Found In Translation

For those who've been following the professional progress (or lack thereof) of the author of this blog, I have some Very Good News Indeed.

For those who haven't been following, well, my professional activity over the last year or so since I finished my M2 (research degree) has involved selling vegetables, arranging yoghurts, and, most recently, renting academic gowns to graduands whilst trying to resist telling them how hard it is to find a decent job afterwards. 

I had no reason to be optimistic, you see. I was accepted for a PhD in Cambridge but it fell through for lack of funding. My attempts to be taken on as a trainee archivist failed for want of experience- to get experience, you need experience (DOH). Finally, the English Heritage graduate trainee scheme for Historic Environment Management, in which I had placed my remaining hope, was abolished three days after I applied because of the Tory party. I won't go into it, but it was DEFINITELY their doing.

I'd been thinking about translation for a while- I've done a bit in the past on a voluntary basis and really enjoyed it, but I wasn't sure how I'd go about doing that as a job without relevant qualifications. As it turns out, there's no fixed route into translation in this country. I applied for something earlier this week on the off-chance, knowing I was unlikely to get it as I didn't have a single one of their 'essential' qualifications.

Y'know what?

Sometimes, a bit of nerve pays off. 

Sometimes, after a year of struggling to find something, things start to come together.

Sometimes, someone will take a chance on the overqualified shop-girl and get her to do a sample translation.

And sometimes- just sometimes- they'll offer her her first freelance projects.

WOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!  

Cake Thursday: Walnut

Today's Cake Thursday cake (well, it wouldn't be a Cake Thursday lasagne, now, would it?) was walnut, as you may have guessed from the title, with coffee icing, which you probably didn't. It was, I think, one of the best yet, so I'm going to post the recipe (as ever, approximative and haphazard, and if your kitchen's not a mess by the end of it, you're doing it wrong).


Ingredients


6oz (150g) Brown flour. If you don't have any in, it's not worth making a special effort to get it. Self raising flour is fine, just omit the baking powder.
3tsp (c.à.c.) baking powder 
6oz (I'm not going to keep writing 150g each time, I'm sure you can work that out for yourselves) margarine
4oz (100g) brown sugar
2 good-sized spoonfuls honey. I think a good-sized spoonful is probably a heaped dessert spoon. If you dip the spoon in boiling water first, the honey won't stick, but then you won't be able to lick the spoon afterwards. Hmmm. Tricky one.
3 eggs from happy chickens. Battery-farmed eggs just don't make good cake. Honest. They also hatch into Duracell bunnies if you leave them long enough.
6oz walnuts. Bashed up is fine. If you have walnut halves, bash about 4oz of them up into smaller bits.


Stick everything except the walnuts in a Big Mixing Bowl (R)- every home should have one! and give it to someone else to mix mix well with a wooden spoon or similar. Preheat oven to Gas 6 or Standard Oven Cake Making Temperature about now. Mix in 2/3 of the walnuts. I made mine in a standard loaf tin, but if you want to make it as a layer cake (yay! twice as much icing!), it will also fit nicely into two 9" Victoria sandwich tins. Stick cake in oven. Wait for oven to cook cake (yes, it does it for you! Now isn't that kind?). This make take anywhere between 20 and 45 mins, depending on the temperament (no, not temperature) of your oven and the size of the tins you used. Generally, thinner cakes will cook quicker. Basic physics, yes?


Once the cake(s) is(are- catering for all eventualities here) cooked, leave it/them/him/her to cool for at least an hour. Infuriating though this is, the icing will melt if you don't wait. Talking of which...


Icing ingredients


3oz (75g) butter. Take this out of the fridge while the cake is cooling to soften up a bit.
6oz (can you remember how much that is in grammes? I hope so...) icing sugar
2 dessert spoons very strong coffee. Like, REALLY strong. Undrinkably strong.
2 digestive or other relatively plain biscuits

Mush the butter up until it's soft and creamy. Don't melt it or the results will be disgusting. Stir in icing sugar, then add the coffee one spoonful at a time- keep an eye on the consistency, if you add too much liquid the icing will be too runny.


Put icing on cake, or on both layers if you're making a layer cake. This recipe will make a bit too much icing for a loaf cake. This is where the biscuits come in. Smear remaining icing on biscuits, sandwich together and eat. Om nom.


