I bring you... FAILCAKE

You've seen Failboat. Failtruck. And now... Failcake!



They were meant to look like little muffins, not mushrooms. I think the containers were the wrong size... they went in looking like chocolate cups, expanded, then all the batter in the cup shrunk. *sigh* At least they taste okay, but they look bizarre. Next time, I'm definitely doing this as an 8" cake.

Do the maths

I love my new tiny silicone mini-muffin cases. They're brightly coloured and cheerful and will forever remind me of this year's tax refund.

However, I should have realised that 24 tiny little cases will take a lot longer to fill with batter than 12 large ones. I turned the oven on before I started making the batter, and quite frankly I could have waited until the batter was made and had plenty of time.

I'm making some chocolate chili mini-bites (possibly the most insanely calorific recipe I've ever tried) to take to German tomorrow to celebrate the end of Kurs 1 and beginning of five weeks of revision. My fellow students will also be getting the remaining cherry ricotta muffins.

The rest of the day was spent monitoring emails, applying for a job that I've realised I probably don't want and would not be a good idea, and making flashcards for German revision in Anki, which I can use on my phone. When I can get the files to the right place on the flash card. I need to get a new notebook tomorrow to write up more grammar notes too. At least something progressed today!

Now that's how you do it

Success!

Something was wrong with the first batch. The two big suspects are a) the baking soda had been open for too long and was no longer active? and/or b) I noticed while washing up my measuring spoons (a kiddies' set shaped like little fish) that the smallest one was 1/4 teaspoon. I had thought the smallest was 1/2 teaspoon. So I may have put in 1/2 +1/4 teaspoon of baking powder instead of 1 + 1/2 teaspoons. Oops.

Anyway, they're quite heavy, smell delicious (the ricotta mixture smells lovely even when it's being prepared, especially after the vanilla goes in) and are very tasty indeed!

In other good news, I did my tax return over the weekend. As I've been freelancing for over a year, I am now in the "payment on account" system in the UK where I pre-pay 50% of my estimated tax bill for that year in advance every 6 months. I did the tax return to check if I owed Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs the full figure for the second payment on account for the year - only to find that they owed me! It's a combination of the agency I worked for overcharging me on Pay As You Earn (always happens, I regularly got large tax refunds when I worked as a temp), not having my personal allowance taken into account... and business not having been so good this year. But I will be getting both the overpaid tax and the whole of the first payment on account back! I went out and bought a new mixing bowl (keep using our salad bowl to make cakes), cooling rack and some multicoloured silicone mini-muffin cases to celebrate.

Other than that, it's cool and overcast and I'm still waiting for progress on the permit. My accountant has advised me to wait until one week before the deadline from the Immigrationsamt and then chase the national insurance people and ask Immigrationsamt for an extension. There is still a possibility I will have to create a GmbH and employ myself, so I'd better sit on the money until then!

Empty, full

Yesterday was a bit of a write-off. After a very poor night's sleep on Thursday night, we both went to bed at 1am on Friday night... and slept until 1pm on Saturday. I felt awake enough when I got up, but shattered again about two hours later. I headed out to buy some things at Nishi's - who were on holiday - and book an appointment at the Hirano hairdresser's next door - who were closed at 3:10pm despite their opening hours being until 4:00 on a Saturday. And I lost one of my headphone earpieces, leaving me unable to listen to any music. After wandering through Globus and Marinello in search of some chili powder (they had nothing more interesting than what I could get at the local supermarket) I headed back to Sihl City for an "It's a Boy!" card for a friend and some food shopping. I was telling myself that the quality of Co-op's fruit and veg was better than Migros' (especially the avocados) when I saw this:



Can you guess what it is? An aubergine (eggplant) with two enormous holes and who knows what inside. *sigh*

Today was much better. Emails cleared. Washing done. Tax return done - and they owe me! Now if I can just get my Summer Greetings ready to email out to my Japanese friends and business contacts, I'll be happy...

See?

The photos from our travels around Switzerland with himself's parents are up! Pilatus, Lucerne, Schaffhausen, Rhine Falls and Bern for your viewing pleasure.

Back to baking

After himself's parents left, I had about 1/2 kilo of cherries left in the fridge that we hadn't eaten... so I looked for some recipes! These cherry ricotta muffins are cooling off and should be ready to have for desert soon...

Rheinfall!

I'm not going looking for these, honest

But there seems to be no end to the 戦国BASARA news! Now on Kotaku is an article about a 戦国BASARA attraction in a theme park at the base of Mount Fuji... Hope it's still there next time I'm in japan!

Hello from Lucerne!

Because that was too healthy?

The frankly hysterical 戦国BASARA food tie-ins continue, and this time it's Pizza Hut!

These are the boxes:


And this is the "Adult Half & Half" pizza, "Super Delicious Bulgogi" and "Dijon Mustard Sausage":


Gigazine describes "dijon mustard sausage" as like a spicy potato salad, and the "super delicious bulgogi" as strongly flavoured yaki-niku (grilled beef). Pizzas the way only the Japanese seem to like them.

