Devil's food cake

So after making my apple cake last week, I came to the horrible realisation that I'd never actually made a chocolate cake. Not a proper one, I have made cakes in which I added a load of cocoa powder, but that doesn't make it an 'official' chocolate cake. So I dove into Mary Berry's recipes, and decided to make one that was called 'Devil's food cake'. I'd never heard of this cake before, but after making it, I have an idea of why it's called that way. Read on, and you will know too.

To manage expectations; this cake did not turn out well. It must be Murphy's law, because just a couple of days earlier someone (my mom) told me that my cakes always turn out great and that I've never had a bad bake. Well...
I've put the recipe below, adding in italics the points where something went wrong with my cake, and how you could avoid making my mistakes in the future. And also how I could avoid making my own mistakes again, as I will be making this cake again, to do it properly.

Ingredients
for the cake:
50 g cocoa powder
255 ml water
100 g butter
275 caster sugar
2 eggs
175 g flour
teaspoon baking powder
teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

for the frosting:
175 g caster sugar
1 egg white
2 tablespoons hot water

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease two 20 cm sandwich tins and line the base with baking parchment.
Ah, yes. I went wrong on the first step. Now I usually don't include the 'grease and line your tin' bit, because it is so obvious that it is second nature. However, as it turned out I did not have two 20 cm sandwich tins. I had one 20 cm sandwich tin, and one 20 cm loose-bottomed tin. I did however have two 24 cm sandwich tins. So I used those, figuring that with all those raising agents, the cakes would come out pretty big anyway. I was wrong there.
Second, I had lots of little bits of baking parchment left over, and was too lazy to cut out one big piece to line the bottoms. Usually with cakes, if you have a small bit you can pull on, the rest comes out easily too. As you can probably guess now, I was wrong there too.

Blend the cocoa and water together until smooth and set aside.
Have you ever tried to blend cocoa and cold water? It is weird. Somehow the cocoa is extremely hydrophobic and wants to stay on top of the water, or in clumpy bits at the bottom. It looks pretty horrible:

Weird lumpy cocoa-water mixture.

Luckily, this bit resolves itself once you blend it together.

Mix the butter and sugar by adding the sugar gradually and beating well in between until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one until you have a smooth mixture.

Sift the flour with the baking powder and bicarbonate of soda.
Yes, I went wrong here. How? How could one possibly mess up this bit, you wonder? Carefully read the first word: sift. I never sift. I am a quick and easy baker, who does not sift her flour. Usually I get away with this, because you mix the flour in the with the rest, and the lumps get beaten to death. However, this cake was of the 'fold in' variety, so that did not happen. Also, the flour was pretty old and hard. So I had lumps. A lot of lumps.

Fold the flour mixture and cocoa-water mixture alternatively into the butter-sugar mixture until well blended. Divide the mixture between the tins and level the surface.
So at this point, I could see it would be a lumpy thing. I tried breaking up the flour lumps, but you cannot really put any force on the mixture, as 'folding' means 'try to work as quickly and lightly as possible or the air will escape from your cake and leave you with a horrible flat pancake'. So I managed to get a few of the larger lumps broken up, but most medium-sized lumps just bided their time at the bottom of the bowl. The irony is of course, that I still ended up with a pancake, because it could not rise properly. Anyway...

Lumpy lumpy cake mixture.

Bake in the oven for 30-35 minutes until well risen (hah!). Leave to cool in the tins for a few minutes then turn out, peel off the parchment and finish cooling on a wire rack.
My cakes were not well risen. One had stayed exactly the same size, the other had somewhat doubled in height, but not nearly as much as one might expect with this amount of raising agents. Most likely because the tins I used were too large and because the lumps made the cake quite heavy. Also, all the lumps had gone to the bottom, so once I turned them out you could clearly see the cratery landscape I'd produced. And as you can probably guess from the first mistake I made; it was almost impossible to get the cakes out of the tins without breaking them. They stuck to the un-parchmented parts of the tins like frosting to a spoon. I incurred several breaks before I had them both out.

