Cake, bike and pun
Cake
This Monday our office had a second bake-off, where staff bring in home-made cakes and biscuits which get sold for charity. We raised the respectable sum of £44.50 for When you Wish Upon a Star, and remarkably my cake was voted the favourite. It was lucky that I remembered about the bake-off on Sunday afternoon, and even luckier that Nigel Slater had a cake recipe in the Observer the week before which was still lying around - the Honey polenta cake with elderflower and gooseberries. I skipped the gooseberries and it’s not very elderflowery; really it’s almond and lemon, polenta cake.
It’s fairly easy to make, but I’d recommend buying chopped and ground almonds rather than blanching, chopping and grinding whole ones as he suggests - that just seems a completely unnecessary effort. Later on Monday I bumped into a slightly scary, former-Fleet Street journalist colleague in the lift, and he, slightly unexpectedly, explained the science of lemon and almonds. The citric acid of the lemon balances out the alkaline almond, this reduces its almondy-ness and means they are commonly used together.
Bike
It’s certainly true that some things in life are “so f*cking rad, like a sick-gnarly graceful swan flying over an epic sunset” and the bicycle ballerina is one of them.
Pun
Yesterday I cycled past a glazier’s van with the slogan ‘Your pane. Our pleasure’ painted on the back. Then today someone sent me a great collection of punning business signs. These lot are pretty good, much better than the usual examples, which should be sent to the … punitentiary?