It is really good! I was reluctant to watch it at first because most sci-fi shows these days are really lame (Stargate just annoys me) but I got hooked after the first few episodes! Coolest storyline ever. I totally want to write a scifi novel now. That's after I finish my other imaginary novel first, of course.
Cuppycakescuppycakes cup cup a'cuppa CAKE! Let's all sing the cupcake song! After uni today (MATH1151 tutorial ARGH) I had THE STRONGEST cravings for cupcakes. I was meant to take the train straight from Central back home but I was like stuff this and took the 394 bus to Pitt St @ Town Hall.
Seeing as how cupcakes, mini-cakes, baby-cakes and all that sorta stuff is all the rage in Sydney right now I thought I might as well try it out. NOT! I JUST WALKED PASSED THE STORE BY ACCIDENT AND SAW THE PRETTIES AND HAD TO GO IN. Haha.
Well, for starters they make the best looking cupcakes out of places I've seen in real-life. Seriously pretty. They have a wide range of pretties. I bought 6 today. They're very pricey though. $2 a cupcake. Sigh. Here's the ones I bought:
The flavours I got were (starting from bottom-left going clockwise): Dark Chocolate, Pineapple Coconut, Tiramisu, Peppermint, Lemon-Meringue and Sticky Date Pudding. Now, the almighty question.
How did they TASTE!?
Well. For starters, I thought the muffin bases were a bit dry. I know! *Sob*. I didn't like how they used the same chocolate base for the tiramisu, the peppermint and the dark chocolate. They were all very dry. The peppermint was probably the worst. The buttercream on top was so fugly, and the mint flavour was too light. Almost bland. Tiramisu was nicer, still dry, but the coffee buttercream was much nicer.
The dark chocolate was nice. The moist ganache off-put the dryness of the muffin base so as long as I took big munches it was good. The coconut pineapple was quite nice. I'm very partial to pineapple so I might be a bit biased. The dessicated coconut pieces were a bit big and poking out everywhere. Not a nice feeling in your mouth, but very tasty.
Now for the big hitters. Sticky date was just DELICIOUS. The muffin was so moist (they didn't use the lame basic choc or vanilla base) and had bits of dates in it. YUM! And the caramel icing was so good. I microwaved it for a bit and it was so warm and good! Lemon meringue was also so very amazingly delicious. They used a vanilla cupcake base, but the core was dug out and filled with the lemon curd. It was so good. It's my favourite one!! Here's a close-up:
I'm not gonna do some out-of-10 kinda thing as it's so tacky. So, all in all, a nice experience. Not to mention I almost got hit by a truck crossing the road in peak-hour frenzy traffic to get there. Do give the place a visit! The service is very good and follow my cupcake recommendations and you should leave as a happy fellow.
Well it wasn't pre-mediated cheating in cold-blood!! I swear. Serious! It's not like I stole the exam paper out of the lecturer's office and then wrote all the answers on my forearm and then just copied them down onto the answer sheet!!
[Answers: A B C C D B A A D L O L J U S T K I D D I N G ]
Ok. This is what happened. I finished my exam with 5 minutes to go (completely legitimately, mind you) and then my eyes started to wander around the room. Then I saw that the 3rd last answer of the guy on my right was different to mine. I thought ok, maybe he's just retarded, but then by then my eyes weren't just wandering, they were freakin' slutting around and so I saw about 3 other answer sheets and they all had THAT answer I didn't have so when the announcer person said "One minute left!" I did a spur of the moment thing and changed my answer to the popular majority vote.
Then I was like. Ok. Hmm. Maybe that wasn't such a great idea. I mean, I'm pretty smart y'know? Maybe everyone was retarded like I previously thought. But almighty Maths is superior to me and probability is Maths' illegitimate love child and hence is also superior to me and so according to her Laws of Chances they were right and I was wrong.
So I call up my brother (who's doing honours in economics, mind you) and turns out I had it wrong before and the one I changed it to was right!
WIN!
Yes, its unethical, yada yada, and if I got busted academic misconduct on my record would totally molest me in the future, but hey, life's not fair. And plus it was only one little itty-bitty question...
ANZAC day. Well, 24 minutes past ANZAC day. I really should be sleeping. My economics midsession exam is tomorrow and I swear to God if I have to draw another supply and demand curve I am gonna have to kill somebody. I studied SO LONG today. I am so drained.
Today is my most glorious joyful of birthdays! I will update this later as I get all my late prezzies so I can display them all in their magnificent glory!
LOL no silly children, this post was intentionally blank, not glitched to pure nothingness. I'm waiting for internets to get uncapped so I can get the photos from Facebook and DANCE around them in words for ya'll to enjoy.
...
Ok, internet back to normal again.
Anyway, last Friday, I got dragged to a karaoke place by my uni friends and turns out it was SO MUCH FUN!! LOL! And the skank uploaded all the pictures to facebook and so the whole internet is flooded with our photos LOLOL.
[Note: Videos might not work yet. Be warned, the videos are of seriously crappy quality. I used my phone! But still, better than nothing ;D]
After uni on Friday I went with my friends to Circular Quay (Sydney Harbour basically) and we danced around and had heaps of fun. Here's a panorama-ish shot I took of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge with my phone's cool panorama function. I think it looks quite pretty:
After that we went to Sticky! The world's COOLEST CANDY SHOP!! They make THE most awesome lollies ever. They look so cool and taste oh so good. And the best part is that everything is hand-made, and they make it in front of your face! I stood there for an hour watching the guy make them. And now I can share it with you! YAY. Looky-look!
They are so pretty. Little designs of sugar. I was thinking, "HOW THE HELL DO THEY DO THIS?" and then the guy (his name is David) popped out and was like, "I'll give you a demonstration in 10 minutes." Cool! We danced around and talked to the people for a while (David used to be a lawyer but dumped it to be a candy man. LOL!) and then it finally started.
