Yesterday, while I was cleaning the house, my husband went out to do some shopping. He went to the bank, he went to Home Depot; then; because they didn't have the lumber he was looking for he ended up at Lowe's. And there was surprised to see well-finished pine boards selling for an irresistible price, so anticipating future projects, on top of the one he's currently involved with, he bought quite a bit of that stuff. Good thing he went prepared, with the car-top carrier in place.

He was by no means finished. From there to Farm Boy where he saw more irresistible buys, coming home with a giant cantaloupe to join the other cantaloupe sitting in the refrigerator along with a honeydew melon, and of course we'd had cantaloupe with our breakfast that very morning. They're locally in season, and delicious. Also, like producing a rabbit out of a habit, my very own magician showed me proudly the fresh sausages he had bought and was proposing to barbecue for dinner. They needed buns to go with them and they also were produced.

And dropping by the bulk food store as well, gained us a large bag of muesli. Oops, it had slipped his mind that he already had a bag of the stuff and didn't particularly like it all that much; the raisins tend to become mushy when the muesli is cooked however briefly and he could hardly find any of the advertised hazelnuts that were supposed to be in the mix.

When my housecleaning was done we set out for a ravine walk, and on our return I plopped on the sofa with the newspapers and he dispatched himself into the kitchen. I could hear him banging things around, being very busy doing something, which I assumed was making preparations to use his bread machine. I asked, and he confirmed. The ingredients he carefully assembled, he informed me later, were yeast, milk, butter, eggs, sugar, candied fruit, spices and flour. What eventually came out of the bread maker was an indigestible sweet-loaf, much to his crestfallen disappointment.

What's in the oven at this very moment, is a yeast-raised coffee cake that I put together this morning and left to rise while we went out for a morning walk. In it is grated orange zest, a bit of orange juice, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, and flour, along with walnuts, raisins and cinnamon. When we left, the mixture filled a scant one-quarter of the tube pan I'd prepared to receive it. On our return from the ravine walk, the volume had more than doubled.

My husband has such fond memories of the yeast-risen buttercakes his mother used to bake. He's looking forward to this one.