What they don't tell you about gingerbread houses

1. You need four hands (or more) to hold everything up whilst you wait for the icing to set

2. Your decor will never look as good as the pictures you see in cookery books.

3. The stained glass windows will melt at room temperature, so soon your house looks like a derelict building, but that's ok because

4. After a few days, the walls will start to go soggy too, so it becomes a rather good impression of a derelict building.

Wallace and Gromit rise again

I watched Nick Parks newest Wallace and Gromit short last night - A Matter of Loaf and Death (cue appropriately dramatic and scary music).I love Wallace and Gromit, the writers have a brilliantly wry and British sense of humour - and as my friend points out, they actually create a storyline which works without taking itself too seriously. The amount of attention to detail and the painstaking effort required to film it frame by frame is worthy of our appreciation in itself. How is it that they can convey more expression via modelling clay than most computer-generated animations seem able to do?(excepting some Disney and/or Pixar films - I won't concede all.)
The best bit for me is the waking up of Wallace scene, with a *new and improved* bakery-incorporated method of getting Wallace out of bed and into his trousers (literally). My glee amplified when the contraption played an extra starring role later in the clip.
A bit floury, very nutty and very well done.

lost in translation

I've been browsing the internet looking for inspiration for birthday cakes. One of the websites I quite like is leisure-cat.com, which has a lot of 'Hong-Kong style' recipes. As such though, everything is in Chinese, and although I can read Chinese, it takes me a long time to do so - I find English much easier. I also find it difficult to work out what certain ingredients are, as the Chinese terms are unfamiliar. I decided to let Google translate some of the pages into English for me, with comical results.

The chinese for gelatine (魚膠片) was literally translated into 'Fish film', and that for white chocolate (白古力) was 'Gu Li Bai' (the recipe has shortened the term for chocolate, using a widely accepted less formal term, but the Google dictionary was therefore unable to find a translation, giving the phonetics of the phrase instead).

As for the actual instructions - instead of 'beat the egg yolks with an eggbeater. Then add the milk and beat well', Google got 'eggbeater playing with egg yolk, adding fresh milk again'.
Similarly, 'beat the cream until peaks form' (將淡忌廉打至8成企身 - which is a rather cryptic way of putting it), become the even more cryptic 'Will be light cream into a fight to 8 who are standing', whilst 'pour the mousse into the mould on top of the cake already placed inside and solidify in the fridge' is now 'Qing has been placed into the mold piece of cake into the refrigerator to snow solidification'.

But I particularly liked the last phrase on the page - '為食貓有野講', a very colloquial phrase that would probably only make sense to Hong Kong Chinese. To Google, it reads as 'There are wild cats for food talk'.

chocolate banana cake (a la Sam)

Weigh out roughly 200g plain flour - recipe actually calls for 225g self-raising flour but that's close enough. Add three and a half tsp of baking powder, you forget how much you're actually supposed to use.

Don't bother to sift. Just put in mixing bowl with 2 tbsp of cocoa powder and 1 tbsp hot chocolate because you've run out of cocoa.

Stir in 75g light brown sugar (you should use 115g, but you only have 75g or so left). Mix.

Make a well in the centre and add zero tbsp malt extract (as you never had any ever), roughly 2 tbsp golden syrup, 2 eggs (minus 1, because you forgot to check how many you actually have), 4 tbsp water (in lieu of the skimmed milk that's not in the fridge), 3 tbsp vegetable oil.
Also add 2 large ripe bananas (plus an extra half banana, to make up for there not being enough egg). Realise you were supposed to mash them beforehand so mush them up with a spoon in the bowl (but you HAVE remembered to take the skins off first!). Mix everything together.

Pour into a cake tin you never bother to grease and line.

Turn body to put tin into oven that housemate is using at roughly the right temperature. Move rapidly to one side as said housemate dashes past and asks to use the grill first 'for just a minute or two'. Sit at kitchen table for next twenty minutes, until oven is finally free. Sit cake tin in oven even though the grill has heated it up to 200 degrees celsius at the top (but have presence of mind to put it on a lower shelf). Turn thermostat to 160 degrees celsius and go away.

Come back later having realised you forget to check the time when you put the cake in. Then find it doesn't matter because oven has turned itself off anyway. Test cake by stabbing the middle with a knife. Still not done. Turn the timer for another 15 minutes and go away again.

Come back after 25 minutes. Cake is done. Surprisingly good, though still too sweet, despite using less sugar and less golden syrup.

Go back to desk, ignoring the imp that's been sitting on your cerebral tissue randomly jabbing needles into your pain sensory centre all day. Blog about it because the imp is making it too difficult to blog about all the things you really care about, like GM crops, biofuels, medicine availability and child worker exploitation.

Eat cake after blog entry has been written.