I made a cake late yesterday afternoon. Cherry and Almond Cake. It's a precarious cake to make because the almonds don't hold together as well as the flour and you bake it in a bundt tin (one with a hole in the middle) so getting it out of the tin is always a fun challenge because of its grooves and nooks and crannies and inevitably a bit gets stuck to the tin.
Yesterday about an eighth of it got stuck in the tin. It sat there taunting me unwilling to get out of its comfortable bed of warmth to begin the process of cooling. I banged the tin, but in the end had to get it out with a palette knife, which caused it to fly out and land in a pile of pieces. I'm not a great presenter of cakes, but having an eighth of the cake in pieces adds extra challenge.
But, the thing is, whilst the cake is still warm it's still cooking a little bit, and there is a window where it can be rescued by the scientific method of holding it together.
So I rebuilt the cake, like a drystone wall, putting together each bit in the hole that was probably made for it, but possibly not, gently pushing it together to make a whole cake again. I held it for a while, firmly but gently so as not to make it a squashed cake. I put the tin back on top for a short while to let the heat flow round and in the cracks and crevices, bringing healing to the broken sponge. It stood together, ready to be iced and I left it to cool.
And when I came back to ice it? The cake stood firm, the evidence it had fallen apart only there in the slightly patch work section where the drywall building told the story of the disaster that wasn't meant to be. I covered it with icing to help it firm up its purpose as one cake and left it to establish its looks to displayed in our community cafe this morning.
I've just had a piece (you have to test it) of the most broken part, and, yes, it stood strong together.
Sometimes when you are broken, like the cake, you just need to be held for a while, and then you will become, scars and all, whole again.
Where the promises of life are not all they are cracked up to be, where the shape you hoped to become falls apart when you try and extract yourself from the mould you hoped would keep you together, where part of you wants to stay in the warm tin, where it's all a bit crumbly.... sometimes you just need to be held.
----------------------------------
Jesus said this:
