Now we are seven

Seven years ago today I began blogging about everything and nothing. Seven years after that slightly impulsive idea, I've amassed nearly 1000 posts about the things I like: food, recipes, music, books, events, places I've been, a few tales and some random thoughts.

It's a quiet blog birthday this year but a milestone none-the-less. At the start of this year, Café Chick transformed into a slightly more demure Caffeinated Weka. While my online persona has evolved a bit, I'm pretty much the same character underneath, albeit a little more sedate these days.

My job involves a lot of writing lately. A LOT. Although I have a reasonably good capacity to write, I've wondered aloud that I seem to have a word writing limit each week and sometimes I reach it by Thursday afternoon. Sometimes, even before then. That doesn't bode well for the 17 posts I have sitting in my draft folder. (It will be 16 once I eventually post this.) The reality is, though, that after a full day of words, there aren't as many left for blogging during evenings and weekends.

I have come to enjoy writing more and more over the years and have explored writing in various styles for different purposes. This blog is unashamedly self-indulgent but elements of how I write professionally have inevitably shaped my personal writing style. I realised I must be overdoing it at work when reading a classic novel this week and mentally trying to rewrite it in plain English!

So, back to the blogging birthday rituals. I always take a screen shot of my pretty red dotted Clustr map and this year is no exception. The dots represent nearly 160,000 visitors from 193 countries during the past seven years. That's a lot of coffee and cake! The map will be archived around 3 December and all the little red dots will disappear. I look forward to seeing them pop up again in the coming months.

I wonder whether there's as much place for blogs and blogging in the world of social media world as it stands today. I've asked myself this same question before, too. Where this blog used to be my shop window, Twitter has become my dashboard, my go-to for news and information. It's also where most of my online interaction takes place. My own blogroll, which used to be teeming with posts to read, only just ticks along these days. Views are down and comments on this platform are few. I guess it's a sign of the times, even if I'm not exactly sure what it is signalling.

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by and, even better, stuck around for another year on this blog. Let's see what the next year brings. Cheers!

Apple and sultana spice cake

My 100th recipe on this blog! Let's celebrate with cake for afternoon tea.

This recipe for rustic-style apple and sultana spice cake comes from Sophie Gray's new baking book, Fill the Tins. It's easy to make and doesn't require a cake mixer. It's very versatile and can be served warm or cold either with or without cream or ice cream. Next time, I'd sprinkle cinnamon mixed with raw sugar crystals on top before baking for an extra sweet finish.

I weigh my ingredients so this is the original recipe with metric measurements included.

Apple and sultana spice cake

Ingredients

• 125 g butter, melted
• 70 g sultanas
• 210 g plain flour
• 220 g sugar
• 1 t baking soda
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 1/2 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t ground allspice
• 2 cups apple, peeled and chopped (approx 2 medium apples)
• 60 g walnuts, chopped
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/3 cup milk

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line the base of a 20 cm loose-bottom or spring form tin.
2. Melt the butter, then add the sultanas so they can soften slightly. Set aside to cool.
3. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and spices. Add the chopped apple and walnuts and toss them in the flour mixture.
4. Add the beaten egg along with the cooled butter mix and milk to the dry ingredients. Fold the mixture together to form a thick batter and pour into the prepared tin. Smooth the mixture over with a spatula, forming a slight mound in the middle.
5. Bake for 1 hour 10 minutes or until springy and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then remove the baking paper and continue cooling on a rack.

Apple and sultana spice cake

Classic bookshelf

I've always loved books. Reading is one of my favourite pastimes, albeit a brief one that usually only occurs on the bus to and from work each day but it's still a pleasure. My TBR list has grown and shrunk over the years and now lives in the form of a spreadsheet on my phone that I can add to any time I see an appealing title. It's also always on hand when I'm at the library or faced with a pile of books I can select from.

As a reader, I've always had romantic notions of thumbing through my own well read collection of books housed in a dedicated room (a personal library, of course), pulling out a classic title or two to reread on a rainy Sunday afternoon. But, to be honest, I'm not really a book buyer and I haven't read many of the so-called classics at all, let alone had time to reread them. Apart from a few that were sadly ruined when I was made to endure them at school, reading classic novels and literature is a relatively recent goal for me.

