Bananarama

Yet more baking!

In my office, there is a tradition of having a positive ending to our weekly staff meetings. Sometimes this takes the form of Pictionary but more often than not its rather cake-based. I was warned before I made my first cake to avoid bananas as our finance guy is allergic to them. So it was decided amongst the rest of the office that I should make a non-banana banana cake!

The cake itself is a chocolate tray bake from Beautiful Baking by Jane Asher. This was my first 'baking' cookery book and has some really good simple recipes for cakes, biscuits and random stuff like crumpets. Its pretty much my go-to book for easy but yummy cake.

I then chopped the corners and middle section off to make a basic banana shape (or wonky moon as by housemate described it!)

I then coloured some ready-made icing yellow (using trusty Dr Oetker) and covered the cake to make the 'inside' of the banana. I forgot to buy jam to stick the icing to the cake, so improvised with golden syrup!

I wasn't happy with the overall bananary-ness of it, so made some half peeled skin using a darker shade of yellow icing. I folded back the tops of the 'skin' pieces to make it look more realistic. Some scored lines down the banana and skin later and tah dah! One novelty cake!

This is my very first novelty cake and I am unbelievably proud of myself! Whether the finance guy will feel the same way is another matter!

This is not a book p. 44

Continuing the This is not a book project, we're on to page 44 - "This is a set of Directions"

My task here was to follow a series of drawing based instructions, like 'draw a dotted line on a diagonal, about 2 inches long' using a drawing implement of my choice. I chose the trusty black biro.

The result is here:

To me it looks a bit like a poorly rendered Alexander Calder sculpture (albeit in biro rather than twisted wire......)

This is not a book p.126

Continuing my 'This is Not a Book" adventures by randomly opening the book and doing as I'm told, today I competed page 126 - This is an Underground Organisation.

My task was to go to the "This is Not a Book" webpage, enter the code 'JT25261' and recieve the mission. (You can do it too by clicking here!)

So off I went to my super secret location (I was tempted to imply that I had some sort of secret lair, but sadly I am not a Bond villain from the 1970s). Here is the result!

Mission Acomplished. This post will self destruct in 10 seconds...........

This is not a book

I was my birthday recently, and I was given a book by Keri Smith called 'This is Not a Book'.

Keri Smith has written a series of books (Wreck this Journal, How to be an Explorer of the World) which are meant to be destroyed/altered by writing on, ripping and experimenting with the pages. Despite this being an awesome idea, I just couldn't bring myself to actually damage the books because, you know, its a book. They're somehow sacred and not to be written on.

But the time has come to take the plunge and start doing as the book is asking me. I decided to come at the book randomly, choose a page by flicking the book open and do what the page tells me to do.

So to page 109 - This is an excerpt from another book.

My randomly selected book is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (a book which I strongly reccommend. Far better than the slightly crappy 90s TV series of the same name.)

I close my eyes and flick onto page 275 and write down the first sentence I see:

"He banged the lump of metal with his hammer, twisting it as he did so with implements Richard assumed, correctly, were tongs."

So there we have it, I have started to complete an interactive book project. Stay tuned for the next thrilling instalment!