It's my birthday tomorrow

It’s my birthday tomorrow and I’m absolutely terrified. 25; that’s quarter of century. You can except your first wrinkles to appear, you’ve reached your peak bone mass, indeed brain cells will start to die off. It’s all downhill from here. 

Now people are getting engaged and married and having babies because it’s perfectly acceptable to do so at this age. No longer is it a case of ‘they’re much too young.’ 

Yes I’m going to be 25 tomorrow and what have I got to show for it? 

I used to think that I was ambitious and knew what I wanted to do with my life but I have no more of an idea of what to do with myself than I ever did. 

At our university graduation there was a speech that pretty much gave us 'permission to get lost.’ Well I’d quite like some 'permission to be found’ or at least find whatever it is I’m supposed to be looking for: you now the whole purpose, happiness, sense of worth thing. 

Indeed if anything I’m in a more dire strait now than I ever was. I mean where would I be without the whole crippling self doubt, severe social anxiety and worry and stress levels that are off the charts. 

What was it they said about Captain Hook in Peter Pan? Old. Alone. Done For - yup that about sums it up.

The marsh and the mallow

Over my past few blog posts I have been investigating the world of experimental ‘healthy’ baking such as substituting traditional ingredients or using superfoods like chia seeds. Now however for something totally different as I set out to make vanilla marshmallows. For this recipe you will need:

250g sugar

400g water

1 sachet of gelatine or 4 gelatine leaves

A few drops of vanilla extract/essence (or food essence of your choice)

3 egg whites

Icing sugar for dusting

Edible gold glitter (optional)

Lightly grease a baking tray with sunflower oil or equivalent non-flavoursome fat and dust with icing sugar. 

Place your sachet of gelatine (or leaves) in 150g of water and leave to dissolve or soften in the case of the leaves.

Meanwhile add the rest of the water and sugar in a thick based saucepan and boil to 121°c (the threading stage) this will take approximately 8-10 minutes. I have used brown sugar for mine hence why it looks so dark.

it's so swirly and pretty

 Take off the heat and combine the gelatine stirring continuously. 

Whisk egg whites until soft peaks form.

Whilst still whisking pour in the sugar/gelatine syrup down the side of the bowl (this took to many hands to do so I was not able to include any pictures). This is the stage where you should add any food essence and/or food colouring. As I have used brown sugar my marshmallow mixture has a light caramel tint and it is for that reason that I chose to add a bit of vanilla. Transfer to your greased tray and dust with more icing sugar

and for an added dash of pizazz a light sprinkling of glitter.

 Leave to set in the fridge for 4 hours or overnight.

Don't you just love it when things go wrong?  It would appear that the syrup component of this mixture has somehow separated itself from the fluffy egg white so upon turning out the tray I was left with two different layers. Quite literally: marsh and mallow.

So yeah that looks quite hideous and gross, it tastes nice though. Upon reflection I  would halve the amount of syrup made. 125g of sugar and water. I'm not sure what I'm going to with this not quite marshmallow stuff that's in my fridge. Oh dear this is like the time when I tried to make gummy bears 

Update: I seperated the sugary syrup layer from the mallow...or maybe it was the marsh...and used it in a milkshake.

Carrot cupcake fail

My adventures in baking have often led me to trying out substitutes to the traditional ingredients such as using different types of flours (einkorn,spelt, gluten free etc) or dates instead of butter. 

This time the main ingredient that I was replacing was sugar but seeing as I was replacing one thing I thought that I might as well go the whole hog so my dear readers I present to you; 

Sugar free, gluten free, saturated-fat free carrot and pecan cupcakes. 

Well they would have been if I hadn't had the urge to ice them. 

The recipe I used can be found here. Only I used wheat free flour instead of almond.

http://eatthecookie.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/carrot-cake-cupcakes/

My mother made a stir fry last week (bare with me this story does relate) and instead of using rice like normal people would she decided that it would be far more nutritional to use shredded cauliflower. Alas (and I have no idea why...) a lot of this cauliflower did not get eaten so it was banished to the depths of the fridge. 

