Unbelievably so, perhaps, given the date and the (ridiculously) mild weather, but yes, it is that time of year again when the Advent Wreath comes out, and each Sunday a candle is lit during the last four weeks before Christmas. Today is the first Sunday of Advent, so here is the first candle. Hooray! #FeelingFestive
Are you doing anything special today?
Posted in Miscellaneous
Morning! As you know, I’ve finished the detailed plan for book baby 9. Maybe I’ll share a little photo later, but I digress… Now I’m planning book baby 10 in much the same way I planned book baby 9.
Obviously I’ve got a name for my hero (pssst… LUKE!) and I’ve got the rough plan all hammered out. Now I’m working on the detailed plan, including (as ever) a vision for the opening scene. As I’m sitting here staring into my sun-drenched garden, I can just about envision my hero waking up, switching on the news… Except. Well, I can’t **see** him. I can only see a **her.** My hero is talking to me in a female voice. And actually, the name is LUCY, not Luke. Where’d all that come from?
No idea, but I like it. So I’ve changed everything round, including the planned PoV (now first person–haven’t written in the first person in ages!) and adjusted relationships, with some interesting twists. Now I’m even MORE excited about this book baby. Wahoo! Who knows what else will happen while this one is maturing in the queue after book baby 9?
#TwoInOneThrillerProject
Posted in Two-in-One Thriller Project
#LoveBeingAnAuthor Just decided that the main character in book baby #10 (the second of the two thrillers I’m planning right now) has a PhD from Johns Hopkins Medical School. I mean, why not? He’s a scientific rock star, so of course he’d have gone to the States for his PhD. In fact, his scientific rock stardom is the very crux to the novel. Oh, the power!
Posted in Two-in-One Thriller Project
After a hard day’s work, the detailed outline–the “blueprint”, if you will–for Book Baby 9 (crime/thriller) is finished. Once I’ve transferred it into my “crib sheet format”, it will be ready to germinate and mature while I address myself to Book Bay 10 (psychological thriller). This whole two-at-once-planning project is proving quite fertile!
Pictured below (suitably blurred, obviously): the handwritten road map and the typed blueprint. Just in case you want to know how my mind works..
The handwritten road map for Book Baby 9…
… and the typed blueprint.
Posted in Two-in-One Thriller Project
My two-in-one project is coming along nicely, if at a slightly more sedate pace than perhaps is usual for me. Then again, I **am** percolating two very different ideas all at once! After a few weeks of germinating and high-level research, the broad concepts stand for Story 1 (crime thriller) and Story 2 (psychological thriller-slash-crime). I’m ready for the nitty-gritty-heavy-duty-detail plan and research stage. #AmPlotting #WatchThisSpace
Posted in Two-in-One Thriller Project
Ideas for books come to me at the most random moments, but very frequently when I’m on the road to somewhere, or waiting for a bus or a train. It happens so often that I’ve come to the conclusion that this must have something to do with my mind playing idle association games whilst not otherwise occupied.
Last week Friday, I was pondering life and bus timetables when a book title assaulted me. It came out of nowhere and wouldn’t go away. If I hadn’t been en route to somewhere, I’d have had to have sat down and get working straightaway. My frustration at not being able to do so was intense, but misplaced. Because as it turns out, the sheer practical inability of getting to work straightaway meant that my brain was simmering away at this idea in the background all morning and all day. Very soon, it turned the title into the active ingredient, the “nugget” of a story, the very core idea. And soon after that, it came up with not one but two complete executions of this one idea–but you couldn’t imagine more different outcomes.
I accepted the challenge and have now begun work on both projects. It’s a lovely twenty-six degrees today, and I’m out in the garden, soaking up the rays whilst setting down the rudimentary outlines for each book. One will be a crime thriller, and one will be a haunting psychological thriller. Both will pay tribute to my writing niche, fear not. There will be glamour and rock and even some romance.
One idea, two different books. Challenge accepted!
Anyhoo, my unprecedented challenge is hammering out these two stories at the same time. That way, I get the satisfaction of harnessing both ideas and ensuring that they remain miles apart from each other.
Will I write the books concurrently? And if not, which one will see the light of day first? Now these are questions for another day. I’ll keep you posted, watch this space!
#TwoInOneThrillerProject
Do you ever manage to land yourself in your own personal hell whilst trying to extract yourself from a different kind of own personal hell? Ha! You’re just like me.
