Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars

These are based off a recipe I found on an awesome baking blog called Cookies on Friday - I can't tell you how long I spent looking through all the old entries when I discovered this blog, soooooo many tasty looking things, I just want to eat them all, and make them all....but mainly just eat them all.

Anyhow, Nicole mentions that her recipe is adapted from the book Martha Stewart's Cookies. Of course, me being me I couldn't possibly do things the easy way and just make the recipe as it is and I made some changes to 'wonkify' it too. I don't have this particular cook book myself so between Nicole's and my own adaptations I'm not entirely sure how close to the original this is now.

The first thing I did - which is fairly normal for me - is to halve the recipe. Making big batches of goodies is all well and good in theory but I know too much would be wasted in this household with a full batch, even taking into account that I'm a piggy and that I can take some in to my work buddies too. I was able to make 18 good sized finger-shaped bars with this quantity.



Next, seeing Nicole's comments about them not having a pronounced peanut butter flavour I decided to tweak the balance of ingredients a little bit. I dropped the quantity of sugar used, then as I also thought the amount of jam needed looked like it was a little much for my tastes (when I have jam on toast I like to spread it real thin, I don't like it thick) I decided to mix in a third of the jam into the batter. I figured that would make up for the potential lost sweetness from the sugar while still complementing the whole peanut butter and jelly combo thing. I used Strawberry jam as I still had lots left from making my fruit filling last week.


Last but not least I didn't fancy having whole peanuts on the topping so I made it with crunchy peanut butter rather than using the smooth. As it happens this turned out to be even better than I expected as when the mix melted slightly during cooking the nut chunks ended up sitting on top almost as if they'd been sprinkled anyhow.



This tray bake took me just under an hour to put together from start to finish (minus cooking time). This is mainly due to me needing to figure out the conversion rate of cups to grams as I went along and as I'd never made it before I was also having to keep checking the recipe to make sure I wasn't missing anything. Not to mention that I also kept stopping to take piccies! Next time I'm sure I could whip it all together in about half the time now that I've converted it and I'm a bit more familiar with what it entails.

These were really good and a big hit - I'll definitely be making them again so, without further ado here's the recipe, enjoy!


Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars

70g butter
110g caster sugar
1 egg, beaten
340g crunchy peanut butter
210g Plain Flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp vanilla essence (yes, homemade from vodka!)
200g Jam of your choice


1 Beat the butter and sugar together in a bowl until light and fluffy

2 Add the egg until mixture is smooth again, then add in the peanut butter and about a third of the jam. Mix well.

3 Gradually add in the flour, salt and baking powder and combine until the sides of the bowl turn 'clean' and you are left with a dough.

4 Set a third of the dough to one side and using the back of a spoon, press the rest down evenly over the bottom of your tray. I used a 10x6 pan lined with foil and greased. Spread the jam over the top of flattened dough.

5 Sprinkle small pieces of the remaining dough over the top like a crumble - I did this just using my fingertips.

Note: I expected the dough to spread and fill the gaps when cooking however it didn't really do that. Fortunately I'd sprinkled it pretty evenly anyhow but it's something to bear in mind - what you put in the oven is pretty much what you'll get out.


6 Place in a pre-heated oven on Gas mark 4, or 350 degree's for 45-50 mins. It did start to brown quite fast so I covered with foil after about 20 mins so that it didn't turn too dark or burn.

7 Remove from oven and leave to cool in tray. When cool, cover and place tray into fridge and chill overnight. Remove from tray the next day and slice in to squares or fingers. Store in an airtight container. The one I tried tasted delicious chilled so I put mine back in the fridge but I suspect that's a question of taste.

Friday Flowers

Turned into a gorgeous day here today so off I trotted to the park - nothing like some flowers to make you get into the summer mood.



Sometimes it's hard to believe that I'm right in the middle of a thriving metropolis.













Even if some of the flowers did look like they were from another world - I have no clue what this is, I've never seen anything like it before. Spikey!










Though didn't seem to phase the Bumblebee's from tucking into it's nectar, nom nom nom...

New email blog gadget added

I really didn't want to just put my email address on the site as it would mean an Inbox of spam shortly after but I had no idea how to add a way for people to write to me direct without it being via a comment on an entry.

