Bake Off Blues

And no I'm not about to moan and whimper about how the BBC has lost the rights to show The Great British Bake-Off. There are several reasons for this.

 

1 - The program, judging by the current series, has totally lost the plot, and I'm not sure that I would have bothered watching another year, whoever broadcast it.

2 - Unlike what seems to be half the viewing public of Britain I do not worship Mary Berry as a god, Paul Hollywood I can take or leave and  I am not a fan of the presenting style of Mel'n'Sue. I especially dislike their constant use of the seaside humour pun, which almost everyone else in the world seems to think is central to the success of the program. All I can say to that claim is Not for Me.

3 - The BBC have moaned and whimpered and whinged enough about this on their own behalf.

 

4-- There are more important things  to worry about. Really people! with the world as it is should this actually be a front page story in newspapers who claim to be serious?

No, the bake off blues under consideration here are my own personal ones. Regular readers may recall that I was planning to take a recipe from each week's program and try it out myself. In theory this is a great idea, but how has it worked out in practice?

 

Not well, has to be the answer. First off was Lee's St Clement's drizzle which, again as regular readers will recall,  was not a success.  Next up I made these from biscuit week

These are Benjamina's Iced Chocolate and Orange Zest biscuits. They don't look like hers, because she made hers in the shape of a bunch of flowers and iced them appropriately, but I don't have a cutter shaped like a bunch of flowers and it did say in the recipe that a 6cm round cutter would do just as well.

 

I can't call these a total failure because texture wise they were, rather surprisingly , spot on. They had that 'snap' that Paul and Mary look for in a biscuit and they were nice and crumbly when you bit into them. But gentles  there's the rub, as Shakespeare didn't quite say, because the fact is they didn't taste very nice, due to having far too much cocoa in them and therefore being more than a little bitter. I hasten to add that they had in them the exact amount of cocoa as per the recipe, but for our taste that was just too much.

 

Well by this stage  I was starting to wonder if perhaps there was something wrong with our taste buds and perhaps this bake a Bake-Off thing a week wasn't such a good idea, a suspicion confirmed by the universe over the next few weeks of the program.

 

After biscuits it was bread week. The bakers started off having to produce a chocolate loaf, which was a non starter for me because I have long held the view that bread dough and chocolate do not go together and I have recently given up eating chocolate anyway for health reasons. The technical challenge was something previously unheard of, a sort of German steamed bun which looked anaemic and horrible and which I would never dream of cooking, and the showstopper task was to make a plaited loaf using three different sorts of dough. A non-starter of a week.

 

Next up was batter week. This was trailed as a Bake Off first which is hardly surprising because I know very few bakers who would think of batter as the stuff of baking (except for the use, in North America, of the term batter for a cake or muffin mix). I was amazed, while watching the first round to discover how difficult some people find it to make Yorkshire puddings. Again I contend Yorkshire pudding is not baking, but cooking, although it is one of the few bits of cooking I am deft at, having learned it at my other's knee. The technical challenge was lacy pancakes. Lacy pancakes? What is the point of a lacy pancake? What are you supposed to do with it? The point about pancakes is surely the filling; pray tell me, what sort of filling can you put on a lacy pancake? I say on since obviously to wrap it up and put a filling in would be to defeat the object of producing a heart shaped lacy pancake in the first place. Finally they got to make churros with a dipping sauce; again I say, that is not baking . That is cooking, in my mind. I might stretch to include the churro as a baked good of sorts: I would deny it on the  grounds that it is deep fried, but there again so are doughnuts... However sauces are not baking, sauces are cooking. So of the three things on offer for an amateur baker to give a go to, one I could do, one I thought was pointless and one I thought wasn't really baking. So again I didn't bother.

 

This week was pastry week. It included miniature Danish pastries, and as it happens Danish pastries are on my Project 60 list, but when I do them I'll be using a recipe from my tried and tested M & S Good Home Baking book, since it has never yet led me to bake anything I didn't like the taste of once it was in my mouth - unlike Bake Off which is currently running a 100% record in that direction.

 

Next week incidentally is being trailed as 'Botanical Week' whatever that is - like I said, they appear to have lost the plot.

An Unexpected Bonus - The Marriage of Figaro

After  we had booked our opera holiday way back when, we got a letter saying that the company had managed to source some tickets for The Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm and would we like to buy some. We thought about it briefly, but came to the conclusion that what with Drottningholm and the train trip to the Festival at Skaret we would probably be all opera'd out by the Monday night so we declined. However we were starting to regret this decision quite early on, so when the tour leader came round saying that there were two free tickets going because a couple had had to cancel their holiday altogether and would anyone like them, we bit his hand off as the saying goes. And we're so glad we did.