Initially with the Classics app on my phone and now with my Kindle, I'm like readers all around the world that now have quick access to all the copyright-free classics at my fingertips. This has certainly encouraged me to intersperse more more classic novels into my reading. (I'm generally talking about books 100+ years old, although there are many titles I would consider to be modern classics.) I wonder how much influence it has had on reviving classic books for other readers?

There are some classic titles that I have really enjoyed delving into. They show me life in a society that existed a whole different age, for better or for worse. It hasn't all been happy nostalgic reading, though. There are some titles that I have barely managed to force myself through and others that I have tried and failed to finish several times; I'm reading one of them right now. Still, I know that I'm barely scratching the surface of the world of classic literature and I'm keen to dive in further.

Here's a quick snapshot of my classic bookshelf.

Classics I've enjoyed

• Pride and Prejudice
• A Christmas Carol
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• Little Lord Fauntleroy
• Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Pollyanna
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• The Jungle Book

Classics I've endured

• The Man Who Would Be King
• A House of Pomegranates
• The Scarlet Letter
• Around the World in Eighty Days
• Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

Classics I want to knock off one day

• Jane Eyre
• Northanger Abbey
• Something - anything - by Charles Dickens (apart from A Christmas Carol)
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• Frankenstein

Classics that have beaten me

• Madame Bovary (almost). It remains to be seen whether I make it past 30% of the way through. So far, I'm enjoying the Wikipedia summary more than the novel which is simply painful.
• Great Expectations - on many occasions. Fact.
• Wuthering Heights. I still can't get past the 2/3 mark.

Are you a classic novel reader? What do you recommend for me?

Bill Bailey - Limboland

The first time we saw Bill Bailey on stage was in 2012 when he was peddling qualms. Last night, he was in Limboland.

Limboland is described as "the gap between how we imagine our lives to be and how they really are". Don't we all know that feeling! As always, Bailey is in fine form. His musings are clever and sharp. No swearing, vulgarity or excessive shouting. Why can't all comedians be this clever?

The 2.5 hour show (including intermission) unfolded and took us on a winding comedic journey. One Direction were the easy target for many gags. I suppose they make it too tempting for a seasoned musician and performer to simply leave alone without having some fun along the way. We got a blow by blow breakdown of the perils of Bailey's extended family trip on dog sleds to see the Northern Lights in Norway and listened him share some pearls of wisdom from the Practical Indonesian Phrasebook, which wasn't so practical after all.

Then there were the musical interludes, which I really enjoy. This time, it included a Jamaican remix of Downton Abbey, Abba reinvented in Rammstein style and the Holy Bible played with a distinct country slide twang.

Having done the rounds in Australia, Limboland now sets off around New Zealand and various other locales. Give your comedy buds a tickle. It's "not too bad, all things considered". (Oops, belated spoiler alert.)

Cheers!

We were out for dinner with a group last night. As one of the first two couples to arrive, we decided to open our bottles of wine and pour some pre-dinner drinks while we waited for the others. We chinked glasses with each other and said cheers, everybody!

The next couple arrived. They poured a glass of wine each and we repeated the ritual. Cheers! And then for the next, even though they ordered drinks from the bar. Cheers! Finally, the last couple joined us and we went in for one last round of chinking. Cheers!

A short while later, I noticed another large group behind us go through pretty much what we'd just done, but it was all at once and the glass chinking happened for a good 30 seconds as guests stretched across the table to touch glasses. It was then that I wondered: why on earth do we do that??

It seems I'm not the first person to ask the question. My searching on glass chinking led me to an etiquette guide on how to make a toast. (Yes, really.) I've found that toasting is a ritual in which a drink is taken as an expression of honor or goodwill. There are theories that the chinking of glasses to cause some of your drink to spill into another person's glass and vice versa could negate attempts to poison each other. Snopes has, naturally, debunked this myth and you can read the article if you are that interested.

So, without being any the wiser for my searching and drawing some very thin conclusions, I am simply going to put the custom of glass chinking down to one of life's social oddities.

Cheers, everybody! Cin cin! Sláinte!