lessons i have learnt this week:

if you make banana buttermilk pancakes on sunday, and then save the rest of the buttermilk for an opportune moment when you can make a chocolate cake, even if it’s just two days later, when it comes to the part in the recipe where you add the buttermilk, you will find that you now have half a carton of thick, tangy yoghurt.

if you substitute normal milk for the buttermilk, the cake turns out fine, in as much as a cake can when you’re still experimenting with the hidden hotspots in a still-unfamiiliar fan-forced oven.

if the top of the cake rises way too quickly, and cracks a big, gaping smile all the way around one side, you can shave off the extra high upper lip, and then use pieces of it to fill in the sludgy hole in the middle of the cake where it hasn’t quite cooked through, which you discovered when you sliced the cake in two.

if you sandwich the cake back together with the pink grapefruit preserve that nellie gave you the last time she was in town, it will be a subtle and unexpected citrusy edge to the dark chocolate cake.

if you hide the scarred surface of the cake with a simple but decadent icing made of dark chocolate melted down with a bit of butter and a bit of milk, and if the chocolate you use is scharffen berger, which also came by way of nellie, it will be all glossy good.

it is a most agreeable thing eating chocolate cake for afternoon tea on the balcony, sharing alternate mouthfuls with the child, watching the planes go past.

if you leave chocolate cake on the kitchen bench in the moist, warm summertime, on the fifth day it will develop an intricate lace of tiny bubbles across its glossy chocolate icing, and make you wonder what will happen should you have another slice tomorrow.