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Lemon drizzle cake

From Alison Bradley via Bernie Baldwin
Makes one 1lb loaf

Preheat the oven to 175C (350F), and line a 1lb loaf tin1.

In a large bowl, beat together 57 g (¼ c, ½ stick) softened butter2, 70 g (⅜ c + 1 T) granulated sugar, 1 large egg3, 2 T milk, a pinch of salt, and the zest of ½ lemon. Then mix in 85 g (⅔ c) self raising flour4.

Pour in to the loaf tin and bake 50 minutes at 175C (350F). In a small bowl, prepare the drizzle by mixing the juice of ½ lemon and 1½ T icing sugar. Set aside.

When done, remove the tin from oven and place it on a cooling rack. Poke holes from top of cake all the way through with a skewer, then slowly pour over the drizzle so that it soaks through. Leave to cool at least halfway, then remove the cake from the tin.

  1. I can never remember if my loaf tin is 1lb or 2lbs. The rule of thumb I now use is if it seems “normal”, sort of pound-cake-sized, it’s probably a 1lb tin. If it seems hefty, more the sort of thing you’d use to bake a nearly full-sized loaf of bread, it’s probably a 2lb tin. If you only have a 2lb loaf tin, you’ll need to double or even triple the recipe, and it will take around 10–15 minutes longer to bake. If you have two 1lb loaf tins, consider making two cakes and freezing one for later since it freezes well. ↩
  2. The quickest way I know to soften a stick of butter (at least for a standard shape stick in the US) is to microwave it on full power with the paper on for 5 seconds on each side. ↩
  3. Egg sizes aren’t standard across the world, so for better results, you might want to adjust how much egg you use depending on where you live. Wikipedia has a good article on egg sizes, though keep in mind that these measurements include the weight of the shell (around 8% of the egg weight, supposedly). This is a British recipe, so one large egg should be at least 63g and no more than 72g. In the US, this means that you should ideally use one very large / XL egg. ↩
  4. If you don’t have self raising flour, add 2 t baking powder per cup of flour. Be sure to whisk them together beforehand. For the 85 g (⅔ c) flour in this recipe, it’s probably best to add 1 + 1 scant t baking powder. ↩

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To read: “Maintenance and Care” by Shannon Mattern for Places

Read the article “Maintenance and Care: A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations” by Shannon Mattern for Places, published in November 2018.

Yet even if we build an army of repair robots (a longtime sci-fi dream) and maintenance AIs, their hardware and software will still require upkeep. They’ll still depend upon well-maintained, interoperable technical infrastructures. They’ll still require cleaning staff — “industrial hygienists” — to maintain pristine conditions for their manufacture. We’ll need curators to clean the data and supervisors for the robot cleaning crew. Labor is essential to maintenance.

As Jay Owens reminds us,

There will be dust. There is always dust. By that I mean there is always time, and materiality, and decay. Decomposition and damage are inescapable. There is always the body, with its smears and secretions and messy flaking bits off. There is always waste and it always has to be dealt with, and shipping it out of sight overseas to the developing world does not change the fact this work has to be done (and it is dirty, dangerous work that demands its pound of flesh).

That’s true whether we’re talking about ditch-digging or dam-building or data-diving. Maintenance at any particular site, or on any particular body or object, requires the maintenance of an entire ecology: attending to supply chains, instruments, protocols, social infrastructures, and environmental conditions.

A lot of this relates to the push and pull between maintenance and innovation, how much more attractive innovation, the shiny and new, is in the public consciousness.

This brings me back, yet again, to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The heroic versus the contemplative, the careful. The spear versus the receptacle. The linear versus the cyclical. Resolution versus the infinite.

What about a Carrier Bag Theory of Everything?

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Growing up in a DDT dumping ground

Rat beach near Torrance, California in 2010

Rat Beach in 2010

I came across the article below recently and was pretty floored.

“How the waters off Catalina became a DDT dumping ground” by Rosanna Xia for the LA Times, 25 October 2020

I grew up in Torrance till I was 5 and Palos Verdes until I was 13. I played in the ocean at Rat Beach all the time, caught tadpoles in the storm drain just next to PVBAC, went tidepooling in Abalone Cove. I had no idea about the Superfund site, this is the very first time I’ve heard of it. How on earth is that?

Lunada Bay in Southern California, 2010

Lunada bay in 2010

It looks like the Superfund site starts just south of Lunada Bay and gets worse as you pass Portuguese Bend down towards San Pedro (see map).

And now they’ve verified punctured DDT waste barrels that have been sitting on the sea floor just off Catalina, possibly since the 1980s. This could be three to four decades of leakage from up to half a million barrels.

They leaned in to examine an icicle-like anomaly growing off one of the barrels — a “toxicle,” they called it — and wondered about the gas that bubbled out when the robot snapped one off. To have gas supersaturated in and around these barrels so deep underwater, where the pressure was 90 times greater than above ground, was unsettling. They couldn’t help but feel like they were poking at a giant Coke can ready to explode.

Sea lions up and down the coast have been dying from it for decades, and still are. We eat a lot of seafood from these waters.

How can this possibly be cleaned up, and who on earth is going to pay for it? Certainly not the Montrose Chemical Corp. of California, they’ve been gone for years.

It’s just so exhausting. It feels like so many people’s jobs right this moment are simply running around slapping Bandaids left right and center, scrambling to fix what have become systemic problems caused by the poor decision making of people in the past. Lack of foresight, deliberately turning a blind eye, “we’ll deal with it later”, “it can’t possibly be that bad”. The environment, tech, policing, advertising.

So much firefighting.

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To read: “Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country” by Cristina Rivera Garza

A friend+co-conspirator from FemOS recommended Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza recently, looks incredible. In her words:

It discusses histories of trauma and violence in Mexico, but I think also speaks to people encountering trauma in their work or daily lives, and how to process or experience that through collective grieving. She posits Mexico as a “visceraless state,” where the government has assumed a solely administrative function, and thus has left the citizens are disembodied. Apt language to describe how states around the world are grappling with the pandemic…

Feminist Press (publisher) | Biblio.com (secondhand) | Bookshop.org

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Current listening: “The Best of the Alessi Brothers”

Currently listening to The Best Of The Alessi Brothers (1998). Had no idea about them, came across them via two cool cats on Twitter.

These vibes are the perfect thing right now. Also, will be taking photos of the Alessi Bros to the hairdresser when that’s an option again.

Apple Music | Spotify

The album’s not on Bandcamp, but “Seabird” is included in Late Night Tales: Metronomy.

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Well, that was expected

Yesterday was a month long. As this guy said, maybe it’s just December 37, 2020. Of course everything would just get worse in 2021.

I’d call this a comedy of errors if it wasn’t so bone-achingly depressing. I’m recording some questions and thoughts here because I don’t want to forget what actually happened. There’s so much gaslighting already.

Here’s a timeline of what I feel are the more salient events from yesterday. This is pulled together mainly from news sources and tweets from journalists, times are linked to sources.

Read more (or don’t, it’s exhausting)