Some days (and weekends) just don't go right.

Ever had that? When despite your best efforts things just don't go the way you wanted? I can't say that things went terribly bad with my baking this weekend, just...not right.

See that cake? Yes that one. The lovely golden brown Coconut cake at the top there. Well don't trust it, looks can be deceiving. See these things below? That's Cornbread. Looks ok huh? Don't trust that either!


I made the Cornbread yesterday. I've made it before in the past and I knew exactly what I wanted and what it should taste like. A golden almost sponge-like 'bread' with a hint of sweet (in the same way as bagels are, that gentle subtle underlying sweetness you get) and a nice 'gritty' texture.

Instead I got a pale yellow, dense, flavourless, textureless...thing *cwies*

It's been a few years since I made it and I've a number of cookbooks but I could have sworn I used the same recipe as I did before and followed it to the letter so I don't know why it was so different! It's possible I suppose that even though the recipe calls for fine cornmeal (aka polenta) that before I used a coarser variety. That would explain the lack of gritty texture atleast, and perhaps even the denseness of texture as it wasn't far off being like normal flour. No clue about sweetness though - perhaps it was before I had my measuring spoons and my idea of a tablespoon back then was a lot different than now.

Could I really have just lucked out before? Several times? I dunno. I do know that while technically the cornbread was ok and more than edible, it wasn't what I either wanted or expected and so was ultimately a bitter disappointment.

On to the Coconut cake then. To make up for the Cornhell, er, bread, I figured I'd make a cake. I had some plain yogurt in the fridge that needs to be used up before Tuesday so figured I'd try a recipe I'd seen for, dun dun dun, a yogurt cake. The original cake had lemon in but as I a) had made the Orange Drizzle cake last weekend for the Sweet and Simple Bake event (will be posting about that on July 1st!) and I didn't want to make something similar and b) didn't have any lemons anyhow, I decided to try and tweak it into a Coconut cake.

Yes that's right. My answer to culinary failure is to try and cheer myself up with a new and untried recipe...and then tweak it to boot. Well lets not stop there, I'll just throw in at this point that I've never really made a Coconut cake that I've been happy with - they always seem to come out too dry for my liking. You know where this is going now huh?

Anyhow, cake on outside - looks good! Cake on inside looks - not so good.


That texture is just...weird (can click on the picture for a bigger version if you can't see what I mean). I think I just basically over compensated for the coconut. For a start I didn't put too much Coconut in and then the coconut I did put in I added an extra spoonful of yogurt and a couple of spoonfuls of water to the bowl and left it to soak it all up a bit first. Last but not least I added some Coconut Cream - and I think this is really where I fell foul.

For anyone not familiar with Coconut Cream it's basically highly condensed puree'd coconut. It comes in a bar and is kinda dense and oily (and smells gorgeously coconutty!). I grated probably about 15g of the stuff into the mix for some extra coconut oompf. That, along with the moistened coconut that I added turned my cake more into a moist pudding texture like the old fashioned english bread pudding (not the more fancy type you tend to get these days as a dessert).

To be fair on myself it does taste ok but...bleh, how can I enjoy eating a slice of cake that's a bit floppy when I pick it up?! Cue more pouting from me after the 2nd 'not what I wanted' of the weekend.

I'm not going to bother posting the recipes for either of these as there seems little point. I definitely will try them both again in the near future with some adjustments and hope for a more satisfying result.

Ho hum. Not a happy bunny but can't win them all I guess.

Friday Flowers

Little smiley faces....that's what I see on these Pansy's - see them? Especially the ones at the back - I think they're cute!






Maybe they're all smiling at this big fat bee trying to get nectar from the smallest flower ever - dude, ever thought about picking on someone your own size? I can't help but think he's making life harder for himself here, hehe.










Ohhh look, it's Mr Spikey again, and no, I'm still none the wiser about our space-age looking friend's name but he sure seems to get around...yikes, alien invasion ;)


Hope the weather picks up again here again properly soon (it stayed warm since my last post but already back to overcast and thundery, boo) - I need more sunshine, I'm running out of flower pictures, meep!