Last Monday, I was supposed to join my husband and my sons on a nine-mile hike around the Lincolnshire Wolds in the name of some Scouting badge or other. I’d gamely agreed to come along. It was meant to be a family “walk”, and heck, a nine-mile walk is worth a couple of sessions of aerobic exercise, right?
So I thought, until the Bad Weather hit the week before. It suddenly occurred to me that nine miles trawling through muddy fields in the company of grumpy, sodden and cold kids (this was a Scout group event, not just our family!) might not be such a grand way of spending a public holiday. At the end of the day, I’m a bit of a chicken when it comes to hiking. All right, I ‘fess up. I don’t care much for hiking. I’m not the most outdoorsy kinda girl.
What to do? I hit upon the glorious idea of providing “field support” by being the “base” who stays at home and takes emergency distress calls. Every field activity needs a base. Better still, to sweeten my husband’s and sons’ disappointment at my lack of participation, I offered to bake a cake for the post-hike BBQ. That turned out to have been a good idea until the one cake turned into two, then three, and oh, could I make a bread too, please?
Sure, says me. No problem. (Anything to get out of a hike, right?). Problem is, I hate baking. That may come as a surprise to you, considering how many foodie posts I’ve shared here, but I find baking really stressful. And most of the time, my gorgeous creations crumble to dust–literally–when they come out of the oven. You can see now where the concept of substituting one personal hell with another came from.
Nonetheless, I was committed. I agreed to make one tear-and-shear bread, one German marble cake with extra choc chips (older son’s choice), one Thuringian crumble cake (younger son’s choice), and one Guglhupf (hub’s choice). Madness!
Evidently, with only two hands, a few hours, and one oven, this required a plan. Being an organised person, I drew up a plan the night before, staggering all make cakes, rising, proo”f”ing (I am an author, after all), cooling and all that. A perfect plan. See for yourself….
BakeOff Impossible: The Plan
Except on Monday morning, my perfect plan was already obsolete before I started because it had occurred to me in the night that the marble cake would have to bake and cool completely before I could cover it in chocolate, and I would need to allow enough time for the chocolate to cool and set.
Here’s how the day went… in pictures.
8:oo am: Mise en place. Get everything ready, set the butter out to soften, and all will be just fine and dandy.
Ingredients at the ready, except for the chocolate powder, which I forgot to put out but still managed to use in liberal amounts.
8:30 am: Make and bake the marble cake: Instead of making it last, I whipped up my double choc chip German marble cake first and shoved it (gently) in the oven before addressing myself to the rest of The Plan.
Choc chip marble cake, ready to bake way before plan.
9:15 am: On to the bread: Thankfully, the breadmaker would do half the work for me. Bread safely deposited in breadmaker, not requiring any more attention for the next two-and-a-half hours, by which time everything else will be almost done. Yeah, right…
Thank goodness for breadmakers! Easy, peasy.
9:30 am: Thuringian crumble next. This one needs to rise twice; once in a bowl, and once rolled out. It’s very important to plan for this, you see. Hence my Grand Plan. It may not look like much in the bowl, but it turns into quite a lot later on…
Yeast-based base, as it were. Looks more like bread dough at this stage but will be delicious.
And here are the crumbles-to-be. No yeast here, just loooooots of butter. And sugar. And some flour.
9:33 am: Marble cake is ready! Woohoo! One (almost) down, three to go…
Proud cake mama!
9:45 am: Where was I? Where’s my head? Oh My Word, what’s happened to my kitchen? Did you know I hate mess? That’s one of the reasons I don’t like baking. Look at the state of it! But I keep ploughing on. There’s not much point in tidying up in between cakes, now, is there. And I had an alien visitor too…
Not my usual state of being…
E.T. was here. I think he wanted to go home… And I swear I had nothing to do with the writing. It just appeared. Honest. It freaked me out a bit!
11:30 am. Struggling Ever So Slightly. OK, quite a lot. What on earth possessed me to make a Guglhupf? While the Thuringian crumble is rising in the sun room which, owing to Bank Holiday weather, suddenly no longer has any sun, I am tackling the Guglhupf. Technically, this is a triple rising cake. Step one: Mix the yeast with the warm cream and see what happens.
Bubble, bubble. Toil and trouble. Ha!
I thought I was off to a good start there, but things got tricky when it came to mixing the rest of the dough. I won’t go into detail, but I had splatters on the wall, in my hair, on the floor, on the window…. and I am a Really Careful Mixer. Only I don’t have a KitchenAid. Just me and my handmixer.
