M is for Mikelmerck, Malfi and Meringue failure

M

Mikelmerck

New followers may not be aware of this, but I've been tatting about with an RPG setting for a while now.  It's been in abeyance lately due to having to be in shows and direct stuff, but there's a fair bit of material to be found on this vanity project already.

Mikelmerck is a fantasy Yorkshire turned up to 11.  For a selection of Mikelmerkian posts, take a look here.  Chris over at Bladesharp also has a couple of great Mikelmerkian entries which are well worth a look.  Although I'm not a mechanics bunny, I have been using Swords and Wizardry stats for the few bits that have such things.  Part of me would rather not use any stats at all, but the gamer-side rebels at having no numbers.

As is probably obvious, I'm a lot less interested in working out the mechanics than I am in the crossover between real and imagined myth.  It has been enormous fun and I'm semi-planning to see if I can do a test run with some of this material.  Possibly on G+, possibly just by good old-fashioned email.

None of this can happen until I've got Duchess of Malfi  out of the way.  This possibly overly-ambitious Youth Theatre production hits the stage in four weeks which is a petrifying thought.  We're pretty close to OK on it, but there is still a genuine knife-edge terror about the whole project.  Getting Webster's language sorted has been a huge issue and despite the numerous cuts, it's still one heck of a long play.  I am currently crossing my fingers and hoping the cast have the same sense of urgency that I do and have spent the Easter holiday constructively (i.e. making sure they know it).

On another issue entirely, I woke this morning to find the kitchen floor looking as though it had been hit by a polystyrene explosion.  Closer inspection revealed that someone had tried to eat one of my failed meringues and suffered the consquences.

Unfailed meringues

I made a batch for our Easter party last weekend and didn't beat the eggwhites long enough.  The results are explosive and not particularly edible as they turned into very hard biscuits of crystalline property.  I made a second batch which worked just fine, but my record with meringues is variable.  Either they are a howling success or they go drastically wrong.  No middle ground here.  I don't eat the things.   Egg white and sugar?  I ask you.  Why is that even a food?.

Even so, this particular failure is still better than my all time best failure when I made a superb batch of impeccable looking meringues only to discover that I had used salt instead of sugar.  Or rather I didn't discover it, but some pavlova lovers did.  Gastronomic treats of our time.

The lesson?  When re-using containers remember to label them properly.

K is for Knack

K

The letter K was causing me problems in my mild A-Z planning, but this is where I've ended up.  

Collins English Dictionary offers these definitions:

1. a skilful, ingenious, or resourceful way of doing something

2. a particular talent or aptitude, esp an intuitive one

Knack covers positive and negative, which is always useful in a word.  My knack for baking cake is matched by my knack for rolling bad dice.

I've also found giving NPCs a knack or two an easy way to bring them to life.  A physical description is all very well, but I run out of hair colours and voices long before I run out of interesting knacks.  Meeting up with that strawberry blonde bar wench is fine, but give her a knack for being always in the right place to overhear what she shouldn't and a mean line in home-brewing and you have a story in the making.

Knacks.  I'm a fan.

Study for the Bar at the Folie Bergere by Edward Manet

Chocolate - can there be too much?

With term speeding to an end, most of the things I need to do are becoming manageable. 

Costume construction - under way and continuing.
Play written.
Props list and other stuff for Oklahoma! - underway and continuing.
Rehearsals planned.
Games all running along nicely.

Obviously I need another project and luckily there is one to hand.

In a moment of lunacy back in February, husband, son and I decided to throw an Easter party for no better reason than we hadn't had a party for years.  To the socially ept, this may seem like an easy thing to do.  Allow me to explain that this is not so around our place.

Although I am quite good at making and keeping friends, along with the rest of my immediate family I am petrified of large gatherings.  Parties in particular.  As a teen, I never went to them.  Partly because I wasn't invited to any (extreme introvert and reluctant to leave the safe confines of my bedroom), partly because even if I had been invited, I'd have worked myself into such a state of trauma that I wouldn't have gone.

