bake up and smell the coffee

As if to prove I'm not completely hacked off with the whole blogging project, or resigned to using it solely as a means of cataloguing my reading habits, here's a recipe. I don't think we've done one for a while - the most recent one seems to have been the yogurt-y soda bread from back in February. 

Background here is that I have a very excellent Russell Hobbs coffee grinding/brewing machine which I use every morning to create enough strong black coffee to get me into the day and provide the illusion of motivation and general paying attention to things. Normally the amounts involved are enough to provide a couple of average-sized mugfuls (mugsful, if you must) for me and Hazel but last Thursday I'd forgotten that Hazel had a breakfast appointment with her BNI group and wouldn't be in the house, so I ended up with twice as much coffee as I needed. No biggie, you'll say, either drink it or tip it down the sink, and yes, I could have done either of those things, but I hatched the idea of making a coffee cake.

People's affection for coffee cake broadly tracks their affection for coffee as a drink (though no doubt there are exceptions); I like it very much but the current fashion does seem for any coffee-flavoured cake to also involve a large quantity of walnuts, a thing that I do not relish. So making my own afforded me control over the recipe (i.e. no bleedin' walnuts); another factor is that a lot of coffee cake recipes don't include actual drinkable (possibly leftover) coffee as an ingredient, either using powdered or instant coffee directly (perhaps with a tiny amount of water to dissolve it a bit) or Camp coffee essence, apparently still a thing. 

Anyway, after some searching I came across this recipe, which ticks all the boxes, i.e. it uses actual leftover coffee and isn't lavishly festooned inside and out with walnuts. I did have to make a couple of alterations to the recipe, partly because I didn't have any sour cream, partly because I had to adjust for the scale of my traybake tin (mine is roughly 13" by 9") and partly just because I am a free-form jazz cook and don't like to be constrained. So my version of the recipe goes like this:

Coffee Streusel

• 100g plain flour
• 200g light brown sugar
• 2 tsp instant coffee powder (I used Asda Americano powder)
• 1 tsp cinnamon powder
• 120g cold, unsalted butter, cut into cubes
• Pinch of salt

Coffee cake

• 300g granulated sugar
• 100 unsalted butter, melted
• 75g oil
• 3 eggs
• 1.5 tsp vanilla
• 300g plain flour
• 35g cornflour
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 0.5 tsp baking soda
• 180g full-fat Greek-style yogurt
• 90ml hot brewed coffee

Icing

• 180g icing sugar (120g)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3 tbsp brewed coffee

If you're doing an item-by-item comparison you'll see I haven't scaled up the quantities for the streusel; this is deliberate as there's already quite a lot of it. You don't need to scale up the cooking time; 35 minutes pretty much did the trick. If you can, as I did, rope in an enthusiastic eleven-year-old to do most of the strenuous beating and stirring while you root around in cupboards and do mental arithmetic then so much the better.

The result is a super-delicious and moist single-layer tray cake with a drizzle of icing on top. Ideal with a cup of some sort of hot beverage, perhaps.

happy vigentennibloggiversary to me

One thing that happens as you get older, in addition to unexplained shooting pains in various limbs, male pattern baldness (see below), increasing irascibility and decreasing ability to make it to the toilet in time, is that you forget things. A significant recent thing that I forgot, or more accurately failed to notice, was the twentieth anniversary of this blog. The initial Hello World post was actually on August 26th 2006, so exactly twenty years and two months ago today.

I can't at this point in my life remember why I started the whole thing up in the first place; it is an odd coincidence that the blog and my relationship with my now wife started up around the same time, but I don't recall starting the blog solely as a vehicle to crow about getting laid on the regular after a bit of a break. I think it was just a thing that a few people were doing in the heady days of Web 2.0 excitement at the bar to involvement in internet content creation suddenly being lowered quite a bit.

It is nonetheless a fact that my life has evolved somewhat since late 2006, most notably in that I am now a married father of three, and have moved house three times, the two most recent moves involving actual adult stuff like home ownership and mortgages. As a result of those things (mainly kids and mortgages rather than marriage, to be clear) a significant percentage of my hair has fallen out and what remains is somewhat greyer than it used to be. Photos below are from the respective trips to Swanage in September 2006 and September 2026; to be fair all of my fellow Swanagers have changed a bit too in twenty years, although you should note that Robin has not changed into a bald guy with a long beard, that's Harry.

In my defence, among the middle-aged things that you might stereotypically have expected me to do are gaining a load of weight and turning into a Nazi, neither of which I have done. Well, I suppose I should qualify that statement by saying: while it is empirically verifiable that I weigh almost exactly the same now as I did then, whether my views have taken a right-wing lurch is probably not for me to say. I don't think so, though. It should also be noted that I'm mildly sceptical about the trope of people getting more right-wing as they get older, though I accept that offering up a single data point (i.e. me) isn't a refutation.

I would imagine that if you took the cohort of people who started up a blog around 2006 you would find that upwards of 95% of them abandoned it within a year or so and some percentage of the remaining 5% abandoned it at some point in the intervening nineteen years; of the tiny sliver who stuck with it I'd imagine most of them would show a similar posting profile to me: initial wild enthusiasm (282 posts in 2007 alone) and prolixity settling into a cynical weariness with offering any sort of opinion on the world and a rather sparser posting schedule (51 posts in 2025), maybe leaning on some regular hooks to hang stuff off (in my case mostly book-related stuff) to retain some sort of posting discipline and avoid complete stagnation. For what it's worth I do find the discipline of trying to occasionally corral my thought into a coherent shape to be beneficial, and I continue to do it because it amuses and entertains me to do it. I think that is the only reason that would ever keep anyone doing it, outside of the unlikely scenario of becoming some sort of viral internet sensation and (even more unlikely) actually being able to monetise it in some way. There, though, you'd presumably be on some sort of obligatory posting schedule and I'd imagine that might become a chore, although the income would be nice.

Anyway, I have no plans to pack it in; leading candidate for causing me to do so would be the Blogger platform being shelved and having to relocate to some other platform at a high cost of time and effort (and perhaps actual monetary cost). Second on that list is probably my own death; assuming that doesn't happen I'll see you in 2046.

taking a bite out of a double decker

You might remember this post from a few months back chuckling at some people's inability to read prominently-displayed road signage, or possibly their inability, having successfully read it, to realise its relevance to the vehicle they're currently driving. We had a rather alarming close-to-home demonstration of the phenomenon just a couple of days ago; not only was it right here in Newport, but it involved one of the buses specifically provided by the council to get pupils to the school both of our girls attend. Not, thankfully, the specific bus that Nia and Alys catch in the mornings - they tend to get this one or this one while, as far as I can make out, the incident occurred on this one. 

Anyway, it was the standard double-decker bus going under low bridge scenario, or, more accurately, most of the bus going under while a small amount off the top got left behind. The various articles featured prominently on national news show the scary aftermath of the incident. The Metro article luridly uses the word "decapitated" to describe what happened to the bus, clearly in an attempt to draw in some ghoulish readers who expect that to be the fate of some of the passengers. This is clearly theoretically possible, but I can't find any evidence of it ever happening, and in fact death and even serious injury are less common in these sort of incidents than you might imagine. A very quick and lazy Google search yields a host of similar incidents:

• This one in Leicester in 1958, a textbook encounter with a railway bridge, this one still in existence. No injuries as the bus was empty at the time.
• Another incident at exactly the same bridge in 2009, this time with a busload of schoolchildren, some of whom sustained minor injuries.
• A much more serious incident in Cwmbran in 1982 where six people were killed. The article is commendably non-lurid about the details, but you would assume it's a bit of an all-or-nothing thing: either you get a bridge in the face at 30mph, in which case we can all imagine the consequences, or you duck and you don't, in which case you probably get away with cuts and bruises. Anyway, the bridge in question was demolished shortly afterwards and that part of the old railway partly used as the route of the new A4051; the bridge was in the location now occupied by this roundabout but the stubs of the old embankment are still visible. 
• An incident in Eccles last year; this time the offending bridge was an aqueduct carrying the Bridgewater Canal (so it was, in a very real sense, a "Bridgewater water bridge"). No deaths but three people with serious injuries.
• One in Bath in 2023; a relatively poor effort here with only the front section being caved in; roof integrity was largely maintained; no injuries.
• One in Tottenham in 2016; five people hospitalised.
• One in Macclesfield in 2011; a few minor injuries.
• One in Swansea in 2021 with one fatality; it seems insensitive to speculate too much about the details but she apparently died 11 days later in hospital, which I assume (though I am not a doctor) is longer than you'd last if your head had come off.
• An interesting central London variation in 2015 where a large overhanging branch, rather than the usual railway bridge, was the culprit. Again, a few minor injuries.
• Other similar occurrences in Bournemouth, Rochdale, York, Coventry, Kilmarnock, Edinburgh and no doubt others too numerous to mention.

The common factors here seem to be:

• driver unfamiliarity either with the route, driving a double-decker as opposed to a single-decker bus, or even with the concept of bus-driving at all
• unscheduled route amendments due to either roadworks, other traffic issues, getting lost, taking a short-cut back to the depot
• in general railway bridges as the immovable obstacle, although there are some variations involving tree branches, canal aqueducts and hospital footbridges. 

The potential decapitation thing did put me in mind of this tweet describing a dimly-recalled childhood incident:

weird childhood recollection: someone telling me a story about a 4-man bobsleigh team whose vehicle left the track and hit a tree, neatly decapitating all the riders and careering off down a hill. weirdest bit is I recall it being my Dad that told it to me https://t.co/Bgr5dG7L5b

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 16, 2022

The incident described, assuming I'm recalling the anecdote correctly, never happened as far as I can tell, though people have obviously died in painful ways while competing in luge and bobsleigh races. In general this sort of thing is extremely rare, not least because for good and sound evolutionary reasons the human head is pretty tenaciously tethered to the human body; people whose heads were prone to flying off in high winds tended not to survive long enough to reproduce. You actually have to try pretty hard to induce your head to come off, usually by doing something incredibly ill-advised such as this.  

Lastly, those inspired by the previous post to frenzied stats-nerdery in relation to UK bridge signage will be fascinated to hear that the location of the crash on East Usk Road is not the type specimen for the (fairly common, I'd imagine) 12'6"/3.8m height combination; this is to be found in Kings Norton in the southern suburbs of Birmingham.