A huge thank you then to Cathe at Just Something I Made for explaining - in words that even I can understand - how to do this. As if that wasn't enough she even created some little icons for people to use if they wanted too!

This week in Ulduar

Bit slow writing this week. Firstly, it's a Holiday weekend in the UK so been busy with other things (see project 'make yummy things to scoff' yesterday for starters) and also because we had a raid planned for Sunday night too and we were hoping to re-visit Ulduar before the raid week was up again.

Sadly while the numbers looked quite promising just a couple of hours beforehand, we just didn't have any reserves which of course meant it was all but a certainty that we would get some last minute drop outs - boo!

We had about 22 or so of us and decided to go smack Sartharian with 1 drake up which we'd not done for ages - we had a couple of people locked to it already so we actually ended up 20 manning it and getting the Acheesement. People were still after the trinkets from there so not like it was so terrible...just...Ulduar....shiny! It's really not the same doing 'old' content now, even if it does still have some upgrades for people. After that we trotted to Naxx and steamed through Abomination and DeathKnight Wing.

I'd kinda dreaded going back to Naxx personally, it just didn't appeal to me at all but once I got there it was fine and there was a really fun atmosphere. It may be old and we may have done it (what feels like) a million times before, but it's easy and we didn't really have to think about much so was really quite relaxing in a way! A few people plugged a couple of small gaps in their gear and lots of people got some offspec loot so while it wasn't what we had planned, it was still useful.

As for Ulduar itself. Wednesday night we had ourselves another new record of killing 6 bosses in the one evening (previous had only been 5), meaning only Ignis was left up out of the first 2 chambers. Thursday proved to be a little bit more of a thorn in our side - due to a string of reasons we only had 1 main tank available from our usual 4. This meant we were reliant on our back up tanks - neither of which had ever done the Ignis fight as a tank before - and anyone who knows the fight will also know that handling the constructs is far from an easy job, talk about getting thrown in the deep end!

So yeah, a bit learning had to take place as 2/3rds of the tanking team had to virtually learn the fight from scratch so was a bit painful. However, they did get the kill and were able to have a few attempts on Freya again, just wasn't as much time as we wanted and our hopes for another first kill this week slipped away.

Ah well, can't win them all and a sharp reminder about the folly of putting all our eggs in 1 basket, yadda, yadda. Will certainly make more of a point of having our '2nd string' of tanks get some experience with the early boss fights now - something that's easier than ever with dual specs!

Chocolate cupcakes with Strawberry filling and white chocolate Mascarpone frosting

This weekend brought another Bank Holiday to the UK and I took the opportunity of having an extra day off to do some more baking - with these luscious cupcakes being the result!

Like the good wonk I am, making these turned in to quite the project. Not only had I not made this particular cake recipe before but I also adapted many aspects of it. This is a great part of the fun of home baking, there's nothing to stop you from messing with a recipe and giving it your own 'twist'. It can also be a little nerve wracking too as you rarely know if your changes will be a triumph or failure until after it's been baked. Happily today is a triumph day, yay!

This chocolate cake recipe is one I saw posted a week or so at Going Coastal, Sedgefield. Jeannine sucked me in with a very yummy picture when I was bouncing through CondronUS and as she responded on her own blog "chocolate cake will lure them in every time!" - well it certainly got me!

Now, piggy I might be but even I would struggle to scoff a sandwich cake before it went stale, therefore my first deviation was to halve the ingredients and turn them into cupcakes. This complicated things a little as I still liked the idea of having jam in the middle but I didn't think it would work to cut the cupcakes in half after cooking - I could just see all the filling squish out the back on the first bite! However a few years back I had made an 'alternative' Victoria Sandwich which had a great Strawberry sauce and white chocolate cream which I loved so I figured I'd make that, pop some of the sauce in the middle before cooking and use the cream to frost the top. Sadly the recipe is now lost to me but I had a vague memory of what I needed and made some educated guesses about quantity and it all seemed to work.


I found these cakes very easy to make and they taste pretty good too in my opinion so here's the recipe. Oh, and by the way - yes, that is a bottle of vodka in the picture below, it's my bottle of home made Vanilla Essence and I couldn't resist having a giggle seeing it pictured with everything else.

