This is a typical Southern Portugal cake that I tried two Christmas and quite liked as looks simple and tasty. So finally this weekend was the time to try this recipe.
Ingredients:
2 medium eggs
100g sugar
100g honey
75ml olive oil
150g plain flour
1/2 tbs cinnamon
1/2 tbs baking powder
1/2 ground anise grains.
A bit of butter
Process:
Pre-heat oven at 180C
Whisk eggs and sugar until double in volume. It takes time doing it by hand!
Add honey and oil, bit a bit and keep whisking.
Add flour, cinnamon, baking powder and anise. Mix all well
Pour the mix in a greased tin.
Bake for 45 minutes aprox. Use a tooth stick or similar to check the inside is cook before removing from oven.
Result:
It raised more than I expected. It wasn’t as moist as I remember but it was tasty. Based on the ingredients reminded me of a olive-Greek cake I did some months ago.
I checked other recipes like this so maybe I will try again at some point.
Somehow I came across this company that provides some crazy numbers in just one rack. Then again nearly by coincidence I show this news from an email that mentioned “cerebras” and wafer-scale, a term that I have never heard about it. So found some info in wikipedia and all looks like amazing. As well, I have learned about Gene Amdahl as he was the first one trying wafer-scale integration and his law. Didnt know he was such a figure in the computer architecture history.
1/2 lemon skin cut at julienne (long and narrow stripes)
50ml water
50g caster sugar
1/2 lemon juice
Process:
Mix water and sugar in a pan. Heat up to boil water.
Add the lemon zest and mix for 10 sec, while water is boiling
Add lemon juice and keep mixing for another 10 sec.
Check the mix is getting some consistency then remove from heat
Let it cool down for later. It should be like a syrup and solidify while cooling down. You can heat it up in microware for 10-15s to make it liquid again.
Lemon Pudding souffle ingredients:
125ml milk
35g butter
70g caster sugar
70g plain flour
2 eggs yolks
4 eggs whites
1/2 tsp vanilla paste
1/2 lemon zest
butter and sugar for greasing
Process:
Pre-heat oven at 180C
Grease (solid butter and sugar) 4 dariole moulds. Be sure there is no shiny parts! Cut a small square of baking paper and put in the bottom of the mould.
Make a “beurre manie” that is mixing the butter and flour by hand in a bowl.
Scold the milk with the vanilla (just hit the boiling point). Then at medium heat, add pieces of the “beurre manie” and whisk non stop with the milk. It is like doing “bechamel” sauce. Once the whisk is not useful, move to a wooden spoon and keep mixing.
At the end you will have kind off a ball, keep cooking for 1-2 minutes to be sure the flour is properly cooked.
Remove from heat and let it cool down
Add the 2 egg yolks one at each time to the “ball”. It should become like a thick cream.
Whisk the egg whites until snow peak. Then add the sugar and lemon zest and whisk again until snow peak. This is the meringe
Now fold a 1/3 of the meringe into the pudding butter. Keep doing the same 1/3 at the time.
Once you have all mixed, pour the butter into the moulds up to 3/4.
Using a deep tray, put the moulds and fill it with water (hot if possible). Be careful the moulds dont float!
Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden on top and risen.
Prepare the egg custard while waiting
Fresh egg custard sauce ingredients:
75ml double cream
75ml milk
35g egg yolk
25g caster sugar
1/2 tbs vanilla paste
Process:
In a glass, mix egg yolks and sugar.
Mix double cream, milk and vanilla in a sauce pan. Add a bit of the sugar and put to the boil.
Add the egg mix to the liquid and mix with a wooden spoon.
Keep mixing until the liquid thick up a bit! Dont over do it! If you ran a finger in the back of the spoon when covered with the custard, it should keep apart.
Remove from heat and pour it in a container. Cover with cling film
Presentation:
Once the pudding moulds are ready, remove the mould, be sure you take off the paper too!
Put each pudding in the middle of a dish.
