Let them eat cake!

Merry Christmas, seasonal greeting and all that Jazz readers. I'm back visiting the family and thought a nice cake recipe would be perfect for this time of excess and over indulgence.

Firstly take 1kg of dried fruit mix and chuck in a bowl with a sprinkling of glacé cherries and mixed peel and soak over night (up to 24 hours, the longer, the better) in either port, sherry or brandy or if you're some kind of weirdo you can just use orange juice.

The fruit mix after its soaking in Port for 24 hours plus some lime marmalade

Take 400g of unsalted butter out of the fridge and leave it out for half an hour so it's soft and then cut it into small junks in a bowl then add a mixture of fine brown sugar and caster sugar (400g in total) to the butter and mix together.

Left: Mix the sugar and butter together...

Right: ...to make a thick batter.

Whilst you have your glamourous assistant mixes the sugar and the butter weigh out 110g of ground almonds and then add 350g of plain flour. Then create a well in the butter sugar batter and crack the contents of a large egg into it (crack open the egg into a mug first so you can fish out any bits of shell which finds its way in there) and add a heaped spoonful of the flour and almond mix and then mix together. Do this process with four more large eggs and then tip in the remaining flour and almond mix and mix thoroughly.

The egg in a well in the middle of the sugar/butter mix with a heaped spoonful of the plain flour/ground almond mix.

Now add the soaked fruit and any of the booze it was soaked in that wasn't absorbed and mix thoroughly. If the batter is the right consistency your should be able to scoop up a spoonful and which when turned upside should fall back into the bowl in fat lumps. If the batter is too dry it will stick to the spoon (slowly add more booze mixing thoroughly until the consistency is correct) and if it's too wet it will dribble off the spoon (slowly add more flour mixing thoroughly until the consistency is just right).

The completed cake batter.

Then spoon the cake batter into two deep, 8 inch diameter cake tins (you know the ones, they have a separate bottom bit) and decorate with blanched almonds. Then place in a preheated oven at 150 degrees Celsius for approximately an hour and a half until golden brown and cooked through.

Left: Ready for the oven!

Right: Put the cakes into a preheated oven at 150 degrees Celsius.

You've probably noticed that I used two loaf tins instead of a second round cake tin and that's because my mother doesn't have a second round cake tin so we used a loaf tin instead. Here below are the finished articles...

Happy baking and I hope to see you back here in the new year!

Tory! Tory! Tory!

I was baking mince pies with Charlie Cat and, that incurable Frenchman, Dom and we'd just sat down in front of the TV whilst the pies baked. Kirstie Allsopp was on and I commented that I thought her attractive but that she was a terrible tory. Both Dom and Charlie looked at me with a look of confusion so I went on to explain that the national press had suggested she'd become one of Cameron's babes. These women are a thinly veiled attempt to make the Tory party look less like a party of sexist, adulterous bores. 

Kirstie Allsopp: a beautiful woman and a terrible Tory

Charlie then dropped the bomb shell when she said, "but I thought you were a Tory..." I reeled from that comment spluttering and stuttering before finally recovering and confirming to them that I'm not Tory.

I grew up under Thatcher and Major and my conditioning started young with seeing my father hurling abuse at the telly whenever Thatcher's smug face appeared on the screen before leaping up and turning the TV off entirely. Thatcher angered my father that much and it puts me in mind of a quote by the infamous Frankie Boyle who when asked to comment on whether Thatcher should get a state funeral said, "most of us aren't interested in what type of funeral she [Thatcher] should have, we're all debating whether she has to be dead before we can bury her!" It wasn't just my father either, local politicians also had a role to play in building my hatred of the Tories. The local council in my home town when I was growing up was Conservative, true blue through and through and as a result of that had changed from a vibrant market town into a dead dormitory town. They were inept, spineless and greedy, slashing services in the town until there was fuck all left. When I started working in the holidays whilst at University I saw Tory voters close up and it made me hate the Tories even more. Small business owners in my neck of the woods were overwhelmingly Tory and they treated their workforce like shit and temps, like me, were even lower on the food chain. After seeing how those bastards treated their workforce I vowed to join a union as soon as I got a proper job. The Conservative party made me the lefty voter I am today and it will be a cold day in hell before I vote blue. Really I find this all too difficult to put into words but I think this sketch from the early 1990s still runs true today... 

