a Cake Shop and all your home baking utensils have absconded to said Cake Shop, and so you can't find a pastry brush? Well, fear not, dear reader, you can just as easily use one of your 5-year-old son's watercolor paintbrushes. Its totally clean, I promise.


Step 15:
Bake tarts at 400 degrees for 20-30 minutes. Ignore that black stuff on the bottom of the pan- its not burnt, its "caramelized."


Step 16:
Eat the tarts, and enjoy one of the last true days of summer.



Love.
ps. It's hot.

Homestyle

Some of our first wedding cakes of the season:


Vegan Raspberry Almond Cake for 100


Cake wonderland at Brahma Ridge

Spring wedding season is here! We are busier than ever, and we are so excited to bust out the most beautiful, delicious cakes for the wedding feasts taking place all over these mountains. But, at the moment, as I am wont to do, I am feeling pensive, and want to share with you some reflections on my life as it relates to working hard. Here goes:

Spring is a time of year that, in recent years, has typically brought chaos. As a business owner, I've had to adopt the "make hay while the sun shines" approach to my work, and work 16 hour days for weeks in a row to meet the increased demand for wedding cakes, festival cupcakes, and birthday parties. I enjoy working hard, and have learned a tremendous amount about the value of hard work in my life. Money has been tight in these early years of the business, as every business owner knows, but I have been determined to make the shop work. I am happy to work hard, because I am glad and grateful to have work to do, a place to do it, and people I enjoy working with. But working full-tilt can take its toll, and I've continued to remind myself that work, while it has a value in itself, is also a means to an end: having a stable and sustainable life. I've tried all along to remember my original intentions for Short Street Cakes: I wanted to stay home with my son, and my cake business was going to be my cottage industry that would allow me to do that, along with gardening, spending time with friends and family, and the other things that make life worth living. I wanted to have a business that created a simple, just, and generous abundance for myself and my family, and when other people came on to join me in that endeavor, my intentions towards a healthy, happy home and business extended to include them.




I've kept those goals in mind while working on growing the business, meeting my obligations to my clients and my community, and going through the process of writing and publishing a book, knowing that, at some point, those wishes towards my own personal sustainability would take root.

Now, I am really happy to say, I am beginning to see the fruits: these past several months my home life has been so sweet, the Cake Shop has been flourishing, and the staff at work have stepped in as the most competent, talented, self-directed individuals I have ever had the pleasure to work with. So, in addition to my usual one day off a week to stay home with my son, I've been taking Sundays off too. Spending Sundays at home with my family is a revolution. I have worked through the weekend almost every week for the last 5 years, and now, I work with a team of bakers that not only CAN handle anything that comes their way, they actually WANT TO. So I've stepped back, a little. I'm taking time away from the shop to write. I've stepped more fully into my role as a board member of Bountiful Cities. And I am so grateful. I have come to appreciate brunch and cleaning days at home, together with my husband and son, as the magical gift they are. There were times that I didn't think that those kinds of days could happen for me, and times that I wouldn't allow them to happen because I couldn't slow my pace long enough to enjoy them.



But something that I am learning as a business owner, as well as in my personal life, is that blessings of support and love are all around us, if we have the ability to recognize them and receive them. This has been a hard lesson in my life. For some reason, I have often operated under the assumption that I have to do everything myself- and have over-burdened myself in the past with other people's problems, the world's problems, and feeling that I had to solve my own problems without any help. But that is not the way the world works. None of us can survive without leaning on each other, and giving is a natural human tendency that wants to be received. Those of us who are natural "givers" sometimes deprive those around us from the pleasure of giving to us, and we deprive ourselves of the pleasure of receiving, without conditions, expectations, or control.

This year, in my personal as well as my professional life, I have chosen to focus on the concept of receiving- allowing those in my life, at home, at work, and in the community to bring love and support to my life, if and when they choose, and to gratefully and gracefully receive it.

This, too, has been a revolution.

Learning to trust the bakers at the Cake Shop, that they can do it, that they want to do it, and that they take pride in their work and they feel supported by me in doing their jobs right, fills me with such gratitude. It makes me want to work that much harder to support all of our well-being: continuing to grow the business so that we can move towards a more democratic, empowering, economically sustainable and supportive workplace for all of us has become my immediate and long-term goal for the shop.

