In Sickness

It’s about that time of year when everyone in the city is getting ill.  My flatmate is coming down with a cold, my boss is sick, everyone at work has the sniffles and worst of all, today I had to interview a guy with what sounded like the chest infection of doom.  I’m pretty sure it’s my turn next – a belief supported by the fact that I am definitely not getting enough sleep and public transportation seems to be better than a nutrient-rich petri dish for growing bacteria.  Thank goodness it’s the weekend and I can stock up on sleep, soup and sanity.

Generally when I feel myself getting sick, I just try to eat a lot of fruits and veggies (right, so, need to go shopping for said healthy things tomorrow), sleep a lot (already failing… it’s late and I need to get to bed!) and not think about stressful things.  This weekend I’m going to take a day trip to Windsor Castle as I haven’t been there year but other than that, the plan is to eat, sleep and maybe, if I’m feeling particularly motivated, do some laundry.

What do you do when you’re starting to get sick to ward off the germs?


Concrete and Glass

Every week, Spoonfed does a city-wide newsletter that selects the best upcoming event and recommends them to our (limited but enthusiastic) fan base.  It’s not often that I have the chance to attend any of the event, unless they’re art exhibitions that are open on the weekend, but yesterday I had the opportunity to swing by part of the Concrete and Glass festival to hear the Errors play at the Old Blue Last pub.  I was accompanied by an incredibly gentlemanly man who bought me both drinks and entrance to the concert although I don’t get the feeling I’ll be seeing him again (I don’t know which was more offputting for him – the fact that I was just barely 22 or the fact that I was a fiscal conservative and didn’t think Obama was God’s gift to mankind.  Shame, he was quite a great guy.)

In anycase, we arrived at the Old Blue Last at about 9:30pm just in time to hear the openers which were called something like Screaming Years… or Scream Year… or Scream and Cheer…. Whatever their name, they looked about fourteen years old.  They had stepped in at the last minute to fill the place of the opener who had dropped out (supposedly to attend a funeral.  What kind of excuse is that?).  I was completely distracted by the fact that the lead singer/guitarist/keyboardist looked absurdly like my brother which was a good thing not only in that I miss my brother but that I was distracted from their rather screamy vocals.  The music was great, however, very indie-rock, but it wasn’t a very long set and soon they were clearing the way for the Errors themselves.

My friend for the evening had heard the Errors before while at a music festival but hadn’t seen them lived since.  I had been warned they were fairly heavily influenced by electro sounds in addition to being instrumental rockers, which in general wouldn’t have sounded like my cuppa tea but I ended up really enjoying the show.  It was jam packed with barely room to move, let alone dance, and it was a great atmosphere for a concert.  The Errors wouldn’t have been my first choice of gig but they were fun, enthusiastic and, as my friend put it, apologetically Scottish.

Really, what more could you ask for?


More baking

Sunday was Ann’s birthday and so with a wonderful excuse to do some proper baking (which I hadn’t done in quite a while) I picked the most complex cake recipe I could find, raided the grocery store for enough chocolate to make everyone else in line raise an eyebrow (and look on quite jealously) and scoured the kitchen for anything that could make my job easier (I’m still using plastic pint glasses as measuring cups as they don’t have American style measuring cups here and we don’t have an ingredients scale).

Image of what the cake was supposed to look like - take from Martha Stewart's website.

The recipe I decided to use was from Martha Stewart’s website and is a Devil’s Food Cake with Chocolate Ganache (picture from her website above) which is basically an excuse for chocolate covered chocolate covered chocolate cake with chocolate filling. I’ve reposted the ingredients below so you can get a sense of how rich this cake is:

Ingredients

Makes one 9-inch layer cake

* 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened, plus more for pans
* 3/4 cup Dutch-process cocoa powder, sifted, plus more for pans
* 3/4 cup hot water
* 3/4 cup sour cream
* 3 cups cake flour (not self-rising), sifted
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 2 1/4 cups sugar
* 4 large eggs
* 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
* Chocolate Ganache

For the instructions, check out the cake on Martha’s site.

I had used this recipe once before – in an attempt to make the cake while at college at Colby. Unfortunately due to a series of scheduling conflicts, we didn’t end up in the kitchen we had planned on using and found ourselves continually sticking the cake and the ganache out in the Maine snow in an attempt to get the chocolate to cool. This time, with at the very least a refrigerator, I wanted to prove that Martha’s cake couldn’t master me.

