{"id":151571,"date":"2014-02-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gracious-khorana.45-76-20-142.plesk.page\/localmex12014x102x1valentines-day-cake-all-natural-red-velvet-beet-cake-goat-cheese-thyme-icing-htmlx1\/"},"modified":"2023-06-26T17:12:02","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T17:12:02","slug":"valentines-day-cake-all-natural-red-velvet-beet-cake-goat-cheese-thyme-icing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/2014\/02\/valentines-day-cake-all-natural-red-velvet-beet-cake-goat-cheese-thyme-icing.html","title":{"rendered":"Valentine\u2019s Day Cake: All Natural Red Velvet Beet Cake + Goat Cheese Thyme Icing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Yesterday I awoke to a letter telling me I was that same girl from two autumns ago. The letter said it saw me: saw me listless, saw me trilling & giddy, saw me working to the bone. The letter was a tender apology. The night before, I\u2019d skittered up and down the stairs, out into the frigid driveway barefoot in nothing but a slip look, look, looking for my damn phone. I needed the alarm on it. I\u2019m trying to become a morning person, you see. Current status of that project is abject failure. I\u2019ll keep you posted. So I skittered around looking for the phone only to finally find it tucked neatly by the detergent on the laundry room shelf. I\u2019m also trying to do more laundry. It\u2019s one of those ambitious weeks. Still haven\u2019t run yet. But I did 100 lunges, and I can\u2019t walk or sit without almost falling down. I, evidently, succeeded in breaking my legs. So there\u2019s that. Anyhow, I found the phone, crawled beneath the covers shivering the driveway chill off, and then the phone looked at me and wailed my battery is dying!<\/em> It was exactly 17 minutes before midnight, and I reached for the charger only to remember I\u2019d left it in the living room. It was mostly downhill after that. You can read about it. Or just scroll down to the recipe link at the bottom of the post. I won\u2019t hold it against you.<\/p>\n

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He was sitting on the edge of the bed about to go back down to the office to do more work (he\u2019s a wise night owl). I looked at him, forlorn.\u00a0Will you get my charger?<\/em>\u00a0He sighed heavily, put out. Which put me out. So I said\u00a0nevermind<\/em>\u00a0(oh the poisonous\u00a0nevermind<\/em>!) and made a great display of getting it myself and see-wasn\u2019t-that-easy. Then I crawled back into bed and silently pulled the covers over my head. Just that. What ensued was a labyrinthine conversation of\u00a0what\u2019s wrong<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0nothings<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0my feelings were hurt<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0can\u2019t I just this<\/em>\u00a0and all of that super-happy-fun, good-times banter. Almost an hour had passed, and it was nearing one. I felt dejected, my dreams of bounding out of bed the next morning already dashed.<\/p>\n

But then, the next morning, I awoke to a letter on that self-same bastard phone (it was, you see, all the phone\u2019s fault. As are so many things.) He\u2019d sent it in the middle of the night. And it said that he was sorry for sometimes being stubborn (me too), and that I\u2019m that same girl he\u2019d loved so dearly two autumns ago. That he loves now just as much. That I\u2019m his first choice. Through some thick and some thin, that is where we find ourselves today. And that, dear friends, beats all the chalky chocolates, pre-ordained bouquets of stodgy roses, and romantic Valentine\u2019s Day gestures in the world. I\u2019ll take a spat & a genuine make up any day. When you and your partner can see your part and admit it\u2026.that<\/em>\u00a0is romantic.<\/p>\n

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We don\u2019t observe Valentine\u2019s Day around here. It wasn\u2019t some decision we made or some declaration; it just bores us both, and we\u2019re usually too busy to remember. There\u2019s also the fact that we both have ideas of love and romance that are categorically antithetical to Valentine\u2019s Day in its present incarnation. But then I discovered\u00a0Lupercalia<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lupercalia<\/em>\u00a0is, to my feeble Wikipedia fueled understanding, one of the ancient Roman festivals from which this, our bland \u201cValentine\u2019s Day\u201d, springs. It was all saltmeal cakes and sacrificial goats, vestal virgins and feasting. It was both a time for purification and cleansing of the city as well as a time to honor the wolf-mother, Lupa. The mid-February (etymology, interestingly,\u00a0Februa<\/em>\u00a0after the ancient roman purification festival the pre-dates even\u00a0Lupercalia<\/em>) festivals, before they were first Christianized; subjected to the medieval ideals of courtly love; and then that final violence, the Hallmark ideals capitalism\u2014before all that mid-February was a celebration of purification and fertility. Which makes sense; seeing as it\u2019s the last bite of winter before spring births the world all over again. The idea that we would cleanse and purify to prepare for this birth as the crone of winter begins to fade away, this makes sense to me.<\/p>\n

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And this is something I want to celebrate. I want to take time to reflect on the winter, to cleanse, and to intend fertility for the coming spring: fertile creativity, relationships, and earth. My preference for Lupa over Cupid is a personal one, and I don\u2019t frown upon bathtubs of red roses and champagne if that\u2019s your bag. I don\u2019t really frown on much of anything. I\u2019m all about forming each our own, new traditions. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a bad thing that traditions that no longer suited a people evolved. But these no longer suit me.<\/p>\n

So now I\u2019d like to take a fine, fine Southern tradition, Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Icing, and let it evolve with me. I created this recipe for Free People\u2019s blog<\/a>, and it\u2019s the perfect cake for the season as we know it today, all beating heart red & rich with cocoa. But along with the canned gestures, an entire bottle of chemical dye in my cake also doesn\u2019t turn me on. This cake, instead, gets its deep hue from earthy beets (you can\u2019t even taste them\u2026not that it would be a bad thing if you did), and the icing is made of local goat cheese. And forget the flowers. I\u2019ll go to the nursery and pick out a little family of succulents for the home we share; they\u2019ll long out live a withering bouquet and clean our air besides. So all natural Red Velvet Cake and succulents are our new Valentine\u2019s Day\u2026nay\u2026Lupercalia<\/em>\u00a0tradition. What will yours be?<\/p>\n

And in case you\u2019re wondering\u2026I still don\u2019t have a stove. These shots are from my brother & sister-in-law\u2019s house. It\u2019s one of my favorite places to cook besides my own kitchen.\u00a0Find the recipe here at Free People!<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Yesterday I awoke to a letter telling me I was that same girl from two autumns ago. The letter said it saw me: saw me listless, saw me trilling & giddy, saw me working to the bone. The letter was a tender apology. The night before, I\u2019d skittered up and down the stairs, out into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":152766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[60,1784,1764,1745,1706],"tags":[375,30,376,377,43,72,378,379,172,215,45,380,381,382,383,41,384,385,322],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151571"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}