Sunshine makes me think about holidays!

The weather in the UK the past week or so has, quite frankly been rubbish! Grey, gloomy, cool and overcast...sure we might get the odd peek of sunshine but just as you get optimistic - BAM - gone again, grr!

Till this afternoon...suddenly we have gorgeous blue skies and it's turned wonderfully warm and pleasant with the forecast cautiously predicting more of the same to come, yay!

So, not a person needing much of an excuse to post a 'summery' photo here's a little picture taken back in November 2004 (I like my holidays late in the year so it feels like I'm getting 2 summers, hehe) when I was on a week long cruise on the Disney Magic. It's taken on Saint Thomas - US Virgin Islands, really picturesque place and didn't feel too spoilt by tourism than some others that I (briefly) have also visited.

Before the day got too hot (and before it became 'cocktail o'clock' *giggles*) we climbed a hill to a gazebo overlooking the port and took this shot of her moored up next to her neighbours - she's the navy blue ship in the middle. She's a proper sized cruise ship (the same one I made my Panama Canal trip on a year later) but the ship in front of her especially makes her look tiny!

Of course, she's a fair distance away...which also reminded me of the Father Ted sketch when he was on holiday too - a little bit different for him though, stuck in a field, in the rain, in a caravan, with Father Dougal *grin*

Sadly, I only had my silly little point and click camera back then so the picture ain't so great compared to my new shiny :( It still does it's job to bring back fun memories though!

Ulduar update

Tut, tut, I'm a naughty Wonk, I just realised that I've not mentioned Ulduar in over a month! In my defence, for a large portion of that time there wasn't much to actually report in about.

All the bosses up to and including Auriaya have been on farm but we (like most other, if not all raid groups) have been suffering with attendance issues recently. Exams, holidays, fine weather and just general 'I'm having a few weeks off' syndrome is kicking in with full force. This is not in any way a new phenomenon, in fact it happens this time every year and we always survive but it can be a little frustrating in the interim, especially as it coincided with us reaching the "Keeper" bosses which are a little bit of a step up in difficulty and we got a bogged down on Freya.

For the first time some of the 'newer' wave of raiders experienced what it is to hit a raiding brick wall (and see how summer can effect a 25 man group's numbers), I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying people were panicking and thinking we were all going to fall apart but some were definitely getting twitchy - there was even a little bit of tension here and there.

There was some 'clearing the air' which occurred on our forums and that did seem to settle people down a bit and then the week after that we decided to take a break from Freya and see how we got on with Thorim. This went really, really well, with our best getting him to 15%, everyone was upbeat and some of the 'buzz' was back!

The following week (last week) we went back again to Thorim where we had a few attempts getting warmed up and then on the 4th try I think it was, we got a sweet little first kill with the majority of folks still alive at the end. Hurrah! Our first 'real' Tier8.25 loot.

With an hour left of raid time we had a little dilemma where to go next. Go and get a feel for Hodir, or go back to Freya who had been such a monumental pain in the neck for us previously. We'd only had 1 weeks 'rest' from her but we were having a good night and the Elder's (mini bosses for the zone) all drop badges too so we figured there was a reward waiting for us either way and off we trotted.

They say a change is as good as a rest. We 1 shot Freya! I don't think even the most optimistic of us expected that as previously out of many, many attempts I don't think we got past around wave 3 of add waves (there are 6 to fight before you switch to Freya), tripping up each time pretty much exclusively on the group of 3 that you need to kill simultaneously. I'm not sure why they proved to be such a problem for us, it's certainly not the first fight we've encountered that required synchronization like that but boy oh boy, it just wasn't happening. However 1 week off did the trick, we came back, everything clicked and we smacked some sense into her good.

So there you have it, we're now 9/14 bosses killed, and we finished last week on a massive high. We are still struggling for numbers but everyone is happy again - for now anyhow ;)

The longest day

Happy Summer Soltice!

Today is the longest day of the year...well, if you reside in the northern hemisphere anyhow, you guys down south are experiencing the shortest day.

