Hehehe I think this is cute .

Oh I think Corey will like it too.

I am proud of this one. I love baking bread. The part I like the most is when the dough rises, doubled up the original amount. And punching it. And let it rise again. Lol. My place smells so good, I feel like am in a bakery wonderland.

The rise of the dough.

I got this recipe from The Fresh Loaf site – an awesome website for bread lovers. The original recipe is here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/blueberrycreamcheesebraid.

Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid
Makes 2 braids

Sponge
1 tablespoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 cup warm milk
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

Dough
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup sugar
2 1/2-3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

Blueberry Filling
2 cups blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Egg Glaze
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk

Cream Cheese Filling
3/4 cup cream cheese
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon egg glaze

I couldn’t find unbleached all-purpose flour at the bakery ingredients store near my place, so I bought 2 packets of high gluten flour (each weigh a kilo). I thought I would be using it a lot, but seriously, unless you like a real tough bread, DO NOT incorporate too much of this flour in your recipe. When I first used this flour I substituted a cup (or more) of all purpose flour with this flour and the bread turned out too tough and dry. Not yummie at all .

For this blueberry cheese braid, I only used 2 – 3 tablespoon of high gluten flour, mixed with all purpose flour. The bread is soft and moist, just the way I like it aha aha! I like it! Aha aha!

Blueberry braid in the making.

For the first braid filling, I used something like a chunky pureed blueberry paste or whatever you wanna call it. Fresh blueberries will cost me a bomb, and I can only find them at supermarkets. This not so fresh pureed blueberries is cheaper, and it’s ready for spreading. I just added a couple of tablespoon of lemon juice to compensate its sweetness.

Blueberry braid.

As for the second braid, I stuffed it with green apple – original recipe is here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/blueberrycreamcheesebraid#comment-165

Apple braid in the making.

2 cups of freshly cubed Granny Smith apples
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup BROWN sugar
1 cup walnuts
1/3 cup corn starch
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tbsp. butter

In a small pot, combine; butter, brown sugar, and chopped walnuts. Stir until combined. Add apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon juice, and corn starch. Combine and heat until you get a gooey concoction . The goal is to get the nuts a touch roasted…the apples will finish baking in the oven.

Big fat ass apple flavoured caterpillar.

If I were to make these wonderful braids again (which I will, definitely), I would wanna try stuffing it with butter mixed with brown sugar, sprinkle with semisweet chocolate chips and cinnamon powder. Ah… the soft, moist, gooey cinnabons.

When I first read about him in the news few days ago, I was like.. oh fuck.

When someone went ape shit and killed people, that someone is just fucking crazy.

But when a Muslim went ape shit and killed people, the entire Muslim nation will get condemned.

It’s baking tiem!!!!

I was rushing to work yesterday morning when I posted the ‘Devin cuppies’ pix, so now am gonna elaborate more on the cuppies. Am new in the cuppies world, so yea if you ask me what cupcake is, for me it’s just some mini cakes. I have always wondered what the difference is between cupcakes and muffin, I can only tell the difference from their looks. But I found this information from the cupcakeproject website, and it says:

‘A basic formula for muffins is 2 cups flour, 2-4 tablespoons sugar, 2½ teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 1 egg, ¼ cup oil, shortening or butter and 1 cup milk. When the fat, sugar and egg ratio in a recipe reaches double or more than this, you have reached the cake level.’

I remember making cupcakes using some leftover of my fruit cake batter and I personally think that they tasted better than if it were to be baked as a normal cake. I don’t know why there should be any difference, probably size does matter after all.

I’ve been baking cuppies using a few recipes, but the one in the picture is courtesy of Magnolia Bakery’s recipe. I love the texture, but I have to say I am not a big fan of a complete sweetness without a slight hint of saltiness. How do you appreciate sweetness when it’s all plain sweet? You would appreciate your health better when you’re sick, you’d appreciate your wealthiness better when you’re broke. Same goes here, salt will bring out more flavour in sweet cakes and savouries.

