We had a strange, bitter little speech at the last Chamber Singers rehearsal from an older, mousy soprano whom I have never actually heard before. It included phrases like “ownership of the event” and “we’re all busy,” but the thrust of it was that we are all expected to show up at the madrigal dinner venue at 2:30 on Saturday and 12:30 on Sunday. This will mean, once I do my housework and errands on Saturday and church on Sunday, that the madrigal dinner will consume the entire weekend, rather than just the evenings as I had expected.

Normally, I would say that one week’s notice is not sufficient, their failure to plan ahead does not constitute an emergency for me, etc. However, it was so clear that there is some sad history there that I am going to do it without comment. Next year, if I am singing with the group, I will suggest that things be done differently.

The week after that is of course Thanksgiving, and we don’t know yet who is joining us or for how long, but I am confident that it will involve extra cooking and cleaning, probably extra work at the store, and perhaps some frolicsome times, but will be busy in any case.

Therefore, it is clear that this weekend I must follow a rigorous schedule of crafting and lolling. I have Christmas presents to make, a madrigal dinner costume to cobble together, and sweaters to finish before the recipients outgrow them. My SWAP got put on hold back in October, but #2 daughter sent me some vintage buttons for my nearly-completed jacket, and I had planned to make a dress for this month’s project.

I haven’t had a new dress since my mother-of-the-bride number three years ago, so I hope I can fit that in. I have even bought the fabric and the pattern. #2 daughter has her new dress cut out, and we had planned a Thanksgiving weekend sewing marathon, but that is up in the air.

So I intend to do a quick grocery trip and some cursory cleaning and then to set out all my various projects. The soldering iron and my collage stuff on the kitchen table by the window. The sewing projects by the sewing machine. The knitting (and some books) by the most comfortable chair. The bath and body ingredients on the kitchen counter.

That way, when I need a break from one project, I can move smoothly to another.

The boys asked for “game food.” This suggests to me that they will be happy to eat nachos and chili and possibly carry-out pizza, and will not expect me to cook much. The happy cries of blokes watching football will make a cheerful background to my endeavors.

I anticipate a productive day. And a restful one. I hope you have the same.

I have been being, if not an actual slacker when it comes to the gym, at least a minimalist. I am doing 90 minutes a week of walking and the odd leg press session, which is what you have to do to keep the body from actually turning to sludge, but that is it.

I don’t intend to continue that, though. I intend to step things up and show my lipids profile who’s boss. So the day before yesterday I did the Lotte Berk workout with 15 pound dumbbells. Yesterday morning I was in some pain, and had another rehearsal looming, and I don’t know if I’ve whined about it lately, but I’m still getting up at 4:00 a.m.

So instead of going to the gym I hobbled over to a comfortable chair and worked on #2 son’s sweater and finished up The God Delusion.

This is what 2 skeins of gray Wool of the Andes looks like.

Chapter 7 of  The God Delusion can be summed up pretty easily: there is some seriously weird stuff in the Bible. If you haven’t read the Bible or any of the myriad discussions of the fact that there is some seriously weird stuff in it, you might find this entertaining. Dawkins repeats some weird stuff from other books as well, and some of the books are by people who were religious.

Chapter 8 can also be summed up quickly: there are some weird people who happen to be religious. This chapter is also mildly entertaining if you don’t keep up with the news much.

Now, this book could be subtitled “Things people have said to me, and things I would have said back to them if I weren’t so civilized.” So it is clear that someone at some point said, “Richard,” or since he is a 65-year-old British guy, “Dicky,” or perhaps just “Dawkins, don’t you see the difference between Osama Bin Laden and the ladies arranging flowers down at the Women’s Institute?” Dawkins boldly says that there is no difference. Right now they might be serving in a soup kitchen, but all religious people have the makings of a suicide bomber in them.

