Where have I been? (and Rainbow Cake)

March 21st, 2010 3 Comments »

Well I’ve been busy, okay? My two final Open University courses started at the beginning of Feb as I mentioned before, and I’ve spending most of my spare time completing coursework. I still have a final project to complete for one of the courses which I’ll get out of the way in the next week or so, then that just leaves two more pieces of coursework to be completed in May / June / July… and that’s all.

In other news… Joseph / Joe / Joey / Joey-joe-joe has had his passport photo taken ready for our trip to France later this year. He looks a bit gormless but it is an accurate likeness. The ferry and stopover hotels are all booked and I hope to have Disney all sorted by the end of the week. We have our new Euro GB style number plates ready for the Oli/Tor-bus and I really must remember to order the European travel kit things with the torch, triangle, first aid kit and stuff in…

My copy of ‘All Aliens Like Burgers’ arrived on Friday too but I haven’t had chance to read it yet. I’m saving that for April when there’s a natural gap in coursework… I’m struggling to get chance to read my monthly subscription of PC Pro magazine too so a full book will be more of a challenge.

And finally… I promised Poppy that I’d make her a rainbow cake for her birthday (no, not gay pride), which isn’t until June. But considering I’d not got a plan together on how I was going to make this, I thought it best to perform a test run. Vicky is in the process of decorating the bathroom this weekend so I thought what better way to keep the children occupied than a bit of baking. So here’s how it goes: I made a mega batch of cake mixture… 300g of marg/sugar/flour and 6 eggs. I split the mixture in to six portions and added food colouring as needed to each one.. Purple, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red (I had to mix some of them myself). Then I spooned each colour in to a cake tin, one colour on top of the other, and did the same for a second cake tin. Bake for 45 minutes and turn them out….

Finally we sandwiched the two together with blue butter icing, then covered it in more butter icing to finish.. Mmmmm count those E numbers. Poppy then decorated the cake with an entire tub of pink sprinkles. I shall learn from my mistakes in making this, firstly I will put the red in first and make the rainbow up from that direction, because it bends the wrong way in my cake. Secondly, I might just make one massive cake instead of two so the rainbow effect is more pronounced. I will also put more effort in to the next one to make it look more like a birthday cake. Will have to get a new icing piper for that methinks seeing as the last one fell apart.

I’ll leave you with these last two photos of the finished product, even if Poppy does look a little unsure what she’s let herself in for.


It’s okay, I’m back…

January 22nd, 2010 No Comments »

Yes, yes, I know, I haven’t posted anything since the end of last year, but that’s only because I couldn’t be bothered. I fancied a bit of a break, ok? Well I’m back now, so are you happy?

What’s been going on in my life then so far this year? I’m currently on day 14 of no chocolate. I decided to give it up for 2 weeks and I’ve been successful. If I make it through this evening then tomorrow morning my face will be very brown and sticky indeed. I’ve already decided I need to sample Cadbury’s mixture of mini easter eggs, a caramel bunny, a popping candy Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and Mars Celebrations ice creams. Not sure what I’ll eat on Sunday though.

Gadget-wise I’ve been pretty lean. I’ve finally given in to ‘The Wife’ and purchased SingStar, the karaoke game for the PlayStation complete with two microphones for competetive spouse fun. We used Nectar points to buy it though so I’m not sure if that counts as a purchased gadget. I had to buy a new car seat for Poppy as both her and Joseph were growing out of their current ones. Joey will take over the old Britax Evolva 1-2-3 and Poppy gets a brand new Britax Kid Fix Isofix seat which clips easily in to the back of the Scenic. Not very exciting but slightly gadgetty nevertheless.


My favourite purchase this year is the USB-MIDI adapter which arrived this morning letting me connect my keyboard (of the musical variety not typing) to my PC. In years gone by I’d have used a special MIDI-gameport cable to do this, but modern computers just don’t have 15-pin game connectors any more… even when you build the PC yourself it’s an optional extra to put one in and the USB cable is so much simpler. So far it seems to work well but I’ll review that once it’s been given a good hammering.

And finally in Joseph news, he had blood taken last week and sent off for genetic testing in the hope that we finally get a firm diagnosis. Well, that or we find out he is the next Wolverine.

Almost time…

November 21st, 2009 2 Comments »

Joseph would like to wish everyone good luck in their frantic festive preparations during the run up to Christmas 2009.

Santa Joe 2009

And no, he’s not intentionally ‘flicking the Vs’.

He's a PC and he's 4 months old

September 22nd, 2009 2 Comments »

Joseph the PC

Joseph is all ready for the official launch of Windows 7 a month today… are you? I’m not allowed to host an official Windows 7 house party (see here) so I’m going to customise my children instead. And yes, I made it myself – I have actually printed this on to a bib, no Photoshop was involved.

Slow News Week

September 15th, 2009 3 Comments »

There’s not been a great deal happening over the last week or so that I’ve felt compelled to write about…. so there’s been no blog update. We visited my parents at the weekend – Joseph’s first time in England (don’t worry, he’d had all his jabs). Then on Sunday Poppy helped me wash the car, mow the lawns, clean the barbecue and make a cheesecake (nothing fancy… from a packet!). Ooh and we nosed around the show home at the new development in the village. Makes for enthralling reading doesn’t it? It gets better.. we ordered a new tumble dryer because the drying part of our washer dryer is more like a washer-keep-soggier now. I played on Monkey Island for a bit.. and while writing this blog I am reinstalling Windows Home Server on the new 1TB drive I purchased (full review of Windows Home Server coming soon). We’re also moving from Tiscali to Talk-Talk for phone and broadband – they’re cheap and offer a 30 day get-out-of-contract deal if you don’t like them so if they’re pants I will hold them to that. Tomorrow is Poppy’s first ballet lesson so I’m looking forward to the report on how that went. Will she dance like a little dainty fairy or a hippopoppymus? I’m almost at the end of day 2 without any chocolate… how long can I last? We’ll see. I’ve been replacing it with a mixture of skittles, red bull and chewing gum. I think I need to cut out all three of those too in addition but that’ll have to wait.

And in sadder news.. it’s a fond fairwell to the greatest of all the TV Chefs, Keith Floyd – his food based entertainment shows shall remain unrivalled forever.

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