The frosting, on the other hand, was a breeze. Put the sugar, egg white and water into a heat-proof bowl and set over a pan of hot water. Whisk for about 10-12 minutes until thick, then sandwich the two cake halves together and put the rest on the top and sides. This stuff hardens out quite quickly, so work fast. Leave to set 'in a cool place, but not in the fridge' (apparently this is not a summer cake).

So, how did it turn out? Surprisingly good on the looks, but as predicted, very stodgy on the taste. The lumps (luckily!) did not turn into powdery flour explosions in your mouth, but were rather just hard chewy bits. If they'd been made of chocolate sprinkles, it might have been quite nice. As it is, my guinea pig friends were all pretty positive, but that may have been because I'd down-played it so much it could only be better than expected.

Frosted devil

So, learning points:
- use the correct size tin as stated
- properly line your tins with baking parchment
- sift your flour before you add it.

Conclusion: the devil's food cake is devilish because it pretends to be a very easy run-of-the-mill cake, but then it tricks you into making all kinds of basic rookie baking mistakes that make your cake come out like a lumpy pancake.

Getting a haircut

There are some reoccurring things in one's life that you have to repeat after a couple of months. These include going to the dentist, having your eyes checked (if you're a contact or glasses-wearer), going to your GP or getting your meds. Mostly, I find these things an annoyance because I don't have that much time, but mostly they're more useful than terrible.
There is one exception to this rule; going to the hairdresser to have my hair cut. I really dread this, because of two things:
1 I don't really pay that much attention to what my hair is doing or how long it's getting, so I usually don't go to a hairdresser until it's about 2 months too late, leaving my hair too long and frizzly;
2 I don't really 'fit in' with people who pay a lot of attention to their hair and hairstyle and make-up etc, which leaves me short of conversation topics while I'm there, and generally creates an awkward atmosphere for all involved.
These things are of course related; because I feel really awkward trying to make conversation while I'm there, I keep postponing actually going, which makes the person cutting my hair even more exasperated with the state of my hair when I finally do go. Thus making me feel even less like a normal human being who should actually be allowed in a hairdresser's.
Although I'm really happy with the result once I've managed to find the time and the courage to actually go, and always plan on bettering my life and visiting more often, the pattern is very well-ingrained and somehow always repeats itself.

The funny thing is; most people I know don't like to go. Usually, because they always get a different result than what they opted for; hair either too short or in a weird way that you can never actually replicate at home. I personally never have this problem, because I always ask for my hair in exactly the same way, and after a couple of times memorised the lingo that the hairdresser uses when they ask the confirmation questions about what you want, so I just tell them those words from the beginning and usually end up with exactly the same hair. Which is thoroughly disappointing to the person who has just cut my hair, because it is a style that doesn't really work when you wear it down, but which works perfectly when you put it in a ponytail or bun, which is how I wear my hair 98% of the time. So I'm happy with it.
And the other thing I hear other people mention about not liking to have their hair cut is the same problem I'm having; the lack of suitable conversation topics that leads to awkward silences. This concerns women, generally, as men either have silent hairdressers or are out of there so fast that the lack of conversation doesn't really matter. And I even know several other women who postpone having their hair cut because of this. So I'm not alone.
However, contrary to all expectations, I had my hair cut yesterday, and it all went swimmingly. The girl cutting my hair was one I'd already seen several times earlier, so we had some recurring topics that we could use. Also, we're of almost the same age, which makes things easier. And, most important of all, we'd both just visited Australia, so we spent about 20 minutes talking about that. We never even got to the question of why my hair was way too long and dry as dust.

Which got me thinking; maybe the solution is that when you make an appointment to have your hair cut, you also hand in a list of personal information, including your age and hometown, but also recent experiences and interests. That way, they can match you to someone who has the same interests, so you have something to talk about.
Also, hairdressers should realise that they are abnormally interested in all things concerning hair (an understandable occupational hazard) but that most other people don't really care that much. So when they comment about styles or products or whatever, and get a terse reply, they should really drop the subject instead of asking even more questions or suggesting difficult products or procedures to 'amend' problems that the person whose hair it is doesn't really have. This would take away a lot of the pre-cutting anxiety, which leads to people going to the hairdresser's more often, which probably also amends the disastrous state one's hair can get into. It's win-win all around.
It would make me, and my tormented hair, a lot happier and more relaxed. Because really, having your hair cut should be just that; having your hair cut.

