For my daughter’s 12th [...]]]> My kids love red velvet cupcakes. There’s something uniquely interesting about the colour, texture and taste of these things that make them deeply desirable. They also need to have a cream cheese frosting to provide the flavour contrast or it doesn’t work. The cupcakes are essentially a chocolate cupcake but coloured red.

For my daughter’s 12th birthday party I made them for her. I could have bought them from the cupcake stores, my local IGA or even Costco’s humongously decadent version but I opted to bake them from scratch. However, I saw this as an opportunity to experiment, i.e. play. There would be three components to play with; the cupcake, the frosting and the decoration.

CUPCAKES

I reviewed a few different red velvet cupcake recipes and finally settled for Paula Deen’s version. I made a few substitutions though based on my local produce and baked the first batch.

They were pretty good, around 8½ out of 10 but they didn’t rise very much. They also weren’t as dark or as sweet as I liked so I made some changes. This was the final recipe I used:

2½ Cups Flour, All-Purpose
1½ Cups Sugar, Dark Brown
1¼ Tsp Baking Soda
1 Tsp Salt
2 Tbsp Cocoa Powder

2 Eggs, Large
1½ Cups Canola Oil
1 Cup Buttermilk (3.25% Fat)
2 Tbsp Red Food Colouring
1 Tsp Cider Vinegar
1 Tsp Vanilla Extract

I used the same directions although I found that the yield was only 20 cupcakes, not 24 as you need to fill each case to the ¾ mark. You also need to use silicone or foil cases, not paper cases as the oil tends to leach a little which just makes them look unappetizing.

I added more cocoa powder to increase the sweetness but also give more of a hint of chocolate. It also gave the cupcakes a dark red colour. I also used dark brown sugar for similar reasons and I particularly enjoy the extra depth and warmth you get.

I increased the baking soda to try and make them rise more and make them fluffier. I still want them fluffier but the experts (the kids) tell me a true red velvet cupcake isn’t fluffy. However, I’d be tempted to increase the baking soda to 2 Tsp and see what happens, maybe this would get my yield back up to the claimed 24. I also used the full fat buttermilk rather than the light version as I found that baking with light ingredients usually ended up with bad results. I also read that cider vinegar was sweeter than white vinegar — I tried both and I couldn’t tell the difference.

If I was looking for more refinements I’d be interested in using butter instead of oil, or using a mixture of the two as I didn’t really like the oily texture but otherwise I’m happy with the final result.

FROSTING

My frosting search was a little trickier as I wanted to use whipped cream. Cream cheese can be over-powering and we’ve previously struggled to find an acceptable whipped cream filling and topping for cakes. Using plain whipped cream was unacceptable as it weeps after a day and tends to look unappetising after two days. I collected a few recipes and ideas from the Internet and made a few different testers.

Adding icing sugar, gelatin and dry vanilla pudding mix to whipped cream all worked well as stabilizing agents. The gelatin didn’t change the flavour at all but we said we’d use the icing sugar version for cake fillings and the dry vanilla pudding mix version for the red velvet cupcakes. Adding just icing sugar to whipped cream worked well but it still looked a little soggy the day after. Therefore I propose two whipped cream recipes:

• Whipped Cream with Icing Sugar and Gelatin – Add ¼ Tsp of Gelatin and 2 Tbsp of Icing Sugar (Confectioner’s Sugar) to 1 Cup of whipped cream.
• Whipped Cream with Dry Vanilla Pudding Mix – Add 2 Tbsp of dry vanilla pudding mix to 1 Cup of whipped cream. I used a packet mix for Angel Food Cake as my ‘dry vanilla pudding mix’.

I found an ‘old fashioned’ whipping cream at IGA with 36% fat which made it easier to whip than the normal 33% version that is more freely available.

And whoever suggested stabilizing whipped cream with cream of tartar should be shot. Don’t try it, it’s vile.

And as for the cream cheese frosting. I tried a buttercream frosting as well as a ricotta version and a devon cream recipe that combined sour cream with cream cheese — all of them failed the taste test.

In the end I stuck to the recipe and it worked very well:

16oz Cream Cheese, Light [softened]
8oz Butter, Unsalted [softened]
1 Tsp Vanilla Extract
4 Cups Confectioner’s (Icing) Sugar [sifted]

I just had to nuke the butter and cream cheese in the microwave for 20 seconds to soften them up. I used a light cream cheese though and unsalted butter. I don’t like salt and I hoped that the light cream cheese would also be lighter in taste. It worked perfectly and I’d happily score the frosting as 10 out of 10. I really can’t think of any way of improving the frosting but you need to use an electric mixer to make it white and fluffy.

