Baking Day

Being at home always seems to inspire the creative cooking side of my brain and when I was told five minutes before dinner that I was in charge of the dessert, I began to panic a little. Luckily, I spotted a jar of marmalade in the cupboard and some apples in the fruit bowl and decided that I could make a slightly less than traditional bread and butter pudding.

Given that I have never made proper custard before and that bread and butter pudding doesn't normally have apples in it, I don't think I did too badly. I remembered hearing somewhere - I think it was from the Hairy Bikers - that if you put a little bit of cornflour in the egg custard something either does or doesn't happen but whatever it was is good. So I did. It didn't thicken as much as I'd have liked it to but I think that was down to the apples leaking quite a lot of juice and making it a bit runnier. Overall it was pretty nice if not a little too sweet so I think I shall be using that recipe again. After using two egg yolks for the custard, I was now left with two egg whites and the only thing I can think of that requires egg whites - other than mousse - is meringue; so I made some of those as well.

I am slightly regretting not using the electric whist as well because my arms are feeling the strain of all that whisking. I remembered another tip from a show I watched only last week - Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets - that if you put some lemon juice in the egg whites then you can't over whisk them. So I did that as well. It is quite reassuring to know that when I watch all of these TV programmes I am actually learning things that will come in useful in later life, rather than simply wasting my time. After quite a lot of cooking at a stupidly low temperature - nearly two hours at 100°C - they were done and done very well if I do say so myself. Crispy and crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy in the middle.

After all that hard work, it was time for some real work and not more than half an hours work later, I had fixed the flaw in the robots.txt parser for my spider. I was clearly in a programming mood and so I bravely attempted my flash conversion of a lost Matlab prototype which I later realised I had backed up in the cloud and so managed to save myself a lot of time by copying the code from that. I sometimes surprise myself with how thoughtful I am when it comes to preserving work but then at times I can be totally stupid, hence how I lost the original in the first place!