Amy made a roast chicken with garlic, butter and honey. I have half of it still to eat at work tomorrow.

Yum

It’s my birthday weekend and I’m having a party at my house In attendance is Postcardstohell, Kisschick1976 and amy20. Expected later this weekend will be Devlin and our friend Ryan (who appears to have no LJ or web page).

So far we’ve all been jammed into my car on the ride home from the station and eaten some Chinese.

I have boxes of chocolate

Today I have spent most of my time sat in a car. In the morning I went off into Marlborough again to do some more expensive food shopping to stock Amy’s grandma up for a while. Then we had to drive home. To make the trip a bit more interesting I plotted a less motorway-intensive drive towards the M1, going via Cirencester, Stow-in-the-Wold and Warwick, then up the M40, M42 and after a bit of zooming down the A42, the M1.

Much nicer driving through the countryside on a sunny day than rocketing up the motorway sealed away in the car. Even if I did spend quite a lot of time stuck behind a tractor, low-loader carrying a grass cutter, two vans and a truck. The truck was from a contract bed hire company for the hotel trade. It was brand new, with an 08 plate and a pleasing blue colour. That’s how long I got to stare at it. All the way from Cirencester to the turning to Stratford-upon-Avon. I used the grindingly steep hills to my advantage and had some food and stared out the windows a bit.

It was a much more civilised drive back. I’m normally racing against time to be back at a decent time because I have something Important to do the day after. Not this time though. My car’s due an MOT and service tomorrow and that’s about it.

We made it back to sunny Scunthorpe for 5pm, taking about 4 hours in total. Then, after a brief rest at Amy’s I shuttled back to Wakefield, stopping at her local Tescos to do some shopping of my own. A bit of a step down from the weekend’s parading around Waitrose, but I did get a bargain on some organic eggs (and in a fit of irony some cheap chicken). My cupboards are now full and look like I live there

It was our NQT (Newly Qualified Teacher - or “Fresh Meat”, if you will) celebration this afternoon. Yes, one of those silly social affairs where all the NQTs, their mentors and some token people from higher up in the school make light conversation, nibble random food and - because it was only 3pm - look at the wine and think “why?”.

I got a certificate and a plate full of food, then after sticking around for some photos, escaped and went home

Then, at half seven, after a catastrophic failure in journey timing, met up with our Curry Club - a once monthly meeting of a select group of staff (getting into the Masons would be simpler) who’s objective is to consume curry. I have some left over, I will eat it tomorrow

It was the leaving do for one of the people at work. Conveniently the leaving party was held in town, meaning I could just drive down the road and not get lost. After finding one carpark that wanted me to pay £2.70 for an hour I went across the road to another carpark that was totally free!

As an added convenience I happened to meet someone else from work who was going to the party, and after visiting the cash machine we met another person… then three more. It was like some covert operation with people all randomly meeting up together

The food was excellent, and because we were in before half six it was half price. Combined with a £5 deposit already paid, our bill - for 14 of us - came to a mere £46! Yep, £3 each for some excellent food So excellent that, not having any change (I’d brought 30 quid, expecting to pay £15-£20 or so) I had my meal paid for by one of the people I work with.

Free food wins every time

We left them £40 in tips too…

This is a little present I cooked up (literally) for Amy’s birthday. It’s a passable rendition of a Nintendo Entertainment System done in the medium of sponge cake and icing.

The cake mix is a fairly standard combination of eggs, flour, sugar and butter/margarine. Google is full of cake recipes, go wild. Bake it at 200c until cooked and then leave to cool on a rack. Since I only had round cake tins I had to chop the cakes to shape resulting in a slightly square looking Nintendo. I was tempted to turn it into a Game Cube cake but didn’t have enough cake to do a cube.

The cake consists of two layers of sponge with a layer of buttercream in the middle (combine butter and sugar together, resist eating it). The outsides being coated in buttercream to help the icing stick.

