Under-worked Chef dies making Royal Icing

It was a close thing. Our brandy-soaked Christmas Cake, its homemade marzipan coat firmly in place, only needed icing.  Into the Kenwood Chef's cavernous bowl went egg whites, lemon juice, glucose and a little icing sugar. Faster and faster the beater whizzed around, the mixture began to thicken and we made ready to shovel more sugar into the frothing mass. Then disaster struck!

Smoke rose ominously from the Chef. The kitchen quickly filled with the acrid smell of dying electric motor and, before either of us could reach for the off switch, it ground to a halt.

Fortunately, we also have a hand-held electric whisk so, with kitchen windows wide open to flush out the fumes, the job was quickly completed.

Cheffie stands in the rain, awaiting his trip to the dump.

Poor Kenwood Chef! He was 25 years old and had worked hard in his youth, helping to create cakes and buns every week for the family. More recently, though, he's spent most of his days in the dark recesses of a kitchen cupboard. Indeed, the last time he saw the light of day was November 2018, when I used him to make my 70th Birthday sponge cake, then last year's Christmas cake.

Shall we replace him? I was astonished to discover that Chefs now retail for about £300; that's a lot for a machine that will probably only be used once a year. Refurbished ones cost about half that amount, whilst 2nd-hand ones on eBay go for less than £100, but even that still seems a lot of money to spend on a little-used item.

Granny mixed all her cakes by hand, so I'm sure I could too, or might a hand-held mixer suffice – like the Kenwood Chefette with which we started our cake-scoffing married lives? We have about 11 months to make up our minds.

Loudish and Clearish

"You ought to get your hearing tested."

"Why?"

"Sometimes you don't hear a word I say!"

"What?"

At times I get so engrossed in a Sudoku puzzle or my daily French lesson that I hardly hear what's going on around me. I call it selective deafness!  Joking aside, though, I reckon that my hearing is pretty good. However, I am aware that it isn't as acute as it once was, particularly if I'm trying to pick out a voice in a crowd, and especially if that voice is high-pitched.

At my age, my GP would doubtless be willing to refer me for a hearing test, but so far I've not been motivated to book an appointment with him. My opticians are also offering free hearing tests, but I don't really trust them as they appear much too keen to sell folk hearing aids costing several hundreds of pounds.  If ever I do need hearing aids, I'm unashamedly resolved to go for the free NHS variety.  With long hair over my ears they'll be as invisible as the expensive ones.

Back in October my friend Lucy blogged about her worries that she may have damaged her ears by playing music too loudly through earbuds. To check this out, she installed a Hearing Test app on her smartphone and was delighted to discover that all was well. Now that really did sound interesting, so I too downloaded the app.

It's important to stress that this is certainly not a 'proper' hearing test; it's only a guide, but a useful one nonetheless. I've tested my hearing over a several days and there's little variation in the results. Here's the latest one...

Mmmm. It's certainly not as good as Lucy's and shows all too clearly that I'm suffering from moderate hearing loss above 6kHz. My left ear (blue line) is slightly worse than my right, which is interesting as that's the ear in which I suffer from mild tinnitus - a whistling sound at about 7kHz.  At times, though, the tinnitus lifts completely and it would be interesting indeed to repeat the test then.

The previous graph was moderately worrying, but this one was more reassuring. It shows the same results, but plotted against a range of age norms. By that measure, I'm just about average for a 71 year-old. 

Growing old gracefully... that's me!

A Feast of Results

The scene is set.  As a responsible citizen, I've cast my vote, though the Forest of Dean constituency is far from being marginal. Indeed, so predictable is the result here that the Lib Dems have dropped out, even though they beat the Greens in 2017. I was sorely tempted to vote Green to give them a little boost, but in the end voted with my head rather than my heart.  Now though, if the Greens lose their deposit, I'll be feeling guilty.  Oh well.

A long, wakeful night is in prospect. I always enjoy watching the results come in and rarely make it to bed before 3.30pm. To sustain me through the wee hours, I've just returned from the Co-op with a diet busting feast.

• The Reds are represented by a nice, but not too expensive, bottle of red wine. This time I've gone for Beaujolais.
• For the Blues I thought some creamy blue cheese would be appropriate, so I've chosen a slab of Cambazola.
• Independents are represented by a small slice of Brie, which will hopefully do better than they will. 
• The cheese biscuit selection has no political affiliation, though being Co-op it might be somewhat left of centre, like me.
• Finally, to celebrate this first December general election since 1923 I've laid out the princely sum of £1.78 for some Christmas Cake Cheese. 

This morning's Poll of Polls in The Guardian had the Conservatives on 43%, Labour on 33%, the Lib Dems on 12% and the rest nowhere. The Lib-Dem-leaning Guardian was trying hard, bless 'em, to put an anti-Tory spin on it, though it looks as if Boris will get the working majority he's hoping for.  However, opinion polls have been notoriously inaccurate in the past.

Of more interest will be the joint Exit Poll conducted for the BBC, ITV and Sky. When that's revealed at 10pm, I'll be strumming my ukulele and singing with the Ukes uv Azzard, but will doubtless contrive to take a look (between songs, of course) at the BBC website. Then it's home for about 11pm, by which time the first couple of results should be in.

My personal prediction (for what it's worth) is that the Christmas Cake cheese will win the night, but it could be a close thing.

FUN in Gloucester

My loyal reader has contacted me, concerned about my long absence from blogging. Truth be told, I find it harder to write moderately interesting posts in the winter as life is apt to become somewhat routine, with no interesting new rambles to describe.  Today, however, was far from 'routine' and such good fun that I'm still buzzing 7 hours later.

FUN stands for Friends UkeNited – a gathering of ukulele players from clubs throughout Gloucestershire, and sometimes beyond. Today we congregated in Gloucester city centre to help the local Rotary Club raise money from their many good causes.

We were still getting ready to sing when this photo was taken.

As you can see, Santa hats were much in evidence. I'm standing on the right, next to a lady in red trousers. As well as my favourite little Santa hat, I'm sporting my Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer jumper, but unfortunately its hidden behind my pink music folder, pink coat and pink scarf. It was quite cold out there!

Under Terry's inspirational leadership, we made Gloucester rock with Christmas favourites such as Jingle Bells, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, Frosty the Snowman and (of course) Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody.  My favourites, though, were Dominic the Donkey and Must Be Santa. If you don't know the first of those then look it up on You Tube – it's hilarious. As for the second, it's an old Bob Dylan number, but unlike anything else I've ever heard him sing. And what could be better than to hear it for yourselves? Thank you, Katie, for posting this one.