Life's a Stitch

This cake has a past - Gateau L’Orange

Not your typical cake story, this one has solid history and there is an effort afoot to preserve its legacy. It has all the elements of a page turner: tragedy, hope, love, survival  and an eye to the future. 

This story starts with Alex Buckman, the president of Vancouver Child Survivors of the Holocaust. In a nutshell, after his parents were killed in concentration camps, he was raised by his aunt, who in a woman’s camp secretly wrote down her recipes from memory. This is not about a happy ending, as no Holocaust story is, but about hope and achieving a sense of purpose. 

One brief paragraph can’t tell this very moving, but complicated tale, so take a few minutes to read about it here. Better still, take 30 minutes to listen to CBC’s  radio documentary, an outcome of which is to inspire people to bake the cake yearly, on Remembrance Day.

The recipe:

The cake: 

Brilliant! Preserving the past

This past spring, when I had professional prints made of the dog portrait I painted for my sister, there was a free pile outside the photo shop. “Thrifting” is another enjoyable non-lethal hunting behaviour for us right up there with mushrooming and geocaching. C views  everything through his “what can I do with this?” filter, as was the case with this Brilliant brand broken tripod from the junk pile in front of the photography store. 

Paired with a piece of hickory wood, C turned it, excuse the woodworking pun, into a side table to put between our new Norwegian chairs. Zoom in to see the Brilliant brand metal plate just under the tabletop.

Rescue mission #2. When we moved into our last house in 1998, we discovered an indoor planter filled with zebra plants and overgrown ladyfinger cacti. The previous owner had lived there since 1959, so the plants were potentially approaching their 40th birthdays. We carefully repotted them and they eventually made the move with us to White Rock.

I did my best to keep them alive during the renovation, but the winter months without heat took their toll. A few of the zebras escaped unscathed and last week I noticed a tiny patch of fresh green on the cactus! These are now almost 60 years old and I was determined to save them. C did a nice job repotting them in a garage sale planter and dollar store pots and he’s carefully spritzing them back to life.

It’s the most colourful time of the year

Aside from fall’s foliage, it’s been an exceptionally colourful month here. I think I crave colour in preparation for the long Pacific Northwest season of foggy greeny greys.

C finished another piece of garden art.

Initially I thought it was responsible for this magnificent afternoon rainbow cast upon our rock wall. 

In fact, that spectrum of light is a fall phenomenon, like the changing colour of the leaves. As the afternoon sunlight angle changes, in October it hits the bevels of our bathroom mirror and produces this example of nature’s artwork.

Not the prettiest pav on my blog, it is the brightest I’ve posted. Never mind the crumbly sides, it was delicious.

Look at these edible mushroom we found last week, appropriately called Laccaria amethysteo-occidentalis, or the amethyst deceiver, as it changes colour quickly.

 

Our autumn sunsets are spectacular.

And the poppy seeds that hitched a ride in planters from our old house, have bloomed right in time for Remembrance Day.