The icing is the premade ready-to-roll variety, a favourite of lazy and busy cooks all over. Deciding to throw past Christmas cake icing experience out the window I opted to ice each side separately rather than draping one large piece of icing over the whole cake and smoothing it down. You can’t see the joins because I used a wet knife to smooth the whole thing.

The distinctive NES patterns and detail were first marked using a sharp knife and then coloured using food colouring and a clean paintbrush; the knife marks helping to prevent the colouring from bleeding into surrounding cake. I was skeptical how well painting icing would work out, but the results ended up much better than I thought. The stripes on the top were done using black decorative ‘writing’ icing in a tube, as were the Nintendo logo on the front and the power LED. The buttons are two pieces of icing.

Early games consoles such as the NES are good candidates for geeky cakes. They’re just squares or rectangles without too many complicated details. If you can bake and have limited art skills this kind of thing is easily accomplished in an afternoon.

I wasn’t aiming to create an accurate rendition of a Nintendo Entertainment System, just something that looked like one. All the non-geeks at the party asked what the weird stripy cake was all about, while everyone else thought it quite amusing.

Tips

• Use plenty of icing sugar to prevent the icing from sticking to your hands, rolling pin and chopping board
• Clean, sharp knives cut icing with clean, sharp lines
• Icing becomes surprisingly pliable when slightly warm and smoothing out bumps and weird parts is easy if the area is given a light but fast rub until the surface feels smooth
• If you get food colouring splats on the wrong parts of the cake, pick them off with a knife and smooth over the resulting hole
• Do not eat too much of the icing, you will feel ill after approximately a golf-ball’s worth and positively awful (but very hyperactive) after a fist-sized glob
• It’s a cake, don’t expect sharp corners or fine detail
• Do not tell the recipient about the little mistakes you’ve noticed because you’ve been staring at the cake for three hours, they won’t notice nor will they care. If it looks OK and tastes good the operation is a success
• Cookery is like hacking or programming, approach it in the same way

It’s Amy’s birthday on Monday, so this weekend was her party. After the usual panic and flapping things settled down into a very nice evening. Beerman and Lager Lass attended, as did two of Amy’s friends from Swindon, and some of her local friends.

We had a giant pile of MEAT, three bbqs and the weather was being sensible by not raining. Oh, and a large amount of drink. The barbeques did their best to smoke out the street, being surprisingly effective and Amy was very excited over her presents.

Here’s a video I made of the evening, created in iMovie and uploaded to YouTube. Enjoy, and don’t have nightmares!

Of course, once we were happily munching away the heavens opened and the hail came down. A two minute deluge managed to put out the bbqs and send us all scurrying inside to hide and continue the party and drinking indoors. Can’t stop the party

This is the product of about an hour’s preparation. A large demijohn full of fermenting ginger beer. It’s now fizzing away quite vigorously, the yeast having a party in the bottle.

I will now leave it to ferment in the warmth of my kitchen for a few days. Not entirely sure when it’s done, but it’s starting to smell beery already.

I made it by simply boiling grated ginger root in water, adding yeast and a large quantity of sugar. The yeast turns the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, eventually killing itself off.

Amy’s come over for the weekend and since it’s nice we decided to have a barbequeue. I bought a double-pack disposable barbequeue pack from the local petrol station, the sale of BBQ equipment at petrol stations being a typically British thing. They weren’t the best things, taking a few sloshes of meths to get the coals going properly, the bit of soggy cardboard lighter paper having no real effect.

Once the chicken was on it soon started going

It’s pretty foggy out there. I’ve just been ‘over the border’ (between Yorkshire and Lancashire) along the M62 to visit Steve to sort out some things we’re doing. The weather wasn’t so bad when I left, just the usual drizzle and rain, but over the tops it’s a near whiteout. Coming back in the dark was a slow and difficult affair, playing the game of ’spot the red lights’ and avoiding the trucks.

Steve’s local pub has wifi, and also a rather poorly chosen password on the router. We did the slightly poncy thing of installing Visual Studio on my Macbook in VirtualBox while eating our tea.