Number 2 - lashings of massage oil

I have had a very blonde week, first I managed to buy train tickets for the wrong day and now I seem to have booked myself a massage.
Complementary does not apparently mean free when it is termed as ‘complementary health’ coooooooooool, you could have told me that earlier as I have now booked myself into a massage on Monday. Oh well I’ll just starve for the week or live like a hermit. The website used was www.thepracticerooms.co.uk and my masseuse was Christina Warren (just to do some shameless plugging)

But as the well-known saying goes, (I made it up but it is now well known as your reading it) when in doubt blog about it, or better still put as one of things in your bucket list.

So when Monday comes around I think better have a shower before I go don’t want to look homeless, I shouldn’t have bothered as my hair now looks like it’s been stuck in a vat of oil. I could go into detail about the massaging process but I’ll spare you. 

I was only technically paying for a Indian head massage but I ended up getting a whole upper body works. Definitely not complaining as I quite possibly spent that hour in heaven. 

Let it be known that you will often be tense around areas of scar tissue. For example, the back of my neck was very tense as was the area around my left shoulder blade/ arm. Another area of sensitivity was that I have a very tense bum.  Good to know. 

After a massage you should drink lots and lots of water as the metabolic waste (read fat) around your muscles has been moved around so that is now my task for the day. 

I have picked up lots of tricks of the trade today, now I just need some willing volunteers.....

musicals, musicals and more musicals

My musical knowledge is severely lacking and this had to be remedied. The scene was therefore set for a musical marathon as I walked out of the library with an armful of musicals

The musicals chosen for this magical mystery tour were:

Carousel
Gypsy
The Wiz
Chicago

A good place to start enriching my education was with a bit of Roger and Hammerstein, namely one of my favourite fairground rides the Carousel.

Maybe I should flirt with the Carousel guy the next time I'm at the fair and get a free ride.

I would love to live in musical land, I could burst into song whenever and wherever I felt like it, not that I don't already....but people wouldn't look at me like I'm a complete loon.

For example there's a song about it being June...June is busting out all over. Maybe I should start singing about it being October.

Fave line- Jigga (the ex-convict): my mother had a baby once...

Fave song: you'll never walk alone

I wasn't aware that this song came from here.

Next up was The Wiz. Its a Motown musical based on the Wizard of Oz starring none other than Diana Ross and MJ.

When I watched the Beatles musical, I thought the writers were defiantly on something  whilst writing it, well The Wiz is in a whole new league with cheerleading munchkins, dancing crows and dustbins with gnashing teeth...oh my

fave song- Get on down the road

I alas struggled to find a favourite line, they were all so funny :)

After a quick jaunt to buy mashed potatoes it was back to the rigmarole of musicals. The next one on my list was Gypsy

I'm not gonna lie,I heard of this through some of the songs featured on Glee.
So I felt obliged to watch the original source

Best line: you need a gimmick to get applause
Fave song: Everything's coming up Roses

I've seen Chicago before but its so awesome I just needed another excuse to watch it again :)

The best songs (I love them all too much): The Cell Block Tango, Mr Cellophane, When your good to Mama, ok I'll stop before I run through all of them

fave line: when your good to Mama, Mama's good to you

Gluten is your Friend

 The day of the great British bake-off, I mean bakery course has arrived. It also just so happens to be one of the hottest day of the year. Oh bother. Luckily the kitchen was fully air conditioned so we were in no danger of dying from heat stroke that is of course until the ovens came on.

The first task of the day was to make the enriched dough. Enriched because it contains sugar, milk and egg . All was going swimmingly until the chef man, Tony, decided that we were going to need half again of each ingredient. So instead of 600g of flour, we now needed 900g and so on. I was actually surprised at how well the weighing process was going, I was expecting to do at least the majority of it wrong. Alas the same cannot be said for poor old Joy, who half way through measuring out her ingredients noticed that her scales had gone from weighing out everything in grams to weighing everything in pounds and ounces. Hence she had to weigh everything out again. 

When making any form dough, you need to knead. ha ha punny. By kneading the dough, you are releasing the elasticity in the gluten, gluten is your friend and so you want to release it in all its glory. Strong flour contains more gluten than just bog standard flour and so it is tended to be used in dough making like when making bread,buns or pasta. Kneading is also very therapeutic and I can pretend to be hitting certain people....ahem..

We now need to let our bread prove before we can knock it back. Ha ha theres some bakery terms for you. To prove the bread you basically put in a warm place for the the dough to rise slightly. The proof is in the punch when Tony got our bowls out of the prover (OK it was actually the steamer set to a really low heat but saying they had a machine just for the use of proving sounds better) Everyone's dough seemed to have risen a considerable amount apart from Liz's which hadn't really risen at all, gutted. 

Oh my whose is that beast?  I asked when my Mr Chef-man brought out some dough that had literally doubled in size. O hey, apparently it was mine.  To knock back dough you basically punch it and carry on kneading it, in essence undoing all the rising that the dough has done whilst proving.

So now we had made the dough, we got on the exciting bit, making buns!!

On the cards today were:

Chelsea Buns

Devon Splits

Iced buns

and wait for it......

DOUGHNUTS!!!

you can probably tell which one I was most excited about.

Its best not to think about the amount of butter and sugar  that goes into decorating these.As my housemate put it - I was going to make her diabetic with all these cakes- but no one was complaining when I walked through the front door laden with sweet nothings.