How to be Idle..

(originally meant to be posted on Monday, oops.)
All I've done over the past couple of days is sleep, make desserts and wash up. Here's some tasty help on how to do that.

Chocolate Brownies
What you'll need:
-250g dark chocolate
-200g caster sugar
-three eggs
-125g plain flour
-50g cocoa powder
-200g butter

What you'll need to do:
1) melt the chocolate and butter.
2) whisk the sugar and eggs in a bowl.
3) mix the chocolate mixture into the egg mixture.
4) sieve the flour and cocoa powder into the bowl containing the chocolatey eggy mixture.
5) line a small tray or dish with foil.
6) pour the mixture in and bake for 20-25 minutes at 160°C.

Blackberry Tart
What you'll need:
-blackberries! (I hand picked mine at Banstead Woods, and used enough to fill your average Chinese takeaway container.)
-any jam
(for the pastry)
-200g plain flour
-50g icing sugar
-125g butter
-two egg yolks
-pinch of salt
(for the pastry cream)
-25g plain flour
-50g sugar
-50g butter
-two eggs
-150ml milk
-two capfuls of vanilla essence

What you'll need to do:
1) sift the icing sugar and flour into a bowl and rub in the butter.
2) add the egg yolks to the mixture and bring it together in a ball.
3) sprinkle some flour on the work surface and roll out the dough.
4) grease the dish and line the dish with the pastry. It doesn't matter if it breaks up, just piece it back together. prick with a fork.
5) put foil or paper on top of the pastry and pour on baking beans. (I use rice as an equivalent). put it in the oven at 190°C. (go to step 7 while the pastry cooks).
6) after fifteen minutes, take off the baking beans and put back in for another 4 minutes.
7) while the pasty is cooking, make the pastry cream. start by melting the butter and stirring in the flour and sugar.
8) break in the eggs and beat the mixture until smooth.
9) pour in the milk, stirring constantly.
10) when the sauce gets thick, turn off the heat, whisk until smooth and stir in the vanilla essence. Cook for a further two minutes.
11) once the base and cream have cooled, spoon the pastry cream into the base.
12) add your chosen berries in any pattern you like.
13) melt some jam on the hob with some water to use as a glaze.
14) spoon some over the fruit and put in the fridge to set.


Song of the day: The Wave Pictures- I Shall Be A Ditchdigger. (Well worth clicking the link for.) I'm thinking about making a brief video for this song- it's not even on Youtube yet to the best of my knowledge! It should be!

http://soundcloud.com/acuarela-discos/the-wave-pictures-susan-rode

Tears

I keep crying today. It's acceptable. There's a lot of shit been going down in the past day or so. This blog is so awful. Oh well. I got my prom shoes on Friday (my last day of school ever sort of) and they are B E A U T I F U L. These bad boys are my dream shoes. Yes, I have dream shoes. Don't be judging me. I have my GCSE's right now. I didn't finish my English exam which I'm really pissed off about. I came straight home after the exam because I hate when people ask me about exams I've just taken. I detest that to the highest level, and I can't bare people happily telling the world they think their exam went great. I mean, that's lovely for them, but how about us all who didn't do so swimmingly? It's not so sweet to hear everybody going on about how they aced an exam. Anyway, on the way home I got on this bus and this horrible bus conductor starts being all rude to me.
'Why did you do that! You can see I'm doing something!' she rolled her eyes at me after I bleeped in my oyster card. I roll my eyes at the other passengers on the bus: I'd rounded a corner to get on the bus, my music was in, I couldn't SEE she was doing anything, her fat arse was blocking any available view. I say I couldn't, actually, and apologised.
So I wait patiently and bleep in again after she's walked away. It does that bleep-bleep thing and goes red (it does this when you're card is broken.) 'You've already done it haven't you!' she shouts at me. I walk over to the pole, peeved. 'You could see I was doing something!' she shouts at me again. 'No I couldn't, actually' I say, and she gets right up in my face (?) and tells me that I can get off the bus if I do anything else. I say I'd happily get off the bus right now and she commands the bus driver to open the doors. Once off the wretched thing, the driver shrugs at me, and I shake my head as the bus departs. I'm seriously so sick and tired of people being rude for no good reason. It's disgusting and it makes me feel so depressed. That's not the only reason that today's been emotional. I'm not going to go any further in it, only one person reads my blog anyway, haha. One brilliant person, none the less. David Bowie cheered me up. I want his face on my wall. I've been trying to search through magazines in search of interesting stuff for my wall, but I've found about nothing. Plenty of gorgeous models, but none of bands I like or anything. Maybe I should start buying more magazines. But those things are expensive and pointless. Sorry, this post has been dismal.

Song of the day to cheer y'all up: Summer Camp- Veronica Sawyer. This is fast becoming one of my favourite ever songs.

