A child offering his seat on the swing set to a new friend. A musician sticking around after her show to share kind words with each fan. A gardener plucking weeds from around her tomato plants in the sun. Too often grace goes unnoticed in this world. Grace imparts our existence with that quality of otherness, beyond-ness. It imbues virtuosity, endurance, sacredness. It gives the dancer his fire, the poet her living breath. It is of itself a sort of spirit which descends seemingly randomly upon our moments, mundane or otherwise. And it is easily missed, like a seed floating on the wind.

I think of grace as gasoline. It fuels our continued resolution to remain in love and at peace with our lives. Despite the crushing, encroaching weight of the world, we refuse to be mashed into ash. We tie up our boots and walk out into the mountains with a heat wave of hope built up inside us. Delight in the blooming laurels and making eye contact with a doe drinking from the stream. Feel cold wind knocking our hair around and sting our faces at an open overlook. Eat a cheese and tomato sandwich, feel the warm sun on our legs, and breath and let it be.

One of my new favorite quotes is by Jack Gilbert, who said: "We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world."

This week I've been taking time to explore thrift stores (and touch all the things), see the lavender in the sunsets, and listen intently to Logans plans for our business. It's too easy to become distracted (I blame Instagram). It's distracted times like these when you need to unplug, invite friends over, and MAKE. That's where this raw cake came from: friendship and stomping on the distraction bug.

This recipe is designed for left-over nut pulp from making nut milks. You can use any nut pulp, but here I used walnut pulp. My friend Annabeth makes walnut milk at home regularly and saved the extra pulp in her freezer for a someday project. Clever girl. And lucky me! She's a raw food advocate who also happens to have tons of tricks for saving money on food. Making nut milk at home is one of the best and easiest ways to get your nut milk fix on a budget. She simply blends soaked nuts with fresh filtered water then strains and presses the milk out through a reusable nut milk bag.

You can, of course, make this mousse cake with any nut flour as well, not just left over nut pulp. To use nut flour instead of pulp just add up to 1/4 -1/2 cup nut milk to your batch so that the consistency is soft and mousse-like. Other-wise this will end up more like a brownie recipe. But that's not so bad, now is it!?