Baking is relatively new to me. I’ve only really been doing it for the last couple of years, and not really on the regular.
There’s something quite therapeutic about working the dough. The kneading, massaging and rolling allows me to really be in the moment and feel grounded, especially when life gets hectic.
When I lived in Szeged in Hungary, I dwelt in a small apartment that was over the road from a bakery. The smell would sometimes drift over, and to this day, the scent of fresh bread takes me back to that warm, comfy apartment where I spent many hours studying.
One of my favourite things to get from the bakery were Kaiser Rolls. The small wheel shaped rolls were always so delicious, especially when combined with some local meats and cheeses. As the famous Pick factory was about a mile down the road, I certainly never went short!
This is a recipe that I’ve cobbled together to make some kaiser rolls, just like the ones I used to eat back in Szeged during that cold winter.
A brief note before we begin. These are not authentic Kaiser Rolls, nor am I going to pretend they are. These are an easy alternative suitable for beginners. However, they’re bloody good.
How to Bake Kaiser Rolls
They might not be authentic Kaiser Rolls, but they taste good regardless.
For the Rolls
500g Strong White Bread Flour
7g Fine Salt
4g Caster Sugar
7g Yeast (Dried/Dehydrated Yeast is fine)
300ml of Warm Water
For the Topping
1 Egg (For use as an Egg Wash)
Poppy Seeds (Optional)
Sesame Seeds (Optional)
Instructions
Combine all the dry ingredients in a good bowl and mix together.
Slowly add the 300ml of warm water to the mix whilst mixing. You want the dough to be tacky rather than sticky. If it is a bit too sticky, you can always add a bit more flour.
Knead the dough for 15 minutes, using flour to stop the dough from sticking to the surface. Form the dough into a ball.
Lightly oil a clean bowl and place the dough into it to prove. Allow the dough to rise for about an hour or until it has doubled in size.
After the first proving is completed, knead the dough for another two minutes to work out the excess air.
Divide the dough into equal pieces and roll each piece into a long sausage shape approximately 30cm long. Tie the dough into a simple knot and tuck one of the tails into the top and one of the tails into the bottom. You should be left with something resembling a pinwheel.
Place on a baking tray. Cover with cling film and leave to prove for one hour.
Once the second proving is done, use the egg and make an egg wash, coating the buns before adding the sesame seeds and poppy seeds.
Bake at 200⁰C for 20 minutes. (OPTIONAL: Use a pyrex tray with boiling water to steam the buns.)
And that’s all there is to it! Let them cool and enjoy!
I’m no star baker, nor have I ever received a baking-related handshake for any of my work, but these rolls recently went down very well at a Friendsgiving Dinner which was held shortly before my friend from Utah went back home.
If I can bake these rolls, then I’m sure you guys are more than capable of doing them too.
I hope that you get something out of this recipe, and I urge you that if you are ever feeling down, lonely or in need of something to occupy your hands, consider baking some of these rolls, as they can warm you in a way that no fire ever can.
I’ve listened to a lot of music over the years. Sometimes it’s one of the only ways that I am able to process my feelings in a way that can be considered emotionally healthy.
When I find myself battling my personal frustrations or the deep feelings of sadness that often plague my thoughts, Sometimes I find that I can’t always express myself outwardly. I tend to bottle things up subconsciously.
The brain is a powerful thing, yet it can be very self-sabotaging too. I can feel sad, yet not acknowledge the sadness, instead storing it away in some kind of vault where it can’t leave, yet continues to eat away at me from deep within without being addressed.
I’ve tried many things over the years to remedy such things, yet nothing has come close to the therapy that music can provide. Sometimes it can be a simple piano melody. Other times it can vary from a rock ballad to an orchestral masterpiece.
It’s hard to explain just why music can have this effect on me. It’s like it provides a borehole leading right into this vault of sadness, allowing some to escape into an area of my concioisness where the emotion can be processed in a healthy way.
Let’s say I’ve had a crappy day at work. I can be absolutely fine, and all it takes is the right song to be playing, and it can resonate within me in such a fashion that it can open the floodgates for a deluge of emotion. I can be driving home, and then just start crying when a particular song comes on.
The funny thing is that it’s not just music that can trigger these emotions. It can be other things too. Seeing a small plant clinging to life on the wall of an long abandoned alleyway in a foreign city can be enough to bring forth a powerful emotional response. For me though, it’s always been dramatic landscapes, particularly mountainous ones.
I recently travelled across Western Canada and Washington State, and seeing the incredible majesty of the mountains there got me thinking about how, geologically speaking, these mountains have been here for mere seconds, yet to us as humans, they have stood for longer than our species have existed. Yet one day, these mountains will be gone. Perhaps before our race ends, perhaps not.
Turns out that there is a name for this kind of thinking. The Japanese call it “Mono No Aware” which roughly translates to the “Pathos of all things”. All things in life are fragile and impermanent. Everything we know and love is eventually going to fade and pass into the unknown. But at the same time, is that not what makes it beautiful?
I stood watching these stars as they slowly blinked in and out of existence. For all we know, these stars could be long dead, and we look and wonder about ghosts.
As I stood near the summit of the Sulphur Mountain, looking out over the world, I was suddenly struck with a feeling of a deep sadness that one day, that the mountain that I stood upon would one day cease to be exist, and I found myself getting quite emotional. Yet at the same time, I could marvel upon the vista that lay unfurled before me and feel wonder and amazement.
It’s always been strange to me that I have required the aid of music or mountains to help me process my thoughts. As I have spent the majority of my life living in a state of almost constant anxiety, it seems that it is my default setting. Yet sometimes all I need is a beautiful piece of music combined with a damn good view to help me settle my thoughts.
Those who know me know I am one of two ways. One of these ways people can see me is sitting quietly, almost as if I am detached from reality or uncaring about what is going on around me. The other way is that I tend to rant about things that have pissed me off that day.
I can appreciate that from the outside, it doesn’t look great. I’ve been told quite often that I suffer from a “Resting Bitch Face” which would be quite true.
However, when I am sitting quietly, I am not always detached from the people or the world around me. Admittedly, that can sometimes be the case, particularly after a day where I have been particularly nervous or have had a lot of social interaction which can drain me greatly.
Most of the time, I simply sit there listening, and trying my hardest to keep myself grounded in the moment. Though it’s not always easy. I’m often quite contented to simply listen, not that I always remember everything I hear.
Anyway, I guess there’s not much point to this post. If anything, I’ve written it more for me than anybody else. I’ve had a rough couple of weeks, and a lot of things are going wrong.
I used to hate English lessons at school. I always found it difficult to engage myself during classes, and my mind tended to wander a lot.
Like many teenagers growing up during the 2000’s, I spent a lot of my free time playing video games. For the first time, online gaming was becoming more and more accessible to people thanks to services such as GameSpy, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network.
My adventures in online gaming had started long before this. One of my earliest memories involving gaming was when my dad picked us up from school one evening. He told us that he’d picked up some computer games. Naturally, I was fascinated by this. I can still remember some of the earlier games.
Beaver Dam . It was dam fun. (Geddit?)
One I remember fondly was a minigame called “Beaver Dam”. It’s taken me a while to find it, but I’ve discovered that it was part of a puzzle game called “The Time Warp of Doctor Brain”. The game involved building a beaver dam whilst avoiding turtles, electric eels and other saboteurs. I found it great fun and enjoyed it immensely.
The music on the menu sticks with me years later.
Another game was called “Odell Down Under” and it was a game about the undersea food chain. You played a fish and it was your job to survive by feeding on smaller fish, and swimming away from larger predators. Again, I hold many fond memories of this.
The final defining game of my childhood was called “Torin’s Passage”. It followed a farm boy travelling between different worlds in search of his parents and was a point and click game that was very enjoyable. It also had a lot of adult references in, that I completely missed as a child.
Torin’s Passage. The little pink thing was called Boogle. It was a shapeshifting sidekick that provided a lot of the comic relief.
The point to all of this is that I daydreamed a lot in English class. My head was always in the clouds and it was during this time that I started planning to make a game of my own.
I did plenty of research and eventually stumbled upon an obscure Japanese program called “RPG Maker”. It allowed anyone to make their own top-down role playing game with very little skill. For a young man dreaming of making his own game to share with his friends, it was a goldmine.
The drag and drop interface of RPG Maker appealed to me immensely, as I never had much of a head for coding
There were many issues getting it to work on my PC. The main one being that I didn’t understand Japanese. I found out that there was a patch that would allow the translation of the program into English, so I learned to navigate the complicated folder structure of the program to install the patch in the correct folder.
Eventually, I managed to get it working, only to find that there was a 14-Day trial before the program would stop working. To young, broke, teenage me, it was a major annoyance. Even if I did my paper round and managed to save up the money, I had to navigate the Japanese website in order to buy it.
So I did what any thirteen year old boy would do. I simply backed up my core files, and uninstalled the program, then delved into the windows registry to remove any references to the program, so that a re-install would reset the timer.
It worked for a time, but I quickly got tired of doing this. It took many years but I was eventually able to get a legitimate version of the program (and have since brought later versions also.)
So I started making a game. I called it “The River of Time” as it sounded cool and mysterious. I also based the characters in the game on my friends. To put it simply, I had no idea what I was doing.
The games were interesting to play, but they never felt like real games. My friends loved the screenshots and videos I would show them, but the gameplay was always lacking. Then I figured it out. There was no real plot.
Characters would simply move from one place to another, fighting monsters to no real purpose. I was also hideous at map design too.
Eventually, I started to realise this, and sought to remedy it and I started writing the outline of a plot. It was empty and soulless. It was then I realised that the plot was nothing without a world for the game to be set in.
It was then that I started building the world. I started off doodling maps in class, writing the names of Kingdoms and Cities down on a hastily scrawled piece of folded scrap paper. It eventually turned into a hobby as I created the history of my world.
Why were there monsters in this world? Because an angry dying god had created them in his final act before his destruction. All of a sudden, the world became more interesting, and so did the plot.
As we skip forward many years, I am still building this world, and it has gone through many iterations to the point where it is unrecognisable from the original maps that I would shove into my shirt pocket to avoid them being confiscated.
Eventually, I moved away from the idea of making it into a video game, but I still continued building the world. As an unintended side effect of this, I developed a love for history as I took a lot of inspiration to write the history of my own world.
I eventually studied the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the Cold War that followed. I also wrote my A-Level coursework on the fight for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom. I also developed an interest in recent history such as the Miners Strikes of the 1980s and the fall of the Conservative government in the mid-1990s.
This also allowed my writing skills to improve, and I quickly became much more comfortable writing long walls of text (Though I never quite mastered proper paragraph formatting.)
My love of Worldbuilding has led me to take an interest in geography. No longer was I drawing random rivers on a map. My rivers now started as mountain streams before flowing down to the sea, carving out long valleys as they meandered down before eventually reaching estuaries.
The mountains on my maps started sitting on tectonic plates, and the geography of the world started making more sense, and as I did that, the world really built itself. Coastal towns relied on an economy based on fishing and overseas trading, whilst the villages next to the rivers made their money through farming on the fertile land fed by the rivers.
The few crossing points on the rivers became fully fledged towns and cities, and the villages in the mountains and forests carved out a living from mining stone and cutting wood.
Now, I am in the process of writing my first book based in my world. It is a fantasy novel following a dwarf named “Klagg”. Once a respected constable, the death of one of his closest friends at the hands of a powerful dark mage leads him to experience extreme survivors guilt which eventually leads to depression and alcoholism.
Picking up years later, the plot of the book involves a now homeless and indebted Klagg learning to deal with his demons, and accepting that he couldn’t have stopped his friend’s death. It also follows his quest to bring his friend’s murderer to justice years later when the dark mage resurfaces.
All of this has come from playing video games and daydreaming in my class. Come to think of it, I can’t remember much of what I learned in my English class. Not to discredit my teachers, of course. I will always be grateful to all those who taught me. It’s just that I didn’t have a love of reading boring stories and looking for meaning that wasn’t there.
My video game inspired daydream has given me a love of writing, a greater understanding of history and an interest in geography and cartography. I was told off quite often for doodling and not paying attention, but in a way, those classes taught me many things, just not in the way that they were intended to teach me.
I’m still worldbuilding fifteen years later, and I will keep building my world, and expanding on the history and stories contained within. I may never publish a book, but who knows?
The Sky. As long as I can remember, it’s always fascinated me. A constantly changing canvas of natural beauty, as far as the eye can see. A place reserved solely for the birds and the bold. A place that many of us living on this planet will never know.
My first memories of looking up at the sky occurred when I was about four years old. I remember seeing a jet cruising at altitude that at the time was inconceivable for a young boy. For me, the top of the stairs was a huge achievement, let alone 30,000 feet.
As I watched it move slowly across my field of vision, I was curious about the white lines that it left in its wake. My four year old brain came up with the logic that those mysterious machines were there to create clouds. Why else would they be spewing out lines of cloud as they soared through the air? I was intrigued by the fact that something built by people, who lived on the ground, could go quite so high.
Several years later around 2003, when I must have been about ten or eleven, we went on a family holiday to Cornwall. The drive seemed to take forever. These were the days before mobile internet, or even before smartphones. I had a Sagem My-X6, which had features such as a colour screen and polyphonic ringtones. My wallpaper was a picture of a plane.
We were listening to music on my mother’s iPod. The device, which was new technology at the time, had revolutionised our drives, moreso because my father had brought a device that plugged into the iPod’s headphone jack and could broadcast the music on an FM frequency at short range, meaning we would have high quality music through the car radio.
We were staying at a small cottage just outside of the small town of Camelford in the north of Cornwall. We had been driving for about an hour or so when I saw a small aircraft in the sky. I had never been on an airplane before and watched with interest. Later that day, we pulled up at a small airstrip a few miles from Lands End. My dad had seen a sign labelled “Scenic Flights” and had stopped to enquire.
Before I knew it, I was being bundled into the back of a Cessna 172 alongside my younger sister. I was given a car seat to sit on, so that I could see out of the window. The take-off was extremely scary and bumpy. Yet before I knew it, we had left the ground. I clearly remember squeezing my sister’s hand hard, yet it was not from fear, more from excitement. I was flying!
We flew around Lands End, looking down on the famous signpost. I remember seeing the patches of sea fog moving gently across the water below. I remember seeing the horizon curve as I looked out to sea. I remember feeling exhilarated, excited and lusting for more.
At that moment, I knew what I wanted to do when I was older. I wanted to fly.
Flash forward a few years. It was my thirteenth birthday and I was given a card by my Aunt and Uncle. It was a card labelled “Good for One Flying Lesson”. On top of that, I had an AFE Flying Training Guide which never left my schoolbag.
My family drove me to Coventry Airport and it was there that I tasted flight for the second time. The aircraft was an old, beaten up Reims-Cessna F150L, callsign G-GBLR.
G-GBLR
The flight was incredible, but this time it was even better. I wasn’t just a passenger anymore. I was in the front left seat.
Matt, my instructor, was from Australia, and talked about how they used the 150’s to move around the larger ranches as the Short Take-off & Landing (STOL) capabilities combined with relatively cheap maintenance made it ideal for hopping from place to place quickly.
We flew over Draycote Water, Rugby and Northampton before turning back to Coventry Airport. I had a certificate printed, which I immediately made a copy of so I could show off at school. On top of that, I was told that unlike many people who had their initial flights, I was extraordinarily gentle on the controls, which meant a much comfier flight.
I had flown a plane, and I had been told I had a knack for it. I’ll admit, this did inflate my ego a bit, but when I was thirteen, the only thing that really mattered to me in life was to be considered “cool” by my classmates. That, and playing video games.
About a month later, I went back for another flying lesson. This time it was with a different instructor. I didn’t like him very much at all. I can’t remember his name either.
We took off towards Draycote Water and he demonstrated the effectiveness of the controls at different airspeeds before performing a stall before we returned. Although exciting, the robotic, monotonous tone of the instructor somehow made flying boring. I remember sitting in the car on the way home, having enjoyed the experience but not as much as the first time.
That would be the last time I would fly for over ten years. It wasn’t for lack of passion. I had plenty of that. It was a lack of money. Flying lessons were expensive after all, and I was thirteen years old. I would have to do a paper round for approximately eight weeks just to afford one flying lesson.
And so for a long time, my interest in flying ended up at the back of my mind, as if it was some kind of half-forgotten dream.
I’ve always had issues with anxiety and self doubt. And to be honest I still do, and more than likely will always have that annoying little voice in the back of my mind telling me that “You’re not good enough” or “You’re going to fail and make yourself look like an idiot – so why try?”
It’s not easy battling with your own mind, and anxiety makes life difficult. When my wonderful girlfriend tells me she’s had a bad day, my mind immediately springs into panic mode, and on top of that, I also start blaming myself for her bad day. It sounds insane, right? That’s because in a way, it is.
My anxious mind takes me through some very silly thought processes, and this all came to a head a few years ago when I ended up having a full blown anxiety attack over something so insignificant that I can’t even remember what it was. I remember being on the phone to my dad and he said something along the lines of “You need therapy.” He was right.
Such thoughts have plagued me for almost my entire life. I can’t help but think it’s held me back from things I would have otherwise done.
Looking for a light in the darkness doesn’t always come easily to everyone.
Although I didn’t see it at the time, through a I came to realise that I had lived with anxiety since childhood, and that it had always influenced the way I went about my life.
Looking back, I see that I let a lot of opportunities pass me by.
I could have gone on a school trip to Spain that would have included entry to the PortAventura theme park as well as other amazing places, but I tore up the cheque that my dad had written at the last moment, because I was scared.
I was a fussy eater, and I wouldn’t like the food, My Spanish wouldn’t be good enough if I got lost and needed to ask for help. I’d have to share a room with other kids, and they might pick on me because I snore too loud. I’d have to be away from my family, friends, and everything I’d ever known.
This was daunting to 13 year old me, and looking back, I realised that I actually really wanted to go on this school trip, yet I had let my anxiety and self-doubt get the better of me.
Years later, as I type this, I am mentally kicking myself for not doing these things. But I also realise that I had no idea about anxiety and self-doubt. These were not widely discussed subjects growing up in the 2000’s. Sure, the foundations for wider acceptance of mental health issues had been laid, but it was still not commonly taught, yet alone accepted.
We all suffered and yet we all felt that we couldn’t talk to anyone about the issues we had for fear of not been taken seriously, or worse – being laughed at.
It’s only recently that I’ve come to accept that my achievements are my own, and the fact that I was supported by people doesn’t devalue what I have done.
At the end of the day, I had financial help from my parents to learn to fly, but it was still me who flew the plane and studied for weeks for the exams. It was me who studied so hard that I gave myself a migraine. It was me, and the achievements are mine.
I still get that voice in the back of my head, telling me I am worthless, and that I shouldn’t even try. But that voice is a liar. It will always be there, screaming and shouting at me, trying to drag me down. Sometimes it might drag me down for a time, but I always get back up.
If you are suffering from anxiety or any other mental health condition, there’s no shame in admitting that there is an issue, and talking about it.
So it’s been a long time since I used WordPress. The last time I used it seriously was back in 2015 when I was first helping to set up a website for a business. Back then, responsive design was very much a new thing as mobile devices became more and more sophisticated following the successful release of the original Apple iPhone back in 2007.
A lot has changed since then. It seems you need less and less understanding of HTML and CSS in order to build a good-looking, functional website. Nothing makes this change more obvious than the introduction of the Gutenberg Block Editor.
Remember the old days where you would create a website using a GUI that looked very similar to Microsoft Word?
A blast from the past? Nah, I remember scratching out bare HTML in Notepad back in the day.
Well it seems that those days are long gone. Now as I’ve not messed around with WordPress for a time, you can imagine my confusion when I fired up a Lightsail instance and installed WordPress only to find out that everything was a weird drag and drop editor that never seemed to select what I wanted to select.
I’ll be honest, I hated the block editor at first. I hated it to the point where I actually disabled the thing just so I could write. But then I realised that Gutenberg isn’t actually too bad.
The hardest thing to do is to stop treating the editor as I would one of the old editors. I was clicking like a madman, trying desperately to get my cursor to where I wanted it. After about half an hour or so, it got slightly easier.
Sure it’s clunky, and it isn’t particularly intuitive, but perhaps this is because I grew up writing my websites manually or using other classic programs such as Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver MX to design and build websites.
These boxes give me nostalgic vibes.
I mean I still think that Block Editing is a bit strange, but either way, I’m giving it a chance.
Welcome! This is just a placeholder until I can upload some of my stuff on here.
When I grew up in the 90’s and early 2000’s, the internet was a new thing. For the sake of nostalgia, I include an old GIF to indicate that this page is under construction.
