The art of baking

I’ve been baking and cooking a lot lately. I enjoy baking a lot more than cooking but that normally depends on how hungry I am when cooking dinner. The more hungry I am the more I don’t want to cook… I need food now! Baking is more of a pleasure as it isn’t something I need to eat urgently, well maybe I will test one or two straight from the oven. So far I have baked sugar cookies and chocolate chunk cookies. Then this evening I baked ginger snaps (biscuits) for my brother as a gift for Christmas. Don’t worry I have got him other presents as well, I’m not that cheap!

Ginger Biscuits

Chocolate and frosted star cookies

The frosted star cookies need finishing with some colour and silver balls – maybe a job for tomorrow lunchtime. There a few other recipes that I would like to try next. Of course these are in the sweet variety. One is the Nigella’s Christmas rocky road – which seems so easy to make. I just need to buy some marshmallows and some more chocolate to make those. That will be a treat to make on Christmas Eve.

Monday – a good day

I’m too busy watching The Wedding Singer to concentrate on writing today’s piece. I was going to write about all the nice things I’ve been baking or would like to bake but don’t feel I can do that justice now. Maybe tomorrows will be on the baking efforts. Today has felt like a good day which is nice after yesterday felt like a bad day. I work for a great company as my bosses have agreed to my request for working at home more until I feel better about travelling on trains and generally just being out of my comfort zone. The one great thing about working at home is that I’m able to cook more, which in turns means I can eat earlier and than get more done in the evenings like walking in the snow (how silly!).

Other good things about today: getting some new rye whiskey for the Christmas holidays; more snow falling; talking with friends and listening to cool Christmas music (not that rubbish stuff that is played in every shop at this time of year). I’ve also discovered that the BBC has some great stuff about anxiety and mental well-being. It’s good to know that I’m not alone. With Christmas only four days away, it has got to that stage that I just can’t wait for it to be over with but oddly I’ve got plans for gifts for next year. More homemade gifts like sweets and chutney. If I do I will have to get more organised next year.

Cookies and the world of sticking things

This afternoon we entertained my nieces (age 9 and 7) along with my sister-in-law and the charming little man who is my nephew (age 20 months). My main idea was to bake cookies and let the kids decorate them. As always with these ideas that seemed great at the time, when it came to this morning I was having second thoughts. With all the snow around it was hard thinking about baking when I wanted to either sit in front of the fire and TV or go outside and make a snowman. After lunch I got on with making the cookies – I had to find an American recipe online as us Brits don’t really make cutout cookies. Of course we call cookies biscuits just to add to the confusion while looking for recipes. Luckily I found this one on Allrecipes.com that had a handy converter to change all the measurements into metric. One problem with that was that it changed all the small qualities are well – eg. two teaspoons = 5 ml – I still use old school tsp and tbsp measurements.

After getting arm ache from mixing the butter with the sugar I’ve decided that I would like an electric mixer for my birthday in January. The baking went down well, with each niece taking it in turns to use the cookie cutters and then I would bake them. After that it was more fun with coloured icing and ‘hundreds and thousands’ on the cookies. I don’t mind mess so it was nice to see the kids having fun. The only mess left is all in the kitchen! As well as baking, my sister-in-law also brought some stickers and other bits for gluing on to plain christmas crackers. Then I found my card making stuff and my nieces sat about sticking and hole punching cards. After some homemade pizza they departed for home in the snow and ice. A great afternoon was had by all and now I’m enjoying the peace and quiet with a few drinks.

Google self-destructs

In a technology meeting at work yesterday I threw in the wildcard in technology trends for 2010 by saying that Google will self-destruct. Or as I like to create an image it will be caused by ‘red matter’ and Google will collapse into a blackhole. Only people who have watched the Star Trek film will know what I am going on about. Anyhow, the only reason I thought of the Google self-destruction is that the day before I was thinking about web hosting and how much it costs in the UK. After a bit of searching on Google (of course) I came across Google Sites. Create a website for free! Yes, that is right, it’s free!

A few weeks ago I tried Google Wave, which was really interesting and good for working with other colleagues in real time but with only three people that I know on there it is hard to experiment with. Maybe when it goes ‘live’ it will become useful. My point about self-destruction is that I remember when Google was just a wonderful search engine. When it was the best search engine for it’s quick and correct results with a clean web page. Unlike the Lycos and Yahoo! pages that were full of adverts and news items with rubbish results. Now Google has its fingers in all the pies. Google Mail, Google Documents, Google Maps, Google Labs, Google Pizza etc etc. Of course they don’t make pizzas… yet. Will Google become like Microsoft? Too big for its boots. When Google is everywhere in the world will the cool people find an alternative that was created by a couple of kids in their bedroom? Most probably. I currently use Google for most things and still love it but instead of a war creating the end of the world maybe it will be when Google collapses in on itself then the world will end.

