Every Hand in the House

We feed it year-long.
Its sixpence heart waits for the great reveal

(through summer's parched dominion,
through another bastard year of inferior cinnamon)

and mellows with every month
and every lavish swig.

Every hand in the house had stirred it.
And as another Christmas shivers in

we take it from its cupboard home,
dense as a neutron star and burning blue.

A Molotov pudding, a brandy sun –
every hand in the house presents a spoon.

Jody Porter is Poetry Editor for the Morning Star. His poetry blog is All Deciduous Things.

O My Dears One Learns Something New Every Day

        How painful to admit

                                  so many cakes later

                    that due to sloth

& one’s terror of inadvertent

                                        flour inhalation

                    one has missed

                                                  a trick

         but one is not above

                        confessing one’s peccadilloes.

  One speaks, O my dears, of decades

of denial:

                         all that faff

                                           with the sieve

                                resulting, as it turns out,

                  in a lighter sponge.

    Who knew?

                One will now don

                                 one’s sheepish apron

hold one’s breath,

                   sift as if one’s life depended etc,

            apply heat          

                                & revel in

  this frankly indecent expansion.

             O my dears, how

                                   perfectly

                                                      fat.

Jacqueline Saphra's latest collection is The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions. You can read more of her work on her blog.

                                                                                    

Paul Hollywood’s Chestnuts

 The seller sang The Christmas Song,

rustling up the blackened beauties

in paper bags, thrusting them to us.

'That’s two quid, mate.'

Within the wrapped-up crowd I peeled;

I tasted. I offered up the bag.

‘Mary,' I said,

'I'm not sure about the bake.’

Lara Jakob's blog is Word of Mouth.

Stirring

Heap up the dried fruits, let them marinade

all night, a second honeymoon of booze;
an upset of almonds with their whiff of cyanide;
sultry cherries in their violated glory;
bittersweet, the candied taint of peel
we once discarded. Add citrus zest
to this pirate’s chest of jewels, sprinkle
cinnamon for regret; swing a great censer
of nutmeg absolution, a covet of allspice,
slow-blending muscovado. Help me preserve
all these good things against the winter. Bind
with butter, eggs and flour, bake it loveblind
in a bedding of brown paper, the fragrance
hotter now than summer. Let us make
a new abundance in this kitchen.
Let there be a sticky handfasting
of gritty marzipan and fondant icing.
Let there be more fruit than cake.

Judi Sutherland is a poet and writer, she blogs at There Must Be More To Life Than Having It All.

Icing

The silver medal bears the firm’s name

not her’s. No matter. I know

how she formed fancy from sugar and water:

roses in woven work, scrolls, waves.

On a snow day we’d sit in the back-kitchen;

she’d steady my hand, but there was always

something: the piping bag too fat for my grip,

the dummies resistant, their cardboard hard,

nothing like the riches of cake.

They smelled of must, not sweet-soaked fruit

brandied each week since October

with the Georgian crested ladle.

‘It’s practice’ were words of discomfort.

I’d sooner stop, watch her layer

a royale ice rink into winter’s wonder.

Kate Noakes blogs here. Her first collection Cape Town is published by Eyewear.