I really should be revising for my exam tomorrow but I don't have the motivation. So, instead I have decided to share some of my latest kitchen exploits with you all. 

Sticky Blobs

Making Sticky Blobs: These little guys are so amazingly simple. They are just little round(ish) biscuits baked with a blob of jam in the centre. Now, I don't actually think enough people are reading this to warrant my posting recipes so I'm not going to bother. But these are very quick, don't call for anything fancy to make them and usually last about 6 minutes here in my flat.

Decorated Chocolate Cake: Just a basic chocolate sponge cake with some chocolate buttercream and magic stars on the top for decoration. Some of my flat mates have found this one to be overly sickly but that is what happens if you make chocolate cake with chocolate decorations!

Vanilla Fairy Buns:  Classic little buns with a spoonful cut off the top, fill the whole with butter cream and then but the part you spooned out into two pieces to make "wings" for your fairies. I have memories of making these as a child and having them at birthday parties and what have you.

Chocolate Top Hat Buns: These work very much like the fairy buns but they are chocolate and have "hats" instead of "wings"

We also had a bun making kit one night and made these little things which was a great fun, social activity that killed an evening.

*sigh*

So I failed at the regular blogging thing, I'm sorry. I got over excited after my Dalek Cake was featured on a Doctor Who site over on LiveJournal. (Sorry guys but I don't remember who you were!) Then after that a whole lot of other things happened and it was all a little crazy. 

I've been applying for graduate jobs a lot recently, been rejected by several now. It's a really competitive market, in the case of major supermarkets you have about 9,000 students applying for 20 jobs. So far my rejection list includes: Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Lidl, Aldi and Transport for London. However, I still have applications pending and I have an assessment centre to attend in February. So my fingers are crossed for that right now and of course for all my other pending applications. 

What else has been happening? Umm, I've developed a skin allergy to Evra, which is a bit annoying as other than that we were getting on very well. My Doctor, after more discussion about how I fail to take pills everyday, revealed that I have two options essentially now. Nexplanon, the new version of Implanon or Nuvaring. 

Personally, I'm not convinced by either, I watched someone having an implant put in the other day and it scared the crap out of me and I also have reservations about Nuvaring, yes, shamelessly, about how on earth people have sex with it, and also fears about it falling out etc. However, they were my options and I'm less scared of awkward sex than I am of needles and blood, besides they have a catchy commercial to remind me that it can cause heart attacks and blood clots!

So, for the next three months I'm trialling Nuvaring while I think about Nexplanon and try to forget the horror scene I witnessed at the surgery not so long ago. 

It is also exam time up here in Stirling, and I really should be revising rather than blogging. However, procrastination often wins. I have also played countless games of Robot Unicorn Attack on Facebook and made two loaves of bread. I'll get some pictures the next time I make some so I can show off.

Making a Dalek Cake: Part Two: Decoration

Welcome back to the Dalek Cake Saga, here follows my guide to turning a towering pile of sponge cakes into a greay dalek complete with eyestalk.

Decorating Your Dalek Cake!

Step One: This first step was the one which posed the greatest challenge in terms of decoration. I had to make grey butter cream, now I was without the aid of some of the lovely paste colours you can get from decent shops (and even online) so I had to make do with SuperCook water based black food colouring. Now, anyone who understand science will know that water and fat don't mix all that well together. So, mixing water based colour with butter was always going to be a trial. The solution however is to use a lot more icing sugar than you would usually. I also strongly advise making your icing up the night before as leaving it to stand will quickly show you if you have got the ratio wrong. If you don't have enough icing sugar it will seperate out into soemthing bad and nasty looking and you don't want that to happen on your cake.

The end result is a thick buttercream that looked like a bowl full of mortar.

Step Two: Coat the stack of cakes in this thick mortar like substance, I also piled it up quite thickly on the top of the cake to create a somewhat rounded top. You could, if you were more organised than me, have made a rounded top of cake which you would then just need to cover.

Step Three: Fashion some "weapons" - I used breadsticks for this. Again I cracked out my knife steel to make some preliminary holes in the cake rather than just forcing an easily broken breadstick through. I added a lump of black regal ice to the end of one to make the eye stalk. The regal ice was made black by kneading in a small amount of black food colouring. It gets sticky so add icing sugar to dry it out and really knead the colour in well. If you have trouble getting a dark enough colour you could buy some pre-coloured ready roll icing if you have a shop that sells it, or, mix the food colour with icing sugar to make a paste before mixing it into the regal ice. I also added a "sausage" of this black around the bottom of the dalek.

