Jumbo Blimp Jumbo

Ugh.  Mondays.  Plus, today really should be a public holiday.  It really should, and I'm not just saying that 'cause I fancy a holiday.  Waitangi Day (which is kind of like Noo Ziland's national day, fraught as it tends to be with racial tensions and politiking) was on Sunday, so happy birthday to my buddy Stephanie and to Bob Marley also.  Anyway, we're currently in a bit of a pickle, because this is the second year that some of our public holidays will fall on weekends.  We only get eleven public holidays here anyway, so we guard them preciously.  Our Prime Mininster reckons he's going to "think" about Monday-ising them, not that it's just his decision, and he should really know what all the workers of New Zealand want him to do.  If he doesn't he's an even bigger moron than I thought. 

But I digress.  Today did have it's uplifting elements.  And that was that we were having a shared morning tea at work (you'll be beginning to think that all us toilers at the information coalface ever do is eat morning tea) to welcome back a returning staff member.   Honestly, I did eclairs because they were the easiest think that I could think of to do.  Choux pastry?  Simple.  Seriously, the hardest thing about making them is figuring out how much 'six tablespoons of butter' is in grams... some stupid woman (me) wrote that measurement into her recipe book, and I'm stuck with it now.



Parle vous Francais, mon petit dessert?

And the curse of the Chocolate Witch struck again - that is, I suck at melting chocolate.  It seems that ganache is just not my thing.  So I made chocolate icing out of the final tablespoon-ish of cocoa.  No-one noticed the difference, obviously since they all got hoovered down in record time, and lots of nice compliments to boot.  Awesome!  Oh yeah, and I couldn't be arsed making creme patissiere as well, so that's just whipped cream in the middle.  Lazy as.  I wonder if I can make sponge cake, now that I can't make ganache?  I'll have to try it again sometime.  From memory, sponge is one of those things that is seriously humidity dependant.  Plus, my grandma's sponge cake is literally lighter than air, and also literally about eighteen feet tall (okay, so there might be a little exaggeration in there somewhere... never let the truth get in the way of a good story!).  So unless I wanted to get competitive (I don't), there isn't much call for sponge cake.

In other, totally non-related-to-eclairs news, I finally managed to find the two Kyuss albums I was looking for on CD on the weekend.  Success!  They've become a sudden obsession with me, I've been singing Demon Cleaner for like, a week.  Kyuss Lives!, which is the semi-reformed band, are touring here in May, but I'll probably be knee-deep in textbooks by then.  Plus, it's kind of like going to see any reformed (semi- or otherwise) band; it's never quite the same.  Which is why I'm looking forward to the invention of the time machine...