First-pass pages have arrived.
And now work begins again. Proofreading, handling editor’s notes, making semifinal changes and additions…
It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks.
(BTW: want to pre-order the book on Amazon? Click here.)
So last night I was working late-ish, and it occurred to me that this would be a good time to bake some bread. In particular I wanted to test the Odlums “strong white” bread flour to see how it behaved with the enhanced white bread recipe* I’ve been playing with, and how it stacked up against the Hovis “super strong” bread flour that I normally use.
The making actually only takes abut fifteen minutes: throw the ingredients together, then knead for six minutes at slow speed with the dough hook and six minutes at higher speed. Put it in a greased bowl, walk away. Back to work.
…Or theoretically back to work. When I sat down at the machine again I had a quick look at my Twitter feed and saw this:
Pencil structure. 8.6 x 7.3. 2014. Really? I’ve drawn comics all these years so I could draw a squirrel? Really? pic.twitter.com/J3UqrL6m1V— Walter Simonson (@WalterSimonson) July 15, 2014
Two things immediately occurred to me: (a) this was someone I had the pleasure of meeting way back when and hadn’t crossed paths with since, and (b) that was one mean-looking squirrel. So I tweeted him and we got to chatting.
And I forgot all about the bread, having (a little earlier) punched it down and shoved it in a loaf pan. (Forgot about the work, also, for the moment. But the bread was more likely to get stroppy in the very short term.) When I went back in the kitchen it was climbing out of the loaf pan in a very determined way. (Seriously, it shouldn’t get that high before you bake it…)
Anyway, it all came right in the end. This is how that loaf came out…
Not too bad. Taste testing comes later in the day.
*The enhancement: add 50g of oat bran and 50g of wheat germ to the basic Tessinerbrot recipe. This produces a bread in the “soft white/whole wheat” category beloved of marketers trying to get some kind of wholegrain content into breads that don’t look like they’ve got any, so that kids will [theoretically] eat them.
(See also this entry. I think this may have the wrong picture attached to it: seriously, this bread always rises like crazy.)
Those of you who may remember the above image from a week and a half or so ago might be curious about how things have been progressing.
Briefly, not real well.
(Inserting a cut here (on the Tumblr side) to shield the eyes of innocent onlookers from the discussion of painful technical issues. The tl;dr version: My big work computer is screwed, I’m going to be fixing it for days, I will be cranky while this happens, my apologies in advance for an anticipated decrease in cheerful posts. (sigh))
Having tried everything one normally tries inside the case when a drive has non-noisily failed — swapping power and data cables around, checking everywhere for loose or dirty connections, fiddling with the BIOS (insofar as I dare to… I don’t like messing with the BIOS: there is nothing more pathetic and annoying than a motherboard you fried yourself), I then turned to out-of-case remedies and ordered in a SATA drive enclosure (we needed one anyway…) so that I could test the drive using a USB connection and find out whether any data could be reclaimed from it at all.
So yesterday the enclosure arrived. (Along with a Seagate 3-Tb external drive for backing things up from now on.) Very nice, too: sleek design, pretty. With due care the failed drive was put into it and powered up.
Nada. (Or as I originally just typed, Dana, which as Irish people will tell you is another thing entirely. )
So the situation is as follows:
(a) I now have a failed boot drive that will have to be sent off for data recovery in a clean room. What diagnosis I can perform at this end suggests that the failure was very likely electronic (drive board chipset failure, a short, etc etc) rather than mechanical, which is about as good as the news gets at this end: probably the disk platters will not have been damaged. Nonetheless this is going to be annoying and expensive to recover from.I haven’t actively started soliciting quotes yet, but my best guess suggests that if I get away with paying as little as €500 for recovery, I should count myself lucky. It could be double or triple that. (sigh) I will also have to spend a while wondering whether it’s worth sending the thing off for recovery at all, as I have no definitive list of What Used To Be There to compare against What’s there Now in the files restored from backups. (See (b).) I think I know. But then I thought the backups were complete and that most important program installs had been done to the 1Tb F: drive.
Gaaaah.
(b) While there are fairly recent backups of C: drive material (the most recent was May 18th, [heavyirony] whoopee, happy birthday to me [/heavyirony]), they are not as complete as I wish they were: some directories in the C: drive that should have been tagged for backup were not. (Mea culpa, mea bloody maxima culpa.) Some of them are/were quite important, like my installation of Dragon Naturally Speaking, Scrivener and so forth. Now, these can be reconstructed: in almost all cases I still have, or can quickly recover, the original installation media / files. But doing so, weary piece by piece — including in some cases having to install original files and then their upgrades, one after another — is going to take days of time that I really wish I didn’t have to spend right now. (While I am also busy finishing a writing project.) Ah well.
(c) The backups that did restore haven’t quite settled in at the W7 system end. In particular, user profiles from the old installation, though their files are all there, have not re-manifested themselves in W7 as yet… so that desktops are MIA/unavailable, and everything has to be searched for before it can be used or worked on. (And if the profiles don’t come back after a few reboots, I’m going to have to start working out how to make them come back. Oh joy. The Descent Into The Registry: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” Gaaaaaaah x2.)
