Doughnuts for a Cure

Doing my usual internet rounds a little two weeks ago, I spotted a photo of sumptuous looking cake doughnuts on www.tastespotting.com— I unabashedly visit Tastespotting along with Tom and Lorenzo everyday.

I clicked on the link with the plan to quickly feast my eyes and move on but the story I found on Sweetsugarbean, the blog to which the link led, excavated feelings buried not quite so far below my uneven-keeled surface. The food blogger, Renée, is in the throes of post-breakup agony, according to her post on the blog. So, because I have been that woman– blindsided, broken and beyond despair– because I am still, sometimes, that woman, I knew I had to take to my kitchen and try my hands at the recipe she shared as a sort of  pseudo-symbolic (tautology intended) means of showing solidarity. Heartbreak is a lugubriously beautiful existence. Its occurrence is so quotidien, that we often forget  how profound it’s impact is. I once opined in the unintelligable language of  my delirious pain:

Have You Ever?

Have you ever seen a heartbreaking? Have you ever heard a heart breaking? Have you ever felt a heart,
breaking? Have you ever tasted your heart breaking? Have you ever smelt heartbreak?

They say it is the most quotidian of things…like birth and death it happens everyday. Well, I have
seensmeltheardfelttastedheardbreathed it and it is more wondrous than a winged-boy, drenched in
molten wax, enshrouded by a floating airy globe of plumage, falling out of the sky.

He saw my heartbreaking, my heartbreak and my heart break and he told me I looked open,sad, but as he
said this his heart did not break and so mine broke all over again.

Just some nights back, I woke from a dream through  which the former being of my affections trampled and I decided it was time to share some of the beauty of heartbreak here, in the incarnation of these very simple and tasty cake doughnuts. The point here is not the food (though,  I suppose it is), or the eating (I served and gave away all but one to my darling friends) but the need to create and to share, and  the desire to be shared that bubbles –or did for me at least– from the hot oil of a breakup, in order to climb out of the pot of boiling anguish, cooked into a more well-done version of our self. My dream last night was emblamatic, for me, that the spoils of love (lost) may never dissolve into nothingness, but that I am no longer shaken by dreams such as these, an indeed am able to observe them with equanimity, shows how far I have traveled, not just from the darkness, but in  the darkness.  And yet, there is so much growing left to do and though:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
…I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

– Robert Frost

Renée, I made these in your honour. Thank you for sharing you pain candidly. And for the lovely recipe:  the doughnuts delicious by all accounts. I wish for you better and brighter days ahead.

And if you came for the food porn, I’ll stop rambling now.  Doughnuts take centre stage:

*Get the recipe  from Renée’s blog here*

I dusted some of my doughnuts in organic cane sugar and the rest in cinnamon sugar and served with a frothy almond milk latte to friends who were present for the greasefest.