A.C. Flory's Blog, page 29

The Making of Christmas

It’s been a fraught lead up to Christmas this year. Since my ‘I hate December’ post, both Golli and Mogi have had to go to the vet and Mogi is still not well. But Christmas must go on, so here are some pics of the Chocolate Mousse cake ‘in progress.’

The chocolate mousse. The two holes were for quality control…honest.

Two homemade chocolate sponge cakes, cut in half. Each layer will be placed in the baking tin and covered with room temperature chocolate mousse. Like this:

When all the layers are done, including for the top and sides, dark chocolate is shaved over the top:

After popping the cake back in the fridge for a couple of hours, this is what the layers look like:

It tastes sinful.

If anyone wants the recipe you can find it here.

May your Christmas be full of good food, good friends and good cheer.

love,
Meeks

‘There’s no such thing as them. There’s only us.’

If you watch only one video today, please, make it this one:

love,
Meeks

Coffee and…Arabian Macaroons!

I’ve been trying to stay away from sweets leading up to Christmas but…you know how it is? Sometimes you just have to go to the pantry and see what’s there. Or not there.

In my case, there was no chocolate, no biscuits, no sweets of any kind except for some dried dates. Yeah, me too.

The trip to the pantry wasn’t a complete waste of time though because I did find some shredded coconut, and that gave me an idea. Diving into my trusty photo album-recipe book(1), I flicked through a stack of recipes I’d found online, or in magazines [back when we still bought them], until I found a recipe for Arabian Macaroons. And wonder of wonders, I had all the ingredients!

Ingredients

1 1/3 cup coconut [I used dessicated, shredded coconut],1/2 cup finely chopped dates [hah! I used dried, pitted dates],1/2 cup chopped walnuts [I used hazelnuts because I didn’t have walnuts],1/2 cup sugar [I used caster sugar but next time I’ll reduce the quantity to 1/4 of a cup],1/8 teaspoon salt [I used a very small ‘pinch’],1 egg, well beaten,1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Original instructions that came with the recipe:

Combine coconut, dates, walnuts, sugar and salt; mix well. Blend in egg and vailla extract. Let stand 5 minutes.Drop from teaspoon onto greased baking sheet. Bake at 350F for 15 minutes or until golden brown. Remove at once from baking sheet.

My instructions:

Pre-heat oven to 350f or 170c [fan bake(2)],Line a large baking sheet with baking paper [parchment paper]. No need to grease.Finely chop the dates and hazelnuts [separately!] until they look like large ‘crumbs’,Beat 1 whole egg with the sugar, vanilla extract, and a tiny bit of salt until the mixture forms ‘the ribbon’. In other words, the egg mixture becomes thick enough to hold its shape for a few seconds when dribbled on top of the mix.Fold all the dried ingredients into the egg mixture and allow to stand at room temperature for 5 minutes.Use two spoons to take small quantities of the ‘dough’ and scrape it onto the baking paper. The mix is quite sticky and won’t just ‘drop’. It needs to be scraped out of the spoon.Place the baking sheet in the middle of the oven, and set the timer for about 12 minutes. If your oven is old and temperamental like mine, you will need to check the macaroons at that 12 minute mark to make sure they bake evenly and don’t burn. If you oven is fine, leave for 15 minutes.When golden brown, take the macaroons out of the oven and gently lift them onto a cooling rack. At this point they are still a little soft but they will firm up as they cool. Store in an air-tight container…if you can wait that long.

The finished macaroons will be crunchy on the outside and a little bit chewy on the inside. Honestly, they really are delicious.

Bon appetit!
Meeks

(1) I use those old fashioned photo albums with clear plastic sheets covering each page. I pull the sheet back, stick the recipe on the page and cover with the clear sheet again. Keeps the recipes relatively clean.

(2) Fan bake or fan forced is always a little hotter than the standard oven temperature so if you use those setting, you should drop the temperature a little to compensate.

Posts on WordPress don’t show up in a name search

I have just had a scary experience. I did a DuckDuckGo search on ‘acflory’ to see if my Youtube videos were showing up. They are. So are my Medium posts and references on Amazon and Goodreads etc. But NOTHING from WordPress.

Even when I typed in ‘acflory wordpress’ nothing showed up in the search results.

But wait, it gets worse. When I typed in the title of one of my popular posts…I got the same results. Zip. Nada. Total invisibility. Adding ‘acflory’ to the title did nothing either. Yet I’m sure I used to find references to my WordPress posts in the past.

Please – if you use WordPress.com, do a search on your name and let me know what comes up.

