The Gnome at the Bottom of the Garden

Tonight we made my version of Honey Crackles. Its pretty much the standard recipe that you find on the cornflakes box with a little twist. Tonight we baked them in patty pans (makes about 24), but as an alternative, you can bake it as a slab, making sure you press into a lined pan quite firmly. You will need to cook it a bit longer. While its still warm cut into bars (but leave it in the tin). When cold, remove form the tin and recut. Homemade Crunchy Nut Bars! 

4 cups Cornflakes
1/2 cup crushed nuts
100g Butter
1/2 cup Caster Sugar
2 Tblspn Honey

Place butter, sugar and honey in a saucepan. Heat slowly until the sugar dissolves then increase the heat until the mixture boils and becomes frothy.
Mix the  nuts and the cornflakes together. Pour 1/3 of the cornflakes / nuts into the saucepan and mix well. Pour all this back into the bowl with the rest of the cornflakes and mix well.
Place into patty pans that have been placed in a muffin pan. Pack the mixture in well. Bake at 150C for 10 minutes. Allow to cool in the pan. Try to eat just one! 

When I was in year 11 at school, my class tried to play a joke on our (thank heavens) extremely good natured teacher. We found out when his birthday was. We found a cow pat. We covered it in plaster of paris (to keep the smell in) then we iced it. Then we presented it to him for his birthday. We all sang happy birthday to him and then he broke the knife on the plaster trying to cut the cake. Oh well. I mean, he was only a teacher and all, so he’d never expect any of his 15 and 16 year old (predominantly male) students to play a joke on him…. Nah. Never.

So when I was channel surfing this afternoon and heard Whoopi Goldberg espousing the merits of a Diaper Cake I was more than intrigued. Turns out that plaster of paris is not required, and that they are all the rage for baby showers etc. Have I been living under a gigantic rock? Why have I not seen these before? An extensive range can be found here, (Yes, I’ll just wait here until you come back). Cool huh? Or did you know about these and not tell me. If so, why not?

Your toast pops up and it’s not quite done yet, so you put it back down for what you think will be 10 seconds and then you get distracted by something shiny and you forget about the toast and then when it pops up all on its own, it’s burnt.

You cook another piece of toast, and when you are halfway through eating it, you discover a little bit of mould on the crust and you wonder how much mould you have eaten without noticing. So you give up on the idea of eating breakfast.

For the sake of your health, you eat plain boring popcorn (which, face it, is really just cellulose - one step away from paper) and for the next 72 hours you end up having to pick bits of husk out from between your teeth and no amount of water and “ack”ing will move the last little bit from the back of your throat. Meanwhile, the rest of the family eat popcorn that is covered in butterscotch. They might still have to deal with the wayward husk situation, but at least they got butterscotch sauce.

There’s one wayward hair, that keeps flying from it’s proper place, despite a large amount of “product” and it keeps tickling your nose and you keep trying to move it but it evades your fingers, and you try to blow it out of the way and it just falls back into place, and you look for it in a mirror and you don’t see (or feel) it and as soon as you turn away - there it is again.

All the food is either eaten up or burnt or has mould on it, so you have to go grocery shopping and that means that you have to get out of your flanny jammies and slippers and put real clothes and shoes on and go buy food.

On the way to the car to buy said groceries you walk through a spider web and it tickles worse than the wayward hair and you can never find all the bits and OMG WHERE IS THE SPIDER?? so you go back inside to change.

You head back out to the car and your realise that you have left your keys inside and you have to walk all the way back to the house and get the car keys.

You get to the store and realise that you must have put your purse down on the kitchen table when you were looking for your car keys and you have to go home again.

So in the end you just give up, eat a handful of leftover butterscotch popcorn for breakfast, put the jammies back on and head back to bed. Which is where you deserve to be.

We found this amazing piece of technology at the Science Centre in Singapore. I don’t really get how this works, but what I do know is this:
This “pond” is projected onto a screen from above. (You can see this when the arm passes over the screen - it is then projected onto his arm).
You don’t actually touch the screen, your shadow ”interacts” with the pond. So whatever you do with your shadow becomes part of the “movie” that is being projected. You can make ripples by “poking” at it. You can make a whirlpool by drawing a circle, and the fish will move out the way if you just move your hand slowly through the water or try to catch them. Cool!!