Becca Jane St Clair

…is to go to their Facebook page and complain. What company wants potential customers to hear that an item of theirs broke on you or dissatisfied you?

I’ve had good luck with contacting companies. Last year, when Boots No7 Foaming Face Wash made my chin break out in bacterial acne because I was unaware the product contained an item I was allergic to, Boots very nicely sent me a £15 gift card in addition to letting me return an unopened bottle without a receipt. For Christmas 2009 (really, January 2010 when we celebrated), my Mother-in-Law gave me a thermal cafetière from Scotts of Stowe. It started to leak a few months later and coffee got in between the walls of it, so it smelled really fusty. I contacted Scotts of Stowe, and they told me if my MIL called them with her customer ID, they would dispatch a new one. When the new one never arrived, my MIL called them back, and they sent out a second replacement (which did arrive, and I’ve been using since with no problems).

But lately…not so great service from emailing Crocs or Gelert directly from their “contact us” forms on their respective websites.

I have a pair of Crocs (the style no longer appears on their website. It was a pair that does not have any venting holes) and I was wearing them one day when I slid in the kitchen and my shoe went flying off. In the process, one of the little “rivets” that holds on the back strap cracked and would no longer hold the strap on. I first checked eBay for the rivets, but didn’t see any. Then, I went to the Crocs website where their instructions were to “take the shoes back to the retailer for replacement rivets”, so I sent them an email through their contact us page explaining that I had moved to the UK but had purchased my shoes in PA and could not take the shoes back to the retailer, but needed one single rivet in order to be able to wear the shoes comfortably again.

I received no response, so after a week, I looked for the company on facebook and posted to their Facebook page:

I sent off an email about cracking one of the “buttons” to one of my shoes and have not yet received a reply! I’d love to continue to wear these shoes, but it’s hard without a strap.

Within a few hours, I had a response giving me a different email address to write to with my address. Once I sent off the email, it was only a few days before a full set of replacement rivets arrived.

Most recently, Tim and I have been dealing with our flasks (as you know). Before we were trying to clean the newer ones, We tried to use another flask we had that was made by Gelert. Unfortunately, the stopper in the cap had a broken washer, and it was leaking. I tried to fix it, but even with clipping the broken washer back on, it still leaked. I went off to the Gelert website, and sent off an email asking for a replacement washer.

No response. So, I did exactly what I did with Crocs….I went to the Gelert Facebook page and posted:

Hello, I recently sent an email via your website in regards to a product of yours we own that has turned out to be faulty but did not receive a response. We own a 1L steel flask, and the lid has started to leak. I would like to know if it is possible to get a replacement new lid, or even just have the small washer that goes in the lid sent to me. Thanks!

And would you believe? Within a few hours, I had a response to that post informing me to email a specific email address, and I’ve since gotten a response to that and been informed they have put a replacement cap in the post for me.

Obviously, only contact a company if you really have a problem with a product and always check first to see if you can purchase a replacement. Things like phone chargers and USB cords are readily available, but something like the lid to a container might not be. I think it also helped that I was asking for small parts from each company – I don’t think Crocs would have sent out a new pair of shoes if I had asked for new shoes, but replacement rivets were no problem.

In the end, the worst thing a company can do is tell you no or ignore your request. As it’s lots easier to ignore email, I went straight to Facebook, because I felt the companies wouldn’t ignore a negative comment left for all the public to read. I may have been right!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, or the RSS feed(s), please notify me.

I didn’t get the part.

I’m not too upset by it, but at the same time I am a little disappointed. It’s hard hearing such great things about your voice and then getting told “sorry, we’d rather go in a different direction”. But the woman who called me told me at least four times in the five-minute phone call that the judicatures were all very impressed with my voice and liked my singing…it just wasn’t what they were looking for. Admittedly, I wasn’t really expecting it to be. I have a polished voice…this was for the part of Priscilla Biggadyke, who probably didn’t have a polished/professional sounding singing voice. I also of course had the American accent thing possibly going *against* me – but at least I was honest when asked if I could do a British accent. Saves them the trouble of possibly casting me only to find out my British accent would make Dick van Dyke’s accent in “Mary Poppins” look proper! (Though I also could pull off an Eliza Doolittle accent, but that’s pretty much the same as DvD’s, really.)

The best thing to do is accept the rejection graciously. I’ve been offered tickets to the performance, which I might take them up on. I also do plan on asking BBC Lincolnshire to keep my information on file in case anything pops up that I would be appropriate for. Even if it’s just singing a jingle for an upcoming event or something.

I suppose it’s a little late in life to revert back to my 16-yr-old self’s dream of singing professionally, though.

OTOH, at least I don’t have to worry about squeezing in rehearsal for this on top of convention rehearsals with Lincoln Sounds, garden railway steam-ups, and everything else that goes on on a regular basis.

Still, like I said, it is a little disappointing after having such a fantastic audition.

Will I audition for anything else in the future? Probably. I keep wanting to get involved with the Theatre Royal’s productions, but find out about auditions and things too late to participate. The Broadbent Theatre is also close by, though participating there will have to wait until I can drive myself. And of course, there’s always my “dream” of joining Lace City in Nottingham!

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I’m quite pleased with my audition. It went really well, and the people I auditioned with were very nice…they even made me blush by telling me how good I was!

Talk about a confidence booster. It was especially nice to see the three judicatures nodding their heads and tapping their feet to “Anything Goes”.

So here’s what happened:

I got to the studio about a half hour before my audition slot, and was sent back to the interior lobby where I was interviewed (and recorded) by I’m guessing a student intern (she mentioned living in student accommodations while we were chatting, so that was my clue). I was just asked some general questions about who I was, my singing experience, my performing experience, and how I found out about the interviews. Then, it was back out into the interior lobby to wait to be called back into the audition room – three judicatures, 2 techs running the cameras and recording equipment, and the person I had been emailing with this past week. I managed to sing the first two verses of their song they wanted everyone to sing before I stopped and apologized for not being able to do the last verse (I had forgotten how it went!). I was told that they were sorry I had had to stop! That felt good! Onto my second song, “Anything Goes”, and I think I did really well. Like I said, people were tapping their feet, nodding their heads, and really enjoying it and again seemed to be disappointed when I stopped singing! After the audition, I was called back in to be interviewed (just to ask how I felt it went), and the interviewer asked me if I had been asked if I could do a British accent…I hadn’t been asked, and I admitted to the girl that I didn’t think I could, so…we shall see.

I should be hearing this afternoon if I received a part or not, but even if I didn’t, it still was great to go out there and sing.

A big thank you goes out to BBC Lincolnshire for even considering me!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, or the RSS feed(s), please notify me.

I’m perhaps doing something incredibly insane. Last week (Thursday, to be exact I think), I was poking around online and came across an article about BBC Lincolnshire holding a performance of a new musical about Priscilla Biggadike. Priscilla was the first woman to be hanged in a private hanging on the grounds of Lincoln Castle. She was hanged for poisoning her husband, however information came out a year later that proved her innocence. Poor woman.

BBC Lincolnshire is holding auditions for the musical….today. And I signed up to audition, giving myself 4 days to really learn the song I need to perform and to pick another song to sing! Am I crazy or what?

I think I’ve finally got down the Priscilla song. I’m worried about having to sing it unaccompanied though, since the recording is backed with a guitar. I’m also singing it an octave higher than the singer on the recording, since the man who wrote it is performing it, and I can’t sing that low.

For my second song, I think I’ve finally settled on “Anything Goes”. It’s tough trying to pick a song that’s appropriate and won’t put people to sleep with! I debated “With One Look” (Sunset Boulevard), “On My Own” (Les Mis), “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (Carousel), and several others….but I think I’m solid with “Anything Goes” now. Maybe.

My audition is at 3:30 at the BBC Lincolnshire studio….wish me luck!

The performance will be on 7 April at the Castle. Regardless of if I get in or not, you should go see it!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, or the RSS feed(s), please notify me.

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house

Our house has charm. It was built in the 1840s as a farmhouse (and all the farmland is now our village) and then divided into two houses in the 1930s. I know I’ve mentioned our house oddities before, but our house isn’t divided equally. Our bathroom is in Dave (our neighbour)’s “half” – ish. No, we don’t actually go to the bathroom on his side, but our bathroom juts out into what would be his sitting room/lounge, so if we’re in the bathroom, we can hear his telly, and he can probably hear everything that goes on in our bathroom (ewww). It also means our bathroom is located under his spare room. Get it? No? Hmm. Here’s a crappy MSPaint drawing I made:

So, our house has character. The woman who lived here before Tim bought it was fond of hiring “cowboy builders” to fix things, so we find all sorts of new oddities all the time. Like how we can’t really hang anything on the outer walls of the house because the wall is so soft, you stick a drill in and could practically write your name with it. Or how instead of taking out the exterior toilet, concrete was just poured into it, making it loads of fun for Tim to remove…and making even more fun this past January when it flooded the workshop because it was never actually disconnected from the water, they just put a cap on the pipe. Yeah. Oh? And even more fun with the splitting the house into two? If you look hard enough, you can still see where the doorways should be into the other half.

But we love our house to bits, and if anyone doesn’t like it, they can sod off. Sure, we might be living with dusty floors for a while longer until we can get walls re-plastered and the windows don’t match because for whatever reason, the previous owner only replaced two front windows instead of all three (we will get matching windows when we get double glazing), but it’s still our house. Our loveable, quirky house.

Today, my friend Helen came over to help me patch up the wallpaper in what should be our bedroom. To make a long story short – a brick fell through the roof and it made a hole in the ceiling of the bedroom, so we had it fixed, and now that we’re redecorating the bedroom so we can move back in, needed to put new wallpaper on the damaged part (that chipboard lining stuff). I say Helen came over to help, but really, she did all of it and I only held the paper. But she knew what she was doing, so it was probably for the best!

While we were mending the ripped paper on the ceiling, we noticed that the ceiling is in fact, crooked. She put up the first strip straight, but then the second strip went up and even though the seams matched, it was crooked. We also discovered a nasty floorboard that seems to rock if you stand on it….only, it’s not floorboard size and feels like a rectangle of chipboard. Who knows what we will discover when we pull up the original carpet. Looks like we might have to add “fix floorboards” to the list of things to do in the bedroom! Particularly since the wonky floorboard is right where we plan on putting the wardrobe….really don’t want that thing to fall on me, thanks.

But the good news is, we aren’t on as tight of a schedule as we originally were. I think I mentioned this before, but we were getting our “new” bedroom furniture from someone who was downsizing from a three-bedroom to a two-bedroom, and they expected to move at the beginning of April. Well, the offer for their house fell flat (person never contacted them again after a counter offer!), so they aren’t ready to part with the furniture yet. But like I said, it just means we have more time to do the redecorating, and if the bedroom is done before we can get the new stuff, we’ll just move our existing furniture into the room. No big deal. So the current plan is to get the bedroom painted the last week of March while Tim has off to help me, then sometime in April see about getting new carpet put in. My goal is for us to be in our redecorated bedroom by June, but May would be even better if we could pull it off somehow in between Region 31 convention and Tim’s training for his MOM position. Yeah, probably not likely.

I posted pics of the wall to facebook, but here’s the photos again:

The paper looks yellowed for two reasons – 1) the walls are still yellow and 2) we were using up the ends of some rolls of paper Helen had in her loft (US: attic). It will all get painted over in a few weeks anyway, and you’ll never even know that it was old wallpaper or that it even had been patched!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, or the RSS feed(s), please notify me.

Okay, so editing the .htaccess file to block hotlinking didn’t work.

I managed to even cause my server a 500 internal server error in the process.

Crap.

Anyone know of a way to batch watermark images? With the number I tend to post (especially with Austria pics) it will take AGES to watermark everything, but at this point, I feel I really need to in case places are hotlinking to my pics.

Argh. This is really frustrating.

Basically, the .htaccess file was blocking images on the RSS feed and on the LJ Feed even though it wasn’t supposed to and no matter what I added to the file, it still blocked things. And I really don’t think that most of my readers ever even click through to my site, unless it’s to leave a comment, as most people read things on one of the RSS feeds, so it’s a little counter-productive to say “click through to my site to see pics”.

Blegh.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, or the RSS feed(s), please notify me.

[Taking a brief break from posting about Austria]

A few weeks back, while I was in between bouts of flu (really. Who gets 2 different flu strains back-to-back? I DO!) Tim and I travelled down to Brighton to help out his friend Nick with his stand at ModelWorld, which is an annual model show. No, not fashion models! Things like trains, toys, ships, doll houses, aeroplanes, cars, trucks, and things made out of Lego.

There were loads of interesting things to see at Modelworld. I was quite smitten with a doll house display where they had put a T-gauge (think really small. The engine is less than 2 inches long) train track in the loft (US: attic) and had it running. There also was a Doctor Who display with loads of Dalek’s including the famous green Dalek from the Winston Churchill episode.

But what Tim and I liked the most, was the model of the USS Intrepid….made entirely out of Legos.

The Lego ship was 23 feet long, at a scale of 1:40…and I promise you, it looks exactly like the real thing.

Here is the real USS Intrepid:

[image thanks to WikiMedia]

And here’s the Lego version:

[image thanks to Lego Monster on Flickr]

Pretty impressive, right?

We got to speak with the man who built the Lego ship, and he told us that he has an invitation to take his Lego ship across the pond to put it on display on the actual USS Intrepid, which is currently serving as a Sea, Air and Space Museum.

What I loved about his ship was all the details – down to the planes having foldable wings!

[If you click on the photo once, it will take you to that photo’s page. If you click on the photo again, you will be able to view it full size. I have no idea why WordPress made it so complicated! Apologies to LiveJournal Users. If you do not see the gallery below, please visit my website via the link at the top of the entry to view the gallery. I am working on fixing that.]

[Photos taken by either myself or my husband, Tim and are all © Tim and Rebecca Lockley]

While at Modelworld, I snuck away for an afternoon and spent it with Tim’s cousins wandering Brighton. I’ll post about that and some of the other things we saw at Modelworld in a different post!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, or the RSS feed(s), please notify me.

Yesterday, I was looking at my blog statistics, and this website popped up as being a referring website. I always like to check my referrers just to see what they are, and if it’s another blog that’s linked to me, I like to read a few posts and consider adding a link back.

Well. Not this website. Apparently, they not only were hot linking my image of banoffee pie I made several weeks back, they also copied word-for-word my entire post* about making banoffee pie…and the website appears to have no contact information listed, and they’ve conveniently disabled the ability to leave comments on posts. Right clicking on other images and clicking “view image” showed me all sorts of images that had been pulled from other websites, blogs, even livejournal. This leads me to believe that the entire food.tasteonline.info website just copy/pastes in other people’s blog posts….especially after they copied a post from the Guardian and the bottom of the post says:

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

I managed to disable the hotlinking of the image. That was pretty simple and involved editing the .htaccess file (you can google for instructions if you’ve had this problem, too, or even add a WordPress plug-in. Just search the plug-ins for “disable hotlink”). The images (So far) still copy over to the RSS feed and the Facebook feed, but will not show up on any other website.