Thanks,
Meeks

The Essence of Haiku

I am not a poetry person. I don’t read poetry [mostly], and I certainly don’t write it, but ever since my university days, I’ve loved the sound of haiku… in Japanese.

In particular, I love the Bashō haiku about the Old Pond:

Furu ike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto

There are countless translations of this haiku, but the one I like the best is the one that sticks the most closely to the actual Japanese words:

Old pond
Frog jumps in
Sound of water

Water can have all sorts of sounds, so the onomatopoeic word ‘plop’ used in some translations kind of makes sense, but while that idea is obviously understood by Japanese readers, the actual words are so much more…subtle?

Mizu means water.
Oto means sound.
No is a possessive.

Thus ‘mizu no oto’ literally means ‘water’s sound’. It is left to our imaginations to decide which one of the many mizu no oto is made by a frog when it jumps into a pond.

It’s been fifty years since I last tried to mangle the Japanese language, so I went looking for a proper native speaker to recite this haiku. What I found was a video that gave the best explanation of haiku I’ve ever heard. Syllables vs mora vs on. Content words vs rhythm. And a whole lot more.

I promise. The video below is well worth the listen:

Oh, and you’ll find the recitation I was talking about at 2:37. You’re welcome.

Meeks

And now this…update to ‘I Hate December’

First cup of coffee. Look out the kitchen window and….

That’s a rather large branch from a Red Box eucalypt. It came to rest right in the middle of my quince tree.

All the rain we’ve had has ruined a lot of the fruit this year, and now it seems we’ll have even less than anticipated.

I’m particularly annoyed by the fact that the branch also half squashed my little fig tree…the very first year it has fruit. Grrrrr…. And to add an extra twist to my frustration, I’m now going to have to pay someone to come in and remove the branch because I don’t do chain saws.

-sigh- I really do hate this time of year.

Meeks

I hate December!

I was going to say “I hate Christmas!” but that’s not completely true. It’s not so much that I hate Christmas, it’s that I hate the lead up to Christmas, especially this year. December in Australia is the first month of summer, and summer means bushfires and snakes [we’ve seen two already].

In normal years I would have spent most of spring mowing a little bit every day. We’re on 1.6 hectares, and that equates to a lot of grass. The alpacas do their best, but in spring they can’t eat the new grass fast enough, and once the grass sets seed they won’t touch it.

So that’s in a normal year – a little bit of mowing spread out over a couple of months. This year has been different though. Australia is experiencing its third La Nina event in a row which has meant rain, rain and more rain. All that rain has triggered unprecedented floods all along the eastern seaboard with lives lost, crops lost and whole towns inundated.

We don’t have to worry about floods here in Warrandyte as we’re on a ridge, but all that rain means the grass grows an inch over night. And it’s too wet to mow during the day, especially with a small, cordless lawnmower.

In desperation, I paid for a guy to come in and whipper snipper1 the worst of it, but that’s left sheaths of grass drying on the ground. Exhibit A:

What’s worse, the new grass is already growing through. It has to be mowed.

And now we get to the other reason I hate December so much: things break down. This year, my faithful Ozito cordless lawnmover has struggled even with the lower grass, hardly surprising given that I bought it in 2016 and have used it in ways it was never designed to be used. So I had to go out and buy a new cordless mower.

I tried the new model Ozito, but it died after just one mowing session. Note to Ozito: I am so disappointed.

Thank gods Bunnings let me swap the new Ozito for a Ryobi cordless. The Ryobi is a great little mower but it’s battery takes ages to re-charge and the catcher is a stupid design so the outlet from the blade constantly clogs up. But at least it does cut like a champion. Exhibit B, a pic taken looking back up at the house:

But December hasn’t finished with me yet.

We had a couple of days of ‘hot’ weather recently so we filled up the firefighting pumps with petrol and tested them. One started without a hitch. The other tried to start but just wouldn’t catch. Grrrrr….

I do have a fabulous mechanic who fixed the last problem with the pumps, but he’s flat out until….you guessed it, Christmas.

I’m not too worried as I don’t think we’ll have any major fires until maybe mid-January, and one of the pumps does work, but still…I did not need this, not the worry and certainly not the hit to my budget. If the Reserve Bank is reading this post <> I didn’t intend to contribute to inflation this year!

Anyway, it looks as if it might rain again soon so I’d better get out there. Who needs a gym when you’ve got grass? -grump-

Meeks

Whipper snipper1 : I think it’s called a ‘brush cutter’ elsewhere in the world.

Books that authors love, including me

Many years ago, I started a blog to showcase book recommendations by other authors. It was a nice idea that never got off the ground. And then along came Shepherd, a nice idea that did get off the ground. I’m thrilled to be a part of this new way of reaching readers.