Up shit creek without a paddle (in a rapidly sinking canoe)

Well this could be the last post for a while whilst housemates play silly c*nts. Two of my housemates are a couple and decided to announce that they'd start looking for a love nest for themselves in a few months time. They're not looking now because one of them isn't working full time and so is looking for a new job. This still started the hideous homeless ball of misery rolling with the other two housemates looking for a new house with a mate of theirs. The problem is they've appeared to have found somewhere and could be moving out in early October leaving me and the love birds up shit creek. The love birds will be okay as they can still find a place, I, on the other hand, could be looking for another place to live with completely new housemates or trying to find new housemates to fill the current place. Either way I have little time to do it in and no  breathing space if things fall through. FUUUUUUCCCCKKK!

If you find talk of cars boring stop reading now

Up in Malvern Hills the girls and boys of the Morgan Motor Company have been scribbling away furtively on the back of their Maths books and have come up with these concept sketches...

They've decided to call it the Morgan Aero SuperSports (yes they did leave the space out between Super and Sports). Pleased with their design they dashed to the woodwork room and the metal shop and got to work making it a reality. The result I think it is quite beautiful BEHOLD!

I want one! Not only is it beautiful but a BMW 4.8 litre V8 nestles under the bonnet so it goes like shit off a shovel. Sadly it also has a BMW-like price tag too at £108,000 which sadly is out of my price range but at that price you'd have thought they could've sourced a better steering wheel! It looks like it was stolen out of a rusting Ford Escort and spruced up a bit which is a shame because the interior trim looks a bit steampunk.

In other news Ben lent me some Co-Exist who sound like caustic, white noise merchants from the ninth level of Hell (that's a good thing BTW) but I still think Raging Speedhorn are better. Co-Exist's vocals sound positively angelic in comparison to the bellowing roars from Raging Speedhorn's vocalists who tag team your ears into submission. Co-Exist have it on Album and Song titles though with their first album called surgical removal of the teeth, toenails and drilling of the kneecaps featuring such tracks as urge to mutilate, teeth meet fist and stress related killing. Charming. Both bands are excellent and worth checking out.

The Writing Thing

Apparently my last blog (The Jolly Buffoon) was witty and well written. I still haven't worked out how or why but a re-enacting chum who sees me perhaps six to seven times a year instantly recognised me through my writing style and said it was one of the best blogs he's come across. Mind you this character did the military parade sketch from Monty Python (see below) in his 1742 Grenadier Uniform to the French Artillery.

I also know that isn't much of compliment considering how much total and utter crap is written on these forums but perhaps I should try writing as sort of a proper hobby. I've been thinking about what to write and looking at my book shelves for inspiration and found most of my shelves were filled with factual books on anything from motorcycles to architecture and military uniforms to cookery. I'm no expert on any of those subjects so writing a book on them would be a bad idea so I looked to my sadly small fiction section. This is mainly composed of historical murder mysteries, a few Sharpe like novels by Allan Mallinson and fantasy type stuff by Philip Pullman and George Mann. I have been thinking about creating a murder mystery in a fantasy world with a series of smaller mysteries interwoven around the central mystery. This would allow me, the writer, to insert 'red herrings' to throw the reader off the scent as well as allowing the world I create to unfold. At the moment the world is in Regency-like age, on the verge of an industrial revolution which the old magical order is stuggling to adapt to or destroy and ever growing empires battling with one another whilst threatening to collapse under their own weight. I've started thinking about the first chapter but really I need to work out the entire plot out before I start writing the actual story. The main problem I've been having at the moment is writer's block, a stunted imagination and the worst grammar known to civilised man, seriously writing this blog article has taken all night as I um and ah over the wording and grammar. Dyslexia is a bitch.

I don't think I'm ready to write yet, I need to read more to help me pin down what I want to write and how I'm going to go about it and I need to travel more, see the world and expand my imagination to what is possible. One thing is certain however there will be NO RETARDED CHARACTER NAMES! What the fuck is up there with stupid names such as Azoth, Durzo and Tisamon? Tolkein's stories had systems for character names based on his knowledge of ancient languages and those he had created but it seems that fuck-nut fantasy writers now seem to think that stupid made-up names are par for the course as well as giving no anthroprological thought as to how their world's races and societies developed.

