Christmas Greetings!

Merry Christmas to one and all this fine day (Christmas Eve actually, as I type this).  We're on the verge of another Christmas Day, and all that it entails.

For me it'll be a fairly busy morning of opening presents, seeing my parents for a massive breakfast (rather than the traditional Christmas dinner my parents have a huge breakfast, and then snack as needed throughout the day), presents, seeing my gran, and then back home for the rest of the day, and some dinner later.

Featuring this year will be my Christmas cakes, one iced and with marzipan, one just iced, and one totally naked (except for tin foil which will hopefully be removed before anyone eats it!).  Hopefully they'll be nice, or at least the amount of alcohol in them will distract people :)

I'm quite tempted to have a session watching the Food Network tomorrow, bearing in mind their plan for the day:

In summary, 21 hours of Adam Richman eating well over twenty five pounds of food. It sounds amazing.

It's been ages since I made a video, so I finally did one this morning - it's a bit random, but hopefully entertaining, with a bit of Christmas-relating wittering, singing, jokes, and at one point the camera phone even gets abducted, which wasn't planned!

Anyway, I do hope that whatever you're doing, you have a good time over this holiday period.  Do, as always, drop me a comment, and let me know what you're up to!

Christmas Baking

This weekend we've decided to get cracking on the Christmas decorations.  The tree took a great deal longer than expected, as I couldn't find the lights from last year - reasoning that we'd had them a number of years and was due some new ones, I headed down to our local supermarket, and bought two packs of white lights for a reasonable amount of money (£6), returned home, and set them up.

Ready to decorate.

They weren't particularly impressive.  True, with the aid of a microscope, you could indeed identify a faint luminescence from within them, but otherwise they were pretty rubbish.  Fortunately my wife was out shopping, so I sent her a text message requesting that if she happened to be in the vicinity of a shop selling lights that she get some.

She returned later with the lights, we put them on the tree, decorated it, and it looks very impressive.

Then I found the old lights.

Anyway, to my main experience of the day - every year, I state that I am going to bake a Christmas cake.  And every year, I don't.  I don't do a great deal of cooking, and I do even less baking, generally restricting myself to turning out a few cupcakes once or twice a year.

This year, I decided, would be different.

After soaking a kilo of fruit in alcohol last night, I made the cake mix.  All went reasonably well, until I put in the flour.  Using scales, I measured the right amount of flour, sieved it in, and mixed it up, but it seemed like a bit too much.

Then I weighed the remaining flour, and discovered that I had somehow managed to put twice the required amount in.

I endeavoured to resolve this by putting in more of the other ingredients (butter, sugar, and eggs) to balance out the flour.  This resulted in an increased amount of cake mix (batter?) for cooking.

At this point I discovered from my wife that I actually needed proper cake tins to cook in, I couldn't just use any old metal tin I found lying around, so went to the supermarket to get some (this was the same visit as for the underpowered lights)

After baking for about an hour and a quarter, the cakes came out like this:

So, they appear edible, and, possibly with the exception of the one on the right, aren't overly burned.  They've had another douse of alcohol, and they're now wrapped in foil and resting in tins, awaiting further dousing over the forthcoming weeks, until they get iced a week or so before Christmas.  Whilst I'm clearly going to endeavour to eat all three of them myself, I should warn anyone who might be considering visiting our house over the festive period to think twice before accepting my offer of a slice of Christmas cake :)

Do let me know how your seasonal preparations are going, if you are indeed preparing for anything seasonal! And I should say that my wife has added some new lines to her selection of needleminders, do stop by www.denkaidesigns.com and check her things out :)

And if you want more Christmas stuff, my last post was all about Christmas cakes and puddings :)

Cake!

I don't enter a huge amount of competitions but one that I noticed that raised my curiosity was one for winning a cake that you received in the mail.  This seemed like a somewhat bizarre idea, yet the BakerDays Letterbox Cakes look great, are customisable, and (apparently) can survive the Royal Mail.  So when I saw the blog about them on Chapters of Kat I didn't hesitate to enter the competition.

And I won!  This was ideal as one of the things that my son had asked was at Christmas "Can we have cake?" and he doesn't mean a traditional Christmas cake, he just wants a slice of vanilla sponge (chocolate would also be acceptable, I suspect).

The cake was duly ordered and within a few days I was washing up at home when a box came through the letterbox and toppled onto the laminate floor, upside side, with a heavy thud.

That'll be the cake ruined, I thought to myself, but I'm pleased to say that it wasn't the case - the cake came in a metal tin just its size, along with a Christmas cracker and a couple of sheets of information about the company.

Obviously the cake hasn't been sampled yet but with any luck it'll be a great surprise Christmas present!

A very anonymous box...

Aha!

Cake customised as requested!

For more info about these cakes go to http://www.bakerdays.com/

Mice

I don't like mice.

Actually, that's not true.  I'm perfectly happy with mice, depending on the situation.  In a field?  Fine.  I'd fully expect to see a mouse in a field, or peeping around a tree in a forest.  Basically, in a natural environment, I expect to see small furry things. I am down with that.