I think the summer solstice is a bit of an odd one really. It's a time of the year usually associated with celebration - but yet as Wiki explains the celebrations don't actually happen on the solstice itself and are instead celebrated by most as Midsummer within a few days of the event.

There are a few exceptions though, most well known being the Pagan's and Druids. In the UK this famously manifest's itself in a small festival at the prehistoric monument Stonehenge, pictured above.

Expect to see a 'Countdown to Christmas' any day now on QVC *runs off screaming*

Lemon Curd Cupcakes with Lemon glaze

I mentioned these briefly in a post earlier in the week when talking about the difference between muffins and cupcakes.

These little babies are the result of me seeing Sweet & Simple Bakes Lemon Curd Muffins but wanting them in a more spongey cupcake form. It resulted in a lot of guess work as while I've switched the odd little thing about in recipes before (who hasn't?) this was changing the basic fundamental balance. To quote myself from the other thread... "meep!"

Happily things turned out ok and I had some lovely cupcakes to chomp my way through. That said, the sponge - while nice and yummy in it's own right - wasn't quite as moist as I'd had in mind...see how they were before the glaze? There is no sheen to the sponge. It's probably the reason they 'cracked' on top too, especially with the hot curd swelling inside during cooking - not that I had a problem with that either, I thought it made them look quite interesting!

Now, I figure that could be fixed with either a teensy bit less flour, or I could add an extra egg. Never one to do something to recipe that results in me getting less cake to eat, I'll opt for adding the egg next time and that should do the trick. As I say, the cupcakes were totally tasty in their original form and if I only had one egg available I'd not hesitate to make them again this way, this is just my personal preference for a more moist sponge.

Anyhow, cupcake recipe coming right up! If anyone does try these I'd love to hear back how they turned out for you :)

Oh, and by the way, check out my new widget to the left called Culiverter (yet another thing I spotted on the Sweet & Simple bakes page, you guys are awesome!) - this lets you convert weights and measures in to your preferred measuring system. So if you don't like working in metric you can just type in the amount and convert to imperial or cups, yay!


Lemon Curd Cupcakes with Lemon glaze

200g self raising flour
100g light brown sugar
2 eggs (note that the picture only shows 1 as that's how I made them originally)
100g butter or margarine
150ml Buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
12 teaspoons of Lemon Curd (about 100ml)


1 Cream the butter and sugar together until smooth.

2 Beat the eggs in a separate jug or bowl then add buttermilk and vanilla essence to egg and mix well.

3 Sift flour, salt, baking powder together then alternate adding small measures of the flour and the egg mix to the butter cream until fully combined.

4 Half fill the bottoms of 12 cupcake cases with the batter then gently spoon in a teaspoon of Lemon Curd into the middle of each one. Top with remaining batter.

5 Bake in a pre-heated oven on gas mark 5/375 degree's for around 15-20 minutes. Leave to cool slightly before turning out.

Lemon Glaze

1 large tablespoon of Lemon Curd
1 teaspoon of lemon juice

1 Put the Lemon Curd and pop in the microwave for around 20 seconds. This melts and starts to bubble really fast so be sure to watch for this as microwaves have different power levels so it may vary.

2 Add the juice to the melted curd and mix well.

3 Brush glaze over cupcakes with a pastry brush. Note: Wash the brush in warm water as soon as you're finished or it's a potential nightmare to clean!

Friday Flowers

Sometimes, in it's own way, the Stamen is as interesting as the flower, don't you think?



And sometimes the flowers can be so small and close that looking at them all together like this, they almost seem like one big flower.

Funny, it was only when I was looking at this afterward I realised there was a teensy little spider on his web on the middle right hand side. If you enlarge the picture (click on it) you can just about make him out. So small I never even noticed him at the time!







Nothing tiny about these giant Poppies though. Those little purple flowers at the bottom are a 'normal' size, just these guys were so huge they positively dwarfed them.

Beautiful though, and the red is so vibrant.







