Author: laranettle

Old

40.

I do hope to get a lot older, but 40 has a certain gravitas. I do feel that 40 year olds should have a certain amount of their shit together. Not all of it, of course, or you might as well give up, but 40 means goodbye to nightclubbing (at least the way *I* used to do it), and hello grown up and responsible.

So I am planning a party. A knitters house party. Mum and Dad have said I can have the house at Pearl Beach for the weekend of my birthday, so people can come and go all weekend, and hopefully some people will want to stay over, so we can all sit around and watch movies, drink wine, knit, and chat.

Sounds like a proper grown up part don’t you think?

Rainbow Cake Recipe

Thanks to my friend Simone who made Inigo’s first birthday cake, and then shared the recipe with me to make his second.

Ingredients
250 g butter
250 g white chocolate
200 mL water
1½ cups caster sugar
1¾ cups plain flour
1 cup self-raising flour
2 eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

And food colouring. Don’t bother with the liquid ones you get at Woolies, you need specialty cake decorating gels. Liquid colours won’t give you the intense colours that you need for the full rainbow cake impact, and if you’re going to go to all that trouble, you want to get the wow factor. I got mine here – cheaper than eBay, and awesome quick service.

Method
Preheat oven to 150°C. Line the cake pan with baking paper (this cake will stick).

Heat butter, sugar, chocolate, and water in a saucepan and stir over low heat until all combined. Let it cool a little bit so the self-raising flour doesn’t fizz before its time.

Sift both flours together and blend into chocolate mixture (don’t worry about lumps).

Stir in eggs, sour cream and vanilla (use a whisk for this bit and any remaining lumps will break up once these wet ingredients go in).

Pour the mixture into a deep 20 cm tin* and cook for about 1 hour, or pour into two 20 cm shallow tins and cook for about 45 minutes (this time is way out – cook it until a skewer comes out clean which will take much longer). I would also seriously consider cooking the cake/s au bain marie ie. once the mix has been poured into the cake pan, put the cake pan into a big roasting pan and fill the outer container with boiling water so the cake won’t form the really thick crust that comes with having to cook it for so long.

Recipe notes
Instead of sour cream you could use thickened cream, yoghurt or condensed milk, this just adds to the moistness of the cake. Also great with white chocolate ganache (hell, what isn’t?).

Colouring

Here is where being married to a maths nerd is handy – but don’t worry, I married one so you don’t have to. My cake batter weighed at about 1600gms, so I separated out the batter for colouring in the following proportions –

500gms – red
400gms – orange
300gms – yellow
200gms – green
150gms – blue
50gms – violet

Pour the colours into the tin in the above order, trying as much as possible to keep the pouring centered. You will end up with a tin that looks like a multi coloured target from the top, and each colour will fall “inside” the previous colour like a bubble.

1.7 litres (3 pints) = 200 mm (8 in) ROUND = 180 mm (7 in) SQUARE
2.3 litres (4 pints) = 230 mm (9 in) ROUND = 200 mm (8 in) SQUARE
3.4 litres (6 pints) = 250 mm (10 in) ROUND = 230 mm (9 in) SQUARE
4.5 litres (8 pints) = 280 mm (11 in) ROUND = 250 mm (10 in) SQUARE

And if you want more rainbow goodness – try pancakes!

School has started

And our group is awesome.

We have a landscape architect, a few designers, an art director, a pattern maker, a career coach, a rare book maker, and a lawyer. And three of us used to work in the film industry. It’s an ecclectic group, but mostly with a strong design/art background, or at least a strong interest.

I did some sketching/doodles the other day and I realised that I haven’t done anything like that for about 20 years. So I got to class early, and sketched away happily, absorbing the “studio air”.

We have about 6 weeks of school and I may not produce anything I’ll want to share with the world, but I know I’m going to have fun!

Boys and girls – should we parent them differently?

I’ve often thought about this, and have made the decision to try to raise an emotionally connected boy who isn’t afraid of colour, who doesn’t use violence to solve his problems, and who doesn’t pee on the toilet seat. I’ve wondered if the boy/girl divide is more nature or nurture, so I was happy to find this post.

Especially since (no matter how he dresses), heaps of people seem to think he is a girl anyway.

A new low


Greetings:

I am sorry to intrude into your private and peaceful life, all the same
My name is Mrs. Rosario Ana C. Labindao, I work as an accountant in a
bank in Haiti. I contacted you to work together with me in claiming a
fund that I tend to use 50% of the money for assistance of displaced
people here Haiti.

I wait for your prompt response so that I can give you more briefing on
what you need to and how to do it.

Best regards from,

Mrs. Rosario Ana C. Labindao.

At least this one will only be attractive to particularly selfish and greedy people who deserve to get scammed!