 

The Roya Opera House in Stockholm is a lovely building inside and out. You're obviously not allowed to take photographs of the performances but here are some pics I managed to grab of the interior before the opera began.

 

 

Quite ornate and not usually the sort of thing that I like - but opera houses are all about swagger and drama.

 

The production of Figaro was quite the oddest I have ever seen. It was set in what appeared to be a Grand Hotel in the 1930s, presumably on the French or Italian Riviera. In some ways this worked quite well, in other ways it was so-so and of course in some ways it was just silly, because the opera isn't actually written to be set in a hotel but on a large private estate and this gives rise to some odd moments in the action. Note, I'm not against up-dating or re-siting opera per se. I saw a fantastic Tosca set in Mussolini's Italy once which really worked, and a 1950s Boheme which was fine and even the infamous ENO scrapyard set Carmen had a certain amount going for it. But you know, you have to be careful.

 

Leaving aside the setting, this Figaro was Open Season for gropers. Everyone was groping everyone else, to the extent that the production was not 'erotic' as heralded in the program but bizarrely and banal-ly (which probably isn't a word) boringly unerotic.  I suppose there's no reason why Cherubino shouldn't be bi-sexual, but Figaro and the Count as well?? Figaro himself was also portrayed as violently sadistic, which again may ( just may, I'm not convinced) be supported by the libretto but it's not something that I've seen before and not something I'm keen to see again in a hurry. This is also the only time I've watched The Marriage of Figaro and wanted to slap Cherubino every time he appeared on stage. However that may be how we're supposed to see him.

 

The sad thing was that many people were so overwhelmed by horror/disgust/annoyance at the production that they couldn't see past it to the excellent singing and acting going on on the stage and the equally excellent work being done by the orchestra in the pit. If your production gets in the way of the singers, that's a pretty cardinal sin in my book. We have just booked to go and see Scottish Opera's Marriage of Figaro at the end of October, a revival of Sir Thomas Allen's recent  production for them, and that I know will be a lot more traditional. You don't want traditional every time, but I'll happily settle for it on this occasion, if only as an antidote!

Free Time on Stockholm Day 2

So, what with Stockholm being a city on the sea and spreading over a large archipelago of islands there are a plethora of boat trips on offer to tourists and we're suckers for those, so no surprise that we spent the morning doing that very thing. The one we chose was relatively short as we had other plans for the afternoon. In effect it just chugged out to one of the larger islands - Djurgarden - and motored slowly round it. It was very pleasant though, there's nothing quite like being on the water on a sunny day, enjoying the view, sipping coffee and  watching people go about their daily lives.

 

There are pictures, naturally

 

 

 

May have overdone it there with the pictures but it's hard to choose.

 

The afternoon we spent wandering round Stockholm's Old Town - Gamla Stan, mainly looking at shops and buying a few nice bits and pieces, mostly for other folk, it must be said. I heroically resisted the urge to find either of the excellent wool shops that I know there are in Gamla Stan on the grounds that I am not in need of Any More Wool. There are a couple of pictures of little details I took in Gamla Stan

 

 

I should have taken more and probably will when we go back in December.

 

Free Time in Stockholm Day 1

We had two free days in Stockholm on our trip and we tried to make the most of them, although slightly hampered by the OH's disdain for Public Transport. The interesting bits of Stockholm are fairly compact, but fairly compact is a variable concept and his and mine certainly don't co-terminate. I will draw a veil over the bouts of marital discord this engendered, and you will be relieved to hear that I never did take a photo of the huge and painful blister I developed on one of my toes as a result of being forced to walk everywhere all the time even when the sensible option would have been to take the underground.

 

Incidentally as far as the blister goes it went from 'No, there's nothing there, I can't see why it's painful, maybe you've just rubbed your foot against your sandal' to 'Gosh, yes, that's a really horrible blister, you really don't want to be walking any further than you have to on that, and for goodness sake don't prick it' in less than 24 hours. I am fairly convinced that the actuality of the blister didn't change, just a certain person's perception of it. Also, after 36 years of marriage during which I have never ever been tempted to burst a blister I do not really know why he was suddenly so set on telling me not to do it. The thought would never have crossed my (pain-numbed) mind.

 

Anyway one of the free days we spent visiting the Vasa Museum. It was decades, literally, since our last visit so we were keen to go and see it again, take in a bit more of it, and see the updated displays and so on. Here's  the website, and here's what it says on the front page, which tells you what you need to know about what the Vasa is and why it's important.

 

The Vasa ship capsized and sank in Stockholm 1628. After 333 years on the sea bed the mighty warship was salvaged and the voyage could continue. Today Vasa is the world's only preserved 17th century ship and the most visited museum in Scandinavia.