Original post at Gigazine (Japanese)

For your amusement

Here's something I found while sorting through some books today - getting them repacked into plastic bags and moved into storage in crates in the cellar instead of having them in damp cardboard boxes in the garage. It should be particularly amusing to anyone who met me after around 2002 when I started having my hair short!



This is a sketch of me from 1999, done by one of the students at Akechi High School in Japan where I worked as an assistant English teacher. Happy days.

Things that make me laugh out loud

Just spotted this on Gigazine: the city of Ueno, Nagano is collaborating with the computer game/anime 戦国BASARA to market apple wine and cake!

How could you resist this box of biscuits?

By the power of steam!

I can't believe it's July already.

Last Sunday was spent steaming steamed breads - three batches, two green tea and one cocoa - and then heading out for an amazing steam train ride out of Zurich up into the countryside and back!

And I've finally got the photos organised. Enjoy!

In other news, I got a registration card from the AHV, but no confirmation yet that they consider me to be a freelancer. But it's another piece in the puzzle. There is no point in thinking of this process as an orderly progression along some kind of path.

David's office party is tomorrow, there's a Japanese fundraising bazaar on on Saturday, Friday to Sunday is a festival in town, and next Saturday there's a showing by a small Japanese boutique in town. Things to do!

Ah, how Teutonic!

Seen in the big Co-op non-food shop in the local shopping centre. I was in there today to pick up some cute measuring spoons (shaped like fish and intended for children) and a small plastic spatula to run around the edges of the non-stick ramekins I'm using for the steamed breads. I made a second lot of green tea ones this morning... and they're all gone. ^_^; I also made the hijiki brown rice recipe from the same book last night and it was amazing.

In other news, I finally repaired Mom's bracelet and the latest Skulduggery Pleasant book and posted both off this morning. I got a letter from Stadt Adliswil, which I opened with bated breath, only to find it was not my residence permit but them wanting to know who my health insurer is. Well, that comes after the permit.

The birds are still eating everything we put out, and brown rice (cooked) is the new favourite. There were some very confused and upset great tits after himself took down the half coconut shell that was once filled with fat and seeds and now looks like it's been cleaned and polished. I swear they use it and the feeder as swings. We've been seeing some other kinds of birds that we're not able to identify, but at a minimum we have sparrows, great tits, blue tits, goldfinches and greenfinches. No need for TV!

Where there's green tea powder, there's cocoa powder!

After my surprisingly successful attempt at making steamed green tea bread (from the The Okinawa Diet Plan, which I recommend as a cookbook if nothing else) I decided to have a go with cocoa powder.



It worked beautifully! The flavour is subtle but delicious and the texture is amazingly dense. It's a definite tie with the green tea ones.

The one thing that didn't work so well was using both trays in the steamer. The ramekins I have are too large to put four in one tray, so I put two on each and the ones on the bottom steamer got dripped on, one worse than the other.



Himself insists he's going to eat the slightly soggy one regardless.

Been really enjoying the recipes and will probably try making the Hijiki Brown Rice tonight. After my cross-questioning from the lady at Nishi's Japanese shop while buying the hijiki yesterday - although to be fair, I didn't know you couldn't use it in soup, so I learned something this time.

Man to man

Reading up on the Japanese offensive in India in WWII for some work.

At this period a special jeep supply column was formed from a London Territorial Regiment. In its ranks were numbered many London taxi-drivers. General Messervy tells a story of one of these jeep crews. "All races produce tough, brave soldiers, but only the British soldier really has that sense of decency and kindly humanity which nothing can upset.

"A Jap was seen skulking in a bush near Jessami, by the side of the track. Out leapt the Gunners and seized him.

" 'Shall we kill the little bastard ? It's what he and his like deserve.'

" ' Oh, no, we can't. We'll take him back with us.'

"After a ' few hundred yards---"Ere, Tojo, you look pretty miserable. 'Ave a fag.'

"A mile farther on they had a puncture, and it was 'Come on, Tojo, give us a hand:'

"By the time Kohima was reached, 'Tojo' was a mascot, if not a friend."

From Anthony Brett-James' Ball of Fire: The Fifth Indian Division in the Second World War.

Seems there is always hope left somewhere in the world that people can just treat each other as people.

New and old

It's nice to get something off the long-term to-do list. I now have a functioning backup system, and it's bootable to boot. What finally got me to do it? I've decided that I really want to upgrade from OSX Tiger to Snow Leopard. The performance should be better, things may stop supporting Tiger soon as it was two releases ago, I get Boot Camp which means SDL will support me when I run on my Windows partition and I get to use Chrome instead of Firefox. I don't know what has happened to it, but it's become slower and slower and chews up up to 20% of my CPU. So, everything is copied over safely. Twice.

