My first batch of madeleines, made with my @crowd_farming lemons from Spain. I’ve intentionally been reflecting today on all sorts of things, including how cooking, in particular, baking, is a labyrinth of most tempting alchemy. The obvious temptations relate to being able to eat your creation. The more sublime temptations are found in the lure of predictability.

In this current world of ups and downs, which we are all deeply experiencing right now, the act of creating food brings some kind of certainty.

If you follow some instructions, it is highly likely you will get the desired outcome. To a certain extent, you can rely on a decent amount of solid cause and effect; yeast will leaven, sugar will sweeten, heat will melt, cold will firm.

As in all science however, there are no absolute guarantees.

Today I have learned several lessons. My oven is too hot for madeleines at the recommended temperature, the recipe that allegedly makes 12, would make around 20 in the tin I own (see the photo of 4 smaller madeleines, rather than the 10 bruisers in the first shot) and the batter probably needed more than the 20 minutes standing time for the flour to fully hydrate and get rid of the big bubbles. All the good ingredients have saved the day and they taste great, with a splendid texture.

I’ve been listening to a great podcast from the @onbeing project, This Species Moment, where anthropologist Agustín Fuentes is interviewed about how we might rebuild society after the pandemic, contemplating the importance of reliability and our huge capacity for compassion, and I can’t help but think his words got baked into these madeleines from my head to my hands.

Acknowledging your given compassion and the compassion that is given to you, will impact not only on how you see the world but on your actual physiology. We’re back to alchemy again, metamorphosis in swing.

What you feel is a combination of reactions of everything within you and your reaction to everything you perceive beyond you, yet we commonly have more agency over our feeling, than we think we do.

To put this into one simple line; we are all regularly wonderful, we just need to recognise it to regularly feel it 🧁