DECORATION

I don’t like royal icing or fondant icing; it looks nice but they taste like hardened cardboard or soggy cardboard so I opted for marzipan. I used the Marzipan Candy recipe from All Recipes and it worked perfectly. However, I couldn’t model with the darn stuff so I was limited to flat shapes. It was an acceptable trade-off in my opinion.

As the video says SOPA gives the entertainment industry and the US Government the power to block specific web sites, [...]]]> Much has been posted online recently about the proposed US Government bill to stop online piracy commonly referred to as SOPA. This is one of the best videos summarizing the bill — http://vimeo.com/31100268

As the video says SOPA gives the entertainment industry and the US Government the power to block specific web sites, sue web site owners or the companies that provide web hosting, payment services or that provide advertising.

For example, somebody posts a video parody on YouTube (the Newport one came to mind but it’s already been taken down). Anyhow, let’s assume it was still there. The entertainment industry could have YouTube blocked, anybody that links to the video from their Facebook page, WordPress blog or other site. Paypal would come under fire for processing any advertising revenue and Google would also have to reclaim any advertising fees.

With SOPA you’d end up with site owners, service providers and many of the core companies that underpin the Internet infrastructure all in the cross-hairs of the entertainment industry and the US Government.

Where will this end up? It will end with everybody moving out of the US and innovation and creation moving somewhere where freedom of speech is still valued. Europe would be my best guess.

As the video points out it will not stop people downloading. That horse bolted a long time ago and it’s never coming back so the entertainment industry needs to find alternative ways of making us pay. We’re all willing to pay a fair price for creativity, but the industry is so corrupted these days with so many middle-men and restrictive contracts that nobody is willing to pay $15 for auto-tuned trash with no soul, or regurgitated movies with no creativity that blindly follow a get-rich formula; a dash of action, a pinch of romance, an anti-climax and a CGI-filled climax shot in vertigo-inducing 3D.

As SOPA drives US businesses and innovation overseas the Government will then be forced to use its control of the Internet numbering system to setup the Great American Firewall of Protection; so all of these ‘free’ sites and services can’t be reached inside the US. It will work exactly like the Chinese, North Korean or Middle Eastern firewalls whereby the Government decides what content is filtered but it will be sold as a defensive and protective measure. Anybody questioning the validity of such a mechanism will be unpatriotic, an anarchist or even a terrorist.

Eventually, the Internet may become so broken by this that the rest of the world will simply establish a new Internet; a dark Internet. One where nobody controls the content; one where lawlessness and law-abiding packets are exchanged; one where there is no Government interference; one where freedom of speech is still permitted and one where people can still do what they want to do. Just like the Internet we have today.

There are problems with existing laws today and their effectiveness in dealing with illegal activity on the Internet but it mostly works. It isn’t perfect but it does work. The US entertainment industry has too much power right now and it’s only getting worse. Why do we feel the need to keep extending copyright law to protect Disney? Europe was producing literature and music for centuries before the US and never felt the need to extend copyright just because Mozart was getting old or Dickens’ estate needed to top-up its bank balance. So why are US companies so well protected? At this rate we’ll be extending Intellectual Property rights for years to come and stifle innovation. We already have massive patent wars occurring between mobile companies where one company is using the law to pull competitors products off the market even though they’re all as guilty as each other. They patent the most obvious user interface elements, like auto-detecting a telephone number and attaching a click-to-call function, and then use it to stop other companies using the same feature. How is this IP squabbling helping anybody?

SOPA will not kill the Internet, it will just kill the Internet as we know it within the confines of the US. Hosting companies will simply move overseas. Google, Paypal and others will move or be replaced by Chinese or European start-ups. Rather than the US having the best Internet connectivity, Eurasia (a much larger contiguous space) will simply take-over and the US will become the tag-along.

SOPA will kill American domination of the Internet. If America no longer values the freedoms that created the Internet in the late 1960s then it deserves to lose it. The Internet, for all of its rough edges and imperfection, will continue to survive. We simply have to find a way of making it work. The US entertainment industry needs to have a long hard look at itself and maybe accept that the business models of the 1950s just don’t apply today — you’ve had your glory days, move on. Just as the horse and cart business lost out to Mr Ford, you need to adapt and find a way of making money.

