Where were you ten years ago? - A chocolate, walnut and fig cake to celebrate your victories

"Where do you see yourself in ten years' time?" This is probably the question I hate the most. I never knew what to say in response, because I could never - still can't - picture my life so far ahead. Ten years is a long time, how can I know? I may be aware of where I'd like to be in ten years' time, but I also know I can be dead in ten minutes. So I've always refrained from answering that question. You have no idea how many jobs that cost me. Even though I knew I should have answered every single time, I have a problem with coming out and saying something I don't believe in. I get uncomfortable, I get sick to my stomach. So I usually shrug when that question comes up, give back platitudes like "Happily married and healthy, with a nice job." and move on. Because I honestly have no idea where I'll find myself in ten years. I hope I'm still writing and publishing and keeping this blog. I hope I'm a lot more successful than I am now - and it never crossed my mind to be as successful as I already am! I hope I sell a million copies of my books or more, in the space of ten years. It's where I want to be and I'm going to work on getting there, but... we all know it's not as simple as that.

But the fact I don't like to predict where I'll be in ten years' time - or any other time - doesn't mean I don't find myself making a bit of a retrospection on where I was and how far I've come in the past ten years. Ande November has found me doing a lot of that.  Because, frankly, so much has changed in these ten years. So much has changed in my life, but mostly inside me. In my heart, my head, my overall disposition, my being. Ten years ago to the day I was smack into what was the opening months to a very rough, very hard, very bad few years. For a few years, I was doing things that went againts my beliefs, my ethics, my morals. The jobs I worked were soul-sucking, life- shattering, and the pay, honestly, did not make up for all the bad, all the terrible. I was in a place where I no longer knew who I was. I was in total survival mode. And I hated myself. I had no self-esteem. Absolutely no self-confidence, no self-belief. I really thought I deserved the worst, most humiliating jobs there were, and was confident I'd fail at them too, because I was a failure. I was an ugly, disgusting, fat failure. And in my head, I deserved all that. I deserved to constantly lose the jobs I got, I deserved to fail at the goals set (goals that were made to be failed, and I knew it, but my head said I failed because I was worthless.) I didn't deserve to get a job I enjoyed doing, nor did I deserve to be appreciated. This was where I was ten years ago.

Maybe I was suffering from post-partum depression, maybe it was just general depression, maybe it was nothing, but the truth was I could not see a light at the end of the tunnel, nor an end to that particular tunnel. It was so bad, so crushing, so soul-destroying I gave up. I honestly gave up. The jobs I go were temping jobs that lasted for a week, two. Or maybe they lasted for years and years, always on a temping status, of course, being paid bellow minimum wage, sometimes not even being paid at all, doing things I loathed, and that depressed me even more, only to be told I was fired if I happened to have to take my son to the doctor or keep him home from pre-school because he was sick, thus having to skip work because there was no one else to stay with the kid - and before anyone starts fuming his father could have, let me just point that the money we'd lose from him skipping work was three times the amount we lost if I was the one skipping, That's equality in Portugal for you. Truth is, it got to a point where I simply gave up. I wasn't even being called for interviews for one day temping jobs, let alone something better than that. So I just stayed home, and kept on staying home, and eventually I wasn't looking for a job anymore.

Slowly, very slowly, our life started to improve. I still felt like the worst person ever, I was a failure, crap, someone living off her husband's work because I was too lazy to go find myself a job. And it didn't help that so many people around me saw me a little like this. Insisted I should get out there and accept any job that came along, just so I got back in the market. Jobs that demeaned my CV, honestly, jobs that were akin to slavery, jobs where you didn't get paid for one, two, three months, and only if you managed to pass those three months' worth of training would you start getting paid. We couldn't afford it, so I just stayed home. My self-esteem started improving a little, my joy too. I was wrinting again - had so much time in my hands I could revert to doing the only thing that had ever made me happy. Then one day I wrote A Study for Love as a dare to myself, and thought it was pretty good. Slowly, really slowly, I started looking into publishing, I started studying the business, I started researching and trying to understand how it goes and... one year later I published my first novel. I cannot tell you how much my overall state of mind improved from doing it. But if anyone were to ask me ten year ago where I saw myself, this wouldn't be the place. I believe the universe did conspire, though, to get me here, I believe this was meant to be. This is where I was meant to be. And if I don't get much further from this, it's fine. For now, this is a really great place.

So this past October, when I celebrated my birthday, I celebrated all these milestones too. I celebrated the ten years it took me to get to this place, ten years down the line and ten books published. I celebrated myself and my decision to give up, when in fact I wasn't really giving up, I was giving in to the only thing I can do. It may not pay the bills, but I hope in ten years' time it'll at least help cover some of the expenses. Until then, I have cake and books and it's not bad at all. So here's the cake for you:

• 150 gr flour
• 150 gr sugar
• 150 gr butter
• 2 tsps baking powder
• 3 medium to large eggs
• 100 gr dark chocolate + 100 gr dark chocolate
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1 cup walnuts
• 1 tsp butter
• caramelized honey figs (just heat up honey in a saucepan, let it darken slightly, add the figs, let cook for five minutes.)
• Fig jam

Turn on the oven at 180º Cream the sugar and butter until fluffy and white. Melt 100 gr of dark chocolate and add to the sugar and butter, mixing well. Start adding the eggs one by one, along the flour and baking powder. Make sure the batter is silky and everything is combined. Fold in the walnuts, pour into a baking tin - I used a small round one because it's a small cake, really - and bake for at least 35 minutes, but check at the 20 minute mark. When the cake is done, allow it to cool completely before you decorate it. I cut the cake horizontally in two and layered some fig jam over the bottom half, then covered with the top one. Then I melted the rest of the chocolate with the butter and the cream and poured it over the cake. Finally, I added the caramelised honey figs and served. It's an easy but delicious cake, one you can indulge in once in a while, especially if you want to celebrate yourself!