I’m trying to make it 4 weeks between the ‘main’ food shop on binterwebs and it being the 3rd week I’m running low on cake making things… or rather chocolate, and arsedness to make complicated stuff.
In order to make these mildly entertaining pastry things do this:

Ingredients:

  • puff pastry
  • Caster Sugar
  • Golden Syrup
  • A rolling pin
  • Is simple. scatter some sugar on to a clean worktop, like you’d do with the flour. Plonk the pastry here and pour some sugar on top of it. Start rolling it out with the aim of getting it to roughly 5-10mm thick depending on how huge you want to make the things. I made them from about 2-3mm thickness as I had very little pastry. As you get it thinner keep rolling in more sugar.

    Heventually when it’s at desired thickness add a little more sugar to all and fold over the top and bottom edges about a 3rd in. Do this again. There should be about half inch space in the middle, which then enables you to fold it once more into a thin pastry tube. Squash it down gently just to help it stay in that shape.

    Slice it about every 1/4inch or 5mm. and place on a baking sheet, parchment etc. with a couple of inches space between each. Now spoon some golden syrup over each one, you don’t need a lot as it gets thinner as it heats up.

    Oven it, middle shelf, 160-170 degrees C. Maybe 15-20 minutes as it caramelises.

    Tasty.

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    I wanted to make more brownies as they are the awesomest. But having no chocolate in the house limited my options. I found a recipe for ‘blondies’ which as you can guess is brownies without chocolate. However the recipe – and end result – is rather different to the brownie recipe Lorna gave me. Anyway it turned out as cake, which is fine by me.

    Ingredients:

  • 4oz caster sugar
  • 4oz butter
  • 3 dessert spoons honey
  • 2 eggs
  • 5oz self raising flour
  • Honey to dress
  • In a pan put the sugar and butter and honey. Warm until the sugar has dissolved and then cool. Stir in the beaten eggs. Fold in’t self raising and smash it all into a pan about 8 inch square. Unlike the brownies you can safely use grease proof here and it won’t stick to it.

    Place it in the oven at 190 (180 fan) for 25 minutes. When it’s done get it out, spoon some honey and spread gently over the top. Leave it to cool. Turn it out. You could turn it out before doing the honey to be safe.

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    About 10 or so years ago I did some beta testing for a mmo game called Jumpgate. It was a closed beta and so a small community of interested people. Anyway I wrote a lovely series of stories to great acclaim by some people who may or may not be literate. I uploaded them to my old site, but it makes more sense to have them here. If you have no idea of this game then some(all) of this will make little sense. And so without further procrastination:

    Life Of A Pirate – Part 1

    Woke up, got dressed, attached fake eye patch, poked eye whilst doing so.
    Went to open bedroom door, but it was jammed, so blew it open with explosives.
    Went to make breakfast, but no food in room, ordered room service.
    Room service person came, I let him in, closed door and shot him in the head, after saying Pay Or Die.
    Blew body up with explosives.
    Made my way down to ship, chased by station security on the way. Jumped in ship, and left QC just as the station closed its launch tubes.
    Shot a few defence droids, and swore over open comm. channel.
    Left sector laughing, with a cat hiding in my hold.
    Jettisoned cat at Omni V.
    Flew off to secret TDP base, located at ****************.
    Killed a few conflux on the way.
    Docked, went to bed.

    Life Of A Pirate – Part 2
    A Day in The Life Of A Pirate

    I awoke to the beeping sound of my alarm, as it beeped. I glanced at the display to see it was 0400 hours, the alarm had gone off late, there was only one course of action available to me. I shot the alarm clock with my gun. After feeling much better for shooting the alarm clock I disembarked from my bed and walked over to the shower cubicle, turned it on and jumped in. Soon after doing this I realised I still had my flight suit on, cursing to myself (consisting mainly of: Bugger) I burned my flight suit whilst still wearing it so I did not have to bother taking it off. I suffered 3rd degree burns on the entirety of my body, however I did not complain, I am a pirate, this is my life, pointless suffering occurs most days. I managed to stand and get out of the shower, partially heal myself with some odd thing I found in Outer Reaches last week, and get into a new flight suit which I had stolen in a bar at Quantar Core.