…So. Those of you who follow me may find me a little less forthcoming with posts than usual for the next 3-5 days, and if my tone sounds a little strained when I do post, you’ll know why Please bear with me until I get this mess as sorted as as it can get in the short term.
Thank you. 🙂
This was crossposted from DD’s tumblr http://ift.tt/1pHE23c, where it was published on June 05, 2014 at 11:18AM
Braunkuchen (Brown Cookies / Biscuits)
Sometimes you want something a little different from the usual run of Christmas cookies. These fit the bill nicely.
Germany has a long tradition of spice-based cookies / bikkies, the most famous probably being the ginger-and-cinnamon-based lebkuchen that first start turning up in recipe books in the 1500’s and have since proliferated all over that part of the world in staggering variety. (A very basic lebkuchen dough, for example, is what’s usually used for the construction of gingerbread houses.) And there are some times of year in central Europe when escaping from lebkuchen seems like an impossibility.
Yet there are cookies in the region that share the same general culinary DNA but diverge in interesting ways. These simple brown biscuits are one sort. There’s no ginger in them at all — which by itself is a touch unusual, gingerbread having so generally overrun the holiday-baking landscape — but their spice quotient is very high, and their aroma gets significantly stronger over time. Opening a tin of them even after just a day or so sealed up lets a cloud of sweet dark fragrance into the air, after which it’s impossible to walk away without eating two or three. Or more. If not quite a lot more.
This is not a same-day cookie: it requires a stay overnight on the kitchen counter, wrapped up, before it’ll be ready to roll out, cut out and bake. Also, due to its northern heritage — it comes from Scheswig-Holstein — this recipe calls for treacle (a.k.a molasses), for depth of flavor, and lard, for additional body and crispness. (If you have trouble getting your hands on lard, you can substitute other solid fats like [UK] Stork or “white fat”, or [US] Crisco, or even butter: but lard works best.)
Ingredients and method under the cut.
If you’re in the Netherlands (I don’t say Holland, because you might be in the Netherlands without necessarily being in Holland) and you’ve ordered coffee after a meal or a snack, odds are strong that this is the cookie / biscuit that will come along with it. They seem to be everywhere over there.
For most of us who make it at home, this would be a cookie-cutter cookie, but on the Continent they’re likely to turn up in quite ordinary shapes — rectangles or squares — that are ornamented with designs that have been pressed into them with special Speculaas molds. (Very ornate and seriously huge Speculaas biscuits used to be given to children in the Netherlands on St. Nicholas’s Day [December 6th], but I don’t know if this is done any more.)
The flavor is something special. It sounds a little odd to describe a bikkie’s flavor as “fresh”, but this is, and the cardamom used in its spicing is what’s responsible. A lovely fragrance comes off a tin of these when you open it up, and the cinnamon and cloves that are also part of the recipe add a very holidayish scent. So this is nice to bake around this time of year for when you want something just a little different from the cookies you’ve probably been eating since the week before Christmas or thereabouts.
The only frustration about making these at home is when you go looking for a recipe on the Net. The best ones are all German, it seems, but they all seem to call for “spekulatiuswurz”, or “Speculatius seasoning,” which is a big help especially as it gives you no idea what’s in it. Fortunately there is a good scratch recipe in that bible for those interested in central European holiday baking, <em>Festive Baking in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, and this recipe comes from there.
Ingredients and method under the cut.
Ginger nuts are a favorite store-bought biscuit in most parts of the UK and Ireland, but homemade ones are way better. And somehow or other I seem to have made these three times in the last week and a bit, so I think I’ve acquired some expertise.
If you want to make some holiday-ish biscuits/cookies that aren’t a lot of trouble, especially for gifts, these are an excellent bet. They’re crisp and flavorful and very more-ish. They’re also a good sort of bikkie to make if you want to let children or those who are normally a little baking-challenged assist (meaning it’s the kind of thing you can do sitting around the table with a bunch of adults and a bottle of wine, gossiping while you do the slightly repetitive work of getting them ready to bake).
Making the dough takes twenty minutes or a bit more, depending on how long you spend creaming the sugar and butter and flour together. After that it’s just a matter of how quickly you feel like assembling each baking sheet’s worth of cookies / biscuits. The dough refrigerates nicely for short periods, but because ginger nuts are raised only with baking soda / bicarbonate of soda, I wouldn’t keep the dough unbaked for more than 4-6 hours. The recipe makes between four and five dozen gingernuts, depending on how large you roll the pieces.
The ingredients and method:
- 200 grams / 7 ounces caster sugar / granulated sugar (extra fine if you’ve got it)
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 150 grams / 5 ounces butter, cubed and slightly softened
- 1 egg
Cream all these together with a beater until light and fluffy. This is the most labor-intensive part of the process if you don’t have a mixer, but whether you do or not it’s worth while taking your time over it until everything is as fluffy as it’s going to get. Do the sugar, butter and salt first, and then when they’re well creamed, add the egg and beat like crazy until everything goes very fluffy.
Meanwhile mix together:
- 125 grams cream flour / cake flour
- 125 grams strong white flour / all-purpose flour
(You can use just all-purpose flour if you don’t have both kinds. The mixture, though, produces a slightly more delicate / crisper cookie.) Add to the flour/s:
- 1/2 rounded teaspoon bicarbonate of soda / baking soda
- 1 rounded teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 rounded teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 rounded teaspoon ground cloves
If you’re a real ginger fan, kick it up to a teaspoon and a half. However much you use, stir until the spices are blended all through the flour.
