Filed under: >Italy,Travel Planning — Posted by: Baden on Jan 30, 2005
As of a few weeks ago, we have officially begun our 2005 Excellent Adventure trip planning. Even by our standards we are ahead of the game as we’ve even bought our tickets to Italy already. Our trip this year will be unique as we will be travelling with my brother Peter and his wife Liz making this the first time we have travelled from beginning to end with other people.
[continue reading "The Making of an Excellent Adventure 2005 - Part 1" ...]
Now that the flights are booked and we have a tentative agenda agreed upon, Barb and Liz will be taking over the task of researching the fine details of where we will stay and the in-country travel bookings (trains, planes and car rentals).
As I’m now using this web log for all Excellent Adventure updates (and no longer sending out individual emails anymore), I’ll be posting details of how things progress throughout the year leading up to our late September departure. You can check back here every now and then as I’ll post updates on a regular basis.
Baden
Goto the next episode of Making of an Excellent Adventure 2005
Filed under: Blog on Blog — Posted by: Baden on Jan 29, 2005
About 6 months ago (while we were planning our recent trip to France), I decided that I wanted to change the way that I was sending out my Excellent Adventure updates. As most of you know, I was previously just sending out emails to a large distribution list while we travelled on our adventures. While this method worked well enough, I wanted to get away from more or less forcing everyone to read my emails and have a more participatory method where people could choose to read when they wanted to.
[continue reading "The Making of My Blog - Part 1" ...]
A web log (or blog) seemed to be the way to do this as it gave me a way to still communicate my travel observations but I also could do so on other areas of interest to me such as cooking and dining out.
Out of this was born this site www.excellentadventure.ca.
In order to run my new site, I needed to find some appropriate blog software. I evaluated one or two and eventually decide that WordPress was the right one for me. Once I had decided on WordPress, I spent the following several weeks trying to learn the nuance of it (which I am still in the process of) and got it to a point where I felt it was good enough to start working on adding some content like this posting.
This basically brings us to where I am today.
The Blog on Blog category on this site will be an ongoing commentary of my attempts to build and customize my site. At present, other than continuing to improve the look and feel of this blog, I have a few technical issues needed to be addressed:
1) As one of the main purposes of this site will be to discuss the details of our Excellent Adventures when we travel, I need to be able to efficiently post new blog entries from remote locations.
2) I need to make all efforts to ensure that my site is as secure as possible to avoid getting hacked and to withstand as much spam as possible.
To address the first point, I have already ordered a handheld computer which I will be taking with me on our trips. My first task when I receive this device will be to start testing software which will allow me to post new blog entries from it through the Internet.
No matter what, both of these tasks will likely start to consume much of my time over the next few months. Good thing that we arent leaving on our next trip until the end of September.
Baden
Filed under: Recipes — Posted by: Baden on Jan 29, 2005
Ever since I can remember, my grandmother used to make a special cake called Love cake which we used to see about once or twice a year. However, since my grandmother passed away a few years ago, this cake hasn’t been made in over 15 years.
Love cake is a rich, heavy cake which is made up mostly of ground cashews, egg yolks, spices and sugar but it also contains a fair amount of brandy in her recipe resulting in the aroma from a freshly cut Love cake being a thing of beauty.
[continue reading "Love Cake Recipe" ...]
For a couple of years now when the family would get together, we would all talk about how much we remembered Love cake and that we should try and make it again “if only we could remember the exact recipe”. My aunt Marlene had the most complete notes amongst all of us for making Love cake as she had spent many times working with her mother (my grandmother) making this recipe. A few months ago, we all decided to get together after Christmas and try and recreate the recipe from her notes. If we could accomplish this then we would properly document the process and hopefully revive the Love cake tradition for at least another generation.
I had come to learn that my grandmother’s Love cake recipe was handed to her by her mother (my great-grandmother) which made this cake a part of my family for upwards of 100 years. As you might imagine, there was more involved in trying to recreate this recipe that just having a bite of cake again.
According to my aunt, my grandmother’s original recipe involved a lot of hard manual labour with up to 3 hours of manual stirring the batter (my grandmother used no electric mixers in her recipe). Part of the process that we were going to do was to attempt to modern up the recipe with the addition of my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Armed with my mixer, electronic scale and digital camera, we got together at Marlene’s house on December 28th to try and produce a reasonable modern facsimile of the original Love cake recipe and document what we did in the process.
The attached link details the recipe that we made and we were extremely happy to eventually find out that we had made a pretty good Love cake that was by most measures, close enough to the taste and texture of my grandmother’s version.
With any luck, we’ll still have this cake recipe in the family 100 years from now.
Love Cake recipe link
Baden
Hey Baden, you missed an opportunity to give Dell a plug!
Then again, if it doesn’t work well on your trip, you can tell everyone it’s a iPOD!