Brownies by Paul

I've made brownies before, I've even made cheesecake brownies at some point, but they've never really been my favourite thing to make. It may be my fear of pouring hot things (melted chocolate) into egg mixtures, which can result in dramatic curdling. It may also be the fact that somewhere deep down, I think brownies should be a thing you can just get, without having to do the work yourself. Also, technically it's 'a brownie', until you cut them into squares and they become 'brownies', and somehow 'a brownie' reminds me of the girl scouts (actually; of Gilmore Girls, when Rory pretends to be a girl scout so she can talk to Dean's sister some more, and ends up running down the street completely embarrassed).

Whatever it is, a few weeks ago, I decided to make brownies the Paul Hollywood style. You may know Paul from The Great British Bake Off, where he is co-judge of Mary Berry. In fact, that is the only way I know Paul Hollywood exists, but he seems to be some kind of famous bread-person in the UK. Paul's book, How to Bake, had been sitting on my cookbook shelf for a while now, after an initial enthusiastic beginning of bread rolls. Luckily for Paul, he's also included some more bake-y recipes, otherwise it may have been a long time before I tried one of his recipes again.
Anyway, I made the brownies, and they were a disaster. Not taste-wise, but rise-wise. Paul tells you to use a 20 cm square baking tin, which I don't have, but I do have a 35 x 15 tin, which should be plenty. Unfortunately, it wasn't. The mixture poured over the top of the tin, gently coating the bottom of our oven, where it quickly turned into carcinogenic black lumps. Also, after 25-30 minutes, the brownies should be 'nicely crusted but still soft in the middle', whereas mine were 'brownie soup'. I stuck them back in the oven, after gently pushing in all the bits dangling over the side, for another 30 minutes. The mixture was still quite fluid, but now with a semi-hardened top. To let some air out, I pre-cut the brownies in the tin before sticking them back into the oven for another 30 minutes. Finally, they were done, nicely chewy in the middle with a firm crust. Despite the oven disasters, they tasted very very good.

Crappy picture, but I think you get the gist

But I can't have this recipe beat me, so today I decided to give it another go, only halving all the quantities. This made for quite a sad little puddle of brownie mixture in the bottom of my baking tin, but will hopefully prevent a repeat of the brownie waterfalls.

The recipe I used today is as follows:

50 g butter
100 g chocolate
2 eggs
125 g sugar
50 g flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
15 g cocoa powder
60 g walnuts (actually 50, but they sell it per 60 g here)

You can also add 50 g dried cranberries, but I'm not really a fan of fruit in my brownies, so I skipped those.

Preheat your oven to 180 C and line a 20 cm square (or whatever size you have) baking tin with baking parchment.
Melt the butter and chocolate together au-bain-Marie, stirring occasionally until the mixture is smooth and well-combined. Set aside to cool.
Using an electric mixer, mix the eggs and sugar together "until the mixture is pale and thick enough to hold a trail when the beaters are lifted". Let me help you out here: this is going to take a while. About 5 minutes, in my case. You should get past the famous 'ribbon' stage into a more thickly, almost custard-like mixture, with lots of air bubbles.
Now for the crazy part: fold the chocolate mixture into the egg-and-sugar mixture, stirring gently so you don't loose to much of the air you just worked so hard to get in.
Add the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder and fold in as well. Finally, add the chopped walnuts and whatever other filling you like.
Bake for 25-30 minutes or whatever time it takes for the mixture to become firm and not soup-like.

Looking much better!

In this case, it (they?) came out okay after 30 minutes, not as nicely crusted as the last time, but that may come with the cooling. We won't eat it until tomorrow, so I can't report on the taste yet, but as that was the only thing that actually went well the last time, I'm thinking it should be okay this time around too.

New phone

So I got a new smart phone. Some of my colleagues are still naively awaiting the day that we will all get one for free from our employer, but I don't really think that's ever going to happen, and if it will I will probably be in an employee category that doesn't get one. Also, I would be devastated to get a nice shiny new smart phone that isn't really mine and that I can't really play games on or install other nice apps on because it should be professional and nonsense-free. So I got a new one myself.
I got my first smart phone for free with my phone subscription, and it was new and shiny and marvellous with its touch screen and key board, and really it was actually already outdated when I bought it, which means that after 2.5 years the battery kept dying on me and I couldn't actually update the software anymore because my phone was too old to understand it. I had the same problems with the two (non-smart) mobile phones I had before that: kept buying the things I like, but those things had already gone out of style, which is why I could get them cheaply, but also why they wouldn't function properly anymore after a couple of months.
So this time, I wanted do things differently.
I bought a phone that has only been on the market for 3 months, the newest type in a very popular series, so that several friends and co-workers went 'ah, you have the same one as I do, only the newer version'. Which felt like I'd spend my money wisely, because this time it definitely won't stop functioning properly before I'm actually done with it.
On the other hand, having this very shiny, very new, very expensive (okay, could be worse, but quite expensive) thing makes me kind of anxious. I was never really worried about losing or dropping my old phones (I have in fact never lost or dropped them, so it wouldn't have been a very rational fear), but somehow I feel like I am more responsible for this one because it was more expensive. And because it is newer. And because I made the decision to buy this one much more consciously than with the previous ones, where I just went 'oh, keypad, I like it!'.
I'm not one of those phone-obsessed people that always wants to have the newest and fastest thing, but now I kind of feel like one because I'm so overly attentive to this one.
But it will pass, I know. In a couple of months there will be a newer, shinier version, and anyway, I tend to forget what things cost me pretty quickly, which is a pretty good financial survival instinct. But the next thing I got after choosing which phone I wanted was a protective case. Which went on almost before I got the phone out of the box. And which will probably save me many more anxious moments to come.