 

One of the great things about the Museum is that there are hardly any restrictions on taking photographs, although to be fair the light levels make personal photography a bit of a challenge. Here's a selection of what I took

 

 

 

The top two are of the small scale model they have beside the original; underneath is a detail from the restored stern of the real thing.

 

more carvings from the interior of the reclaimed ship

 

Our lunch table - as you can see it was a grey mizzly day. But it's a lovey setting for a museum café. Can I just say the Museum Shop is also excellent. We spent a lot of money in there, and could have spent a lot more had we not restrained ourselves.

 

It was a long, possibly refreshing, walk back to our hotel, which wasn't the most conveniently situated to be honest. What with the blister and the rain we decided to eat in the hotel; this turned out to be a mistake as it was the worst, most expensive and inefficiently served meal we had during our whole stay. Possibly because it was Sunday. Or possibly not.  

 

Not Going Beck

There's a pun in the title there, but only obvious to Britain dwelling English speakers ....

It seems like only yesterday, although it is probably more like a month, that I was rejoicing in the return to our  screens of Beck, the Swedish crime drama, and appointment to view TV as far as I was concerned.

Sadly after the episode which aired last evening, I won't be watching anymore.

The point about Beck was that I didn't watch it for the lugubrious protagonist, or his misery-hunched, whey-faced daughter, or  his mad drunken neighbour who seems to  wear a permanent neck brace from choice, or for idiot boy Oskar the  no-longer rookie cop who still persists in making rookie cop mistakes.

 

No I watched Beck for bad boy Mikael Persbrand playing Beck's volatile sidekick Gunvald Larsson. Gunnvald was the sort of cop that we should all  deplore in real life; an end justifies the means cop, a let's clear the streets of this trash even if we have to break rules to do it cop, a cop who had no patience with a system that seemed sometimes to protect the guilty more assiduously than it avenged the innocent. And he wasn't above doing things that as a policeman he shouldn't do, in  order to weigh the scales a little more in favour of those who were wronged, rather than those who wronged them.

He was I suppose a character who was always going to come to bad end, but I wasn't prepared for the bad end not to coincide with the end of the series as a whole. Beck without Gunnvald is going to be like crisps without salt - totally non-consumable. Especially as, as far as I can tell,  Persbrand was replaced by a man with a face like a troll and an extremely unkempt red beard.



It's not the best picture of Persbrand I've ever seen. But you have to hope it's the worst picture ever taken of his replacement. Or is that too harsh?
 

Not Closing the Circle

I'm not superstitious. Not really. I walk under ladders, and I don't avoid cracks on the pavement and those Fridays that come round with the number 13 attached to them don't bother me. OK, when I spill salt I always pick up a pinch of it and throw it over my left shoulder but that's a reflex thing. Honest.

 

But a funny thing happened during our last week in Australia. I know, you can't believe I never finished chronicling it, and I can't believe it either, and I guess after all this time what you haven't heard you won't be missing, but here's the thing that happened.

 

We were staying near my friend S, who I have visited every time I have visited Australia, bar once. There's a lot of water gone under the bridge since my first trip, but when I went that first time, she and her husband and her daughter picked me up at the local railway station and we went to a  pub for lunch and I had a steak sandwich.

 

This time, for the first time since that first occasion, we went back to that very same pub. Not with her husband, as he sadly died a few years ago, but her daughter was there just like before. And I looked at the menu and I thought, I'll have a steak sandwich. And then I thought, no, I can't have a steak sandwich because if I place the same order in the same place it will be like closing a circle and I'll never come back here again.

 

I don't know where this sudden attack of constraining atavism came from and it was remarkably odd. That said, since I have every intention of returning to see S and family for many years to come, I refrained from ordering a steak sandwich and had something else instead.

 

 

It was a fun lunch, much enlivened by S and daughter bickering over whether or not the daughter could keep a horse in her Mum's duck house. Happy Days!

Project 60 - Number 34

This has to be a quick one as I have a very busy day, but here's a pic

That's a long tail cast on. Something which, like Jenny's Exceedingly Stretchy Bind Off  of blessed memory  hadn't previously  bothered my knitting mind. However I have a new knitting project which called for a long tailed cast on, and despite it being extra complicated because I was using two colours, and despite the fact that I had to follow a You Tube video to cast on every single stitch because I just couldn't 'get' it, I managed in the end.

 

I have to say that actually I rather liked the resulting edge and I can see that another time, when a project I am comfortable with (which the current one isn't), calls for a long tailed cast on I might well actually use it, rather than declare 'Blow that for a game of soldiers' and use my normal over the thumb method.