But what can I do about the copied words? Nothing, really. It would be possible to track down the website owners, but often that doesn’t even give you the proper information. For example, if you check who “owns” my domain, it will list Dreamhost, my hosting company because they protect their client’s identities.

I had another problem recently where a camping website had pulled my post about what you need to drive on the continent. On their site, they claimed it was “edited from” and at least included the link back to my article. The edit was pretty bad though. They changed random words and it wound up not making sense, but again, not much I could really do about it, other than leaving a comment on the article and asking them to remove it.

But since the people that run the sites seem to copy in every last word of a post, so from now on the bottom of every post of mine is going to include a copyright notice similar to the one I use under the photos.

I also looked into disabling right clicking, but then that would also disable the “open in new tab” option if someone wanted to click on a link. I suppose I could also start watermarking all the photos I put on the blog, but that would take ages to do, as all of the “batch watermark” programs I tried in the past were horrible.

*I looked at the banoffee pie recipe again. It appears to be lifted straight off the LJ cooking community, and not my actual blog.

Hmm. I’m going to test posting an image here just to make sure it posts over to the RSS and Facebook feed.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, or the RSS feed(s), please notify me.

For the second leg of our trip, we really only knew we wanted to be close enough to both Salzburg and Vienna to go on day trips. The railways Tim wanted to visit would have taken us too far away from the cities, so we looked on a map to pick an area within reasonable driving distance of railways and the cities and picked the Salzkammergut lakes. We spotted many tent symbols on the map, so we were confident we could find a place just by showing up. We started by circling the Attersee. The first town we came upon was called, I kid you not, Attersee am Attersee. I spotted a tourist information centre, so we decided to stop. Unfortunately, the centre was closed, but outside the building there was a tourist information computer and brochures for the region. The internet terminal pointed directly at the area’s tourism website, and we were able view several campsites and printed out several locations that looked good.

We headed around the lake. Some of the campsites were hard to find, but we finally spotted the sign for Camping Gruber in the town of Nußdorf*. Unlike Camping Hofer, Camping Gruber had controlled access, making it a little safer at night – which was a good thing, as the campsite was nearly deserted!

Camping Gruber has a lot of static caravans – people who park their caravan there year-round and come up on weekends and holidays. We saw a few people around on Sunday while we were setting up, but after the weekend, most people had left. Out of the sites that were still occupied, we were once again the only tent.

Camping Gruber has sanitation buildings at both ends, though the ones closer to the lake were nicer and newer. According to their website, they are remodelling their sanitation building for the 2011 season, and I can only assume they will be upgrading the older building. The older ones were dark and operated with automatic lights. Fine when the camp is busy, but not so great when you need the loo in the middle of the night. Twice I had the light go out on me while I was using it, and we never showered in the older facility. Both buildings had washing machines and dryers, though I did not check on the price. Both also had sinks for washing your dishes. The new building even had hobs (US: stove tops) you could use at the rate of 1 Euro for 20 minutes. We didn’t use it since we had a gas stove, but it’s nice to know if you run out of gas, you could still cook!

The newer building is also located on the waterfront, and at the pool and there is a small snack shop/cafe attached, too.

Both buildings have keyed access. When you check-in, you are given a waterproof wrist band that has a chip in it to operate the bathroom doors and the main gate. We nearly had a panic on our hands when we thought we had lost one, and then again a day later when we asked to extend our stay but hadn’t gotten our wrist bands updated. We had to park outside the campsite and walk in, and fortunately, the older bathrooms weren’t locked!

Like I said above, we were one of the few occupied pitches while we were there. It was a bit odd for it to be so quiet, but I suppose with it being near to the end of September, it made sense. The campsite was gorgeous though, and they even had their own boat launching dock right on the Attersee, as well as a diving board partway out into the lake. I was daring and waded into the water up to my ankles, but the water was quite cold and definitely not warm enough to swim in! Apparently the Attersee is so large that even with freezing temperatures, the lake hasn’t frozen over since the 1940s!

Our first day saw us getting settled in and setting up the tent. It was gaining on sunset time when we decided to walk down to the waterfront to take some photos and video.

[If you click on the photo once, it will take you to that photo’s page. If you click on the photo again, you will be able to view it full size. I have no idea why WordPress made it so complicated!]

[Photos taken by either myself or my husband, Tim and are all © Tim and Rebecca Lockley]

Day seven is our trip to the Styrtalbahn, but I might have to get Tim to help me with my post…all the railways start to blend together for me from this point on. Not because they weren’t interesting, I just get the four remaining lines we visited confused with each other for some reason.

*In German, a ß is used for a double S, so the town of Nußdorf is pronounced “Nussdorf”.

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I had a problem. Tim and I have stainless steel flasks we use for carrying around tea when we are out and about. And of course, we have milk in our tea in the flasks. You can imagine where this is going, I’m sure.

Yes, I forgot about emptying the flasks the time before last. I dumped them outside and discovered we had made tea-flavoured cottage cheese (no, I was not about to eat it!), and left a film on the inside and bottom of the flasks. I thought I had cleaned them out, but the next time I made tea in them, my husband complained that it tasted funny.

I searched google to find a way to clean out my flask, and after wading through many sites about how to clean your hip flask, I was getting no where. I changed my search term to “clean steel Thermos”, even though ours aren’t Thermos brand flasks, and found several e-how articles. I tried the following:

-bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) and hot water
-fill it halfway with white vinegar and top off with hot water
-mix hydrogen peroxide with bicarbonate of soda
-soak with regular dish soap

And nothing worked, so I went to a favourite LJ community of mine, Hip Domestic. I got lots of solutions that either didn’t make sense to me or that I didn’t have the supplies for, and then jackmaybenimble came forward with a great soloution – Steradent.

She instructed me to put the Steradent into the flasks (with water) and then to use pebbles. She suggested glass pebbles like the kind you can get to put in vases, but I just grabbed a handful of pea shingle from outside and washed them off. Seal up the flask and then shake. The combination of the fizzy Steradent tablet and the rocks act like an agitator to help scrape off the inside.

And you know what? Both flasks look brand new. I’m going to give them a re-wash to make sure all the Steradent is out, but there isn’t even a stain on the bottom! All the filmy stuff that was clinging to the sides of the flasks is gone, and we’re confident we will have tasty tea tomorrow!

Why isn’t this stuff listed on a cleaning website?

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[Finally blogging about our trip to Germany and Austria we took in September 2010!]

We learned something on this trip. Trying to break up the camping into two different sites is not a good idea – we lost nearly three days of our holiday just from setting up and tearing down our campsites. Next time, we will probably pick a location that’s not so much near some of the things we want to do, but within a reasonable driving/railing distance from everything we want to do, although I would go back to both campsites we were at in September in a heartbeat!

The first site, where we spent the first 4 nights of our trip was at Camping Hofer in Zell am Ziller. I picked this campsite based on it’s location to the Zillertalbahn, and based on the photos on the website. I emailed them, and the woman who runs the campsite wrote back promptly and let me make a preliminary reservation the day before we left!

When we arrived, it was still fairly light out. We were given a map of the site with circles around the available pitches. Tim and I took a mini tour looking at the different spots, and finally picked one that was located close enough to the sanitation building for late-night bathroom trips, but far enough away that the noise of people going in and out of the building wouldn’t bother us.

Our set-up took us a lot longer than we thought, hindered slightly by the rocky ground. It seemed that everywhere Tim tried to peg in a tent stake he would hit rock, but we finally managed to get ourselves set up.

