Wow. 

I just won a studentship to do a PhD at the University of Reading. I'm still in shock despite hearing about it this morning. The topic that will be taking over my life for the next four years is "Medieval ecclesiastical gatehouses". Looking at their form, function and how they related to the rest of the ecclesiastical precinct and what role they played in ecclesiastical life. Basically looking at why you get big impressive ones, one's with doors all over the place and accommodation, and others which are simply entrance to the monastery. 

Or, as I'm mentally calling it, "A holistic approach to the fundamental interconnectedness of gatehouses to everything".

Why yes I'm watching the new Dirk Gently series on the Beeb, how'd you guess?

Ah yes, after discovery icons deep on my hardrive for Tron and trailers on youtube for Tron: Legacy - I felt obliged to get covered in icing again.




Basic gingerbread recipe and a custom template. What I mean by custom is I used a piece of cardboard because I've yet to find a gingerbread man cutter that's the right size.




All baked up and the first layer of icing goes on. Slightly thick royal icing to create the 'walls'



Next on goes the flood icing which is basically of a thinner consistency so that it spreads out nice and flat. Pushed it around with a toothpick to get it to fill every corner.



And now, the fun part. Well, seeing as it was 9.30 at night it wasn't that fun but anyway. On went the circuits in baby blue and dusty pink because I have cheap and cheerful supercook colours which taste awful if you up their quantities too much to get a decent colour. I also made the blue too thin and it spread out too much...



And what else did my programmes need? Laser disc things!!!

I mean, what's not to love about retro inspired sugar comas?




Used a carboard template for their shapes and then coloured them all in with various consistencies of royal icing. Basic sugar cookie recipe which I may post at a later date but it was vanilla-ry, and delicious.

Completely influenced by this blog:


http://www.snackordie.com/2008/07/pacman_and_ghost_sugar_cookies.html

...these are but two of my favourie things at the moment.

I've a couple of posts I want to write up soon but in the interest of procratination, I wanted to share with you (the internet) two of my favourite blogs.

First up, is Bakerella. I've not baked any of her recipes yet as she relies on American boxed cake mixes quite a bit but she's an artist when it comes to decoration. If ever something was eye candy, her blog contains it.

http://www.bakerella.com/




Cupcakes inspired by Julie and Julia...



And sheep! (How could I fail not to love these)

Next up is Ms. Humble who gives me hope that I can graduate university and not turn in to some crazy haired person obsessed with digging up dead people. I mean, I still might,  but there are other women out there who are kindred spirit and will eat baked goods inspired by geeky things.

http://notsohumblepie.blogspot.com/



Hostess style binary code cupcakes. So cute!




Mmmm, bacterial cultures...

I'm an online recipe-aholic. I really am. Baking blogs and general cooking blogs are my drug of choice at the moment and I shall sporadically post me favourite recipes.

This is my favourite comfort food and I hope you enjoy.

Time: 1 hour, start to finish
Cost: under £5
Serves: 2

Ingredients:
BBQ Chicken
Chicken wings(2-3 wings per person)
Tomato ketchup
Olive oil
Worcester sauce
Sugar
Mixed herbs
Cayenne pepper
Salt
Pepper

Potato Wedges
Potatoes (Depends how hungry you are, I usually do 3 between two people)
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Paprika/Cayenne
Mixed herbs
Oregano
Garlic salt/Dried garlic

Lets get down and dirrrty:
Plop a good amount of ketchup into a large bowl. when I say good, I mean about 1 and a bit tea mugs full. Drizzle olive oil on top until it feels right (about 2 tbsp probably) and add a big pinch of sugar (that would be a 3 finger and a thumb pinch). Splosh on some Worchester sauce now, about a tbsp, and then add a sprinkling of mixed herbs over the surface, a small pinch of cayenne (to taste) and then salt and pepper to what you think is right.

This isn't rocket science people.

Plop the wings in the sauce and let it marinade for as long as you can. Be this 5 minutes or overnight. Place in a baking dish/roasting tray, sauce and all and bake in the over for about 30-40 minutes. Baste with any remaing sacue at about halfway and they should look like this when done:



If you're not sure, dig into one and check that the flesh is white, very hot and there aren't any pink juice running anywhere.

Whilst these are cooking, move on to the potato wedges.

