Christmas Cake, Part II

It's taken a bit longer than I thought to make (as in I started making it last night at 19:00 and it's now 07:55) but it's finally finished.

God knows how I'm going to get it in to work tomorrow - it weighs a ton.



There's also something not 'quite right' with it. It might just be a bit wonky. I might see if there are any cake decoration night classes going on - my icing needs a bit of work, I think.

Anyway, there you go. Same again in another 12 months...

Update
It melteded...

Christmas Cake, Part I

Not content with moving house this weekend and only being half-packed so far, I've chosen Thursday as the day to take a Christmas cake in to work.

Here's the blueprints. I think Jayce suggested this last year so props to him for the idea:



I'm going to use the same home-made cake stand I used last year so it'll stand about 20 inches high in 4 tiers when done. I'll try to make the arms with florists wire covered in icing.

More info to follow shortly...

How Not To Cook Pizza

I've been sitting here this evening working away and I've just noticed I feel quite tired. I'm normally a bit of a night-owl so 01:00 is a fairly early for me to have heavy eyelids.

I've just worked out why, and it's because of a sequence of seemingly unrelated facts...

• I'd made some muffins for breakfast at the weekend with some cheap sausages that gave off a lot of fat and I haven't cleaned the grill pan yet.


• The bedroom I use for an office is directly above my kitchen, but the stairs are in the opposite corner of the house, making me 2 hypotenuses and 1 storey away from the kitchen.


• I bought a pizza for tea tonight as I was feeling a bit lazy, and in my haste to scoff it I didn't turn the oven off. I *did*, however turn the grill on instead without realising.

The result: my grill has been happily turning the fat from the sausages to a very thin smoke for the last 5 hours and I didn't notice. My eyes did, however, and they want to close now.

And that is how not to cook pizza.

Halloween Cake, Part II

I'll keep this short because it's 02:00 and I'm quite tired now as I've just finished making my Halloween cake for work.

If you remember the sketch from a couple of weeks ago it was supposed to look like this.

First, a little bit of prep work. I've been making some vanilla sugar for the last few weeks (I say 'making', but all I did was put a vanilla pod in some sugar) so I'm going to use that in the cake.

... and I need some coloured icing, too.

I'll skip the cake baking thing, so it's just about making the pumpkin...

My first quadruple-decker cake :-). It's a bit burnt around the edges but I'm going to cut them off anyway so it doesn't really matter.

I put it in the freezer for an hour so it was a bit firmer and easier to hack around with.

A marzipan wrap so the icing has a smoother finish. I used apricot jam as a glue to hold it in place. It's also starting to creep me out a little bit.

Another layer of jam and coloured icing creates the finished product. I've carved out the face just like the real thing.

So there we go. I'm quite pleased with it, if I do say so myself...

Lobster Cake

These are some plans for a lobster cake that I never got round to making. It was going to be for the family Boxing Day 2008 get together, but I made some vol au vonts instead.

Lost a Budgie?

If you've lost a dozen or so Plain Parakeets recently, they were in my neighbour's garden earlier making a bit of a racket.

Last seen heading West by North West.



I know it's not a very good picture, so here's an identikit close-up...

My Day In Pictures

I've been working at home this week which means that apart from phone calls and 2 grocery trips I've not left the house or had much human contact.

I was getting a little stir-crazy last night so I decided to go for a walk today along Regent's Canal from Limehouse DLR to Kingsland Road.

I followed the canal towpath (and not the roads), but this is a rough route map:

http://snipurl.com/regents_canal [http://maps.google.com]

Here's some pictures I took along the way...

First off, I was amazed how quickly the noise and bustle of Commercial Road turned into this tranquil little haven. Literally, a staircase with about a dozen steps separated the main road from this.

A little park about 10 minutes along the canal. I found another staircase back to the smog, got a coffee and brought it here.

Some barges. There were a couple of dozen in total along the stretch of canal I walked. Most were up by Victoria Park though.

Some little duckies (Moorhens?). There were a fair few of these little chappies.

Big duckies. These were the only ones I saw.

Haggerston Gasworks.

One of the avenues running through Victoria Park. I didn't spend much time here, but there's a lake that probably has a nice view in winter. It's blocked by bull rushes at the moment.

Someone with a sense of humour has decorated a few of the mooring points like this.

A mural on the side of what is presumably Ron's Eel and Shell Fish Shop.

I'm feeling a lot more relaxed now as you can probably tell from my writing. I might keep this as one of my secret little happy places.

Unless I accidentally post the photos all over the the Internet. D'oh!

Halloween Cake, Part I

I know it's still 3-and-a-bit weeks to go, but I'm already planning Halloween. To be fair, it's not really that far in advance given that Christmas decorations are already on sale in supermarkets...

