Ginger in five variations

January 7, 2022

My spiritual director tells me she thinks God is inviting me to make a cake. At the end of our session, we sit in silence together. You think that sounds awkward, try sitting in silence with someone over Zoom. But it doesn’t feel awkward to me, it feels like a reprieve: permission to stop taking care of people, to pause the inner swirl of problem-solving and risk-mitigating and navigating the landmines of others’ emotions. My task is not to figure anything out, not even what God might be saying to me. It is merely to be still, and receive whatever invitation might come. The act of pausing to listen itself is an invitation to embrace a basic concept of spirituality, that God is God, and I am not. After all, if the omnipotent creator and sustainer of the universe wants to get through to me, do you imagine I could prevent it? There’s no conjuring necessary. 

Often I do sense something, a person I might connect with, a practice I might try, a metaphor I might meditate on. But this time, after a few minutes of waiting in silence I open my eyes and pronounce, “I got nothing.” Coming up empty this way might have triggered a sense of shame at not having been graced with a holy mystery, and the companion pressure to find something to report. But at least for now, at least right here, it doesn’t: no conjuring necessary. God will speak when God wants to speak. Though I’m a beginner mystic, and may always be, I’ve practiced the discipline of listening enough to know that there’s no telling what the deep well of the heart is undergoing even when the surface reflects nothing. Sometimes you get a divine word, and sometimes the fruit of pausing to be quiet in God’s presence emerges, much later, as the ability to retract the cranky response moments before spewing it out in a fight, the inspiration to text a friend you haven’t talked to in a while who just happened to need a kindness.

My spiritual director smiles. She’s not scared of receiving nothing. “I think,” she says, “God is inviting you to bake a cake.” She prays a blessing to close our time, and I head to the kitchen.

In fact, I’ve been hoping to bake a cake all week, but as usual, I’ve mapped out more projects than I’ve made time for. But if the invitation is from God, how can I say no? Let a few emails remain unanswered another day, let the floor remain awash with crumbs. Cake isn’t a necessity, but joy is. 

During the holidays I had one of my famous flashes of inspiration, the kind that send loved ones ducking for cover: we should develop a house label! For the concoctions I lovingly develop over the year, the brews and blends and infusions that populate our fridge and pantry, pulled out for spontaneous guests, dropped off on porches in celebration and consolation, carried along as hostess gifts. For next year’s Christmas gifts, handcrafted in my kitchen and presented all fancy in beautiful packaging. Anyone can have random jam jars on the shelf; I want branding! And what better flagship product than liquor?

Or more precisely, liqueur. It started when Nate injured his foot walking down icy stairs just before New Year’s Eve. I, ever the compassionate and loving wife, set about making him a pity cocktail to sip while he convalesces. How about one named for a cure? I tried mixing up a classic Penicillin, but only had approximations of a handful of the components, chiefly, ginger in its various cocktail-ready forms. If you know me at all, you are not surprised that my next move was to google “How do you make ginger liqueur?” Can’t be too hard!

On New Year’s Eve I set about finding out for myself. I chop a hunk of ginger and simmer with sugar, orange zest, vanilla bean. Transfer the dreamy scented potion to a jar and top off with brandy, where it steeps for a few days before I pronounce it done: my first batch of Domain de Newton. More ginger is simmered with straight sugar, coming out flecked with black vanilla specks left behind in the liqueur pan. The syrup may grace a future cocktails but right now it provides a welcome burn to my morning coffee. 

(Lest you think this sounds all together too magical, here’s how the rest of convalescent cocktail night went: Launch Christmas break celebration homemade pizza night just before husband gets injured. Husband pinned to couch, I make convalescent cocktail take 1. I plough ahead with ambitious project single-handedly, while a child kicks over the cocktail. While I clean it up, typically complacent baby left alone in high chair reaches breaking point. Grocery delivery arrives, except it’s the wrong person’s groceries, but hey, there is a jar of pickled beets and surprise, baby loves picked beets! Screaming temporarily averted, I make convalescent cocktail take 2 and resume dinner, spilling cheese on a 550 degree baking steel and triggering the fire alarm which triggers a panic reaction in two of three children. After prodding the machine to cease beeping and complimenting my terrified children on how bravely they kept daddy safe, I return to the kitchen. At which point, of course, a child knocks over the second iteration of convalescent cocktail and I lose all capacity for rational thought and swing for the only possible refuge: “BEDTIME, NOW!” Kids to bed, standard post-kid-eating disaster swept up, and a little after 9, Nate hobbles over to join me in a feast of what will probably be the most memorable lukewarm homemade pizza we’ll ever have.)

