I baked a tunnel-of-fudge cake with a chocolate glaze for Thanksgiving. I am proud of this cake because it looks not unlike the tunnel-of-fudge cake in the photo in the cooking magazine. Often things I make do not resemble the prototype. The fact that this one does makes the lights go on inside of me. It makes me feel free and happy, like I do when I am holding a French bulldog puppy.
I struggle with making things look like the example. Days after a new haircut I can't get my hair to look anything like it did in the salon. I fuss with it in front of the mirror endlessly and it still just looks like ... my hair. After I buy new clothes and try them on at home it seems they look nothing on me like they did on the model, even if I am roughly the same weight and height. If I try to paint my nails at home instead of paying a professional to do it for me -- the results are embarrassing. My baked confections are often slightly misshapen and awkwardly slathered with frosting, icing, or glaze. But they taste good. Even when I write something it isn't anything like the ideal in my head that I started with. I feel like there's the world, filled with other people's gorgeous hairstyles, beautifully iced black-and-white cookies, and exactly shellacked nails. And then there's the world inside me. The things I am able to manifest tend to look ... not like the model. But maybe that's OK.
I was very happy with the way the tunnel-of-fudge cake looked, but I didn't like the way it tasted. It could have been a timing issue. Because I made it for Thanksgiving dinner, I prepared it hours before it was eaten. Technically we should have eaten it just after the glaze hardened, which we didn't because we were, at that time, overstuffed with turkey, cranberry-horseradish relish, and wine. After tasting it I wasn't convinced the tunnel-of-fudge inside of the cake formed exactly as it should. And the cake itself seemed dry. I felt disappointed.
I also made a pumpkin pie. It was one of my visual catastrophes. The crust was slightly burnt, it receded around the edges, and generally looked like a horror story. But it tasted fantastic. The surface of the pie was marred with blemishes which I tried to remedy by smoothing the top with whipped cream sweetened with confectioners sugar, but the cream looked messy and peculiar piled atop the pie. It reminded me of when I would cover up my acne-ridden face with CoverGirl concealer in Junior High school, accidentally creating a greater visual defect than what I began with. But, to me, my pie tastes exactly like a pumpkin pie should. The texture combination of filling and whipped cream, the flavor of pumpkin, the flaky quotient of the crust. The way it tastes and feels in my mouth is exactly what I had hoped for. The day after Thanksgiving, my misshapen pumpkin pie was all I wanted to eat.
I think I am better at creating things on the inside. I am good with words. I understand people's feelings and people tend to ask me to help them sort theirs out. I am good with making food taste, words sound, and people feel a certain way. I am not good with glazes, the way things shine on the surface, or ensuring that a belt cinches around the waist just the way that it should.
But maybe that's OK too. There's something about my strange, misshapen pies that attracts me. Like a French bulldog. French bulldogs are peculiar looking, but they are wonderful in their peculiarity.
This reminds me of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that is rooted in the idea of transience and imperfect beauty. Wabi-sabi sees beauty in that which is flawed and authentic. One Japanese phrase for describing wabi-sabi is natsukashii furusato, or "an old memory of my hometown."
Daisetz T. Suzuki, a scholar of Zen Buddhism, described wabi-sabi as "an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty.... Wabi is to be satisfied with a little hut, a room of two or three tatami mats, like the log cabin of Thoreau," he wrote, "and with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall." Wabi stems from the root wa which refers to harmony, peace, and balance and has come to describe someone who is simple, non-materialistic, and in tune with nature. Do I know anyone like that? "Someone who is perfectly herself and never craves to be anything else would be described as wabi." (http://nobleharbor.com/tea/chado/WhatIsWabi-Sabi.htm).
Sabi means "the bloom of time" and speaks to the way "things carry the burden of their years with dignity and grace: the chilly mottled surface of an oxidized silver bowl, the yielding gray of weathered wood..... An old car left in a field to rust, as it transforms from an eyesore into a part of the landscape, could be considered America's contribution to the evolution of sabi. An abandoned barn, as it collapses in on itself, holds this mystique." (http://nobleharbor.com/tea/chado/WhatIsWabi-Sabi.htm).
So, together, wabi-sabi speaks to transient, imperfect beauty, that which embraces asymmetry, asperity, modesty, intimacy. "If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi).
From an engineering or design perspective, wabi may be interpreted as the imperfect quality of any object, due to inevitable limitations in design and construction. Sabi could be interpreted as the aspect of limited mortality of any object. In a Japanese tea ceremony, tea bowls may be rustic and simple-looking, with not-quite-symmetrical shapes, and colors or textures that emphasize an unrefined style. In reality, these items may hide signs of excellent design and they deliberately contain nicks or chipped places from overuse.
There is a part of me that likes my misshapen baked goods for their honesty and authenticity. There is something about my lopsided pies that seems truthful. Like the pie is telling the truth about who made it. But I will always try to create a pie that resembles the beautiful model in the photo. And when I do, I feel like I've touched something, like I've reached something almost sacred. I don't know if I'll ever stop reaching for that and I don't know that I want to. But more than flawless pies, I want to be "someone who is perfectly herself and never craves to be anything else." When I bake something imperfect and allow its imperfections sometimes I feel like I'm getting closer to being that person. When I cinch a belt around my waist and allow the things I manifest to be as they are, and in my acceptance of their imperfections I allow myself to see them as beautiful, I feel like I'm getting a little closer to being the person that I want to be and perhaps already am. Wabi-sabi and my tunnel-of-fudge cake remind me of that.
images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/span112/2355403013/sizes/o/in/photostream/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/moriza/2114612508/in/photostream/; http://zdw.posterous.com/?page=3; http://frenchbulldog.hrastro.com/#photogallery_me
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