So New Year's now been and gone and now one gets down to New Year's resolutions, cleansing diets and leaner selves. Well at least some people do. In the spirit of the New Year's resolution, in the hope of better things to come, I too have decided to find some resolutions though less of a giving up sort than a acquiring sort.
First, I have started reading again. I got a new book for Christmas - The Help - which was an excellent read. I finished the last 100 or so pages in one evening, so difficult to put down it was! I do enjoy reading, once you get into the habit of it. It also helps to stop that feeling that my brain is slowly but surely declining. It's much too early to get that feeling so keeping up the reading feels like it is helping. It is also helping to while time away now work has gone into a strange crawl of waiting for the moment of truth.
So on from one multi-million copy US best-seller to another, I am now reading - Three Cups of Tea - a book I got last Christmas. I have also ordered a couple more books. One fluffy one from Marian Keyes and a hopefully inspiring one from Elizabeth Gilbert. The DVD would have been better but well, a book takes up a bit more time and anyway, the DVD is too expensive having just been released. It's amazing what being able to buy cheap DVDs does to your expectations of what a DVD should cost.
The same goes with books.
Apart from taking up reading, I have also decided to try to bake more, seeing as I may not have the chance to do that in the future. I had a craving for Victoria Sponge yesterday evening and promptly searched for a recipe - what would one do without the internet! It was all well and good that I had a jar of raspberry jam for christmas too. However swopping double cream for single cream in the hope of reducing fatness resulted in a soppy frothy cream instead of proper cream. You learn something new every day! Otherwise it did turn out quite nicely even if it was very dome-shaped. Looking up baking forums this morning, there appear to be some remedies for this 'problem'. One is to reduce the amount of baking powder or to use half plain and half self-raising flour. A second suggests cooking it at a lower temperature.
That would take way too much time. I shall try the half plain and half self-raising flour remedy instead. Or I could just trim off one of the domes for the base. Maybe I should host a tea party since I have about 120 tea bags - yet another Christmas present.