We did not use many of the available facilities, and I honestly couldn’t have even told you where the pool was located, though there was one on property. As it was late September, I really wasn’t interested in swimming, anyway! We weren’t really there to just camp, as we had plans for nearly every day. If we had just been there on a camping holiday, we might have taken advantage of some of the facilities. They also have a restaurant and bar, but we glanced at the menu and though the prices were a bit steep for campers. The facility also has a gasthaus and is open throughout the Winter season for skiiers, though I wouldn’t fancy staying in a tent in the middle of Winter!

The sanitation building looked fairly new. It had washrooms and shower rooms for both genders – the toilets were in a separate WC room with just a single sink to wash your hands in, and then the room next door had a long row of sinks at a mirror, about 6 individual stalls with sinks and stools for washing, and 4 shower cubicles. The showers operated on an on-demand type system. Instead of just turning on the shower, you had to push to get water. The shower stream lasted for about 10 seconds, and you could press it as many times as you wanted (showering was free). While it was a slight inconvenience, it did mean you could lather up your hair without the water turned on, and I’m sure that helps the site to conserve water. The water was nice and hot, but you did have to usually duck out of the way the first time you turned it on to avoid the spray of cold as it warmed up. Each shower stall had an outer area to change in as well as the common area, so if you didn’t feel comfortable getting undressed in front of other people, you didn’t have to.

The sanitation building also housed 2 rooms for washing dishes. Each room had long counters along each side and 2 sinks on each side (4 in each room/8 sinks total). Not all of the sinks had hot water, however, so you always had to check first. The sinks were standard, industrial size sinks. You needed to provide the soap and sponge. We packed along our dishpan, too, but I wound up using it more for carrying the dishes back and forth than washing.

The facility also had a laundry room with only 2 washers and 2 dryers, as well as a hanging rack to drip dry clothing. I found the room to be very crowded and wound up taking my line-dry items back to the tent to hang outside. The laundry services wasn’t cheap, either. 7 Euros per load, so a wash and dry cycle cost 14 Euros. Crazy, but I suppose they have you by the nose. Next time we go camping, I’m going to try to pack enough underwear to last the whole trip, and hope our clothing doesn’t get too stinky, because I do not want to pay that much for laundry again!

Tim and I appeared to be the only people with a tent – everyone around us had caravans. Even funnier, a lot of the caravans had little satellite dishes outside! Can’t go on holiday without your telly, I guess.

The site had loads of international visitors, too. Lots of license plates from Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Fortunately, the family that runs the campsite speak English.

As for the camping itself – we both had a great time. The only time we didn’t like camping was the night it poured down rain – the sound of rain on the tent really makes you have to go! Since it was pouring, neither one of us wanted to make the walk to the sanitation building, especially as we left our waterproof jackets in the car. I wound up sacrificing one of my cooking pots to turn it into a chamber pot. Yeah, I know. That’s kind of gross. Sorry. But I promise I never intend on cooking in that vessel EVER again.

Camping also tends to get boring late at night. The light would finally fade around 10PM, and then Tim and I would try to read by the light of our torches, lanterns, and candles, but it never was enough light. The lack of light, paired with it getting cold without the sun meant we had a lot of early evenings….which meant that most mornings I was awake by 5 or 6!

All too soon our time at Camping Hofer was ending, and we had to take down the tent and pack everything back in the car to drive up to the Salzkammergut region. It took us several hours to get everything packed and into the car – mostly because we forgot how we had packed the car! Next time, we’ll be taking a photo of the car.

I only have one other picture to share from Camping Hofer – the telephone booth:

How funny to see a red phone booth in Austria!

Next up – either driving in Austria or setting up camp. I haven’t decided yet!

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I thought I’d take a short break from recapping Austria, and show you my latest taste of home creation.

The funny thing is, I rarely ordered meatball subs if we had subs, because I usually went for a chicken cheesesteak hoagie, but I really wanted them after reading a post on a food blog about them. I suppose I could have gone to Subway and ordered one (I assume UK subway has them), but this was more fun.

I bought a pack of bake at home Petit Pans so the bread would be warm and crusty, but obviously, you could use pre-baked rolls. I also used Cheddar cheese because we always have a big block of cheddar in the fridge, but Mozzarella would make it more “authentic”. Finally, I also used turkey mince for the meatballs, but a traditional meatball sub is most likely made of beef and pork.

You will need:

500g turkey mince
1 egg
50g breadcrumbs
4TBS basil
Tomato Passata (plain tomato sauce)
Grated Cheddar cheese, about 75g
4 petit pan rolls, or other rolls

Preheat the oven to 200C.
Combine mince, breadcrumbs, egg, and 2TBS of basil and form into small balls (about an inch to two inches). Line a baking sheet or casserole dish with parchment paper or spray with cooking oil and arrange meatballs in rows. It’s OK if they touch each other, you can cut them apart later. Cook at 200C for 15-20 minutes, or until meatballs are no longer pink and are brown on top. The larger the ball, the longer they will take to cook.
Combine passata and 2TBS basil and heat through. You can do this in the microwave or on the stovetop, whichever is easier.
Slice open rolls and hollow out one side of the roll. Place meatballs inside the hollow you just made, cover with sauce, and sprinkle with cheese.

One word: Yum.

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[Finally blogging about our trip to Germany and Austria we took in September 2010!]

When Tim and I were discussing all of our options for our trip, Tim mentioned the Achenseebahn, and told me about a cruise we could take around the Achensee on the Achenseeschifffahrt. And very conveniently, you can take the Achenseebahn from Jenbach to the Achensee (at Seespitz) and you could even ride the Zillertalbahn up to Jenbach from the valley, too.

I love riding on boats, so I asked Tim if we could go on the Achenseeschifffahrt…of course, this also meant riding on the Achenseebahn, so Tim wasn’t going to complain!

The Achensee is the largest late within Tyrol, spanning 9.4km and 133 metres deep at it’s deepest point. The Achensee has Trinkwasserqualität, which means you could dip a cup in the lake and drink it without any filtering. The Achensee is an alpine lake, bordered by the Karwendel mountains and the Brandenburg Alps (notice we’re out of the Zillertal alps), and the water temperature rarely reaches above 20°C. Despite the cold temperatures, the Achensee is suitable for surfing, but we did not see any surfers in late-September! The water itself was a beautiful shade of green. Tim calls it “toothpaste green”, but it just reminds me of pine trees. I’m surprised the water is potable given it’s shade of green!

The cruise originates at Seespitz, right next to where the Achenseebahn stop is. By the time the train had gone halfway up the mountain, we had collected a few more people, so there were about a dozen people boarding the boat at Seespitz. This by no means meant we had a quiet cruise! The Achenseeschifffahrt is used by tourists as a sea cruise, but is also used as transportation between the small towns bordering the Achensee. At one point, a bus worth of tourists boarded, only to debark at the very next port. Tim and I had purchased a complete trip around the lake.

We packed our flasks and some snacks, but were highly disappointed to see signs informing us not to eat/drink food brought onto the boat. Checking the prices of a cup of tea or coffee on the boat, and we could see why! The prices were quite steep, but they had a captive audience and if we wanted to drink a cup of tea without getting in trouble for drinking from our flasks, we had no choice. Later on in the cruise, after the top deck had filled up with lots of people, we did see several passengers pulling cans of coke out of coolers, but Tim and I still felt uncomfortable bending the rules.

We met several people while on our journey, too. I was attempting to take a photo of Tim and I by extending my arms out and hoping I could get us both in the picture, when an Italian gentleman sitting near us offered to take our photo for us. As the boat started to fill up, Tim and I had to share our bench with other people, and we wound up sharing with a German gentleman who had a very large, professional looking Nikon camera. He attempted to talk to us, but I don’t know many technical terms in German, Tim only knows railway technical terms in German, and the gentleman spoke little English, but between our strange mix of German, English, and just pointing at things, we did manage to “converse” with him….though Tim thinks the only thing the man was trying to point out was that his camera was bigger than ours!

