Plummy goodness

What does one do with a couple of unused plums? And oodles of boredom? Whip them up together with eggs, butter and flour and let them be friends inside a temperamental oven. The result - a warm and beautiful plum cake for tea, especially for the overcast, drizzly late afternoons that we are beginning to be threatened with. What's worst, they are here to stay. Just brew a fine cup of chai, preferably ginger or cinnamon, and a damp autumn never felt half so good.
Oh and yes, don't forget to invite the birdies. For I've heard a tiny dollop of birdie gossip makes this cake perfectly plumtastic!

For the interested and curious:

Plum cake 

serves 6

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup butter

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2 plums, pitted and sliced into thin long petals

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9 inch round cake pan.
In a small bowl, cream the butter with the sugar. Then beat in the eggs and the milk.
In a larger bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Make a well in the center and pour in the egg mixture. Whisk gently till the batter is silk-like fine.
Spread the batter evenly into the greased pan. Arrange the plum slices attractively over the batter (I prefer it the free-spirited, whirlpool way!).
Bake for forty minutes or until a toothpick when inserted comes off clean.
Transfer to a cooling rack and allow to cool before serving.

That Steve Jobs is no more, still hasn't sunk into me. There are some people whom you don't need to know personally to feel that strange void once they are gone. May the man who changed the way we live today rest in eternal peace. In his own words, just "Stay hungry. Stay foolish".

Of signs and tempting fate

God's exclamation mark! Will my day be funny?!

I am a believer of signs. Well, somewhat. The other day when sitting by the window, I was brooding over how supremely grey and monotonous a Monday morning feels, a flock of geese flew right across the patch of sky that I call my own. Arranged in their typical symmetrical V, they darted across like a beautiful feathery arrow. Just a flash, yet it did take some bite away from my sombre mood, thus leaving me dazed and in another world for a moment or two. That was a sign to me. That life is certainly much more than Monday morning blues, and that this too shall pass and make way for the weekend soon. Another frequent occurrence that is a sure cure for sore eyes and frayed nerves is the curious bunny who makes regular rounds of our yard. So potent are these beautiful distractions, or 'divine interventions' as one friend calls it, that the hovering worries feel half conquered by the time I rearrange my head to brave them. Haven't you felt like that on similar occasions?

Then there are moments that I call tempting the fate. When like a temptress I chase and flirt with fate for a flicker of a moment, when I feel immensely invincible. I play little bets with myself, both serious and ridiculous at once. Short-lived and punctuated with impatience, they go something like this - if the tea gets done by 3.15 pm, then the call won't come; or, if the neighbour's cat is still sitting by the hedge when I stare out of the window next, then something good will happen; or, if I reach the signal before it turns green then....

While on this topic, I am reminded of two French movies that I watched recently (yes, all a part of my bourgeoning Francophilia!). The Girl on the Bridge, through the relationship between a middle aged knife thrower and his zesty young target, explores the fragile link between luck and togetherness. Luck is an absent concept and therefore the human urge to build it through signs, love and life. In A Very Long Engagement one comes across such nonchalant bets with oneself by a young woman who is in search of her missing fiance during the World War I. At once hopeful and miserable, she trades with time, place and situations that would lead her to him.

Before I digress further, is gambling with fate more or less a woman thing? As far as I know, men generally don't entertain such follies. At least the ones I know, don't. We women do it all the time in our heads, this eerie permutation and combination of situations and their possible outcomes. Or am I the only one out here?

The Bee

It buzzes past the myriad mazes
of a ticking, restless mind.
Maze after maze, it searches for nectar,
that dewy, lusty taste of life.
There is a forest of grey and white,
a forlorn winter scape.
High walls and claustrophobia
guard this haunting world of nonexistence.
The bee hovers and beats its wings aimlessly,
willfully hitting itself on the dank walls.
With each passing day,
there are flakes of gossamer wing
tumbling down like the hopes of a spring,
of blossoms abundant.
And then, there is the bee,
floating and gliding in a vacuum
without any wing, without any spring.

The Zeroes

An abstract round
that crawls and spreads its wings
into a larger round of nothingness.
An emptiness that looms large
over a room wearing a vacant expression,
it's corners squirming and inching away.

This big lump of roundness,
dances in concentric circles
like a spider's web, like the fringe of a smarting wound.
In its core I have stored some carefully plucked mistakes.
Mistakes of many colours and patterns.
Earthy reds and azure blues.
I try to kick them hard,
so that they spill out into a sea of namelessness.
But they spring back boomerang-like
rebounding, reappearing.
This time devoid of all colours.

The circles now resemble the gnawing hollow
of sunken cheekbones and beaten desires.
A cluster of full bloomed zeroes,
zoomed and magnified in a photographic lens.