Diverse Ramblings

Cupcakes, mmm.

Thursday was a public holiday and, for me, the start of a long weekend.

Having recovered from the upset stomach (see previous post) I decided some cupcakes were in order.

I am actually capable of making cupcakes from scratch, but I like to keep Betty Crocker on standby, just in case. So I decided to use a Chocolate Fudge cake mix that had been teasing me every time I opened the pantry.

I made up the mix as per directions, but I also added a couple of ingredients based on tips I have picked up through my baking experiments in the last few months. I mixed a teaspoon of instant coffee with a little hot water and added it to the mix (because coffee really brings out the chocolate flavour) and also added a couple of capfuls of vanilla extract (because I lurve vanilla).

For the frosting, I used a great recipe I found last year - cream one and a half cups of icing sugar (I used Tate & Lyle) with half a cup of butter (Kerrygold unsalted) and then add a quarter of a cup of cream (Scottish Pride double cream) and a pinch of salt. Mmmm.

The frosting recipe also calls for a teaspoon of vanilla extract, but I held off on that until I had divided the frosting in two. One batch I flavoured with vanilla and coloured blue, and the other I flavoured with lemon extract and coloured a deeper yellow than the mix already was. Both the extracts I used were from Marks and Spencer, as that is the only place I have found so far in Malta that sells extract as opposed to essence.

A sprinkling of hundreds and thousands, and there you have it.

I have a long and varied history of culinary disasters to my name, but these turned out pretty well asides from that I undercooked one of the trays of cupcakes.

When you bite into one, first the frosting flavour hits you (vanilla or lemon), then you get the actual buttercream taste (although it's overpowered in the lemon), and after that the coffee and chocolate come out to play.

Tomorrow for breakfast I am planning on having Arabica coffee with some of the leftover double cream, and a cupcake, and I have been looking forward to it all evening. Now there's an incentive to get out of bed!

Got pie?

Pi Day 2009 caught me by surprise, and I faced with the challenge of throwing together some sort of pie after the shops were closed (because not having pie on pi day would seriously harm my geek cred).

After some googling, I decided that, even though I had three apples available, apple pie was out. Chocolate pie looked promising though, especially after I unearthed a packet of Angel Delight from the back of the pantry.

I decided to go for mini pies so that I could use cupcake liners (which I conveniently had left over from last year's cupcake spree). For the base, I put a Pan di Stelle biscuit in the bottom of each liner, then filled it up with Angel Delight that had been in the fridge for a bit.

One packet of AD made six mini pies, and I stuck them back in the fridge (muffin tray and all) to set some more.

Unfortunately, the AD was expired and I got sick just from eating the bowl scrapings, so I never actually got to eat one of the mini pies. I did decorate one with mini Smarties before throwing it out though, just to show that they looked cool.

McCafe in Valletta?

This week I noticed that the McDonald's in Valletta is closed for renovations.

What I am really hoping is that it will re-open with a McCafé section like the ones in Gozo and Luqa, so I can lounge around with coffee, muffin/cookie and laptop - that is my definition of bliss.

So far, the closest I have found to that in Valletta is Café Jubilee, but it's not really designed for lounging and they don't have chocolate muffins or really big cookies.

We'll see next week when the McDonald's re-opens...

Note to self: resurrect blog

*blows dust off interface*

Well, actually I have been blogging all along, just not here.

I spent the end of 2008 blogging about my Panto experiences here, took January off to recover from Panto, and then spent February blogging about my Home Economics A-Level coursework here.

Now my coursework is handed in (yay) and I'm back to Diverse Ramblings. I've still got some loose ends to tie up on both of those blogs, but right now I can't really be bothered, heh.

After spending almost every evening from October to the beginning of January either rehearsing Panto or performing Panto, spending time at home was great after the run ended. In February instead I spent my evenings working on my coursework, trying to get the hang of soldering and sewing (and doing neither particularly well).

Now, life is more or less back to normal.

As usual, I have a few projects going on... I'm studying for my Home Economics exam, which is at the end of April, and preparing for musical theatre exams which are in May. For the home economics, I am studying nutrition and child development, and for musical theatre I'm learning lines and honing my tap-dancing, so I think I have some good all-round education going on *grin*

From my coursework, I got involved in the field of soft circuits, which is very cool. I decided to continue experimenting even though the coursework is over, and this week I received some stuff that I ordered off the net, so I'm looking forward to dabbing in that. I want to make some simple soft circuits for Easter presents, but in the long run I hope to do more complicated things with my Lilypad Arduino.

I got the Lilypad working on Windows last Sunday, but the Windows desktop machine is in another room to my workbench and equipment. So I'm trying to get the Lilypad running on my Linux laptop, but got stuck because I'm not yet used to doing command-line stuff. Apparently all that I'm lacking now is two drivers for the serial-USB interface, and then I'll be fine.

The rest of this morning is going to be rather mundane by comparison... I'm off to pick up a soft circuits book that is currently awaiting me at the post office in the next village, and then my primary goal for this weekend is to get the bathroom sparkling clean, which is probably the household task I hate the most.