A Long Day

Today was always set to be a long day, as Mondays always are however today was set to be a particularly long day as it was yet another birthday. October seems to be a very popular month in my circle of friends and thankfully there are now no more until next year. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the celebrations but when you have one a week for three weeks on the trot, it can get a little bit exhausting.

Three lectures in a row in the morning - including the dreaded Machine Learning lecture, this time with added appallingness because we couldn't see the lines on the graphs either.

Another attempt at making a cake came this evening and I still cannot get used to this damned cooker. Never in my life have I made such a mess of something as simple as a Victoria sponge until now. I still have no idea where 180° is on the dial and so its all a bit of guesswork really. I decided to go for a semi-chocolate cake this time, partly due to the fact that no shops seem to sell good old fashioned cocoa powder any more and also because I never think they taste very nice (at least not when I seem to make them anyway). I've always found it very difficult to make sponges actually taste of anything and even putting masses of cocoa powder into it seems to just make the sponge taste slightly bitter. My theory is to just make the sponge as best as you can and put the taste in with the fillings. This one did have chocolate chips in as I figured it would take some effort to make those not taste right and I also put some chocolate icing on the top (made with drinking chocolate). From what I sampled, it tasted pretty good!

I also received another good review for my grilled cake from last time which makes me think that perhaps there is a better way to make a cake that no-one has considered before. The more sceptical side of me thinks that they were just being nice and seeing as I didn't get the chance to taste the cake for myself I have no way of knowing without trying to recreate the experiment. I guess I'll just have to see what response I get to this one and then I'll decide. So yes, the afternoon was spent shopping for ingredients and baking the cake before we were invaded by a couple of girls consisting of a friend and sibling of a housemate who had come to visit so that they could see Michael McIntyre at the Sheffield Arena.

We were going for pizza again at the wonderful restaurant on West Street (as mentioned here) and then to a couple of bars before heading off to Leadmill. As we visited a few bars afterwards, the DJ convinced us to change our plans and instead visit Embrace. I had been trying to avoid this places after some bad experiences with it in the past couple of years and haven't been since the beginning of last year when we made the mistake of going during freshers week. They always seem to conveniently forget the legal capacity of the venue on these nights and the result is that you can barely move, it takes hours to get a drink and you generally have a blooming awful time - hence my dislike for the place. We also stopped off at Reflex for a quick cheap drink on the way and had a marvellous time. Mondays are student nights and the drinks are cheap and the music as cheesy as it gets. Where else can you here A-Ha and Chesney Hawkes!?

As it turns out, Embrace wasn't nearly as bad as I had been preparing myself for - in fact I rather enjoyed myself. They refused to play my request and they cut off Little Boots a quarter of the way through but we got to hear some Vengaboys, Grease and even some Village People so I couldn't complain. We did have to enjoy Lemar who happened to be the special guest of the evening but he only stayed to sing three songs (none of which I recognised) so that wasn't so bad.