Take a potato. Isn't it a comforting vegetable? So versatile and tasty...
I digress however. I tend to leave the skins on but that's up to you. Cut them in half lengthway, and then half again, and then in half again so that you have 8th-ed your potato lengthways. Place these on a baking sheet and drizzle liberally with olive oil (1-2 tbsp) and now it's time to get creative. This is my personal preference but tbh, you can add what you like. My only comment would be don't forget the salt as otherwise they're pretty tasteless no matter what you put on them.

Sprinkle on and all over the potatos your spices(in this case, paprika, garlic, salt, pepper, mixed herbs and organo) and then rub and mix all the potatos and goodness together with your hands to get them all evenly coated.

Place these in the top of the over for about 1/2 an hour until golden brown.



With practice, these will come together and be cooked at the same time so you can enjoy them and revel in the beauty of these. Enjoy and have fun with them!

In Surrey...... SURREY people!!!!

I have never seen this much snow this far south. Never. All my trains are canceled, the roads are treacherous for bikes so I'm stuck inside grumbling.







Grumble, grumble.

We’ve got huge two metre (possibly?) wide windows here looking over what passes for a back garden and there are no curtains on them as the house has been unoccupied for a while.

Now, one of the highlights of my revision is the pigeons here. Apart from their waddle after eating too much bread and the pretty feathers (Can’t work out why some of them have brown/pink feathers) they have a tendency to fly into the windows. So far the score is Windows: 3 Pigeons: 0.
I’ll be busy doing something when THUNK. A loud sound makes me look at the window.

So far no actual concussed pigeons on the ground but we have got three rather nice pigeons smudges on the windows. You can actually make out the wings and all.


The moral? Buy big windows with no curtains and keep them clean. Better than television…

Here I am in sunny Surrey and I've now had to acknowledge that I am indeed an almost complete country bumkin.

We were going to Tesco (always a good beginning to a story) to buy some hot chocolate. An easy task to complete seeing as the Tesco we have back in Thurso has Galaxy, Aero etc. plus pure cocoa and Tesco own brand. A reasonable selection but nothing to ponder on.

Tesco extra here had about a yard of hot chocolate to choose from and I lost count of all the varieties. They have ready made cups of it ready for microwaving! WITH MARSHMALLOWS!!!!!
I didn't think it was possible to get so excited over hot chocolate and I spent a good ten minutes agonizing over which to buy. The Tesco staff may fear for my sanity now.

Oh yes, eggs.
When we drive over to Camrbidge (as one does) to the centre that does my exams we always park in the Waitrose carpark. Apart from the quirky clientèle in there (read, middle age and with an expression that says they just trod on a lower class person) the egg range have amused us no end. Apart from it being impossible to buy 6 eggs for under £2, you can actually select the breed of chicken it came from! Oh, and quail eggs are £2 something a dozen and we're selling them for only £1 on the farm (although admittedly most of the population of Caithness is unaware of what quail eggs are).

Back to my corn pickin'.

Hey all,

Just stumbled across this link so I thought I'd post it:
http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Main_Page

Seems to be a Discworld/PTerry wiki which I hadn't come across before. I use the Myst wiki a lot so I'm pretty darn pleased to have found a DW one too.


Oh, and I 'd to say a HUGE thank you to all you grand folks who helped me with my English paper. It's been submitted and fingers crossed now. Depending on what my mark is I'll post a link later for anyone interested (not posting it before coz well, you know, wounded pride and such...) but thank you so much for all your memory searching and quotes.

Can't get rid of me this week it seems but I've a question to ask of the community.

I'm trying to find a passage in the discworld series where Pterry's got Mr Slant (or anybody) using a lot of the pig latin in the series to confuse and sound complicated.

It's for an English project and I'm using Pterry as an example of how authors use speech to define characters. So far I'm using the nac mac feegles, the witches and the Genuans as examples but I'd really like to find an example of him parodying lawyers speech. I'm sure he does it with Mr Slant but I've already skimmed through Going Postal and I'm about to skim through The Truth but if anybody knew exactly I'd be most grateful.


To make this post a little bit more interesting, my did you know fact for today would be -


Well, I can't think of one off the top of my head. But did anyone else ever look up rat kings after reading Maurice? I didn't quite believe the epilogue by Terry but not one to tarnish my hero I went and looked it up and said doubts were crushed.
Oh, and turpentine and sheep. Up here I've yet to see turpentine used, but whiskey is one neighbor's personal choice and another farmer whipped up an egg and brandy and used that in place of colostrum (very rich milk in the first hours of life for anyone past high school biology or not in farming).

Hope that was slightly interesting.