This little dude, well isn't he just a little of everything? Fiery red leaves, yellow flowers and shiny red berries...what an exhibitionist, I mean really, just exactly which bit does he want me to look at here!? ;)

My mini 'to do' list of recipes

Well, I'm a bit of a slacker and there's absolutely no way I want any of these recipes to feel like a burden that I have to make but I thought it would be fun to pull out a handful of random recipes that have caught my eye that I'd like to make sometime in the near-ish future ie. before the end of the year.

I have lots, lots more than this tagged, stashed and filed for future consumption though...can't wait to make (and more importantly eat!) them all :)

So here they are. My mini to-do list, in no particular order.

Chipster-Topped Brownies - basically choc-chip cookie dough baked on top of brownies! I've been drooling over this one since I saw it as the Tuesday's with Dorie selection a while back.

Coconut Cream Pound Cake from Big Oven. This site has a gazillion recipes which you can not only add to your Favorites list but can make a temporary 'Try soon' list as well. It's great as it reminds me of the recipes that have piqued my interest then if I like them I can then move to my permanent file.

Snickerdoodles - this is one of those recipes that I'd never heard of...then when I saw them in one place suddenly I was tripping over people talking about them left, right and center! Cookies on Friday is just one of the many fabulous food blogs I follow and is the one where I got the basis of the recipe for making my Peanut Butter & Jelly Slices from.

Old Fashioned Crumb Coffee Cake - another from Big Oven - I've only ever tried an Entenmann's when I've been Stateside but if it's anything like that I'm gonna just scoff the lot.

South African Milk Tart - I love regional recipes, especially if they've been shared by a local rather than just pulled from a cookbook. This yummy sounding custard flan is posted by the same person who shared her Hot Milk Chocolate Cake recipe which in turn I adapted to make my Chocolate & Strawberry cupcakes.

Sultana Cake with Vanilla Custard Cream from the brilliantly named blog, The Caked Crusader. I only recently discovered this Aladdin's Cave of glorious baking delights but it's been going for a couple of years - sooooo many goodies there I just want to make RIGHT THIS SECOND! Better yet it's an English Blog (and a fellow Londoner to boot) so all her recipes are in metric not cups...no annoying conversions to worry about, she really is my superhero :)

Honey Nut Squares - another from Cookies on Friday. The picture made them look so tasty I all but wanted to lick the monitor ;)

Fresh Strawberry Danish - follow the link, scroll down, observe photo....ok, now you know why I simply must try to make these myself.

Chocolate Custard Muffins - I mean come on...CHOCOLATE. CUSTARD. What's not to like?

Homemade Mincemeat - I would normally quake with terror at the prospect of mentioning Christmas in June however even I can't ignore the allure of making my own mincemeat beforehand. Compliments of the quintessential (and original) english TV cook, Delia Smith even says it can last up to 3 years. Result, make a ton of it and I'm sorted for ages...that's my kinda recipe!

Tartest Lemon Tart - another Tuesday's with Dorie selection a while back. I'm a total sucker for seeing something a little unusual in a recipe and only wanting to make it because of that...in this case it was the fact that you use the entirety of the Lemon in the tart.

Tres Leches Cake - from recipe and community portal FoodBuzz. I can't begin to tell you how delicious this sounds to me.

Ever wondered what the difference is between a cupcake and a muffin?

Ok, ok, so chances are that it's never even crossed your mind - but go on, admit it...now that I've mentioned it aren't you giving it just a teensy bit of thought now? Well, there's a simple (and not exactly 100% accurate) answer, and then there's the detailed answer.

The simple answer is that a cupcake has frosting and a muffin doesn't.

Hmmm...yeah, I didn't really go for that answer either. Who hasn't eaten a cupcake without frosting, even if it's a sneaky one still warm out the oven? Un-frosted cupcakes are relatively common in the UK, in fact you can even buy packets of 'Fairy Cakes' in supermarkets. Did you eat it and for some strange reason think it was a muffin? Nuh-uh. Did putting frosting on it suddenly and miraculously turn it into a cupcake? Nuh-uh. And that muffin with the crumble top, did you get addled and think it was a cupcake? Nuh-uh. I didn't get confused, confuddled or bemused because newsflash - the 2 things have an entirely different texture about them.