Horror

Now I love films of the horror genre, but this is not the kind of horror I am referring to here. I am talking, of course, about the horror that is the night before school after a holiday period, where you are supposed to have completed a tonne of revision and art work, (see the first image). Unlike horror films, this is a real and truly scary issue. To deal with my amazing level of incompetence, I am going to remain 'chill', maybe watch Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds while I attempt to hurriedly transcribe paintings by Degas and Schiele in various media, shitty and imperfect as ever. I did spend a lot of yesterday taking photos. Albeit, some of those photos slightly unrelated to school (they essentially consist of me wearing black cherry jam and doing stupid wacky poses in front of my dirty bed sheet. Yeah, I am maybe a little weird after all...?), a lot of them were, and I retook and retook until they began to mildly resemble the paintings I was basing my poses on. Egon Schiele's stuff had a lot of single women as his subject, so I mainly posed as the women in his work, as I only had myself at my disposal. If you 'google' him, you'll see a lot of his stuff is kind of...my friend described it 'provocative' but in my opinion it's verging on being pornographic. Although, for me porn is more about the act of sex, so a woman just displaying her vagina isn't pornographic for me, unless say her eyes are slit and she's saying I want you. But yeah, it's kind of that kind of art. Needless to say, I love it, right up my street. And I took some quite alright photographs, but I know that in my Christian school- wait, it's actually not about it being a Christian school, it's more about the maturity levels of, oh I don't know, say- 100% of my art class. If I did a really good thing everyone would be like 'that's sick', 'who is that' 'it's you?!' *laughter* 'oh my god' 'what a slut' 'who does she think she is' 'who took the photos?' People always ask me dumb shit like that. It's called SELF TIMER. Anyways, beyond that bullshit, which I undoubtedly could overcome, it's also slightly about the fact that when people come around to look at the GCSE art display, they'll see my naked body (or parts of it), being 'provocative' or whatever we're calling it. And I am not really into that. Photos (tiny incy minuscule photos) will be in my sketchbook for the middle aged parents of my peers to be...shocked, disturbed, excited about. Here they are, and PLEASE, please judge me for it. Oh, I also included a picture of a panda eating cake, for the lols. Thanks love ya bye.
Here are some albums you should be listening to:
Warpaint- The Fool
Effi Briest- Rhizomes
Salem- King Night
Pocahaunted- Make It Real
Coasting- Coasting Singles Compilation
Lykke Li- Youth Novels

Song of the day, to decapitate my well deserved feelings of stress over my work load~ Vashti Bunyan- Diamond Day. (It was on adverts. Probably for banks, you know how they like to drain all the good things from this world and corrupt them. Yes. Money is evil. I'm going to become a Buddhist if I ever take to religion.)

www.youtube.com/embed/B3W4sLS67oI

Mint.

This recipe is based on one in The Usborne Yummy Little Cookbook. I made some peppermint creams from a recipe in that book earlier this week, but they were too runny. Still tasted minty and delicious though.


Coconut Ice
You Will Need:
-450g icing sugar
-175g desiccated coconut
-2 egg whites
-4 tablespoons of water
-pink or green food dye

1) Line a shallow baking tin with baking paper and grease with a small amount of oil.
2) Stir the egg whites until frothy in a large bowl.
3) Stir in 2 tablespoons of icing sugar and gradually add in the rest.
4) Mix in the desiccated coconut and water.
5) Add half of the coconut mixture to the tin, smoothing it out about 1cm thick.
6) Stir one-two drops of food dye into the remaining mixture.
7) Spoon the rest of the coconut mixture onto the white mixture in the tin, and smooth it out.
8) Leave in the fridge or a cool place for a few hours/ overnight. Enjoy.

SOTD: Washed Out- New Theory
www.youtube.com/embed/SnTf70aX2ms

Patatas Bravas

You will need:
-A tin of chopped tomato/ loads of fresh tomatoes chopped up
-Three cloves of garlic
-Two medium sized potatoes

1) Chop the potatoes into small pieces.
2) Put them into a shallow tray. Use 1-2 tablespoons of oil over the potatoes as needed to coat them.
3) Season well with grounded pepper and salt.
4) Place in the oven at around 200 degrees celcius. Cook for around 50 minutes.
5) Meanwhile, reduce the liquid from the tinned chopped tomatoes in a small saucepan.
6) Crush in around 3 cloves of garlic. (Add more or less to your taste)
7) After around 50 minutes (you don't need to cook the tomatoes for that long at all. The aim is mainly to heat, soften and reduce the liquid), stir the potatoes into the tomatoes. Serve and enjoy.


Serves 2.
This recipe probably isn't accurate at all. Or, to use a better term, isn't true to its origins. I've had tapas about twice in my life, and as a vegetarian this was the best dish I had there. I just made this recipe up based on what I tasted.