Liberty is a breath of life to nations. – George Bernard Shaw
To everyone celebrating, Happy Fourth of July!
When disaster strikes
I made a cake for someone last night and finished it early this morning. It was a chocolate Guinness cake. And it was beautiful!
So I went to work, on the train as usual. When I got to the office, I opened the cake box to check on the cake not expecting anything. The trip was uneventful. I didn’t swing the cake, I didn’t hit the box with anything, no one hit the box…it was a really good train journey.
So imagine the shock when I find the top layer of my cake cracked right through the middle with a section of it fallen off. My heart tumbled down to my tummy then broke a little during the journey down.
I had to make the difficult call to my friend to say the cake broke and that I couldn’t give the cake to her for her party.
The silver lining? Everyone at work got the chance to have chocolate Guinness cake with white chocolate cream cheese frosting. Oh yes. It was a VERY rich cake!
The day we celebrate our uncaped superheroes
They wear ties, suit jackets, lab coats, overalls, steel capped boots, trainers, glasses, gloves…and nary a cape in sight. But they are our superheroes – able to leap to our rescue, hold back floods of tears, amaze us with their strength and creativity, make things happen for us, save us from ourselves, allow us to gain the power to control our futures. All this strength coupled with the gentleness to hold our hearts and our delicate egos so they don’t get broken.
They are our fathers. The ones who, apart from our mothers, loved us first. They are ordinary men with the extraordinary capacity to love us, warts and all. They are our uncaped superheroes, our everyday supermen and powerful paragon.
Today is the one day of the week we are officially supposed to fawn over our amazing fathers. And fawn over them we should.
To my dad, who is recuperating in the hospital, get well soon Abbadabbadoo! You are my own very personal superhero and strong man. I love you! Happy Fathers Day!
A gem off the beaten path: Coleman Coffee Roasters
We came across this lovely café quite by accident. We were exploring Lower Marsh and the rain started to come down quite heavily. We were also looking for a place to have breakfast because our usual cheap eat favourite Marie’s on the same street was closed.
We took shelter and the smell of coffee wafting from the beautifully gleaming vintage espresso machine was amazing! We were greeted with a really welcome “Hello guys!” so we went further in and looked at the menu. We were intending to be polite and just have coffee and possibly cake. But they served Staffordshire oatcakes or “oaties” and there was quite a choice from sweet to savoury fillings for the oat pancakes. We’d never had oaties before so our curiousity was piqued! We chose to have bacon and stewed tomatoes. The aroma of cooking bacon was amazing, and boy were the oaties oh-so-fabulously good! It rated an “oh-my-God-this-is-amazing!” with my mouth full of oatie-bacon-tomato goodness! The oaties were light but surprisingly filling. I expected to feel full and bloated after, but I didn’t. It was heaven on a plate.
Now. let’s get to the lovely brew! I opted for drip coffee because it’s what I do when trying out a new coffee place (my better-safe-than-sorry coffee measure). I was offered a choice between the Guatemalan and another blend (I think it was Costa Rican blend) and I chose the Guatemalan. It was very nostalgic for me because it was served on a Duralex looking cup, which reminded me so much of the French coffee cups that my father favoured. At first I was worried because the drip coffee looked light and watery. But oh no, was I VERY wrong! The coffee was rich, comforting and oh-so-flavourful.
The staff are lovely, very friendly, so very helpful and they know their products. They’re happy to explain what they sell, what you’re options are and they give you lovely recommendations. They also love what they’re selling. That’s key!
This isn’t quite on the main road from Waterloo Station, but this is definitely worth a visit. The space is small and there are only a few seats, but that’s part of the charm. If you have the opportunity to wander around Lower Marsh, pay the lovely folks at Coleman Coffee Roasters a visit. It is DEFINITELY worth it!
That face!
If you can, pay a visit to the Colchester Zoo. I’ve not been to ZLS London Zoo but from the looks of it, Colchester might provide you with more value for money. I think this opinion is slightly biased because I do love what I call my local zoo!
Sharing with you one of my favourite snapshots of the red ruffed lemurs who love lounging above in the beams of one of the thatched roofs in the Lost Madagascar enclosure.
Wallpaper photos: pink flower
I’m quite pleased with the photos that I’m taking.
This is one of my favourite photos and I’m using it as my Samsung tablet wallpaper. It’s a close up macro photo (I’m just spewing out photography terms and I don’t even know if I’m using them properly! Ha!) of a bunch of pink flowers that I saw at Colchester Zoo.
Nothing earth shattering just me giving myself a pat on the back!
Mid year!
Just writing thoughts down. This post has completely no purpose except to vent.
Time flies when you’re having fun…and even if you’re not!
I can’t believe we’re half-way through with 2016! Someone once said that you know you’re getting older when time flies past so quickly. If that’s the case, then I’m definitely ancient. I find myself thinking more often than not, “Stop the world, I want to get off!”
Sometimes I get home and I want to just completely switch off. Just go to bed and pull the covers over my head and just sleep. But I can’t because there are chores to be done, food to be cooked, a kitchen to be cleaned. Then after all that, sometimes I wonder if I’m just wandering around life, walking in somnambulistic circles? I find that I’m asking myself all sorts of existential questions which scare me.
