Egypt tomorrow!

Hi!

Well I am more than a little excited about going to Egypt tomorrow. This feels like proper travel - this is a truly foreign country. I've been to lots of countries but this one has different toilets - if you have to squat to go to the toilet you're in a foreign country.

So anyway I've been checking the weather forecast for Cairo a bit over the past week. Well actually that's not true the forecast doesn't seem to vary much. Or at all. Just sunshine logo after sunshine logo.... ahhh.... bliss.... check it out:



So we've got 9 days, on a tour, filled with sun, sand, trains, planes, feluccas, maybe camels, hot air balloons, ancient temples... I will have one long post to write when I get back!



xxx

Mindy

Memories

Ok here's my situation - which I'm guessing I'm not alone in - any songs or movies from my childhood I automatically love now, and am incapable of judging them in a non-biased way. You've probably all seen this phenomenom I'd guess every year or so you'll take in part in a conversation about good old 80s cartoons with all the other people a similar age to you. Well the difference here is while we all watched the same cartoons we didn't all get exposed to the same music or movies - this was something very much controlled by our parents. And for better or worse now I can't help but feel warm and fuzzy inside when listening to any of the following:

• Queen (I'm not complaining about this one)
• Deborah Harry
  
• Tina Turner
• The Carpenters (you should see me get excited when a Carpenters song comes on - Carpenters for me equals driving up to Marlborough for our family holidays).
• Phill Collins
• Paul Young

My Mum and Dad aren't huge music fans so it was mostly those on rotation - though they did have a few more records than that.

As for movies - well it was the ones we had on VCR that got played again and again - some I can't remember now but the whole inspiration for this post was a particular movie which I just happened to watch last night. It had been at least 14 years since I last watch this movie, probably more and I still knew almost every word. And all the dance moves. Yes when I was a kid I LOVED the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I watched it again and again, Ame and I listened to the CD and sang along - I don't think we ever went as far as acting it out thank god. But still. It is AWESOME.


I always wanted to be Magenta - I loved her hair. And I thought it was so funny how the men were wearing ladies underwear! And pearl necklaces! I of course had absolutely no idea what what really going on - but I'd still sing along with gusto "I'm a sweet tranvestive, from transsexual, transsylvania". And of course knowing the Time Warp came very handy at all those school discos, and then again many years later on a night out in the Bog or somewhere else that plays that damn good sing along at the top of your lungs dancing music.

So be warned if you live in Christchurch, and I like you a little bit, or even just vaguely know you, you may find an invitation coming your way for a Rocky Horror Picture Show themed birthday party next year!

xxx
Mindy

Egypt this week

Howdy,

Well I was supposed to talk about slugs and barley. So I will. Even though I'm almost over the slug thing now. What happened was the other night I got home, and as I normally do I kicked off my shoes (I hate wearing shoes) and walked into the bedroom. Well attempted to. I was stopped by feeling my foot press down on something cold and squishy. So I quickly raised my foot again and looked down to see a slug! Ewww! I hate slugs (well actually slugs are fine I'm just a bit scared about them). So I ran away (as you do) and told Darren to move it - which he didn't. However when I went back in about 3 minutes - it was gone! Vanished! So now I have to live with the knowledge that there may or may not be a slug in my house.

The plot thickens however when I was telling Marie at work this and she told me in one of her rental houses her tenants had been complaining about a slug infestation. She's done some research at the time - so I did some research too and lo and behold it's a common problem in the UK it seems! There were numerous pages of advice about how to get rid of them. Worse though was the descriptions some people had of their problem. Some were reporting finding several 4 inch slugs in their house each night. One had found their cat's food bowl teaming with them. EW! There might be something wrong with me because I find this extrememly gross - actually sickening. I would die if I found a 4 inch slug. Well maybe I wouldn't. I'm not sure where this extreme aversion came from (I'm not good with catepillars or worms either) but maybe from Under the Mountain, a book I read when I was a kid by Maurice Gee I think.

Anyway as for barley. I love barley. Barley makes everything better.

And also we're going to Egypt on Saturday! I have just been out buying "non figure hugging" clothing - as apparently all my clothes are too skanky for Egypt. :( Hehe although I do welcome the chance to buy new clothes - I had to shop at granny shops though to find ones that were covered up enough.

xxx
Mindy

Nemos and An Experiment in scaling a recipe down

Good day!

Well last night I was planning to do something but my plans were thwarted - and since I'm so busy at the moment it meant I had to do what was planned for tomorrow. Making cupcakes for Marie's kids. Unfortunately I was almost out of flour and of icing sugar but had just been to the supermarket and refused to go out again (which I actually did anyway but after the cupcakes were made). So I measured how much flour I had - found out I had 1/2 a cup and decided to try scaling down a recipe. I used the white velvet recipe from HowToEatACupcake and excluded the marshmellows.

