(CW) The extensive hot chocolate musings you've been waiting for

Longtime comedy hero releases book, Simple sketches I & II, cake of the month

CW:
Simple sketch I: allusions to child sexual abuse
Simple sketch II: allusions to adult sexual abuse

Hot chocolate hack
Maybe you could have guessed that this is not a place where we drink hot chocolate packets. We don’t look down on anyone who does, but as a chocolate enthusiast with endless patience for cooking, it’s just an unnecessary solution for my lifestyle. As such, I present the following opinions on hot chocolate.

The best hot chocolate recipe is unequivocally this one. It’s slightly thick, very luscious, sweet, buttery and deeply chocolatey. I would say toasting the sugar is inessential to this drink’s greatness. The easiest hot chocolate recipe is unequivocally this one: two tablespoons cocoa powder, one tablespoon sugar, one cup milk heated in a saucepan. Add a pinch of salt and a few drops of vanilla extract to upgrade.

And now for the truly big news in my life, the hot chocolate hack I just discovered that pulls the lynchpin from the deluxe recipe into the basic recipe for amazing results: white chocolate. Melt one ounce of white chocolate into the basic recipe for a huge boost in richness, butteriness and complex sweetness. I’ve tried dark chocolate, and it’s still an improvement, but white chocolate is really the x-factor to delectable hot chocolate. It’s that simple.

Now, finding white chocolate may be more difficult, as I can’t seem to find it hardly anywhere these days. Craft dark chocolate snobbery has gotten to a point where a white chocolate bar is now nearly impossible to find. You can more often find white chocolate chips, which are fine for this recipe but are less suited to melting for baking projects. At Whole Foods they only have a stevia-sweetened option. Come on. I have good luck at upscale bodegas, which are quite a specific and geography-dependent location. In any case, I wish you the best of luck as you rush out to try this chocolate beverage hack. 

Lastly, I wanted to mention drinking chocolate, which you may or may not have heard of and is decidedly different from hot chocolate. It’s more akin to drinking melted chocolate, with a high proportion of it compared to milk or sometimes water. An indulgence for sure. Also easy to make, though, and here’s a solid recipe. I couldn’t leave the topic without making sure you had all the information on liquified chocolate, thanks for listening.

Longtime comedy hero releases book!

Maria Bamford and last month’s cake of the month slice, frozen and thawed, ‘nuff said? This is her new memoir, Sure I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere. Maria is a mental health hero who has been talking about the topic for decades, starting at a time where we could barely choke out “mental health” as a euphemism for mental illness. Even then, she’s held out some of the more frightening stuff until recently, including in this memoir, because for those of us on the more extreme end of things, we can be called “brave” for speaking out while still keeping a few choice facts in the hopper out of shame.

For Maria, while she’s been open about things like bipolar disorder, having breakdowns and being institutionalized, she’d previously—totally understandably—avoided talking about a lesser-known disorder she has called Intrusive Thoughts OCD. Her ongoing web series, of which I am a proud Kickstarter contributor, deals with this topic exclusively. She has unwanted thoughts of a violent and sexual nature on an obsessive basis, such as fears that she will molest children or “genocide” people even though she has no desire to do so. “If you don’t want to, then why did you have the thought?” says the voice in her head, and a fruitless argument continues endlessly. At one point, these fears prevented her from leaving the house. You can see how a disorder like this could be easily misunderstood, and she’s indeed had doctors agree with the voice in her head that she must want to actually hurt people, totally missing the point and setting back her treatment.

To bring it back to yours truly—same! Some people, including some psychologists, don’t think DID is even real! And there are some topics I still haven’t broached as much due to shame or fear that people can’t stomach it. But with inspiration from Maria, I will exclusively reveal one of those topics for the first time in writing: I, too, have been institutionalized at a low point. Wow, can you believe it? It was bad, folks, but it happens! More on that some other time, but there’s the band aid ripped off in Maria’s honor.

Check out Maria’s book for an action-packed tale of decades of false starts and meaningful but minuscule steps forward in self-help circles and similar venues with the kind of mental illness that really does require oftentimes out of reach professional help. It is very much written in her stand-up voice, so it’s full of colorful word choices and delightful details. Maria is hard on herself for her shortcomings, but as one of the many strangers she has succeeded in helping, I’d like to hereby bestow her the coveted title of “good person,” and that’s the final word on that. Thanks, Maria!

Simple sketch I

This simple sketch depicts three abusers from the hand and perspective of a single alter, younger than age five, along with her notations (below) explaining what she drew. I went through several iterations of what I wanted to say about this one, exploring what is at the core of why I’m sharing, but ultimately I just think it’s kind of cool to have produced. Sad and heartbreaking, sure, but admittedly kind of neat, right? Alters were once secret and hidden and terrorized, and now they can come forward and tell their own story in their own words and images to a safe audience of me and my therapist and my husband and you guys. How often do you get to hear the truth of this kind of tragedy straight from the mouth of an imaginative pre-schooler? Well I have one inside of me, and this is what she said! Yes, even the word “looms.” My adult vocabulary can often match words to their feelings, and knowing this man, that’s definitely the feeling. Still, this piece is pretty purely her, and for that I’m proud.

Simple sketch II

This simple sketch is about my life c. 2018. It depicts what my alters were going through while I lived a seemingly normal existence. While this image does say “death” on it, it also shows that certain alters found a small radius of safety inside a larger unsafe space. I dedicate this piece, which, again, does say death on it, I can’t deny, to the people who created that safe radius by being kind to me at that time. A select few are on this email list, and I thank you the most.

Because of the way my personal alters are structured, the me from that time still very much exists, and she and I are having a time of it right now hashing it out. She covered for me a lot, and, unlike many other alters, had a lot of face-time with the outside world of non-abusers. Now that we’re in a safe place where her protection is no longer needed, what’s hers and what’s mine? In handling the outside world myself, I’m taking away her “job” from her in a way. And while there were a whole lot of bad parts of her job, there were some good parts too, and there’s a feeling of loss to that. According to my therapist, it’s common for alters to feel this way—irrelevant all of a sudden; purposeless. She says their purpose is to heal, but that’s a pretty abstract concept to translate into day-to-day practice. “My job is to feel better? How do I do that?” We’re figuring it out, I guess.

Cake of the month: Gingerbread with pear compote and whipped cream

Maybe gingerbread is a winter cake, but here it is existing in the fall, so what do you have to say about that? And its friend pear compote made from decidedly-in-season pears from the farmers market? Definitely an autumn cake for this autumn month. Not that seasonal was ever a stated requirement even. I guess I’m just feeling defensive about it like someone will come at me. Who, though? Of course none of you. We’re harder on ourselves than we are on other people. Perhaps this unfounded fear is the trauma talking, let’s face it.

The cake itself is from Smitten Kitchen, “Gingerbread Snacking Cake,” and while I did run short on ground ginger and have to sub with more fresh ginger, a possible cause for quality decrease, I found it not much special on its own. Good not great; adequate for snacking I suppose, so I guess I can credit this cake with staying in its lane. With perfectly-cooked pear compote and freshly-whipped cream, though, it was a delight, a dessert, and something I am proud to call the cake of the month. When the toppings ran out, I tossed the rest, sorry to say. But with the toppings, glorious.

To make a simple fruit compote like this one you just heat about three parts fruit to one part sugar in a saucepan. Peel apples, pears or peaches for a smoother result. The sugar will suck out the fruit’s juices, and soon the fruit will be swimming in a sweet liquid without having needed any water. Simmer until fruit is softened a bit, five to ten minutes. That’s the tip, that’s the cake, see you next time!