I find that a recurrent thought is me to have proper downtime. For me to just lie in bed. To not be responsible for anything. For me to have a day when no one asks me to do anything for anyone. For me to be alone with my books and my thoughts and my dreams. For me to sit at a coffee shop window, nurse a huge cup of coffee and watch the world go by.
I think I now understand what it is now to have social media fatigue. Ever since I moved to England, I’ve been online all the time. I’ve worked really hard to make the thousands of miles between me and my family and friends appear small and insignificant. I’ve invested in tech so that I can get in touch, be in touch and be accessible to everyone back home 24/7. There are days, however, when I want to completely switch off. To not bother catching up on tweets, Instagram, look at Facebook posts, catch up on LinkedIn (which, I might add, I haven’t really totally wrapped my mind around, even though LinkedIn says I’ve got an “all star” profile, whatever that means!), and to not care about work emails and how many emails I have in my Outlook inbox.
Mark Babbitt said that “[w]hen you realize you’ve stopped contributing original thought to a conversation, you are suffering from Social Media Fatigue. It is time to step away and take a social-less vacation.”
I think I need another break. A long one where I’m allowed to just walk, take pictures, enjoy my little seaside town, and not be responsible for anyone or anything, to completely switch off. To not worry about tax investigations or HMRC correspondence for clients. To not worry about family and if they’re all okay. I need to refill my spirit tank. I need to replenish my cheerful me supplies, restock my happiness cupboard.
I think that’s my goal for the next half of 2016. To find time for me. I have experienced burnout and that wasn’t a very good place to be in. I need to take care of me because no one else will do that.
Book du jour: Taming the Queen by Philippa Gregory
I’ve finished another book! Hurrah! I am now catching up to my goal to read 24 books this year. I am now just a book away from catching up! Yay!
The book that I’m now reading is the next installment in the Tudor story beautifully written by Philippa Gregory. She now writes about the last of King Henry VIII’s wives, the queen that survived him, Katherine Parr.
I’m about about 5 chapters in now and am quite pleased with my progress! Here’s to more books, eh?
Can someone recommend what I should read next? Any suggestions folks?
Brownie points
Who doesn’t like chocolate? Apart from chocolate cake, one of my favourite chocolate consumption delivery systems is the good old chocolate brownie. And after trying all the ways to make a brownie, looking through so many recipes, I have finally settled on my own. Because I’ve made the brownie this way several times now and it comes out with that thin, shiny, crackly film on top, which I firmly believe is a sign of a good brownie! Of course, other opinions are welcome.
So, if y’all are interested in trying it out, my brownie recipe is written down below.
Ingredients:
- 200g dark chocolate (at least 56%), roughly chopped
- 175g unsalted butter
- 3 eggs
- 250g caster sugar
- 150g plain flour
Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 170°C (350°F). Grease and line a brownie pan with parchment paper and set aside.
- Place the chopped chocolate and butter in a heat-proof dish and place the bowl over boiling water, making sure the boiling water doesn’t touch the bottom of the bowl. Melt the chocolate and butter, stirring occasionally to make sure the butter doesn’t burn. Once butter and chocolate are melted, take off the heat and set aside. Allow to cool to room temperature, making sure you stir occasionally (I usually add the paste made from 1 heaping teaspoon of instant espresso powder dissolved in 2 tablespoons of hot water at this point when I want to add a slightly different flavour to the chocolate).
- In a free-standing mixer with a paddle attachment (you can also do this by hand with a wire whisk, but it’ll take a bit longer), beat the eggs and sugar together until the mixture becomes a very pale yellow mixture (will usually take about 7-10 minutes, depending on the mixer, about 15-20 minutes by hand).
- Add the flour in three additions, making sure that the flour is incorporated each time. Add the melted chocolate mixture to the batter ensuring that you scrape the sides of the bowl to make sure that everything is well-combined.
- Pour the batter into the prepared brownie tin and level with a spatula. TIP: I place a baking tray (or cookie sheet) in the oven whilst it pre-heats and I place the brownie tin on it so that the brownie cooks evenly (raw brownie batter is lovely but bad for the tummy!). Bake for 30-35 minutes. Brownie is baked when a crackly film forms on top and a skewer/toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Serving suggestions:
- Plain, just sliced into squares (sized definitely according to preference)
- Topped with caramel and salted roasted peanuts
- More melted chocolate
- A sprinkling of icing sugar (if you can handle even more sweetness), add a little coffee or cinnamon to add different dimension to the taste
TIP: Caramel cheat – in a deep saucepan, boil water and add a can of unopened condensed milk (sans paper label), yes the whole can. Boil for 3 hours. When you open the can (after it has cooled enough to touch), the caramel will be ready to spread on anything!
A balm for the soul
There is something infinitely comforting in walking in nature. I took this photo on a walk with Alan on Saturday. It makes me smile to look at this photo. Sometimes, when you need to slow down, when you need to centre yourself, a quiet walk, surrounded by nature, is the best solution.
When I flounder around in deep waters,
When the stresses of life take their toll,
A sudden deep hush steals upon me,
Your gentleness calms the soul.
Yellywelly 