Cupcake brownies

You wake up on a Saturday morning with the realisation that you just finished your university tests and you have absolutely nothing to do (no, I will not continue studying just yet). Room cleaned ✓, house cleaned ✓, outdoor errands ✓. So a few weeks back, I baked a chocolate cake (which because of my lack of presentation skills resulted in no pictures, no post) which was surprisingly very delicious. I've never baked cakes before so the chocolate cake would be my first. I had quite some leftover bits of ingredients from the chocolate cake so I decided to use them to make brownies. The recipe I used is from All Recipes. 

Serves: 20

Prep time: 4 mins

Cook time: 20 - 25 mins

Ingredients

400g caster sugar

225g butter, melted

60g cocoa powder

1 tsp vanilla extract

4 eggs

225g plain flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

60g walnut halves (optional)

Directions

1. Mix all ingredients in the order given. 
2. Bake at 180°C / Gas mark 4 for 20 - 25 minutes in a rectangular 23x33cm greased baking tin. 
3. Cool, and slice into equal square portions. 

Due to my inability to access my mum's supply of baking utensils (mixer, baking trays, etc.), I used muffin tins instead of a baking tin which resulted in little mini cupcake brownies. I must say, I'm quite satisfied with the way the brownies turned out. 

Siobhan Lim

Goodbye winter

Winter evenings in Moulsecoomb, Brighton

Never have I ever had the problem of wanting the season to change so bad. I grew up in a country where it's practically summer all year long. Heat, heat and more heat. The first time I experienced a season other than summer that I can remember would be the student exchange programme I participated in 5 years ago. I travelled to Japan early winter for about a week and that was my first time experiencing temperatures below 10 degrees. 

A few years later, I travelled to Australia with my family. It was early Christmas and supposedly summer time there (and I've heard that summer time in Australia can get pretty toasty). I was and will always be prepared for summer time anywhere. But nope. The temperatures deviated from 8 to 20 degrees and I was silently and slowly freezing to death. Yes, I know. What is 8 to 20 degrees? I'm not a big fan of the cold, so you could only imagine my sufferings. To make things worst, I only packed a pair of jeans which I had to live in for the next 7 days. Note to self: no matter what the season, always pack more than one pair of jeans. ALWAYS. 

Moulsecoomb, Brighton

Flash forward to slightly less than a year ago when I travelled to Europe for the first time. Temperatures were between 18 and 25 degrees which was, by far, the best weather I've ever experienced. I froze for a bit when I first arrived, but slowly adapted and enjoyed the beautiful weather. 

When I first touched down to the UK, I wasn't really worried or nervous about the weather. I mean, how bad can it be, right? Wrong. As winter slowly crept in, the temperature just kept dropping, and dropping. At the rate the temperature was dropping, it BETTER start snowing. But then again, Brighton is by the coast which meant: no snow. Well of course there are exceptions some years, but the chances of it snowing is pretty low? Nonetheless, I was really excited with the hope that it might snow here in Brighton. Even if it's just one time, I'd really love to see snow. 

And it did.

It wasn't much, but honestly, seeing snow for the first time just cancelled out any sort of disappointment about there not being much snow. The snow even disappeared leaving no traces of it ever snowing at all once it was 10AM! That's sunny Brighton for you. But nonetheless, another item checked off the bucket list ✓.

Siobhan Lim