When you’re finished creaming the butter, sugar and egg mixture, slow the beater right down to a crawl (assuming you’re using one) and start adding the flour and spice mixture in large spoonfuls until it’s all combined. Stop the mixing process and scrape down the bowl once or twice if necessary, rather than mix any more quickly: you don’t want to take the chance of toughening up the dough.
When the dough is ready, stick it in the refrigerator for half an hour or so to make it easier to work with (as it’s fairly soft when it’s initially finished mixing). Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180 C / 350F and start preparing your first cookie sheet by lining it with baking parchment. (It seems likely you could use a baking-silicone mat for this, but I didn’t have one of the right shape and so haven’t tested that.)
Ginger nut dough is one of those kinds of cookie dough that likes to run all over the place while you’re baking it, so all the next steps are about controlling that tendency. Get ready:
- A little bowl with four or five tablespoonsful of granulated sugar to roll the cookie dough balls in
- A drinking glass to flatten them with (a heavy-bottomed one is best. We use a Pernod glass for this, but any tumbler will do.)
There are two schools of thought about ginger nuts. Some people like them big enough to dunk in tea. Others prefer to be able to eat them in one bite. (There’s something to be said for this approach, as these are quite crisp when baked.) You can make these either way, or both ways, depending on how large you roll the individual pieces.
If you want the dunking-size biscuits, start scooping out the slightly chilled dough from the mixing bowl with a teaspoon and rolling it between your hands into balls about the size of a big “shooter” marble (usually just shy of an inch in diameter, though who knows, your marbles may vary). After rolling each piece, drop it in the little bowl of sugar and roll it around until covered: then place it on the baking sheet. For smaller pop-in-your-mouth ginger nuts, roll each piece to the size of a small ordinary marble (about 3/4 inch in diameter), roll it in sugar as above, and sit it on the baking sheet. Whichever size you go for, this is the part of the process in which small children, or idly gossiping adults, can be enrolled to best advantage.
Once all this is done, use the bottom of the glass to gently flatten each of the balls a little bit. Don’t overdo this: they just need to be flat enough to stay put on the baking sheet.
Slide the baking sheet into the oven with some care (because the little flattened discs will still slide around on the parchment if you let them) and bake for between 5 and 6 minutes until the edges are just starting to go a little brown. When I was baking these I found that 5 minutes 30 seconds was the right time for our oven. Yours obviously may differ, so when you’re doing your first batch, check them at 5 minutes and see how they look.
Remove the baking sheet from the oven and move the baking parchment off the sheet and to a heatproof surface for five minutes or so. After about that long, use a spatula to remove them from the baking sheet and let them finish cooling on a rack.
Repeat the dough-rolling, sugar-rolling and ball-flattening process on another parchment-lined baking sheet, and keep going until all the dough is shaped and baked.
Once baked and completely cooled: immediately put the biscuits / cookies in a paper-lined tin or other airtight container and seal them up. They’re really hygroscopic, and will quickly go soft if you leave them out. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Otherwise: enjoy!
Some of you will know (or guess) that I’m interested in the intersection of Sherlock Holmes and food. God knows, in canon Holmes really enjoys his meals, and one of his standard reactions to a big cheque at the end of a case is to rub his hands together with glee, grab Watson, and run straight off to a good restaurant. (For example, “…I have a box for Les Huguenots. Might I trouble you then to be ready in half an hour, and we can stop at Marcini’s for a little dinner on the way?” [HOUN]; “When we have finished at the police station I think that something nutritious at Simpson’s would not be out of place.” [DYIN])
So when the excellent Azriona started a new fic entitled Mise en Place, and AU-cast Sherlock as a sort-of-Gordon-Ramsay, of course I was interested. In this scenario, John is the co-owner with his sister Harriet of a superannuated, deeply indebted and generally ailing family restaurant on which abrasive-celebrity-chef Sherlock descends to either fix it or put it out of its misery. During the initial assessment meal, for his dessert Sherlock’s served a piece of chocolate pie made by Molly (once waitress, now occupying the position of cook under duress) and finds it not only the only edible thing he’s been given but actually worth finishing.
Now, I enjoy baking, and really like a good cake or pie (as this might indicate). So when Azriona put up the recipe for Molly’s pie, I said, “Hmm, okay, let’s give it a shot and see how it turns out.” Obviously this was going to imply a conversion of the ingredient quantities (as well as some substitutions) for cooks on this side of the water, where — in modern times anyway — recipe measurements, at least of dry ingredients, are routinely done by weight rather than volume.
So here it is.
From the bottom up…
The crust:
The closest readily available UK/Irish equivalent is the “digestive biscuit,” a slightly sweet wholemeal / whole wheat “cookie”/ biscuit with a slightly different texture. To the right is one from one of the better-known brands, McVities.
The Food Network crumb crust recipe is as usual slanted toward the US market and uses US measurements and concepts. Well, fine, they’re playing to their major market. But here we run hard into one of the more annoying problems for the UK-Irish-European-based cook: There are no graham crackers here. (Well, okay, there are some… in specialty stores that cater to expats… but you do NOT want to pay what they’re going to charge you.)