Anyway, I need to try and one-up my cakey offering from last year, which to remind you was the following (can you believe I've been here a year already?):



So here's the concept sketch for this year's effort. I'm thinking of two whole cakes stacked on top of each other to get the height and then cover it in royal icing or marzipan (or both). I might even put some of the rumtopf fruit in it for good measure.



Watch this space for progress...

Going too far

So you've probably all worked out by now that I have a bit of a geek streak running through me. I play to it sometimes and most people seem to know when I'm joking and when I'm serious.

I might have gone a bit too far today though. Someone at work asked me if it was my birthday last week (which it was) and I said yes. They asked how old I was and without batting an eyelid I replied:

"35. I'm really excited because it's a multiple of two primes, and next year is a square number."

To be honest *I'm* not sure if I was joking or not.


P.S. And the year after *that* is a prime, too, but then it goes downhill for a while...

Chocolate Brownies

Something I've been meaning to try for a while is to bake some brownies. I found a recipe on Thursday that looked pretty good so I gave it a go...

Ingredients. Strangely I couldn't find anywhere that sells Cookeen any more so I got some weird "Stork for Pastry". Whatever that is...

Melt the fat then add quite a lot of cocoa.

Mix!

Add sugar. I hope this is right - it looks a bit 'odd'.

Add some vanilla, eggs and a bit of salt. Mix again!

Bake. I made one batch with some chopped walnuts and one with chocolate chips. This is the walnut, but I think the chocolate one was better by a long way.

Architect's Conundrum

So you're designing a new building, but the one at the existing location has some sort Listed status / preservation order on the street-facing wall.

What to you do?

a) Find a different site to erect (pffft) your masterpiece.

b) Get the building de-Listed then tear it all down in one go.

c) Shore up the Listed wall with scaffolding and some serious steelwork, tear down the rest of the building and then tuck a new one in behind it.

The answer, of course, is (c).

Street view. Just another load of scaffolding in the City?

Side view.

Crazy stuff. (Click for bigger).

I saw this on the 149 on the way home from my brother's flat the other week and hopped off the bus to take these. You can see the monument at, er, Monument in the background of picture number 2 - it's also up in scaffolding while they clean it.

Smoke On!

No, not the cigarette sort of smoke. The sort that's trailed out of a canister strapped to the tail of a light aircraft flying at about 200mph, 20 metres above the River Thames.

I went to the Qualifying Day for the Red Bull Air Race, London leg today (well, Saturday), and "smoke on" is the instruction given to pilots to switch on the smoke trail at the start of their run.

It was a fab day - the planes were shockingly fast, and it's hard to describe just how amazing some of the flying was. I didn't get any photos, but there was a random guy there who had a camera with a zoom lens bigger than my forearm, so I asked him if he'd mind emailing me his flickr url once he's uploaded some pictures.

In the mean time, here's some from another flickr account I found from last year's London race. Last week's Rotterdam leg will also be on the Channel 4 Catch Up site for another 4 days (there's a bit at 03:30 that shows how fast it all is)...

http://www.channel4.com/video/brandless-catchup.jsp?vodBrand=red-bull-air-race-2008

Office Olympics

I don't know how I end up doing these things (probably a combination of sheer dumb luck and not saying no very often) but I've just got back from an afternoon competing in the Office Olympics in the mini-ampitheatre at Broadgate Circus.



It was organised by a charity called Richard House - they're the chosen charity for 2008 for a company I work for. Events included:

• The Floppy Discus. Spinning round on an office chair and chucking floppy disks in a bin.


• Post-it Fencing. Stick Post-it notes on your opponent before they to it to you.


• Recycling Rowing Relay. Bucket-brigading sheets of used paper down a lengthways line of rowing machines.


• Office Chair Relay. Running round the arena with an office chair.

All under the watchful, curious, yet somehow disdaining eye of the early-afternoon pub-goers.

Still, I got a medal and we had an ice cream afterwards. It was like school sports day all over again...

Rumtopf

A while ago I found another traditional German recipe I thought I'd give a go. It translates literally as 'Rum Pot', because you basically add rum and fresh fruit in a stoneware pot and leave it for 4-6 months.

Originally fruits would be added in batches as each variety came into season, with more sugar and rum added each time. Modern supermarkets have kind of rendered that unneccessary, but I decided to follow the stage-by-stage approach anyway.

Ingredients: Rum, fresh fruit, sugar and a 3-litre rum pot.

The first fruit to be added (that's strawberries, if you're agriculturally challenged). The first batch gets double its weight in sugar; the remaining batches only get 1:1. Coat the fruit in the sugar for about an hour before adding it to leech out some of the juices.

