Isolation Journal 25

It was fairly late by the time I got into bed last night, probably around 2am, but I didn't expect my first open eyed "this is a new day" realisation to be at 11.50am!  I'd missed the chance of logging into the parkrun zoom call and it was lunchtime.

I made some black pudding sausages and scrambled eggs with sriracha for brunch (or lunch!) and we watched some Scrubs.

I'd planned a few things I wanted to do over the weekend on my post it notes and I did a few of them like tidying the lounge, dining room and kitchen and I managed to hoover a bit later, but still need to mop the floors down.  Alan cleaned the bathroom and after nearly 14 weeks of black marks post lush bathbomb we have a white bath again!

At 4pm I realised that it was nearly time for my 5th dance class with Eliza, so I watched Catfish and ate leftover curry from last night (not the best way to prepare for a dance class) before the class at 5pm.  I was awarded star of the week and we learned that our dance teacher had interviewed and recruited her sister to do all the admin for her (her mum hoped writing invoices and posters would encourage her in her writing) with a payment of not playing loud music at least 2 times a week.  I do enjoy the sense of entrepeneurship she has demonstrated.

My friend Gem came around to get me to sign a form for the guides for gift aid and it was nice to see for a catch up with her daughter and husband Chris, I also saw both the neighbours from number 2 and number 5 as well.  

Alan went for a run and then after he'd returned told me that he thought that I should cut his hair for him.   Last time was quite stressful, but I'd watched a video from Brad Mondo which seemed to have a better method and so I shared it with Alan and we watched it and used it to cut his hair, again he put it live on Facebook, but I'm more pleased with the end results even if it took 40 mins!

I then took my opportunity to go for a run and did 6.5K in 35 mins and watched the sunset.  Felt a bit sluggish, but was very pleased to be out.  Dinner was ready when I got through the door and so I had a pork stir fry with rice from Hello Fresh and we opened a bottle of Cava and watched Hidden Figures as my friend Mark mentioned it earlier.  It was a really good film, although my attention span for films is very challenging at the moment  

I'm now running a bath and I've very naughtily opened a bag of Cadburys treatsize chocs that I ended up getting for free as they were incorrected sold as weighing more than the catalog, but 8 weeks later they've not asked me to return them, but I have to say after very little chocolate in the past 3 months, I'm eating it, but with less joy than I thought I'd experience.

Living La Vida Cocoa!

So I might just have mentioned before that I'm on the committee of Buns & Roses WI which is a lot of work, but really good fun.  This evening for example we had a chocolate making workshop courtesy of York Cocoa House which was brilliant.  Unsurprisingly our workshop was fully booked and so we had 34 lovely ladies together to make and enjoy some lovely chocolate.

First of all we got to taste the chocolate we were using which was gorgeously creamy milk chocolate.  This was then made into a ganache (chocolate + butter + double cream heated to boiling point, poured over and mixed together).  We piped out the ganache into what can only be described as "dollops" and then they went to be cooled.  We then tempered some more chocolate for using to make chocolate lollies and dipping our ganache to make truffles.  What do you think we used to melt the chocolate?  I can bet that you weren't thinking hair dryer!  Surprisingly this worked really well and we used melted chocolate to make lollies which we decorated with orange, lemon and strawberry flavoured chocolate buttons - yummy!

After making a lot of mess "shaping" the ganache and then dipping in chocolate we then put our creations into  plastic presentation bags (sampling quite a few along the way thank you very much!).

Laura from York Cocoa House was a great presenter, really engaging.  And I think it was great value for money - £12 for members and £15 for non members.  My friend Jenny also started off the evening really well by giving me some fudge that she'd made for me to try.  

I also have finished my embroidered art picture and so Hayley very kindly stretched and stapled it onto a frame for me - here is the finished article.