Jun 28

Blog post up at SFnovelists

Tags: articles, blog, Uncategorized, , 3 Comments »

I’ve been a member of SFnovelists for a while, but I was mostly lurking. Now I have decided to de-lurk, with my very first blog post on translation, language and cultures. You can find it here (and I’ll be posting monthly from now on).

Jun 25

Orange and chocolate scones

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, Uncategorized, , , , , 2 Comments »

So, I did promise the recipe for the scones…

Below are my VD scones (though I didn’t put enough baking soda in, and ended up making oversized cookies. They are supposed to look a bit better than this normally):

Scones

 

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Orange and chocolate scones
Prep time: 
Cook time: 
Total time: 

Serves: 8-9 scones
 

A dessert that combines two of my favourite flavours: chocolate, and orange.
Ingredients
  • 230 g flour
  • 11 g baking soda
  • 60g butter
  • 1 teaspoon caster sugar
  • 145 mL of milk
  • 1 tablespoon Orange Blossom water
  • 120g chocolate, chopped into coarse bits
  • Zest of half an orange, chopped into tiny bits
  • Pinch of salt

Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven at 200°C. Leave the butter out to soften a bit.
  2. Sift the flour, the sugar and the baking soda in a bowl, and gently rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the milk little by little, until you have a spongy dough.
  3. Work in the orange blossom water, the orange zest and the chocolate chips until the dough is smooth and uniform.
  4. Grease a baking sheet. Divide the dough into 8-9 parts and shape it like cylinders (roughly 5cm across, 1cm thick). Or, if it’s too much trouble, just put dollops of the dough onto the baking sheet :-)
  5. Bake for about 15-20 minutes, until the scones are risen and light golden in colour.

 

Enjoy :=)

(I originally was looking for a chocolate and orange scone recipe after eating very tasty ones in Montreal, but couldn’t find one that worked on the net. In the end, I adapted this from the plain oven scones recipe contained in Scottish Teatime Recipes by Johanna Mathie)

Jun 16

Move along, move along…

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Not much to report here, apart from the occasional bout of cooking (Cantonese rice, Vietnamese fashion, courtesy of my grandma; and some sliced marinated beef that went great with the experimental tomato rice).

Research for book 3 continues apace; I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that I need to hit the American Library in Paris and their JSTOR subscription for the info I need. If all goes well, I shall be near Schleswig (in Germany, up near the Danish border) from Friday to Monday, in order to attend the Villa Diodati workshop (aka the retread of the one that lost against the Icelandic volcano). Cross your fingers for me.