But in order to do that, we all have to be whole people. And being a whole person means that I spend my time doing more than just working. I need to garden, I need to take long baths, and I need to engage in this ritual of spending mornings in my pajamas writing. I need to take walks and ride bikes and go to the woods. I need to travel and visit family and friends, and I need to have time to commit to community work, because those are the things that feed my soul. And if my soul is not healthy, then I cannot work from a place of love. And that is what we are all here to do.
And so, I want to say thanks.

(thank you cake by Emilou)

So... I'm setting a goal: I want to have a garden this year. It seems obvious that I would have a garden, considering the amount of time and energy I spend thinking and writing about food security, community gardening, and urban agriculture, but the truth is that I have not had a home garden for years. In the early days of Short Street Cakes I had a flower garden where I grew all the flowers for the cakes. As the business has grown, I have had to streamline and cast aside almost everything in my life besides work and mothering. And I don't regret it: hard work can be a refuge when things seem uncertain, and busting ass to build and create something beautiful is one of the most rewarding things one can do. But now, thanks to the help and support of the community that supports the Cake Shop, the superhero crew at the Cake Shop, and the love of my family and friends, (and my new-found ability to receive that help and support rather than feeling guilty about it) I can now set about having a more balanced life. And I'm going to put my money where my mouth is towards sustainability, family, and community food security, and I'm going to start with a garden.

So this week, on my day off, I hung laundry on the line:


Jasper and I ate eggs from the chickens at our friends Braden and Mindy's homestead:


And I bought this basil plant that I'm going to put in the ground, dammit.


It doesn't mean that I'm not going to continue to work hard at the shop most days (I would miss the thrill of successful heavy production days at the Cake Shop if I didn't), or that I can afford to go on weeks-long yoga retreats or pay someone to do my job. It just means that the future is now, and we all have the power to create for ourselves, right now, what we want for ourselves, despite the chaos that might seem to be around us. And that we have to be able to gratefully receive the blessings of the people around us who want to give us love and support.

Happy Spring!

Winter Time.

(Lucy, outside the Cake Shop on a snowy early morning)


I love this time of year, in all its cold, snowy, melancholy darkness. Though, for all intents and purposes, I am a summer girl, winter holds a special beauty for me, especially the time after the holidays. All is quiet, the days are short, and the mind turns to more contemplative matters. For me, its a time to regroup after the mad rush of Christmas, at the shop and in family life, to set goals and priorities for the year, tidy up corners and loose ends, and begin anew.

And, its a time for sledding.


(Jasper and Hana, on our way to sledding at the Montford Amphitheater)

We've had so many snow days off from school and work this winter that its beginning to feel like a way of life. Between the sledding, the shared meals and time with friends and neighbors (and new neighbors that have become wonderful friends, yay for Peter and Hana!), the card games and general merriment, it feels like Christmas has lasted for a month and a half. We had lovely friends visit from Colorado, we had family up from Charleston and from Atlanta, and Santa came and brought Jasper a transformer and some treats. And while we all need to get back to work and school at SOME POINT, this Summer-Camp-in-Winter feeling is certianly lovely.


(On the one warm-ish day we had in the last 6 weeks, Jasper and Stella hung out downtown)

We had a gathering on New Years Day, with Hoppin John and collards and wine and friends and kids, and we made wishes for the new year and put them on a garland in the kitchen.


We burned last year's Christmas tree, along with the slips of paper on which we had all written down the things we want to release and let go of from last year, in the bonfire in the backyard.

When we burned the old tree as the yule log on New Years Day, in my heart I hoped for the best and brightest for every one this year. I think 2010 was challenging for many of us. I know I've got alot on my mind, trying to balance the beauty and the difficulty of the experiences I've had this year with the long view of being grounded in my home and family, and balancing the joy and creativity of my work with the sobering reality of the hard work that giving my life to a specific path entails. My Cake Ladies book is complete, and will be coming out in the fall, and I'm so proud and excited. But right now, with the snow on the ground and the house warm and cozy, I'm not in a big hurry- the book (and wedding season) will come soon enough. For now I'm going to enjoy the winter, and life with my family.



And, speaking of family, Duncan's home! That's right, we got the band back together. And I won't go too deeply into that story right now, but I'd just like to say that I'm incredibly grateful, and that I'm learning: about teamwork, about appreciation, and about the giving and receiving of love. All year, as I journeyed and wrote a book and experienced magical adventures, my heart kept returning to the things that were here all along: my home, my sweetheart, my baby boy, my Cake Shop. And now I'm learning that life doesn't have to be an either/or situation: that I can have my happy, healthy home and family life, and have my soul journey too. Integrity is a word that comes to mind: a wholeness, a sense of being yourself no matter where you are, and of believing that, everything, joy and sorrow, solitude and togetherness, creativity and good ole hard work, are not opposites, but co-exist in proper measure, one to the other. This is what I think is expressed in this image from Tarot:



And that's what I've been trying to incorporate more of into my life. Temperance and balance have been tough lessons for me. I've been working hard in these years since Jasper was born to create more balance and stability in my life, but sometimes it seems life's changes keep coming at me so fast that its hard to take a breath, much less put own solid roots. Sometimes, I do get a little bit affeared. But I'm learning that, when we feel affeared, that maybe what we need is stability not in the form of security, because nothing is truly "secure," but that actually what we need is just a little bit of shelter, a respite for a minute before we pick up and keep moving. I've learned that we each carry a little bit of shelter around with us- sometimes we find it with friends, sometimes, it's in our home; but most of the time, its in our own hearts. And that we have to look if we want to find it, and we have to appreciate it where it is, and that nobody is going to do it for us, and that we sometimes have to work to accept and receive it. Luckily, right now, I'm feeling it in so many places- in my home, in my work, in my relationships, and in my heart. And I'm learning to believe it and to recieve it.

Another couple of images that come to mind are:


The Benjamin Long fresco of the Prodigal story, from the Chapel where Duncan and I were married 9 years ago.


And the ten of pentacles, a symbol of stability and family, which carries with it a reference to Odysseus, who was only able to return home to his family after a long journey.

So Duncan and I returned home to each other, and our love and our home and our son are healthy and happy, and it took us being apart for a while to get there. And the Cake Shop is strong, and I'm appreciating each of these things like never before, with a presence that I am just now learning.


I am grateful for my community, and for the friends and family that love and support me. This year, my intention is to give and receive, in equal and reciprocal measure, that love and support in all my endeavors. My hope for all of us this year, friends and family and the world, is that we learn to truly give and receive love. And so may it be, and so it is.



Post Scripts:

-There is tremendous personal power in letting go. I'm now an advocate of breaking up if that's what you need to do to figure out how to make it work, or to figure out that you need to move along. (sort of along the lines of, "If you love someone, set them free.") We are each responsible for our own happiness, and for doing what it takes to make things right for ourselves, even if it means taking a seemingly terrifying leap. And its OK to be alone.

-Standing in your own power and opening your heart only benefits all of those around you. You do not diminish anyone's else's light by shining your own.

love.

Happy 5th Birthday, Jasper!

This week, we celebrated Jasper's 5th birthday! We started the day with birthday pancakes:

And made birthday decorations with his friends.

We had birthday dinner:

Consisting of Jasper's preferred menu of cheeseburgers, oatmeal, and "soft carrots with honey." And cake.
The next day, we went to the FAIR!

And had a party, with many of Jasper's besties (and their moms and dads) in attendance.

We had more cake! (Jasper chose Strawberry Cake with a Ganache Topping)

And there were presents (with a definite Star Wars theme).


We rode rides and ate fair food. I was giddy... I love the fair. And this birthday seemed so much to me to be a milestone- for Jasper and for me. I feel like I'm catching my breath and marveling at the beautiful child he has become in just 5 short years. At the same time, I'm marveling at the fact that 5 years seems so LONG- sometimes it feels like just months ago that he was born. In keeping with that theme- that five years is a long time- I'm realizing that the past is over, as much as I keep trying to go back and make sense of the whirlwind of the last couple of decades. I'm ready to make some changes in my life- to get more grounded in the here and now, and to grow my business and my relationships. I feel so psyched about Jasper and the adventures we have ahead of us! And I'm grateful to our family, and family of friends, for giving him such a web of love in which to grow.

So Happy Birthday to the coolest, sweetest, loveliest 5-year-old Jedi Knight in the universe. So much love!