Cake
I made this cake for my dad’s birthday. There’s a kind of a tradition for a chocolate cake decorated with M&Ms, but traditionally it used a handwritten recipe called “One Two Egg Chocolate Cake”. That recipe only uses two tablespoons of cocoa, so it’s not really a chocolate cake, more a brown-tinted vanilla cake, which I’m not really into.
So I googled and found this Nigella recipe for Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake. It was super easy to make (it basically involves biffing everything in a food processor) and it used a hearty 40g of cocoa so it was good and chocolately. And the icing was quality. I rejected Nigella’s suggestion of decorating with sugar flowers, and instead went for the traditional M&Ms, M side down (well, it was either that or removing all the green ones).
Hääletamine on suletud?
I’m really enjoying the Great Language Game. You listen to short clips that seem to be all taken from radio new broadcasts from around the world and you have to identify the language that’s been spoken. It’s multiple choice, starting with two options, increasing as the game progresses.
The most I’ve scored is 800. I partly attribute this to it being right in the midst of the build up to Eurovision. I’ve watched a lot of the national selection TV programmes, so I can say “voting has now closed” in a dozen different European languages. (By the way, the best competition was Ireland, where one of the guest panelists and a mentor had a stand-up row. Proud 2 b Irish.)
Sometimes I could apply a bit of logic to choose the languages (like when I figured that the posh sounding broadcast was more likely to be Hebrew than Yiddish)
What is blog?
One thing I know is that blogging isn’t what it was 10 years ago, or 15 years ago. Or even five years ago.
A lot of my friends’ blogs have turned into collections of reactions about Twitter storms. Some controversy happens, then everyone toots about it, then someone makes a blog post with a collection of the most dramatic and/or wittiest toots along with a bit of commentary. It gets stale so quickly. Like, in a week you’ll read it and will fondly recall that time in March 2013 when everyone got fired up about the radio DJ who made the slightly sexist tweet, offered a half-arsed apology, but he didn’t lose his job or anything, oh well.
And then there are political blogs, which get a lot of media attention but are generally only of interest if you’re really into politics or if the Justin Bieber fandom isn’t providing enough drama to satisfy your needs.
Then it just leaves those personal website type blogs, which should be where all the cool shit is happening. But it’s not because when I check my RSS feeds, hardly anyone updates anymore.
My website is going to be 18 years old later this year. And as much as I’d like to treat it like an 18-year-old person by urging them to go flatting or maybe backpack around Europe, that’s not going to happen. My website is not independent. It’s like a lazy-arse teen that just sits around the house all day watching MTV, like it’s still 1997. God.
A few months ago I realised I hadn’t updated my site much and I thought that was a bit lame. So taking inspiration from the original format of Courtney Johnston’s blog Best of Three – that is, posting about three things – I got back into it. And it worked – as rules and restrictions and limits tend to do for me.
But I don’t want to be alone in this. So if you have a blog that you’ve been neglecting, put some stuff on it. Put your favourite photo from Instagram or a link to some fun quiz thing that was going around on Facebook. Just something of the quite-good variety.