Dawkins began the book by pointing out that religion is as common to humans as heterosexuality, and went on to suggest that it is just a misfire of the highly-adaptive tendency to fall in love. Would he then say that there is no difference between a loving husband and a serial rapist, or that a prom date is the equivalent of a jealousy-provoked murder? Presumably not. Yet he claims to see no difference between people who do mad things and blame it on religion, and the local vicar.

He says correctly that when Hitler and Stalin did appalling things in the name of science and politics, they were perverting science and politics. But he explicitly rejects the thought that things like the Spanish Inquisition were perversions of religion.

In Chapter 9, he goes right off the deep end and proposes that religious instruction is worse for children than sexual abuse.

The book finishes up with some suggestions on how, if he has done what he hopes to do and taken the reader’s faith from him or her, the reader can find comfort. There are even addresses to write to in case you feel isolated as an atheist, now that his careful arguments have convinced you to become one.

Over the past couple of days I unpacked 48 cartons of toys, so I am not suffering the usual consequences of skipping the gym when you have sore muscles, but I must definitely go today.

(The usual consequences, for any of you who have never done this foolish thing, would be DOMS, Delayed Onset Muscle Pain, which is the name for having even more soreness the second day after the workout. I recently learned that it is one of the main reasons people give up exercise. Now you know.)

I packed up half the contents of the 48 cartons to send to the other store, but the rest must find a home. So today I will be taking down and putting back up the toy section, and probably math and science as well, since the toys include things like the Mathshark and the Talking Microscope. Definitely a day for jeans and sneakers. And plenty of time to finish contemplating the issues raised by The God Delusion.

Let me share with you a bit of a conversation I had after posting the things about morality:

CHOMPHOSY:  Rosie says that if there were a God, then we would all agree on morality
Bouthdi:  we do agree on morality in general
Bouthdi:  she’d be hard pressed to find someone that thinks murder is ok
Bouthdi:  and if she did
Bouthdi:  she might want to rethink that friendship
CHOMPHOSY:  but there are lots of different definitions of murder
Bouthdi:  true
Bouthdi:  there are those who feel that all killing is murder
Bouthdi:  and others who feel that the impetus is important to acknowledge
CHOMPHOSY:  some say that abortion is murder, or killing animals for food
CHOMPHOSY:  some say killing in war is murder and some not
CHOMPHOSY:  some say capital punishment is murder
CHOMPHOSY:  some say euthanasia is.
CHOMPHOSY:  There are widespread differences of definition
CHOMPHOSY:  but agreement that murder is wrong
CHOMPHOSY:  like colors
CHOMPHOSY:  we all agree on red
Bouthdi:  yea
CHOMPHOSY:  but when you get down to fuschia and cerise
CHOMPHOSY:  you get a lot of disagreement

Following this conversation, I went on to read the rest of Chapter 6 of The God Delusion.

Dawkins reports on Hausam’s Moral Minds, a book which Pokey recommends. It sounds like a very interesting book.

Hausam did some cross-cultural studies and found widespread agreement on basic moral issues — the reds, if you will, rather than the fuschias. Dawkins seems to think that this goes in his favor, but I think he is in error. If our moral sense developed entirely through natural selection, and has no external reality, then you would expect to see the same level of variation as you find in, say, human languages.

Dawkins tries to make this support his position by misrepresenting the Christian position like this:

• Christians know what is right because the Bible tells them.
  Atheists have no reason to be good, and no standards of goodness.

He then adds his own view of morality amongst the religious:

• When Christians are good, it is because they are “sucking up to God.”
  When atheists are good, it is for some nobler reason.

The orthodox Christian position is, I think, this:

• There is an objective standard of right and wrong, which is the same for everyone, and available to everyone.
  We, being human, cannot consistently reach that standard.

You can add stuff about Adam and Christ and God there, but those are theological matters, not moral ones. Let me know if you are a Christian and feel that I am misrepresenting the position.

