Gbazz

Earlier this afternoon, while at my cousin’s house,  I was nursing a hangover from a party the night before. I also kept falling asleep on the couch every three minutes or so. Sometime between 2PM and 5PM, one of my nephews started screaming about Mario Galaxy, which woke me up.

Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I started browsing Google Reader’s recommended feeds, and stumbled across a blog post where the author had taken empty toilet paper rolls and cut these intricate designs into it.

Then of course, since I’m a regular Martha Stewart, I decided to try to make one when I got home.

After obtaining an empty toilet paper roll (all that paper really makes a mess), I then proceeded to cut little designs into it with a scalpel. As you can see in the picture above, they’re not that intricate, but the whole thing is damn well beautiful.

The lesson to take away from this is that everything can be beautiful. Except for your face. But that’s not your fault, so it’s ok.

The Blue Snowball mic that I bought off Ebay last week arrived on Tuesday, and everyday since it got here, all I’ve done before work is sit in front of the computer and record myself singing. Don’t worry, it’s a totally healthy activity.

Anyway, I decided to do my own rendition of Sophie Madeleine’s “Beardsong”. It isn’t that polished, but it was fun to do.

Here are two versions of it, the normal one, and the oolllld tiiimmeeee raaaadioooooo version.

Beardsong Cover

Beardsong Cover-Telephone

Earlier this afternoon I noticed that @adhokk7 had dedicated all of YouTube to me:

Isn't he lovely?

so of course I had to upload a thank you video for him.

Not my light bulb planter, unfortunately

Earlier this morning, after scoffing down four Ferrero Rocher chocolate balls and reading all the new posts in Google Reader, I realised didn’t really have much to do today besides reading a book and texting people, so I decided to have a look at the starred items in Google Reader, and came across a Lifehacker post on turning old burnt out light bulbs into terrariums/vases.

The concept and the pictures were cool, so of course I wanted to do it straight away. What’s cooler than a little light bulb vase next to your monitor? The Lifehacker post linked to these easy to follow instructions on how to hollow out your own light bulb.

After hunting around the house for a while, I found an old burnt out light bulb, which was perfect, except for the fact that it was the kind that you push down and turn, rather the type that screws in. I went ahead and used it anyway, going on the assumption that all light bulbs are more or less the same.

Unfortunately for me, the inner workings of my light bulb were totally different from the bulb in the blog post.
According to the instructions, once you got the base open, you would be able to use a pair of pliers to remove the filament but my lightbulb looks like it was made out of one whole piece of glass, making it difficult to remove the filament without shattering the glass.

It looks like this craft experiment is at a dead end until I go out and buy a screw in light bulb.

Sigh.

Awesome hotel room

You know how hotel beds always have those smooooooth, comfortable sheets on them? Ever wondered why hotel linen is just so gosh-darned awesome?

It’s because it’s been washed a bajillion times by the laundry elves in the hotels basement. Do you know why they’ve washed those sheets so many times? It’s because a few thousand people have used those sheets before you.

Your sheets are comfortable because of all that sweat, drool, blood and jizz that’s been rubbed onto those sheets.

Isn’t that great?!

Not the coq au vin I made. Mine looked just a little bit better, hehe.

Sometime durinng the weekend I had the urge to cook a new dish, and since I saw Julie and Julia at the movies recently as well as seeing Samantha magically whip up a coq au vin on one of my Bewitched dvds, I decided to make coq au vin, which is basically chicken in a red wine & chicken stock sauce.

Since this was a new recipe I tried to do a little reading and found a recipe that was looked relatively easy and bought the ingredients for that recipe. After getting home though, I found a modified version of Julia Child’s recipe, and decided to give that one a try instead.

Now it’s not generally a good idea to change recipes just before cooking, as I found out, so I decided to just combine the two recipes and see how it all turned out. Both recipes had red wine in them, so I assumed that everything would be fine.

The whole thing was a bit complicated, and it took me about three hours to finish everything, but it was a fun experience. My favourite part would have to have been making the bouquet garni, all those herbs tied up into a little bundle smelled wonderful.

We served the coq au vin with a tasty potato bake that Adam made, and I had seconds like the greedy pig I am. Adam also made a beautiful little custard that was very creamy and nutmeg-ey.

The only downside to the whole dinner was that I think I didn’t put enough chicken stock into the pan or it could have been that I didn’t flambé the dish before adding the stock. Anyway I didn’t really notice anything wrong until the next day, when I woke up with a horrible headache and a dry mouth.

That’s right, my chicken gave me a hangover, and I didn’t even have anything to drink the night before! In fact, I’m ready to swear that I’ve been hungover for nearly two whole days now.

So if you feel like getting drunk one night and have a craving for chicken, hit me up. I’d be happy to cook you some coq au vin.

Apparently something was wrong with the mp3 I linked to in the previous post. It worked fine in my browser, but here’s the link to the original file on the Smule servers: Listen here

I was bored this afternoon when I remembered that Annik Skelton (@neekatron) tweeted that while she was out drinking herself into a stupor, she or one of her degenerate friends had the wonderful idea of singing ‘Hakuna Matata’ into the I Am T-Pain iPhone app.

Now I tried singing that, but it doesn’t sound cool when you’re the only person singing into the phone so I decided to sing ‘Bleeding Love’ by Leona Lewis. To spice things up a little bit I also sang the song in my best Southern Accent. Audio quality isn’t the best, but what do you expect from something with T-Pains name on it?

Click the link to listen: Bleeding Love

On another topic, Adam (@ohnoitsadam) just told me about a nightmare that he had last night. There was this weird rapist in his nightmare (no, he was not raping Adam) who had gotten caught, or was being interviewed fro something and he had this strange raspy voice which totally terrified Adam.

Luckily for Adam, his alarm went off then and he started waking up when he realised that the rapists horrifyingly raspy voice was actually my snoring.

So there you go, my snores sound like a rapist. Thank you very much.

So I made the cake! Definitely going to play around with fondant in the future.

The white layer looks a bit bumpy but that’s probably because the fondant is too thin.

Up next, pretty cupcakes!

This is not the cake I'm making for Adam. Isn't it pretty though?

Something strange happened this year, I ran out of gift ideas for Adam’s birthday! So I decided that aside from the usual presents, I would try to make him a special cake.

Now I can’t go into too much detail just yet, since it isn’t complete yet, and because Adam might read this. Let me just say that it involves rolled fondant.

I’ve always wondered how people made wedding cakes that look so great and during one of my occaisional Flickr trawlings I stumbled on some of the most beautiful cukcakes I’ve ever seen in this photostream. After looking through all of her pictures I saw a comment that mentioned fondant, and that’s pretty much how I got into this baking situation.

I only saw one type of fondant in Woolies and it didn’t look or taste that great, so I looked for a recipe that claimed to be for a relatively tasty fondant. After much searching, this recipe came up and I’m glad to say that it’s been a success! (On the second try though, I wasn’t paying attention to the pan on my first go and burned the lot.)

I’ve just got to make a couple more batches in the morning, grab the last of his presents from the shops and then we’re set!

Once the cake is complete, I’ll do a blog post with pictures. Hopefully the cake turns out well!