Busy busy busy
It's been quite annoying that LJ has been down for most of the week because I've had several things to post about and I've not been able to do so till now. And now it's Friday which generally has very few people reading LJ. Although maybe with the recent downtime that might not be the case. Anyway, I'll have to put all my news into one post and hope that it doesn't get too long.
Last weekend was spent backing up stuff on my laptop and then upgrading to Natty Narwhal. It was about two months overdue and if I left it much longer I'd be going straight to Oneiric Ocelot instead. Thanks to this new Unity dealy, it's seriously different to Maverick. I'm not entirely sure I like it, primarily because I can't see what I have open and so I keep finding I've opened something and forgotten about it or Update Manager has opened in the background and I wasn't aware of it.
Tuesday morning was spent making apple cupcakes. I found the recipe in the Sainsbury's magazine and it sounded very yummy. It contained a secret ingredient which happened to be something we had in the fridge that needed using up so it seemed quite opportune!
NB The ingredients and instructions are in English metric. You may have to alter for your home world.
Ingredients:
150g unsaltened butter, softened
115g golden caster sugar
1 tsp bitter almond extract
2 medium eggs
140g self raising flour
50g sultanas
100g apple sauce
Preheat the oven to gas mark 4, 180°C, fan 160°C.
Place 12 cupcake cases into a 12 hole cupcake tray. I used muffin cases and a muffin tray. Because I didn't have cupcake stuff that's the way I roll.
Have some coffee.
Using an electric beater, cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy.
Add the almond extract, eggs and 1 tbsp of the flour.
More coffee!
Continue beating until combined. The flour is supposed to stop it curdling but I found it did that anyway so you might need to put in another tablespoon or two of flour.
Add the remaining flour and sultanas and beat again. It is not easy to beat cake mix with sultanas in.
More coff - oh.
Fill the cases halfway with the mixture. I would advise roughly dividing the mixture into two in the bowl to make sure that you don't use too much at this stage as I nearly did.
Add 1 tsp of the apple sauce into each case.
Top with the remaining mixture. Nathaniel's Top Tip! Before putting the tray in the oven, lift it a little off the worktop and drop it back down to knock out any air bubbles.
Bake for 20-25 minutes until risen and golden. Today's menu: CAKE!
Leave in the tin for 2 minutes, before cooling fully on a wire rack.
EAT! My dinner was a tuna butty with fresh tomatoes from the greenhouse picked a few minutes before, and an apple cupcake. The cupcake was So Yummy. And the tomatoes weren't bad either. And after dinner, I went off to the garage to make up a new connecting hose. The old one that went from the outside tap to the hosepipe reel had perished so it was leaking. There was plenty of spare hosepipe in the garage so I cut off a length and then had to wedge in the tap connector with brute force. Good job I'm v strong and manly.
Wednesday was fun. I took my mother off to B&Q in the morning to have a look for bark chip stuff that goes on the garden to keep the weeds down. With all the rain we've had lately, the garden has been full of weeds and we're both fed up of having to get rid of them. We got two bags of some rustic red bark stuff and so I spent the afternoon spreading it on the flower beds. The bags did not go as far as I'd thought they would - I'd thought one would be enough for the front and the other would do the back - but I ended up using both on the front garden. It took me about all afternoon and it was seriously hard work! Because the bark chips were crammed into the bags, it was quite tricky working my fingers in to be able to get a handful of it. There was also a lot of kneeling and bending and getting back up again which I'd underestimated. It looked pretty good when it was all finished anyway and although I was all hot and sweaty, I was more knackered than anything. My hands were a little sore so I decided to give them a rest and watched Ghostbusters II rather than going online. I couldn't believe it on the following day when my legs, back and arms were really aching! My hands were about the worst of it. They slowly got better as the day went on and they're all fine now. Which is good because this has been a very long post and it would not have been fun typing it all out with sore hands!