Overall, in terms of flavor and performance, the digestive biscuit is an OK substitute. But now we run into a problem: how many of these do you need? Because here we run into another difficulty: the Food Network recipe is calibrated in “graham cracker sheets”. This means the longer one of these, to the left:
…So we need to know what one of those “sheets” weighs. The trouble is, go Googling to find out and you get a lot of different answers, not to mention people arguing more or less fruitlessly about what constitutes a serving. I went off to the Nabisco site to try to pull data from the nutritional info panel of the brand I remember best from my US childhood, Honey Maid grahams, but they weren’t incredibly helpful. Calories? Yes. Weight of sheet? No. (“Serving Size: 31 g. Serving[s] per container: About 13.” [eyeroll] “About”? Seriously, guys, if you don’t know, who do we ask? Sheesh.) Worse, this site suggests that a serving is two sheets “weighing about 28g”. Yeah, but is that 28g per sheet, or per the whole serving? Is it too much to ask these folks to write clearly? (Other people have been having this kind of problem as well. This makes me feel slightly better. But only slightly.)
Anyway: somebody over here has actually specified weight (and also appears to have put the graham crackers through a bomb calorimeter, which is scientifically interesting if not culinarily germane). THANK YOU GUYS. A sheet weighs 14g.
Moving along: a single digestive biscuit weighs 14g on my scale. A perfect 1:1 correlation: something I’ll never need to waste time thinking about again, all Gods be praised.
Onward. The Food Network crumb crust recipe converts this way:
Makes 1 9-inch pie crust
14 digestive biscuits (196g), finely crumbed (I put mine through the food processor, but stuffing them into a Zip-Loc bag and bashing them mercilessly with a rolling pin would certainly work as well)
- 3 tablespoons / 48g sugar (Irish cooks / cookbooks have a tendency to assume you’re rounding/heaping your spoonsful, where US cooks would routinely level. I split the difference here and rounded slightly.)
- 6 tablespoons / 72g unsalted butter, melted
Preheat the oven to 175C. Process the biscuits and sugar together until finely crumbed. Add the melted butter and pulse until moist (or stir in well with a fork if you couldn’t be arsed to mess up the processor for this).
Press the mixture into a 9-inch pie plate and bake until firm, 18 minutes or so.
European cooks, please note! — While the original recipe says “18 to 22 minutes”, if you leave this version of the crust in for 22 minutes, it will have burnt itself black. The digestive biscuit crumbs are (I think) denser than graham cracker crumbs, and a bit more heat-absorptive. Also, if you’re using a fan oven, that will speed things up as well. I’d start checking the crust at about 14 minutes — 12 or 13 if you’ve got a fan oven — and yank the thing out as soon as the top edges start to get seriously brown.
A note in passing about making this crust: Normally I tend to fight shy of graham / crumb crusts because they can be fairly uncontrollable (not to mention difficult to make pretty). It’s like making a sandcastle, but the sand is greasy and you’re working in a pie pan. Push down in one spot, it pops up in another and tries to escape over the edge. While I was making this, I found myself muttering “Next time I’m doing this damn thing in a springform.” …Maybe I will.
Now to the filling:
Here again, the measurements are slightly less problematic than the ingredients.
Not until relatively recently have there been good dedicated baking chocolates on the UK market: and none* of the best ones are local. In particular, until quite recently there’s been nothing at all locally available that corresponds to the “Baker’s” brand cooking/baking chocolate familiar to most serious US cooks. A lot of UK-based cooks, if they don’t have access to something patissier-specific like the lovely Belgian Callebaut, will routinely reach for Cadbury’s Bourneville when baking something that calls for semisweet. But this isn’t an ideal solution, as that bar of Bourneville you get from the Tesco is a confectionery item rather than a baking ingredient. It contains additional vegetable fats, and more sugar than is strictly necessary.
Nonetheless, I went with the Bourneville (which comes in at only 40% cocoa mass or thereabouts) for this first pie, simply because it’s affordable and there’s sort of a cultural bias towards it. If as a casual cook I wanted to goose the cocoa mass percentage in this pie up to the recommended 60% or thereabouts, I would pick up a bar of Lindt Excellence 70% or something similar and split the total chocolate weight about half and half between that and the Bourneville. Or I’d look around the shops for something from Green & Black’s. (When I take another run at this, though, it’ll be an all-Lindt production, since I’m staring at two bars of the 70% Excellence at the moment.)
In any case, the cooked chocolate custard that results even when you’ve only used Bournville in this approaches a pot-de-crème-like consistency and smoothness. Very nice indeed.** (I’d also think seriously about making this pie with Green & Black’s Maya Gold instead of plain semisweet chocolate. Mmmmm.)
So, onward! The ingredients:
- 450ml milk
- 92g sugar
- 30g cornflour / corn starch
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 4 large egg yolks (at room temperature)
- 2 tablespoons / 30ml brewed coffee, cooled
- 1/2 teaspoon / 2.5ml vanilla extract
- 115g semisweet baking chocolate, chopped (21 of those little blocks in the large 200g Bourneville bar will take you just over this, to 121g. You may as well eat the rest. The angels weep if you waste chocolate.)