But what is Shepherd?

I see Shepherd as a cross between Goodreads, that blog I mentioned, and word of mouth. Plus the website itself is beautifully laid out and provides readers with lists of books recommended by authors themselves. Each recommendation comes with a kind of personalised mini-review, and the whole website just works.

This is a pic of my list. I called it ‘The best books that explore what it means to be human’:

Each author gets to recommend five books so click on the link:

https://shepherd.com/best-books/explore-what-it-means-to-be-human

…to see all five of mine.

At the bottom of my list are links to other lists in a similar vein. I had a look at some of them – how could I not? – and discovered that I’m not alone in loving Dune and Left Hand of Darkness! And that makes me think I might give the authors who recommended them a try. After all, if they like what I like, maybe they’ll write stuff I’ll like too!

If you’re a voracious reader like me and always on the look out for new favourite authors, Shepherd could well become the discovery tool of the future.

cheers,
Meeks

Dog Bone Soup – on sale for 99c

No, I haven’t suddenly taken up butchering! Dog Bone Soup, by Bette A. Stevens, is one of the best historical novels I’ve ever read. I gave it 5/5 stars when I first reviewed it, and I still give it 5/5. Here’s a short excerpt from Bette’s blog:

“BOYS, GET IN HERE. Hurry up!”

We set the groceries on the table and ran in to see what Mum was so worked up about.

“President Kennedy’s body’s back in Washington. Look, they’re switching from the Washington to that Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. The world’s at a standstill and no wonder. I can’t believe that someone’s gone and killed the President…Sit down. Watch.”

“What’s for dinner?” I asked when I handed her the change.

“Good. We have more than a dollar left for the week.”

“What about dinner, Mum?”

“I’ll fix us some supper, later. We had plenty of hotcakes to tide us over this morning,” Mum sat there, captivated by the news.

Coverage went on all day and long into the night. Willie and I went out to cut and split fire wood for the week. Then we grabbed our fishing poles and ran down to the brook. I figured if we caught something, we could have a nice fry for supper, even if I had to fix it myself.

Willie peeled and cut potatoes while I figured out how to mix flour and cornmeal and get the fish going. I set the fish on the stove to keep warm while I fried up the potatoes.

We never did get Mum away from the darned TV.

https://4writersandreaders.com/2022/11/22/dog-bone-soup-99%c2%a2-thru-november-27th-holiday-sale-remembering-thanksgiving-1963-excerpt/comment-page-1/#comment-66766

If you prefer a trailer, here’s a short, two minute video to watch:

Or go to Bette’s blog and check out the entire post here.

Whatever you do, I strongly suggest grabbing a copy of the book while it’s on sale.

You’re welcome,
Meeks

Making videos and other bits and pieces

It’s been an odd week, with lots of rain and too little sleep, but I have been fairly productive. First up is my latest how-to video: ‘ESO – how to build a pointy wall’. It’s quite a long video so I don’t expect anyone to watch it all the way through!

The reason I’m showcasing this video is because of the new skills I’ve learned using VideoStudio Pro 2021, my video editing software.

The first thing I learned was how to create short, animated visual directions. The video below is only a few seconds long and demonstrates what I mean about a ‘visual direction’:

The animation is created from within VideoStudio Pro 2021 using the Painting Tool. I can see this tool getting a lot of use once I start making how-to videos for self-publishing.

The second thing I learned was how to manually fade the background music in and out. VideoStudio Pro 2021 has a feature called ‘Audio Ducking’ which is supposed to make the music go quiet when there’s narration on the video. The feature is okay, but I wasn’t too impressed with when it decided to raise and lower the volume of the music. So I went looking for a manual solution and found one.

The blue track is the music track, and the purple one is for narration. When I’m talking, I want the music to be very soft, but when there’s a gap in the narration, I want the music to swell. The section of the tracks I’ve circled in red is one of those gaps. As you can see, the white line showing the volume of the music goes up – i.e. becomes louder – while I’m not talking.

To make VideoStudio Pro display the audio controls, press the icon circled in red below:

Controlling the volume of the music manually is a bit time-consuming and ‘clunky’, but I think the end result is much better.

In case anyone is interested, the music was created by Peritune, a Japanese composer who writes lovely, non-jarring music that compliments my videos beautifully.

And last but not least, I’ve just made my new Youtube ‘handle’ :

I’m not quite sure how the handle is actually supposed to work, but apparently in time, it will be used to personalise the URL of my Youtube channel. A small thing, but Indies have to grab their branding where they find it!

It’s Sunday here in Melbourne, and for a wonder the rain has stopped so I’m going to do a garden promenade with the animals.

Have a great weekend,
Meeks