Welcome to Another Weekend Coffee Share!
How are you? I hope you are well and have had a great week.
I am feeling a tad of remorse. On Friday night I went to a loyalty night at our local bookshop…10% off and come and meet the new owner. There was also a mention of wine and cheese and social mingling. All of that was well and good, but a few wines down the hatch, and my already weak will was crumbling. Not unsurprisingly, I succumbed to a beautiful recipe book I really don’t need but the photography was so good, I could almost lick the icing off the page and who can resist that? Certainly, not I!!
Then, as is often the case, sins compound. Having bought the book on a total whim, I felt compelled to bake something from it today. That’s even though I’ve been really tired, and it’s been wet and miserable and real curl up under the doona and snooze weather. These days, it appears you no longer call yourself a sloth on such days. Oh no! My friend introduced me to this rather flash Danish term that is doing the rounds: “Hygge”: a cozy quality that makes a person feel content and comfortable. During the long, dark winters when Danes retreat inside their homes, hygge is what brings them a great sense of comfort and joy. Sounds good to me.
Except instead of being all snug and cozy, I decided to bake the Baklava cake from the cookbook, which is listed in their “Lazy Baker” section. Well, their concept of a lazy baker is very different to mine, although maybe they managed to find shelled pistachios. I had to shell a cup full of those blighters, which was a pretty strenuous job for this lazy baker. Then they needed to be chopped, along with a cup of walnuts. The cake also had three steps to it where you made the cake, a lemon honey syrup and a filling of cream, cinnamon and mascarpone. As you can see, this was amounting to a rather impressive cake, that would win friends and influence people and not something to cook up for a family of four where the kids didn’t touch it (can you believe it! Are they insane?!!) I will come back tomorrow and post a photo of said cake. I don’t know how I forgot to photograph it before I packed it away in the fridge. However, I must say that the cake was worth it and always good to try it out on the family first before you venture further afield.
Lastly, this week I read Alex Noble’s gripping motivational memoir: I Fight, You Fight. Have you heard of it or read it yet? It’s been heavily promoted here in Sydney but probably not so much overseas. On the 21st October, 2016 sixteen year old Alex Noble, a year 10 student at Sydney’s St Ignatius College (Riverview), was training with the Under 16s NSW Rugby 7s Selection Squad at the Knox College playing fields when the unthinkable happened. His neck was fractured at the C4/5 level in a tackle leaving him a quadriplegic. Instantly, this super-fit, driven young sportsman who lived for footy, chicks and his mates; entered a whole new reality and was starting over. His accident was covered by the media and knowing he would need financial support, his father stepped into the public arena to manage the incredible public support. Right from go, this was a journey taken in the public arena, and in that way quite different to most of us who undergo very private, and often unrecognized journeys, through extreme adversity.
I have written a fairly extensive review of I Fight, You Fight and here’s the link: Must-Read: Alex Noble’s I Fight You Fight. Have you read it? He also gave a very inspirational talk at a youth conference called Standing Tall back in 2021.
On that note, I’m going to head off now. So thanks very much for joining me.
This has been another contribution to the Weekend Coffee Share hosted by Natalie the Explorer.
Best wishes,
Rowena
Beyond the Flow 