Forgiving Cake

Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.  – Ephesians 4.31-32 (The Message)

A forgiving recipe, it seems, is one which does not require exact measurements, where some ingredients can be substituted without the result being affected, or where a cook can get it wrong and it still turns out okay.

Nigella's forgiving banana cake recipe calls for sugar . . . rum . . . overripe bananas, a stove . . . folks wrote in about substituting golden syrup for rum . . . brown sugar for white sugar . . . not-so-ripe bananas, and my fav – a camp stove and some foil instead of an oven and a cake pan . . . and they all got the same thing . . . banana cake!  

That’s forgiveness:  starting out with the correct recipe (knowing what you should do) then changing something (doing something else – other than what you should have done) and still getting cake in the end.

You shouldn’t – get cake, that is.  What you should get is an ooey-gooey mess of something that was supposed to have been a cake.  But with a forgiving cake, you get cake every time.

That’s something.