The Hot, Hot Oven

On the final days of a meditation retreat in early summer, I had begun to think of worldly things. Two worldly things became interesting to me in those days: an oven thermometer, and an oven timer. I bought them shortly after the end of the retreat.
I haven't been baking much this summer, but any time there is a birthday (a twelfth, a forty-seventh, a forty-fifth), I fire up the oven and make a double-layer chocolate cake. This is an old picture, but you get the idea... they're messy cakes, and obviously home made. The last one was covered in chocolate-covered star-shaped cookies. It looked crazy.