    By the time I was fully dressed and had eaten my breakfast consisting of Evil Cats and toast, it was nearly 0600 hours. This was bad, I was meant to be at a rendezvous point by 0900 hours, this left me only 3 hours to cover about 3 sectors, this would be a challenge indeed as I would no doubt have to either kill of PoD every moving thing in each of these sectors, otherwise I would not feel like a true pirate. I ran out of the door to my quarters and down to the turbo lift. This seemed odd to me as I did not remember seeing a turbo lift in my life before, it seemed out of place, however it did take me to the flight deck after I told it 7 times. Upon arriving at the flight deck I was approached by a non-pirate person who I recently did business with. When he got within verbal communications range (approx. 6ft) he said to me, in an odd snob-like voice, you pirate scum, your days are numbered! I took offence to this and shot him, in the eyes. This seemed to shut him up, as he fell to the floor writhing in pain. Shortly after this he died. After taking everything of any worth from his body and shooting a number of interfering security guards I made my way to my Typhoon Fighter. I strode up to it and touched its shiny hull with my hand, it felt cold, so near to open space this part of the station was always cold. Another pilot who appeared Octavian in race walked over to me and commented, “thats sure a nice heavy fighter you got there snrgle snrgl,” I answered with, “argh, you stupid Oct its a Fighter not a Heavy Fighter!”. The slightly unintelligent Oct replied by spitting at my shoes and making some odd smell, obviously he did not know who I was, like too many of the new recruits these days. Well he would soon never forget my name, I shot him in his chest once, from this wound he fell to the deck and bled lots. I shot him once more in the head and that seemed to shut him up. I continued towards the ladders to the cockpit of my ship and got in. While I was initiating the startup sequence I remembered I did not tell the dead Octavian my name, so he would not actually never forget my name. I was mildly annoyed by this as I lifted my ship off the ground and swung it around 360 degrees shooting everything in the place. This seemed to agitate the people in the station as on my way out of the sector I was chased by about 10 defence droids, but being droids they were stupid and soon dead. I left the sector shouting profanities on the sector comm. channel.

    After arriving in Omni V I heard some noises coming from the back of my ship. I went to investigate this and got attacked by a cat, an Evil Cat no less. This was quite shocking so I jettisoned the Evil Cat by some asteroids, after shooting the asteroids. I soon arrived at The Dark Path station with half my hull destroyed and a hole in my fuel tank. I felt my journey was successful as I had killed over 50 Solrain pilots of varying ranks with relative ease. However, many of these silly Solrains had started shouting at me on private comm. channels as they must have been bored on their way home. I ignored these insults for the most part, but I did transmit some self destruct codes to their pods which soon stopped their shouting. Upon docking at The Dark Path Station there was a big flash of light. After consulting launch control, and witnessing my ship vanish while I was still inside it, I came to the conclusion that I, or at least my ship and everything that made me, had been destroyed. I could not leave the station, nor communicate with the rest of the universe – apart from a minority of people who said they were from the EU and insisted I was too, but not knowing what this EU was, I thought it best to kill them, which I did. I was then left alone, which became boring after a short while, as shooting walls was not as much fun as shooting people.

    Life Of A Pirate – Part 3
    An Unconfirmed Amount Of Time In The Life Of A Pirate

    The days grew into months, and the months into two months. I had exhausted the stations supply of intelligent life, including the squads pet budgie. I had almost given up on life, and was about to take a walk outside in space, when I remembered a physics project I had worked on before I became a ruthless pirate. I had left the half finished device in the science lab, which was renamed to the Torture Chamber shortly after we started taking prisoners. Although now it was dark, empty and devoid of any prisoners screaming in pain as one of us ripped their internal organs out whilst searching for any hidden money that people sometimes hid inside themselves.

    I decided to take the stairs to the lab, as I needed the exercise and that was the only was down there. Sadly the lab was 34 floors below and the stairs were steep in the extreme. ‘God damn the designers of these stations’ I thought to myself.

    After walking 20 of the flights of the stairs and falling the rest, I made it to the science lab, although I decided to take a detour to the sick bay to repair my newly broken neck.

    After shoving a metal rod up my spine and into my skull, my head seemed secure so I went back to the science lab.

    As I opened the doors to the lab a young Solrain woman ran past me screaming, “goose goose!”. As you can imagine, to a trained killer such as myself, these was only one course of action, I turned to see her dashing to the stairs, drew my trusty but over-used blaster and shot her in the back.

    The shot killed her instantly thanks to the stupid anatomy of Solrains with their hearts bulging out from right behind their spines.
    Job well done, I said to myself as I dropped my blaster back into my holster, accidentally letting off a shot which grazed my leg, “bugger” I exclaimed in a calm yet evil pirate type voice. I always tried to vary the tone I spoke to myself in so as not to become a dull person to have a conversation with. I had to think of my future you understand.

