Almost forgot to put the spice mix in this pilau. I'd turned the hob off and lifted the pan up to pour into the rice and everything.

Very nearly just made oily onion rice! 😅

Also this is a Buckingham England sieve. They're a British brand. It's stainless steel. We're known for our steel, it's the one thing we're actually good at.

"Made in China" though. 😆

The sieve I bought for filtering the rest of this chocolate batch, in case it's bits if granite or something thats ended up in it from the melanger, arrived. It's sold as a 23.5cm diameter and the images showed it as the measurement excluding a lip at the top. 23.5cm is the exact size of the lid for our 5ltr pan, excluding its lip, so sounded perfect.

Nope. Drops right through. 23.5cm is the size including the lip. 😩

So I'm going to need a food safe 23cm gasket of some kind too.

Cursed batch!

Logged in to the business PayPal to buy something, and it's showing the billing address as what I thought was our home address. Didn't seem like this should be the case but Kate was in a meeting so I figured I'd just wait until she's out and then check I'm safe to continue (honestly, bank stuff is never my domain!).

Anyway, she's out now so I click back into this tab and look again at the address. It's the office address. Of course it's the office address. Why wouldn't it be?

My brain. 🤦‍♂️

Worth it.

Bearing in mind I do have the extractor fan on and this thing is half way across the kitchen.

I guess now we know it works.

This air purifier thing that we bought has just decided that my cooking has made the air quality in here shockingly bad, and is now blasting filtered air through. Rude! 😮

When you're heating up the remaining half of a vegetable goan curry that you made yesterday, and you're midway through making some herb rotis for it, and brown rice, but... It's just not the chicken tikka with mushroom pilau, garlic and coriander naan, and couple of onion bhajis that you're actually craving. 😭

Rackspace have confirmed that this outage was caused by an issue with the authentication process of their OpenStack API, which we use for listing media files within our website administration panels, uploading new content, and for some front-end image thumbnails.

Media that's loaded into website front-ends directly rather than via thumbnail scripts continued to work as normal, so most content was unaffected.

Apologies again for the disruption.

Awaiting Rackspace to confirm what exactly the problem was, but I can confirm that we're fully operational again now.

We're aware of an issue at Rackspace currently, which is affecting images and other media loading across some of our hosted websites. Apologies for the disruption, we've raised this with Rackspace and will update as soon as a reason is known.

In case anybody happens to be looking for the literal best lemon curd, it's this one: https://www.cottagedelight.co.uk/product/all-butter-lemon-curd-2/

I usually buy jams and curds but get bored of them after like one breakfast and the rest ends up in the bin 6 months later, but I'm actually slightly addicted to this stuff! 😁

Follow me for more unsolicited ads, I guess. 🤷‍♂️

Not my code, but I just stumbled across this comment in a PHP script. @llamasoft_ox @gilesgoat have you been on a hacking spreee? 😂

We've probably spent about £1300 on new equipment for this batch now, not even counting the beans or any of the existing equipment for it. I swear to all of the Gods, if the remaining yield doesn't turn out to be the best damned chocolate this world has ever seen, I'm going to flip.

In the fight against whatever it is that's ending up in this chocolate and has so far made us throw 2kg in the bin of the 3kg batch we've spent a month making, we now own a slightly gigantic air purifier. I honestly didn't expect it to be this big! 😆

I'll also be buying a 200 mesh sieve to make sure there's nothing in the final 1kg before tempering it. Which in hindsight I could've maybe used to rescue the 2kg that's now in the bin... 🤔

What a good old fashioned guardrail actually looks like, when the devs are human and "going rogue" isn't a concern. 😆

As if this thing wasn't ridiculous enough, apparently you have to use Dyson's own £8.50 per tube toothpaste with it, because regular stuff would foam up and block the camera.

Gosh. Think I'll order 3.

Best guess at the moment is that it's granite from melanger. I vibrate the moulds before cooling, to work the bubbles out, so maybe the heavy grain works its way down and ends up on the fronts? 🤷‍♂️

So that's another 1kg in the bin. Ffs.

This batch is cursed. The bars tempered perfectly, moulded up almost perfectly, set and released perfectly except for 2 tiny release marks... But somehow came out covered in specks again. Which makes no sense. The moulds couldn't have been any cleaner. All dried with compressed air and heat, zero contact. It's only the fronts that are ending up like this though.

Not convinced this is a good idea, but @KateMinervaHarris wants to try it so I'm melting the next ~1kg. 😬

The heater has been on in the kitchen for 3.5 hours and I've only gotten it to 21C and 72% humidity in here.

If it works, we'll have 1kg of chocolate orange in a couple of hours. If it doesn't, we'll just have weird splodges.