Experimenting with Prettiness

If you're reading my blog today, you might notice its changing colours and backgrounds and pictures.  Do not be alarmed, I'm just playing about with the templates and trying to figure out exactly which is my favourite and suits me and the blog.  Call it experimenting with prettiness, or Autumnal redecorating.  Hopefully I'll have settled on something by the end of the day, but I'm not guaranteeing anything...

Margaret Fulton's 9" Sponge Sandwich

5 eggs
1¼c caster sugar
1¾c self-raising flour (or 1 ¾c regular flour and 1½t baking powder)
Good pinch of salt
1½t butter or margarine
5T hot water

Grease two 9" sandwich tins or a  9" cake tin and dredge with flour, or line with baking paper.  Separate eggs.  Beat egg whites stiffly, add sugar gradually beating until thick.  Add yolks.  Sift flour and salt together and fold into egg mixture lightly and evenly.  Fold in melted butter and hot water quickly and lightly.  Pour into tins and bake at 180° for 30 minutes or until cake springs back when lightly touched.

Mum's Birthday - Part One: The Cake

After two posts in a row without anything to do with cooking or crafts, I'm glad to finally talk about the projects I did for Mum's birthday.  My Mum's birthday is the 17th of April, so this post is very delayed because I have not felt like posting the horrible photos that I manage to take using my phone's camera.  I know, I need a real camera, but if I could afford it, I'd have bought one ages ago.  So I'm getting over it.

Firstly, the cake.  I had thought about what I should make for Mum's birthday cake for a week or so before the day, and had happened to see a picture of an awesome cake in:

It looked much like the cake in the lower right hand corner of the cover - what looked like ladies' fingers around the outside of the cake and chocolates on top, with a pretty little ribbon.  Suddenly, I knew what I would make:  Tiramisu Cake.

I used the 9" sponge sandwich recipe from The Margaret Fulton Cookbook (1976 reprint of the 1968 book), a book that Mum has always had but never really used.  While perusing the pages, I found another yummy recipe, this one for Spanish fish, that I will share in another post.  The sponge was a huge success on its own, but did it ever take a lot of effort to fold the dry ingredients into the egg whites!  I even had to let Mum take over for a while.  I think I need a bigger plastic or glass bowl for making bread and sponges, because the biggest bowl we have is one of my stainless steel ones, and neither yeast nor egg whites like metal.  Eventually the sponge looked like this:

Next, Mum cut the cake because I was totally not game to, and was then chased from the kitchen.  I then filled the sponge with a mixture of 1c of cream, a pouch of mascarpone cheese, 2T icing sugar, and 4T of Kahlua (coffee liquor).  This wasn't from a recipe, as such, I kind of made it up using a recipe for tiramisu, so I tasted it before using it, to make sure that the Kahlua was strong enough and the mixture was sweet enough.  After tasting it, I made sure I left some in the bowl at the end to eat, it was SO good.

Then I covered the top with dark chocolate ganache and added oreo truffles that I made the night before.  Lastly, I took the ladies' fingers I made three days previously and put in the freezer (apparently they go stale really fast), and defrosted them and crisped them up in the oven, then drizzled white chocolate all over them.  When they were set, I cemented them onto the outside using more dark chocolate ganache.  Then I tied the ribbon around.  End result:

I think it turned out really really well, I'm incredibly proud of it.  I only wish that I had put baking paper under it when I decorated it in order to keep the plate clean, but you live and learn.

I made the ladies' fingers from scratch using a recipe from here.  It may look tricky, but it was surprisingly easy.  I will make them again, because they are light and crispy and I can imagine they'd be great dipped in stuff - hot chocolate, chocolate sauce, chocolate fondue....  You get the picture.  The piping was the only tricky part, and in the recipe they suggest leaving a large amount of room between the fingers when you pipe them so that they can expand in the oven.  They don't.  Well, they didn't for me anyway, no more than any other biscuits.  I found the suggested length of 7.5cm was just enough to reach the top of the cake, but if you wanted to make that basket effect the cake on the cover of the book has, where the ladies' fingers would keep fruit or chocolate from falling off the cake, make them a little longer.

This is them after I drizzled white chocolate over them.  I had too much mixture (or too much empty space on my baking sheets) to fit onto two large baking sheets, so I cooked those and then piped a heart shape (to save for Mother's Day in the freezer) and a large biscuit so I could try one.  I had about four biscuits left over after decorating the cake.

In the next post about Mum's birthday, I'll talk about the croissants I made for breakfast-that-turned-into-brunch-that-became-lunch!

Remember those cute and silly quizzes we all used to take online back in highschool? Or the ones from magazines we still sometimes do? Well, I stumbled across one for determining which Star Trek character you are, and I'm happy with the result so I'm posting it. Just because I can, so there.
You are Beverly Crusher

Beverly Crusher 85% Deanna Troi 70% Chekov 65% Uhura 65% Jean-Luc Picard 65% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 60% Will Riker 55% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 50% James T. Kirk (Captain) 45% Mr. Scott 40% Spock 39% Data 29% Mr. Sulu 25% Geordi LaForge 25% Worf 25%

A good physician and a caring parent. You are devoted to your children and to your occupation.

Click here to take the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz...

