This week I made a coffee, cardamom, and walnut traybake. I love the flavour of cardamom and the uniform squares of a traybake are so satisfying. One of my small joys is when people see them they say ‘How did you get them to all look so neat and the same?’ and I smile and say I don’t know. 

I’ve been thinking this week about the new year and my New Year’s resolutions. I love making resolutions and I note them all down in January only to rediscover them sitting unopened at the bottom of my notes below shopping lists and snippets of song lyrics I’ve heard to type into Google when I get home. My last year’s ones were: to have more fun, to say yes more, and to watch more TV. I liked ‘say yes to more’ and I noticed myself doing it, saying yes to after-work plans with colleagues, trying new things, and letting people help me instead of doing everything by myself. ‘Watch more TV’ is good because it’s easy and actionable but without a direct target. If I had said ‘watch five new TV shows this year’ the pressure would have made me watch no TV shows, and I’d have continued in the comfort of watching reruns of The US Office. ‘Have more fun’ is difficult because it’s vague and I’m still not entirely sure what my 2022 self meant when I made it. Now I’m not sure if I did have more fun or from what place I was trying to have more fun from; so I’m going to scratch that for this year. I stopped making resolutions for a while when I was at University. I think because I made so many during my teenage years that sounded like ‘eat less bread’ and ‘do fifty sit-ups a day’, followed by ‘be more dedicated to the first two than last year’. It was miserable and I always failed and now I eat lots of bread and don’t force myself to do sit-ups on the wooden floor in my bedroom until my spine bruises and resolutions are fun again. 

2024’s ones are not fully formed yet but shaping out to be: 

1. Go to the cinema more (building on last year’s TV one and actionable)
2. Make more time for myself and baking and be selfish about it ( ‘No, sorry, I can’t hang out tonight, I’ve got plans my new loaf tin)
3. Eat more hotdogs (I love hot dogs)
4. To be more honest and to be less of a pushover (hard to action but important)

I’m sure I’ll make some more before January and probably throughout the year. The ‘be more honest and less of a pushover’ one occurred to me while I was home with my parents when one day my Dad decided to randomly declare that he didn’t think women should get maternity leave. I feel men are told that they’re important when they’re young, but as they grow older they feel themselves dissolving into irrelevance and so decide to say weird and triggering things to get a reaction. I don’t think he even actually believes women shouldn’t get maternity leave. My only reaction was to get up and leave because, if that is the starting point, I don’t even want to know the ‘justifications’ for it. I feel every point of the argument would only get worse and worse, like shovelling out dirt from the deep hole until he could lie down in it like a grave – dead to me. But now I think about it a lot when I’m on the bus or about to go to sleep or waiting for my tea to brew and I feel that I should have said something. Not because his opinion will change, but so that I could let go of my frustration and not feel it like a constant stone in my shoe. I know I won’t bring it up again; he won’t remember it and I know it wasn’t important to him. I’ll go home at Christmas and he will have risen from his grave of opinion, hand me a pair of trainers I wanted ‘from Santa’ and I’ll forget the whole thing. I always find it hard to catch things in the moment and I don’t react to things in line with how I feel; I hate confrontation. But this year, I will confront if I need to confront, argue if I want to, I’ll tell people that they’re boring me, I’ll say ‘no I can’t do plans because I want to bake’, and ‘no I can’t change the day because these are my baking plans’. I imagine in reality a lot of the confrontation and frustration is in my head. I know my friends would never ask me to change my baking plans. I think I need to let go of some angst and I hope baking will be a good outlet this new year. 

This traybake turned out super delicious! I love a fluffy cake, and not a big fan of stoge (although it has its place). These are fluffy and strong in flavour and the coffee and cardamom go together so well and the walnuts are crunchy. I had to make a vegan buttermilk using lemon and oat milk and I substituted the cream cheese icing for a cinnamon butter cream. I like eating cake for breakfast sometimes (teehee) and this is a great cake-for-breakfast cake and I’m excited to wake up to it tomorrow.

The recipe I used is from Ravneet Gill’s new book, Baking For Pleasure – highly recommend it!

Goodbye for now.

Watch the reel.