The family record is not good in this respect.  It is, therefore, a little strange that we decided on a whim to hold a massive Easter egg hunt for what now looks like about 35-40 people on Easter Sunday.  The British weather being what it is, the current warm and Spring-like spell is unlikely to last.  I mention this only because we're planning to hold said egg hunt in the garden.  In the event of rain, it will be inside.

Several challenges await. 

The house must be tidied.  Not simple.  We live in a very large house indeed and it is packed to the gunnels with what can only be described as clutter.  For guests to get through the door without injury, something must be done.  Son has agreed to help.  Amazingly.

Mass catering must ensue.  This is fun and easy.  No problems there.  Except that in my nightmares, all guests decide they have better things to do and don't come.  Always an embarrassing possibility with parties.

Eggs must be purchased.  Also fun and easy, but brings me back to the original title of this post.  Can there be too much chocolate?  Clearly I can live on the stuff and I know I'm not alone in this, but I've got a slight fear that unless we make some kind of uber-spreadsheet, we may well be finding unfound Easter eggs well into next year. 

So far I've got lots on order.  No recent shopping trip has been complete without adding a couple of packets of chocolate eggs of varying types to the basket.

Guilt-free shopping for chocolate.  Lovely.

Getting my cookery mojo back

Made a chocolate cake yesterday. 

It was (and what remains, still is) delicious.

The only reason this is important is that I needed a confidence boost. 

I enjoy cooking and I'm good at it.  So, when I made some vegetable soup last week and it turned out to be as interesting as dishwater, I panicked.  It also looked like dishwater.  This is not how it works.  I can make vegetable soup - done it many, many times with uniformly great results until this one epic failure.

Instant crash of confidence.  If I could not make vegetable soup, using the same ingredients and whatnot that I've always used, who knows what else might fail?  Possibly I would no longer be able to make cake.  This was a tormenting thought.  Cake has ALWAYS been my thing.  Failing with cake would be unthinkable.

When confronted by a crisis of this nature, I did what I always do.  I procrastinated and let my inner self nag me.  Surely it was better not to make cake than make cake and fail? 

"We're talking about cake here.  You've been making cake and cooking regularly since you were 10 years old.  And let me remind you, that is now a very long time."

"Gee.  Thanks, inner self.  You really know how to give a person a boost."

"It's not meant to give you a boost, moron.  It's a reality check.  Get that butter out of the fridge and BAKE."

My inner self has these dictatorial tendencies.  I cringed away and whimpered.  And got the butter out of the fridge and baked.  In a blur.  On auto-pilot.  In exactly the same way that I'd made the failed soup that started this whole confidence crisis.

It worked.  I feel better now.  I still don't know what went wrong with the soup, mind.

This probably has wider applications, but I'll take being able to cook again for now.

The reading pile - more brain mapping

As we settle in for the great family blob, I am looking forward to my reading pile.

By the bed and dotted strategically around the house are the following:

Printed versions of character creation rules for the RPG formerly known as Runequest and Elric of Melnibone.  This in anticipation of a Google+ game intended to enliven the festival.

The Popes - John Julius Norwich and Saints and Sinners by Eamon Duffy

Reader's Digest book of British folklore

High Spirits by Robertson Davis, because what is Christmas without a ghost?

How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson - because who knows when the bakery urge may strike?

A random selection of Chalet School stories.  I love these.  If anyone knows where I can find a copy of Redheads of the Chalet School - just tell me.

Heroes of Shadow - D&D 4e handbook to update my bard with

As many plays as I can lay hands on, because being prepared is good.

The Lord of the Rings - an annual re-read.

Dracula - another one.

Everything I can find by Diana Wynne Jones and Georgette Heyer.  Never failing delights the both of them.

This list is pure joy.

Bakery revisted

The great baking projects are complete.  I have the stained fingers and bizarre facebook statuses to prove it.

Operation Gingerbread went surprisingly well.  Once baked, the slabs behaved reasonably and responded to the application of icing-as-glue.  Well, one of them did.  The other admittedly suffered a structural collapse at a crucial stage, but imagination came to the rescue.  We decided that building a gothic ruin was a perfectly acceptable adaptation of the gingerbread theme.  The swift addition of a fallen body, several Christmas trees, a dusting of snow and fake blood and lo - a seasonal ghost story was born in bakery.  The other dwelling looked rather dull in comparison and I think next year I shall focus on ruins from the outset.