So let’s see what we need to make these lovely cuppies..

Magnolia’s Vanilla Cupcake.
Recipe’s adapted from http://hubpages.com/hub/Magnolia-Bakery-Cupcakes

1 cup unsalted butter, softened (225gm)
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups self rising flour
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla

And no salt.. BOO!

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit (180 celsius).
2. Line two 12-cup muffin tins with cupcake papers.
3. In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth.
4. Add the sugar gradually and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes.
5. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
6. Combine the flours and add in four parts, alternating with the milk and the vanilla extract, beating well after each addition.
7. (for 3-layer cake skip to step 11)
8. (Cupcakes) Spoon the batter into the cups about 3/4’s full.
9. Bake until the tops spring back when lightly touched, about 20 to 22 minutes.
10. Remove cupcakes from pans and cool COMPLETELY on a wire rack before icing with butter cream frosting.
11. (3 layer cake) Divide batter among the cake pans.
12. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a cake tester inserted into center of cake comes out clean
13. Let cakes cool in the pans for 10 minutes.
14. Remove from pans and cool COMPLETELY on wire rack before icing.
15. When cake has cooled, ice between the layers, then ice top and sides of cake with either Vanillia OR Chocolate Butter cream frosting.

My horrible icing skill defies the taste of these lovely cuppies.

I added a pinch of salt, but I think that wasn’t enough. The topping is just a typical chocolate ganache (heavy cream + chocolate). I brought some of these cuppies to my brother’s place and he only had one. Well actually his kid had one but he didn’t finish it up so my brother was just eating the leftover hmmpphhh!! Yea I was so fucking sad . Seriously, I kid you not .

Think am gonna blame my horrible icing skill .

I use google to search for stuff.
My sister uses yahoo to search google. Lol.

I’ve wasted my 82 minutes watching Half Baked today. I had a high hope on this movie, thinking it would be something like Clerks II or Pineapple Express. Yea it’s a stoner movie but crap, Jim Breuer looked like a tard the whole time. I had a laugh on a couple of scene though.. hardly remember which scene anyway. Thought of stopping halfway but I was optimist that probably there would be some funny scene in the end but I was wrong.

Hahaha Elias is so funny I love em geeks.

If only I have the ability to transfer my thoughts to my blog, the number of posts would’ve prolly been doubled. No. Tripled. Probably more. The problem with me is I waited for too long. Way too long that all my ‘bright, lively’ ideas and thoughts in my head weaken out. And when the excitement is dead, there will be no more joy in writing. I guess that’s why twitter is so popular these days. Quick update in a short period of time. But that is something that am not interested in anyway.

Some of the things that I have thought of writing yet I didn’t:

Horrible drivers.
I curse a lot when driving. It doesn’t really matter whether am driving to work, or driving back home from work, nasty drivers can really get on my wick! Everytime I start cursing, I’ll think of blogging it, and expose their license plate number. I even thought of creating a website just for me to update my daily encounters with all these cocky drivers. But looking at the rate of my posting on my own personal blog.. nah.. forget about it.

Recipes, recipes and more recipes!!!
I’ve been baking a lot lately, mostly breads and cakes. Breads are awesome, I almost finished up a can of yeast in a matter of weeks! It all started off when I embarked myself in a quest of finding the best donut, or doughnut recipe. I made donuts on 3 weekends back to back, and my third attempt was so good that I actually wanted to mail that guy to thank him for sharing his recipe. But oh well.. I haven’t done that either.

Here’s the recipe courtesy of Secret Donut Recipe:
http://www.secretdonutrecipe.com/recipe1.html

I have saved several pictures of my bread baking journey and yes I will definitely write about them. What fantastic about bread is that even if it turns out slightly off, most of the time it is still edible. Argh I’m hungry right now and I want cupcakes..

Update: At the time of posting, I’ve already baked about 50 cupcakes

Teeth.
5 months with no updates . Need to say more?

