Lemony delight (where “y delight” = bars)

For Easter my lovely fella's lovely mammy invited me over for dinner, so I had to bring something tasty. I've been meaning to make something lemony for a while, and so lemon bars were made. Unfortunately, they're awful tasty, so I had a couple for breakfast, leaving not quite enough to go round after dinner....

The base is a sort of lightly crispish base, like that of the caramel slices, and the topping is a lovely sweet lemon curd. I'd imagine dropping some of the sugar or increasing the amount of lemon juice should increase the tang, or making icing using the juice of another lemon should get a proper wince going.

Science Hack Day and crocheted blood cells

At the beginning of the month (March 3rd and 4th to be precise), I had the pleasure of attending ScienceHackDay Dublin, which was a great big hackathon in the name of Science! A hackthon is basically a long session hacking away at your projects or your friends' projects, think staying up stupid late to get a paper in for a deadline, except more fun and the project is of your own choosing.

The event was very well organised, with food provided (including apple lattices for all!), and plenty of space to work. All internetworking sorts of things were well sorted too. After a few introductory project talks in the morning, people assembled off into groups to work on a variety of projects from programming to building hardware to visualise aurora. But wait, Tríona doesn't do programming or building hardware, so what did she do for the 36 hour event?

Caramel Slices (or, Diabetes in a Mouthful)

One of my favourite things to have with a cup of coffee is a humble caramel slice. They also make excellent treats to bring in to work (if you try to eat the whole tray at home on your own, I am not responsible for hospital bills). So, when I finished my second PhD rotation, I brought in caramel slices, to make doubly certain everyone would miss me....

Dinosaur Cheese Bread

No no, there's no dinosaur cheese in this bread, sure dinosaurs weren't mammals so they didn't make milk! The blobs of gouda on top make me think of dinosaurs (what a dull explanation).

• 200ml Milk
• 200ml hot water (not boiling)
• 5g salt
• 7g packet active yeast (them sachets you find in the supermarkets, you'll have to increase the amount if you're fancy enough to use fresh yeast)
• 300g strong white flour
• 300g plain white flour
• 50g butter (softish)
• sliced up block of gouda (or other nice cheese, gouda was what we had in the fridge)

Put the flours, yeast and salt into a bowl and mix through. Then pour on the milk and then the hot water (the combination of hot water and cold milk should be a pleasant warm temperature that the yeast will like). Squidge around in the bowl until it all starts to come together, you can then turn it out to knead it or you can just squidge around longer in the bowl (i dont like messing up the countertop until I need to). The dough should be slightly sticky, not totally wet, but definitely not dry. Pop the dough back in the bowl and cover with a lid or a plate or some cling film. Leave on the counter for two hours until all puffy and risen.

Kettle corn

With the sorrowful arrival of the kettle corn recipe, comes the shopping for clothes two sizes bigger. The stuff is unnessecarily tasty, and as I discovered this evening, terribly easy to make. So far it doesn't seem to have ruined the pot either (my other excuse for not making it till now), though I will keep you posted if I find out otherwise tomorrow.