Enjoy!

Chocolate Cake



2 eggs
125g Sugar
1 Tablespoon Butter
125ml milk
160g Self Raising Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
4 tsp Cocoa Powder
1 tsp Vanilla essence




Beat the eggs until they turn light and fluffy, add in the sugar gradually and stir well until the mix becomes thick and slightly frothy.

Add butter to the milk and heat gently until it melts, I just put it in the microwave for a minute. Add the vanilla essence and stir.

Sift the dry ingredients and then alternatively fold it in to the egg mix along with a little splash at a time of the hot milk. Be sure to start with the dry ingredients first then add the milk in slowly as you don't want to risk curdling the eggs.

Place a spoonful of mix into the bottom of the cupcake papers then gently spoon in a little of the Strawberry sauce, making sure you include some lumps of fruit. Cover sauce with another spoonful of cake mix.

Place in a pre-heated oven on 180C or Gas mark 4 and cook for 12-15 minutes. Allow to cool throughly before frosting - if you do want to nibble on one while warm be careful, the sauce inside will be very hot! See? One actually erupted 'volcano style' during baking.


Strawberry sauce




150g of Strawberry jam
4 large fresh Strawberries, diced in various sized chunks
1 tablespoon of water
Dash of Lemon juice






Place the jam, water and lemon juice in a small pan and mix well over a low heat until it becomes more fluid. Add the Strawberries and keep stirring constantly until the fruit softens and the sauce starts to gently foam. Remove from heat and transfer to a bowl and place in the freezer for several hours/overnight.

Remove from freezer right before you start making the cake and it should be soft enough to spoon by the time you need it.


White chocolate and Mascarpone frosting




60g White Belgian Chocolate
60g Mascarpone
1 teaspoon of butter
1 teaspoon of strawberry sauce







Melt the chocolate with the butter in the microwave for 45 seconds or so, stopping mid-time to stir well.

Allow to cool for a couple of minutes then gently blend in the Mascarpone until smooth and all the lumps are gone. Stir in a teaspoon of the Strawberry sauce taking care not to include any fruit, you just want to make your frosting have a hint of pink with some flecks.

Place in fridge or freezer until the frosting firms up before spooning or piping on to the cup cakes - you want it to be spreadable but not runny.

The passing of a mouse

Regardless of whether you like, love, hate, or are indifferent about Disney, everyone knows Mickey Mouse and can recognise that high pitched voice of his.

On Monday Wayne Allwine passed away from complications of Diabetes at the age of 62 - he had been the current voice of Mickey Mouse since 1977, a job only 2 people prior to that had ever held, Jimmy MacDonald and Walt Disney himself.

Somewhat poignantly his wife was by his side when he died who is the current voice of Minnie Mouse (you may also know her from voicing in The Simpsons).

Some days the phrase 'the end of an era' can mean more than on others.

A different kind of Snapshot...

...than I've been talking about recently what with the new toy and all.

This is a small addition I've added to the functionality of the site to make life easier when I link to something externally. Aside from the photo's (I really should take a look at that sometime to figure out how), I currently have links off-site open in a new browser window so that people don't have to continually hit the 'Back' button to return to my blog. None the less, it can be a tad annoying having to flick back and forth between links when you may just be after a little bit of additional info on a topic.

Enter stage left - Snap Shots, a widget of sorts that lets you see a mini-preview of the link. Sometimes Snap Shots will bring you the information you need without you having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not. Very handy I thought!!

Of course, this may not be to everyone's taste but fear not if you find the little pop up's annoying. Simply just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and you can opt-out.

I'd be very interested in hearing if people find this a useful or annoying feature.

Before and after

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I went out to the park at lunchtime to take a few snaps on my new Olympus 520.

For the most part I took all the shots in Auto mode aka the camera's point and click mode as a) I wanted to see what it could do by itself and b) I still don't have half a clue how half the settings work on it anyhow! I did experiment and learn a little bit though so while it may have only been a short trip out it was mission accomplished with what I wanted to achieve.

This first picture is of a place called Horse Guards Parade which sits right alongside the park I was in. This is basically a show ground for special display's by the military for occasions like the Queen's birthday. Like many things in the area, it's very old and has a long history, even though it's basically just a fancy yard!