Then I used giant chocolate buttons to add the "bumps" that daleks have. I checked out a few pictures as well to check that they do have four in each column.

Step Four: Making an eyestalk was done in much the same way, with a bread stick and then a blob of blue coloured regal ice made in the same way as the black but with blue supercook instead. I then added two "lumps" of white regal ice to the top for the lights and voila! Dalek!

Making a Dalek Cake!

This week saw Tamsin's birthday and also saw me undertaking one the greatest challenges in my baking career. I set out with an idea, with a vision if you must, of what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to make a Dalek. I thought about it, and I foresaw only three problems:


1) How to stop it falling over.

2) How to colour butter cream because Tamsin does not like Regal Ice.

3) How on earth to cut it when finished.



So, I tackled the first two problems through a mixture of trial and error and a few phone calls with my father, picking his brains. The final product took about 6 hours to bake, assemble and decorate and required 15 eggs worth of cake mix. However, it tasted amazing and I am now here to give you the full story.



Making a Dalek Cake

Step One: Assemble a base for the cake. To give the cake the height it requires without it falling over it requires some support structure. I visited my local £1 shop and purchased a wooden chopping board and then to my local hardware store to get some dowling:

Step Two: Drill a hole in the centre of the chopping board and stand the dowling in it ensuring that it is a tight fit.

Step Three: Bake an awful lot of cake. This was like creating some creature from the deep in my oven as the largest cake tin started overflowing and coating the base of the oven. In total I baked 6 cakes of varying sizes, getting smaller in circumfrence and depth as I went.

Step Four: Extract all cakes from the over (all in all I spent about 3 hours baking) and let all of the cakes cool properly. My cakes came out slightly greasy around the edges as I was out of flour for the tins. I used kitchen roll to wipe them off a little but this is potentially risky as it can fall apart if the cake is very wet. Newspaper works on chocolate cakes however as you wont notice the colour if the ink runs.

Step 5: Carefully make a hole in the centre of each cake. I used my knife sharpening steel to do this as it was about right the diameter, but experiment with what you have in your own kitchens and then lower each cake onto the dowling. Don't try and force the cake over the dowling without making a hole first as you will most likely break the cake!

You can use some fillings in the cake as well, this will stop of being a mass of sponge. I used chocolate spread as Tamsin is very adverse to jam in chocolate cakes.

You can then move onto decorating your Dalek - See Part Two

'Mon the Goats!

From yesterday I am climbing back on the healthy eating, healthy living wagon. I'm tired of bumming around my house with no motivation to get up in the morning. Tired of rolling out of bed at 11am at skipping right over breakfast cause it is too close to lunch and even then just eating cheese on white toast. 

So, as of yesterday I be eating sensible foods again. I lost 10 kg in the last 4 months and I am not going back on that now. So, tomorrow I start work and have a reason to get out of bed. Hopefully soon enough I will have a roadworthy car and then I can get myself a swimming pool membership and take things from there. 

Yesterday I made friends with the Wii Fit again after 105 days away and I intend to get myself back on that for 30 minutes in just a moment. :)

Feels like coming home

Lack of posts can only be due to my being utterly busy.

I left Uni on Sunday morning, just after 11am I believe and drove all the way home in my amazing hire car! Yeah, as the insurance company is still dealing with the fall out of the rear end shunt the car was in involved in three weeks ago I had to hire a car to go home. Eventually, after much searching, I got a good enough deal with Europcar and hired me a Hyundai i10. Only, when I arrived at the garage they presented me with a Skoda Fabia. Bit of a difference there, the i10 being a 1.2ltr and the Fabia being a 1.9ltr TDI. But it was a learning curve and a very comfortable drive, it must be said. 

Now there is an insane amount of drama kicking off as to what happens with the car since every man and his brother thinks they have a right to get involved when really, it is my car and I should be able to do what I want with it. Surely?  Such a complicated bundle of stress. 

I'm slowly approaching the end of my first week with Evra and other than it looking unsightly we seem to be getting along quite well. I think I shall be placing it in a less obvious place next time, but for the first week I wanted to be able to keep my eye on it. I really didn't trust it to stick through a whole week of washing and sweating. But somehow, almost miraculously it has. It started lifting on one edge the other day but it stuck back down again with a little bit of pressure so everything is good there. I know a week isn't really long enough to determine if I'm going to have any side effects but so far so good. And definitely better for me than having to remember to take the pill. 

Thursday I am going to see Matt, which is going to be utterly awesome. Getting into Bristol on our 19 month anniversary, which is utterly terrifying and also amazing at the same time. :) 

Now however I am going to bed because it is late and I need to get up in the morning to go car shopping. Fantastic. 