As per Azriona’s recipe:
1. Heat the milk in a large saucepan until hot but not boiling.
2. Whisk the sugar, cornstarch and salt in a large bowl; then whisk in the egg yolks, coffee and vanilla. Whisk half of the hot milk into the egg mixture until smooth, then gradually whisk the egg mixture into the pan with the remaining milk.
3. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture boils and thickens, 3 to 5 minutes. (If you have a thermometer, the mix should be at least 160F to ensure that the eggs are cooked and you’re not going to kill anybody. Sherlock would be disappointed, but your friends and family won’t be.) Note that this produces an extremely thick and tight custard, very very quickly. Don’t turn your back on this one, and by no means stop whisking during the cooking period or the whole business will burn. Also, turn that heat right down as soon as it starts boiling. You need to keep the cooking process gentle, as the custard’s consistency damn near approaches that of magma as it tightens.
4. Remove from the heat and whisk in the chocolate until melted. Transfer to a bowl and cool slightly, stirring a few times to prevent a skin from forming. (You might do this over cold water if you like, but just make sure you stir it quite regularly until it hits the just-before-lukewarm stage.)
5. Pour the filling into the crust; press plastic wrap directly onto the surface and chill until set, at least 4 hours. (Just because it’s something I do in these cases, I buttered the plastic wrap first.)
6. Cut, top with whipped cream and shaved chocolate, and serve.
A couple of notes in passing:
- I left the pie alone for six hours before cutting a test slice. It had set well at that point, but it’s still a soft set. In the morning, after a total of about 14 hours, it cut more cleanly but the set was still on the soft side. If you’re one of those people who wants their cut pie to stand perfectly upright even at the pointy end, you may not get that here.
- Softly whipped cream seems to suit this better than very stiff cream. Your mileage may vary.
- This is a REALLY GOOD PIE. I may take another run at it in a day or two and tart it up a little. But still. REALLY GOOD. I just now had it for breakfast and I suspect I’m going to have it for lunch as well. The rest of it is going down to our local to be shared with our neighbors before we make total pigs of ourselves.
So go make this pie.
*As far as I know.
**Peter thinks that this would make a good cooked-custard-based ice cream mix. GTFO, Mr. Husband. (Actually I think it would need to be a thinner for the ice cream machine’s sake, but the flavor would certainly work.)
Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed an uncharacteristic outbreak of annoyed language the other morning.
FECKFECKFECKFECK FECK SHIT DAMMITALLSTRAIGHTTOHELL. …Also “tits”.
— Diane Duane (@dduane) March 29, 2013
Well, this was the cause.
ETA: Secondary to all the below, and after no steps taken at home proved useful, the machine is going to be heading back to its lovely builders for service… so we’re having a sale at the Ebooks Direct store to “celebrate”. Details are here.
…I have two computers. One is a Samsung NC10 netbook on which a surprising amount of writing gets done (because it has a lovely keyboard; while I do dictate a lot of my work in Dragon Naturally Speaking, sometimes you just want to type, and the Samsung is the best machine in the house for Just Typing on). The other computer is a desktop named Calanda, as all my desktops are these days. (For the curious: Calanda is both a [theoretically] haunted mountain near the Swiss city of Chur*, and a Graubuendner beer brewery that produces a very superior dunkel and a lovely weissbier. All my other devices except for the iPad (Spot: of course it would be Spot) are named after characters from Tenchi Muyo. The netbook is Ayeka, the phone is Tsunami, etc etc.)
…Anyway. The present Calanda (II, or probably III at this point) is the first custom build I’ve ever owned, made by Scan in the UK: a lovely machine. It has never given me a lick of trouble. (Well, the video card has, but that comes under the “Occasional Wobblies / God Knows Why It Did That / Maybe It’s Sunspots / Never Mind, It Got Better” class of problems. It did get better.) Despite many years of home-building our machines, I’ve never had the urge to do anything with it except crack the case occasionally to do a little dusting.
And everything has pretty much been hunkydory until a week ago today, when in the middle of some website work the display froze, then went black. And then the machine rebooted itself.
Fine, I thought. This happens very, very occasionally. No problem.
Except that it then rebooted itself again. And again. And again. No display to the screen: just the fans coming on. And then more attempted rebooting. Much moar.
So I forced the machine off, pulled the power cord, waited, did deep breathing for a bit, then plugged the cord back in again and hit the Go button.
Same deal.
…Now, over twenty years or so of building PCs from the bits up, I’ve seen most kinds of errors they can throw… drive stuff, motherboard stuff, memory stuff, slot stuff. But this was a new one on me. And when I realized this, and that it was really problematic due to several projects I have working right now that really need the big machine rather than the netbook, several things happened in sequence.
(a) A great disturbance in the local Force: as if a single voice had cried out in anguish, and then shut right up because the crying-out-in-anguish stuff upsets the cat.
(b) The above distressed tweet. (Followed by much helpful advice from various people who saw it and the ones that followed, which were a shade more coherent.)
(c) Crack the case, look inside, and start diagnostics.
(d) Breathe some more and decide to wait until today to start doing anything whatsoever about it: because trying to get anything tech-meaningful done in Ireland (or to a lesser extent in the UK) on Good Friday is a challenge not worth taking.