Sure, cupcakes do usually have frosting and muffin's are usually left plain as they come out the oven - but that's a symptom of what they are, not the cause.

Cupcakes and muffin's basically have different ratio's of ingredients and it's that balance between fat/oil, eggs and sugar in relation to flour that defines them as one or the other. I found that Dianas Desserts (awesome site by the way, well worth exploring) explains this in the simplest way.

"A basic formula for muffins is 2 cups flour, 2-4 tablespoons sugar, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1/4 cup oil, shortening or butter, 1 cup milk. When the fat, sugar and egg ratio in a recipe reaches double or more than this, you have reached the cake level."

As an aside, I've also noticed that muffin recipes all tend to use oil whereas cupcakes ask for butter. I don't know if this is a hard and fast difference though, just that it seems to quite often be the case.

So there you have it. In case you're wondering why I got to the bottom of this little mystery for myself is because I saw a really great looking recipe for Lemon Curd Muffin's for May's Sweet & Simple monthly bake event.

I so love the whole 'bake club' concept, I used to belong to one at work a few years back where each week one of us would take a turn to bring something scrummy and home baked in. Catering for 20-30 people meant it was no small project when it was your turn, especially as Bake Day was always a Friday so Thursday night after work would mean a marathon kitchen session. Good times! Sadly that all fizzled out as people left the company/dept etc etc, so I'm really looking forward to joining the Sweet & Simple Bake gang for June's Orange Drizzle Cake this month.

Anyhow, hmm, where was I...ah yes, the Lemon Curd Muffin's. Well I loved the whole idea of them but you guessed it - I didn't want to make them as muffins but as cupcakes. Hence the research that ultimately resulted in quite a nail biting moment where I fundamentally messed around with the ingredient quantities of the original recipe and had no idea whether it would work until I took the first bite, meep!

Thankfully delicious cupcakes were the result and hastily devoured (oh boy, lemon curd and sponge just TOTALLY works) and I'll be posting the Wonkified recipe with pictures soon.

Friday Flowers

There have been fossils of flowers dating back to around 125 million years ago. Where there's life, there have been flowers. Sometimes they are bold and colourful like this Aster.



Sometimes they are small and delicate like these. I have no clue what they are called so if someone knows please do share as they are soooo pretty!









Sometimes they are really quite odd looking.












And some barely look like flowers at all...though this little honeybee certainly had no problems recognising it!







Of course, not everything colourful has to be a flower - this yellow leaved bush stands out like a beacon next to all the other green ones. There's certainly no missing it.

You has food for me?

St James's Park is very popular with both Londoners and tourists alike, with one of their favourite things being to feed the local inhabitants - namely the ducks, swans and squirrels. Seriously, if you're ever in the area on a Sunday, especially a summers day then check it out - it is absolutely mobbed there and the atmosphere is wonderful.

So it's hardly surprising when wandering around the park the other week I met this little fella - possibly the fattest Grey Squirrel I've ever seen...and yup, he was looking right at me in the hopes of more!

Only the Red Squirrel is indigenous to the UK (and are the cutest little things ever!), with the Grey Squirrel artificially introduced to our shores some time around the turn of the 20th Century. Sadly the Red Squirrel is now considered endangered - I've never even seen one in the wild *cry* - and there are fears that they could be lost to the mainland in as little as a decade.

A large portion of the blame for this is being laid at the door of the Grey - they are bigger, bolder and much more resilient than our native Red's. They comprehensively dominate our ever shrinking woodland areas, have no natural predator to keep their numbers in check and successfully compete against the Red for all their food. As such, the Grey is now considered a pest in many quarters and there are many calls for aggressive action to be taken to curb their numbers.

Looking at this cheeky, chubby guy, it's easy to understand why they do so much better than their shy smaller cousin.

Chunky Apple Buttermilk Muffins

I love to bake but even I have to admit I can sometimes have an odd methods of deciding what to make. Take this week for instance...