Geeks who dick.
Okay I don’t know what’s that supposed to mean, but am referring to geek who is also a dickhead. Most geeks will feel insulted if they were asked whether they know how to do <insert-technical-task-here>. But some of them are seriously emotional emos that I feel like bitchslapping them left and right. Now I’m getting all emotional hmmpphhhh!!

Example:
me: Have you installed that already?
dick: I’ve installed that many times already..

You see, my question is simple, and the answer should be either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. That kind of response is another way of saying.. “So you think I know jackshit???”

Should’ve just responded back, “Just checking, you noob”.

My new keyboard.
I’ve been using my trusty Samsung keyboard for years that some of the letters are just not visible anymore. I don’t really have any problem with that since I type with my eyes focus on the monitor, and not the keyboard. Thanks for my years of experience in IRC, ICQ and YM. I decided to switch to my another keyboard, A4tech after I noticed an annoying stickyness everytime I hit the ‘A’ key. But the stupid thing with the A4tech keyboard is its layout. The pipe ‘|’ key which is normally located on the top row, below the Fn keys row, is instead placed right next to the right ‘Shift’ key, below the ‘Enter’ key. I use ‘|’ a lot so this is actually a major turn off for me.

If you’re a nix user, you’d understand how important this pipe key is. Why did I buy the keyboard in the first place, you ask? Because 5 years ago I was using Windows

You may say it is just a keyboard, but am hell fussy with it. The feel, the sound, the surface of the keys, are all important to me. I will normally close my eyes, lean a bit close towards the keyboard, and start typing. I started to feel embarrassed after doing it so many times at every single store. I was hooked with Razer Lycosa gaming keyboard, but it was so frustratingly expensive. The keyboard alone will cost me almost 300 bucks, but it is one helluva beauty. So beautiful it haunted me every night, calling my name, begging me to run my fingers all over it. Anyway I didn’t buy the keyboard due to its price. Unless am a gamer, I don’t think it’s a wise idea to buy it and waste all of its macros  and whatnot capibilities. Eventually I bought myself a Gigabyte GK-K6800 keyboard and it’s a brill, but unfortunately I can’t use any of the glorious multimedia keys since my FreeBSD failed to detect them using xev. Yet to try to configure it using the standard keyboard multimedia keycodes. It’s an awesome keyboard and the price is cheap.

My fluctuating weight at that time of the month.
I just realized few months back that about a week before my menses, I’ll feel constantly hungry. Almost everytime at that time of the month, I’ll gain myself 2 – 4 lbs. It’s not just plain hungry, it’s more like having multiple cravings that can drive me up the wall. Am like a mid-end desktop turning to mainframe, but instead of crunching numbers, I crunch food

Economy.
Lol. Kidding.

Unrelated, why the fuck is the break tag doesn’t work properly in wordpress?

I haven’t been blogging for more than a month. I have abandoned my blog temporarily and I don’t really quite like the fact that I did it. I don’t know why, I think am just lack of mood to write anything.. or even visit my blog. Lol.

Altec Lansing AHS515.

So anyway, I was being a bit creative this morning. I have an Altec Lansing AHS515 headset which I bought few years ago, and am not really impressed with it because I only used it for less than 2 years when suddenly there was no sound coming out from the left can. Not long after that the left pad fell off, so I decided to just throw it away. But wait.. the microphone is still working fine. But the annoying part is, it’s too bulky for just a mic. Yea you might be wondering why wouldn’t I just wear it since it’s a headset? Well now I have another headphone courtesy of Devin, who gave it to me because he thinks that the headphone sucks (see how nice he is? lol), so yea I can’t be wearing layers of headphones. Bottom of the line is, it sucks that I have to hold the big mic all the time while talking to him on linphone.

So today, I managed to convert my Altec headset, to a microphone with stand! It is fugly.. but am still proud of it. Oh am on linphone right now with Devin and am using the mic at the time of writing. The joy of multi-tasking

Me mic hehe.

Oh well, belated. Been off to bed awfully early lately.

Anyway, to all sexy system administrators out there, Happy System Administrator Day. Hope one day I’d celebrate as one