My Hazy (mis)Adventures

I just finished skyping with a near and dear friend whose name rhymes with CALM, which she ironically, is not ;). Our conversations, though infrequent, are generally quite lengthy and 2.5 hrs after of pure chatting I was FAMISHED! So into the kitchen I went to dig out the pudding (aka dessert) that M and I had made earlier today.

We followed the recipe his mum, in laymen’s terms, has called “tiramisu”. However, when I served this concoction/scientific experiment of a dessert to him he quickly renamed it “cow splat”. Why? Well, take a look at this beauty.

I suppose we could’ve used it as fertilizer but seeing as we’re lacking a vegetable garden the cow splat went into our bellies instead. And dear lord, was it ever yummy!

I’m not sure where in the process we went wrong…making tiramisu is fairly straight forward (so I thought) and the appeal of making it came from:

a) The lack of ingredients we’d need to buy (just lady fingers and mascarpone, we already had eggs, coffee, sugar, and chocolate)

b) The fast prep time (no baking involved! I thought I was saved this time…tiramisu just involves some whipping, stirring, and layering really)

But somewhere along the road of Italian cooking we went somewhere drastically wrong. Where egg whites should have been whipped into beautiful peaks that look like the Swiss Alps, we got something that looked like the polluted froth of Lake Ontario. Where the final mixture should have been firm like my stomach, we got something as runny as my sister’s nose the first time she saw Bambi. But I am a true believer in second chances (this is only true for food, I’m not as lenient when it comes to people) and wanted to try to salvage the remains of our disastrous creation.

So what did we do? Well there were three possible hypotheses in how to thicken up the diarrhea-like mess:

Cook the mixture- I mean, usually when you heat stuff up it thickens a little, right?
Add in flour or corn flour/corn starch- because again, this is the stuff you put in to give some strength and oomph to sauces…right?
Throw in some bananas- it helps for milkshakes and I figured it could add a nice flavour to the dessert.

We went for option 1 and 3 and the result was a banana-flavoured custard.

Talk about a tiramisu of Titanic proportions.

Meh, to hell with it. I went on to finish my thang, dunked the lady fingers in espresso (and downed the remainders of the espresso, which gave me a nice little burst of energy), completed the layering process and stuck it in the fridge. I was hoping the frigid temperature would help in solidifying the liquid mess (I guess I’m a believer in third chances too??), but even that didn’t help. *sigh*. I served the dessert with forks, but a soup spoon probably would’ve been more fitting. There’s still a bit left. You know what? It’s going in the freezer, baby! Because tomorrow I can be guaranteed it’ll be hard as ROCK…like an ICE CREAM CAKE, and that- THAT you cannot go wrong with! Fingers crossed that 4^th time’s a charm…

Ever since I entered the blogging world I’ve found myself constantly looking at beautiful photographs. Apparently one of the golden rules of blogging is to satisfy people’s visual appetite by taking perfect pictures. I thought I was doing my due diligence by merely uploading pictures but I don’t think the pictures from my cell are meeting the basic requirements.

The thing is, I do have the right equipment to take pictures, but as is often the case for many people, having the right equipment just won’t cut it…you need to know how to USE it. After much begging and convincing, I managed to score a beautiful DSLR (Canon Rebel XSi) for Christmas. This was 3 years ago and my beloved camera has probably spent more time hibernating in my closet than it has being put to full use. The way I use my fancy little gadget I may as well just have a regular point and shoot. Always on automatic. The manual settings intimidate me and it’s for this reason that I’ve become fairly well acquainted with the running man, the portrait symbol, landscape, and the stars that symbolize night portrait. I wanted the camera so I could take amazing National Geographic-worthy pictures during my travels and while I have taken the odd nice picture or two, it’s really always been by sheer luck.

I guess M heard me moan enough times about how I wish I could take nicer photographs to take some action because this past Christmas I received a photography course by the Royal Photographic Society from him! I’d always contemplated taking a course but thought it’d be a waste of money considering everything I would learn I could just teach myself from the manual. If only I could bring myself to read the manual…

I just completed the short weekend course and learned more in one day than any self-teaching I’ve done over the past 3 years. I FINALLY get aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. Do you know how happy this makes me??? Photography is actually starting to make sense! The information-packed course included a mini field trip around Bath and I spent the majority of the afternoon trekking in mud and tortured my exposed hands to a near-frostbite incident. But it was all worth it when I took a look at some of the beauties I took! You know those amazing waterfall/babbling brook/streaming river pictures you always see where the water is all blurred but everything else in the background is nice and crisp? Guess what? I learned how to do that! This is a VERY amateur shot of something that could be very cool, but once I invest in some camera accessories (just a tripod- nothing fancy) I’d be willing to bet a bowl of cereal that good quality pictures will adorn my site.

My hands weren't steady enough to make this a perfect shot

The second part of the course was a crash course in Photoshop. Wow, this subject contains enough material to do a whole degree in it and I finally learned how I can make myself other people look 5 years younger than they really are. But I think Photoshop has also allowed photographers to remove a lot of the naturalness from their pictures, which is a shame. I often find that professional photographers go Freddy Krueger on pictures and just edit the living daylights out of pictures. The natural beauty of pictures are often removed and are instead oversaturated and overexposed until the entire composition of the picture is altered into something analogous to Michael Jackson.

My goal is to take GOOD pictures and use editing software only to ENHANCE what’s already good. Think of my picture like:

…Natalie Portman

My goal is to turn

into THIS

You know, something that already looks really great to something that looks AMAZING. I’ll know I failed if my pictures go from:

Something that looks nice, but has the potential to look better..

To something that’s been wayyyy to overdone and just ends up looking ridiculous.

Here are some pictures of my Bath beauties…it’s just a preview of better things to come. It was cloudy all weekend so I didn’t get the opportunity to take some brilliantly beautiful pictures, but for a practice round it’s not too shabby, huh?