I want to be a helper. I am certainly grateful these days for the reminder to look for the helpers, when the wounds are so heavy. The contrast between the monks walking for peace across the south and the ICE thugs besieging Minneapolis is staggering.

The helpers, the good people with big hearts, are showing up in many thousands along the trail of the Walk for Peace monks; and the helpers generating compassion in action are showing up in the many thousands in the Twin Cities. It’s helpful to keep these many thousands of good-hearted Americans in mind.

My heart breaks for the VA nurse murdered yesterday and the mother murdered two weeks ago, and the two-year-old girl and the five-year-old boy and the fourth-grader and and and… I mean just imagine it for a second and it can’t help but break your heart (if you have one): a tiny child with no sense of what’s happening or why suddenly ripped away by strangers from all they know, and shipped to who knows where.

The sun coming out helped my heart yesterday. I remember the wisdom of the teachers that when I get mired in sadness because of anyone’s suffering I’m helping no one. I only help if I let that sadness morph into compassion and take action to alleviate the suffering of others. You can do it too. Call your congresspeople every day, show up in the streets if you’re able, write letters to editors, talk with friends and family, share reliable news sources with them if they’re blinded by propaganda from the regime. Do something to support the resistance: action is the antidote to anxiety. The stakes have never been higher.

Also, or if it’s all you can manage, do some random act of kindness for a neighbor, or a friend, or a stranger. And also: take care of your own nervous system. Everyone has their own unique capacities in each moment, each day. I took the weekend off, mostly, from screen time, from news, and still it was hard to relax. There’s this dreadful undercurrent, against which happiness, joy, and gratefulness become acts of resistance. So I spent the weekend in the kitchen, mostly, baking for friends and neighbors in gratefulness for their kindness.

Watching as much GBBO as I do, I got to feeling that there are too many great cakes and not enough birthdays. It’s time to step up my cake game, and anything you want to get good at requires practice. So I decided that I’d try to bake a birthday cake for everyone in my found family here this year. Clearly I can’t ship them to Portland, Florida, Santa Cruz, Virginia, Alabama, etc., but if I can drive it I aspire to bake it.

Today was devoted to a Bake Off worthy birthday cake for Neighbor Mary. The challenge I set myself was creative fillings, so I made white chocolate ganache and piped it around the bottom layer because that’s what the bakers on the show do. I don’t know why. I covered the first layer with ginger jam and a thin layer of the ganache.

Atop the second layer I smoothed the last of the raspberry and hibiscus jam, sorry there wasn’t more of it but committed to it once I started. I didn’t want to mix it with any other jam and get judged for sloppy flavors. (Does Paul Hollywood say sloppy flavors? I don’t think so.) I didn’t have a time limit and two kitchen icons waiting to judge me, but I can’t say that it wasn’t a bit stressful. But the fun kind of stress, where you’re stretching your capacities in your growth zone, like on the show.

I did have a deadline and some important distractions throughout the day. I was glad I had paced the elements, baking in the morning so it could cool completely, making the ganache before lunch so it had time to cool enough to whip, and starting assembly immediately after my family zoom so I could deliver before dark.

I covered the whole cake with chocolate cream cheese buttercream. Please recall that piping was not the challenge. Piping does challenge me, and I easily loaded the piping bag with a trick I saw on Instagram from Blue Cottage Bakery, so I gave myself a pat on the back for that step in the right direction. I scribbled the remaining ganache on top, plunked the cake in a Chewy delivery box, ripped the snow cover off the windshield dislodging six inches of frozen snow, and drove around the block just after sunset.

Neighbor Mary was thrilled. Her delight and joy was the icing on the cake for me. I begged her to wait for her birthday tomorrow to cut it, but she wanted to send me home with my tithe tonight so she cut a sliver for herself as well. (That’s my tithe above, and her sliver below. Obviously, I need to taste test all the birthday cakes so I can judge for myself.)

As she tasted and swooned over the various components, I told her what they were. I waited til the end to tell her what kind of cake it was. I wanted to capture her reaction for all time. “It’s a chocolate mayonnaise cake,” I said, camera ready.