Me Time

Way back when, friends of mine were getting married, and I was making the wedding cake for them. We had agreed on a two-tiers-plus-one-extra plan, and I took a couple of days off work and got baking (day 1) and icing/decorating (day 2). The idea was to have slabs of white chocolate layered around the tiers, decorated with chocolate hearts in white, dark and milk chocolate. And a heart painted gold, I seem to recall.

Day 2 was the hottest day of the year. While all the fecky hearts went okay, trying to ease 40 or 50 slabs of chocolate off a warm surface was... challenging. And the decoration vision needed to be tweaked. In the end the slabs became triangles, so the cake looked kinda like an enormous crown - very Alice in Wonderland (and the bride was called Alice, so it all worked out fine).

Anyhoo, something about this weekend felt similar, though the decorating was housey not cakey. Taking time off work; racing against the heat; anxiously hoping that it's okay for the intended recipient, that it's good enough for them. And through it, the sense of... offering. There's something very satisfying about spending a batch of time in effort for another. Sometimes, the inclination is to consider it not 'your own' time, but the time this weekend - and the Wedding Cake-a-thon - felt all mine. Treasured, solitary, devoted-to-another time.

I still have furniture to shimmy back into place, and curtains to hang, and general tidying, but it's pretty much done. And it refreshed me. Back to writing now :-)