On Balance and Apple Cake

My dears, you must make this apple cake.

I made it in celebration of Besos and Bubbly's 100th (!) post. In my very first post, I featured this same amazing rum-and-butter apple cake, and it seemed like the perfect way to celebrate today's little blogging milestone.

So, this afternoon, I baked said delicious apple cake, and left it on the counter to cool. It looked golden and perfect and round. I sniffed and admired it. I decided I'd walk the pooch to the park, then come back and take a picture of it in all its freshly baked glory. My husband had other plans. While I was out, he came home from work and tore into the warm cake, leaving the gaping hole you see above, and an irritated wife. I got snippy, explaining that I wanted to style the cake up, make it look pretty for the blog, but now he ruined it. He laughed, then said something so annoyingly true: But, I thought your blog was for you. Then joked, And I thought the cake was for me. :)

Blogging is new to me, but I'm finding that sometimes there's a difficult balance. I want to make things for this space that look pretty enough to share (no one wants to look at ugly pictures), but I also want to capture moments as they happen in real life - free of any staging. I went back to my Blog Blueprint to remind myself: The reason I started this blog was to have a chronicle of the life we are actually living, a true account, for me.  But sometimes I can't help but re-arrange food on a plate, or move the table into the sunlight, or style up the cake in an effort to take prettier pictures. And there's an impulse to try to make the photos on this blog look as perfect as they do in my mind. In the end, I'm not a photographer, and the photo above doesn't look very different from one I might try to fix up anyway.

Flavio digging into the cake is a welcome reminder to keep it real, to let things be, and to create posts free of contrivance.  That's the goal for my next 100, and beyond.