Cakes and doughnuts

My sweet tooth is getting out of hand. Yesterday Liddi & I spent the afternoon making cupcakes, which were nice but I got the recipe from my friends Jack & Christi (Christi's from New Orleans dontcha know) and the measurements were all in 'cups', as those crazy Yanks tend to do. I tried to convert them online to grams, but have found that you get a different measurement for each website you use - often with wild variation between them! So I've no idea if the quantities I used were right; they didn't rise as much as I was hoping but they tasted nice enough so that's all that matters really. We had fun decorating them and writing all our names on them, although for Isaac I chose instead to do a portrait of him from the time he dyed his hair blond when he was around 13. The resemblance is uncanny and the shade of yellow identical.


Then the other day Liddi revealed to me that she'd never had a Krispy Kreme doughnut*, which is, frankly, criminal. To my horror, a bit of research revealed that the North of England has an extreme dearth of Krispy Kremes, as it turns out Manchester is the only place you can get them up here! We wondered whether we should throw caution to the wind and go there anyway - despite the 2 hour driving time - before realising that I had to go to Manchester anyway today to pick up my sister Toni from the airport! Kismet, surely? So off we trot today.

*why dough-nut do you think? I mean, dough, obviously, but in what sense is it a nut?

Russian Roulette

I like to play Russian Roulette. Not with guns, because they're illegal and I don't know where to get one, much less fire it, and I'd probably get arrested. Although if I did it with guns then I'd have to do it on telly and become famous and Derren Brown would want to meet me and obviously we'd fall in love and get married and have lots of lovely beardy children and live in a house full of stuffed animals. Sigh.

But instead, I like to play Russian Roulette with food. Every so often I'll forgo my usual brand of whatever and buy the 'basics' 'value' 'savers' 'no frills' version and see how it does. When it works, finding you only have to spend 13p on a can of chopped tomatoes in the future can be immensely gratifying. This week's purchase was Sainsbury's Basics Corn Flakes. For the record: nasty.