I was thinking about what makes this book so disappointing. It is not that I take offense at Dawkins’s views — his views haven’t changed since the last book of his that I read (he is in fact merely repeating himself when he is on his own subject) and I have never found him offensive before. Though I have to confess to a sense of revulsion when he suggests that the sincere Christian’s striving toward personal holiness is a matter of “sucking up to God.” Did you feel a little revulsion there yourself?

I think it comes down to one simple thing.

Dawkins is best at explaining difficult concepts to the layman. In this case, he is talking about something he doesn’t know much about. I have read nearly all the books he cites, and I am not particularly well-read on the subject of theology, so it is pretty clear that he didn’t bother to do much research. He is surprisingly ignorant on basic Christian doctrine, and hardly attempts to discuss any other religions.

He is quite snippy, possibly because he is just up to here with personal attacks from religious loons, and snippiness coupled with ignorance never comes across well.

I am going to finish the book, and I hope that those of you who are reading it will also do so, but if you haven’t bought it yet, I’d say don’t bother.

Andrew+numbers has brought up another and in many ways better example of moral pluralism than the one I mentioned: namely, the changes in morality through time.

This is an issue that I have had to deal with frequently, since I do a lot of research and teaching on history. It is easy for kids to hear about the actions of people in the past which we now deplore, and conclude that the people at that time were just wicked. This is not a conclusion borne out by the evidence. It is clear that people of other times were like us in their degrees of goodness and wickedness, and also that they disagreed with us, or at least behaved very differently, when it came to moral issues.

C.S. Lewis writes about this, saying that we tend to focus on the ways in which people of other times were worse than we are, but that there are virtues that are characteristic of a time, just as there are evils. We look down on the people of the Middle Ages for their cruelty, he said, but they would look down on us for our lack of courage and chastity. Having reminded ourselves of this, let us recognize that there are plenty of things that people did in the past which scandalize us today.

Let us consider slavery. It is, I think, an excellent example of this because we would be hard-pressed to find either anyone who approves of it now or any culture that has never practiced it.

When you talk to people who remember segregation, they often say that they never thought about it. It was just “how things were.” In my own lifetime, I can remember people smoking in public places, men making sexist jokes to their female employees, and parents spanking children — all behaviors now shocking to many of us but once accepted as commonplace. Doubtless there were people who accepted slavery in the same way. But there were also people who thought about it, and concluded that it was right.

Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the father of President Woodrow Wilson, wrote a sermon on the subject (click on “sermon” to read the whole thing) which argued that slavery was just another type of family relationship. Someone has to do the work, he said, and it is often the wife or the eldest child or a poor relation living in the house, or it may be a slave. To Wilson, a slave had a relationship to his or her owner akin to the relationship of child to parent or wife to husband. He was not advocating cruelty or rejoicing in evil, but his understanding of slavery was fundamentally different from ours.

There were also people who believed slavery to be wrong, but were involved in it anyway. In the town where I live, there was a woman who inherited several slaves in the 1860s. She could not simply free them, because at that time it was not legal for a black person to live in this state as a free person. She did not have the funds to send them to another state and set them up in a new life there. She agonized about this in her diary at some length, and in the end determined to keep the slaves in her household. Now it might be that, had she asked them, the slaves would have said they would take their freedom and chance the consequences, but she did not ask them. Nor, it seems, did she consider keeping them in the household, but in a position of equality. She was a product of her time, and did not see those alternatives. She simply saw that she was in a complex situation, and chose the best of the options she could think of.

Slavery continues today. I have written about this before and I will probably write about it again, and I hope you do not think that it is conspiracy theory imaginings. The U.S. Congress and the International Labor Office are among the institutions that are concerned about slavery in the modern world. I have often spoken about this, and about the steps we as first world consumers can take to end it, including boycotts of the worst offenders, buying Fair Trade goods, and writing to the businesses involved.

I know that many people who get this news continue to buy goods produced by slave labor. In the 21st century, I am fairly confident that this is not because they approve of slavery. Nor is it really because they feel that they have no option. It is because they prefer to do what is cheaper or more convenient, or more accustomed, in spite of the moral issues involved.