Obviously I took the shot from this direction so as to get the London Eye in the background too. I'm not entirely sure if I took the picture a bit wonky or whether it's just the perspective and angle making it appear that way...knowing me though, probably just wonky, hehe.

This second picture is virtually the same apart from one thing - I changed from Auto to Mountain mode. These are still settings the camera picks just I'm letting it know there is something far away I want it to look at. Granted the London Eye is a long shot from being a mountain (in both size & distance) but I figured I'd see what happened.


As it turns out there was a subtle but noticeable difference between the two shots. The whole white balance changes and as a result the colours are a lot more vibrant, most obviously shown by the blue sky and the red seats. It was one of the few times I messed with the basic camera options but I'm really glad I did!

This is a photo I took within St James's Park again. It's really not a place known for it's flower beds but rather it's lake and wildfowl, however they do make a token effort to brighten the place up with some colour too. It's not exactly a bad picture but it was a very sunny day and this resulted in the colours being a little washed out.


Ok, so first off I not so much learned something, but rather remembered something. When shooting in bright sun light it would be a really, really great idea to put the lens hood on to shield the front from glare. This would be the very same lens hood that is permanently carried on the lens in question in it's easy carry form - all I had to do was unscrew, turn it around and re-screw back on...DOH!

It's a little hard to know just how much of a difference this alone would have made as the sun was just over to the left of the shot. Failing that the next option would have been to take it off Auto and taken the exposure down a stop. Basically letting in less light. However as I said at the start, this little trip was really just about what the camera could do by itself and besides, where clever camera's fail there is always software to help fix things!

This is the exact same picture after I slightly tweaked the brightness/contrast and the hue/saturation in Olympus Master 2 though it's a little hard to see the differences on the weenie versions but if you open them both up in their bigger forms you can see that the grass is greener and the red and yellow of the flowers is deeper ie. more how they looked for real!

This was done the software that comes with the camera so I figured it was a good opportunity to see how decent that was too - seems ok on the whole though I couldn't see any obvious way to select specific areas such as the sky so it's quite limited in what you can 'fix' as whatever you do will affect the colour balance of the entire picture. Still for something that comes free with the camera I can hardly complain that it's not a match for professional photo-editing software like Photoshop.

Anyhow, good fun was had with all my messing around and I'm looking forward to going out again when the weather warms up a bit (and it stops raining, grr!) and trying it out some more soon.

Alpha Inventions vs CondronUS - Final verdict

Well as you may recall, nearly a month ago now I posted that I intended to compare both of these 2 sites side by side to see not only how they both performed in sending me potential new readers, but how they compared against each other.

Final verdict? Condron US just nails it and wins.

In all honesty, neither of them do particularly well at bringing me new quality visitors - could probably be counted on one hand infact - which considering the amount of hits I've gotten is in it's thousands that's not a very good return on my efforts. Those efforts being that I constantly have to submit my site in to the reading cycle.

Using Statcounter I can see exactly who has visited my site and where the referring link has brought them from. With Alpha Inventions I get a noticeable jump in site visits via them.....for about 10-15 minutes after my submission but that's it - BAM - drops off the face of the earth and appears to be completely gone from the reading cycle. 15 whole minutes, whoopee!

With CondronUS I get the same 'burst' of site visits immediately after a submission and this does fall off quite quickly too though perhaps takes a little longer for it to do so, probably more like 30+ minutes. However - and here lies the key difference between the 2 sites - it doesn't disappear from their reading cycle altogether and while they may be rare I do continue to get a few limited hits from them even days later.

From the other side of the coin as a 'viewer' of the blogs that are on display I also prefer CondronUS. Their top bar is far less intrusive than Alpha's who takes up around a quarter of the display unless you have a huge monitor and quite annoyingly has 2 scroll bars on view, one for the blog and one for their own site. For people who then start their blogs with a big header it means next to nothing of their most recent entry appears on screen to catch people's eye and when that visit only last 6-ish seconds well, who wants to scroll all the time like that when there's only a small chance of finding something that might be of interest to you?

All in all, while they do just what they say on the tin and bring lots of traffic the fact is that unless you get your thrills only from your hit counter go up rather than people actually reading what you write then you're probably going to end up disappointed with both sites. If you're going to stick with one long term though then Condron seems to be the one that offers the better quality & longevity vs effort.