…So I started working my way down the least invasive of the suggestions this morning. On cracking the case I found the original tight beautiful build, undisturbed (I’ve never added anything because the original build had everything I wanted). I had a careful look around to make sure that there was nothing obviously burnt, oozing or otherwise deranged. And nothing was.
Then I hit the button and let the machine run through the cycle a few times. The results you can see in the embedded video.
The thing most of note for me: the processor’s heatsink fan will not run. It tries, but fails. There are a number of things this implies, but I need to talk to the guys at Scan who built the machine before I go doing what my mother used to refer to as “jumping to concussions”.
Meanwhile, for those of you who were trying to work out what was wrong: that’s what we’ve got to work with so far.
…Also, for those of you who wanted system specs to assist you in diagnosis: here they are. It’s essentially a system built for fast graphics work (it spends a lot of its spare time rendering in Terragen, in particular) but also obviously handles WP work at damn-near-blazing speed.
- Housing: Antec Three Hundred Black Midi Tower Case w/o PSU
- Mobo: Gigabyte H55M-UD2H, Intel H55, 1156, DDR3 1600/1800/2133, RAID, VGA, ATX
- Processor: Intel Core i3 530 2.93GHz S1156
- To keep the processor chilled: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2
- Memory: 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600), CAS 9
- Video: ATI Graphics 1GB XFX HD 5870 XT, 865Mhz GPU, 1600 SPs, 5200Mhz GDDR5
- Display: It’s a Samsung 28-inch (I think?) flat screen. I can’t find the model info at the moment: it was bought separately from the main system, an open-box bargain.
- PSU: 650W Corsair CMPSU-650HXUK PSU (High End Graphics Card)
- HD 1: 500 GB Samsung Spinpoint F3, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache
- HD 2: 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3, 7200rpm, 32MB Cache
- CD/DVD drives: Sony AD-7240S-0B – 24x DVDRW (x2)
- Sound: Creative X-Fi Titanium – PCI-E (x1)
- Still more cooling: 120mm Akasa Amber Case Fan
- System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
…So there you have it. To those of you who’ve tried to help so far, many thanks! 🙂
And now I’m off to let Moffat make me scared of WiFi.
ETA: Secondary to all the above, and after no steps taken at home proved useful, the machine is going to be heading back to its lovely builders for service… so we’re having a sale at the Ebooks Direct store to “celebrate”. Details are here.
*Disambiguation: for the worldgating complex, see the Chur entry at ErrantryWiki.
On this day twenty-six years ago, I got married (for the first time*) to the coolest man on Earth.
There he is in a pic I took of him some months previously, by the boathouse on Central Park Lake. That afternoon seems like about ten minutes ago, some ways. And even after two and a half decades spent being with this man and learning his complexities, the experience never gets old. My life and my work would be utterly empty without him: his presence and his gifts inform everything I do.
He contains multitudes. Hotshot novelist, gourmet cook, indefatigable researcher (“Are you still on TV Tropes??”), crazed modeller, retrotech geek, artist, sound effects specialist, raconteur, friend of all cats (especially big ones) and softie about all cute things, eagle-eyed pilot, militaria expert, swordsman and screenwriter, connoisseur of fountain pens and typewriters, sex god, ever-understanding confidant, protector and defender, best friend, kindly and incisive critic, Calvin to my Susie: he is all of these and more… way more.
Peter, I love you.
Bring on the next twenty-six years.
*There were two weddings: one in LA to get the paperwork handled, and the second on in Boston so that the maximum number of friends could be there.
It’s a cheerful moment at the start of a much-loved story…
“[Bilbo] had a horrible thought that the cakes might run short, and then he — as the host: he knew his duty and stuck to it, however painful — he might have to go without.
“‘Come along in, and have some tea!’ he managed to say after taking a deep breath.
“‘A little beer would suit me better, if it is all the same to you, my good sir,’ said Balin with the white beard. ‘But I don’t mind some cake — seed-cake, if you have any.’
“‘Lots!’ Bilbo found himself answering, to his surprise; and he found himself scuttling off , too, to the cellar to fill a pint beer-mug, and then to a pantry to fetch two beautiful round seed-cakes which he had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel.”
And there you have it. Clue-finder and web-cutter, friend of bears and guest of eagles, Ringwinner, luckwearer, barrel-rider: Bilbo Baggins bakes, too. Here is the all-round hero in potentia, waiting for the Call… but with one eye on the oven timer. (And the appetite obviously heroic, as well. Only a hobbit would consider two whole seedcakes “a morsel”.)
…It’s been hanging about in British children’s literature for a while now, the seed cake. The appearance in The Hobbit is hardly the first one: seed cake turns up as comfort food often enough, sometimes in strange disguises (the reference in Winnie the Pooh to “crustimoney proseedcake” is one of these).
I woke up this morning (completely irrationally) with the yen for it and went to check what recipes were to be found.
There are quite a few recipes online at the moment: apparently the cake is having a mini-renaissance due to people rereading The Hobbit in the wake of the film, or in prep for it. Now, we’ve had a recipe for something similar over at the Real Irish Desserts site for a while now, but it’s more along toward the Irish-influenced “tea bread” end of the spectrum due to the chopped candied fruit in it. So I checked the classic recipe from Beeton, had a look at Delia and Nigel Slater, and then wandered about a little bit more (discovering along the line that we’re out of baking parchment [makes a note on the kitchen chalkboard]) and assessed a few others.