A Wall Street Journal essayist recently announced that he would buy laundry soap from Satan if he were offering the best price. Many of us are doing essentially that. And I am sure that there were many people in the days when slavery was legal in our nation who participated in it or benefited from it in lower prices, who knew full well that is was wrong, but were able to still their consciences.

Across time and across cultures, we see that people have different interpretations of specific behaviors, that they feel stuck in behaviors they think wrong, and that they do things they know to be wrong. I don’t think that this has changed.

As students of history, as readers of literature from other times, we have to consider the historical context of behaviors in order to understand what was going on. I think we also have to understand the cultural context of behaviors in our own time in order to read the news with understanding, or to have compassion for others.

But that does not make slavery right.

#1 daughter and Son-in-Law return today to the Frozen North.

We will miss them.

Looking on the bright side, though, it will mean that I will be able to get back to making holiday gifts, a process which — between the wedding gift and the celebrations — got pretty throughly derailed.

Oh, I have been knitting.

Here is #2 son’s sweater, with the armscye decreases begun. I am using The Handy Book of Sweaters, at Lostarts’s suggestion, and so far it is working quite well and has eliminated all the arithmetic from the process. I haven’t gotten to the tough part yet, of course. I am making this in Wool of the Andes. I also have made some progress on Pipes, but a gray sweater is bad enough; I can’t also subject you to a picture of a navy blue sweater.

Both are great colors to wear, but they make dull progress pictures, I know.

My Christmas crafting this year is not mostly knitting, though. I am very conscious that I have not been getting any soldering practice in. So I found this picture from the Crafty Chica reassuring. Her soldering is just as primitive as mine, and her charms look, well, charming. 

I am not going to link you to her directions for these, because they say to put pictures inside glass, surround it with copper foil tape, and solder it.

We already have that concept, right?

It’s just harder than it sounds.

I have been making more little collages, though, and along here somewhere I will have time to set up my soldering iron and get them all from concept to reality.

In Chapter 6 of the The God Delusion, Dawkins looks at the question of morality. I’ve been having a lot of conversations about morality lately. C.S. Lewis (and I haven’t been chatting with him, but he is, like Dawkins, one of those writers who makes you feel as though reading his words is the same as having a conversation with him) makes the case in Mere Christianity for the existence of an objective moral law, and suggests further that the existence of such a law implies the existence of a lawgiver. It is this argument that Dakwins seeks to refute in Chapter 6. (If, by the way, you are interested in this argument or want to refute it yourself, then you should read Lewis’s book, or at least the early chapters in which he discusses the question.)

#1 daughter holds that an objective moral law would be identical for all people. That is, if religions were correct, there would only be one.

This is also Partygirl’s strongest argument for Catholicism. If Protestants were right, she says, they would be in agreement, instead of having so many different flavors of church.

Lewis says that we may not agree on the details, but we have startling unanimity on the basics. That is, some cultures say that you can have three wives and some say that you can have one, but none says that you can have sex with any woman you want with no restrictions. Or, to take an example from my conversation with #1 daughter, everyone agrees that murder is wrong, though we do not agree whether “murder” describes killing in war, abortion, or the killing of animals for food. Our human sense of right and wrong, says Lewis, is like the multiplication tables. We do not make it up, but instead we discover it.

Now, Lewis is a moral absolutist (that is, he believes that some things are right and some are wrong, plain and simple), but that is not the only possible position.

Another position is utilitarianism. This view holds that the rightness or wrongness of an action can be judged only by its effects. We hear this view expressed in terms such as “As long as you don’t hurt anyone else, do what you feel like doing.”

The problem with this point of view, to my mind, is that we can’t predict the consequences of our actions.

