Boysenberry Gelato, Brownie Base Baked Alaska
A friend and I talked about making up a recipe that included gummy worms (this friend is particularly partial to gummy lollies). What better than a gummy worm pie! And who doesn’t like chocolate… so Worms in Mud pie it was!
She didn’t have time to bake it when we came up with the idea because she was going away to Italy for 5 weeks. So 2 days after she got back home, we were in the kitchen cooking up a wormy pie!
This is something I have always wanted to do. Bake worms… in a pie. Who hasn’t at one stage wanted to cook worms into a meal!?
We decided on a delicious short sweet crust pastry base, a 50% cocoa dark chocolate mousse filling and then a thick coating of crushed Oreos on top to make it look like real dirt… oh and 2 packets of gummy worms of course!
Yum yum yum!
Verdict was very positive, but that it was very rich - but I have a tendency to bake super rich desserts, so thats just normal :)
I found this really cool website for anyone that rents/flats with 1 or more flatmates - www.splittherent.com. Essentially, you add all your flat mates and their emails in and then you can add expenses, rent, bills etc, which is split by the people in your flat. You can then keep track of who owes who and send out reminders via email. Better yet, IT’S ALL FREE and I’ve spoken to the developers of the website and they have a whole lot more awesome features launching next week!
Check it out… it’s a work in progress, but an awesome, free service!
Adobe, out of time
Great post by a friend of mine about how the Apple iOS is fast becoming better (in some ways) than the full fledged Apple OSX. I too am waiting for the day where big software makers such as Adobe and Microsoft (Office) implement some of the many inbuilt features of OSX. In the mean time I will slowly migrate my workflow to far cheaper and much better indepent software developers’ software.
“No wonder you’re late. Why, this watch is exactly two days slow.”
—Mad Hatter, Alice in WonderlandIt’s quite impressive to think that iOS is less than four years old and it’s already more satisfying to use in many ways than Mac OS. Sure, iOS isn’t nearly as capable as OS X, but I’m not talking about features. I’m talking about software.
The thing about software is that, because iOS is a new platform, most of the available software takes full advantage of the latest features. This means that the proportion of ‘modern’, ‘cutting edge’ software seems higher than it is on OS X. Many independent Mac developers are responsible for the best software on the platform and are committed to remaining at the forefront of on the OS X feature set—and for great value.
Adobe and their Creative Suite, for example, is comparatively ancient and—with the momentum of iOS pushing the industry forward faster than ever—the gap is widening rapidly. This is evident in the generally poor UI and UX, backward-looking features (read: Flash exporting) and lack of API support. OS X features that other developers support, and would make Adobe’s Creative Suite a much better product, are being completely ignored. Examples:
- Exposé is buggy and poorly supported (Adobe’s insistence on it’s non-standard UI)
- Quick-Look is unsupported beyond PDF and common image types (Adobe prefers to offer this function through it’s clunky Bridge application which was really only a concession for Windows users suffering at the hands of Explorer)
- OS X’s longstanding dynamic file link advantage is still unsupported (Moving a file breaks the link)
- Font auto-activation
I’m unfashionably excited about OS X 10.7 Lion’s upcoming Auto Save, Versions, and Resume features. Like Exposé and Quick-Look, they’ll be extremely valuable to designers but I know—almost for certain—that Adobe will ignore them, simply to maintain feature parity between the Mac and Windows versions of their products.
At Adobe’s current pace, independent developers will surely outclass Adobe with competing products (it’s happening already. The sooner this happens, the better.
Im not a happy chappy in the kitchen at the moment. I have been working on perfecting the French Macaron, but I just cant master it! The photo is of my latest attempt - Chocolate Macarons sandwiched with Chocolate Ganache and Apple Blackberry Coulis (puree). They turned out pretty mediocre in my opinion.
Problems:
- They have mini craters from where bubbles have popped even though I banged them on the bench like instructed.
- A large number of them cracked even though I tried baking them on different temperatures and at different levels in the oven and with different baking sheets (heavy and thin ones).
- One of my first batches got slightly over-cooked because I had to leave them in so that they would set in the middle properly.
When I first tried making macarons about a year ago I was using a recipe I found on the internet, the first batch using that recipe made cracked macarons. So I tried again and that time they came out perfect …BUT… since then I brought a book all about macarons and have only been using the base recipe in that. Made 3 batches, each better than the last but no where near what I am satisfied with and not like my second batch using the other recipe.
I AM SO FRUSTRATED WITH MACARONS!!! I trusted the book, thinking… “it’s a book, it has to be correct,” but im beginning to doubt it.
Next batch: Im using a new recipe.
I’ll let you know how I get on.
What have they done to one of my childhood favourites!? The humble tip top traffic light popsicle has turned in to a lime Popsicle with some colouring on the outside for the orange and red. I remember the days when you lips would be turned red from sucking on the red bit. But thus, that joy/embarrassment is no more :(
I rung tip top about it, but the lady informed me that the recipe had not changed and therefore it must be a faulty one. She’s sending me a voucher for more… Then I can check to make sure they haven’t changed. But I’m skeptical! I hope I just got a dud one.
Behold! The Firefox logo as seen in variable star V838 Monocerotis of the constellation Monoceros.
Interesting infographic about radiation dosage. People near Fukushima are totally fine—Airline pilots get more radiation at their day job.
We would like it if every web page on our new site had an option to download as a PowerPoint, so users can read the page on their computer.”
— (via clientsfromhell)
I love statistics. Especially when they are presented in an easy to understand and interesting way.
This video by National Geographic determines that the average human being is a 28 year old, male, han Chinese person who owns a cell phone but has no bank account. Very fascinating indeed.
