We regret to inform you that...

"You are very employable just not to us"

"You were too honest"

"We are unable to progress with this vacancy at this time"

I didn't have enough experience

Or my favourite, that I was too enthusiastic.

Well I'm terribly sorry but I wasn't aware that being honest or enthusiastic was a bad thing.

Although the most frequent excuse on a rejection e-mail that I have received, and let’s be honest they are excuses (sometimes or in my experience most of the time,they are just looking for an excuse to not hire you) was that they were lots of successful applicants and the competition was fierce.

Well in that case if you have 50-100 applicants for 1 job and they are all equally as qualified, the choice of who gets the job is based on pot luck. With a large percentage of the job interview being perceived by your body language and visual appearance  does it really matter what you say?

At a career day that I attended at my university they said that what you say only has a 7% impact on the whole job interview experience. Although once you put your foot in it it’s very hard to back pedal and you can normally tell (well at least I can) when the turning point comes and you can wave the job goodbye.

So from this rant you can conclude to be able get the job  you need to say exactly what the interviewers want to hear. By this point they have (you would hope) read your CV and they know everything  that they want to know about you,  during the interview (in my experience) they just want you to amaze them with your knowledge about their company (and  if that involves quoting their website word for word then go for it) and it’s just a chance for some good old ego stroking. 

Pot luck that is what all your hard work has come down to, if you are not on the top of your game for the 45 minutes in which you are in the interview room, well then you are doomed.

Yes I am bitter and I have a pile of rejections to prove it.

The Great British Teacake

Inspired by the Great British bake off I decided to try my hand at making every recipe from the show. But after a while I got bored, but I have the book now so I can revisit this task at a later stage.

One of the recipes that I decided to tackle head on was the chocolate marshmallow teacake. A nice challenge to sink my teeth into and it tasted rather nice when I did.

The first challenge I faced was before any ingredients were even set on the counter and that was to get a silicone baking tray. Simple, I thought and head off to the nearest supermarket to find said tray. Alas the tray was nowhere in sight, nor was it at the next supermarket, or the next.  Not to be conquered we set off to a specialist bakery shop, it wasn’t there either. Getting  ready to tear my hair out at this point I quickly purchased some piping bags, I later learnt that these were the wrong kind but more on that later. 

Eventually we finally found what we were looking for, well sort of, this tray was a bun tray not rounded like I had hoped but if I had to settle for funny upside down bucket shaped teacakes, well I suppose that would just have to do. 

The Recipe used was from the wonderful Paul Hollywood and can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/chocolate_marshmallow_60410 Or in fact here because I will post it too. (makes 6)

Ingredients

        400g/14oz dark chocolate with around 40% cocoa solids

        50g/1¾oz wholemeal flour

        50g/1¾oz plain flour

        pinch salt

        ½ tsp baking powder

        25g/1oz caster sugar

        25g/1oz butter

        1 tbsp milk

For the marshmallow:

        3 free-range eggs, whites only

        150g/5½oz caster sugar

        6 tsp golden syrup

        ½ tsp salt

        ½ vanilla pod, seeds only

Melt 300g of the chocolate in a bain marie and leave to cool slightly before evenly spreading the melted chocolate around the mould making sure that there aren’t any holes but you don’t want the chocolate to be too thick either. Leave to cool completely while you turn your attention to the biscuits but don’t put them in the fridge because that will spoil the chocolate and it will lose its shine.

Preheat the oven to 170C

To make the biscuits, put the flours, salt, baking powder and caster sugar into a bowl and rub in the butter with your fingertips. Add the milk and stir everything together to form a smooth ball. Roll out on a floured surface and roll out until an approximate thickness of 5 mm. Cut out six rounds with a diameter of approximately 7.5 cm or to cover the bottom of the mould. Leave the rounds to chill in the fridge for 10 minutes, the addition of a magazine or the TV remote control is optional. Baking the biscuits when they are well chilled helps them to keep their shape and stops them spreading in the oven. Bake for 10-12 minutes.

While the biscuits are cooling melt the rest of the chocolate before fully coating the cooled biscuits in chocolate, you could cover only the bottoms if you are running out but my philosophy on life is the more chocolate the better so slather the yummy stuff all over.

To make the marshmallow, place all of the ingredients in a large bowl over a bain marie and whisk with an electric whisk for 6-8 minutes, making sure it is smooth, silky and doubled in volume. Please note that for a bain marie the water has to be boiling, not just in a hot pan. Whisking the eggs over a hot but not boiling pan doesn’t actually get you anywhere, well apart from ending up hot and bothered with a pan of egg whites. Paul Hollywood recommends using the seeds of a vanilla pod but I didn’t have one of them so I put a few drops of peppermint essence in. This was a mistake because my marshmallow tasted rather like toothpaste.