Adherents of free love in the ’70s did not foresee AIDS. A survey given me yesterday by a local grad student has “agree” or “disagree” options for statements like “Human ingenuity will insure that we do not make the earth unliveable.” Now there’s a gamble for you! But the people whose behavior led to the Dust Bowl did not know what was going to happen.

Combine our inability to foresee the consequences of our actions with our amazing ability to justify our selfish behavior, and utilitarianism leads to unintended harm.

Another viewpoint is pluralism, which says that different things are right and wrong for different people, in different cultures and circumstances. I used to hold that viewpoint. Reading and discussion in a Sunday School class persuaded me that I was wrong on that.

Lewis points out quite accurately that moral pluralism would mean that we could not condemn the Nazis for the Holocaust. He says that people who say there are many different moral systems, all valid, do not usually follow through with that when they are morally offended. You may be nonjudgemental about your friend’s belief in free love, but not if he dallies with your wife. You may be prepared to accept that property is theft, but that does not mean that you will help a robber carry your TV set to his car.

If we accept that some things are right and some things are wrong, regardless of the circumstances, then we also have to accept that people do things that are wrong with alarming frequency.

Now, my own view is that people do things that are wrong all the time, myself included. I do not think that I have a responsibility to condemn them for it, and I think that awareness of circumstances should lead us to compassion for wrongdoers, including ourselves. Sometimes we do not understand a situation well enough to be able to see clearly what is right or wrong, but that means we need to learn more about it. Many moral pluralists are very unkind about other people’s behavior — not on moral grounds, perhaps, but on questions of style or coolness. They are just as wrong in this, I believe, as those who picket movie theaters because they think that they are responsible for upholding morality.

Dawkins starts Chapter 6 with a sampling of loony letters he has received from people purporting to be Christians, and these ravings give me a clearer understanding of why Dawkins might be a little hysterical about religion. Like the rudeness of pointing out someone else’s slips of ettiquette, the immorality of abusing someone for his moral lapses should be enough to prevent us from doing it.

As Lewis points out, people who don’t know this — or any other example of right and wrong — are assumed to have something wrong with them.

Oh — I don’t know if you remember that Chanthaboune and I entered a writing contest in the summer. It turns out that we were third runner up. They sent us a prize — this handy book — and invited us to enter their next contest, which is in the romance genre. I may have to read more romances….

Here is the link.

The tapas party was fun, and the food was delicious.

The sangria was very good, and I have been asked to share the recipe on the blog, so here it is:

1 bottle Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon
1 oz Grand Marnier
juice of 1 orange and 1 lemon
8 oz ginger ale
1 orange and 1 apple, diced

Put all these things into a glass pitcher and let them hang around together and grow acquainted for a few hours.

My first thought was that it would be spoiling good wine to do this, but actually it was refreshing and lovely, so go right ahead. Then you slice a baguette and toast it, put out some Port Salut and Gruyere cheese, a few grapes, and some sesame crispbread.

At this point you need Janalisa to come over and do all the rest of work while you hang out with your friends and family drinking sangria and laughing.

If this is not an option, then mix some cream cheese with feta and garlic, add some toasted almonds to fresh pesto, and whip up a little olive tapenade with green olives, kalamari olives, and roasted red peppers. If you have previously made some Spanish cakes, you will find that there is plenty to eat, and everyone will love it.

Does it appear to you that the tapas party had some French and Italian overtones? I cannot argue. And in fact, I think it very likely that future versions of this party at my house will include French cakes rather than Spanish ones, because the Spanish ones were okay, but if you are going to eat butter and sugar, you might as well get French cakes.

While these things took place, the guys hung out in the living room watching football. This gave our household an unfortunate air of segregation, but I am being honest with you, so I will admit it. My husband came and admired Janalisa’s knives, #2 son came in a few times, and Son-in-Law came and ate some tapas, but they can’t do without the football, can they?

At the wedding on Saturday night, there were regular reports of the score.

“Isn’t she sweet? I remember when she was just a little bitty thing!”
“It’s 16 to 6!”
“16 to 6?! Woo hoo!”