This week in Ulduar

Aaaaand, back we went.

In the end we didn't manage to get a group together for an extra raid last Sunday. No biggy, our group always only aimed for 2 progression raids a week and summer is coming and we got a whole bunch of our players revising like crazy for their exams now at the end of the month and obviously that takes priority!

Once again we managed to speed up a fair bit on the Wednesday night raid, last week was the first time we had ever killed 4 bosses in 1 night, this week we bettered that and killed 5 bosses. This meant that aside from Ignis (who we 1 shot thankfully), we had plenty of time free on Thursday to have some attempts on Auriaya who they'd had some practice attempts on at the end of last week.

As I mentioned in my last report, this boss is largely about the tricky pull. If you can get past that without many casualty's then it's mainly just keeping your head and interrupting an occasional big nasty spell thing.

As I'm a rogue who can interrupt, I equipped my pvp trinket for this to break her Fears early (along with my Undead racial and also a tremor totem this was very effective) and it all worked like a charm. It was a great (and pleasant) surprise to us all when we killed her on the first attempt of the evening, yay!

What this also meant was for the first time we were able to move in to the 3rd area of the dungeon. We decided to make Freya our next objective and we moved into a lush green oasis with lots of triffids looking to make our lives miserable, LOL.

There is quite a lot of trash in this part of the zone, however there are also 3 mini bosses too which don't drop loot but do drop those currently precious Badge of Conquest's. This works in exactly the same way as the Sartharion fight - if you leave these mini bosses alive, they will aid Freya during the main fight, buffing her abilities and making it more difficult (it does reward better loot though).

After some 'comedy moments' that involved graveyard zerging on the first trash pull while it beat the snot out of us and then a premature pull of Freya along with some trash that resulted in us once again getting the snot beaten out of us we finally got to the stage where we could make our first real pull.

Freya herself doesn't have much health but for all intents and purposes she is immune to damage for the first phase of the fight. Between us and killing her are several waves of defenders that she summons to protect her - only by killing them do we remove the buff that makes her immune and lets us move in to phase 2.

Our first attempts were pretty chaotic really, different kind of defenders can spawn in different orders and they all have a variety of very painful tricks up their sleeve. Obviously by the end of the evening we were also getting a bit tired too, however on our last pull before calling an end to the raid for the night we had a really good attempt where we handled the first couple of waves as smooth as can be which was a great improvement and a high note to finish on.

With the speed we're improving on the old bosses, hopefully we'll have more opportunity to practice Freya next week and with what we learned on how to handle things this week I think we have a good chance of adding her to our list of conquests providing we have sufficient time.

Time of course is the tricky bit as we mostly always only raid twice a week for 3 hours a raid and with Ulduar being such a big dungeon our progress on the latter bosses now is directly related to how much we can speed up and get the earlier bosses on farm.

Still, our progress moves steadily onwards and we have yet another new boss kill to our name this week - and most importantly, people still seem to be having a blast.

Happy Snappy!

Finally had some sunshine coincide with when I could go out and get some pictures, hurrah! So I went for a little trip down to St James park on what was a gloriously sunny though very (very!) windy day.

Took tons of piccies during my lap around the park - some a success, some not so much, LOL, but all good learning experience. Today I almost completely stuck with point'n'shoot mode as I wanted to see what it was capable of with a dunce like me behind the view finder!

Unfortunately the park keepers were of a mind to thwart me even though I finally got my much desired weather - half the lake was drained, lots of ugly fencing and diggers were around and the island in the middle where the wildlife nests was majorly disrupted meaning there wasn't anywhere near the birds present that I thought I'd be able to photograph and some of the flower area's were fenced off - boo!

Still, despite all this I still managed to take almost 80 pictures though that's not quite as 'bad' as it first sounds. I have discovered this wonderful feature with the camera that basically lets you press the shutter and it'll keep on taking pictures until you release it again. At up to 3.5fps (frames per second) it takes a bunch of shots very quickly and is great for moving targets that can otherwise be tricky to catch 'just right'. It also lets me feel like Paparazzi with the -clickclickclickclickclick- so addictive I swear I'm going to kill the battery in no time with it, haha, so much fun though!