And, I'm also okay with mice as pets.  You have a cute pet mouse in a cage or some such thing?  No problem at all, sonny Jim!  I bet that they're quite cute things to stroke and pet and stuff,

What I'm not okay with is the wild variety of mice, inside my house.

Mice are a common issue where we live, we're close enough to a railway line and a good chunk of grass (this would be a "footgolf" course aka a mashup of football and golf, quite good fun actually) for mice to thrive, and periodically they venture into the houses nearby, for food, shelter, and to terrify humans.

And I really don't like them.  It's ridiculous - there is pretty much nothing that a mouse can do to me.  I certainly don't want them in the house (spreading bugs and stuff), but all it takes is for me to hear one of them scratching around, or - even worse - see one dash across from one side of the room to the other, for me to jump around shouting at them, as though the sheer power of shouting will make every mouse in a five mile radius say "Hey, you know what?  That field was a far better place to live than the dry, warm building full of food. Let's go!"

In other news, I've won a cake (more details likely to follow in a future blog), and I've made a video giving 5 tips for guys (entirely applicable to females also) ahead of Christmas.  It's getting close now and if you haven't done the things in the video yet then I'd recommend cracking on.

WHY IS THIS

I've got Christmas cake. Right in my kitchen. It is now Boxing Day and I still haven't eaten any of it.

Why?!?

Merry Christmas!

Welcome to Winter!

Well, today is the first day of winter, apparently (or is it the mid-point?  Google says the first day but I'm unconvinced), and more generally known as the Winter Solstice, bringing with it the longest night.  For some reason I've not noticed winter creeping up so much this year - we haven't had that many frosts, car windscreens haven't needed to be de-iced, no sign of snow at all (although I wouldn't be surprised if some shows up January/February time) but nevertheless it is that time of year.  The time of year can get people down - I know when I go to work it's dark, I come home and it's dark too, sometimes I'll go for a walk at lunch just to see the sun - wrapped up well of course!  Plus there's the stress of buying presents and things for Christmas, getting them sent off in time (this is an apology to anyone to received their Christmas card/present late from me because I've missed the last posting date!)

Anyhow, I've attempted to get an early start on my New Years resolutions by registering at a gym this week, and then actually going!  I've registered at Xercise4Less in Hull, which is astoundingly cheap compared to some exercise places, and still has all the equipment that you'd want in a gym.  I would note that I celebrated registered at the gym by immediately purchasing and eating chocolate cake from Vintage Cafe, but since then I have been to the gym twice so hopefully it's being burned off.

I must admit to being shocked at how out of shape I am, but as I think about it I haven't regularly gone to a gym for about five years, and gave up football about a year ago so I really shouldn't be surprised if my fitness level has dropped slightly!  Strangely I am actually tolerating enjoying exercising so fingers crossed to doing more of it!

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is funny and Cards Against Humanity is as well

We've had a busy weekend, taking the little one to Sundown adventure play park on Saturday - that went really well, I was dreading the two hour coach journey but amazingly he loved the coach trip, that was possibly the best part of the day for him!  And then on Sunday people came round for a belated third birthday celebration for him which went very well and involved lots of cake.

Two particular things for me to talk about today!

Firstly, Aaron Dembski-Bowden (hope I've spelt his name right) - Aaron is a seriously good Warhammer 40K writer (amongst other things) who is responsible for certain publications such as the Night Lords books Soul Hunter, Blood Reaver and Void Stalker, as well as The First Heretic of the Horus Heresy series.

He also has a fantastic blog at http://aarondembskibowden.wordpress.com and his latest post, set in the style of an old text adventure, is brilliant and made me laugh out loud.  Strongly recommended if only for the TINY GUARDIAN.

Secondly, Cards Against Humanity - this is a cool card game where essentially you get given a question and a set of answer cards, and you have to choose the answer card with the funniest answer.  Simple to play and very fun (probably best for older players though - no kiddies), you can buy it online or download a free set to print and cut out.  Find it at http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/ and if you want to see how the game operates (and help test the game to make it even better go to http://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/lab/ to see how it works.

Cake and head flicking

Firstly, I made a new video!

Recently I've been around my other half's mums house for a few evenings, washing clothes as our tumble dryer is temporarily out of action (belt snapped).

Anyway, I saw some cake and had to make a video about it.  You can see it here.

Or just watch it below.

Apart from that, I have this habit when I'm excited of kind of flicking the hair towards the back of my head with my fingers.  I haven't done it for ages but while I've been watching some TV at my other half's mums (Hornblower is surprisingly good) I've caught myself doing it at the end of a couple of TV shows.

Anyone know why I do it?  Very odd.

Temporarily not thinking about myself for a minute, it's seriously scary what's happened in the US with Hurricane Sandy.  I know that I'm not prepared sufficiently if there's an emergency around here, despite this part of Hull being hit with flooding only 5 years ago - and North Hull being hit with a flash flood only about 2 months ago.  Must do better.

Let's finish the post with a picture of my son standing on his head.

For the observant folk, that's a book by Marcus Brigstocke in the bottom left corner of the picture - or M-A-C-U-S B-I-G-S-T-O-C-K-E if my son's reading it.

The guy will just have to leave the R's out of his name until the little one can say them.