There it lay slowly festering and seeping into the other foods and quite frankly stinking to high heaven. Remember this little tale because we shall be deviating it in a few paragraphs time.  

For the icing I made a simple cream cheese butter icing using golden icing sugar. The golden sugar in this icing gives off a slightly caramel flavour and your icing will be lightly golden. 

I first mixed the icing sugar in with melted butter to make a smooth butter icing before adding a table spoonful of cream cheese -  does something smell a bit funky to you? 

 As it turned out the cream cheese had fallen victim to the great cauliflower invasion  yet I didn't realise that this was the case until  after I had already decorated the cupcakes. 

Anyone for a carrot cupcake with cauliflower icing? 

The not so relaxing pamper evening

You know the feeling when you have watched a YouTube video and suddenly feel inspired to do something. No? Well today I watched a video by the wonderful  Zoella on how to have the perfect pamper evening and thought to myself that I was going to do that.

I have always enjoyed indulging in all things beautifying  and love a good pamper party.  Something that those of you who have seen my toiletries cupboard will probably know so to turn  down a good pampering down would be just barbaric. 

I started the evening off by drawing a bath and throwing in a bath bomb that somebody gave to me about five years ago and I never got round to using however I couldn't just stop there no sir for next comes the bath caviar and the confetti.....and bubble bath.

I don't know if it just me but I often get bored lying in the bath with nothing but my thoughts  to occupy me, I guess that's why I have never been one who can have a nice long hot soak but today I decided that this was all going to change. People often find that reading in the bath is a nice relaxing pastime but every time I try to do that the book gets wet and it's all very stressful. Nevertheless I  grabbed the first book off the side and got into my bubbly tub yet the book in question was the second book of Storm of Swords in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones book three, part two)  and let's just say that relaxing it was not. By the third fight I was just like 'why can't they all just love each other' but no sooner had I thought this then that is what they did and oh dear god I need to get out of here.

By now the majority of the bubbles in the bath had disintegrated and I felt that it was safe to switch on the jacuzzi. Alas I was wrong and the bubbles kept on growing. I was literally swimming in bubbles well not so much swimming I don't have a swimming pool sized bath like they do in the prefect's bathroom at Hogwarts.

Having now suitably scrubbed myself clean I turned my attention to my face. Yet a problem arose when I realised that I didn't have a face mask handy and even worse there weren't even any avocados in the house so I that I could make my own. But fear not my friends for I have a plan up my sleeves and it appears that you can make a face mask out of any number of kitchen ingredients.

For a egg yolk, honey and olive oil  face mask you will need:

1 egg yolk
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp olive oil

Mix it all up and what have you got Bibbity Babbity Boo. Well it's not quite as exciting as anything the fairy godmother could cook up but 15 fifteen minutes after putting on the mask and washing it off in hot soapy water and hey presto - soft, shiny, fresh faced skin!

Bend and Snap

People have often told me and then in turn I have assured myself that I would be awesome on the Great British Bake Off or least I would be a cause for amusement on a Tuesday evening as I would be the one having a mental breakdown in front of the oven or watching on as my biscuit tower crumbled into a heap.

Therefore very much like last year, I decided to try out some of the technical challenges. If you have been following this blog you may know that I tried my hand at making teacakes last year and apart from tasting a bit like toothpaste and not looking all together that wonderful they weren’t actually too bad so I was hoping…..and this was a big ask I know that this time would go slightly better even if I was attempting…wait for it…the tuille.

The Tuille for those of you who don’t know gets its name from the French word for tile and is an incredibly thin biscuit often rolled into curved rounds or cigarette like rolls and the ends are dipped in chocolate, it was the latter that I was attempting today and let’s just say that things didn’t quite go as planned.