There seems to be an awful lot of dried and glace fruit here. I just hope the dough rises around it, as advertised!
So off the cake goes to rise in the sun room, right next to the Thuringian Crumble. #FingersCrossed
12:30 pm: The bread dough is ready. The bread dough is READY? I haven’t even had a chance to have lunch yet! And this is when it truly fell apart, if only for a few moments. Two cakes failing to rise in the too cold sun room. One tear-and-share bread needing to be shaped and put somewhere to rise. No lunch had. Not even a sit-down. Heart pounding from too much coffee. I am NEVER going on Bake Off, ever. Not me, thank you very much.
Desperate measures. Improvised proofing ovens. Obviously I can’t bake anything in one oven whilst something is proofing in the other because the temp would go through the roof. *Tears at hair*
1 pm: Panic Stations. Nothing has risen to plan. Something needs to get baking, or the whole plan goes to pot. Improvise, Nicky, improvise. Keep calm. All right. Regroup. Bread needs to bake first. Then crumble. That gives the Guglhupf one more hour to rise, pretty please. Third and final rise is supposed to happen in the tin, so in the tin the dough goes. Good luck!
Rise. RISE!
1:20 pm: There’s light. The bread is out. And it looks like it should. Two down, two to go.
One tear-and-share bread. A very forgiving recipe that never fails and always delights!
1:50 pm: The crumble is out. Slightly less professional looking than I’d hoped, but very tasty. Three down, one to go. And still there’s no more rise in the Hupf. I’ll have to take my chances. Feeling a bit calmer though. And the kitchen has been returned to normal. Nobody warned me this would be So Much Work!
Yum! I wish I could share the sweet scent of buttery chocolaty crumbles!
2 pm: While the Hupf is baking (she hopes), the marble cake is getting its finishing touch. Mmmm chocolate. Yes, I am licking the bowl. I deserve it. I need it.
One finished cake. If I’d had more chocolate, I’d have covered it completely, but this will do.
3 pm: The Guglfhupf is out. For better or worse, it’s done. It feels heavy and dense. I just hope it’s edible.
One Guglhupf, slightly smaller than anticipated.
4 pm: My completed spread. I DID IT!
A nice dusting of icing sugar will cover up many a sin.
Six hours. One bread. Three cakes. Mission accomplished!
Wow. I am all done, and all done in. So much baking. So much tidying! Here’s hoping I have an appreciative audience at the post-hike BBQ!
Postscript. The proof the of the cake is in the eating. And my Hupf turned out to be perfectly yummy. Maybe it didn’t need to rise as much as I thought. Maybe it did all the rising it needed. Who cares? It was lovely, according the the hiking Scouts and accompanying adults.
Almost perfect.
Posted in Miscellaneous
Tagged bake off, Bank holiday, Cake, crumble, Guglhupf, marble cake
Happy Easter! This year, the Wells family was overwhelmed by the happy memories of last year’s Easter holidays spent in France with some very good friends. We had a fabulous time back then, and we felt a little sad not being able to be there this year. But hey, if the prophet won’t come to the mountain, the mountain will move… or something like that. So we imported a little piece of France to our very own home, and I’m not only talking about brie, baguette, and wine. I’m talking a traditional French Easter lunch, the Pâté de Pâques. Our cooking was experimental and slapdash if truth be told, but the results were stunning and were gobbled up by adults and children alike. Here’s how we did it.
T Minus One Day. Hard boil four eggs.
One. Mush up (with your bare hands, if you fancy) the meat. This involves a pound of minced beef, a lesser quantity of pork sausage meat, liberal amounts of rosemary, thyme, coriander, parsley, salt, pepper and any other seasoning you might fancy. Oh, and you also need to mix together and mush in with the meat two eggs and about 60g of creme fraiche (or cream, if you fancy it really rich!).
Meat, herbs, and egg mixture…
Two. Ready the pastry. And yes, you can use the shop bought stuff. You don’t think I got up at six to make the puff pastry from scratch? Psssst…. I got two handy packs of ready-rolled puff pastry.
Three. Lay out the “Pâté” in two long strips. Spread the meat mixture on the pastry, then distribute your eggs in a line, top with meat mixture, and finish off with another layer of puff pastry. Remember to make the top strip of pastry slightly wider than the bottom strip. Paint the edges of the pastry with milk to make a good seal when you squish the edges together. Brush with egg yolk.
