Chocolate Snack Cake

The high dude to sword ratio assures
quality.

Awhile back I ran the Seattle marathon, and it was a surprisingly peaceful experience.  Occult/Satanic black metal is a mixed bag, but at its best, it's quite soothing. Songs proceed steadily, have clean structures, and hit a sweet spot between overall simplicity and movements of complex, discordant riffs.  It goes well with extended study; perks up the mind but doesn't distract, pushes one through dense swaths of text with dreadful inertia, and creates a happy background atmosphere. For such reasons occult black metal also makes a great soundtrack for distance running. Leading up to the marathon, my time had been evenly split between running and studying Joyce's evolution of traditional features of Irish myth in Ulysses.  So, occult black metal has been in heavy rotation, and in terms of listens, Hade's Hecate Queen of Hades has been crowned a surprising but unambiguous victor.

The catchy bits and the more hilarious lyric passages replayed in my head for the better part of the marathon. Towards the last several miles, I couldn't keep up with the beat, but it set a great pace for the first 3/4ths of the race. The last quarter of the Seattle marathon is comprised of a series of hill climbs, which kept me busy imagining myself into a tardigrade anyhow. Tardigrades don't listen to music; they live underwater. They also have eight legs, a number which makes it markedly easier to run up hills, perhaps not quickly, but inevitably, like a microscopic, bear-shaped tank. The chitinous claws provide traction!

Several years back, ESA hosted a small program cutely named TARDIS in which tardigrades were shot into space completely unprotected from solar radiation. Aside from hunting amoebas and having armor plating, the cool thing about tardigrades is that they can survive an excess of 100 years when rolled up in an anhydrous tun. While secure in their desiccated tun-state, tardigrades can survive being boiled, frozen, thrown into acid, and, as it turns out, exposed to cosmic radiation. 12% of the micro-astronauts survived the flight and went on to have normal babies. What became of the percentage that survived but mutated, I wonder? how do you get weirder than a tardigrade?

Tardigrades: totally metal.

The Seattle course goes across Lake Washington and through a couple of parks. It rained the entire time, first a drizzle, then a downpour, then back to some characteristic spitting just in time for the finish. Windy too. COming north along the lakeshore into the second half of the race I saw some gorgeous flurries of the last of the sopping yellow alder leaves. Aside from transforming into a tardigrade and listening to an excellent mental soundtrack, the climate and the sections through these forested parks in the east of the city contributed to my overall feeling of well being and ease. It really felt like I was out for a nice trot the entire time despite pulling off speeds over distances that I hadn't thought myself capable of. The weather just felt right. The trees felt right. The air and the dirt smelled good.

Not alder leaves.

I'm not a particularly stationary person. I've popped up and down the west coast over the past ten years, and before that I wandered around the South Pacific. Though I don't always indulge it, I have the desire to move house about every six months. Yet I very much feel the Pacific Northwest to be my native habitat. Taking the Coast Starlight up from SF, there's a point after crossing the Siskiyous but before reaching Eugene where the plants change, get thicker and greener, and something in me that I didn't know was tight relaxes. It's like my mind has been holding its breath and suddenly takes a lungful of the cool, damp air.

Music can be place bound too. Of course Agalloch and other Cascadian black metal acts like Addaura or Alda (Is an A name an implicit requirement for this genre? Pretty sure I can list at least two more starting with the letter.) spring to mind. Kyuss sounds sometimes like the southwest. How is it hat musicians capture place in sound? It doesn't always work, or at least translate over to every person. Nothing of Sibelius's, not Finlandia, Karelia Suite, or his Sixth Symphony, feels like any part of Finland I've seen. But you wouldn't have to tell me the name of the band or song for me to imagine crouching beneath a wet spruce on a ridge in the Salmon Huckleberry Wilderness when I listen to Agalloch tunes. Though I've none of the desert in me, Kyuss, which I don't like on account of it, feels like getting slapped with dry sunshine.

Rather be slapped with this please.

Music hits straight to the core, the way the sight of plants in the weather does. Writers evoke place with varying success, but the effect is never as direct or moving through the filter of words. The immediate pleasurable pain of connection to a place transmits much more naturally through sound. Silently processing prose calls forth the mind. Music invites consciousness of self to melt out from the inside and disappear.


Somewhere around the 18th mile of a long run the same self dispersal begins. Water and wind carry me along. Trees take root and stretch out where my flesh had been. Flocks of geese get mixed up with my thoughts, seagulls with my feelings. But, I should note that I've only ever run longer distances west of the Cascades and north of Portland. Can I disappear into a habitat foreign to me? Can that be learned? I'm going to do some research.

Of course I wanted cake after running 26.2 miles fast. Become one with the landscape all you like, that's still a metric ass-ton of calories burned. So, here's an easy pleaser, chocolate cake with lemon frosting in the shape of a tardigrade. The neon food coloring enhances the flavor!

Eat effigy, assume tardigrade powers.

Chocolate Snack Cake

Oven at 176 C, 350 F.

Mix:
4 dl flour
60 ml cocoa
5 ml baking soda
2.5 ml salt


Melt on the stovetop:
2 dl packed brown sugar
60 grams of chocolate
80 ml margarine

Fold wet ingredients into dry,
then add:
2 dl + 40 ml water
5 ml vinegar
2.5 ml vanilla


Put into greased, floured pan(s) and bake 35-40 min.
Let cool before cutting into fanciful shapes (if desired) and frosting.
I used two 9 inch round cake pans and four cupcakes to create the tardigrade. But I was still stupid from running. On reflection, try four cupcakes and one 9x13.

Lemon Frosting

Cream together:
2 T margarine
1 C powdered sugar

Drizzle in lemon juice until desired consistency is achieved, about half a lemon.
Portion into cups and mix in food coloring.

Goodbye Seattle.