Anyhow, obviously not going to post them all and as I don't have much time today will just give a sneak preview of one. The weather forecast for the entire rest of the week is rain (bah!) so not like there's any rush to showcase them anyhow.

Don't mind me, just catching a little snoooooooooze!
A Mallard duck having a nap amongst the Daisies.

As per normal you can click on the picture for a bigger version of it. More to come soon!

Foiled by the weather!

Well, the weather this week has been very changeable. We've had the odd sunny spell but for the most part it's been gloomy, drizzly and pretty chilly (my heating even tripped one day) - not the kind of conditions I want to be trotting around experimenting with my new camera on!

Ah well. Hopefully this week will be a bit more forthcoming and also helps that I should be more quiet at work which means I can be a little more flexible with my lunch hour too.

In the meantime I've realised that I've not been talking much about my little Disney obsession what with so much happening since patch in Warcraft and then getting 'the toy'. So, as I've been frustrated at not being able to post new pictures I figured I'd fall back on an old one.

This was taken at night in the Magic Kingdom on Main Street USA where there are always a number of balloon sellers walking around with seriously HUGE bunches of balloons hoping to catch the weary tourist leaving the park who is looking for that one last treat. Being foil they bob in the wind and shimmer under the night lights.

I've mentioned before about how I like to take shots that fill the screen, and I've always liked this photo, something a bit surreal about it I guess, hehe. Especially Tinkerbell in the corner there, oh sure, she tries to look all sweet and coy but look at that evil eye she's giving me!

This week (so far) in Ulduar

Well I think we're really starting to find our rhythm a bit now in Ulduar, at least we're certainly speeding up!

Wednesday night we headed in though had a little hiccup to start with - we left a tower up as normal and were sitting there all saying 'wow, this seems easier this week!' only to realise after that the person who triggered the event had forgotten to talk to the special NPC that activates the 'tower powers' - oh right, so it seems easier because it is easy, woops hehe.

Aside from that we cleared the whole first chamber without problem which is a first for us to manage in the 1 night. All this was also without our 2 normal 'main' Raid Leaders in attendance (one of which is a main tank and the other is a main healer) so this was brilliant!

Personally I hate being a main Raid Leader in game. I loathe talking on Teamspeak (no clue why but I've always had a bit of a thing about phones too so think it's just some weird psychological block about talking to objects rather than people) and so try to avoid it at all costs, I also get a bit stressed when shouldered with 'real' responsibility, so I'll be honest and say I was quite dreading Wednesday's raid where I knew I'd have to co-lead with someone else who also doesn't usually lead on the night.

I'm normally more of an admin person on the team who looks after things like the raid bank and I have a high forum presence where I generally chivvy people along with stuff - on the night itself I just help out the other RL's with tactical suggestions and take bids on loot, but that's about it and I'm happy and willing to take a back seat to the people who do a magnificently better job at that sort of stuff than me!

Fortunately we have some amazing tanks and healers who are more than capable of thinking for themselves so for the most part it was largely just leaving them to get on with the things they are good at. The other RL was the 'voice' who helped get everyone syncronised, and I did my normal poking and suggesting from the sidelines and was also Master Looter for the night.

We had the odd blip but for the most part it worked and apart from me being a nervous wreck about potentially assigning loot to the wrong person (am I the only person to get so totally and utterly paranoid about being Loot Master that I have to check my selection a minimum of 3-4 times?!) - which was made even more nerve wracking by Leviathan dropping a Fragment of Val'anyr too - I ended the night a bit tired, a bit stressed, but overall happy.

I wasn't on the follow up raid on Thursday night as coupled with the raid and it being my crazy week at work I was totally knackered. However they killed Kologarn again and downed the Assembly of Iron on their first attempt (though as I mentioned last time they did get a little bit of practice on them at the end of last weeks raid).

It did mean that they had enough time to go and have a few attempts at Auriaya which seemed to go quite well (it's one of those fights like High King Maulgar - it's basically all in the pull) and we're going to try for an extra Sunday raid this week which if we can get the numbers and the class balance we'll head back and see if we can follow up on what we learned last night.

All in all a good, if tiring week - and I even got my first piece of Ulduar loot - Rising Sun, yay!

