"Practice makes Permanent"

Food for thought:

There is the ongoing joke. A tourist asked a famous violinist How do you get to Carnegie Hall? to which he replied Practice.

I've never been into poetry, but since seeing this one youtube clip of Phil Kaye and Sarah Kay reciting spoken word poetry, I have been hooked. One particular clip which Sarah Kay did on long distance relationship titled "Postcards", she metaphorically speaks of the ongoing practice of a drummer living downstairs. How practice does not make perfect- it makes permanent. We may be repeating the same mistake over and over and it truly does not get us any closer to perfection- in fact, it draws us further away as we learn our mistakes. Phil Kaye further talks about repetition in this clip. If we repeat something enough times, it loses its meaning, be it words or actions.

It is always so much harder to unlearn a mistake and relearn it the right way, than to start from a blank slate and learn from no prior knowledge. Be it music, sports, relationships... /emo rant.

From baKEE

So after a long time of not baking anything, we decided to go back to basics and make a mud cake. With cream cheese frosting.

From baKEE

1 cup water with 125g butter and 1/2 cup cocoa, nuked in the microwave till everything is melted and whisked to combine. Add it to 2 cups plain flour, 1 tsp bicarb soda and 1 (slightly more) cups caster sugar, combine. 

Crack in 2 eggs and 1/2 cup buttermilk with a bit of vanilla extract, and bam~ cake mix done. Original recipe from Donna Hay required 2 cups sugar, but let's not try to kill ourselves. This isn't a very healthy cake as it is- though it says 125g butter, just wait till we get to the frosting :D

From baKEE

So beautiful. And it was all done with a good ol' hand whisk and muscles.

Pour into cake tin, oven it until done (40 mins 160 degrees, or just eyeball it).

From baKEE

Then the frosting.

100g butter, 500g cream cheese (two packets)- cream those two together, then add in 1+ cup icing sugar and 1/2 cup cocoa, beat till it's nice and fluffeh. Recipe calls for 2 cups of sugar again, but that just screams diabetes. Put the cake together with frosting however you like, but we sliced ours up in half and put the frosting in the middle and on top.

I think if we were to make this again- make half the cheese filling required and spread that in the middle, but make a chocolate ganache to go over the top instead.

From baKEE

It wasn't perfect- the top part of the cake had cracks in them, but covered with the cream cheese frosting, it's not noticeable at all. Bonus that it had 0 salt, which means my mum could eat it. And she loved it =)