The recipe that looked best to me was this one over at the HobbitsSecondBreakfast site (now gone: link via the WayBack Machine). …And typically, once I started working with it I started to adjust it. The changes are fairly significant, so let’s change the title a bit to signal this.
ETA, 26 April 2024: I’ve added measurements for a larger (and possibly more Hobbit-sized) bake suitable for a full-sized US bread loaf pan, or a UK 2-pound loaf tin. (EU 2-liter tin.)
Took Family Seed Cake
- 250 g / scant 2 cups cream flour or (US: cake flour) // For a tenderer crumb than with plain flour. (For a large loaf pan: 300g / 2 cups flour.)
- 1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder // For a better rise with cream flour (For a large loaf pan: 1.5 teaspoons baking powder.)
- Optional, for a higher rise: 0.25 teaspoon cream of tartar. (For a large loaf pan, 0.5 teaspoon.)
- Pinch of salt (For a large loaf pan: 2 pinches.)
- 150g / about 3/4 cup butter, softened (For a large loaf pan: 200g / 1 cup butter.)
- 150g / scant 3/4 cup caster sugar (US: superfine granulated sugar, or regular granulated) (For a large loaf pan: 200g / 1 cup sugar.)
- 2 tablespoons milk or buttemilk. (For a large loaf pan: up to 3 tablespoons of your preferred milk.)
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract (For a large loaf pan: 2 tablespoons)
- 3 tablespoons caraway seed // Double the original amount. If this is going to be a seed cake, let it be a seed cake for Eru’s sake. (Nigel Slater gets a little snippy about this, but I think he has the wrong end of the stick here. Or his caraway seeds were superannuated.) Also: Some people prefer to substitute poppy seed here. 2 tablespoons would probably be a better amount. (For a large loaf pan: 3-4 tablespoons of caraway seeds, according to your preference.)
- 3 large eggs (For a large loaf pan: 4 large eggs.)
- 2 tablespoons lemon zest (or 1 teaspoon pureed zest, if you can get it) // To my mind lemon works better with this than orange. (For a large loaf pan, 3-4 tablespoons, according to your preference.)
Preheat oven to 180°C / 350°F.
Butter, and ideally line with buttered greaseproof paper / baking parchment (assuming you haven’t just discovered you’ve run out of the damn stuff) a one-pound loaf pan / tin. (ETA: Do the same for a 2-pound loaf pan if you’re using one. Or, for a more Bilbo-like result—specifically a round seedcake—give the same treatment to the bottom and sides of a 9-inch springform pan.)
Sift together (or just stir together, if you couldn’t be arsed) the flour, baking powder, cream of tartar if used, and salt.
Get out the electric mixer and cream together the softened butter and sugar until light and fluffy. (If you can’t wait that long, cream them together until you can no longer feel granularity in the mixture when a little is rubbed between finger and thumb. Do not do this so many times that people start suspecting you’re only testing the consistency because you really like eating just-butter-and-sugar.)
Add the eggs one at a time to this mixture and after each one is added, beat like crazy. Add the vanilla extract and lemon zest.
Slow the mixer down and add in the flour mixture tablespoonful by tablespoonful until about half of it is gone. Add the milk. Then continue slowly adding the rest of the flour. Don’t overbeat this. Just mix gently until combined.
Slow the mixer to a crawl and stir in the caraway (or other) seeds.
With a spatula, fill the loaf pan / loaf tin / springform pan with the mixture. Smooth the top a little. Use a knife to draw a line down the center the long way. (This really does work a little the way it does with bread, to make a path-of-least-resistance for the cake to rise along.)
Bake a seedcake in a loaf pan for 50 minutes: a seedcake in a springform for 35 minutes. (If baking in a large loaf pan, bake for 90 minutes.)
Test for doneness. A skewer should come up almost entirely dry. A few crumbs sticking to it are OK.
When done, remove the cake from the oven and let it sit in the tin for another ten minutes.
Then remove it and stand on a wire rack to cool.
Slice and serve. This toasts brilliantly, by the way. Be careful of toasting temperatures, as the sugar makes it likely to scorch if the temperature’s too high.
If expecting dwarves: make about six more.
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Dude, where’s my Apocalypse?!
Does anybody have an 800 number for the ancient Mayans? Because I need to lodge a complaint.
Seriously, 2012 has been something of a wash all around. Tragedies. Mass shootings. Anguish of all kinds. Local cataclysms of the flood-and-earthquake variety. Wars and rumors of war (well, yeah, we always have those, but this year has seemed worse than usual for some reason). Superstorms. Droughts and famines. Endless human pain. (And other species are suffering too, obviously, but in typically human fashion it’s our own pain we notice most.)
A nice hefty apocalypse would’ve really taken the edge off all of those.
Because just think of it. No more… well, no more [fill in the blank with whatever really gets on your case]. I have my own list: full of the great tragedies above, but also full of many lesser ones, of annoyances and disappointments and things that just get under my skin. No more Prometheus. No more robocalling marketers. No more fiscal cliffs. No more spam. No more Windows 8. No more Apple Maps. Crash a runaway planet or so into us and it’s all over with, and good riddance. (I really would miss never seeing season 3 of Sherlock or the remaining Hobbit films, but when so much evil would be wiped out at the same time, it seems petty to complain.)