On that angry note I shall stop my rantings and retire to bed but before I do I will urge you to get out there and vote on the 4th June even if you protest by spoiling your ballet paper get out and vote. Tristan (a champagne socialist of the worst kind) seems to think I have simular views as the man below. I can assure you that I'm just a weak wristed liberal if however you hear someone shout "I say we give the man a chance" turn round and tell Matt 'Sturmbannführer' Smith to shut up. 

Hat Check

Ok here is a quicky for you guys. I spotted the hat below and thought I would look awesome in it. Its a Tyrolean hat from the Austrian Alps and I think the small brim and feathers make it rather dapper piece of millinery to place on my esteemed nut.

Being "Street"

I saw this and thought of Ben...

The Darwinian Dating Technique

My little brother is obviously a bit of a lothario and felt I needed some pointers and so he sent me some step-by-step guides to dating women...

By the way if there are any single ladies who read this blog I do have an actual job, I don't live with my parents and my offspring are likely to have an above average IQ. If you've got the sweaty palms and a pounding heart from reading that leave me a comment...

The Luncheon Club triumphs once again over Bolshevism

Despite his efforts to avoid destruction we saw through Uncle Joe's disguise.

Messing about in the snow, bicycles and perfumes

Well hello again it seems a lot of blogable material has been coming my way recently and so here is yet another awesome post complete with pictures and witty comments. Firstly I went off in February to part of Wiltshire in the depths of winter's icy, snow covered grip to reenact the French Indian Wars of the mid 1700s...

French Marines and local milice form a rough firing line under the command of a Lieutenant of the Artillerie for once they aren't running away.

It was an awesome weekend of shooting, reenacting, historical wargaming and most importantly drinking. Another experience I had more recently was less fun but just as hair raising. The organisation (my employer) had a PR event that it wanted any employee with a bicycle to attend and I decided to borrow a colleague's bike that I'd been eyeing up for ages (see below).

A Long John Delivery Bike made by S.C.O. of Denmark

It's a very heavy bike but once rolling it's a fairly nice bike to be on though my muscles disagreed with me after riding it. It's one of the few bicycles I've come across that requires you to do a three point turn to turn around in any narrow street, it is huge. On the way to this PR event I was peddling through the centre of Bristol and at the Haymarket I had to brake for traffic lights (mainly because cars were in my way) and this is where I discovered that the tiny front hub brake was shit. In blind panic at the bike showing no intent on stopping I yanked at the other brake handle which wasn't a brake at all...

...it was, as the picture above clearly shows, a horn... A very loud horn... That scared the shit out of me, a large number of passers by and the car drivers in front of me who suddenly made space for me to filter through them and stop using my feet at the front of the queue shaking with fear. After the light turned green I set off again and discovered between there and the next set of lights that the rear break was operated by back peddling about a quarter of a turn to apply a powerful brake cue me almost falling off again whilst making this discovery. The rest of the journey there and back was quite uneventful but the experience left me slightly shaken and my unsympathetic colleagues amused as I recounted the tale.

After all those fun and games today a package arrived for me and the Boy. It was a range of perfume samples some of which were suitable for both men and women however some were more suited to one sex than the other. Marianne was most put out when she discovered I had ordered for myself eighteen different scents (to her pathetic six) of which I wittled down to eight to try and hopefully get down to a short list of just three for a larger order. We got them from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab based out in California and a very nice range of scents they offer too it's a shame about the rather flowery and oh so unhelpful descriptions of some of the scents.

Myself and Marianne debating which of the scents are suitable for a gentleman such as myself to wear without smelling like a tart's boudoir.

 

Hello, Greetings and Welcome

Hello and welcome to the new blog which will pretty much be like the old one but much more awesome! Anyway I've found an interesting blog on home brewing an activity which I have attempted (badly) in the past but I've been suitably inspired recently by the thought of Marianne's Death Cider 2000 maturing under the stairs. Ben has mooted an interest in the past and I might talk him into taking part in the production of some homebrew. For the blog if anyone is interested click here...

A posh but very nice society girl is throwing a party this weekend and she has invited me to attend so I'll try and drag along the usual suspects to keep me sane amongst the horsey guffawing of the set she generally mingles with. I will keep you informed of what happens...