The puff pastry performed admirably, rising to glorious heights and flaking into as many layers as could be wished. The custard squares as a whole weren’t quite as successful, though. They tasted good, but I was unable to replicate the rubbery solidity of bakery custard squares. Instead it made a thickish custard that promptly squoze out the sides when I tried to cut them. Any ideas? Helpdesk Man suggested using gelatine and it may come to that, but I don’t quite fancy the idea. Maybe I could try doing a baked custard - they tend to be firm and cuttable. Sort of a Spanish flan deal which I then slapped between puff pastry and iced. It seems tedious though, and none of the recipes I’ve found suggest it. Maybe Firm and Upright Custard is simply not reproducible by the home cook, being comprised of chemicals too vile to name. I suspect that is the case… but I like Firm and Upright Custard. A conundrum.
Took the pig to Lollipop’s Playland on Saturday. It’s an indoor play area thingy with a ball pit, bouncy castle, tunnels and so on. The pig had a marvellous time, although much of it was spent in examining, dropping and laboriously finding again (and again and again) a number of large sequins which had presumably fallen off some child’s clothes. In between times she amused herself immensely by bouncing on the bouncy castle, stealing her aunt’s fries and trying to climb up slides in the toddler section (a vulgar and loutish practice of which I disapprove). When we left at the end I was surprised at her biddability, vaguely expecting a tantrum… and then we discovered she still had the sequins clutched firmly in her fat wee hand.
Right, well, this week’s challenge is to be productive. Because I have things to do, including sorting out some drearily soul-sucking matter with the IRD (turns out throwing away letters from them on the grounds that one is not really into taxes and finds the whole process sordid isn’t as sound a financial plan as one might think); binding a quilt; hastily making some summer tops for the snortlepig; and plowing through a huge number of books, DVDs and CDs lent to me by various folk who want them back. And I need to write more articles, of course. I keep getting behind on my Hair Care articles - once a week comes around more often than expected.
So anyway, I am reluctantly allowing myself no internet again this week, except for email and work-related purposes. Hopefully I’ll either do useful things out of boredom or read some of my borrowed books instead.
Question: If you were going to sing an a cappella medley of TV theme songs, other than Friends and Scrubs and Charles in Charge, what would you pick? It would need to be something that matched those three fairly well in tone, so not the Enterprise theme (which is weedy and pathetic anyway) or the lyricised version of M*A*S*H* or anything.
AprilElf Says: