Brownie breeding-mixing chocolately goodness with sweets

I can bake a reasonable chocolate brownie. They are incredibly rich and sweet and often require a sit-down after consuming. However, I feel that they could be improved by the addition of sweeties. My first effort was the inclusion of 3 pilot gummi worms, (I carefully marked their position before the mix was placed in the oven, so they could be found quickly and not give anyone a nasty shock - not everyone is as pioneering as me). The gummi worms melted and when found within the brownies, oozed out lusciously (although not leaving the worm shaped vacuums I had hoped for). The taste of brownie and molten worm unfortunately did not gel and were declared a failure.

Marshmallows seemed a more logical inclusion to brownies, but I had to question if they would form a homogenous compound with the brownie batter upon heating or would they stay isolated? I therefore pondered the question: What sweet would not melt? Flying saucers! They are made of the same stuff under macaroons, and that doesn't change shape under the influence of heat and syrupy mix. The only real question was the effect of the air. Here are the results of my first trial flying saucer brownie[1].Step 1. Take some Chemie special Brownie mix (not from a packet I might add, there are weighing scales, whisks and Bain Marie involved).Step 2. Chop Marshmallows into various sizes, so heat exposure and melting can be analysed. Realise that chopping marshmallows is an endless, sticky hopeless task. Give up and add marshamallows in various stes of chopped-up-ness to mix
Step 3. Place flying saucers in the tin and add mix. Run side experiment to see if the mix will seep into the saucer at room temperature. Proudly note it does not.Step 4. Bake with great anticipation. Note the early marshmallow rupture and worry for the safety of the flying saucers.
Step 5. Wait for brownie to cool. Under the cool kitchen luminescent light, attempt first Brownie dissection. Get annoyed when ringbearer will not hand you a scalpel or swab when told to and merely eats the extracted samples without consideration. Note flying saucers are intact, but marshmallows have merely added pleasantly to the stickiness.
Step 6. Demand critical response from ringbearer, who judges end product to taste of 'flying saucers and brownies'.

Personally I feel that the marshmallows, worked well but added little in flavour. Mini-mallows in larger quantities might help. Flying saucers work well with Brownies, the sherbet is a nice tang and breaks the heaviness of the chocolatey goodness. Next time; more saucers! Or maybe strawberry millions....

[1] Of the cake kind. I've worked with brownies fo the girl guide kind, you do not want to give them any form of unsupervised aviation equipment .

Videogame Nation - Videogaming is now exhibition worthy history and/or art?

Videogame Nation is an exhibition running at the fantastic Urbis in Manchester about the British video games industry (no Supermario here). It is accompanied by several talks and events relating to the videogaming industry. The exhibition is slickly put together with many games available to play, sketches, merchandise and game cover art. Parts include actual bus shelters for you to play you Nintendo DS in or an arcade style room for the arcade games as well as telephones that play recorded interviews. The walls are covered in snippets of gaming history, anecdotes and some worryingly pretentious quotes. ''Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other,' Charles Lamb' seems to be glorifying spending 4 hours straight on Tetris a bit too much if you ask me.

I have to admit that this is a great way to spend several hours on a rainy summer's day. The £3 entrance fee essentially lets you play limitless computer games, whilst indulging in some serious nostalgia. My friends' thrill at seeing 'Elite' again was strangely endearing and it offset the upset of seeing young children utterly amazed at the modern archaeological status of their beloved 'Jet Set Willy' . (Seriously, one kids was staring at Micromachines like it was a Viking helmet). We walked through the rooms to the endless cries of 'I remeber that!' and managed to get re-addicted to Lemmings. I'm afraid a lot of the nostalgia was lost on me. I never got into our Amstrad CPC 464 and my parents neither understood it nor encouraged me. I got pretty good at anything that involved viciously hitting the space bar (Bubba Bubba and Harrier Attack) and then left the world of computer games until as a procrastinating university student we were re-introduced. However at the exhibition, I triumphed in Sensible Soccer after brilliantly coming across the notion of hitting only two buttons very quickly for 2 minutes, which is exactly how I succeeded at any videogame in the 80s.

The exhibition, laid out from conception to today, underlined the meteoric speed and development of the gaming industry. I'm not sure however, that it did much else. The art of various magazines and disc covers, were sporadically dotted about but never alluded to as being part of a greater artistic trend. A shame really because the art of video games and it's influences could have been very interesting. Towards the end the recent issues of violent games, women gamers and the health concerns relating to gaming were almost cursorily shown. Which left me feeling that the exhibition seemed unsure as to it's purpose. Videogame Nation was a history lesson, art gallery and playroom all in one but it felt like a thesis that had failed to pose, argue or attempt to answer a question. It was a lot of fun, a lot of detail and information, but I'm not sure in bringing all these games together it achieved anything except saying that videogames have developed....a lot.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - How Hollyoaks does it better

I'm not sure how you could not know the plot by now, but spoilers for anything Potter

I like Harry Potter films, there is something cosy and Sunday afternoonish about them and I always get a little tingle in my spine when that melody kicks in. I even just about forgive the atrocity that was film 2, mostly because it taught all future directors and writers that they were going to have to slice and dice the books to make a decent film. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince sees Harry and friends return for another year of education, adolescent development and fighting Lord Voldemort. Film 6 is as much about the raging hormones as it is about the raging battle between good and evil outside the school walls. Large amounts of film time are dedicated to the teen-angst relationships between the teenage heroes. The problem is the actors aren't very good at portraying it. Ginny in particular drove me mad with her very strange motherly seduction techniques. Shoelace tying only works with naughty smile when kneeling down and mince pie feeding is sort of sexy if you don't precede it with a matronly 'open up'. Poor Ginny managed to exude fewer (admittedly adolescently incompetent) 'come hither' messages in the entire film than the waitress sweetly managed in 2 minutes. Quiditch and Ron's relationship with Lavender (wonderfully hammed up) is all well and good, but mentioning that people are dying and disappearing outside the walls might also have been relevant.

The relationship between Harry and Ginny was eventually OKed by Ron via Hermione as an afterthought during the Empire-Strikes-Back-window framing final scene. Why go to all that painful effort for one throw-away sentence? That among with a few other strange cuts, such as the hourglass and the burning newspaper has led me to believe that several parts of the film that were shot were edited out. Sections of the book were also cut, the Tonks subplot, the Ministry politicking, Bill Weasley and the Dursleys plus all the staring into the swirly memory bowl has thankfully been minimised. References to previous books were present without further painful exposition (Aragog, the marauder's map, Harry's parents). But two points were strangely absent: Sirius, (something of an important figure to Harry) was barely mentioned or grieved for and the fight in the castle was completely missing, having been mostly transferred to the Weasley home. The last I found to be the most confusing; it seemed that Draco had been filling his time (and a portion of the film) with his efforts around the cabinets, so that the deatheaters could arrive and provide...moral support?

Film 6 is the set up for book 7 (films 7+8 if you will) and it truly felt darker and more epic. The young cast look and act like nearly-adults (although hilariously Neville looks about 30) ready to unsteadily face the world. Broadbent's Slughorn worked perfectly and Draco's change from snide bully to a far more dangerous,clever and scared foe was well handled. So the younger actors are erratic and they could learn something about portraying teen relationships from the cast of Hollyoaks. But the cast of Hollyoaks isn't sharing a screen with the pitch perfect royalty of British acting, where nearly anyone is going to look weak. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is a solid lead into the final book, lets hope the actors practice their goo-goo eyes and body language before it starts filming.

It Felt Like A Kiss - terror and revelations in a Manchester office block

It Felt Like A Kiss –How an insight into US culture, your pack mentality, human suggestibility and blind terror can be a great Birthday present.

It Felt Like a Kiss (IFLAK) was one of the stand out events of the Manchester International Festival. A collaboration between film-maker Adam Curtis (The power of Nightmares), Punchdrunk ( A theatre group specialising in walk-through theatre experiences) and Damon Albarn (the man whose breadth of creativity Noel Gallagher wishes he had ).It's officially over now and was originally slated to be a one off, although now it is rumoured to be travelling to London and Moscow?!? Because the more you know about the performance, the less you get out of it I shall keep this part brief. IFLAK is a similar to a walk-through fairground ride, which will just like Curtis's films shoot ideas past you at a rapid rate. At the centre was a 35 minute showing of Curtis's film, a documentary on late 50s/early 60s America and the power and falsehoods of dreams. The spaces you walk to to get to the film, reflect fragments of the film. These spaces are incredible in detail, innocuous discomfort or blatant fear manipulation. After the film (as you are warned at the beginning) and as you progress through more spaces connected to the film you begin to see the dream become an nightmare. And what was naggingly uncomfortable before becomes a terrifying assault. Your role as spectator changes slowly to participant and you find yourself assaulted with just how suggestible you are and how much you will obey. And after 2 hours of creeping about, with growing paranoia, it's a lot more than you think. IFLAK wants to show you that you are not an individual, that you are the same as everyone else and as you dash gasping and possibly screaming into eventual daylight and see the rest of the audience doing the same, you take the point to heart. Not bad for 'art'.

After most theatre/gig trips you can find yourselves dissecting the performance over a pint, maybe relishing a few choice memories for a couple of days. Post IFLAK most people sit in the pub, gently shaking, convinced the barman isn't real and desperately trying to process the ordeal. You won't forget IFLAK, infact most people will be having 'nam style flashbacks for weeks. I managed to get very alarmed by an empty corner of my bedroom at 3am following the show. With such a resounding impact, I recommend the performance to anyone who relishes a new experience, enjoys having the boundaries between exhibition, play and film blurred and can handle a gentle transition from spectator, to active participant. Go and experience IFLAK, sell your horror movie DVD collection, psychology, self help and history books. You'll get a more intimate understanding of yourself and your fellow man in 2 hours of IFLAK than in any of them.

It Felt Like A Kiss: The spoiler version

My more detailed re-cap is below. Obviously spoilers, don't read if you think you will ever get a chance to go.

The It Felt Like A Kiss performance took place in a completely bland 70s office building. So innocuous was it, we struggled to find the entrance and with entry limited to groups of 6-8 every 20 minutes, there were no handy queues to show you the way. Innocuous on first inspection yet disturbing on the inside was a recurring theme for the next 2 hours. Fear is all about expectation and IFLAK is a masterpiece of building it. From the moment a very nice steward gave us severe warnings about unsuitability for people who are pregnant, have heart conditions or have a nervous disposition and reminded us about wearing sensible enclosed footwear (They weren't kidding on the last one), to the rooms that connect by ominous black corridors, or ominous music, to the time later on when you are issued an classic horror movie adage of 'Don't split up', expectation is a fundamental part of your experience. Hence my heart-rate was already rising as I entered the lift with 4 strangers, all of us indulging in a terribly British jokey banter to calm our nerves. By the time the lift opened to nothing but darkness and a yawning clown's face, I was already telling myself 'It's just a show'

IFLAK's walk-through sections shoot ideas, objects, sounds and fragments past you at a rapid rate,just like Curtis's films. We crept through some rooms and sauntered through others. They key is to feel, smell, touch and hear rather than to process. It really is a walk through movie. I barely noticed Albarn's soundtrack, although I knew it was manipulating my mood, just a a good soundtrack should for a film. You could touch anything except the dummies which occupy some spaces (at least you hope they are dummies and trust me you ask yourself that every time you come across one). I felt a frisson of spy like pleasure as I nosed through the CIA's filing cabinets and an unknown family's book shelves. The rooms smelled authentic and everywhere TV screens showed fragments of the documentary, often strangely at odds with your apparent location, sometimes in perfect keeping with it. For example Tina Turner's 'Mountain High', was wildly appropriate and inappropriate when wandering through a dystopian rubbish dump. At one point I thought I was George-W style seeing a young Saddam Hussain everywhere (pinned photo to a notice board, Saddam moustaches in the props department, on the bedroom TV). The rooms and the documentary have something to say about any number of social and economic points and sometimes it felt like an unprocessable deluge, so many connections were there to be made as the documentary and the 'theatre' rambled through them. It was almost frustrating to not be able to make them all. I found later that I struggled to remember a lot of these moments and connections as the events after the documentary (the nightmare) somewhat assaulted and then clouded my memory. A mistake or another way of saying 'You noticed the nightmarish fallout, but you didn't see all the signs leading up to it did you?' The film itself; an 'experience', a whirlwind of ideas and questions that was designed to feed some other part of your brain than the one Panorama normally takes up, left a strange after-taste. Certainly a desire to see it again and try and process but also a sense that maybe the message you found was just for you, More art than history lesson or political point.