A couple of weeks later I added some blackberries. A bit early for the real season - the ones in the wild brambles next to my house are only just coming out now. Blackberries should be added sparingly because they can discolour the rum, and they're normally a little bit bitter (or so I read).

The rumtopf so far...

My dad used to grow raspberries in the back garden when I was a kid. They're my favourite fruit, so I added a shed-load about 2 months after the strawberries.

The rumptof so far, again. The colour is being drawn out of the fruit into the rum so the strawberries look a bit pale now.

Store the pot with something holding the fruit under the rum to stop it spoiling, then cover with clingfilm. You can see how red the rum has become so far.

Still to add later are cherries, pears and plums, although there's not much room left for them. My plan is to make a trifle with some of the fruit when it's ready, then puree some more to make a coulis and serve with the rum as an after-dinner liquer.
*smacks lips*

Front-Paged on H2G2

H2G2 is the online version of a real-life Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, created by Douglas Adams in 1999 and taken over by the BBC in 2001. It's sort of like Wikipedia in that the general public can contribute, but it's written in a more lighthearted way and it has a formal editing process.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2

Why is that interesting? Well because I wrote an article for it a while ago and today, for one day only, it's been sitting on the front page!

Slow-cooked Roast Wing Rib of Beef
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A36869494
It's a lengthier version of the Wing Rib of Beef I wrote about here a couple of weeks ago.

I've also got another article coming up soon, so keep an eye out for it...

Bat and Trap
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A36213761
A crazy pub version of cricket I used to play. Actually, it's nothing like cricket at all - who do I think I'm kidding?

Another Taste of London

So you might remember me telling you a while ago about the Taste of London food & drink event in Regent's Park. I'd booked tickets for the afternoon/evening session today, and it didn't disappoint.

There were lots of nice foods and drinks to try, and I think I finally got a taste for bitter. Tapping the barman up for a free Bombadier t-shirt (which became a belated Fathers Day gift for my dad - how cheap am I?) was a high-point.

The only down-side to the whole festivity was the guys at the Appletons stand eventually recognising me and hiding the free rum samplers when I got near.

I came away with some tasty onion marmalade, some smoked chilli jelly and some crab pate. It was either that or lose the tokens I'd bought.

Everyone enjoyed themselves, and the important thing was we all left quite nicely oiled up :-). Same again next year?

Confuser Interface

I don't own a car since apart from the odd hiccup here and there public transport's pretty good in London, and it saves spending money on petrol and parking. The odd time I get a cab is offset by not paying for road tax, insurance, MOTs and repairs.

There is one down-side though, and that's trying to use the Prepay Ticket Machine at Greenhithe train station to get a ticket to Bluewater Shopping Centre. I'm totally bewildered by it every time I go there, so here's a little challenge for you...

You've just got off the train at Greenhithe station and you can see the bus for Bluewater pulling off the roundabout on its approach to the station. You've got about 30 seconds to use the machine below to buy a ticket. What buttons do you press, and in what order? Bonus points for buying the cheapest valid ticket for getting there.

Click the image for a bigger version if you can't read it, and if it's not obvious, I added the letters to the image myself - they're not there in real life.

Good luck - you'll need it.

Prawn Toast

I went to Billingsgate Fish Market with my brother last Saturday at the unholy hour of 06:30 to get some fish. We ended up getting a massive 4.5kg side of tuna, 4kg of prawns and a side of salmon, so our respective freezers are bursting at their seams with sea-faring chow.

I'm not sure quite how I'm going to use up 2 whole kilos of prawns so I thought I'd try making prawn toast...

Raw prawns. Pull their heads and legs off, shell them and then 'de-vein' them - basically, pull our their digestive tract :-(. If you do the first big wrong you end up squirting prawn brains all over your hands, which I did a lot. Made me nearly throw up a couple of times, but I guess I'll desensitise to it eventually.

Prawn heads and bum pipes. Yuck. The orange stuff is their brains, by the way.

Prawn shells and tails. Apparently these can be used to make fish stock so I'm going to freeze them until I've got enough to try that...

I'm not sure if these are really worth the gore-fest needed to extract them.

Next step - blend the prawns with salt, half an egg, some ginger, soy sauce, spring onions and sesame oil.

Spread the paste onto some bread, which should preferably be a bit dry so it doesn't soak up loads of oil when we fry it. I bunged the bread in the oven for a few minutes to dry it out.

Frying tonight!

I realised at this point I forgot to coat the tops in sesame seeds before frying. Oh well, maybe next time. I've still got about 6 bags of prawns left, anyway...