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CAKE
2/3 cup light vegetable oil
1 cup apple juice concentrate
2 cups banana rum
2/3 cup raisins
1 cup lightly walnuts, chopped
4 cups chopped mango
4 & 1/2 cups soy flour
1 tsp salt
1 tb baking soda
1 tb baking powder
1/2 cup cocoa powder
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Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9"x13" pan.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the oil, AJ concentrate, soy milk, and rum. Stir in the raisins, nuts, and mango.
Sift the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cocoa powder. Add the sifted mixture all at once to the liquid mixture and stir gently, just until a thick batter forms.
Spread the batter evenly in the prepared pans. Bake in the preheated oven on the middle rack for 75 minutes or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean.
Cool the cakes for 30-60 minutes until slightly warmer than room temperature.
Cover the cake and refrigerate it until completely cold.
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The batter was not very sweet, and had a weird flavor from the soy flour and all the rum, and not having any spices this time around... I'm going to wait until the cake is done and all the flavors are more blended together, and the alcohol bakes out before I make a judgement on whether or not I will glaze it.
EDIT: After baking, the flavor was nice, so I decided not to glaze it. It tasted like a less sweet version of banana bread (with a little chocolate!) after the alcohol cooked out. Next time, I'll use the mango rum with the mango chunks so I don't lose their flavor to the bananas. Still good though, and the extra moisture from the rum makes it really hard to tell that this cake is gluten free. :)
I made this entirely of glass scraps in my workshop. Saving all those small pieces paid of nicely for this project. The colors in the end piece are chips of transparent red, cobalt, and turquoise. The mirrors inside are pieces I cut from an old bathroom mirror we took down in our house. The clear pieces on the end holding the chips are seed glass for the triangular pieces being looked through, and glue chip on the sides to let the light in, but make it a little more more decorative. For reference, the clear box on the end is an inch long, and the rest of it is maybe 7" or 8" long. I didn't actually measure it yet.
...but anyway, this is the last project I finished before we took a break. I pretty much finished it on the last night that we did any work. I left it at in-law central though. When I get it back, I need to put some little rubber or felt feet on it for some padding. I really need to start putting all my cute little fairy things in a display cabinet or something. :)
Lately, I've been having an odd craving for pizza. With a gluten intolerance and a dairy sensitivity, getting pizza usually means making everything myself from scratch. Since I'm on my 8th day of a juice cleanse/fast/whatever, I decided that I'd try to make something to make my taste buds happy. I'm pleased to announce the end result was both yummy and satisfying. =)
The recipe goes something like this:
7 plum tomatoes
4 cloves garlic
1/4" slice off the center of an onion
2 small handfuls of spinach
couple TB nutritional yeast
pinches of: sea salt, black pepper, white pepper, red pepper (cayenne), basil, and oregano
To thicken it up, I took some finely pureed pulp and mixed it back into the juice, so it was really more like a smoothie. The spinach was to darken the color up a little, sneak some greens in there, and give it a little more earthy and less tomato-y flavor. I really think the onion, garlic, and oregano went a long way to create an Italian flavor, and the nutritional yeast give it a blast of protein, b-vitamins, and delicious creamy and cheesy flavor.
I will definitely make this again.
I ran some blueberries through the juicer first, and then a mango. When I poured the juice into a glass, there was a gelatinous purple block at the bottom where the portion that was blueberry had coagulated. There was also a small chunk of the same gelatinous creation around the auger when I disassembled the juicer parts to clean them. I think this might be worth pursuing in future food experimentations.
To the blueberry and mango mix, I added fresh squeezed orange juice, from the oranges that were grown on my tree, bee pollen, and ground flaxseed. It's very tasty! Will definitely need something very green to balance this out tonight.
I've also been looking at getting a good quality food processor in about two months for my birthday, and shopping around for a good quality dehydrator, to be purchased at a later time. I am very excited about continuing more raw food experimentation.
Life expectancy for women is dropping, obesity epidemic, etc. Some "expert" wrote that there was a problem with the US health system.
Seriously? Idiot.
The system is not the problem. The people are the problem.
When did we throw personal responsibility out the door? When did we stop giving a damn about taking care of the only body we have? When did we become complacent and actually think anyone but ourselves was capable of doing things right? When did we decide it was a good idea to put nutritionally deficient foods into our bodies because it was cheaper?
Much of the shit you find on the aisles of the grocery stores today is not real food.
I guess the system is a little flawed too... covering costs for health issues that people bring on themselves only encourages this type of behavior. I am very much a disciplinarian, and I don't believe people should be coddled and encouraged to become lazy and rely on larger entities to take care of them. Insurance premiums for people who willingly put poisons into their bodies on a regular basis should be MUCH higher, like painful compared to the rising costs of gas and food.
I think this is a great idea too:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/eu
People care more when costs and consequences directly impact them, and things aren't handed to them.
I think it's a crock when people talk of socialism to fix various societal problems. The solution isn't stealing more of my hard earned money before it even reaches my bank account. It should be actually exposing me to the problems and giving me a choice to learn from the consequences of my actions.
I'm not sure if I should hold out any hope for mankind. I want to, but the world is full of so many people who just don't get it.
I'm grumpy and cynical this morning.
I don't have an icon that feels right for this post. I am normally not an angry person, but I'm all riled up today.
- Mood:
annoyed
check that site out. it's pretty cool what those people are doing.
DEN OEVER, The Netherlands (Reuters) - A Viking ship made from ice-cream sticks set sail for England from the Netherlands on Tuesday.
The 15-metre (50-foot) long ship, named after the Norse god Thor, is made from 15 million recycled ice-cream sticks glued together by U.S.-born stuntman Robert McDonald, his son and more than 5,000 children.
"If you can dream it you can do it ... I want to teach children that anything is possible," McDonald said.
Badly injured as a child in a gas explosion that killed the rest of his family, he has loaded his ship with cuddly toys and plans to reach London and visit children in hospitals.
He and his crew hope to cross the Atlantic later on the ancient Viking route to North America via Iceland and Greenland.
The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the Internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel Internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.
It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.
Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.
“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”
- Albert Einstein
I'm interested in learning a little about book binding too. I thought it might be a useful thing to learn if I ever start drawing again.
I always love to learn about new craft things.
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