CAKE FETISH

As much as I hate to be cliché I have to admit I’m the type of person to bake a cake and take a snap—or two. Over the years I’ve accumulated a fair number of pictures of cakes.

This was my brother's graduation cake, with truffles and chocolate stripes. It was my most successful and most difficult bake-the chocolates took longer than the cake itself!

A bit of a bog standard I made for my flatmate's birthday. There was no electric whisk at uni so I whipped the cream by hand, by which time I hardly had any energy for decorating. That should explain the chocolate buttons.

This one I did with the cousins. The end result of watching Nigella on TV, scanning the internet for ages in search of  the recipe and breaking my mum's food processor was some chocolate biscuits that resembled crumbly cakes.

A Birthday cake, and  possibly the prettiest I've ever had. Courtesy of my lovely friend Sara!

The Lurpak ad reassures me that 'it's ok to bake imperfect looking cakes.' Ok, these cakes looked imperfect , but they were the tastiest things I'd baked in ages, which is really an achievement when you consider that half of them were burnt.  

Driveway Cake Sale
Today I witnessed one of the most successful cakes sales ever- a driveway cake sale at my cousin’s.  I've learnt some tricks of the trade, namely that perfect weather and perfectly decorated fairy cakes equals a sell out in less than an hour. I’m tempted to try this myself.

Are You Easily Distracted too?

I’m talking about salaat. When you’re praying, do you suddenly get a million thoughts crossing your mind, stuff that you weren’t even thinking about just before? The answer is probably yes—everybody gets distracted by their thoughts during salaat. Sometimes, you remember important things, things that you need to do, people you need to call, sometimes you even remember where you’d put that certain thing that you’d been looking for all morning. Someone I knew remembered that she had left her USB with all her coursework on it in the common room at Uni, and rushed off straight after she’d prayed Asr to retrieve it. She said she was so grateful that Allah had reminded her about it whilst she was praying, or else she would have been in trouble, but then my friend told us this story after:

There was a young man whose family had been saving money in a pot for generations. Finally, his mother handed it to him and told him to use it for his own needs. However, when put in possession of such a great amount of money, the man felt nervous because he knew that it could easily be stolen. He decided to bury it somewhere deep in the desert until he actually needed it, in a spot that he could remember. So, he picked a landmark of particular prominence and buried it there. However, many years went by before the man needed the money, but when he went back he realised that he couldn’t remember where he had buried it. He searched and searched and tried desperately to remember, but had no luck. Every night he we get up and pray to Allah in a hope that by offering salaat, Allah would accept his du’a and help him find it. After many nights of praying, during his salaat, the man suddenly remembered where he’d buried it. He was so excited that he rushed the rest of his prayer and hurried out to retrieve his treasure.

Later on, the man related this story to a pious and learned man. ‘Because I prayed every night, Allah helped me remember where I’d buried the money,’ he told him. The pious man shook his head and informed him that it was actually Satan who had caused him to remember. Satan was so frustrated that the man was getting up every night to offer prayer that eventually he caused him to remember where he’d buried the money in a hope that it would distract him from his salaat, which it did!

A USB is certainly not as valuable as a pot of gold, but the message is still the same. Shaytan hates it when you pray and will distract you in any way, even by reminding you of something important. So be on your guard next time you’re about to pray and refuse your mind access to distractions!

Cruisin’ Down the Nile

If you’ve read my previous post you’ll know I’ve been to Egypt recently. Apart from wandering through valleys and temples I was lucky enough to go on a one day Nile cruise. My hotel backed onto the Nile also, so I managed to get quite a few pictures of the famous river (although credit is due to my brother for the better pics of the lot). Hope you like them:

Caves, Coalmines and Mummy Tombs

Whenever I go on holidays by some stroke of luck or misfortune I always end up going underground. I don’t mean tube stations or even the Euro Star on the way to France, but in enclosed, dark and stuffy places that usually aren’t very appealing. I’m not one for caves, the first caves I remember visiting were the Luray Caverns in America where the lights went out half way during the tour thanks to a technical fault up above, so naturally I’ve developed a slight fear of caves. In Dewsbury a couple of years ago I had the bizarre experience of going down a coalmine. If there are any northerners reading this can you please tell me whether coalmines are popular tourist attractions? Because going down a dark shaft deep underground where people dig for rocks is not something I would choose to do if I was given a choice, but on that particular holiday I wasn’t even consulted. Nevertheless once I’d got over the darkness and the heat it was interesting to learn about the working conditions of coal miners in the past, mostly because they were so horrific. I won’t go into details-why not visit the coalmines yourself?! But by far, the most fascinating underground experience I’ve had is going into mummy tombs, on the west bank of Luxor, Egypt.

These tombs are located in a place called the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, in the stifling heat of the desert. Imagine walking through the valley in 40 degrees Celsius and descending into heated, narrow tombs which are not so different from your kitchen ovens. But once you get over the heat the interior of the tomb is absolutely fascinating. 3000 year old art work by the ancient Egyptians, colours still preserved and visible, patterns and pictures on the walls and celings and columns upon columns of hieroglyphics. I wish I’d been allowed to take pictures because these mummy tombs are certainly sights hard to contest. When you’re in them you actually forget that you’re in a tomb of a dead person in a gigantic graveyard. In reality, that’s what the Valley of the Kings is— a gigantic, extravagant graveyard, all history and embellishments aside. In theory, that’s got to be worse than a coalmine hasn’t it?

Oprah Magazine's Unlikely (but Lovely) Cover Girl

http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Choosing-to-Wear-the-Muslim-Headscarf/1