I finally managed to give in my application for my residence permit and registration in the community this week. It will take up to a month to hear back, but can take less time. I successfully registered with the Handelsregisteramt, despite technically not being able to get a notarisation without a permit, and they informed the SVA (national insurance) of my existence. I've filled in the form for them and sent it back with piles of contracts, invoices, etc. to convince them I'm self-employed - it's also missing lots of information like my permit number and bank details. But they wanted a response within the month so this is what I can give them.

Work has been reasonably busy. Well, it's been furiously busy or nothing, as usual. I still need to get used to it. And use some of the downtime to do my accounts and figure out how well I'm actually doing in the grand scheme of things.

I got my official results from the exam board - I passed! So I can now add another MA after my name (MA squared?). And ACIL - Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. And I took the final set of training for SDL Trados Studio 2009 on Friday, just have to do the exam now and that's the lot. Other than the Termbase one. It's all professional development.

Right. Now for the rather scary endeavour of upgrading my OS.

And boom!

The doorbell went at about 9:00am - David was in the bathroom and I wasn't very dressed, so I peeked out the door of the flat and saw that someone had abandoned a box outside the front door.

I'm assuming this was Swiss Post. Contrary to expectations they seem to be even dodgier than Deutsche Post - so far they've delivered an enormous box to the mother & baby shop in front of our building despite being told it was the wrong address and rammed a box that was too big into our postbox (thankfully the contents were in hard boxes). Oh, and not delivered letters for no apparent reason, causing our ISP to cut us off for non-payment when we hadn't received the bills.

This abandoned package (which a kind neighbour had brought inside the door by the time we went to get it) contained something David had put in an order for months ago but assumed he hadn't got as it was only available in limited quantities - the pocket-böögg!

For those of you who enjoy Sechseläuten, you can get your very own mini-Böögg, the exploding farmer-snowman. It came in a lovely box with three stepped wooden bases, a set of stickers to make the face and bowtie, a removable hat, pipe... and mini firecrackers to put under the hat. And the wooden bases appear to be prepared with something flammable, as the bottom one has three wicks in it. There's a video of one being assembled and burnt on the site, along with the traditional Sechseläuten march music.

So, not only are these made by adults with cerebral palsy, but sent by post? The Swiss really do have a different idea of health and safety!

More updates later - it's been busy, and I've been tired.

Shhh

Woke up an hour early, still on Swiss time. Have caught up with some emails I needed to answer - I'm always annoyed when people flake out on me and don't respond, so I have to not do it myself.

Still surrounded by boxes, but less of them and they have the contents written on the top and have been logged in a packing list and someone is going to print them for us before the movers arrive. A day early. We were going to go into London and treat ourselves to a hotel for the last night we're here - now without a bed - but we have return tickets already bought from Reading so we're going to keep the inflatable bed out and just crash here instead.

Seen lots of people, didn't managed to catch others. Had two Japanese meals on Thurs and wound up the staff at the new Jamie Oliver Italian restaurant in Reading last night. Just have to keep on going and get everything ready to go, including the Amazon order that arrived yesterday. Bought N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the complete Ouran High School Host Club, Afro Samurai (it was cheap enough on Blu-Ray to buy on a whim), Barry Atkins' More Than a Game and a book on vegetarian sushi for himself along with the Lekue Makisu sushi mat which for reasons best known to Amazon is arriving a week later than everything else and after we leave.

Must get dressed and clear the front room. This isn't over yet.

Oh, and apparently the Sheffield exam board met on Thursday but I haven't got final results yet. Will have to harrass the office. Ah, how nostalgic.

Interesting times

Well, that will teach me to complain about not having enough work. Client A emailed me last Monday with a huge project to get done in 2 weeks. Great, thank you! Then Client B checks in with a project I could get done in a day, and is games related. I'll take that, thank you! Then... Client C pops up asking for some small but short turnaround work. Um, yes, let's split this with someone else and I'll get you my bit in 2 days...

The worst of the crush is over and I'm now concentrating on my big file which has a lovely amount of repetition in it which the translation tools handles all by itself. It's dull, but relatively easy and definitely makes me happy I have the translation tool.

I did the two training exams on Sunday, while hiding out in himself's office while our broadband was down - thankfully just a fault instead of their billing section cutting us off thinking we hadn't paid again. Today is a bank holiday in Zurich and we went out to pick up a van to collect a shelving unit from a colleague of himself's who is moving back to the US. Except it wouldn't fit in the van. Himself and colleague managed to take out one side and some shelves with a hammer, so it fit in the end, but we were looking around for irate neighbours if not the police.

The weekend has been gloriously sunny and 31 degrees today, although it's clouded over now. May has just disappeared, and we're off to the UK on Wed night to pack up and finalise all our stuff. I hope a week will be enough. The leasehold extension for the flats has gone through, so we can now put ours on the market, although the two that are up for sale have been so for some time now.

Particularly looking forward to Thurs, when I'll meet up with people at the Japan Society to discuss doing more work with them, and meet up with people for dinner!

Oh, and I shall be waiting for my official exam board results for the MA on May 27, and for a decision on my application to the IoL on June 5. Fingers crossed they all go smoothly.