The commercial side

I think the gap between this post and the previous one couldn't have been bigger; the despair and starkness of the WWI trenches compared to the story of commercialization that I'm going to tell below. But hey, sometimes my life is just one big potpourri of unconnected things.
Being a project manager at an educational publisher means you have to know a lot about one very particular thing (your subject, in my case biology) and not so much about lots of other things. These include people management, design, finance, marketing, sales, editing, IT, and which business meeting point has the best dinner possibilities combined with the shortest walk back to the train station. We have specialised departments for each of the things mentioned above, with people who have actually studied in their subject, same way as I have studied biology. But they, lucky them, do not really have to know that much about my field to still be able to do their work on my books properly (although our editor now knows more about protein synthesis than she'd ever care to). I, on the other hand, am constantly learning about their specialities.
One of my least developed areas, I and anyone who knows me would say, is commerce. When I call something 'commercial', it's not a positive thing. I never listen to commercial radio stations, for example, or watch the commercial channels on TV. I don't know that I ever owned a piece of clothing that had it's brand displayed for all the world to see. So doing the commercial things that come with the job can sometimes be a bit difficult.
Yesterday was a case in point. We were at a biology convention (the biggest biology convention of the Netherlands) and not only did I have to man our stand (which means talking to the 650+ teachers who attended the convention, answering their questions, handing out free goodies, and on occasion try to get them to buy our stuff), I also had to give a workshop. To be honest, it was only a small part of a bigger workshop, and my part wasn't really that important, and if I hadn't turned up none of the 35 people in the workshop would have noticed. But still, for me it was quite a big thing, because talking in front of a room full of people is not my favourite thing to do.
Thankfully, it all went well. It went better than well, because everybody listened and participated in the short assignment I'd thought up for them, and when we went through the answers they even forgave me for not knowing exactly why something was the right answer at some points (it was about linking words in educational texts, not exactly my area of expertise). I was dead tired and had a pounding headache, but nobody else seems to have noticed that, which was good. My publisher did the other 80% of the workshop and she made the good points and gave the right answers to the questions, to which I added some small bits of info when I thought she was being a bit too brief.
And then we went back to manning the stand and talking to people in friendly manners. I have never had one of those trainings in which you learn to find out whether someone will actually buy your stuff at some point, and how to ditch them as quickly as possible when you know they won't, so some of my conversations may have been pretty useless in a commercial sense, but I had fun and being nice to people is something I like to do. But still, after spending 12 hours anticipating other people's needs, questions and wishes, I'm going to be the most self absorbed person ever for the next 24.
Anyway, it's nice to know I'm slowly mastering yet another part of the jigsaw puzzle that is professional life.

KitchenAid love

Wow, I actually haven't written anything in the whole of September. How did that go by so fast?
Anyway, now that it's October, and autumn is about to start and my birthday is creeping up (which is less and less of a good thing as years go by) I am hoping there will be more time to actually write stuff here. Because it's not that stuff hasn't been happening. A lot of stuff has been happening, it just that I was simply experiencing the stuff, and not able to write about it. And I will now stop using the word 'stuff'.

