So.. I’ve been baking cupcakes a lot lately. It was my birthday on Wednesday, and one of the traditions at my workplace is that the birthday person provides cakes for everyone.
I thought I’d be different and actually make them myself. There are 80-odd people in my company, so this was no minor undertaking..
It all turned out quite well, and I managed to get them all to the office, on the train, by means of panniers and my trusty bicycle.
I made Chocolate and Guinness, Orange Chocolate, Lemon, and Carrot and Cream Cheese flavours.
By far the most popular were the carrot cakes and poor philb didn’t get to try an assembled one as I iced everything at work (to maximise the chance that they would all arrive in a reasonable state), but he enjoyed the two separate sections.
So today, I decided to bake some more, just for philb.

Carrot Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

Makes 12
For the Cupcakes:
120g caster sugar
95ml vegetable oil
2 tablespoons orange juice
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon salt
110g plain flour
180g grated carrots

For the Icing:
227g Philadelphia cream cheese(room temperature)
85g icing sugar
1/4 tablespoon vanilla extract

Directions

Put oven on 180C

For cupcakes
Combine sugar, vegetable oil, vanilla extract, eggs and orange juice
Sift in flour, baking powder, baking soda, allspice and salt
Mix in carrots
Spoon into cupcake tray or paper cases
Bake for about 25 minutes

For the icing

Sift the icing sugar over the cream cheese and beat until smooth. Add vanilla extract

Owing to my pathetic fear of hairdressers, I have just hacked off chunks of my own hair. It is now possible to actually get a brush through it without spraining something. I consider this all I can ask for from a hair-cut.

As a result of this, I found myself having to explain to Philb what a ‘toffee spreader’ is.

Many moons ago, when I was a small cute infant, my dad used to brush my hair. This was always a struggle, as I had long hair, and had usually been visited by the mysterious Toffee Spreader, who left inexplicable snarls in his victims’ hair when they weren’t looking. No actual toffee was involved, of course, but it was a reasonable (so I believed) explanation for the multitude of tangles my hair always seemed to contain.

Now I come to explain this, it does sound a bit weird. Maybe I dreamed it.

A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless as one day he hopes to be a respected lawyer, came out with the following (during a conversation about latin phrases used in law):

“assuming polar bear poo freezes, so decomposition is very slow, if the ice melts due to global warming, will we get flooded with water AND poo?”

Just how do you get to that from “malum aut est malum in se, aut prohibitum”??

Even though thingsonsticks has more or less faded into sticky memory, I still retain a certain fondness for items on sticks, so I was particularly delighted to come across the artist Brian Pike and in particular, a picture called ‘Things on Sticks’.

Have a look. I’m sure you’ll see the appeal.

Philb and I have decided that we must own something by this genius. Preferably involving sticks/owls/cats, but all his pictures are fabulous.

Yay!

For those occasions when you are manually editing data and need to replace what you are removing with a NULL. The keystroke is control-0

The number of times I’ve googled for that, as I can never remember it..

Never have I been more aware of not being ‘one of the boys’ than I am right now. There is a pool match at the pub, arranged between the two male members of IT and two other people from the company. As it’s not unusual for the whole IT department to go out to the pub at lunchtime, I assumed that when they asked me what I was doing for lunch, that I would be welcome, so said I would come with them. The response was ‘Oh, we were going to ask you to cover’. Gee thanks boys.

For months now I’ve been feeling like I don’t really fit in with the pair of them. They talk endlessly about football and are very cliquey together. Whenever I join in the conversation, or make a suggestion, it’s like I’ve not even spoken.

I’m not generally this sensitive, but I’ve been feeling like I’m in a team of one for quite a while now, like I’m not part of the IT department, and just happen to share an office with them.

My boss is not in today, and if she were, we would have all gone together. But I’m sat here on my own. I’m not going to pretend I’m not hurt, because I am.

Ouch!,
originally uploaded by Purplekitten.

Random Cat has had large thorn item removed from his eye, and personal items removed from his person. It seemed to make sense to get it done while he was having a general anyway for the eye-debris-problem. I have large amounts of cat-guilt though as he just thought he was going to have his eye sorted out, but we just can’t have a full tom about the place, Mogret would pack her bags…

Oh boy. The ’soothing music’ approach failed. From about 21:30 last night Random Cat yelled and yelled and yelled and yelled and yelled. When we went to bed he was still yelling, and didn’t show any signs of stopping. If anything, the cries were increasingly frantic.

Eventually I got out of bed and curled up on the floor next to him in his room. Immediate purrs and then silence. He lay next to me and slept.

So, we got some sleep, but I’m now full of I-slept-on-the-floor-to-comfort-a-cat aches.

I feel so guilty that this poor cat is so unhappy about being trapped in our house. If there was another way, I’m sure we’d do it, but he’s got to have eyedrops four times daily and we normally only see him once or twice a day, if that. Plus he’s got to be here to go back for the operation to remove the grass seed, and sometimes we don’t see him for days.

So, sorry Random Cat but it will be over soon.

After a tense and miow-filled night, I sought to discover some method of calming our anxious house-guest.

Earlier today, if you visited his room, he would be assessing escape potential and looking wary. I’ve been playing romantic classical music at him for a few hours now and he’s currently in a state of placid acceptance. It is now possible to go in and out of the room without causing more than a happy purr.

Whether or not this is due to the large amounts of Rachmaninoff I’ve been pouring into his lug-holes, I shall probably never know, as he could just be calming down of his own accord. Mogret is also calmed by music, although we discovered that her taste is a little unusual. She finds Mr Scruff particularly soothing (as we spotted while redecorating the lounge) and seems to have a penchant for trance and techno. Personally I think that’s just her attempt to ingratiate herself to the maker of such music (my husband). She’s smart enough to know how people work.

On the subject of manipulating foolish humans, she executed the sneakiest move yet this morning: she moved into Random House, the kennel we had built for our current house-guest to give him some shelter if he persisted in being afraid of Indoors. She sat in there looking reproachfully back at the house, as if to say “he’s in my house, I suppose I’ll have to live here now”. Evil, evil cat. She knows just how to make me feel guilty.

Oh boy. Random Cat has cried all night. Somewhere along the way I did manage to block out the pitiful wailing and get some sleep, but it must’ve started again with renewed vigor at 05:13, as it woke me again.

I dutifully trundled downstairs and fed Mog (first of course) and then returned upstairs with a sachet of food for our guest. Never have I seen food vanish so rapidly.

I had trouble escaping from the room though: every time I went to the door he would rush to me and headbutt me, purr and generally make a fuss. When I did manage to get the door open, he attempted escape. He’s back to the crying now. It would break my heart if I didn’t know that this was definitely for His Own Good. He just doesn’t like being alone in that room: when you are in there with him, he’s happy and purry and catnip-silly with pleasure.

There isn’t room to sleep in there with him; which is good, as I’m just soft-hearted and silly enough to consider that as an option.