Here's what my recipe looked like:

1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/3 teaspoon salt
30g butter
1/3 cup sugar
1/6 of a cup of milk (roughly - I just tried to fill my 1/3 cup measure halfway)
1 egg white

Method (same as original)
1) Mix flour, baking powder and salt
2) Cream butter and sugar (I didn't really do this properly it was too hard with such a small amount)
3) Alternatively add milk and flour mix to the creamed butter and sugar ending with milk
4) Now I added some red and yellow food colouring
5) Beat egg whites - supposed to do it till they form soft peaks but I just did it with the whisk until my arm for sore
6) Fold egg whites carefully into other mixture
7) Cook at 160 celsius for about 20 minutes

I also used this as an opportunite to try my silicone cases without paper linings, and they worked well! Anyway the original was supposed to make 12 and I got a perfect 3! So here's the pictures (I was playing around with my camera settings so the colouring isn't totally consistent:

Waiting to be cooked:


Mmm out of the oven - they had a nice (? well I thought it was nice but I'm a positive person) spongy sort of look to them, maybe from pockets of egg white - would be good for a spongebob cupcake - oooh I wanna do a spongebob cupcake!


I bought a new piping nozzle and now have pretty decent looking swirls! Yay!


And finally - on go the nemos! I made these specially as Marie's kids are going to Nemo on ice this week, also a good change to play with my edible pen. However I was soo excited and did it too quickly - I could have done a more polished job with the pen.


Tomorrow's post: slugs and barley (ew and yum!).

xxx
Mindy

Earring Holder

Hi! Sorry I haven't posted for awhile. Um I've been lazy! We had a FANTASTIC weekend with Rach and Greg it was so nice to catch up and just talk etc. Plus we learnt how to play Canasta which was really fun - I've always been a bit reluctant about card games my whole life really, it's a hangover from being an incredibly shy child and being too self conscious to do anything that I could do badly in infront of other people (this includes ALL sports). But anyway now I'm older and not shy anymore well it was such a fun night playing with them. Darren and I are going to play today to make sure we don't forget the rules!

This week I haven't done any baking just some truffle making but I didn't photograph those as they were incredibly easy and tasty and well quite a boring process to make really. They were chocolate rum and raisin - delicious! I think I can remember the recipe:

1. Melt 50g butter with 100g chocolate
2. Stir in half cup of icing sugar
3. Add 1 tablespoon rum and 1 tsp cocoa power and 1/2 cup chopped raisins
4. Stir in another half a cup of icing sugar
5. Room into balls then roll in something nice like coconut
   

Oh the recipe was from the Edmonds cookbook, but I added the raisins to the recipe. I've made a LOT of truffles lately and these were just such a nice muxture to handle - didn't stick on your hands and rolled into balls very easily. Not messy at all. I have a feeling I will be making these a lot over the rest of my life.

Ok so onto something I do have a picture of. I've started packing to go home - yes that's right - BACK TO NZ YAY!!! Anyway part of this required some tidying and I decided once and for all to deal with my earring storage problem. So last night's project was making this:



I just LOVE being able to see all my earrings at once. I love earrings and would have more but often lose them (that might be a thing of the past given my new holder!

Here are some cute skulls Darren got me:



And these are my two favourite pairs of sparkly earrings, the tops danglies are from Mum and Dad and the bottom ones (which really need a clean) were a birthday present from Darren:



xxx
Mindy

Neapolitan Cupcakes

Hello!

I hope you all remember my funky multi-coloured chocolate hearts? Well they were just the start of the story! Here's a picture to jog your memory:



Ok so these were destined to be more than just chocolate art, they were destined to adorn beautiful cupcakes. So on Wednesday night I helped them to achieve their destiny. I decided to make HowToEatACupcake's Neapolitan cupcakes because they were so damn pretty! Also I used to love Neapolitan icecream when I was kid. The recipe (off the site) was so good! It worked perfectly, I had no problem keeping the vanilla and chocolate batters separate - and it was such a delicious batter. Infact I should probably never make these again as I ate too much of it!

Anyway here you can see how the cooked cuppies looked - nice distinction between the vanilla and chocolate (you can see the front one has been stabbed with a knife - it must have been the one I used to test for doneness).


So I didn't use Swiss Meringue Buttercream though as I said I wasn't going to do it again without an electric beater so I just made normal butter cream: 113g butter (1/2 cup) 3 cups of icing sugar, 1/3 cup strawberry jam (with no bits), and 1/4 cup of milk.

Here is the finished batch:


And here's one close up:


I really need to get my icing whirls a bit neater! I guess practise makes perfect, I also need to try with adifferent icing tip too.