    Once I had been back to the sick bay, bandaged my leg, and got back to the science lab AGAIN it was getting dark, which seemed odd as the station was only lit by artificial lighting.
    I entered the main science lab and looked for the door with my name on, I found it up against the far wall with the word HEAVY scrawled before my name. This irritated me as I didnt consider myself heavy in any sense of the word. Still, I thought it best that I put myself on a weight reducing programme sometime soon.

    After scouring the whole room I eventually found a rather large metallic box that had a black label on it, the label read, “Griffos half finished device, piss off”. This was what I had been looking for, I grabbed a box moving hover thing from the other side of the room and managed to lift the box onto it. I pulled the thing out of the science lab and took it to the sick bay as the smell and lighting was more favourable.

    Once opened, the shiny box revealed to me my half finished device, which appeared about finished. I was never a good judge of finishedness.

    I took the device out of the box and placed it on the floor. Underneath where the thing had been was a little note, the note had words on it, these words conveyed to me what exactly was needed to make the device work. It seemed that this was simply 4 AA batteries. So I set about looking for these AA batteries.

    7 hours later I found a digital entertainment device which contained exactly four of these AA batteries. After hurting my thumbs trying to find out it the batteries still had power I took them back to the sick bay, which took me a further 5 hours as I forget where sick bay was.

    Eventually I got back to the sick bay and inserted the batteries into the device. This, I decided, made the half finished device a device. I felt proud of myself for achieving such a thing, and proceeded to dance around the room for some time, breaking glass objects and various items on the work benches. After I had finished expressing my joy I decided it best to find out what exactly the device did. As with all good devices the instructions were extremely difficult to find, and turned out to be hiding at the very bottom of the metallic box, un-thoughtfully stuck in place. I eventually succeeded in removing them and set about learning how to read.
    Some time later I managed to decipher the instructions. It looked like the device I had made was an ‘Inter-Dimensional Space-Time Distorting Solrain Killing Brain Slightly Frying Machine’ no less. What this meant was not apparent to me until I had sobered up from getting drunk in the celebrations I took part in on discovering I could read.

    I was tempted to dance again but thought it best not to as the floor was melting due to a spillage from my last dancing episode.

    After long and deep thought I decided I was going to use the aforementioned machine to travel to a different dimension, hopefully where there was no jiggery-pokery stuff with those supposed EU people. I paused mid thought,

    To Be Continued…

    Life Of A Pirate – Part 4
    An Unconfirmed Amount Of Time In The Life Of A Pirate Part II

    We left our HERO Griffo as he paused, mid thought:

    I paused mid thought, then, regained control of my mind and continued thinking. I decided the best course of immediate action would be to collect things that could be of use to me in this new dimension I was going to invade. I smiled, picturing in my ample sized head all the Solrains that would be ripe for the slaughter. Shortly after I bandaged my head after slipping in my own drool, I was read to start gathering stuff. The embarrassment would have caused me to kill everyone who saw me, but thankfully everyone was dead, so there was no cause for violence, just self pity.
    After repairing my head once more I headed back to my quarters Thankfully, due to my new found talent at reading I made it back to my quarters in under a day. This I felt was a great achievement, and so I made a note in my pirating planner to steal a medal to immortalize the occasion.

    Once in my quarters I closed the door, for no apparent reason as there was nobody to see me, although closing the door did stop an irritating draft which I never managed to locate the source of. Damn those infernal drafts, I thought to myself, raising my blaster above my head, swinging it wildly. After searching my room for anything useful, I came upon a small number of items that I felt would be of use to me. These included a hammer, three wing nuts, a dead rat and the head of an Evil Cat which, in this universe at least, was a prized and much sought after possession. Also in my list of useful stuff was a Desert Eagle, which looked rather lonely, and I was sure that the other universe would have eagles, although they may not be dead like my one. Lastly, there was an assortment of light and heavy arms, including but not limited to, 3 very-sharp-indeed knives, cleaned, 2 light blasters slightly charred, 1 assault rifle, blood stained, 2 big odd looking guns from my old ship and 5 assorted grenades.

    These items I was sure would be all I would need to get along in this new home-to-be of mine, but I did however pick up a bit of money before leaving my room, 10.5 million credits or thereabout.
    On my way back to the sick bay I accidentally vented half of my money and the wing off my desert eagle into space. This was a bit of an annoyance, but I did managed to shoot them after finding an EVA suite somewhere and going outside with my assault rifles.

