I've been making dinner and dessert on a weekly basis for the last few weeks. The first few times has gone okay. Today's task was trifle. Fairly simple you'd think. Made the jelly and poured into the glasses. Started making the custard. Decided it should be a little thicker for trifle and used slightly less milk. Wanted to let it cool before pouring. Fell asleep. Woke up to check on it and it's set. Firm. Like blancmange. I ate the whole thing to hide the evidence and have now made it with the right amount of milk. Hope it sets properly.

Tried to make a white choc flavoured whipped cream topping. Melted some choc, let it cool slightly and mixed it with whipping cream. Tried whipping it but stayed liquidy. Ended up using the rest of the whipping cream, whipping it and then incorporated the weird choc-cream mix. Seems to look and taste okay.

And yet I can bake cookies, brownies and cupcakes reasonably well.

Every chef's excuse


The former you're probably changing the %age of fat in the bowl too much (white chocolate is actually largely just cocoa fat) for the air bubbles to 'stick' to give you the volume. The latter method is kind of the standard way of doing things like that - whip the cream then fold in whatever you're adding carefully so as not to knock the air out.

You can't beat a good trifle though .


Baking is a very specific skill of itself. I know people who are good bakers but not really good confectioners and vice versa.

For last months photo competition is made Tablet... twice because the first batch was a complete disaster. Don't get me wrong, it was eminently edible but only if you didn't mind losing teeth.



That would have been a very bad idea with the tablet - 2lb of sugar for a start.

So, did the trifle have booze in it? I've never gotten on with alcohol in puddings for some reason, probably because I'm not generally a fan of spirits.
Trifle, just like wot Mum makes, for me is jelly (with fruit), custard and cream with some glacé cherries on top. Not convinced by ones with the biscuity things in the bottom.

Making proper chewy toffee in a home kitchen is actually surprisingly tricky. It's very temperature sensitive and there's weird thermal inertia things going on.


I prefer it without the biscuit/sponges as well. They just turn to soggy pulp, never saw the point of them.

Mum never made trifle and it's not something I ever liked. Boozy chocolate puddings FTW!

Oh this was chewy and no mistake.
I have a sugar thermometer, although the first batch inspired me to go and get a better one. Having an accurate thermometer that doesn't require a huge amount of the probe to be immersed in the liquid is a definite advantage.
There's only a few degrees of difference (Centigrade) between being good and going horribly wrong.
I've never actually tried to make toffee. Think it requires a slightly higher temperature than tablet (hard ball rather than soft ball).

I quite like making sweets and baking but as I live on my own I can't really justify doing so on any sort of regular basis (without ending up more overweight than I am already )

Around November last year, I attempted to make fudge. It came out like some weird thick chewy caramel type thing. I had a sugar thermometer but I think what I did wrong was try and mix the ingredients once they'd molten together, and something to do with cooling (either too slowly or too quickly).


I've never bothered much with booze in desserts. This was strawberry trifle (with chopped strawberry in the jelly), a cheat pack of instant custard (because the other version came out wrong), and white choc flavoured whipped cream. They were poured into individual pots. Might top with either flecks of white choc or maybe a half a strawberry. I completely forgot to buy a strawberry swiss roll for the sponge layer (figured it'd be a surprising twist).

Dessert was a success.

I've got an IP phone at work. It's powered by a PoE injector box that takes the normal network cable plus a power cable to give the output side enough power to run the phone. So my network connection goes:
Wall socket>PoE injector>IP Phone>PC. Now, they connection at the PoE injector is a bit flaky so any slight movement drops out the network connection. I've seen this on quite a few of these injector boxes. Another triumph for IT procurement

Why are you not using PoE phones?

The phone is powered over the network cable so I assume it is a PoE phone. I assume they have to use the power injector blocks because none of the hubs are PoE enabled - we're still on 100BaseT here for most connections AFAIK and I suspect replacing lots of hubs would be quite a task given the number of buildings and the size of the site.

From what he's described, they are, it's just that their network switches don't provide PoE so that is why they are using the injector box...

It is, they just don't have PoE switches in place to power them, so they need injectors.

Beaten to it!

We have PoE phones here as well, but only on the ground floor. Upstairs we have a DECT repeater and that only works over PoE, but the PoE doesn't reach upstairs (as we only have 10 PoE devices in house and 9 are downstairs, we didn't get a PoE switch for upstairs as well, just an injector.

Everybody else uses softphones on their PCs with Jabra headsets.

Sounds like you're in the dark ages lol

You may very well think that, I couldn't possibly comment.