The city council say [...]]]> Imagine a city where the roads are filled with the same car. This city only allows one manufacturer and one model of car to be driven on its roads but they will allow you to choose your own paint colour, air freshener and interior trim. Would you want to live here?

The city council say they employ such draconian measures for your safety and convenience. They want to ensure that all cars meet their safety requirements and that you have no problems changing your oil, obtaining spare parts or training your sons and daughters. It’s a standardized world and there are substantial benefits to restricting your choices.

Now look at your IT infrastructure, see any similarities?

Most corporate IT environments look much like our standardized cityscape. Our desktop, laptop, tablet and server computers are standardized. Our software is installed the same way, we only provide support for ‘authorized’ software and lock everything down to stop people personalizing their technological space … but we’ll let you change your desktop because we’re nice.

The consumerization of IT is happening right now and it’s presenting a lot of tough challenges to people like me. Our staff have become accustomed to their user-friendly iPads and iPhones and want them in their office. They don’t want to be use our software or conform to our ways any more. They don’t want to carry two laptops or two phones in the office, they want to use just one. We need to change; ‘we’ being the IT professionals.

Just as the world doesn’t dictate what type of car you drive, there are policies you must comply with such as emissions standards, traffic laws and driving etiquette. Some of these are black and white rules, some are grey, some are optional. Some rules are simply open-ended ranges such as maximum speed limits or minimum emissions standards. There is no reason we can’t define IT infrastructure in a similar way.

With desktop virtualization technologies it’s now easy to package corporate applications and a corporate OS together and deliver them to a range of platforms. This makes a bring-your-own-computing policy more practicable. Software-as-a-Service and Cloud-based providers provide other opportunities to lessen the infrastructure footprint we work with but all of this flexibility comes at a cost. We have to re-tool, ‘we’ being the IT professionals again.

We need to develop our skills, we need to look at alternative technologies and be less focussed on the tool and more focussed on the outcome and the business requirements we’re trying to meet.

Firstly, granite [...]]]> We live on a mountain, a huge granite-filled monster of a mountain that seems to have filled our front and rear yards with its spawn. During some of our earthworks we’ve developed a few techniques for removing the rocks and boulders that we’ve encountered that we’d like to share with you Internet folks.

Firstly, granite is a very hard type of rock and particularly heavy, it’s 2.6 times heavier than water which means even the most innocuous looking piece of rock can quickly reach unmanageable weights very easily. The other problem you find with granite boulders is that they’re often round and don’t have holes or lips for picking up — it’s almost as if they’ve been designed with frustration in mind.

If you can’t pickup a boulder by yourself it’s probably too small to get help from another person.

Tip #1 – Pickup the Small Ones

The obvious starter tip, just remove the soil, pick them up and toss them. You’ll quickly learn out what you can comfortably pick up so stay within your safe working limits. A falling boulder hurts so I’d invest in some steel toe-capped boots. You can also use them to rest a boulder on as you squat down, get your hands underneath and stand up. Remember to lift with your legs and a straight back!

Tip #2 – The IKEA Bag Trick

IKEA sells these blue plastic shopping bags called FRAKTA:

They have a rated maximum load of 25kg (55 pounds) but they’ll easily take 50% more than that. For those slightly larger rocks that you can’t pick up just roll it into a FRAKTA bag, scrunch the corners up and use these two makeshift handles as your lift points. You may need a friend to pick up the bag but it works well.

Tip #3 – Use Rails

I’ve often use aluminium (aluminum) ladders as makeshift ramps for moving heavy loads around so I planned on doing the same with the rocks. In the end, I made my own ladder frames — I used two 16′ pieces of 2×4 decking lumber and installed five rungs of 1¼” poplar into the side rails. This was just a standard closet hanging rail that I cut up. I made two sets of rails as I needed to move rocks up to 30′. The rails are only around 12″ apart as I find this is the size of boulder that starts to become problematic to move.

Friction can be an issue when pulling a boulder up the rails and I was planning on installing some steel plate to counter that but I never needed to.

If I’m moving a boulder up to 50kg (110 pounds) I generally just flip it over and over using the rails as a smooth surface and ramp.

Tip #4 – Use a Boat Winch and a Marine Battery

I’ve tried using the ratcheting pulls but they’re slow, it’s far easier to use an electric winch. I found a boat winch at Canadian Tire for $99 that was rated up to 2,000 pounds. I mounted it to a large piece of MDF and secure it to a large tree using car towing straps that are rated up to 10,000 pounds. As you pull a boulder you have to bear in mind Newton’s laws of motions. As you pull a 200kg boulder the winch is pulling 200kg against the tree so make sure you pick large trees.