#2 daughter had to leave right after the party so she could make it to work this morning at 8:00. #1 son showed up shortly thereafter, having enjoyed his visit to Rhodes. He is contemplating applying there, though he still has a meeting set up with the horticulture guy from the local university.

We were looking at his college stuff, the glossy brochures from the schools he is contemplating. So far, Mizzou has the coolest graphics. And of course the coolest nickname. But my great-grandfather went to Rhodes, #2 daughter’s college was a wonderful experience for her, and the local school is certainly the place to go if he actually wants to study horticulture.

The evening involved relaxing with carry-out pizza and The Thin Blue Line. Today is the last day of #1 daughter and Son-in-Law’s visit, and then we will be back to our usual non-frolicsome state.

We went to The Princess’s wedding last night and enjoyed it very much. The ceremony was beautiful. The officiant was the same as at #1 daughter’s wedding, and when she was speaking, it was sweet to see Son-in-law reach out for #1 daughter’s hand.

Partygirl said it was the first Protestant wedding she’d been to where she felt they got their money’s worth.

This was our former pastor, the one the kids grew up with, and she does an excellent message. Each one is specifically written for the couple being married, following her counseling with them, and there is always a certain amount of sniffling in the congregation.

Since we’ve been reading The God Delusion, I was wondering what a secular wedding would be like. Presbyterian weddings involve asking the family and the congregation if they will support the couple, so everyone gets to say “I will,” and praying that all the married couples will leave with their own vows strengthened, and singing of hymns, so what with one thing and another you get to feel involved rather than just spectate.

There were lots of people in the wedding party, and lots of processing. #1 daughter’s wedding had very little processing and lots more music. It is sort of like Andrew+numbers’s discussion about opera: is it more interesting to watch people move around, or to hear them singing? You can’t have both.

The reception was a great opportunity to catch up with friends we hadn’t seen in a while. There were some particularly charming moments: the flower girls in their fluffy tulle dresses dancing under the disco ball, the bride getting the giggles while dancing with her father, my girls’ reunion with their former youth leader, The Empress beaming away in her mother-of-the-bride outfit..

We’re having a lovely soft rainy day today. The kids are coming to church with me, we have a home-cooked lunch planned and then the tapas party, and #1 daughter has already announced her intention to provide pizza for dinner, so I am expecting a frolicsome day and a relaxing evening.

Apparently, the pizza is different in their current home in the Frozen North.

They don’t seem to have come to love it there. I asked them what they called the residents of their state (you know, like you say “Floridians,” so what did they say for the state where they live?) and they answered, in chorus, “Rude.”

Enough random persiflage. I have to clean house some more, and make breakfast, and finish up the pesto, and do some pre-prep for the sangria, and find the Sunday School lesson I prepared.

My co-leader wants to talk about whether stealing is always wrong. Since I am a moral absolutist and she appears to be leaning toward situational ethics, it should be an interesting discussion.

Everyone arrived safely, and a fair amount of low-key frolicking has taken place already. I have to work today, so I will miss some of it, but such is life.

Last night we were discussing The God Delusion. I am pleased to be able to report that Dawkins has come up with something interesting at last.

This may be a bit unfair. #1 daughter found some of the preceding bits interesting, and she likes the fact that it is a protracted hissy fit. And it may simply be that we have finally come to a part where I haven’t already read all the references.

But the part I found intriguing was Dawkins’s suggestion about why religion is so widespread.

You may recall that Dawkins said that religion, being well-nigh universal among humans, must have an explanation of some kind. The possibility that it is nearly universal because there actually is a God he has of course dismissed. Sighkey’s suggestion that it is adaptive in that it reduces stress-related diseases he concedes, but judges to be too small an effect.

Instead, he suggests that religion itself is not adaptive, but that it is a byproduct of some other human characteristic that does lead to increased reproductive success. He mentions a few that other folks have proposed, before settling in with this one: the human tendency to fall in love.

