Day 632: 5 Minute Freewrite: Sunday - Prompt: sweet walnut liqueur

Ever seen powdered walnuts before?

I haven't either, at least not at the store. You need a truly nutty – in a good way – chef to come up with that.

I go to this bakery called Sweet Nuttings for the walnut cake. Everything there is great, but the process alone for that cake sells me. The pastry chef works behind glass, and you get to see everything.

I mean, walnut cake is cake, so you expect flour, butter, sugar, eggs, all that. You don't expect the chef to be standing for 20 minutes, pulverizing fresh walnuts to a packed cup, after chopping a cup of fresh walnuts. All those go in after the eggs, and just before a generous quarter-cup of sweet walnut liqueur and several generous shakes of powdered cinnamon and cloves.

By this time, you can smell the walnuts, and the sweet booze, throughout Sweet Nuttings.

Into the oven the cake goes, and it is on to brown sugar and fresh butter – add a touch of cinnamon and yet another quarter-cup of sweet almond liqueur, and then add a loving chef, his or her mighty hand on a whisk making a sound in the bowl like a delicious drum solo on a generously laden cymbal. The drum solo in this case takes ten minutes. I love every minute of it.

By this time, the cake the chef did before opening has cooled off, and on goes the frosting – one long, glorious, generous, sweet lathering of brown-sugar-boozy-buttercream perfection all over the just-cooled cake. I'm always first in line. I always buy that very first cake, and then I go home.

I don't drink. I don't have to. I get everything I need from that walnut cake, eaten for Saturday breakfast with milk.

Everybody has at least one vice. Don't judge.