A diagnosis story

So, I promised an informative blog about being a young adult with a condition no one my own age seems to want to talk about. As such I guess I owe the world my own PCOS story. 

From about February 2009 my cycle started messing up more than usual, I mean, I had never had a regular period on my life but they had always been almost totally painless. Then they started getting all out of what, the break between them last from 3 weeks to nine weeks and the bleed lasting between three and ten days. Then on top of that I started cramping until finally it reached a stage where I got two  weeks between one period and the next and then it last for ten days and felt like it was trying to kill me. I was tired and cranky and I knew something wasn't quite right, so I finally sucked up all my embarrassment and went to see my GP. 

My doctor actually turned out to be incredible, one of the things I come against time and time again when reading others people's experiences of the condition is that they struggled for years to get a diagnosis. I was very quickly booked in for blood tests and a full sexual health screening to rule out any other causes, my doctor even offered me a test for HIV and Syphilis! When the blood work all came back clear (strange eh?) the doctor referred me to the hospital for an ultrasound.

The ultrasound referral paperwork was waiting on the doormat when I arrived back at Uni after the christmas break in February 2010 and so off I tottered to the hospital. I can remember how uncomfortable that was, honestly, having drank an insane amount of water prior to the appointment (as requested) having the sonographer pressing  the thing against my abdomen was a nightmare. If I think about it I can also remember what the pictures on the display looked like, but no one said a word to me. No one told me anything. I also had fresh blood taken for testing. 

The ultrasound results were with my doctor before the blood results and this confirmed the doctor's suspicion that it was indeed polycystic ovaries. She showed me the pictures again and explained everything and then asked me what I wanted to do.  After a brief discussion I left with a prescription for Microgynon and a head swimming. 

When the blood results came back the surgery called me and I was made an appointment with one of the senior partners at the practice. She went over the diagnosis with me, discussed why it has been suggested that I try hormonal birth control to both regulate my periods and make them lighter/less painful and she also prescribed Adalpene cream (Differin) for my facial acne. The blood results showed a real lack of estrogen and progesterone and very high levels of androgens, suggesting my hormone levels most likely fluctuated throughout my cycle as the other results had been clear.  

And that was in February. Now we are almost in June and I have switched off of Differin and onto PanOxyl as Differin was drying out my face to a point where it was incredibly painful and utterly unbearable. I have also just began using the Evra patch rather than the pill as I am an utter klutz who can't remember to take a pill every day. 

So there we have it, my diagnosis story. 

A little about me

Hello!

I'm new to the whole blogger set up, having long held a LiveJournal. However, I think the time has come to try something new and also to take a chance at reaching a wider audience. So, to kick things off here is a little about me, also known as - everything you need to know about me and probably a little more! 

I'm a twenty one year old Law student at the University of Stirling and in February 2010 I was diagnosed with poly-cystic ovary syndrome (PCOS.) It was a diagnosis I was both expecting and not expecting at all. I knew it was a possibility but this was another one of those things I never expected to happen to me. Despite as many as 1 in 10 women in the Western World having PCOS I had never really heard of it until the day I went to my doctor to ask her why my period felt like it was trying to kill me.

Since I asked my doctor that question in November 2009 and she first hinted towards PCOS I have spent more time than is probably healthy looking into the condition on line and seeking out others just like me to talk to. Because, if I am brutally honest, my doctor handed me a diagnosis, a prescription and booted me out of the door to cope with the emotional fall out by myself. The internet and my friends kept me sane but I found a real lack of voices my own age openly talking about this condition. I guess it's because none of us like talking openly about menstrual cycles, acne, excessive hair, cramp and all those other nasties. So, here I am, willing to open it all up and let others like me know what the score is. 

Moving aside from PCOS I am your pretty average student... Well, I guess I'm not because I don't really go out on the town all that much. But, I'm a pretty average gal. I have friends and hobbies. I like to read and outside of term time I play World of Warcraft. I swim semi-regularly and so far this year I have run a 5 Km and 10 Km road race and was scheduled to run a half marathon until I scored myself a fantastic quadriceps and hip flexor injury. I spend far too much time on my computer and watching Facebook, recently becoming addicted to playing Bejewelled Blitz and Farmville. 

What else can I say? I actually don't know, I've never been good at talking just about myself in general, so I think that will have to do. I plan to be back tomorrow with a new post and hopefully something a little more interesting to fill the pages of my life with law and PCOS. 

- Kizzi