Raison d'être... cake

On finishing Sartre's Nausea I decided to stir something up into being. Cake, as superfluous and perhaps as necessary as existence felt like the appropriate response to ideas that left me a little feeling hollow. I don't normally make cake without someone in mind but I wanted to test out my new set of scales and it is so-called Fat Thursday tomorrow, the last Thursday before lent, a day on which it seems we are obliged to feast.

So, this raison d'être cake is really Nutty Apple Loaf taken from the de-lovely Hummingbird Bakery book. The recipe states that you should leave the mixture overnight before baking. It doesn't tell you for why. But, I can't argue with a process that resembles a brew so I went to sleep with hopes of encountering a bowl of mellowed, matured or even bubbly batter in the morning. Purposefully delayed gratification gave me a good reason to be... waking up the next day.

On waking I found the batter looking.... pretty much the same. I have faith something magic happened though. The kind of magic you can't see.

Ingredients: 175g butter softened, 140g brown sugar, 2 tablespoons jam, 2 eggs, 140g plain flour, 1 tbsp baking powder, 1 tsp cinnamon, 100g chopped nuts, 50g dark chocolate chopped, 2 apples cored and diced.

Beat the butter, sugar and jam together.
Add eggs
Stir.
Sift in floury things.
Mix.
Add nuts, chocolate and apple.
Mix more.
Cover and leave to mysteriously brew overnight.
Preheat oven to 170 C (or 100 C in our oven with the warped thermostat)
Bake for 50 minutes or so.

Oh I don't know. Sartre has his moments -

'I'm going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep. Sleep, eat. Exist slowly, gently, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red seat in the tram.'