…and cover with the rest of the puff pastry.
Four. Add a touch of Titanic. Make a few slits across the top and add rolled up tubes of baking paper as a “chimney” to allow excess steam to escape while cooking.
…and chimneys.
Five. Bake. Put your French Easter lunch in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees (Celsius) for 30 to 40 minutes. Remember to turn the tray around once or twice if your oven cooks slightly unevenly like ours.
ET VOILA!
Six. Enjoy with a crisp green salad and a nice glass of white.
Hmmmm I would like to eat all of that…
… but I’ll start with a more modest helping and a nice big salad. Delicious!!
Happy Easter! Have you got a favourite “foreign” dish or tradition that you like to carry out at Easter?
This gallery contains 5 photos.
Originally posted on Coral McCallum:
A Leap Day act of faith but Book Baby 2 aka Impossible Depths has made its debut on Amazon worldwide. EEK! I still can’t quite believe it’s real. Can’t get me head round the fact…
Travel broadens the mind, they say. Travelling certainly provides an education, quite literally ‘on the go.’ And what’s that adage about ‘travel yourself interesting’? Well, the Wells Family went north for the recent October half term holidays, and we had the most brilliant time. We started in Inverness, worked our way west towards Fort William, had a pit stop on the Isle of Mull, then drove across to Stirling, and finished the week in Edinburgh. It was epic. And here are fourteen things I didn’t know about Scotland before this trip…
ONE.
Scotland was born south of the equator.
TWO.
Everything to the north of the Great Glen Fault (which, roughly speaking, runs from Inverness to Fort William) is sliding southwards little by little all the time, or so we were told. Or maybe that’s just a myth to entertain the Sassenachs?
THREE.
It really is heart-breakingly beautiful up in the mountains.
View of Ben Nevis
FOUR.
Scottish people have a sentimental if entirely irrational attachment to the myth of Nessie.
Nicky, not Nessie. No monster here today.
FIVE.
All the lochs are said to be connected by underground rivers. I find it hard to wrap my brain around this, especially as some lochs are fresh water and some are sea water, but once more, this is what we were told.
SIX.
You can get married on a beach on the Isle of Mull if you’re so minded—even in October.
The bridal party heading to Calgary beach to tie the knot. And no, I have no idea who they are but they were quite happy to let me take a photo!
SEVEN.
Haggis isn’t as horrible as it sounds. In fact, we quite enjoyed it. Thank you, Karen Soutar!
This young man had three helpings and completely shunned the sausages that Karen had so thoughtfully cooked as an alternative!
EIGHT.
A ride in a mountain gondola beats a rollercoaster ride hands-down in the thrill and stunning views departments.
These ‘cages’, as the boys dubbed them,…
… would take us all the way up there. And they rocked and swayed in the (very gentle) breeze. LOVELY.
NINE.
When James Bond retreats to Skyfall, that seminal scene with the car-and-the-view is set at the bottom of Glencoe. Been there, done that!
We should’ve got out of the car to stare moodily into the distance… #Skyfall
TEN.
The place is awash with distilleries (alas, you’re not allowed to visit with children under nine. No wee drams were being had by any member of the Wells family.)
ELEVEN.
Beer battered scallops are surprisingly yummy. I know. They shouldn’t be, but they are!
Fresh Isle of Mull Scallops. Nom nom nom.
TWELVE.
Contrary to popular belief and much to the children’s disappointment, you can’t get deep fried Mars bars in every Scottish chippy anymore. In fact, we never managed to find a chippy that sold them. Ho hum, something to keep for another trip…
THIRTEEN.
There’s a lot of German in the Scottish language. Loch being a case in point (literally meaning ‘hole’ in German and pretty much pronounced the same way in both German and Scottish). And ‘kirk’ is another classic. I was surprised at how many ‘kirks’ there were about in Scotland. ‘Kirk’ being an old German word for ‘church.’
FOURTEEN.
The scenery around Loch Linnhe looks exactly how I imagine Alaska or Newfoundland, all shimmering water and lush green hills. Evidently I’ll have to go to Alaska and Newfoundland one day to test this impression…
Simply lovely. Breath taking. So beautiful!
And that, as they say, was that. We really enjoyed our trip and didn’t really want to come home. Should I ever win the lottery, we shall be relocating to Mull, and that’s a fact.
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Nicky Wells: Love & Thrills 