When is a cake not really a cake?

Why when it's a Welsh Cake of course!

These yummy little treats are sometimes also known (wrongly) as drop scones and do have more in common with scones than cakes. Sprinkled with fine sugar they are delicious eaten plain - especially when warm, mmmm. Or they can be served with butter or jam. They also go down a treat with a nice cuppa tea, how very British of me! *grin*


Of course, this isn't just about the Welsh Cakes, it's about the happy snappy camera toy too and as I said yesterday, I do so love to take pictures that would be a good jigsaw puzzle so here's another one!

Hmm *drools* I could even have that as a desktop background actually - trouble is I swear just looking at them sends another inch to my hips, hehe.

These are actually very easy to make, in fact, they take longer to cook than to mix up as they are cooked on top of the hob. Unless you have a huge griddle (I don't) then you're only going to be able to cook 6 or so at a time.

Adapted from my totally awesome Mary Berry cook book.

Welsh Cakes

250g (8oz) Self Raising Flour
1 teaspoon Baking Powder
125g (4oz) Butter
90g (3oz) Caster Sugar
90g (3oz) Currants
1/2 teaspoon Ground Mixed Spice
1 egg, beaten
about 2 tablespoons milk

1 Sift flour and baking powder together into a large bowl. Add butter and rub in with finger tips until mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

2 Add the sugar, currants and mixed spice and stir well. Add the egg and milk (I do this splash by splash rather than all at once) to form a soft but not sticky dough. If you overdo the milk and it is a bit 'gloopy' just add a sprinkle of flour back to it until it stops sticking to the sides of the bowl.

3 On a floured surface, roll out the dough to a thickness of about 5mm (1/4 inch) and cut out rounds with a cookie/pastry cutter. Failing that, anything round, I've used the top of a glass or cup in the past when I've not had the right shape cutter around!

4 Heat a griddle or heavy frying pan and grease lightly. Cook the cakes on a hot griddle over a low heat for 3-4 minutes then flip to brown the other side for a couple more mins.

5 Leave to cool on a wire rack and sprinkle with sugar if desired. Stored in an air tight container they last for up to a week - well, I'm sure they would, mine don't usually last that long ;)

Clickety click!

Well not a whole lot of time to post today but I did promise to throw up just a couple of my test snaps taken with the new toy!

Obviously these are very basic, point and click 'don't really know what I'm doing yet' shots and hopefully if we get some half decent weather this week I'll get the opportunity to go out and about in town and try and get something more interesting.

First one...well, it has to be the infamous leaf of course!

Looking at it now I can see I was just a smidgen too close as the tip is a little out of focus. Still, for something akin to the flight deck of the space shuttle to deal with I was very happy with the 'out of the box' result.




Next up, I tried my hand at a flower. Which is no small feat as I don't actually have many flowers on my little balcony.

I reduced the file size so as to not bog down the speed of the page but on the original you can see the little stamen's much more clearly - clicking on the pictures also opens them in a bigger window.

Last but not least I did what highly professional photographers do (not)...I threw open the kitchen window, hit zoom and snapped a tree across the yard, LOL. I'm so sophisticated!

I like this kind of shot, every time I snap something that fills the frame I always imagine what it would be like as a jigsaw puzzle.


More shots to follow tomorrow as I actually *gasp* did some baking yesterday. Homemade food and pictures = drooling blog!

1 month old already!

Well, it might be a little bit sad of me to 'celebrate' this, but The Land of Wonk was 1 month old yesterday.

It's funny, already I can see the effect of having blog has had on me in that short time. I started off thinking I'd just be talking nonsense to myself with nobody any the wiser that I actually existed in the cyber world. Not only did people find me (yay!) but I found my own, hmm, I suppose ambition would be the best word, for the site growing.

From what I assumed would be just a few random words thrown out on occasion I quickly found that I was putting quite a lot of thought into what I could write about. I initially thought it would mainly be about my principal hobbies - the 2 worlds (Walt Disney World and World of Warcraft) - instead when I'm getting up to something, or I spot something on TV or in Newspapers I find myself thinking 'hmm, could that be something interesting to talk about?'. I definitely feel that I want to spread my wings a little bit in that respect.