Christmas cake (i.e. chocolate laced with plum brandy confection) assembled and ready to be consumed whenever seems like a good idea.

Birthday cake also assembled.  It looks vile - and I say this with true feeling.  I spent the afternoon attempting to coat tentacles in buttercream and moulding demon eyes out of royal icing.  Just for the record, neither task is easy.  I would have been better off going for royal icing, but it doesn't taste as good.  In honesty, I'm not quite sure that the finished product looks like, but it does verge on the nightmarish which is the point after all.  I've stabbed it in one grotesque eye with a symbolic candle and shall take another poke at it tomorrow when I've got the food dye off my hands.

Organisation - I have the skillz

Sometimes I have the skillz.

The list so far - and meagre though it is, it pleases me:

Festive meat ordered:  Traditionally we tend to hole up over Christmas and just blob about amiably for the duration, but on this occasion we're going to be in Cyprus over the New Year.  Therefore it seemed a little foolish to buy vast slabs of meat.  My mum would have been so proud of me for thinking ahead.  One turkey crown, one piece of outstandingly beautiful beef, one ham to be cooked at home.  No pre-order on chipolatas.  The very fine butcher assured me that they will have plenty and they can be purchased on pick up.  Down payment made.

Bake fest impending:  Today and tomorrow.  Dear friend (she is my usual partner in crime for cake construction) is descending later today and we have plans to make a gingerbread building of some kind.  Possibly several as between us we never knowingly undercater.  A wistful phone conversation earlier in the week suggested that we may try to build something capable of accommodating a tealight without the gingerbread catching fire.  We shall make the building blocks (so to speak) today and then get busy with the icing gun tomorrow.

I also intend to make a Christmas cake based closely on the uber-chocolate cake I made for the infamous wedding back in October.  Fruit cake is pointless in our family as nobody eats it.  Booze-infused chocolate cake is likely to go down well, however.

Additionally, there is the son's birthday cake.  By tradition, he chooses what he wants the thing to look like, and so far has had a bird-eating spider, Cthulhu devouring a boat and a flame spitting dragon.  This year he wants another Elder God and I shall attempt to craft Shub-Niggurath for him. 

Trees:   Will go up this weekend as well.  One in each front facing bay window just because.

Yet to be done:

Umm.  Some present buying would be good, I suppose.
My tax return.  I'm whispering this one as it's a black spot in any year for the self-employed.

Cake

I have a couple of cakes to make in the next few days.  Mr Rev's birthday cake and a cake for a dear friend who weds his partner next week in Edinburgh Castle.

The end of September sees the start of the birthday season in our primary social circle, with everyone born at one end of the year.  Our gaming group are a cheerfully social bunch, so in the past we've done a lot of celebrating with themed cakes.  My usual partner in crime for these events is hors de combat due to the recent arrival of her son, and the gaming as a whole has dropped off a little, but we continue to go to some trouble to celebrate birthdays.  Go us.

Not the right wedding cake.  This was a white chocolate monster made last year for two of the gaming group who got married to each other.  Or rather, the first of the two pairs of gaming group members who married each other.  Shutting up now.  The caption is practically longer than the post.

Sunday is Mr Rev's mumblety-mumblety birthday.  I'm being cautious about this not because he's paranoid about his age, but because I can't remember how old he is.  For that matter I mostly can't remember how old I am either without serious thought.  Anyway, the gamers are coming around on Sunday evening and we'll let him try to kill us as a treat.

The cakes in question will both be fun to make.  Mr Rev wants a toffee apple spice cake and the wedding thing is going to be the darkest of dark chocolate sloshed through with homemade plum brandy.  I need, therefore, to do some shopping.

Coxes apples - the sort that disintegrate gently on cooking
Bag of Werhter's toffees
85% dark chocolate
Edible gold leaf or similar


This is a good list.  Every item is absolutely needful and all of them look indulgent.  Well, maybe not the apples.