I can be horribly indecisive so on this occasion instead of finding a recipe and then getting the ingredients I just went to the shop and bought a bunch of random stuff with a view to looking for a recipe I could incorporate them into when I got home. Yes, from now on you can just call me a BB. That's a Backwards Baker.

While plodding around the supermarket being vague a little bell rang that I'd seen Buttermilk used in some American muffin and scone recipes and so I wandered to the cream section. At this point I should mention that I've looked for Buttermilk before without luck (it's not a British staple and usually only big supermarkets stock it), so I wasn't too optimistic but lo and behold, tucked away on the bottom shelf were 2 lonely pots of Buttermilk. I felt like I'd won the lottery! Ok, maybe not quite that euphoric, but certainly warranted an 'oh, oooh' moment as I grabbed a pot quick in case it somehow managed to de-materialise right before my eyes.

With my new found treasure I trotted to the baking aisle and picked myself up a bag of Wholemeal flour rather than the regular Plain flour I normally use. Talk about life on the edge, baby! By now my brain was already ahead of me, making some sort of wholesome muffin and briefly toying with the concept of 'healthy' so it was with some urgency that I reached for a bag of light brown sugar to nip that errant thought in the bud. A couple of apples, a bag of raisin's and a tin of mango later (I'd recently seen a recipe for mango bread and hadn't totally ruled out trying that instead) and I headed for the door.


Hunting through my American cook books I didn't come across anything that grabbed my eye so I turned to the internet and good old came to my rescue. With a few Wonk-style tweaks planned (as always!) and the usual conversion to metric I'd finally found the recipe I was happy with.



I didn't have any suitable oil so I switched that for melted Stork (the cooking margarine, not the bird), the Plain flour I switched for Wholemeal flour for added texture. I didn't have any baking soda only baking powder so I used that instead and doubled the quantity and finally I switched Cinnamon for the fuller flavoured Mixed Spice - not to be confused with Allspice, or even worse, Old Spice.

I was initially a teensy bit disappointed with these muffin's (due principally to me, not the recipe), however they improved immensely after they'd been left to sit for a few hours. The one I ate for breakfast the next day was way nicer than the one(s) I tried when still warm from the oven. That said, I plan to do a few things differently next time - and I definitely will be making these again.

I thought the topping was just a bit too sweet. A little less brown sugar replaced with more chopped nuts should do it. I've left the recipe with the original quantity I used but if you prefer a hint of sweet rather than in your face sweet that's something to bear in mind.

I had quite big chunks of apple in my muffin's. I don't regret this because they taste really great but I will confess I expected them to soften down a bit more during cooking. Next time I will still keep the big chunks but I'll be sure to mix it with some smaller sized pieces too.

Last but not least I will trust the timer. It recommended 30-35 minutes cooking time. Doing the trusty toothpick test at 30, 35 and 40 minutes the pick still didn't appear to be coming out clean. I left a couple more minutes after that then decided to just go for it. The muffins were cooked fine inside but had a slightly crispy crust even inside the papers that I felt over-shadowed things (though the crust did soften by the next day and they became 'normal'). With hindsight the pick was probably hitting the apple chunks which obviously remained moist during cooking.

So enough with my wibbling, recipe ahoy. Enjoy!


Chunky Apple Muffins

165g light brown sugar
115g melted butter
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp vanilla essence
190g wholemeal flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
130g/1 apple (I used a Braeburn), cored, peeled and chopped
125ml buttermilk
35g walnuts, chopped
1/2 tsp mixed spice


1 Set aside a quarter of the brown sugar (around 40g) for the crumble topping. Combine the remaining brown sugar with the melted butter, egg and vanilla essence.

2 Slowly add in the flour, baking powder and salt and fold in until smooth.

3 Add buttermilk and chopped apple and mix well until there is no sign of milk left 'sitting' on the mix.

4 Divide mix between 12 muffin cases. Mine are cupcake size so you'll get less if you're making the bigger type of muffins.

5 In another bowl, stir together the remaining brown sugar, the chopped walnuts and the mixed spice, making especially sure the spice is well dispersed. Sprinkle evenly over the top of each muffin - for me it worked out at about 1 heaped teaspoon of topping.

