bothari.

My amazing co-workers. :)

I’m scared of Ling Ling’s head.

Toffee

I don’t know if you ever have made toffee before, but here’s how I do it.

• Get cans of Eagle brand (or similar) sweetened condensed milk.
• Place unopened, unpunctured cans in a LARGE pan of boiling water on the stove, and cover. The water must go over the top of the cans.
• It is important that the cans remain covered with water at all times, or the risk of explosion increases. Just keep topping it up.
• Cook for 3+ hours. I do it for 3.5 hours, and it comes out just about perfectly.
• I needed two cans of toffee for 36ish cupcakes, but it will keep unopened FOREVER so you may as well do as many cans as you can fit in the pan, it’s useful to have toffee lying around!

Banana Cupcakes

I used this recipe for banana cupcakes. They are moist and delicious, although I think I mashed up my banana a bit too much. Keep the banana chunkier if I were you (mine was more a paste than chunks).

I made one addition; throw in some Graham cracker crumbs and melted butter into the bottom of each cupcake paper, to make a nice Graham cracker base to the cupcake.

Construction

Once the cupcakes are thoroughly cooled, cut out a little cone from the top. Just get a paring knife, insert it about 0.5” from the edge, angled down towards the centre of the cupcake, and slice around. A nice cone is produced! Slice off the bottom of the cone so that there is just a disc of cake remaining, for putting back on top. Make sure you don’t get the discs and cupcakes mixed up!

Time the finishing of the toffee for when the cupcakes are ready and have had their centre cut out.

Take the pan filled with cans of toffee off the stove, put it in the sink and start filling it with cold water. I leave the cold water cycling through the pan for about five minutes; this actually encourages a nice smooth chilling of the toffee and in my experience creates a much richer toffee than if you leave them to cool at room temperature.

Here’s where you have to be a bit quick. The toffee should still be a bit runny, so start spooning it into the holes in the cupcakes. If you wait too long it’s going to thicken (deliciously), but will be a bit harder to get into the cupcake. Place the disc back on top of the cupcake once it is filled with toffee.

Finally, for the frosting I used stabilised whipped cream. This makes enough for 36 cupcakes.

• Take 1/2 cup of cold water and add 2 teapsoons of gelatin powder.
• Mix, and then microwave for 1 minute to mix them better.
• Remove from the microwave and leave to cool to room temperature.
• Place a large mixing bowl + beaters in the fridge for 20 mins.
• Once everything is cool, beat together:
  • 2 cups heavy whipping cream.
  • 2 tablespoons white sugar.
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.
• Beat until the mixer just starts to make peaks.
• While still beating, slowly pour in the gelatin mix.
• Beat until stiff peaks have formed.

Frost the cupcakes immediately, and then top them off with dried banana chunks (so they don’t go brown while waiting for you to eat them; use fresh if you are eating them sooner), and perhaps some Graham cracker crumbs.

Modern Warfare 3: Looks pretty, still don’t like their gameplay.

Tomb Raider: Looks awesome, please come with 12” “distressed” Lara Croft action figure.

Mass Effect 3: Looks awesome, and I hope it recognises my accent.

Gears 3: Looks solid.

Fable Journey: I’m done with this franchise.

Halo CE Anniversary: Uninspiring but I’ll probably get it just to play the campaign again, in HD.

Halo 4: I really wish they had left that story untold. Chief needs some peace.

Tim Schafer: TAKE MY MONEY.

I see a blue sky turning purple with the sunset, crossed with airplane trails and wispy clouds that fade out over the distant ocean, bordered by trees that smell more amazing than they look like they should. I love it here.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m getting old, because I recently had a child, because of my relocation to California, or just because I’m an irresponsible asshole, but I’ve found that I care increasingly less about time keeping. There are obvious exceptions - I wouldn’t want to miss the start of a movie, or miss a flight - but on the whole I could not care less about promptness.

I remember being a teenager and getting annoyed at my aged parents making us late for dinner, or picking me up late from boarding school, or a thousand other things, but these days I realise that it was completely inconsequential.

And I’ve found that not only am I a lot happier for it, I get a whole lot more done. If I have the time to properly finish what I am doing before moving on, then I won’t need to come back to it later. If I get to properly recuperate by playing that extra five minutes of Halo before starting dinner, I’ll probably be able to concentrate on dinner more and make it quicker.

So please, slow the fuck down; whatever is waiting on you can wait a little longer.

I’ve found that being a father quickly makes you invincible. In the past 24 hours I have been:

• Kicked in the balls at least four times.
• Headbutted on the nose twice.
• Kicked in the face while sleeping.
• Bitten numerous times

If the assailant wasn’t a 20 month old little girl, I’d be pressing charges.

I had a discussion with a random German on the Internet last night about the misuse of apostrophes, spurred by my iPhone assuming that whenever I type “its” I mean “it’s”. I don’t, for what it’s worth.

I apologised for my misspelling and explained that I was embarrassed at my use of a “greengrocer’s apostrophe”, and he went on to tell me that in German they call them “Deppenapostroph” which literally translates to “moron’s apostrophe”. He explained that an apostrophe in German is only ever used for a contraction, never as a possessive pronoun, so the misuse of them is a major faux pas. He blames American products (“McDonald’s”, for example) for conditioning the Germans to misuse it, and gives an excellent example of a sign he saw (“Rechts” is German for “right”):

McDonald’s

100m recht’s