One of the things that happened which I can write about because I can be relatively brief is that I bought a KitchenAid. An Artisan KitchenAid, to be exact, in a deep red colour. And if you don't know what a KitchenAid is, go look up pictures now.
I've been wanting to have a KitchenAid for as long as I knew they existed, but first there was the sharing-a-kitchen-with-loads-of-other-(thieving)-people issue, then there was the no-money problem, and then there was the our-kitchen-is-smaller-than-most-people's-walk-in-closet thing. The last hasn't technically been resolved, but when brand-new KitchenAids were being sold for 2/3rds of the normal price, I couldn't resist. So I bought one (with some mental support from my boyfriend) and then waited patiently for 3 weeks for it to arrive.
But oh, how pretty it is! How shiny and strong and robust. Also, how heavy (due to the smallness of the kitchen, I have to move the thing in place whenever I want to use it, and KitchenAids clearly don't expect to be put away in dusty cupboards). But it works like a charm. It came with a big (4.6 l) steel bowl and 3 types of mixers, and I'm already planning to buy loads of accessories once my bank account has recovered. I used it to make brownies for last weekend's family day, and all agreed that they were very tasty brownies indeed.
So apart from the storage issue, I am very happy that my KitchenAid dream finally came true. Now we'll just have to buy another kitchen to fit it in.

Not dead!

So every blogger has to do one of the obligatory "I'm not dead, just really busy!" posts, and this is my first one here, so that's pretty good considering I've been going at this for 1.5 years. Even though I haven't posted anything for the last 2.5 month (seriously, didn't realise it was that long!), there are still quite a lot of viewers, mostly Postcrossing-directed. Don't be afraid, I will post more in the (near) future!
But for the last couple of months I was just too busy with work (36 hours a week, plus 8 for the editing work I'm still doing), and then we went on holiday to France. Which I will probably write some stuff about sometime, but not now, otherwise this wouldn't be a not-dead post anymore.
So keep tuned.

Silly superstitions

So now that my essays have all been handed in (and my teachers are taking their sweet time correcting them!), it is time to relax and enjoy the holidays. Only it isn't for me, because I'm working, starting work on my MA dissertation, and also planning our 3-week trip to the US in September. But still, it's less stressful than writing 16,000 words in three weeks, you'd say.
Not true. With the handing in of essays, the silly superstitions that have established themselves over years of school and university start to set in.
When I was still in secondary school, I always kept the book I would have an exam on the next day on my desk while I was sleeping, I never put it in my bag as I usually did with books I needed the next day. I know some people who actually put their books under their pillows, as if the knowledge would drain into their brain through the pillow. Also, I never ever did the last-minute revision thing that you see so many people do in the hallway right before a big test. I was so afraid that by studying some random small detail, I'd forget something else, probably something big, that I did not look at my books anymore once I left the house. I have no idea if either of these things work, and they seem a bit contradictory now that I look back on them, but there you go.
With essays, this becomes less of an issue, but now other things have crept in. If I have a folder from the teacher I'm handing in to (sometimes they bring spare folders to class, when the pile in their office gets too big), I will always hand in my essays in that same folder. For my Theatre course, I have a blue folder that I used for all 3 of my assignments, taking out the previous one and then putting in the next one as I go along. On some conscious level I know this doesn't affect my grade in anyway, but still I do it...
Another thing is that I cannot return the books I needed for the essay to the library until I have my grade. This is some weird kind of reversed psychology; if I hand in the books, I will need to rewrite, and then I have to pick the books up again, so if I just keep them at home, there won't be any point in having to rewrite, as there is no extra effort involved, so I will pass. Again, pointless, but I know several others who do this.
And then there is the checking of the grade. Ahhh, how much easier must it have been when grades were just posted in lists on paper on actual boards, and people just knew when they were there and could go to that place and check their grade. Now, grades are posted online, and many teachers forget to email their students that the grades are in. So you keep checking the website, but not too often, otherwise you'll somehow annoy or speed up your teacher, who will then definitely fail you, but just often enough so that your grade will be posted when you check (needless to say, it never is, as I've already checked some course websites 10 times without knowing my grade. Also, some teachers just put the essays in their outboxes, which is really mean, because then it may take days for someone to notice that they're there, and then there is a sudden rush of text messages and emails and people practically running to the university to prevent others from seeing their grade before they do... Ah well). This is the same as the 'we cannot leave the house now, I'm waiting for a package to arrive!' situation, which we had last Saturday, when the package does indeed arrive just at that time you are out (I realise this does not matter for your grade, which will still be online, and is more annoying when you have to ring you neighbour's bell 5 times before you finally have your things, but still, it's in the same category).
I have a funny feeling all 3 of my grades will arrive at the same day, namely today (as the teachers have had the whole weekend to check things), which will cut short any adrenaline rushes and stress I have been experiencing over the past week, as I keep remembering things I really wanted to put into an essay but forgot at the time. But that would be good, because then I can return the 15 books that are clogging up my desk to the library, and start on my MA dissertation with a fresh, clean desk. Also, I will be able to go to places where there is no Internet without thinking that the grades will be posted that exact second and all my classmates already know everything and I'm the only one on the planet who does not have her final grade. Also, I will finally able to relax. Which is what the holidays are all about.

