It's been an exciting August, and September is starting off with a delicate sense of newness found in ripening of fruit and the quiet yet bewitching love for a newborn. My niece was born yesterday morning and seeing her tiny frame cradled in my arms filled me with a newer fondness for her and the future she'll inherit in her tiny hands. If I have anything to do about it, she'll inherit a lot of baked treats in her hands soon enough.
Through it all, my bones are quaking under my skin, ready to rattle my limbs into reaching for newer things while holding onto the things that have anchored me in summer sea. I always approach new seasons as an explorer would with a rusted compass and a fierce sense of adventure.
I approached this recipe similarly, but with whisks and a map of where I hoped I'd end up. The plums were perfectly ripe, and the dough had been sitting for more than a day. I plunged through the forest of doubt and sliced, chopped, and pressed as well as my instincts let me to make it to the end. I'm not a weathered baker like the captain of a mossy vessel whose strength stems from decades of learned skill and a lack of need for direction or order. I'm just a girl who wields her tools as a weapon against not any enemy, but as a way of measuring my own strength in the bigger world I live in.
