Doing an Orton

I have just written a word into my Roget's.

This is ... not something I do. That whole annotating-books thing: every time I follow a recipe from a book, I think maybe I should be noting my own alterations as I go, and I never do. Other people's pages are kind of sacrosanct, apparently, although their recipes are not.

But. Yes. Pen in hand, I made my vandalism.

Thing is, anyone who knows me knows that my memory has always been a problem. Until recently, it's mostly been external to the page: people, mostly. Names and faces. I can remember neither, and never have been able to.

These days, that has very thoroughly extended to a more generalised nominative aphasia, so that authors, book titles, all my more solid ground - stuff I've known all my life - has become unstable and sometimes utterly inaccessible. I hate this, but I get away with it: a wave of the hand, "someone obvious whose name I will remember later," like that.

What I can't get away with? Is losing my vocabulary. All my life, my job has been to find the right word for the occasion. These days, too often I find I can't remember the right word.

Which is why, for the first time in my life, I write with a Roget's at my side. As a prompt, not a source: when I simply can't remember the word I'm groping for, mostly I can track it down through synonyms.

Sometimes, though, I get to the right place and the word isn't there. Today, I lost patience. I have added "tmesis" to Roget's figures of speech. Next time I need it, I'll just have to hope to remember to look it up under "figures of speech" rather than grammatical terms or rhetorical terms or...

Chocolate beetroot cake

Okay, this works rather well. In the interests of full disclosure: my improvised white chocolate ganache did not work quite so well; it was a leetle more liquid than intended, so it kind of slid off the cake overnight and pooled on the plate. This is, um, not photogenic, hence no photos; but it's not exactly a disaster either. I just serve cake with a dollop of icing on the side...

Chocolate Beetroot Cake

85g cocoa
200g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
225g vanilla sugar
280g beetroot
3 eggs
200ml sunflower oil

First, cook your beetroot. Some people roast 'em in their skins, and then peel; some boil in their skins, and then peel. Both of these take time, which I didn't have. I peeled 'em, chunked 'em, boiled 'em till a knife slid in; maybe half an hour. Then I flushed 'em with cold water till cool.

Sift the flour, cocoa and baking powder into a large bowl with a large pinch of salt.

Whizz the cooked beetroot in a food processor. Add eggs one at a time, then the oil, then the sugar.

When your gloop is smooth and of a pinkness extraordinary, stir it into the dry stuff. Pour the resultant batter into a lined loose-bottomed 23cm cake tin. Bake in a medium oven for 45 mins or so, until firm. If the surface cracks, don't worry.

Cool on a rack, then ice it better than I did.

[ETA: I am fairly sure you could do this with grated raw beetroot. I am fairly sure, indeed, that you could take any carrot cake recipe and substitute beetroot in whole or in part. Just, this time I was kinda following a recipe, with variations. Next time I may be looser...]

But why is there no more gin?

I kind of frittered, today. I had to wait in, to give new keys to the catsitter; but a little light tidying, a casual vacuuming, these are probably not sufficient unto the day.

I had meant to pass the evening reading a book I mean to blurb, but I got waylaid; I seem to have written a thousand words or so, of something you wot not of. So now I can sit down with book and a clear conscience, and a clear glass also - but this is the last of it, and why is there no more gin...?

(I have been described recently, and I think fondly, as "self-ginning". I cling to this.)