Mine mine mine!

So as you (should) know by now, I am a big fan of Ryan Gosling (we watched The Ides of March yesterday, because if there ever is a good day to watch that film, it is Super Tuesday, and it was brilliant!). So I was really happy when a few days ago, the movie reviewer in my newspaper said that "looking back on this period, we will see in a few years that this were the hey-days of Ryan Gosling - he has made 5 films in 2 years, and holds his own against great actors such as Anthony Hopkins, George Clooney, and Philip Seymour Hoffman". I was happy, because someone else is also recognising his talent and being a fan of him. And then I felt somewhat annoyed, because he is my discovery, and now the newspaper man was acting as if he was the first to notice him. And then I was sad, because now everybody is going to be talking about him, but I was there first!
In short, I went a bit Gollummy ("My oowwwwnnnn... My preciousssssss!").
A similar thing happened when Game of Thrones was first announced (I still want to stab the person that decided it was going to be Game of Thrones and not A Game of Thrones! Seriously, some titles just need an article!). I have been reading and loving those books for about 6 years now, and I have told everybody who wanted to listen that they were great and brilliant and should be read, and I loved the series. But then it became popular, and everybody started watching and loving the series, and random people who have never even opened a fantasy novel in their life were talking about Tyrion and Arya and Jon (and making the most stupid comments ever, that Daenerys would be Jon's mother, or some craziness, she is younger than him, for crying out loud!) and I felt sad and robbed and annoyed because I am a true fan who has been there from the start and they are all fakers lifting on some HBO-induced wave of popularity.
Right-o.
Safe to say that I do not express most of these feelings, because then I would have been locked up in the Asylum of Sad and Jealous People a long time ago, and I may have exaggerated somewhat about my feelings, but still, it is weird when you think about it. If you have something you love, something smallish and unknownish and up-and-comingish, you want to share your love and appreciation with everybody, but when that thing then becomes big and popular (and mainstream), you get all angry and annoyed and want the others to go away because it is yours. (Or you start hating the thing that you used to love, which is the approach most Pink Floyd fans took, but that's really not an option for me.) Why do I (we? Am I the only one who has this? I can hardly believe it) get this way? Is the thing you like less likeable when others like it too? Or is it the feeling of "I know something you don't know" that makes me (us?) feel so happy and special? Is it really about the thing itself, or is it about the way that thing reflects on us, makes us feel intelligent or edgy or "alternative", and how that effect goes away when too many people like it?
I'm not sure. I do know that it is really annoying, and not something I like about myself, and something I try to keep to myself, but still something that is there. But nevertheless, I do hope that you all go forth and watch Ryan Gosling movies, because he really is great (seriously, he is named after a little goose, how much better can you get?), and that you all read A Game of Thrones (A! A Game!) and all the other novels of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, and when you have done that, you can watch the series and make intelligent comments. Or just watch the series, because it is brilliant. You will enjoy and love it. And I will try not to resent you for it.

First time's the charm

Right-o, the first post. Always annoying to get things underway.
Anyway, here I will (hopefully) be writing some more than on my previous blog (or journal, as I prefer to call it) which has not been updated since July 2011. I am planning to post some stuff about my creative works, my writings, Postcrossings, culinary stuff, travels, and some random thoughts when they occur. Post may be in Dutch or English, as suits the occasion.
I may import my older blog posts at some point, but I also may not.
I'd love to get some comments, if only to know that people are reading my stuff, but that probably also depends on how much I will actually write!