It's My Birthday and other things

It's my birthday

They come around far too quickly these days

My husband Alan is buying me a tripod for my camera

The long delay on some of the menu settings cause hand shake so I thought this would be a good idea

My son has bought me an external hard drive for my computer

I will now be able to just hook into any computer and have all my own stuff there as well as back up everything on my computer

I do not want to repeat the scenario I had when my last computer crashed

My daughter Jane bought me my favourite Eden Belgium chocolates plus an enormous sized bottle of Origins Spearmint and Lemon Hand Lotion plus Michael Palin's latest book

The New Europe

I have been watching the series on TV and have copied it onto DVD and now I can read about it and enjoy the photographs

I appreciate all of these gifts plus the chocolates from friends

Everybody seems to know that I am a Belgium Chocoholic

Actually these will probably last until Christmas as I limit myself to two per night

Alan also treated me to a delicious speciality ready meal from Marks and Spencers so that I did not have to cook and at the meeting this morning there was a Belgium chocolate and caramel birthday cake

What more could a girl ask for

Yesterday Jane and Chris came over for the day with dear little Oliver

He is 15 months old now

I made some cake that I thought would suit Oliver

It was very moorish if you have a sweet tooth so I will leave you the recipe

It is a children's recipe where the author likes to make sure that her recipes are not just empty calories but nourishing ingredients too

Everyone enjoyed it including me whose hand of course was on the camera

I'm sure you can easily guess whose hand belongs to who

Rice Krispie Squares

100g white chocolate 75g unsalted butter
75g golden syrup 60 g Rice Krispies
60g porridge oats 50g chopped dried apricots
30g pecans, finely chopped

Melt together chocolate, butter and syrup.
In a large bowl mix together rice krispies, oats, apricots and pecans
Stir in melted chocolate mixture

Line a fairly shallow 8 inch square baking tin
Spoon mixture into tin and level surface
Place in fridge to set and cut into squares

Store in fridge. Makes 9 squares

Having been asked by "Midlife Cycler" if I could convert to American Cups, here is the nearest I can manage. Fortunately I do have an American cup measure.

Apricots 8 Pecans 1/2 cup Chocolate 3 3/4ozs Butter 2 3/4ozs

Syrup 1/4 cup Krispies 2 1/2 cups Oats 2/3rds cup

I was so excited last night, I was able to get Page Elements up

Not only that but it uploaded more photos to my sidebar

I have been having problems with this for months

I would be lucky if I could get it to load once in a week

Getting the sidebar picture download was almost impossible

I don't know if this is an issue that blogger has fixed or that being Saturday night it was a quiet time

especially as it was the nearest Saturday to Guy Fawkes

(more of that tomorrow)

Anyhow I was reluctant to close it down in case I could not get it again

So I used it some more and loaded some Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter photos

I was determined to get some use of it!