Press the remaining walnuts into the icing while it's still soft. This cake will be happiest in the fridge, especially in summer, because of the butter in the icing.


Happy baking!

P.s. New font size- better/worse/indifferent?

It's all relative

Hellyloes! Yes, I am still alive and functional. Just about.

I thought my life was relatively normal (note the "relative" there, it's important). And then, last Tuesday night, I found myself making chlamydomonas cupcakes. (I was going to put "Chlamydomonas" as the title of this post, but I decided it sounded a bit too much like an STD).

Chlamydomonas, for those of you who are wondering (if you're not, feel free to scroll down to the next paragraph) is a genus of algae, a member of the Volvocales order (algae which have their headlights on even in the daytime?) which Ze Boy has been studying for the last few months. It was his last day at the lab, so I made him cakes to take.

This is a chlamydomonas:

 

From http://plantphys.info/plant_biology/labaids/chlorophyta.shtml- 

credit where credit's due, I do not have the necessary algae-photography skills

Note the flagella (those things that look like antennae- it uses them for swimming) and the big round eye-spot in the middle.

This is a chlamydomonas cake...

It looks so unhappy, poor thing, like a chlamydomonas out of water

...and a whole colony of them!

 

Well, I say a whole colony, but I actually only made 16. A real colony would have about 3000 of them, but that would be one heck of a lot of cake.


Ze Boy and I then proceded to run round the kitchen pretending to swim with our flagella (ummm...the leftover liquorice bootlaces) while the cakes looked on in befuddlement.

And they're letting us get married?

Ten Good Reasons To Move To Sweden

1. It's too hot here

2. They don't have the Tory Party in Sweden. Well, they better not...

3. I can be as pale as I like and still look tanned

4. In my dreams, it would sort of be like living in Ikea, in a very good way

5. We could open a very English tea shop with polka dot teapots and it would be exotic

6. Sweden is not south of anywhere. Well, nowhere habitable, at least.

7. Big houses at £42,000. You couldn't get a one-bedroom bungalow next to Sellafield nuclear power plant for that

8. Father Christmas! I imagine he's a very good next-door neighbour (what do you mean, he lives in Finland? I'm sure he lives in Sweden really!)

9. The fact my mother knows the words to Abba's "Honey Honey" in Swedish (seriously, I am Not Kidding, the £2.99 CD bin in Tesco has a lot to answer for) might actually come in useful

9 1/2. I could wear really big jumpers all year round, not just 7 months of it

9 5/8. Daylight in winter is overrated, anyway

10. It's TOO HOT HERE. Or have I already said that?

Nutella Cakes, The Recipe

...Because I feel it's only right to share this one with the world.

As per usual, this is a Catherine-style recipe, i.e. relatively haphazard and fairly open to interpretation, but I'll try and be fairly precise!


Ingredients

3oz (75g) self raising flour (ou 75g de farine normale et un peu plus de levure chimique)

1oz (25g) ground hazelnuts (optional and fairly expensive, can be replaced by same quantity of flour)

2oz (50g) cocoa powder

3 eggs (medium? large? I don't think it actually matters)

6oz (150g) Marjoriiiiiiiiie! Erm, margarine, I mean, or butter

6oz (150g) sugar (white, brown, whatever). If you have treacle to hand, replace 1oz of the sugar with a tbsp of treacle. If not, don't worry about it.

3tsp baking powder, or 2tsp if you replaced the hazelnuts with flour


Stick all ingredients in a Great Big Bowl and whack the heck out of it with a wooden spoon (if you're feeling in need of exercise) or an electric whisk (if you're lazy like me).

This will fill about 12 small muffin cases, less big ones, more smaller ones (logique, quoi)

Medium ones will take about 20 mins at GM6, 180°, or whatever your oven thinks is the appropriate temperature for cooking cakes.

Wait for them to cool off a bit, then make the topping:

Put three tbsp of nutella in a bowl and then one in your mouth (this way round, please, the other way isn't particularly hygienic). Add 1 tbsp boiling water and 2 tbsp icing sugar. Mix well. Adjust quantities of icing sugar and/or water until it feels like thick icing. Spread on cakes.

Done!

There would be pictures, but my camera appears to have died. EIther that, or my 99p-for-four batteries weren't that much of a bargain. Come to think of it, it's probably the latter.