RETRO RECIPE REVIEW

I Made An Accidentally Vegan Chocolate Snack Cake

A recipe so easy it‘s impossible to wreck

Yes, I know. Two raspberries is a bad arrangement. It tasted great anyway. Photo by author — all rights reserved.

In the past few days, with my husband out of town, I’ve been exploiting my alone-time doing things I rarely do. It’s great to have the freedom to fuck things up then iterate them until they’re right or until I give up in disgust. No matter how long that takes.

I spent a few evenings and most of this weekend buried in the memory vault. Snuffling around in 50 years of dust and cobwebs, I found content for three more chapters of childhood memories and enough ideas for future chapters to blow up my drafts file. At least now I don’t have to drum up topics from scratch.

Inspired by crime and cupcakes

At bedtime, I’ve been binge-reading a series of silly novels from my Kindle Unlimited subscription; a 35-book series of “Cupcakes and Crime Capers” by A.R. Winters. The hero is a card dealer in Las Vegas who moonlights as a private investigator. Cupcakes and other sweet baked goods are so ingrained in the plots of these novels they’re practically characters. I’m reading at least one a day and I’m up to number 14 in the series. Yes, I have a problem.