04.37 pm
I’ve only now come in from the kitchen, where I’ve just finished making my cake… with a few hiccups. I wanted to make this one a “citrus-y” one, with orange zest, mixed peel, and almond extract. I got everything ready, whizzed all the ingredients except the flour and the orange zest around in the food processor, sifted the flour into a bowl, and popped the orange zest in with it, to await the nice slurpy mixture from the food processor. I said to Julian “I’ll want the mixed peel in a minute,” and he said “What mixed peel? You should have told me earlier, and I would have had it ready!” So he went looking for the mixed peel. I looked for the mixed peel too. But despite me remembering that I’d put a packet of mixed peel in the trolley, the last time we went shopping together, it had apparently vanished, as completely as an iceberg about a week after it had floated into the tropical waters of the Bahamas! By this time I was a trifle put out! Julian seemed to think I was going senile or something, and I was equally as positive that I’d grabbed the packet of mixed peel off the supermarket shelf with a self-satisfied smirk, and put it in the shopping trolley – and in the meantime, the cake was rapidly going nowhere! Julian stomped off to drive up to the shops and get some mixed peel for me, and I fretted and fumed over the loss of the mixed peel. When he got back, I re-whizzed all the stuff that was still sitting forlornly in the food processor [small interlude: the kitchen timer just went off, telling us that the cake was probably ready – I dashed off to the kitchen, and guess what! We couldn’t find the skewer that we use to test cakes etc.! In the end, I had to use a small, sharp knife! The cake, however, wasn’t ready… the timer has been put on for another five minutes. We will now return you to your normal reading…] poured it into the flour and orange zest, and started mixing! When everything looked well combined, I poured half the mixture into the prepared cake tin, and scattered small handfuls of mixed peel over the top of the batter, trying hard not to get any on the sides of the tin, then we poured the rest of the mixture over the mixed peel. I say “we” because Julian had to help me by turning the cake tin around as I stood there pouring. The glass mixing bowl is quite heavy, and thanks to arthritis, my hands aren’t quite as flexible and as dexterous as they once were 
Anyway, the cake was finally ready to go in the oven! Naturally the kitchen timer went off again, just as I finished the small interlude above, and I had to dash off again to re-test the cake with the small, sharp knife. And Julian is indeed right! We do need more than one rather small skewer in the kitchen! I shall add them to the shopping list right now! Done! Well, the small, sharp knife came out clean this time, meaning that the cake was ready, so we tried to turn it out onto the cake rack… nope, it liked being in the tin. We gave it a bit of a sharp shake downwards, to loosen it, and tried again. The cake said “I’m comfortable where I am, thank you very much – I’ll stay in here where it’s nice and cosy and warm!” We shook it again – a little harder, this time. The cake said “Zzzzz…” from its nice, warm tin. Well, we gave it quite a hefty jolt downwards, almost slamming it down against the heavy chopping board that lives on the kitchen bench, and this time, Julian felt something “give” a little… He upended the cake tin a last time, and the cake slid free… leaving a healthy chunk of it behind in the tin. I guess I must have managed to get a bit of mixed peel against the side of the tin, after all! 😦 However using a bit of gentle persuasion, Julian managed to get the stuck part out in one piece, and it was duly placed over the “bald” bit, reunited with the rest of its cakey family. It actually doesn’t look too bad, and by the time it’s cooled, and had the icing sugar sifted over the top of it, I don’t think it’ll even be noticeable from a distance – of about three city blocks with skyscrapers in the way! 😉 Anyhoo – we’ll eat that part of the cake first, so no one will be able to see the broken bit!
This morning I played WoW again/as usual, and after settling Wynterthyme’s Followers and Fleet, I switched over to Arisnoë, and took her questing – I’m now in a hurry to get her to level 98, when she can upgrade her Trading Post to level 2 – Everything else is already level 2, but Blizzard seem to have this “thing” about the Trading Post, and not being able to upgrade it as quickly and as easily as all the other Buildings! Oh well, I’m just barely more than half way through level 96, so only two and a half more levels to go, or “This time next year… in Jerusalem”… With Arisnoë on her own though, questing is really hard – one forgets how spoilt one’s been, playing in tandem the way Wynterthyme and Mouselet have been – it sure is a lot easier and quicker with two of you, mowing down the Mobs! But, she’ll get there in the end…
And now on to the more important part of the blog! 🙂
Food stuffz: last night for dinner we had home-made hamburgers, which were really more like rissoles, or very tiny, individual meat loaves, or even very large meat balls – but whatever you want to call them, they were absolutely delicious! As it turned out, we didn’t have them with potatoes, boiled, mashed, or chips, we had them with steamed rice, flavoured with our very own home-grown spring onions (and a bit of Soy sauce) We didn’t even have our customary half a tomato! (gasp, shock, horror!) but there was, I think, tomato in the hamburgers. For dessert I had a small tub of low-fat strawberry yoghurt and a few pieces of tinned peaches (from a plastic jar! So should I be calling them “jarred peaches”, or “peaches in jars”?) I had a sandwich for lunch today, made from the extremely nice Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread. Julian used hummus with pine-nuts instead of butter, and the last two “hamburgers”, which were just as nice cold and crumbled up in a sandwich, as they were last night on a bed of rice! 🙂 Tonight we’re having King Island Beef sausages for dinner, with chips, half a tomato, and either green beans or Brussels sprouts (Julian hasn’t made up his mind yet! 😉 ) and of course for dessert, I’ll be having a slice of my new “citrus” cake (with no cream!) and one of the Corella pears, which should be ripe enough to eat tonight! I’ll let you all know tomorrow night what it was like (not the Corella pears, the cake!) 🙂
Weigh-in this morning. Maybe things are slowing down? I sure hope so… this morning I went from 63.1kg, to 63.1kg, so I stayed the same. This is a good thing, and a bad thing, I suppose, but definitely more good than bad, because at least I didn’t go up again – though I’ll probably do that tomorrow, especially after licking the spoon a few times when I was making the cake! 😉 It’s only bad because continuing “no worries” weight results can tend to make you complacent, and then you eat too much, and immediately feel guilty!
And so to tomorrow! I was thinking that I was going to be having a fairly free day tomorrow – I know my next Warfarin blood test is due, and I was thinking of getting it done in Glen Waverley, and then going along to the Medicare office up near the Library to change my name on my Medicare Card (no, we still haven’t gotten a round tuit yet – they are very rare, you know! It’s almost impossible to source a good one…*Winter shakes her head sadly*) And then, this afternoon I received a phone call from my Podiatrist’s Receptionist, to remind me that I had an appointment tomorrow afternoon, around 5 o’clock – and I saw my “free day” escaping through the Den window, even though it was shut at the time! This probably means that my blog will be late tomorrow night, as I doubt that I’ll have enough time to start writing before dinner – sorry! And really, that’s about it from me again for this evening! Do call in again tomorrow night though – fairly late, unfortunately – and find out what my “citrus” cake was like, whether my weight went up, or down, or stayed the same for a third day, and how Arisnoë is going with her attempts to get to level 98! But until then, please bee as good as you can, remember to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep warm – or cool – depending on what the weather’s like, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 