Friday, March 12, 2010

Blog migration

Since Blogger are discontinuing FTP and SFTP publishing at the beginning of May, I've now migrated my blog to being hosted by a Blogger "custom domain", http://blog.peter-b.co.uk.

Fortunately, I've been able to use a .htaccess file to add a mod_alias Redirect directive that ensures that old links to http://peter-b.co.uk/blog/ will continue to work. So that makes it a lot less of a hassle!

What was a hassle was figuring out the CSS to disable the Blogger navbar, since it completely destroyed the harmony of my site design. It's hard to believe that it's almost seven years old! I should probably break out the text editor and update it at some point, but after this long I can hardly remember how to use CSS and HTML; I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Banana and walnut cake

A cake recipe that I've had some success with recently is this rather delicious banana and walnut cake. It's dead simple, and takes very little time to make. There's one in the oven right now!

  • 450 g ripe bananas (weighed before peeling), mashed
  • 125 g unsalted butter
  • 150 g caster sugar
  • 2 large eggs
  • Half tsp vanilla extract
  • 50 g walnuts, chopped
  • 250 g self-raising flour
  • Pinch of salt

Pre-heat oven to 180 °C. Lightly butter a 25x10 cm loaf tin. Cream butter and sugar together until smooth and pale.

Add eggs one at a time, beating well. Fold in mashed bananas, vanilla and walnuts. Sift in flour and salt and fold in.

Spoon mixture into loaf tin, and bake for one hour or until a knife pushed into centre of cake comes out dry. Cool in tin for at least 20 min before turning out.

My chocolate brownies have also been popular recently, this time with the University of Surrey Mountaineering Club!