The Top Floor Flat

Last Friday was an exciting day in Spoonfed HQ.  Not only was the weather glorious and there was left over cake from the previous Cake Thursday, but Matt Cowen of Reuters TV came by to pay us a visit, camera in tow, and to learn more about the Spoonfed Radar application for the iPhone.  He interviewed Alex, took some shots of the office, and put together this little piece about finding London nightlife using mobile apps.  If you look closely you’ll spot the back of my head…

Leave a Comment

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:

[13] Comments

Brilliant, so after a week I finally got YouTube to upload my video of last week’s concert in Hyde Park to celebrate Andrew Lloyd Webber’s birthday. To be fair, the fact that they were so far off on the date (even the man himself pointed out that we were all there about six months too late) had more to do with the fact that the massive stage from the BBC Proms in the Park the night before was going to be unused that Sunday and they had to fill it with something rather than the fact that BBC Radio2 and Andrew Lloyd Webber aren’t Facebook friends (honestly, how did we remember anyone’s birthday without Facebook?). In any case, I have to admit that I didn’t much mind who we were celebrating or what they’d be playing because I was going to see John Barrowman present.

Mr. John Barrowman is a television and stage actor who just happens to be one of the most fantastic characters in the Doctor Who universe and so I couldn’t pass up a chance to see him present the show, and sing. In my excitement to see the dashingly attractive (unfortunately gay) and talented John Barrowman, I had actually forgotten how much I do enjoy most of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music.

Ann and I, along with her co-Girl Guiding leader Ellie, packed a delicious picnic dinner (more difficult than you might imagine when Ellie is gluten-free, Ann is vegetarian and I like meat and bread) a bottle of wine, and made our way to Hyde Park. The concert area was enormous and we were quite far back but thankfully they had set up giant screens. Effectively, I was just watching the event on TV, but it was a lovely night and being outside, with all the other people at the event, was quite fun.

I was also amazed at the other stars who were in attendance that night - of course I hadn’t looked much farther down the playbill than John Barrowman’s name when I was reading about the event, but Joss Stone (the blurry person in white in the video below), Idina Menzel (the less blurry person singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”) and a bunch of people from the reality TVs shows here in Britain to find people to play the West End roles in Joseph and Oliver.

I had a great time, actually a lot more fun than I expected. The music was fun, everyone was having a good time, and I hope Andrew Lloyd Webber felt rather proud of himself when 3500 people all stood up and sang “Any Dream Will Do.” Happy birthday Mr. Webber. Thanks for some wonderful music.

You know, after the fact, I realised that I had recorded mostly the songs from Evita which is my favourite ALW music but were not the best performances of the night.  If you’re so inclined, there are so pretty bad quality (like mine!) videos of the performance of “Light at the End of the Tunnel” from Starlight Express which might have been my favourite song of the night.

Speaking of birthdays… I have a flatmate who’s got a birthday soon….

1 Comment

As promised (you didn’t think I’d carry through, did you!) here is actual footage of me dancing. Last night was the last night in town for Sarah and Steve before they head off to Sydney (lots of ’s’s for that family) to get married next month. I’m really going to miss them both but it’s going to be so weird not to have Sarah at the office, and then at the dance classes! I’m so glad everyone in the office is so nice, but it’s been especially great to get to know Sarah. In addition to being incredibly sweet and fun, she also manages to find more free things to do around London than I would have thought possible! She was kind enough to lend me her fiance for the dance; keep in mind that I am an absolute beginner (last night was one full week of dance classes!). Also, I overlayed the track because the music came out really fuzzy and there was a lot of chatter - so I just added in the sound again myself :).

Oh, I should mention, that the dance class uses jive steps but modern music, which is great for us as that means you can actually dance in a club somewhere, you don’t just have to wait for big band music. Alright, enough stalling. Here it is - the culmination of 7 Jive Nation dance classes.

Because it’s a little dark I’ll throw in a few more stills that Sarah took throughout the night (not that these were posed at all :-P).

So, that’ll probably be all you see from dancing for a while until my trusted photo- and film-ographers return from Sydney. Today is my day off which means I have more to do than I could possibly imagine. Off to Wales tomorrow morning!

Leave a Comment

At the risk of documenting something that will be a source of long-term embarrassment (if only because I always hate the sound of my own voice once it’s recorded) I’m just doing a quick update to share one of two videos I made for Spoonfed. This is a site tour for some of the basic features. Yes… I am an American doing the narration for a website about London. Unfortunately David Attenborough wasn’t available. Enjoy!

Leave a Comment

Whew, what a weekend! It’s right late and I’ve got to get up early for work so I’m keeping this short(-ish).

Saturday, I headed out early to get to the Tate Modern as it was opening. I allowed myself about 40 min for the journey, way more than was necessary. What I didn’t count on was being stunned speechless by the amazing Millennium Bridge which crosses from St. Pauls on the one side of the Thames to the Tate Modern on the other. It was absolutely gorgeous and I was about halfway across (a process which had already taken me a good ten minute as I was oogling the view) when I realized that sitting right next to the Tate on the opposite side of the river was the Globe Theatre (of Shakespearian fame) and I nearly fell in I was so exited! I had forgotten it was in the area and suddenly there it was in all of its Elizabethan glory.

I spent a lovely morning at the Tate Modern, which had some absolutely stunning Picassos, Matisses, Kalinskys and Pollacks to name just a few. I was there quite a bit longer than I had planned because there was so much to see, and I didn’t even go into the paid exhibits as there were over two floors of free show rooms.

After I had exhausted the Tate, I wandered over to the Globe and was so excited to be there that, on a whim, I bought tickets for a Sunday night performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play of which I knew the basic plot but not the details (it’s one of the relatively few plays I haven’t read by Shakespeare!). I got some poor touring couple to take my picture in front of the iconic building and wandered off towards the Tower of London (where the lines were too long and prices too steep for me to even consider going in) and caught a train up to Camden Town, already excited for my Globe experience the next night.

Camden Market is a huge sprawling outdoor market of stalls that sell everything you could possibly imagine, from clothes to shoes to food to accessories to musical instruments to fob watches (Beth, if you’re reading this, I was *so* close to getting a fob watch, but it had some naff picture of Big Ben on one side!) to toys… it was unbelievable, and I only saw a small part of the market. I bought a pair of trainers which I desperately needed and a backpack, then made my way back home to watch my Saturday night fill of Doctor Who (which didn’t remotely fill. In fact it was a total cliffhanger ending as it was the penultimate episode of the season).

Sunday was an incredibly lazy day - I cleaned house, relaxed, did some writing, and took it easy before heading off in the evening to see my play at the Globe. It was FANTASTIC! I can’t even describe what fun it was. I was there with some of the most brilliant audience members who really knew their Shakespeare, and the actors were wonderful! I was roaring with laughter the entire time, as was the rest of the crowd. The way it works is there are seats (expensive) or you can stand in the ground level, in front of the stage, where you would have stood in the Elizabethan era if you were fairly poor but wanted to see a play (hey! like me!). I was right in the middle of the action as the stage literally wrapped around where I was standing. It was so much fun, and I was grinning all the way home.

Tomorrow starts another busy work week, but hopefully I’ll have time for a few social things! Hope everyone stateside is doing well!

Leave a Comment

<a href=”http://megabroad.livejournal.com/782.html”>Listen to my phone update from the JFK Airport in New York before leaving for London</a>

Leave a Comment