Month of January: “Essentials of Italian Cooking” Recipe: Polenta cake with raisins, dried fig and pine nuts

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver

Today is my birthday. January 29th. For some strange reason everything today has gone awry. WordPress is posting that it’s January 30th and I can’t seem to figure out why? It is not January 30th!!! I wanted to make a dessert from this cookbook instead of my never fail favorite coconut layer cake with custard cream and meringue frosting. I drove to 3 stores to get the ingredients for this endeavor. Trader Joe’s always has pine nuts and I mean ALWAYS but not today. The co-op parking lot never is full at 10 am, even on a weekend, but on this particular morn, there was nowhere to park. They always have cornmeal but none when I went looking for it. Can I just say that trying to make this cake for my birthday has been a very weird experience from beginning to end? It’s like this cake just did not want to be made. And now I know why. It just sucked as a birthday cake. Should have made the coconut. Live and learn. Live and learn.