Book Review - Connie Willis' Doomsday Book

I know I don't usually post this kind of thing, but I found I had a lot to say about this month’s Women in Science Fiction Book Club book – Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book - so I thought I would make a blog post about it where I can prattle on as I like without filling up the forum.  PLEASE NOTE I have put a lot of spoilers in this (and a lot of words), so if you haven’t read the book and would like to, and you like surprises when you read, then stop reading now until you’ve read the book.  I mean it, go read the book.  Read it?  Good, now let’s begin (Click on the image to show my review).

I hadn't heard of Connie Willis prior to signing up for the book club, and now that I've read this book, I intend to go on to read the rest of the books/stories set in the same universe.  As a reminder, this book focuses on two time periods and two intertwined stories as Kivrin, a young anthropology and archaeology student travels back in time to study the Middle Ages and the people who she leaves in our near future deal with the outbreak of a deadly influenza epidemic.  The confusion of the epidemic and the illness of the 'net' technician leads to Kivrin being stranded in the wrong year - the year the Black Death arrived in the small village she is studying.  While she attempts to protect those she has come to care about and to change the past, in the future Mr Dunworthy and Dr Ahrens attempt to discover the origin of the influenza and thus a cure, while trying to convince the acting head of the university department to go back and collect Kivrin.  The book is formatted as a chapter or two in a row in each time period - I found just enough happened in each time period to make me need to know more before switching to the other time period.  This really kept me motivated to read on.

The book club that I signed up to that recommended this book focuses on science fiction written by women.  I found this book to be a brilliant cross-genre story with elements from science fiction (the time travel technology is based upon and limited by a lot of complex physics, the medical technology) and historical fiction (the entire plot for Kivrin once she arrives in the Middle Ages).  I think the two genres were equally paired, though the science fictional influence was subtle.  For example, everything that occurred regarding the influenza outbreak, including the back story of a contagion outbreak in the recent past, had a technological basis.  One commenter made the point that none of the characters used mobile phones, instead relying on landline-based technology, and that this made it difficult to believe the setting was in the future, however I felt this omission made the setting very close to our own time (particularly because this book was written over 10 years and published in 1992).

At times I preferred the near future chapters, and at other times (particularly as the story progressed) I enjoyed the past chapters more.  Luckily (unlike the forum moderator) I had a book whose cover only hinted that Kivrin had been sent to the wrong time period, so, although I suspected it fairly early on, I was still shocked when my suspicions were confirmed.

I don't know enough about physics to judge how convincing the time travel aspect was, but I appreciated the fact that there were limitations, inconsistencies, variables, and that a whole lot of work had to go into the preparation for a trip. I thought this was very realistic, especially as the book is set in the not too distant future. I can imagine that time travel technology would be fairly complicated, and in this story, though it is well established as a research tool, it seems to be a relatively new tech.

I have a degree in anthropology and archaeology, so I found the motivation of all of the characters to be really convincing.  Kivrin seems to be a post graduate student and is naïve, eager to learn, and so motivated; just like most post graduate students she bites off far more than she can chew (I particularly loved that Kivrin had prepared and learned to speak all of the languages thought to be important, but that she couldn't understand anyone - one of my pet peeves is that we are so sure how ancient and historical languages were spoken, without first hand evidence).  Gilchrist reminded me of early archaeologists who cared little for anything other than the fmae and glory associated with the discovery of new artifacts and sites (while letting others do all of the work for them), while Dunworthy is the more cautious and careful kind who cares deeply for the safety and wellbeing of his students. I found myself identifying mainly with Dunworthy due to his reservations, his cautious and concerned demeanor, and his inability to give up on Kivrin.

Did I cry?  Oh yes, I cried when I thought Bahdri was going to die, I cried when I realised that black death had come to the village despite Kivrin's efforts, I cried when the little girls died, I cried when I found out Dr Ahrens died (so much that I had to put the book down), I would have cried when Roche died, but I so emotionally drained! I also cried at the end. This might make me seem like a crier, but honestly, I don't think I have ever cried so much in a book! This really surprised me because in the beginning, I found the story extremely difficult to get into and throughout the book found the characters quite clinical and not at all personal. It was only when people started dying that I realised that the story and the characters had such an impact on me.  This is the main reason I want to read the other books in this universe.

Lastly, the tension and quiet suspense that built up over the course of the story was great.  Until Dunworthy and Colin actually arrived in the Middle Ages, I was certain they wouldn't end up going back, that something would go wrong - Dunworthy would realise that Colin had jumped into the net and cancel the drop, for example. Until they actually found Kivrin I didn't think they would, that she would have already left for Scotland. I was convinced to the point that I didn't realise the boy in the kirkyard was Kivrin until after Dunworthy did.  But the one thing I would change about the book would be that we are left not knowing where the hell the head of the department is and why on earth noone could get in contact with him. It was a great plot device, but not tying that up at the end made it feel like it was JUST a plot device.

Spoiler-free again now.  To sum up, I strongly suggest reading this book if you like time travel, anthropology and archaeology, science fiction and health, or just a good adventure story about people struggling against forces outside of their control that does not have a necessarily 'happy ever after' ending (that is not a spoiler as there are so many possible endings that fit that criteria).