6 Bake for 30-35 minutes on Gas mark 3 or 325 degrees.

7 Enjoy the smell of warm spices wafting throughout the house while they cook!

Friday Flowers

The nice thing about flowers is that they're something that can be experienced by just about everyone. Even if you don't have green fingers or the space to grow something yourself then most people are just a short trip away to the countryside, a park or a public garden.


I like this picture. I think it might be a Daisy of some sort but I've never seen a lilac-pinky one before. There's something so nice and simple about Daisy's - we like's 'em, yes we do.


I'm guessing this is some sort of Geranium, I love the little serrated 'frills' at the end of it's petals. The red and white rings make me think of a target board - perhaps it's own little way to try and entice the bee's in!








This poor little dude was all by himself, aside from a stalk that was yet to bloom there were no other ones like him anywhere that I noticed. I'll check back in a couple of weeks if I remember, see if he's just an early developer and there were more growing. He was pretty and I bet a whole cluster of them would look lovely.

No clue on the name though, had the feel of a Lupin or a Foxglove, yet the little 'trumpets' were a bit different. Probably related to that family though...







...and the park did also have a number of Lupins and Foxgloves elsewhere. This one's just starting to peep out too. I love this time of year.

The quest to be 'quite interesting'

There are times where I find it really easy to write something and then there are times when I don't. This could be what is known as writer's block, but I'm not so sure.

Now that my initial enthusiasm for blogging has passed and I'm finding a more regular rhythm I'm also finding that I'm sometimes asking myself the question "umm, what should I talk about next?". Perhaps it's just one of those things - the harder you try, the harder it becomes.

Some days I like pictures, some days I like food. Oh ok, every day I like food, I just force myself not to obsess about it....mmmmm, food *distracted* Oh, where was I again? Ah yeah, trying to be interesting.

Ok, today is a big fat fail on my part to think of something to write, so when in doubt fall back on trivia. This trivia brings brownie points if you're cheesy like me and manage to tie the title of your subject in to a rather awesome cult trivia quiz show called QI. Yes...that same QI standing for 'Quite Interesting'.

My hero Stephen fry is the show's host so a little trivia about him.

When he grew up, Stephen Fry's mother was embarrassed by him telling elderly relatives he wanted to be an actor. In consequence, he spent three years pretending to want to be a barrister.*

This is the same person who:-

In the BBC poll for the Greatest Living Icon, Stephen was ranked 6th*

Funny how things work out, eh Stephen's mum?

Stephen Fry's best friend is Hugh Laurie of House fame - yes folks, in shock news Hugh Laurie's American accent isn't real, you read it here first! ;)



*Trivia sourced from TV.com

UP flies high to reach US box office no.1 spot

I know, I know, don't say it...I should sooo be a headline writer with witty puns like that huh? *edit - or not, just noticed the BBC use a similar cheesy headline, LOL, go me!

UP is Pixar's latest animated film about a widower fulfilling his and his wife's life long dream to travel - by attaching a gazillion balloons to his house and floating away. Not in his cunning plan however, is the cub scout who happened to be on his porch during take off...bit of a woopsie that to be honest...but so begins the unlikely duo's adventure in deepest, darkest South America.

UP was the first animated feature to ever open the prestigious Cannes Film Festival this year so even before opening in Cinema's it was making waves. It's not scheduled for release in the UK until October(!!!) but it Premiered in the US on Friday (29th) where it reportedly took $68.2m (£41.9m) over the weekend.

I heard somewhere (curse my useless memory that I can't source it) that the money men weren't so optimistic about this movie for the same reasons they didn't like Oscar winning Wall-e (brilliant film, if you've not seen it yet - do!) - and that reason is merchandising. Toy Story and then later on, the even bigger merchandising cash cow Cars (speculated sales at this point of up to $1billion) raised a bar that the money men measure success by ever since.

Fortunately Pixar seem to remain dedicated to quality rather than franchising - long may their box office success reign!

If you've not seen the movie in the US yet, or are in Europe and have to wait another 4 months for it to arrive you can watch various trailers for UP at the Apple website.