Naxxfish

This is my first unaided attempt at a chocolate cake – it’s not perfect, but it’s getting there.  Here’s the recipie I used:

The Cake

• Caster Sugar (250g)
• Butter (250g)
• 3 large eggs
• Self raising flour (250g)
• Baking powder (teaspoon)
• Cocoa powder (tablespoon or two)

1. Take 2 cake tins about 8″ across, and put greaseproof paper in the bottom.  Rub butter around them to stop the cake from sticking.
2. Soften the butter and add the sugar.  Mix until they’re well combined.  Add the cocoa powder and mix in well.
3. Add the flour in small amounts.
4. Beat the eggs – add a spot of milk if you like to make them mix better.  Slowly add eggs to the mixture and try and get air into the mixture, too.
5. Add the baking powder, and vanilla essence if you desire.  Fold the mixture to ensure it’s well combined, but don’t beat it or you’ll lose the fluffy texture when it’s cooked.
6. Divide the mixture equally between the two tins.  Flatten off with a spatula.  If you can, make a dimple in the middle of the mixture – this will stop the cakes from making peaks when they rise.
7. Put into the oven for 25-30 minutes.  Don’t open the oven before they’re finished.  If you do, they’ll collapse and have a huge dent in the middle – not very attractive.
8. After the 25 minutes, turn the oven off but leave the cakes in to cool down slowly.  After 5 minutes or so, remove the cakes and turn them out onto a cooling rack or something roughly equivalent.  Leave to cool for about 20 minutes.  Don’t try to rush this or it’ll probably fall apart in your hands.

Icing and filling

• Icing sugar (sieved)
• Butter
• Cocoa powder
• A bit of flour

1.  Take the butter and melt it in a pan.
2. Add the icing sugar and cocoa powder and stir well for 10 minutes, whilst keeping the mixture on a low heat.
3. Thicken the icing by adding more icing sugar.  Make sure it is sieved or you’ll get lumps in it (like mine did)
4. When it’s done, leave to cool off a little before icing the cake.

For the filling, simply reduce the amount of butter and increase the amount of icing sugar, and don’t heat it.

All that’s left is to fill the cake, ice it and dust it with icing sugar.  Yum!

I appear to be living full time in Canterbury.  I’ve got a whole five bedroom house to myself for the summer (more or less), and I’m rattling around a bit.  The neighbours are very friendly – I don’t think a day has passed when I’ve not at least gone over to say “Hi”. At the moment, they’re all sharing my Internet connection (which is probably a post in itself).

The contents of my bag as I walked back from town yesterday was comical:

• 2 pints of milk
• 6 large eggs
• a rotary solenoid
• 500g self raising flour
• Embedded computer PCI development board
• Some sort of UV emitting gas in a glass enclosure
• 250g Butter
• An old-school BT telephone
• Scope probes of varying types
• 500g Sugar
• A copy of Windows XP Pro
• A box file full of someone’s email
• A MS-DOS 3.0 Manual
• Three tubes of a currently unknown IC (I think they’re 74k logic, but it’s a bit hard to tell)
• A breadboard (of the electronics kind)
• A really nice lens
• Double cream

You might ask, what the heck’s going on here?

First, I wanted to make a cake.  Victoria Sponge to be precise.  I don’t quite know why I wanted to bake a cake, but I did.  It’s the first time I’ve used the oven in this house – Gas Mark 4 is more like Gas Mark 2.5, and as such I had to poke it half way through cooking and when I opened the door, it collapsed in on itself >_<.  Next time, Gas Mark 5 for half an hour. Damn you,  thermodynamics – you shall be the end of me!

Second – my my department are refurbishing all the labs, and there is a huge skip full of … stuff … outside.  Woo hoo time for some trashing!  Some members of staff said I was welcome to any of it (presumably because if I take it they pay less for the disposal!).  Other highlights of things I found:

• Catalogues for HP semiconductors, MAXIM and more
• About 300m of CAT5e
• Many desk lamps
• A teapot
• An unopened bag (!) of Starbucks ground coffee
• Desk fans
• An awesome looking mains powered industrial fan cooling rig
• A Whiteboard
• Various project boards
• Coaxial antenna cabling
• High powered UV light (about 2000W at a guess) (which I dismantled to get the solenoid and the UV tube)
• Numerous phones – some PBX only some BT capable
• Hundreds of CDs
• Polarised glass panels
• A couple of theses
• Several filing cabinets worth of email correspondance (I need to get the “I read your email” tee now – because it’s true!  Except maybe I should amend it to say “I read your email … it was really, really boring”)

And that’s just the stuff I could get to.  There was quite a bit of broken glass so I couldn’t quite dive in.  Nevertheless – quite a haul!

I have plans to build a doorbell with the solenoid (I’m not paying £10 for a button that plays a sound file when you press it!),  the phone is now plugged into my telephone line (it’s got a ridiculously loud ring), and the electronic stuff is stashed away in my Electrojunk Storage Facility above my desk.