cake du jour - battenburg

Battenburg. I'm sure we called it something. Chess cake or something like that, but I am full of cold and my synapses won't snap. I used to pull it apart before I ate it, I know that. I still would, come to think of it. I like food that I can play with. I'm a fiddler.

We ate it at Grandma's. I remember sitting next to her on the sea-grass stool, eating Battenburg from one of the marbled cake plates on her little round oak table. The living room was a haven of toys from the late fifties, and card games. There were matchbox cars whose rubber tyres you could chew off, and tanks that fired spent matches. My favourite was the wooden tiles that you could arrange into different patterns. Some of them had been chewed by various dogs over the years, which made the corners a slightly funny shape but didn't dent their attraction. Grandma would sometimes run through a variety of names including the dog's before she got to yours. You could sit in her living room at that table for hours, and never be bored.

Nowadays the sea-grass stool is in my living room, the oak table under my window, the cake plates in my dresser. I don't ever eat Battenburg though, and I've forgotten how to play Rummy.

*If you too have been having trouble uploading images to Blogger you need to change your Blogger dashboard password so it points to ww2.blogger instead of blogger.beta. Like magic, it is.