Have a nice weekend everyone and good luck to my Mum and Dad who are doing a huge (160km) bike race this weekend!

xxx
Mindy

Toffee!! Yay!!

Some of you might remember my post about my big toffee/taffy failure where I ended up with fudge! Well I must admit not once, not twice, not even thrice, but four times now have I ended up with fudge when I wanted toffee! I was sure I just hadn't heated the sugar enough the first two times, so for the third attempt I bought a candy thermometer but had the same problem! Then I decided pulling taffy was too complicated so I went with simple poured nut toffee - but the process of stirring in the nuts once again resulted in fudge. I guess I just wasn't careful enough not to get any sugar crystals in the mix (one sugar crystal causes the whole batch to re crystalize and turn into fudge). So for my 5th attempt I decided I wasn't even going to stir at all - just boil then pour! And finally.... toffee! And it's good.... sooooo good! So after this success will I be trying again - most definitely! I'll work my way up to nut toffee but I'm going to take things slowly!

Here's the recipe:

1 1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup boiling water
Pinch baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
30g butter
1/2 cup cream (I used whipping cream)

1. Put first 4 ingredients in heavy based saucepan (which I don't have so just used a normal one) and put on stove over a low heat stirring constantly until sugar dissolves and mixture is boiling (for me it happened in that order).
2. When boiling put the lid on the pan for 3 minutes to let the sugar crystals dissolve on the side of the pan.
3. Now put your candy thermeter in, I turned the heat up a little but it was still pretty low, and let it boil till 236 F.
4. Gradually add cut up butter alternating with cream, don't let the temperature drop below 225 F.
5. Leave to boil till reach 256 F - took about 10 minutes again I turned it up a little but it was still only low - moderate heat.
6. When reaches 256 pour into buttered pan.
7. Let cool a bit then mark into squares.
8. When cold cut into squares.
9. I then dipped in icing sugar and wrapped in greaseproof paper.

Dissolving the sugar.



The boiling sugar syrup.



Cream and butter just been added - yum!



The poured toffee cooling.



Cutting into squares - a very tiring job!



After coating them in icing sugar I found a really good way off getting rid of the excess icing sugar was to put them all in the sieve.



I wrapped up around 90 little toffee! Then promptly upwrapped two and ate them... yum!



xxx
Mindy

Fun with Chocolate

Ok so on Monday night I decided to try some things out with chocolate. Mostly because i nthe weekend I made the trek to the Cake Decorating shop in the Doncaster market and bought some proper food colouring paste so I could try colouring white chocolate (as some of you might know you can't use water based food colouring as water and chocolate don't mix!). Anyway I'm thinking about making some neopolitan cupcakes to take to Cambridge when we visit Rach and Greg so I decided to make neopolitan coloured chocolate hearts! I didn't really know what I was doing just mucked around but I was really happy with the result. So easy but a good effect!

Step 1:

I melted 4 square of dark choc - didn't need that many, ended up coating some cake balls with it and still had some left.

Anyway take some melted dark chocolate and sort of splatter and drip it on a piece of baking paper on a flat tray.

Step 2:

Melt some white chocolate and add red food colouring. Drip and splatter the melted pink chocolate over the dark chocolate doesn't matter too much if they mix.

Here's the result of Step 1 and 2:



Step 3:

Put the tray in the fridge so they chocolate goes hard.

Step 4:

Melt white chocolate and carefully spread over the pink and dark chocolate splatters. Even the white chocolate so it's smooth, then cover with another piece of baking paper and I put a book on it to make it flat. Then in the fridge again.

Step 5:

When the chocolate is hard take cookie cutters and cut out your chocolate shapes! Don't press them hard and quickly into the chocolate like you would making cookies as that will just crack the chocolate but slowly easy the cutter down.

Here's my cute wee heart cutters I got the other day:



And the finished result (Plus some random yellow hearts that I made out of left over yellow chocolate I was also playing with):



xxx
Mindy

Movember!

Well I have just two things to say today as I'm very tired and want to watch Battlestar Galactica.

1. It's now Movember (if you just look to the right you'll see my little web badge that proves it). So if you can grow a mo do so! I am an avid facial hair fan (on males) and so Movember is my favourite month of the year.In Movember everybody wins - I get to see (at least through photos) some gorgeous moustaches, and the commendable New Zealand males who are growing them are also raising money for good causes. So once again everyone grow or sponsor a mo or do both! If you need someone to sponsor you can sponsor Adam here - even if you don't like Adam (in which case you're obviously a weirdo) rest assured he doesn't get any of the money it's all going to a good cause!

2. Cooking for almost 9 hours makes your hands very dry... it may be something to do with the number of dishes I had to do throughout the day.

3. (Sorry I thought of something else) I really like charity second hand shops... they are awesome!

:)
Mindy