    Once back at the sick bay with my bag of various items I began the process of finding the ON button for my amazingly spectacular ‘Inter-Dimensional Space-time Distorting Solrain Killing Brain Slightly Frying Machine’. This was a mammoth task and took me the best part of two weeks to find. It eventually turned out to be right on the top of the thing, which may seem obvious to other people, but to a highly skilled, trained-to-kill-with-his-eyes pirate, this was not an obvious place to seek out and find the ON button, nevertheless, due to my multi-talented brain, and the bright flashing light on it, I found the button in the end.

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    So many years ago Jesus, Deliah Smith and the prophet Muhammad were over at Mary Magdalene’s house smoking weed and trying to work out how to make magic brownies when they discovered they had no chocolate left. This led them to try and make a madera cake, but it went wrong. The result, as we all know, was pancakes.
    Every year after that fateful day Christians around the world have celebrated this event by smoking pot and making pancakes. Below is my belated recipe that was inspired by Jesus. And by ‘inspired by’ I mean copied from. And by ‘Jesus’ I mean Deliah Smith.

    Ingredients:

  • 4oz plain flour
  • 2 eggs
  • 200ml milk with 75ml water
  • 2oz butter
  • To serve:

  • a lemon for its juice
  • sugar
  • What you do:
    Sift the flour into a bowl. Break the eggs in and mix it with preferably a whisk, by hand. Add the milk and water mix a little at a time and whisk it bloody good. I left it overnight but that was because I’d already made some thing with prawns and so wasn’t hungry but was bored.
    Anyway, get a probably non-stick frying pan hot, add a little butter.
    When the butter is melted add a bit of it to the mixture and stir. This step probably isn’t much use with a non-stick pan but I don’t care, it’s just too dangerous to disagree with Deliah on these matters.
    Ok, pan is hot, butter is sizzling, add some of the stuff to the pan – I don’t know how much, work it out after the first one is too large or too small. Pick that pan up and swirl it about a bit before it sets to get good coverage. After 20 seconds or so give it a shuffle to make sure your pan isn’t shit.
    The rest is simple, turn it over whenever and serve some time after that. Chop the lemon in half, squeeze, add sugar, eat. Add broken glass for that special party feeling.

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    Since I was a very young boy I always though that to eat Eggs Benedict I’d have to be in a restaurant or fancy bar. Today I proved this to be untrue.

    It’s actually easy as hats and I managed to make perfect poached eggs for the first time ever. So, you need this stuff here:

  • Toasting muffin
  • 2 eggs
  • Hollandaise sauce
  • 2 slices of parma or prosciutto
  • 3 tbsps whitw wine vinegar
  • Get a big ass dep pan and fill with water an inch or so from the top. Bring it to the bil and add the vinegar. Maybe set the muffin toasting about now as we’ll only poach the eggs for 2.5 mins each. Chop it in half and put in’t toaster. Now, get a spoon and swirl the boiling water to get it vortexing faster than a pretty fast thing. Crack one of the eggs into a small jug or wtf and then slide it into the fast swirling water. In the middle, please. Now by the power of Greyskull it’ll form a tasty little sphere of egg. Let it boil for 2.5 mins and remove. Do the same with the next egg. MEANWHILE: When the muffin halves have toasted put them on’t plate and add a bit of the holland. Then fold the ham on. Then plonk the done eggs on. Then add more of holland.

    Then eat.

    Don’t forget to rinse your plate and put it in the dishwasher and turn the dishwasher on to prevent it being a pain in the arse to wash up later when you get back from the pub.

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    This recipe is from Lorna. I have yet to try it but when I remember to send the proles out to buy supplies I fully intend to create these. I have eaten some that Lorna made a while ago and they were this: amazing.

    Ingredients:

  • 125g butter
  • 100g plain chocolate
  • 200g caster sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1tsp vanilla extract
  • 90g plain flour
  • pinch of salt
  • 100g milk chocolate
  • 100g white chocolate
  • I am told the quality of the chocolate is very important so don’t buy chocolate that is crap. Beware of dark chocolates that are bitter.

    Melt the butter and plain chocolate over a pan of simmering water. When it’s all melted remove and let cool somewhat. Add the two eggs, sugar and vanilla, and stir thoroughly. Add the sifted flour and salt. Break the milk and white chocolate into chunks and add half to the mixture. Pour the amazing mixture into a greased tin and add the rest of the chocolate on top.

    35-40 minutes on 160C, or probably 150C for the fan ovens amongst us.

    Eat.

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