The recipe for tuilles is the simplest bit about them as they only require three ingredients:

2 egg whites

85g sugar

100g flour 

Indeed the recipe is very straight forward. Firstly you are instructed to preheat the oven to 180°c –smashing I can do that.

 Next combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix into a batter. The mixture should be thicker than a batter for a pancake but not too thick so that is still liquid and can be easily spread. Trust me you will want to spread it. 

Finally bake in the oven for about five minutes or until golden brown. Remove and roll into shape.

It sounds like these biscuits should be a stroll in the park….remind yourself of that thought when you’re pulling your hair out an hour later because THEY KEEP BREAKING!

This one gave up

aww look a heart

The thickness of your tuille will often determinate whether or not it will succeed in life if it is too thin it will be too brittle and snap but if it is too thick it will be chewy and gross.  

Too thick and it's all squishy

The thickness of the biscuit is not the only deciding factor in whether or not your tuille will live as the cooking time matters a lot too. The overcooked tuille is too brittle to work with where was if the tuille is undercooked (often you can tell this if it hasn’t gone ever so slightly golden) it won’t be crisp enough to be get a satisfying snap. As my good friend Elle Woods taught me in Legally Blonde it’s all about the bend and snap.

Having had (hopefully) determined what is a good tuille bake we now focus our attention to the actual cooking process. At first I tried putting a few blobs of batter onto the mixture before spreading it out and then popping it in the oven yet I quickly realised that this wasn’t going to work as the biscuits had nearly all hardened before I could even get one off the tray. A method that I found worked best was to make one tuille at a time spreading the batter very thinly on the board. I used a chopstick to roll the tuilles into cigarette rolls yet this brought with it its own perils as the biscuits snapped more than the crocodile in Peter Pan.

This 'roll' was clearly not 'rollin' with the homies'

I think that it safe to say that Tuilles are not in my top 10 list of things bake list especially when they crack and shatter to pieces and not even melted chocolate can bring them back to life.

The gummy fail

I stumbled across a recipe for homemade gummy bears and I if I were to say that this didn’t tickle my pickle I would lying (eww guys that’s gross). The recipe that I (tried) to follow can be seen here: http://undressedskeleton.tumblr.com/post/42764785751

I tried to follow the recipe but I had no lime juice or orange juice or mangosteen juice or stevia on the raw or even most of the fruits that were used. So I improvised….recipes are for wimps anyway. Famous last words

Hence the use of guava juice, apricots and even a little bit of grenadine and the new flavours of gummy bears were born: Apricot, Orange and Banana and Very Berry. 

Another a really large, gaping problem was that I did not have a bear moulds,  a bear shaped cutter  or even any cutter small enough so even this had to be improvised upon. I did however have a selection of farmyard animal moulds so the ‘bears’ now turned into gummy animals of some description (and hearts). 

Although the gummy things will turn out rather larger than what I been hoping for, they are going to be more like jelly babies than gummy bears. Oh well, In the words of Beyonce: ‘ I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly. 

Alas what I had been hoping for did not happen as when I put the  gummy in the moulds it did not come out.

When heavily greased the shapes did come out but.... this one was supposed to be a duck

Basically the only thing I have been able to achieve this morning is a big ball of goo. It's like Flubber except for the fact that it doesn't bounce or dance or even play the maracas 

After a lot of patience and a whole lot more trial and error I was finally able to create at least some gummy things out of the apricot, orange and banana batch (although I realised soon after it had set that this flavour was not all that pleasant)

It did however require me to grease each little mould before using it every single time. I also learnt that moulds with anything fiddly were a no no so little lambs, bunnies, chicks and anything else vaguely Easter related were out of the question. Gummy blobs are therefore the dish of the day.

The very berry gummy/jelly has still not set (4 hours later) this is probably due to the fact that this batch has a lot more liquid in the mixture than the last one, although I did boil this batch for longer. So I will just have to sit tight and wait to be able to fail all over again. In the meantime I'm making raspberry shortbread.

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.