our summer kills the sun

Autumn is my favourite season. Sure, it's getting colder and the weather's turning rubbish, and we'll probably not see the sun again until May, but look at all the wonderful things that are on the way. Halloween! Nanowrimo! Bonfire night! The pre-Christmas run up! My birthday! Autumn leaves! Manx Litfest! The start of Bake Off! THE START OF BAKE OFF!

Honestly, I can see why this season overwhelms people. There's a whole bunch of stuff arriving all at once, most of which either costs money or uses up time or both, and it's easy to look at the last four months of the year with dread. (Kendra at The Lazy Genius talks about how to approach this season without being crushed by it; it's definitely worth a listen. I thoroughly recommend Kendra's podcasts, listening to her is like someone putting a blanket round your shoulders and telling you you're doing great.)

ANYWAY. The Great British Bake Off 2018 has started. Let the festival of cakeage begin! This year we're doing a fantasy league at home and a bake-along at work. The bake-along is something I wish I'd heard of sooner - everyone puts £2 in, you draw out a baker, if that baker wins the series you get £24. But, if and when your baker is eliminated, you have to bring in cakes to the office. Why did we never think of this before?? Everyone's a winner, because everyone gets cake.

Manx Litfest is right around the corner and, as usual, I'm super-excited and also super-terrified in fairly equal measures, because there's so much going on and I don't feel the least bit prepared.

And after Litfest we're in the run up to Nanowrimo. I've recently made some RL friends (I know, shocking) who are hopefully organising some meet-ups and write-ins and all sorts of other proper Nano type things, which I'm all enthused about. As usual, however, I'm totally without an idea to write in November. Should maybe think about that over the next month or so.

BOOKS I'VE READ THIS SUMMER:

FOLK - Zoe Gilbert Love, love, love, love. Admittedly, I'm hardly unbiased, since this collection of short stories draws influence from Manx folklore, it's set on an island that looks suspiciously familiar, the author name-checks the Isle of Man in the acknowledgements, and she's attending our festival later this month. I am super-biased. But regardless, honestly, this is a fab book. Myth and legend and fable intertwine through the different stories, weaving a whole atmosphere and sense of place, giving it a dreamlike feel, reminiscent of childhood fairytales that you'd read or tell over and over again. It's the sort of book that'll stay with me for a long time, and which I plan to reread and recommend to everyone I know.

SUNBURN - Laura Lippman This one has been hyped to all get-out, but that's probably because it's smart and twisty and very well written. I didn't enjoy it as much as everyone else in my Twitter feed did, but it's still an excellent read.

THE HANDMAID'S TALE - Margaret Atwood Such a slim-line book for the amount of societal weight and gravitas it holds. I wish I'd read it earlier in life, not least because it feels uncomfortably like non-fiction these days.

MIDDLEMARCH - George Eliot I FINALLY FINISHED MIDDLEMARCH, goddamn that was one hefty tome.

THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL ANGRY PLANET - Becky Chambers A space romp! I've previously overlooked this book because the title made me think it was something else (curse my insistence on judging books by their cover) but I'm glad I picked it up eventually. Not a lot of actual plot happens, so if you're looking for high-octane thrills you might be disappointed, but if you like your space operas to be full of character moments and world building, this is just lovely. It's also the first book in ages that made me want to draw fan art.

cheesy-chorizo pizza muffins

There're about a dozen things I keep meaning to blog about, but for one reason or another I'm always putting them off (ah, procrastination, my constant companion). So, in an attempt to get out of my bloggy rut, here is one of my favourite recipes: savoury cheesy-chorizo muffins.

The original recipe came from a woman's magazine years ago, but since then I've lost the original copy and also adapted the recipe quite a bit, so this is kinda fudged together (you can probably tell that from my haphazard measurements). On the plus side, it's a pretty forgiving recipe, and doesn't mind a bit of fudging.

300 gm self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon salt
50 ml vegetable oil
300 ml milk
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon mustard
1 tablespoon tomato paste
150 g mature cheddar
200 g chorizo (or more if you want)
1/2 teaspoon crushed black peppercorns
Big pinch of oregano

(A few notes on ingredients. Fresh oregano is lovely, but I never have any in the house, so I use dried. Also, if you can get the amazing black-pepper-mature-cheddar that some supermarkets do, use that and don't bother with the peppercorns. You can vary the amount of oil to personal taste, as the chorizo makes the mix quite moist anyway.)

Sift flour, paprika and salt together. Mix oil, milk, eggs, mustard and tomato paste together in a separate bowl, then add to the flour. Smoosh it all together.

(At this point, opinion is divided as to whether the mixture should be kneaded. I rarely bother, but if your mix is dry enough and you want to feel like Paul Hollywood, turn it out onto a floured surface and give it a minute of kneading.)

Chop up the cheese and chorizo into fat chunks and stir into the mix, along with the black peppercorns and oregano.

Spoon into a muffin tray and bake at 200 degrees centigrade for about 25 minutes (my oven is a bit slow sometimes; in a better oven they might only need 20 minutes). Should make about 12-15 muffins, depending on size.

Eat 'em either hot or cold (but not straight from the oven because the melted cheese is hotter than the sun).

Like I say, I've always found this to be a forgiving recipe, and if you want to add or subtract ingredients it usually still works out fine. I like throwing in a handful of sundried tomatoes instead of the tomato paste if I'm feeling decadent. If you don't have or don't like chorizo, any kind of spicy sausage works well. I'm also pretty sure you could do an acceptable vegetarian version substituting chopped red peppers and/or olives instead of the chorizo (and chilli flakes instead of the peppercorns), although I haven't actually tried this yet.

So there we go, that's how I make spicy cheesy awesome pizza muffins. Enjoy!

hate synopses, love cake

Oh God, I have to write a synopsis. I am no good at writing synopses. I would be happier typing a nine-hundred word essay about why I dread writing synopses than actually sit down and write one. Which probably explains to you why I'm writing this blog post instead of, y'know.

So, wandering off-topic for a moment, the lovely Peter Clines over at The Ranty Blog has a simile he's brought up once or thrice about how writing is a lot like cooking. To paraphrase, most people can cook to a greater or lesser degree, but not everyone is good enough to open their own restaurant--and the people who do are those who put in the untold hours of practice and toil and painful scaldings. Same with writing. The writers who succeed are those willing to suffer the hours and the (hopefully metaphorical) scaldings.

Mr Clines has also pointed out that, in both writing and cooking, you need to know the basics. A cook needs to know the difference between salt and sugar, say, or how to tell when a chicken is cooked. A writer needs to be able to use grammar, and spell without relying on spill-chick. It's pretty much essential.

I was reminded of this the other night while watching The Great British Bake-Off. If you're unfamiliar with this show... hell, the information's right there in the title. It's a bunch of people in a baking competition. And I love it. For a start, it's about cakes, and it also has that daft British charm that tends to be absent from so many talent contests. (In contrast, I also watch Hell's Kitchen (and make no apologies for the fact); it's very difficult to imagine the contestants on British Bake-Off bitching about each other or sneaking out the back to smoke and kick punch-bags.)

This week's Bake-Off episode featured Toby, who was so delightfully cack-handed you couldn't help but fall in love with him. He had the wide-eyed, bewildered look of an inebriated Bernard Black attempting to do his tax return. By the end of the episode, he had more blue sticky-plasters covering nicks on his fingers than he did actual fingers. His defining moment (aside from announcing at the end that he planned to become "some kind of anti-baking monk") was when, five minutes before taking an angel cake out of the oven, he realised he'd used salt instead of sugar in the recipe. At least the poor boy laughed about it.

So there's lesson number one--knowing the basics. No one likes salty angel cake.

Lesson number two is something I've noticed time and again over the past few series of this show. Essentially, the second of the three tasks each week is for the contestants to bake something from a (deliberately vague) recipe. What surprises me is how, every week, there will be at least one or two contestants who will admit at the start of the challenge, "I've never baked an angel cake/donuts/sourdough/strudel/whatever". Okay, fair enough--neither have I. But then, I'm not a baker. I'm certainly not planning to go on national TV and try to win a competition with my baking (although I do make a mean cheese scone).

These people are bakers, and they're trying to win a national competition with their baking. Furthermore, after three series, they must know that one of the challenges each week will be the recipe challenge. More often than not they're using specific recipes written by Mary Berry, one of the judges. So, if say you were planning to go on this show, would you not maybe perhaps take the time and effort to research types of cake? Possibly go online, read a bunch of recipes and familiarise yourself with cooking times and whatnot for flapjacks and breadsticks and shortcake? Or even make time to try out various recipes at least once in the comfort of your own home, just so you're prepared for whatever the judges throw at you?

This would involve a lot of hard work, yes, and a lot of practice and potential failures. But that I feel is my point--if you want to succeed, at some point you're going to have to put the hours in. Whether it's at home where no one but your cat can mock you for the soggy bottom on your fruit cake, or whether it's on national TV with Paul Hollywood spitting out a mouthful of cake in horror... well, that's kinda up to you.

So then. Two lessons learned from The Great British Bake-Off. One: know your stuff. You can't get away with mistaking salt for sugar, or your for you're. And two: go practice. Go make cakes, or go write. Whatever you want to succeed at, go practice at it.

And, see, that brings me back to my original point. Writing synopses is part and parcel of being a writer, unfortunately. Do I want to be a writer? Then I have to sit down and write--including writing things I don't like, or that I'm no good at. Otherwise I run the risk of ending up like Toby.

God love you, Toby. I would've voted to keep you on the show just to brighten my Tuesday evenings.