Yet after all this effing buildup, what have we got this morning?
Bupkis!
It’s been beyond annoying, really: partly because we were promised two others of these this year. One of them was going to be a few days after my birthday. I thought, “Yeah, typical. I hit a landmark year and then have three days to enjoy it: whose good idea was this??” And the day came — it was supposed to be one of those raptures or something similar — and what do we get?
Nothing.
Then immediately the guy responsible for the math says, “Whoops, no, calculation error, God moves in mysterious ways, I haven’t been told everything, uh, human error, that’s the ticket. It’s going to be October.” The designated date was right after Peter’s birthday this time. P. simply said, “Great, I get a party and no hangover!” — trust him to see the bright side of an apocalypse: this kind of behavior is the reason I married the man. And the day comes, and we have our little party, and the day goes, and what do we get?
Zip. Zilch. Nada.
What’s the saying? Once might be an accident. Twice could be coincidence. But the third time? Enemy action. The third time, any sensible person would pick up the phone and call Customer Service and say, “This is unacceptable. Something is really wrong at the fulfillment end. You need to do something to put this right.”
But who do I complain to?
Because now we’re going to hear the old song again… all the stuff about how complex the problem is, how you can’t possibly blame any one person or organization. It was this writer. Or that broadcasting personality. It was a runaway meme. It was publicity-seeking New Agers — that’ll be a popular one. You can just see what the news is going to look like tomorrow, as all these people who promised us an End Of The World that could actually be worth something start pointing at each other and trying to shift the blame.
“Miscalculations in the calendar” — I bet that’ll be the most popular excuse. Rounding errors. Failure to correctly convert metric to imperial, or the other way around. (At least one Mars probe went God knows where because of that: you’d think people would’ve learned better by now! Seriously.) Or wait a moment, no, it’ll all have been a translation error, won’t it? Such a subjective art. Yeah, let’s blame the translators. Like they don’t already have enough on their plates.
I guess there’s nothing for it but to settle in for a nice long session of watching the fingerpointing, until the news cycle gets bored with it and cycles on. (And I bet that won’t happen soon enough for some of these people, who’ve thought nothing in particular of inflicting their own crazy paranoias on the rest of the planet at large.) It’ll be just like the week after the US Presidential election all over again, with all the people who thought Romney was such a shoe-in suddenly finding all these great reasons how the other guys in the party screwed it up. “Wait, what? Women? Black and hispanic voters? Young voters? He said not to pay them any mind…! Yeah, him over there. And Romney, pff, I never really liked him anyway…”
Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going to let this slide. I want to march up to somebody’s desk and get this made right. I don’t care what it takes: they can bloody well get DHL or FedEx on it, for God’s sake, but I want that runaway planet or whatever the hell it was supposed to be on my desk by tomorrow morning at the latest. And in the meantime, until the email with the tracking number comes in, I just want an answer.
Dude, where’s my apocalypse?!
It’s not a bad thing to take a moment, an hour: a day? …to think about this: regardless of the presence or absence of turkeys.
So today I’m being grateful for relative stability in this crazy business. For all the friends and acquaintances in the field who give me something to look up to and strive toward. For my NY agent, who is a longtime BAMF and near-superhero. For all the Tumblr buddies and fans, all the @’s at Twitter, all the faces at Facebook: all the folks who wander across the screen or through the phone each day and keep turning my mind so usefully outward (for getting stuck inside the writer-head and spinning the wheels with too much introversion is a constant danger): for the folks who take me seriously and the folks who refuse to. 🙂
I’m thankful for the world’s most astonishing husband, a BAMF in his own right and and someone about which not enough good can possibly be said. (Not that I don’t try sometimes.) For neighbors who think what I do is weird but will nonetheless defend it vigorously to passing strangers. For time to learn to do that weird stuff better. For people who’re interested in seeing the results, and who keep thanking me for things I did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. For being forgiven for screwing up. For support from my colleagues when I’ve needed it. From a chance to pay the favors forward, occasionally.
I’m thankful for not being in a war zone. For not having been shot in the head by terrorists because I wanted an education. For not being about to lose my job (or constantly in fear of it). For knowing that the ones I love are alive and well, or at least Maintaining an Even Strain. For (at the moment anyway) inhabiting a locality of relative peace and freedom (for such things are always relative, no matter on which continent one resides). For my health. For always having enough to eat that I can actually need to diet a wee bit. For the incentive to do so, and to pay attention to maintaining my health properly, that’s provided by the occasional email that says “WIll you hurry up and write [fill in name of book here] before you die??!”
I’m thankful for a roof over our heads. For enough of everything to get by and keep the Work coming out (and yes, thank you, Sherlock, for the reminder that it does deserve a capital letter). For a life, in general, that is better than anything I could have imagined when I was a kid, and which pretty much displays a tendency toward getting better all the time, in ways I never could have reasonably expected.
Thankful: that’s me for the moment. For a thousand other things, too, but I have no intention of boring you with the whole list.
And now I’m going to go start up the roast beef. (Because believe me, there is no escape from turkey around here at Christmas time, and I’m damned if I’m going to have it twice in one season.)