First he got out a humongous vat of super hot BOILING sugar syrup at 160 degrees celsius and poured it on to a metal bench in front of him (turns out it was a water-cooled metal thing). His assistant (Lily; she has cool hair) helped him get all the bits out:
Then Lily got out some colours and added them into the sugar and started mixing. Normally, I'm not much of an anti-artificial-stuff kinda person, like I'm ok with food colouring and stuff, but some of these colours freaked me out a bit! For example, to make the sugar syrup white (like opaque white) he added this weird white stuff. I asked David what it was and he said it was titanium dioxide. I WAS LIKE LOL WTF? He told me it was biologically inert and I was like, "Umm. Oh ok. Fair enough!" but still slightly creeped out. Anyway, here's a pic of the blue:
Here's a video!
It was cool how David worked on one side and Lily on the other side. You could tell they were a really good team. Here's the creepy titanium dioxide stuff. Didn't stop me from eating it though:
The just-a-moment-ago boiling sugar cooled pretty quick because the table was cool (LOL PUN!) and so then they slid off the metal guiding things, leaving a funky weird pliable sugar mass to work with. They started cutting it into sections (to separate the colours) and then kneaded it:
Here's a video of them folding the sugar around:
After some kneading (using heavy insulating gloves, of course) this is what we were left with on Lily's side of the cool-table. A blue blob!
Unfortunately, old titanium-white had to be a bit weird, and so kneading it was not enough! To make it really pretty and have a nice sheen, the white sugar mass had to be pulled. Literally! The point of it is to incorporate air. Kinda like a meringue. Anyway, David used a hook and some cool technique to do it:
Pull, pull, PULL!!
Magically, a creamy looking mass remained:
Then we were left with 3 blobs of cool sugar syrup:
Now the three blobs of sugar are ready to be worked with. They were making a candy that spelt "AUSTRALIA". David had to slowly make all the letters in a long 3D kinda way so that when u cut it the cross-section spelt "Australia". Pretty cool, eh? Here's Lily fixing them up:
It's then rolled into a big giant cylinder and wrapped in another layer of sugar for decorative purposes. And extra flavour, I think. Video:
NOW FOR THE AMAZING PART! The huge barrel-looking sugar mass is then stretched out into a skinny tube, which is then sliced up into the lollies! Isn't that SO amazing?? You end up with miniature versions of the big thing!! AWESOME.
Stretching it....
And then chopping them up!
I think Lily does most of the chopping. She's really pro. She uses a tool that's kinda like that teppenyaki sort of thing. She's make an awesome teppenyaki chef!! She puts the candy rods on a mini anvil and then chops away, packs them into jars, and sells them for a ridiculous profit!!
Three people about my age (2 are my brother's friends from high-school, both whom I know, and another is my sister's friend's brother) in my local community got busted by police yesterday bashing/beating up a homeless guy to put up on YouTube for laughs.
WTF!? It's so creepy!! Imagine someone you've known for ages getting arrested for bashing random people (the laughing/taunting part makes it so disturbing) and possession of drugs. It's just so bad. It's so scary how fast people can change isn't it?
I've noticed a few things since I've started going to uni. Some quite unrelated to actually going to uni. But still interesting life observations nonetheless. At least I think so...
1.Textbooks aren't very wallet-friendly, but are so pretty. Not so sure about reading them though. I'm being very slow on starting me studies:
2. Even when it's so very cold in the morning, it's going to get very hot in the afternoon. Strange weather Sydney's been having lately. Winter's coming too fast.....
3. My cat's like to sleep in weird places. Like their litter boxes:
4. Ranting about Nicole Kidman is an awesome way to make a lot of random people suddenly want to read your blog. [Edit: As an after-thought, people like Keith Urban too :P]
5. You can't guess a person's ethnicity by their name. James Vincent is not asian. Doesn't it sound like a typical white-washed asian name? SERIOUSLY! LOL. Not that I mind of course, oh great student mentor of mine. Ok. Please don't find this.
6. Global warming suddenly becomes an after-thought when bus-lines at Eddy Ave (Central Station) stretch out so long people pitch out tents waiting for for buses to get to uni. PERSONAL CARBON DIOXIDE EMITTING VEHICLES ALL THE WAY!! WOOHOO.
7. 9 am lectures are so not cool. Neither are people with bad body odour.
8. Family problems suck. But lying down on the library lawn with friends, munching on weird food and talking about ridiculous infomercials (i.e. Cindy Crawford's Meaningful Beauty with melons that have SO MUCH ANTIOXIDANTS THEY JUST DON'T ROT) is so much fun.
I WENT TO THE EASTER SHOW AND SAW NICOLE KIDMAN AND KEITH URBAN TOGETHER OMGGGGGGG! HOW CRAZY. I WAS TOTALLY ABSOLUTELY FREAKIN' STARSTRUCK I COULDN'T STOP JUMPING UP AND DOWN IT WAS SOOOOOO INSANE.
I SAW HER IN LINE AT THE FERRIS WHEEL AND I WAVED LIKE A TOTAL NOOB AND SHE SMILED AND LAUGHED AND WAVED BACK OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. THEN SHE WENT ON THE FERRIS WHEEL AND I KEPT WAVING AND SCREAMING AND SHE WAVED.
OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. MY LIFE TOTALLY HAS MEANING NOW. ARGH ARGH ARGH GAH GAH GAH.
CLICKKKK THAT PICTURE OMGGG ZOOOOM INTO IT YOU CAN SEEE HER IT'S HER IT'S HER OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG. DUMB SECURITY GUARDS DIDN'T LET US CLOSER ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