When you eventually get the consistency you want, spoon the marshmallow mixture into a piping bag.  However you ideally want a large sturdy piping bag not a small flimsy thing because you will more often than not end up with your hand covered in hot marshmallow. Fill another piping bag with more melted chocolate, yes MORE chocolate, my mother wasn’t happy about the amount of chocolate involved in this recipe but as the well-known saying goes ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you fatter’

   Pipe the marshmallow into the chocolate covered moulds and place the biscuits on the top. Carefully pipe some chocolate to fill in any cracks between the rim of the chocolate and the biscuit. Leave the teacake to set completely before attempting to remove from the mould, if you try this before the teacakes has had the chance to seal properly things could get a bit messy- trust me I would know.

How NOT to do job interviews

Having now had some experience in job interviews I thought that it would be a good idea to share some of my advice.

Firstly when you find yourself lucky enough to have landed a job interview make sure that you don’t research the company, don’t be tempted to go onto the businesses website, it pays to be ignorant. If the interviewers happen to ask about what you know about them just smile and nod, umming and ahhing is also a good choice.

Another solid piece of advice for interviewees is to always turn up really early; it keeps whoever is interviewing you on their toes and more often than not results in a nice cup of tea while you wait. Although sometimes this will result in awkward scenarios in the staff kitchen but isn’t that what life is all about? One awkward scenario after another. 

During the interview it always helps to be one of the following; either desperate for the toilet or really really hungry. Both is also advised as it makes for quite the interesting interview. Although if you do need the toilet so badly that you are on the verge of wetting yourself, maybe you should have gone before you left the house.

It helps your case if you can exaggerate things ever so slightly, now I don’t mean lying through your teeth á la Rebecca Bloomwood in Confessions of a Shopaholic who claimed to be fluent in Finish, but you could suggest that you know how to fully use say a computer programme even if you have only ever used said programme once in your entire life. However this may come back to bite you if they give you a task to do, a task that involves using Excel. Having put on my CV that I had had a lot of experience in this programme ‘they’ may have thought that this was not a big ask however what I failed to mention is that I had not used in Excel  since year 8 which was, it suffices to say, quite a while ago.

If for any reason you have a bad interview I have found solace in talking to the local shopkeeper, for about an hour to be exact. If the person behind the counter is unable to recount your life story after your meeting, then you aren’t doing it right.

*I would strongly advise you NOT to take any of what you have just read as serious advice

*Everything here is based on real events

Devonian Adventures

When you go to Devon for a job interview what can you look forward to? A 12 hour round trip on the trip that's what, a lonely stay in a bed and breakfast and going to the pub all on me Todd. Can you hear the violins playing yet?

I have always enjoyed going to Starbucks for my morning coffee was made all the more pleasurable now that they write your name on the cup. Now everyday (well it could be everyday if I had money to burn) I can be somebody different. Today I was Paula.

Paula enjoys Venti Vanilla Spice lattes, going to the cinema and romantic strolls across the sand.....

 Either the barista was rather deaf or a poor woman named Paula was left standing without her coffee.

Amazingly the train journey down was surprisingly uneventful but as the train pulled into Bristol
Temple Meads I found it most peculiar not to be getting off there and changing to get to Bath. Before you get your knickers in a twist dear reader, I managed to resist the urge and did in fact make it down to Paignton in one piece.

The bed and breakfast in which I was staying was owned by a lovely couple Karen and Nigel, they had only recently acquired the b and b and this would be their second season there. They had therefore, as I found out, not quite got their stamp on the place just yet. I can only hope that the fugly looking floral carpet in the entrance hall was on the list of things that needed changing.

The Pitch Black beach

I knew that my mother would literally slaughter me if I did not get a picture of the sea so I did; the
problem was that by the time I arrived in Paignton it was pitch black.

The interview itself went surprisingly well; although I should probably learn to read instructions properly it might have saved me a lot of aimless wondering.

Once in the taxi back to the ranch I was obviously so overcome with relief that it was all over that my nose gushed, literally gushed, blood all over me, how very apt to have just left Agatha Christie's abode and have blood stains on my coat.

New Year- New Diet. I'd rather not

With a new year come resolutions (I gave up on trying to make them, I was only going to break them and then end up feeling like even more than a failure than I already do) and diet books being thrust in my face. Well great, I don’t need a smug looking thin people sneering at me thank you very much, so kindly do one Rosemary Conley. 

Talking of whom, have you seen her portion pots? Apparently you should eat the amount of *insert food here* that fits in whatever coloured pot that some power hungry Nazi has decided that you are allowed to eat. Well I’m sorry but this amount of food is not even sufficient for my rabbit never mind me. 

They say that it is ok to eat everything in moderation, so if I want to eat cake every other day instead of everyday that should be perfectly alright. Right? 

So I would like to pass on this message to the body image obsessed society that we live in, from the words of Marie Antoinette “Let them eat cake”