I’m not sure I entirely did so. The cake turned out pretty well (and quite delicious) but there were a number of minor issues. First – I would advise you NOT to try this recipe if you don’t have an electric mixer. I did it by hand and beating the ganache for the middle layer took about 40 minutes of whisking. Also, I didn’t have two layer cake pans so used a single, larger 9-inch pan, planning to cut the cake in half to create two layers. This worked alright, although it doubled the baking time which meant that the outsides were just a tad overdone. Unfortunately, in my impatience to get going with the frosting (which I had just spent 90 minutes preparing, including 40 minutes of whisking), I tried to start spreading the ganache before the cakes had cooled which caused the chocolate to melt all over the counter – and the top layer to break in half!

In the end, the cake came out surprisingly well and looking a lot more like the picture than I had ever expected. Let me know what you think:


Colby in London

I didn’t have a chance to say that over the weekend, I had the opportunity to meet up with Parker Beverage, the director of Admissions at Colby, when he came to London to take part in a college fair for prospective students.

On Saturday afternoon I made my way across town to join him at the fair and had an absolutely wonderful time gushing about Colby to some quite scared-looking prospies and their rather intense-looking parents. In most cases, they were international students (from all over the world) studying in London but there were a number of Brits as well. I always forget how much I enjoy talking about Colby until I have a chance to start raving about my Alma Mater. It really was an incredible experience and I’m so happy I went by.

After the fair, Parker and I grabbed coffee and it was great to chat with him just on the level of someone who understands the Colby culture. He also was quite familiar with Castilleja (his niece went there) and the Bay Area. I gave him the DormWise pitch as well and if he comes across anyone who might be able to help me out by taking over the site, he promised to put us in touch.

Best part of it all? I am now on the radar for someone who can do alumni interviews in London :).


Beer Exposed

In the ongoing quest to experience as much of London as possible in the name of event reviews (i.e. for free) I am always excited when I get press tickets from Spoonfed or complimentary tickets for no particular reason at all – as was the case when some random promoter handed me three tickets to Beer Exposed while I was on the tube to work earlier last week. Last night, Sarah and Steve (my now married dancing friends couple – congratulations to the two of them! Although it does make me feel a bit old to have friends who are married couples. I digress.) and I headed off to Beer Exposed at the Business Design Centre in Islington to see what this whole thing was about.

Well, as no one was really surprised to discover, it was about getting drunk. We made a solid effort to treat the event like the beer coineseur’s paradise that it was supposed to be – we took the small sample cups of international beers, read the brochures about what food to pair with which color of ale, got experimental with some fruit (raspberry and strawberry), savoury (coffee and chocolate) and vegetable (carrot and pumpkin) beers which was actually quite enjoyable, but in the end, it was lots of happy inebriated people.

Our two favourites had to be the champagne beer which is made with champagne yeast so as to have the consistency and flavour of champagne (courtesy of Kasteel Cru brewing company) and the raspberry beer (provided by the Brouwerij De Halve Maan group and, apparently, the Flanders and Belgium tourist board). After I had a few drinks in me, I got somewhat patriotically excited by the American brewing companies present which led to this photographic gem (thank you Sierra Nevada Pale Ale):

In addition to Sierra Nevada, some of the other American breweries present included Budwieser, Brookyn Brewers and Blue Moon - which I seem to remember being an on-tap favourite at the Colby pub. Yes, that's Steve in the background.

Also unsurprisingly, it was an incredibly friendly crowd. The patrons were happy, the distributors were happy, everyone was smiling and having a great time. Without a doubt, that event solicited the most interaction between strangers I’ve seen yet in London. It could be their new slogan for next year: “Sick of avoiding eye contact on the tube? Come to Beer Exposed where everyone is your friend whether you know them or not.” I meet a lovely promoter from Ireland who explained to me what the “quintessential British beer” was (she was less than flattering, Brits); an American guy doing a graduate program here who wants to get involved with Spoonfed, another promoter who also got really excited about Spoonfed and will be following up to do some writing with us, and a distributor’s housemate who got dragged along to the event – who gave me probably more free bottles of the beer to take home than he would have had he been working for the company himself and I think asked me out next Thursday.

Overall it was a lot of fun. I don’t know if I would have paid the 14 quid entry, although had I thought about it, since my ticket was free I should have signed up for one of the workshops where they teach you how to pair chocolate or other foods with different beers (with samples) for the extra fiver. It was the first one of these events and I think they’re looking to make it an annual thing. Definitely the most important change for next year would be to get more food at the event next year – the occasional cracker at one or two of the booths was definitely not enough.

Which meant that, after we left, Steve, Sarah and I poured ourselves into the first pizza place we saw. Sorry British kebab shops… we just wanted our drunk pizza.