A Farewell to Arms

So I finished Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (a few days ago, but it's been crazy busy, especially now that we're winning gold medals left and right at the Olympics and everyone is glued to the TV). It was not the first Hemingway I'd ever read, we had " Hills like White Elephants" and another weird story set in Africa that I can't remember the name of, but it was the first full-length novel. As with all the other 'classics' I've been reading recently, it took me quite a while to get through. Much longer than I would have anticipated from the very small and very thin book.
I already knew how it ends because I'd seen Silver Linings Playbook in which Bradley Cooper throws the book through a window because he is dissatisfied with the ending. I won't give it away, but I can tell you that from the first page you will already have the inkling that this won't be a fairytale happy ending. And it isn't.
Anyway, the novel, or more specifically the plot, reminded me of two things: Roald Dahl's short stories and Ian McEwan's Atonement. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Roald Dahl wrote several short stories based on his experience as an RAF pilot in the Second World War, and Hemingway based his novel on his own experiences in the Italian campaign in the First. You can somehow get from their writing that what they're describing is something they know about, something they've experienced themselves. I'm not saying this makes it more realistic, but there is a rawness to it that can make it less smooth to read. That idea actually makes it interesting to compare it with McEwan's novel, as he (as far as I know) has no experience of active service, but the part in which Hemingway describes the retreat, the long line of stalling vehicles and the enemy planes flying above, was very familiar. Atonement was of course written long after A Farewell to Arms, so if anyone is copying it was McEwan, but as I read Atonement first (and several times) it works the other way around in my head.
Even apart from these literary connections I thought the novel very good, and it is probably a good idea to (re)read such novels now that the First World War is exactly 100 years behind us, and there is tension building on all sides in the world.

After finishing the classic I went on to a contemporary novel, Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid (his first novel of the three he has written so far; I've already mentioned his novel How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, if you still haven't read any of his work you definitely should). The only connection Moth Smoke could have to A Farewell to Arms is that they're both written in the first-person narrator, and that narrator is a man. Otherwise, they're completely different. Which is exactly what I need, after such a classic heavy tome.

Rare countries

So I've got my Postcrossing settings so that I'll never have two cards travelling to the same country at the same time. You can choose to do so, but I like to get as many countries as possible on my list, so I have this option turn off for now.
Last weekend, as I was requesting addresses, I somehow got a Russian address even though I already had a card travelling to Russia. Next there was Germany, Belarus, the Ukraine, US, and China. Some of the most popular and populous Postcrossing countries (apart from the Netherlands, which I choose not to exchange any cards with). So I sent a message to Postcrossing support, and they explained:

In Postcrossing there is no guarantee that you will always be sending to different countries at the same time. This would be an impossible guarantee to offer as, at some point, there just wouldn't be enough countries with enough active members to provide this. What our system does however, is try to maximize the number of different countries you are sending to at any given moment - same thing for the countries you receive from. At some point, repetitions must occur, or you (and everyone in fairly large and active countries) would have to be sending to smaller countries where there just aren't enough users to be selected. If did this, those users would receive postcards in much higher than amounts then they actually send.

We realize that many members prefer variety and our system does its best to offer that when possible. The way repetitions will happen is that they will be more frequent to users who are sending larger amounts of postcards at the same time, while repetitions will be less common for those who can send less. Since those who can send more at the same time have, by consequence, a wider variety of different countries than those who can send less, we feel this is more fair for all.

Another requirement for repetitions to happen is that, otherwise, members in larger more active countries would not get enough postcards back. They would be sending, but not receiving back. So repetitions are an actual requirement and our system aims at keep things as balanced as possible.

Lastly, I should note that the level of repetitions can and does change overtime. Our system automatically adapts to the balance level at any give moment. And with this said, I can tell that we are currently are experiencing an unusually large unbalance between countries with a large set of members in some countries not getting enough postcards (they have sent, but they have not yet received). This is probably due the mail backlog that is usually generated over Christmas and other conditions we do not control. And, for the reasons I explained before, this is why you might be seeing seeing more repetitions than usual. Lastly, to be clear, repetitions will always occur at some point in Postcrossing - what might differ is when. The more postcards you send, the higher chances you might get repetitions.

So I realised that up until this point, I'd actually been pretty lucky not to get repetitions.

Also, I'd been quite lucky to get an address in Georgia (the country, not the state), which I'd never exchanged cards with, just before I got the repeat addresses. But this got me wondering: is Georgia really such a rare country, or was it just (bad) luck that I didn't get them before this?

Postcrossing keeps a list of all countries in the program, some of which are not technically recognised as countries but counted separately anyway. There are many many countries with 0 or 1 member, including the Vatican, and some fewer with 2-10 members, including exotic places like Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea.
Safe to say, I haven't been receiving cards from any of those places. However, I did get a card from the Bahamas, which has only 12 members and sent only 1,012 cards. I also got a card from Egypt (followed by a surprise Christmas card), which has 73 members, and Vietnam, which has 77, but that's it as far as countries-below-100-members goes. Still, pretty nice.

As for sending cards, my rarest card has gone to French Polynesia, which has only 10 members, followed by Uzbekistan which has 98. The card to Georgia is currently travelling, but when it arrives it will fall in this category, as Georgia has 23 members.

In total, I have exchanged cards with 64 countries, out of the 217 participating in Postcrossing. Some of these I have strange statistics with, such as receiving 5 from Slovenia but never sending a card there, or sending 10 to Turkey but only getting 1 back. There are some countries I would really like to receive a card from that aren't that rare, such as Iceland or Denmark, and then of course some of the more exotic places, like Nepal or some of the Middle Eastern or African countries. But on the whole, looking at these statistics, I think I've done pretty well so far. It's logical that most of my cards will be going to Russia, Germany, the US and China, but apart from these, there have been some very nice surprises.