So that's been my week, in between constantly refreshing http://status.livejournal.org/ to see what's going on with LJ now. Oh, and I whipped up a little commemorative LJ icon too ;) *see icon* Apple cupcakes to all who've read all of this.
Last weekend was spent backing up stuff on my laptop and then upgrading to Natty Narwhal. It was about two months overdue and if I left it much longer I'd be going straight to Oneiric Ocelot instead. Thanks to this new Unity dealy, it's seriously different to Maverick. I'm not entirely sure I like it, primarily because I can't see what I have open and so I keep finding I've opened something and forgotten about it or Update Manager has opened in the background and I wasn't aware of it.
Tuesday morning was spent making apple cupcakes. I found the recipe in the Sainsbury's magazine and it sounded very yummy. It contained a secret ingredient which happened to be something we had in the fridge that needed using up so it seemed quite opportune!
NB The ingredients and instructions are in English metric. You may have to alter for your home world.
Ingredients:
150g unsaltened butter, softened
115g golden caster sugar
1 tsp bitter almond extract
2 medium eggs
140g self raising flour
50g sultanas
100g apple sauce
Preheat the oven to gas mark 4, 180°C, fan 160°C.
Place 12 cupcake cases into a 12 hole cupcake tray. I used muffin cases and a muffin tray. Because I didn't have cupcake stuff that's the way I roll.
Have some coffee.
Using an electric beater, cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy.
Add the almond extract, eggs and 1 tbsp of the flour.
More coffee!
Continue beating until combined. The flour is supposed to stop it curdling but I found it did that anyway so you might need to put in another tablespoon or two of flour.
Add the remaining flour and sultanas and beat again. It is not easy to beat cake mix with sultanas in.
More coff - oh.
Fill the cases halfway with the mixture. I would advise roughly dividing the mixture into two in the bowl to make sure that you don't use too much at this stage as I nearly did.
Add 1 tsp of the apple sauce into each case.
Top with the remaining mixture. Nathaniel's Top Tip! Before putting the tray in the oven, lift it a little off the worktop and drop it back down to knock out any air bubbles.
Bake for 20-25 minutes until risen and golden. Today's menu: CAKE!
Leave in the tin for 2 minutes, before cooling fully on a wire rack.
EAT! My dinner was a tuna butty with fresh tomatoes from the greenhouse picked a few minutes before, and an apple cupcake. The cupcake was So Yummy. And the tomatoes weren't bad either. And after dinner, I went off to the garage to make up a new connecting hose. The old one that went from the outside tap to the hosepipe reel had perished so it was leaking. There was plenty of spare hosepipe in the garage so I cut off a length and then had to wedge in the tap connector with brute force. Good job I'm v strong and manly.
Wednesday was fun. I took my mother off to B&Q in the morning to have a look for bark chip stuff that goes on the garden to keep the weeds down. With all the rain we've had lately, the garden has been full of weeds and we're both fed up of having to get rid of them. We got two bags of some rustic red bark stuff and so I spent the afternoon spreading it on the flower beds. The bags did not go as far as I'd thought they would - I'd thought one would be enough for the front and the other would do the back - but I ended up using both on the front garden. It took me about all afternoon and it was seriously hard work! Because the bark chips were crammed into the bags, it was quite tricky working my fingers in to be able to get a handful of it. There was also a lot of kneeling and bending and getting back up again which I'd underestimated. It looked pretty good when it was all finished anyway and although I was all hot and sweaty, I was more knackered than anything. My hands were a little sore so I decided to give them a rest and watched Ghostbusters II rather than going online. I couldn't believe it on the following day when my legs, back and arms were really aching! My hands were about the worst of it. They slowly got better as the day went on and they're all fine now. Which is good because this has been a very long post and it would not have been fun typing it all out with sore hands!
So that's been my week, in between constantly refreshing http://status.livejournal.org/ to see what's going on with LJ now. Oh, and I whipped up a little commemorative LJ icon too ;) *see icon* Apple cupcakes to all who've read all of this.