A trip in to town

Today I managed a journey in to London – to the office to be exact. I was brave enough to actually make it to the station and luckily for me the trains were delayed which meant the delayed train pulled in to the station just as I arrived. Not having to hang around the station worrying helped a lot and I got to the office okay. Albeit I felt really tired once I had sat down at my desk. It still amazes how tired anxiety makes me. After a good morning of sorting out the post and other office duties I then made the journey back home. It just makes it easier to travel in non-rush hour times.

Had great fun getting from the station to home though – a sudden snow storm happened. One of those that hurts your face with the wind blowing so hard. Got home damp and cold and then the blizzard just suddenly stop as soon as I got settled back to work. Walking in those type of conditions always makes me giggle to myself and I most probably looked at bit psychotic. Hell, who cares. Actually who cares is my motto of the moment.

Random thoughts

I nearly got to work today but just couldn’t make it and then felt silly. On top of that I then spent an hour in tears about it all. This is going to be a very slow process. I then spent the rest of the day with a headache and wondering… Or as I put to the work chatroom, feeling befuddled. Befuddled – such a great word. I’m befuddled with lots of things at the moment but work is definitely top of the list. Still, my husband actually listened to me today which is a step in the right direction. He also worked out that I would only need £6K to take a year off work so I could rest and explore new ideas. Where I’m going to find £6K from though – maybe I’ll win the Premium Bonds!

One other random thought of the day – over the past few evenings I have watched so many Christmas cooking programs. From Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. What is amazing is that we aren’t even hosting any Christmas meals or parties. Maybe one day we will and maybe one day we will get back to having Christmas parties like in the old days before friends had kids. However, I have seen some tasty recipes so one day when I’m off work over Christmas I will give one or two a try. Yum!

Coin flip

I was going to write ‘tossing a coin’ as the title but when I wrote it down it just seemed rude (such my childish mind). Earlier today I thought maybe flipping a coin would help me decide on what to do with my life – heads I will stick it out at work or tails I get a new job. It came up tails which still didn’t really help me as I don’t think I have the mental energy to go for job interviews. There is also the slight problem of what job to do if I did go for a new job. I like my job for the most part but I’m not sure this is the career that I want for the rest of my life.

Thus, there lies the problem, I don’t know what my lifelong career is. I don’t have one thing that I’m really good at. I would like a job that I feel creative in – going back to my roots of art and design. So how to do this for a job? Become self-employed and try to motivate myself to do something creative everyday. I do wonder how people make a living from the arts but they must do. The fear of not making any money is what is putting me off from doing this. Or the fear of change. Another fear to add to my many others.

Got the tree!

Today we got the tree! A real Christmas tree this year. Last year it was twigs from the garden sprayed white with lights and a few baubles hanging from the twigs. After years of a faux tree that evidently turned in to green toilet brush, we have had more real trees (and twigs). I love buying tree decorations especially the non-traditional type decorations. No red or gold decorations for me. Pinks, turquoise, white and black. Of course a bit of silver too.

The tree

Can you see the red Father Christmas just hanging there? That was a little joke after I found it at a bottom of a bag full of decorations. I haven’t got a clue where it came from but I thought it would add a bit of crazy to the tree. Of course some would think that the blue bird decoration is a bit crazy too!

The bird

Photo Saturday

More jars for jams and chutneys

Worm food and lots of pickled onions

This seasons hat and gloves

New haircut

A long week

This week seems to have gone on forever and not necessarily in a good way. In theory it should had been a good week with tickets to see Eddie Izzard on Monday night. Unfortunately as the week went on it just seemed to get worse. That is a bit of an exaggeration as I’m sure there are people are out who have had worse weeks than me but every now and again we all have rubbish weeks even if the problems are minor.

Eddie Izzard was good – intellectual humour as I like to call his style but going out late on a Monday night and not feeling particularly great about travelling on the train on the way home didn’t really set up the week. Tuesday I had my doctors appointment which stressed me out on top of all my other stresses. From there on I haven’t been able to get to sleep properly and meant I had real trouble getting up in the mornings. It is always the mornings that make it tough to do anything. By the evening I’m feeling a lot better about life and stuff. So, with the lack of sleep, feeling anxious every morning (so much that I had a terrible time even getting to the station and worked at home instead), and today I’ve had a headache for most it, this has been a really long week. Roll on the weekend. Happy Friday!