Our cruise was cold, despite the beautiful day. Then again, we were high up in the Alps, so what did we expect? At one point I was bundled up in 2 jumpers, a fleece, scarf, gloves, and hat. I was very glad I had thought to stick scarves, hats, and gloves in the car while we were packing!

We had a great time on the lake, and once we got back to Seespitz, it was a short wait for the next dampfzug to take us back down the mountain.

[If you click on the photo once, it will take you to that photos page. If you click on the photo again, you will be able to view it full size. I have no idea why WordPress made it so complicated!]

[Photos taken by either myself or my husband, Tim and are all © Tim and Rebecca Lockley]

Next post – campsite tear down and set-up, complete with reviews of both campsites we stayed at.

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[Finally blogging about our trip to Germany and Austria we took in September 2010!]

[the above vlog appeared on my blog months ago, I’m just re-posting it as it’s relevant to today’s post!]

I’m blogging about both railway trips in the same blog post because these two railways are very different, and yet related to each other. Both railways originate in Jenbach. Jenbach is very special, in that it is the ONLY railway station in Austria to have three different lines meet of three different gauges. First, there is the standard gauge OBB (Österreichische Bundesbahnen) line. OBB runs both passenger and freight trains, and from Jenbach you can get anywhere in Europe by travelling on OBB. Your trip might involve several transfers, but you can still originate in Jenbach! One of the best things I saw while watching trains in Jenbach was the train full of lorries (US: 16-wheelers), complete with cabs! Apparently moving them by train is the best way to get things over the mountains. Unfortunately, we were never fast enough with our cameras to catch photos or video of this.

The second line to meet in Jenbach is the Achenseebahn. The Achenseebahn is a meter-gauge (meaning the distance between the rails is measured in metric as opposed to imperial) partial cog railway between Jenbach and Seespitz. The Achenseebahn is Europe’s oldest cog railway, and about four miles long. The Achenseebahn takes you up the mountain to Seespitz and the Achensee. As this entry will be very photo heavy due to it being about two railways, I will blog about our trip around the Achensee in a separate post.

The third line that meets in Jenbach, and my personal favourite of all the Austrian lines we rode on, is the Zillertalbahn. Unfortunately, their website as it is currently down. The Zillertalbahn is a narrow-gauge railway line at only two feet, five and seven-eighths inches. The Zillertalbahn runs the opposite direction of the Achenseebahn, and takes you into the valley of the Zillertal mountains between Jenbach and Mayrhofen. The Zillertalbahn runs regular commuter-type passenger service, daily special steam (dampfzug) service, as well as freight movement for the logging industry. The Zillertalbahn also happens to run through the village we were camping in, Zell am Ziller.

We knew we wanted to ride the dampfzug the entire length of the line, but instead of driving down to Jenbach, we decided to get on one of the commuter trains from Zell am Ziller to Jenbach. We purchased day tickets, which would allow us unlimited rides along the Zillertalbahn for the day, but did not include travel on the dampfzug. We had to purchase those tickets separately at Jenbach.

The Zillertalbahn certainly is special. The dampfzug trips are special trips for tourists, so they pull out all the stops, including a passenger car entirely made from Swarovski Crystal (called the krystallwagen and a brake van (US: caboose) decked out to look like a giant beer barrel for the local brew – Zillertal Bier.

And the coaches looked rather familiar to me, too. The Zillertalbahn had donated some of their surplus to the Welshpool and Llanfair Railway, and I had a ride in one of their donated coaches when I visited Wales in August. This was not to be the only connection back to the Wales trip on this trip, either!

Tim and I both enjoyed the ride. Previously, we had seen the valley through the car windows as we drove back and forth between Zell am Ziller and Innsbruck the day before (the day we arrived it was too dark to see). The Zillertalbahn line runs parallel to the road for quite a bit of it’s run, perfect for gricing later, but it also runs through the valley and into some of the smaller villages you wouldn’t even notice from the road. We also got a closer look at the freight industry as the train ran directly parallel to the logging yards. I’m completely not technical, so if you want more technical information about this, you’ll have to ask Tim, but basically, they load standard gauge freight wagons onto narrow gauge chassis and take the freight up to Jenbach, where it gets loaded back onto a standard gauge train. I hope I got that right! Tim’s at work right now and I can’t ask him, but I’m sure he’ll correct me in the comments if I got something wrong!

We split up once we got to Mayrhofen – Tim to go take some more pictures, and me to find a loo! One thing I learned in my travels in Austria is that public toilets charge a fee. Anywhere from 20 cents to as high as 75 cents and even a full Euro in some cases. You just insert the coins into the vending slot on the door, and then the door will unlock for you. I had somehow wandered into the middle of a tourist group from Yorkshire who had also been riding the dampfzug, and the ladies all decided they would save their money by holding shut the stall door for each other, letting several people use the loo from one single coin. As I spoke English, the ladies in the group just assumed I was with them and let me join them in sharing the coin.

I found Tim, and we decided to get something to eat in the small pub (if you could call it that!) in the station. We had the classic German dish – frankfurters. This was not the first time nor was it the last time we had frankfurters on our trip – they seem to be everywhere and it reminded me a lot of finding hot dog stands on every corner in Philadelphia. This time, I urged Tim to try the mustard (Estragon Senf). He’s not a big mustard fan, but he decided he liked the Estragon Senf enough to ask what it was and where we could get some to take home. The barmaid showed us the bottle and we were able to find it on our trip to Billa that afternoon.

We boarded the train for our trip back to Jenbach, and as it was still fairly early, we decided to hang around Jenbach and took some photos. Then, we decided to find the railway bridge that crosses the Inn River. We were in luck, and not only caught several service (commuter) trains, but also managed to catch the second dampfzug of the day going across it!

The following morning, we returned to Jenbach, this time by car, to ride the Achenseebahn. We discovered an “early bird special” if we took the first train of the day. The Zillertalbahn wouldn’t have gotten us to Jenbach in time, so we drove instead, and just narrowly made it onto the train to discover that we would be the only passengers for the majority of the trip! It was like having our very own chartered train ride that we didn’t have to pay charter prices for! The Achenseebahn is very steep at parts as it takes you up a mountain, so the train uses a cog wheel or rack to get up the steeper parts. A cog wheel is a wheel in the middle of the train that has teeth on it and it uses it’s teeth to grab onto the middle rail to help pull the train up the mountain. The Achenseebahn also has to push the train for half of the trip as it is too steep to pull it. Tim told me this also acts as a braking system to prevent the coach from sliding down the mountain. Yikes! If you watch the video above, you can see the middle cog “track”.

When we got to the top, we took a boat trip around the Achensee. Like I said, I will blog the video and photos of the Achensee later to not clog up this entry with more video and pics!

Since we got up so early, we had plenty of daylight left once we returned to Jenbach. The boat ride was a few hours long, and the train ride not so long, either, so we wound up returning to Jenbach around lunchtime. We needed something to do for the rest of the afternoon, so after getting some lunch (I really think it might have been frankfurters again), Tim had an idea. He wanted to grice the Zillertalbahn’s dampfzug. He asked me if I would be willing to take the video while he took photos, and a new hobby for me was born. I absolutely LOVED chasing after the train and stopping to film it. If you watch the first video posted in this entry, it’s mostly all footage I took while we were chasing the Zillertalbahn. We even made some “friends”, too. There were two little girls who started to recognize us each time the train passed where we were, so they would start waving at us. Absolutely adorable. We followed the train all the way from Jenbach to Mayrhofen, though we didn’t catch it at every stop as we had to contend with other drivers and small country lanes! Once in Mayrhofen, we took our last photos of the Zillertalbahn and headed back to our campsite.

[If you click on the photo once, it will take you to that photos page. If you click on the photo again, you will be able to view it full size. I have no idea why WordPress made it so complicated!]

[Photos taken by either myself or my husband, Tim and are all © Tim and Rebecca Lockley]

Sorry about all the photos, but we have so many good photos and everything in Austria is so beautiful, I can’t help it! Hopefully, by putting them in gallery format with thumbnails it cuts down on loading time for you!

Next up, a spin around the Achensee!

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[Finally blogging about our trip to Germany and Austria we took in September 2010!]

Tim and I decided to split our trip evenly – for every railway we visited, I got a day to pick something I wanted to see. Sometimes, things overlapped and we did both a railway and something I wanted to do because we needed the railway for transportation, but for the most part, we stuck to our plan.

Today’s trip was actually Tim’s idea for me, so kudos to him for knowing me so well! Swarovski, as many of you know, is a synthetic crystal made in Austria. They use it in all sorts of things from crystal figurines to dinnerware to jewellery…and I use Swarovski a lot in my jewellery creations. Tim spotted a brochure for Kristallwelten, and we headed out.

Kristallwelten was nothing like I had expected, but I still loved it. Kristallwelten is located directly next to Swarovski’s factory, but it is not a factory tour. Kristallwelten is more of an art museum with a twist – everything in the museum is made from Swarovski crystal or features the crystals in some way.

When you walk in, one of the first things you will get to see is the Kristalldom. You walk inside, and it’s like being in the interior of a giant Swarovski crystal. The panels reflect the room back at you, and it can get very confusing! One time I thought I was heading towards Tim, but it turned out I was walking towards one of his reflections!

Kristallwelten is based around a “giant” and his possessions – The outside of Kristallwelten is a giant head with a waterfall, complete with Swarovski crystals for eyes, and you enter the attraction through his ear. Inside, you can view his possessions, including a giant accordion, walking stick, and gloves. Outside the attraction, the grounds are an impressive garden culminating in a hedge maze in the shape of a hand. And even though it was a fairly “small” maze as far as hedge mazes go, it still freaked me out when I was in it and didn’t know where I was!

Kristallwelten is located in Wattens and is the second highest visited Austrian attraction, second to Schloss Schönbrunn in Vienna (we didn’t go there on this visit, as I was there in 1997). Kristallwelten caries a hefty admission fee. Adult admission is 9,50 Euros, but children up until the age of 12 are free, so that’s a break for parents. I’m not sure Kristallwelten is very child-appropriate, though. Some of the sections are quite dark and scary, and we witnessed children running around, not paying attention to where they were going or what they were looking at, and then getting separated from their parents.

Attached to Kristallwelten is of course, a Swarovski shop. I was really looking forward to our shop visit, because I thought I might be able to get some beads to make a bracelet as a souvenir. Unfortunately, the prices directly at Swarovski were just as expensive as ordering online from Swarovski, and my online supply company came in as less expensive even with factoring in shipping to the UK!

Kristallwelten took up our morning. We packed sandwiches and sat in the gardens to eat and took a stroll through the gardens, where we explored the hedge maze and climbed up to a lookout point where you could see the entire maze.

We headed back to the car and decided to go to Innsbruck, where we learned an important lesson: Don’t drive into a city without a map! We had our big Austrian road map, but nothing for the cities and we got lost several times trying to follow the directional signs. But we did get a spectacular view of the Bergiselschanze (ski jump) used at the Innsbruck Olympics! We planned to go to Schloss Ambras, but by the time we found it I wasn’t feeling too well and didn’t want to climb up all the steps, so we just took pictures of the castle and the gardens. Tim asked if we could instead take a ride on the trams up into the hills.

I thought this would be great fun and a great way to see some more scenery, but I was to be disappointed on the trip up. The tram was crowded and we wound up standing for most of the journey, which did not help my feeling ill. We also had to spend part of the time standing directly on the bendy part of the bendy-tram (like a bendy bus, only it was a tram), which really started to give me motion sickness.

But, the trip to the top was worth it, and we found a small cafe to get a drink and a bite to eat at. As we were the only patrons other than family at the cafe, we were treated very well and even were offered biscuits (cookies) out of their personal stash.

Fortunately, we were able to get good seats for the trip back down and were able to look out the window. Below you’ll find an edited video of our hour-long trip back!

[If you click on the photo once, it will take you to that photos page. If you click on the photo again, you will be able to view it full size. I have no idea why WordPress made it so complicated!]

[Photos taken by either myself or my husband, Tim and are all © Tim and Rebecca Lockley]

Next Up: Zillertalbahn!

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Has it really been two weeks? Oh, dear. I’m so sorry to have kept all of you waiting for the rest of the Austria trip. I got sick sometime around Valentine’s Day, and I’m still not 100% better, even though we went to Brighton last weekend for ModelWorld. Sadly, my visit this week to see my friend Jessy is currently on hold due to me still having symptoms and not wanting to pass things on to her or her children. I’m hopeful that I’ll make it down later in the week, though.

We also are getting new to us bedroom furniture at the end of March, and need to put up lining paper in the bedroom, re-paint the walls and trim, and get new carpeting installed…plus make it so we can put the new furniture in the bedroom. I don’t know how much I’ll be around until after we get all that done. Working on the bedroom will be taking top priority, as we must move the furniture on the 28th.

To add to all this — it’s competition season for my chorus! We’ve got a competition in a few weeks time and then our regional convention/competition in May….with loads of extra rehearsals on weekends to prepare! If you think that’s all we have going on right now…no. It’s also model railway show season! It’s absolutely crazy around here!!

But rest assured, the rest of the posts are coming. I don’t think I’ll get one out tonight (I’m feeling tired!), but I’ll try to get something up tomorrow. If I don’t get to Jessy’s, I’ll try to post every other day this week.

Oh, and we have a bit of good news – Tim found out his new MOM position will start on the 3rd of May. The only downside is his weeks away at training will overlap my chorus convention…and the weekends will be the only time we’ll see each other while he’s away on his course, so that won’t be fun, but at least we now know when he’ll start!

We also re-arranged our kitchen yesterday and finally got rid of the in-laws picnic table we had been using as a kitchen table. We bought Leksvik from IKEA – it’s a small table with two drop leaves. Perfect for two, and expandable for six. Plus, it fits a lot better in our kitchen! Photos will be posted once I get things back in order. Right now the kitchen is still a bit of a mess!

Hope everyone is doing well!!

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Tim and I spent this weekend with our friends Nicky, Dave R, and Pete. The five of us have decided to get together at least once a month – they provide the pizza, we bring along a pudding (US: dessert). Last time we got together, I took an apple and blackberry crumble along. This time, I wanted to do something different.

I made a black forest cake (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, see? It is related to the Austria/Germany trip!) back at the beginning of August for our friend Dave B’s birthday. It was delicious – we didn’t even have a single piece left of it! Nicky and I were going through my food pics over IM and I said I thought I might make that for this weekend. To make a long story short, her brother (Dave R) made a joke about how I needed to make 5 cakes – one for each of us. Originally I had said that I thought a cupcake version of this would be too messy….but then I had to rise to the challenge, especially after someone on one of the cooking/baking communities I read posted a link to Bake it in a Cake. If that person can bake loads of things into cupcakes….I could do a black forest version. I even modelled my recipe off of their cherry chocolate cheesecake recipe.