The next problem I hit was the car battery charger, the winch killed the battery within a few seconds of pulling. Apparently you need a deep-charge battery for extended winching, something that can deliver lots of power of an extended period. Car batteries don’t do that as they typically only have to deliver short bursts of power to start the engine. I invested in a $160 marine battery and a charger to go with it.

This solution works well and I’ve moved boulders up to 300kg without any difficulty. I have a heavy duty chain and the biggest carabiner I could find that I lasso around the boulder connect it to the 28′ of steel cable on the winch and pull.

Tip #5 – Bury ‘Em

Some boulders are just too heavy to pull upwards as the slightest grade increases the weight tremendously. In these situations I just dig a new hole for the boulder and slide it over or slide it down into its new home, out of my way.

Tip #6 – Split ‘Em

And finally, when you find those really, really huge boulders you need to split them. We had a 22,000 pound boulder in the front yard that had to be split. Dynamite works but it’s loud, expensive and could be prohibited if you live in a residential area. Splitting the rock with irons, feathers and wedges is just painfully slow. Jackhammers don’t do anything to granite, don’t waste your time — tried that one too.

Your best bet is to use an expansive compound like Dexpan or Ecobust. These compounds expand with up to 20,000 PSI of pressure and can easily split concrete and granite.

I just rent a Bosch rotohammer drill from Home Depot and a 1½” bit that can cut holes up to 18″ deep. The holes take up to 15 minutes to cut and it will hurt your whole body doing it. You then need to vacuum the dust out of the holes, mix the compound and fill the holes. Ecobust recommends that the holes are spaced no more than 8″ apart and that you drill a hole that’s 80% to 90% of the depth of the rock. You also need to excavate around the boulder so the fragments can be pushed outwards or it won’t work. I’d also excavate underneath until you see the boulder’s bottom starts to emerge, you need to know how deep the boulder is and if it’s sitting unevenly. If you drill all the way through you’ve wasted a hole — all that pain for no gain.

You also need to think about your fragment size when you’re working out your drilling pattern. There’s no point in splitting a 500kg boulder into two and then trying to work out how to lift two 250kg pieces. I’d recommend putting more holes into the boulder.

The mixture looks innocent and may take up to three days to work but it will work. I’ve split three rocks using this method and it works every time. Ecobust cost me $40 for a 5kg bag which was just enough for my 9′ of holes (six holes, ~18″ deep and 1½” in diameter). It cost another $60 to rent the drill and bit for 4 hours so all told it was only $100 to deal with a boulder that probably weighed close to 500kg (1,100 pounds).

It was only after we moved to Vancouver [...]]]> We acquired a dog in August 2008, much to the surprise of my wife who maintains she was shanghaied into accepting the deal. I’d wanted a dog for around 10 years but my contracting lifestyle didn’t suit it — long days, constantly moving. It wouldn’t be fair.

It was only after we moved to Vancouver and settled down that it finally became a possibility. My daughter was also 8 so she was approaching sensibility. I came across a breeder that had some Australian Shepherd puppies for sale about half-a-mile from my Father-in-law’s farm in Agassiz so we popped in, just to see.

They were six weeks old at the time and while it wasn’t a breed I knew, I did my research and it fitted the bill. It was an athletic, intelligent dog that was loyal and child-friendly. I gave my best doe-eyed look and pleaded with the wife who let me have him. I had to wait until 8 weeks though and then the trouble started.

We had a family holiday in Mexico when he was 5 months old and I’d already gone through his errant potty training, chewing the wooden flooring, eating drywall so I spent most of our two weeks reading every Cesar Milan book on raising dogs. I returned with a new vigour for solving my problems, not his.

I needed to walk him more. So I started exercising him more, varying his routine between the dog park and long walks. I drove 10 minutes down the snow-covered hill to walk around the central city park. Within a week he was a changed animal, far more obedient, far less skittish and a pleasure to be around. Our family and friends thought we’d drugged him!

And now he’s just turned three. He’s a blue merle Australian Shepherd with one blue eye, one brown eye, one black ear, one ‘blue’ ear, a brown front foot and a white front foot. He was named Harlequin because what else do you call such a colourful character.

I wish he’d stop jumping at people when they stoop to pet him and it would be good to chase a ball now and again but I know he’s trainable. I’m the problem, not him.