I also find myself reading a lot more of other people's blogs and the ones I enjoy the most (fairly understandably considering my newbie status) get me pondering on ways to make my own blog perhaps become more appealing. Probably the biggest realisation in that respect was that I'd like to incorporate more photo's - a picture is worth a 1000 words etc, etc. Some of my favourite blogs like Gardening with Turtles, Fresh Eyes on London and Places to Explore are all photo-centric.

I may not be much good at it, but I love snapping pictures - when I started my little blog I didn't think for a moment I'd be wanting to add any to the site, now I sit here thinking of ways I can sneak them in. Of course, buying a new camera is actually a great excuse for more piccies, so I sure plan to milk that one for a while, haha!

I know I still have a great deal to learn about blogging, chiefly how to be 'interesting' and write with a bit more structure - however it's been great fun so far and I'm sure (well ok, I hope) with time and practice that'll come to me.

I like my new little home on the web and I certainly plan to stick around!

This week in Ulduar

No Sunday raid this week as it's a Bank Holiday in the UK and also a large number of our guild and pact members have all run off together for a real life meet. Unfortunately things kept me from going along too (of which my birthday this weekend is one) so I'll just have to make do with seeing - hopefully - lots of photo's of people getting a bit tipsy and having lots of fun together!

This week in Ulduar was our best yet. On Wednesday night we returned and killed Flame Leviathon before moving to Razorscale who we killed on 2nd try and on to XT who we killed on hmm, think it was about our 5th try. XT had received a number of nerfs* since our last kill but managing the adds that spawn from the corners is still tricky and we had a fair few different people handling it this time so had to learn it again, but really, was a great step forward for us to get all 3 bosses in one night as it left us free on Thursday to work on Ignis again.

Ignis also received a lot of nerfs since our attempts on Sunday, primarily to make the healer's job easier. Kind of a shame in a way as we'd worked so hard to nail the tactics and we were feeling pretty good about taking back what we'd learned and beating him so we felt a little robbed, but hey ho. As it was we got him down on the 3rd attempt without much issue. Not that I can claim any credit for it as I wasn't there but was in fact off down the pub having some drinkies at a leaving do for my work mate. It's a hard life but someone had to do it!

The quick kill did mean we were able to move into the next chamber of the instance for the first time though and it was decided that we would go and have some fun with Kologarn. Imagine my surprise when I logged on later that night to find that they were working on the Assembly of Iron as they'd already killed Kologarn on the 3rd attempt too!

They didn't get the Assembly kill but it sounded like they were making some great progress so looking forward to getting more chance to practice on them next week.

All in all, great progress for our little group this week and everyone was buzzing afterwards.



*nerf is a term used by gamers for when the game developers reduce the 'power' of something, whether that's the difficulty of a boss or an individual item that is proving to have more of an effect on the game than is intended.

Lights....camera....ACTION!

Just a quick update on my quest for a new camera.

I finally stopped wibbling and being indecisive and plumped for the E520 in the end. Yes, it was more expensive and yes for someone who's very much an amateur clicker it's probably a bit overkill but I know myself well enough that if I'd gone for the cheaper model a little part of me would always be questioning whether it was the right decision and be just a teensy bit unsatisfied with my shiny new toy as a result.

This constant 'questioning' of myself is a kickback from a harsh lesson I learned 6 years or so ago when buying a new laptop computer. CD Readers were the standard at the time (and still quite shiny) and you had to pay a small supplement to upgrade to a CD Writer. "Bah!" I thought, "when am I ever going to going to be wanting to burn something to a huge CD?" 6 months later I'm crying myself to sleep at my lack of foresight and scrooge mentality!

Anyhow, I digress :)

I am now drooling over my shiny new toy but desperately resisting the urge to play with it as my birthday isn't actually till Monday. Instead I'm trying to assuage my urges and get my new toy 'fix' by reading the 148 (148!!!!!) page user manual. If that doesn't show how desperate I am, nothing will.

Not sure, I may cave in and take some pictures over the weekend, especially as it's a Bank Holiday in the UK so have an extra day off work but if not then soon, sooooooon!

Will be sure to post some up when I do. A nice little Ladybird would be handy on my balcony then I can play mix'n'match bugs with Maria's ;)