The first attempt I made was a half-failure, I’ll be honest. I knew I wanted to take 10 cupcakes with me this weekend (2 cupcakes per person), which meant that would leave two “extra” – just enough for Tim and I to taste test them. The first batch tasted GOOD, but they were too gooey. The cupcakes were spilling out over the top of the liners, the paper stuck to the cakes, and there was just no way that the cupcakes could be eaten without a fork. The filling leaked through the bottom of the paper liner (AFAIK, they don’t sell aluminium liners in the UK) making the liner soggy. I looked back at the cheesecake recipe, and noticed that they gave their cupcakes a crust. Black Forest Gateau sometimes has a biscuit base, so I thought “why not?” and since I had plenty of batter left, attempt number two was made. I am pleased to say that the addition of the bicsuit layer helped to keep it less of a mess!

So, here’s how to make them! This recipe will make 24 Black Forest Cupcakes. I didn’t half the recipe because of the possibility of making a mistake, but when I make these again, I will probably cut the recipe in half and only make 12.

You will need:

200g biscuits (I used 100g plain digestives and 100g chocolate biscuits) (US: cookies)
150g butter, melted

125g plain chocolate (US: baking chocolate), melted*
225g butter, softened
295g sugar
3 eggs (mine were medium sized)
2 tsp vanilla extract
300g flour (I happened to have self-rising, but plain will probably work, too)
4 TBS unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 tsp bicarbonate of soda (US: if using baking soda, only use 2tsp**)
1/4 tsp sea salt (regular salt will do fine)
320ml milk
2 tsp cherry brandy (optional)

1 can cherry pie filling
1 jar maraschino cherries
1 packet dream topping/whipped topping (US: Dream Whip or Cool Whip) or cream for whipping if you’re good at that
good quality chocolate, about 25g (for garnish)

cupcake tin
cupcake liners

hint: To melt your chocolate without worrying about it overcooking if you don’t have a double boiler (I don’t!), place a bowl filled with the chocolate in a larger bowl filled with boiling water. Be careful the water doesn’t get in the chocolate.

hint: If you have cookies/biscuits the same size as the bottom of the cupcake tin, don’t worry about the butter. Just place the cookie directly in the bottom of the paper case. An Oreo (with the filling scraped off) might work well!

hint: to make the whipped topping whip better, chill the bowl and the beaters for at least an hour before you make it.

Preheat oven to 175C and put the liners in the tin.
Melt 125g chocolate.

Make the biscuit layer by crushing the biscuits until they are a fine powder. Combine biscuits with 150g melted butter and spoon into cupcake liners. You’ll need about a teaspoonfull per each cupcake. Use your fingers to make sure the biscuit mix covers the bottom of the cupcake liner. This does not need to be super thick.

Cream together sugar, 225g butter, vanilla, and eggs. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt, cocoa powder, baking powder, and bicarb. If you don’t have a sifter (I don’t), either mix it together really good or push the ingredients through a strainer. Add melted chocolate to the butter mixture. Alternate adding milk and flour mixture, beating until smooth. If you have cherry brandy, add it at this time. Your batter should look light and fluffy.

(Please note, that picture is from the first batch. DO NOT fill your cupcakes that full!) Spoon 1-2 teaspoon’s worth of batter in each liner and spread the mixture so it covers the biscuit base. Then, spoon a teaspoonfull of the cherry pie topping into each liner (make sure you have at least one cherry in each cupcake). Cover the cherry filling with another teaspoon or two of batter. You shouldn’t be able to see any cherry filling.
Bake 30 minutes and allow to cool completely.

Drain maraschino cherries and make dream topping. Take your 25g of good quality chocolate and use a vegetable peeler to shave it into curls.
Put one spoonful of dream topping on each cupcake – just enough to go nearly to the edge. Top with 1-2 maraschino cherries and sprinkle with the chocolate shavings. There will be plenty of topping left. Just freeze the extra for another treat!

*I used a combination of plain chocolate, 85% cacao “good quality” chocolate, and 5 Cherry Cordial Hershey Kisses
**For unknown (and un-googleable) reasons, UK bicarbonate of soda is not as powerful as US baking soda. I’ve noticed I have to add 50% – 100% more in most of my recipes to get them to rise the same as they would have in the US.

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Every year after a holiday involving turkey, my aunt would make Turkey Tetrazzini and she would always invite my mom and I over for dinner because it “made a lot”. Each time, we’d go and I’d eat it, but I never really enjoyed it. It just never appealed to me, and I can only speculate on why. It had nothing to do with my aunt’s cooking – she’s a fabulous cook, and many of my recipes come from her. The recipe called for tinned mushrooms, and I’m just not a huge fan of mushrooms. Maybe it was the mushrooms that turned me off, I don’t know.

I was flipping through my Betty Crocker Cookbook and I came across the Chicken Tetrazzini recipe, which as far as I can tell is the same recipe my aunt always uses. A lot of my family recipes as it turns out have come straight out of Betty. That’s not a bad thing, it just shows to me that Betty’s recipes really are good. I decided there had to be a way to make this taste good to me, so I set about changing a few things to make it taste better and to make it healthier. The first thing I did was swap out those mushrooms for peas!

So here’s my take on this Betty Crocker classic.

You will need:

200g whole wheat spaghetti, broken into quarters
2 TBS butter
30g whole wheat flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
230ml chicken broth or stock
230ml milk
3 TBS red wine
225g cooked cut-up chicken
110g frozen peas
50g Parmesan cheese
50g bread crumbs

Dutch oven

Preheat oven to 175C. Cook pasta according to directions on packet.
In the Dutch oven, melt butter over low heat (if you don’t have a dutch oven, you will need a regular sauce pan and a casserole dish).
Stir in flour, salt, and pepper and cook until smooth.
Add broth and milk, bring to a boil and boil for one minute. Sauce will be creamy and thick.
Drain pasta and add to dutch oven along with chicken, peas, and red wine. Stir until coated in sauce. If you don’t have a dutch oven, transfer the mixture to a casserole dish.
Combine bread crumbs and parmesan cheese and sprinkle over top of dish.
Place uncovered in oven and bake 30-45 minutes until hot and bubbly. Check your dish after about 20 minutes. If the cheese on top is starting to burn, put the lid on.

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[Finally blogging about our trip to Germany and Austria we took in September 2010!]

Today was THE day. I was finally going to see what we affectionately dubbed “my castle”. I blogged about this all the way back in December 2009 when we started planning our trip, though at that time we had been planning on staying in Germany and not Austria. In between December 2009 and going on our trip in September 2010, our plans changed A LOT…but the one constant was always going to be visiting Neuschwanstein.

Neuschwanstein has been the inspiration behind many artists, poets, writers, and….animators. Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World is partially based on Neuschwanstein. It’s no surprise…the castle is gorgeous. Even without going inside, I would have been completely satisfied with my visit having finally gotten the chance to gaze upon “my castle”.

I printed directions before we left the UK to get us from the hotel to the castle, and they seemed to work pretty well. At one point, we were driving on a tree-lined narrow road and I could catch glimpses of the castle through the trees. We pulled over and discovered a path through the bushes (obviously well-travelled by other visitors!) and I got my first in-person look at Neuschwanstein. It took my breath away and nearly had me in tears. We got back in the car, drove about 100 feet, and stopped again, this time to take a photo of the OTHER castle near Schwangau, Hohenschwangau. These two castles are within yodelling distance of each other. We did not tour Hohenschwangau that day, as my main focus was getting to Neuschwanstein, but we will go back and explore it on another trip. There’s so much to do right in that small area I could see us easily planning a week just staying right in that area.