On Epiphany, we have a bonfire, to gather friends by the light of our burning Christmas tree. It’s a family tradition in the making, only a few years old but already forged in our kids’ imagination as a permanent practice. We didn’t get a tree this year, so we burn our Advent wreath instead, and share pizza–takeout, this time–that gets cold in the short walk from the patio table to the folding chairs pitched in the snow around the bonfire in the garden. The space is brighter than I’d expected it would be. Despite the ugliness of forsaken plant matter, festooned with lights by Nate, our little yard makes a plausible space for gathering, even in winter, at night. Kids lounge in the hammock and curl up in adult laps. We breeze through most of a bag of marshmallows. We sip hot toddies fired up with the rest of the ginger, a whole lemon, squeezed and left to simmer with honey and cloves and more good things, topped with a healthy glug of rum. It flashes in the throat, the ginger and rum warming us from the inside, like the flush of warmth from friends around a fire in the snow on a night dedicated to commemorating wonder and light.

And now, I’m making ginger cake, on God’s orders. In addition to an entire quarter cup of powdered ginger, it calls for ginger syrup, which I conveniently now have.

And caramelized white chocolate buttercream frosting.

It sounds simple enough: lay out white chocolate chunks in a mildly hot oven, stir periodically, allow to liquify into a deep brown and sickly sweet white chocolate morphs into something complex and rich. No problem. The recipe even cautions it may get grainy mid-way through, but advises to persevere with confidence, so I’m initially not too worried when my caramelized white chocolate starts looking more like graham cracker crumbs. But it doesn’t seem to change as time passes. Am I burning it? Maybe it will dissolve into the frosting after it cools? Maybe it will melt over a double boiler? I try, and after 10-15 minutes, it starts looking glossy and smooth, from graham cracker crumbles into shiny brown play doh. Aha, I think. This is a metaphor for how you have to just press on through trials. It may look like everything is falling apart, but if you carry on, you’ll find your grainy white chocolate crumbles converge into a smooth caramel sauce. I have triumphed. 

Except, as more time passes, it never moves past the play-doh stage. I give it as much time as I can, completing every other part of the cake, but at some point I have to acknowledge that the ship for whatever chemical transformation I was attempting has sailed. I will make a brown playdoh buttercream frosting or none at all.

A kitchenaid is a marvelous thing. It whips a non-trivial amount of air into the playdoh, lightens it right up. A totally passable frosting if you haven’t seen the picture in the cookbook, Nate reports. I don’t think anyone offered a slice will pass one up. Unless they hate ginger. And in fact, I bring it along to an event I attend on Saturday, and no one does seem to pass it up. “I love ginger!” one guest gushes, “this is so good! You made this?!”

As if there’s any magic I imparted beyond following the recipe. And God’s invitation. 

After I make my ginger liqueur, I can’t bear to toss the spent ginger, orange and vanilla. Spent seems the wrong word for something still so fragrant, even after giving its all to perfume last week’s infusions. “I’m not too far gone to fall headlong into the arms that love me,” Over the Rhine and Lucinda Williams croon; as with us frail children of dust, so with these leftovers. Not too far gone to become something beautiful. All week long it’s been hibernating in refrigerated tupperware, waiting for revival. Tonight, redemption cometh. The ginger steeps in sugary cream and milk from afternoon to after dinner. Finally, in the quiet of kid chaos temporarily stilled and my wounded husband at rest upstairs, I crack the last few egg yolks, temper them with a ladle of flavored cream, and heat it all to a spoon-coating custard. I strain out the solids, and top it off with a splash of bourbon made an hour west, in rural Virginia, and taste a spoonful before popping into the fridge to chill. This ice cream will be impossible to duplicate, and it’s perfect.