Molly Yeh is one of my favorite bloggers and the creator of the cake below, which she calls resolution cake. I'm reposting it here today (with her permission) because I love it for all its chocolate-marzipan goodness, and because I think the beginning of March is as good a time as any to assess the year, revise goals, amend resolutions. Like spring cleaning for the soul.
Molly's 2014 resolutions include eating macaroni and cheese at midnight, making frequent visits to the library, and spending more time with cake (brilliant). Mine, right now, is not to fall asleep in the snow - literally, of course, and figuratively. Anais Nin, whose diaries I'm making my way through now, explains:
You live...sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterly, for instance), or you take a trip…and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure…Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken.
As the year continues, I'd like to take care that I don't fall asleep in the snow. I'd like to continue to tend to my planet. I hope to read more. And I hope that all of this, and the rest of the year, includes many, many chocolate cakes.