We finally reached the castle grounds. You need to purchase your tickets before you get up to the castle at a special ticket booth (located next to one of the many souvenir shops!). This is also where you would purchase tickets for Hohenschwangau, as well as a combination ticket for both castles. After you have your ticket, you can opt to walk up the mountain, take a bus, or ride behind a horse-drawn carriage. As much fun as the carriage sounded, we opted for the bus ride up and the walk back down, figuring down would be lots easier than up! Tickets are for timed entries depending on what language you want the tour in (tours are offered in German, French, English, and then a multilingual tour where you walk around with a device similar to a mobile phone that translates into something like 30 languages), so you really need to watch how you get up to the castle and make sure there aren’t long queues! In fact, we nearly didn’t make it on time as the first bus to come down filled up with everyone ahead of us, leaving us standing about 5 people back from the front.

The bus drops off right near Marienbrücke (Mary’s Bridge), a very rickety wood and iron bridge that goes over the gorge giving you a perfect view of Neuschwanstein. Tim braved the bridge despite his dislike of heights to take a few photos for me. The bridge is still a decent uphill walk to the castle gates, so we had to get on our way quickly so we wouldn’t miss our booked slot.

Tours start from the courtyard. You can’t take large bags into the castle, so they offer lockers you can rent. Tim and I knew this ahead of time and left our knapsacks in the car, stuffing water bottles into the camera bag and my handbag. Each tour has a number attached to it and a barcode on your ticket. When your number is called, you have to go to the barrier, insert your ticket, and go in. When our tour was called, there was a mad (rude) dash to the barriers and I nearly got knocked over twice by people who seemed to think they had to be first.

Before I tell you about our visit, let’s talk about Neuschwanstein. The castle was built in the 19th century by a man who is better known as Mad Ludwig. It was intended to be his personal refuge, however he died while the castle was still being constructed. Ludwig wanted his castle to be a fairy tale castle and to pay tribute to Richard Wagner, and so all of the rooms are decorated to represent his musical works. Ludwig also had a slight obsession with swans, and there are multiple swans in every single room – carved into furniture, worked into the paintings, and even carved into the crown moulding. In fact, one of the first things you see when you walk in is a life-sized swan sculpture. Neuschwanstein means “new stone swan” in German.

Photography is not permitted inside the castle, but I did find a website with some interior photos.

The other people in our tour group continued to be rude. It’s really a shame, but some people just didn’t have the patience to wait their turn and were pushing and shoving at us. At one point, Tim and I even got separated by a crowd of people because they managed to push by me. It’s a castle, for crying out loud! It’s not going anywhere! Despite (or in spite of, take your pick) the rude tourists, we still had a great time. I was in awe. At one point we were looking out some windows at the scenery below, and I asked our tour guide if it was all right to take some photos looking out the (open) window. She gave me permission, so guess what happened? Yep. About a dozen people in our group all went over to the window and started taking photos and I had to wait until they were done before I could go take mine. Not that the guide wouldn’t have given the others permission, but it just really rubbed me the wrong way to have that happen when I was the one to ask about a picture!

At the end of the tour, you can take a self-guided tour of the kitchens on your way to the gift shop and cafe. The kitchen was amazing, and I couldn’t help but dream of the kinds of meals I’d cook if I had that large of an oven and hob at my fingertips! Once again, we ran into an issue when we tried to use the cafe. Tim and I didn’t know what was going on and there weren’t any signs, so we stood there by the counter waiting to place our order while one of the workers did something away from the counter (but saw us). Tim and I both assumed that since she saw us, she would come over to serve us as soon as she was done. Not so. Three ladies walked in behind us, got in front of us, and started calling for the woman’s attention. We thought we’d get served before these ladies because the woman had seen us waiting, but no. She goes and gets the food those ladies ordered, and then goes back to her other work, completely ignoring Tim and I. Not ones to hang around where we’re not wanted, we left and decided to grab food at the food and drink stands dotting the perimeter of the castle.

We started walking down the footpath taking photos and Tim was trying to find a spot to set up his camera for a self-timed shot. Ironically, a British couple heard Tim and I talking and asked us to take their photo in exchange for them taking ours. Worked out perfectly! We started hiking down the mountain and found a footpath to follow that went through the woods. It was dotted with benches, so we had someplace to stop and rest if we needed to.

By the time we got to the bottom, we decided it was time to head towards Austria. We had booked a few nights at Camping Hofer in Zell am Ziller, and we had about a two-and-a-half hour drive to get there. Since we’d be setting up camp, we wanted to make sure we arrived while it was still daylight, and the office at the campsite closed at 7PM. If we arrived later, we’d have been forced to find a B&B for the night. Arriving in daylight also gave us the chance to see what shops were available near the campsite. Fortunately, we passed a Billa supermarket on our way.

We arrived while it was still daylight. One of the very odd things about where we were was the complete lack of a sunset. I think it was because we were in a valley completely surrounded by mountains on all sides. The sun must have been behind a mountain. Tim and I just barely managed to get everything set up and Tim was blowing up the mattress as it started to get dark. I fished out a torch (US: flashlight) and managed to make us cups of tea and instead of going back out to Billa, we decided to eat whatever we happened to still have in the cooler that night. A review of the campsite will be made in a separate post.

We had an amazing day! Tim really spoiled me on this trip, and day three was to be another day of my choice – Swarovski’s Kristallwelten

And the photos…oh, you know you want to look!

If you click on the photo once, it will take you to that photos page. If you click on the photo again, you will be able to view it full size. I have no idea why WordPress made it so complicated!

I read a lot of food blogs because I love to try new ideas in the kitchen, and one of the best foodie blogs out there is probably Serious Eats. Some of the posts aren’t relevant to me when they review restaurants across the US, but I still always find it interesting. SE has several recurring serials, including one called “French in a Flash“, a series of easy French recipes.

About a week or so before the super bowl, an entry appeared for Hot Dog Vol-au-Vent. The creator of the recipe describes the dish as similar to Saucisson en Croûte, which is similar to a UK sausage roll. You know what I call it? Posh (American) Pigs in a Blanket.

The reason I add the “American” marker is because UK Pigs in a Blanket are different from US ones. In the UK, most people when they describe making Pigs in a Blanket are referring to sausages wrapped in bacon. I myself made these at Christmas when I had my “rescued Christmas” dinner as they are a staple on the UK Christmas table. In the US, however, Pigs in a Blanket are usually made from hot dogs or “little smokies” and involve a tube of Pillsbury Crescent Rolls.

When I spotted the Vol-au-Vent recipe, I was curious and thought I would give it a go, but the recipe calls for onion (which I’m allergic to) and something called fleur de sel. A quick google search revealed that fleur de sel is French sea salt. I did not have any French sea salt, but I did have a canister of Saxa sea salt, so that would just have to do. As for the hot dog part – please don’t buy hot dogs in a can. At least go for the ones sold in the cooked meats aisle, like Hessey’s.

Here’s how you make my version of Posh Pigs in a Blanket.

You will need:

One sheet of puff pastry, thawed and unrolled (I bought a “light” version from Tesco)
16 pieces of hot dogs (you can cut 8 in half, or cut 5 into thirds and only make 15 – I did this and wrapped up the spare bit of pastry with just some mustard. Yum.)
Your favourite mustard (ours is Estragon Senf we brought back from Austria)
1 egg
poppy seeds
sea salt

Preheat the oven to 200C.
Take your sheet of puff pastry, and cut it in half horizontally (I used my pizza cutter), then cut each half into 8 strips.
Give each strip a dot of mustard (however much you’d like), and then roll each strip around a piece of hot dog. Place the wrapped hot dogs seam side down on a baking sheet.
Give the egg a whisk and use a pastry brush to give the tops an egg wash.
Sprinkle with poppy seeds (I used about 2 teaspoons) and sea salt.
Bake for 25-30 minutes until pastry is golden brown.

My husband enjoyed these so much he informed me that I had to make them again!