You know the ending to the Blairwitch? Run up and down some empty stairs and see someone in the corner of the room. I laughed when I saw that. I didn't laugh when I was stuck in a strobe lit corridor with a dummy in the corner. Why 6 adults scuttled past something they outnumbered, but couldn't see well in the lighting, is a testament to how easily we are willing to play our part [1]. Have you seen many films where the body in the corner disappears, the CCTV shows you that something is behind you or the 'dummy' moves when you glance in the opposite direction? Dumb jokeworthy cliché perhaps but really quite scary when after 2 hours of paranoia inducing 'entertainment', you are creeping with a group of strangers, along a maze with no destination other than the one in front of you. That you have just filled out a psychological questionnaire[2] about 'freedom' and been warned that people have accidentally died in ghost rides just adds to the effect.

I always comment on how a logical person would handle a real life horror movie. (Find a makeshift weapon, pull out your mobile, refuse to enter a maze, climb things that got in your way instead of going where the resident nutter wants you to go) and in IFLAK I did none of those things. I was disappointed with myself, until afterwards when I took a good look at what motivated me. At one point I was stuck with 7 other people in a room waiting for the lights to go on in the next, so we could move on (or face a grissly chainsaw death). I didn't barricade doors or make weapons, because I knew it wasn't the point. I was on a ride, it wasn't real, there was surely worse to come but it would be terrifying, not life threatening. And I suddenly felt re-assured about my own competence but implicitly aware that I was following someone else's rules and feeling what they wanted me to. Naturally 'sticking together; didn't happen and eventually we were forced to be alone. Except I wasn't, having gotten jammed in a door, my grand moment of terrifying epiphany was shared with a very pleasant equally scared stranger. I feel awful that I missed out, that I didn't finish my ordeal properly, but also kind of proud that I did eventually buck the system (by accident). My eventual exit from IFLAK was inelegant, filled with relief, exhaustion and a desperate need for a pint and some form of group counselling.

So I refused to take a mystery pill, or put a gun to my head, but when asked to pick a door or am jostled and yelled at to 'run' from a chainsaw wielding maniac, I do it. Not the individual I thought I was. How depressing, how awesome a revelation in such an unexpected way. How badly do I want to go again?

[Edited for my grammar, which is always appalling :( ]
[1] Apparently David Dimbleby was in one group. As a true journalist and presumably used to real terror he tried to interview one of the dangerous and scary things that he came across. Everyone else ran.
[2] I didn't. It seems I have a very modern view of privacy of information irrelevant of my 60s, fascistic hospital surroundings

How to confirm that you are the youngest passenger on a cruise.

Recently my in-laws very kindly took my husband and me away on a Fred Olsen Cruise to Norway and the Arctic. They naturally warned us that the average clientèle were Daily Mail reading retirees with an average age of 76 and the cruise was very much aimed at its customer base. Never being one to turn down a new experience (or a free holiday) I embarked on my first cruise. Of the nearly 900 passengers we were almost the youngest (2 single women, who had similarly been offered free holidays by their parents were also on-board and were possibly a bit younger). I thoroughly enjoyed living away from my peer group and witnessing the behaviour of the middle class retiree en-masse and I have subsequently constructed a handy checklist called ‘How to confirm that you are the youngest passenger on a cruise’.

-The duty free shop only includes anti-aging and wrinkle reducing products

-You are the only passenger who knows how to buy and wear appropriately cut trousers

- You are the only person not delighted that the comedian 'wasn't too blue'

-All the quiz questions are based on trivia from before you were born

-You don't wander where the dancing girls get their energy

-You understand the computer room

-All excursions involve less than 5 minutes walking and no steps

-You haven't heard a single track on-board from the top ten from the last 10 years

-The ship shop is better stocked with Tena lady than tampons. (Also there are no condoms available anywhere on the ship)

-You are the only one who is actively seasick. (I suspect that the senior passengers have had many years to develop fearsome sealegs or are so full of arthritis drugs anyway they barely notice the ship move)

-You are the only person who wears a bikini (or should)

-You don’t think twice about walking to the stern or require a cup of tea to recover from it

-You don't know any of the dances

-You are not under the impression that gold orthopaedic sandals and a nice cardi constitute more formal attire

-If you partook of the beauty treatments in the salon and 'took 10-20 years off' you would have to hand in your driver's licence