Falling in love increases the chances that humans will hang around with mating partners to bring up the kids. Ergo, a predilection toward falling in love is adaptive. Religion is a lot like falling in love. Ergo, the universality of religion among humans is the (unfortunate, Dawkins would say) result of this tendency to fall in love.

Son-in-law saw this. The feeling of being cared for and connected, he thought, would be a lot like falling in love. He’s a deist, himself. Not a lot of loving feelings there, the way there is in a personal God, but he could see it.

#2 daughter and I thought it was a stretch. From the inclination to fall in love to widespread belief in God? It seems, as she put it, to be one of those explanations that requires a footnote: “At this point, a miracle occurs…”

I concurred. You would expect, I thought, to see a lot of other manifestations of this tendency.

“Like lots of religions?” said #1 daughter in a trump-card sort of voice.

Not at all, said I. It shouldn’t always be religion.

At that point, Son-in-law brought up addictive behavior. Drug addiction could also be a manifestation. And I remembered the lecturer from the Tuesday night class saying “Everyone worships something” — their comfort, money, themselves, their own convenient image of God put together from the bits and pieces that they like. I can see the parallels with love.

What do you think?

 Sometimes I get seized by a project and — even though I recognize its relative unimportance in the scheme of things — I cannot give it up until I have conquered it.

I will give you a minute to get over your astonishment.

Thus it was with the Origami Wallet, and thus it is being with the Spanish Cake.

We are having a Pampered Chef party on Sunday. This is a party at which the Pampered Chef lady, in this case the lovely Janalisa, cooks things as the entertainment for the party. Sort of like watching the Food Channel with your friends, except that you then get to eat the food.

(If you already know about Pampered Chef and have been hoping for a party so you could get that garlic press, let me know and I will hook you up.)

So we are having tapas. #2 daughter is very enthusiastic about tapas, which is all the rage in the cities, but largely unknown here. It is, essentially, Spanish bar snacks. I have the shopping list for this affair, and it involves olives and cheese and crusty bread and nuts and peppers and stuff like that. Sounds good, and healthy, and a festive alternative to the unhealthy snacks we so often serve during the holidays in the name of festivity.

Dessert is not part of this custom, but it is a party for women, so there ought to be some little sweet. I was thinking bitter chocolate truffles with a hint of orange – for some reason oranges seem essential for Spanish food.

I know nothing about Spanish food.

But Janalisa has this amazing pan, made of silicone, which does not melt in your oven as you might think it would, but instead turns out pretty little flower-shaped cakes. So she loaned me this pan, along with a recipe to make little cakes to dress up the table — caramel and pecan cakes.

To me, caramel and pecan shouts “American cake!” Do they even have pecans in Spain? I make a Basque cake which is pretty amazing, if I do so say myself as shouldn’t, and it is a matter of butter and fruit, not caramel and pecan.

So I set out to discover what a Spanish cake might be, and found that the sweet flavors of Spain do include caramel, but also almonds, chocolate, orange (just as I suspected), coffee, and cinnamon. Spanish cakes appear to run to un-iced pound and sponge cakes, both of which ought to be happy as little flowers. I have found recipes for flourless almond cakes soaked in orange syrup, rich cinnamon cakes, and cakes flavored with coffee and trimmed with shavings of bitter chocolate. Janalisa’s cake wears a little crown of burnt sugar, and that could be nice on any little cake.

I’m thinking that I will have to make a bunch of different kinds of little flower cakes.

Whatever is left over from the party can go in the freezer, to be pulled out for holiday visitors in place of the cookies I have been freezing (as directed by the HGP), nearly all of which have been eaten by the locusts — I mean my sons.

I will also be denuding my garden of its basil and making pesto this morning, since pesto is also on the shopping list. #1 daughter and son-in-law are arriving today and #2 daughter tonight, and from then on we will frolic. Cake and pesto should help that along.