Pour the custard around the pudding
Put a spoon of the lemon syrup on top of the pudding (put in microware if solid)
This is an interesting book about the flooding of data we need to go through and the difficulty to figure out what is true or not. And I feel it many times you read something “scientific” with many numbers, stats, etc and you kind off believe that has to be true. And those new pharmaceutical drugs that are so amazing or latest paper with a dramatic breakthrough.
Interesting points:
With the hype about machine learning, understanding the algorithm may be out of our understanding but the critical thing is the training data fed into that algorithm. GIGO = Garbage In, Garbage Out. Because the training data is “biased” or not relevant, imagine how is going to be the result.
Correlation is not causation. This is a difficult topic becase we see very easily causation everywhere or find one that matches our theory.
Goodhart’s law adapted to normal people: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. That’s so true. Think of your performance review at work, the GPU tests, etc.
Regarding the stats, it is important to pay attention to the axis: start at zero? same proportions/scales?, be mindful of 3D stats, “ducks” decorate or obscure the meaningful data,
If it is too be good to be true/false, then it isn’t.
“mathiness”: formulas and expressions that look like “good” math but they lack logical coherence and formal rigor. This is very typical for things that are not really easy to quantify (ie healthcare quality management), how things are measured?, unit? etc
One of my favourite examples is the paper about the fMRI on the brain of dead! salmons when showing picture of people showing different types of mood. This was important to clarify that MRI images maybe are not as perfect as you expect. I assume that nowadays that has improved….
Prosecutor’s fallacy: You need to prove you customer is innocent although there is DNA match in a database. There is an error rate of 1 in 10,000,000.
Match
No Match
Guilty
1
0
Innocent
5
50,000,000
You are the defence prosecutor and you want to focus in the left column (blue). That means that there are 5 chances out of 6 (5+1) that your client is inocent having a DNA match.
p-values: null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis. Most papers are based on a p-value of 0.05 (now you have Goodhart’s law)
Refuting Bullshit:
Use “reductio ad absudum”
Be memorable (dead salmon example)
Find counterexamples (immune system theory vs trees)
Provide analogies (74M$ -> 2sec faster)
Redraw figures
Deploy a null model
I leave a lot of things behind that I dont remember but it is worth the reading (and more than once)
In summary, the goal is to be “smart” sceptic and dont believe everything throw to us.
100g unsalted butter, melted, plus extra for greasing
oil for greasing
1 tsp sea salt
Filling ingredients:
25g melted butter
100g currants, chopped
50g sultanas, chopped
2 tsp mixed spice
25g caster sugar
Glaze:
200ml water
200g caster sugar
Process:
Mix together the flour, yeast, sugar and salt. Make a well in the center.
Warm the milk at body temperature
Pour milk, melted butter and beaten eggs into the flour. Mix all together and then knead for 10 minutes until you have a smooth and elastic dough. It will be a bit sticky at the very beginning but dont add any flour.
Shape the dough into a ball, add a bit of oil into the bowl, put the dough, cover with clean film and let it prove until double in size (1h?)
Pre-heat oven at 180C
Prepare a tray with butter and a coating of flour to make it anti-sticky.
Prepare the chelsea buns tins. Put a layer of melted butter, then add a piece of baking paper of the same diameter to cover the bottom. Cover again with a bit of melted butter. Tray to cut another piece of baking paper for the side of the tin. Add a bit of butter again.
Swiss Buns:
Once the dough has double in size, put it on a lightly flour surface and knock the air out.
Cut 6 pieces of 80gr aprox. Cover the pieces and the big dough with the bowl and a towel so they dont dry out.
For each piece, make a ball, flat it with your palm, put pressure and make circules with your hand, remove pressure gradually and until you have a ball again.
Then roll it as it were a “cigar”. Put it in the tray. Leave around 3cm distance between each “cigar”.
Prove again until double in size (25-30m). Move to the Chelsea Buns.
Then bake for 6 minutes aprox or until golden light brown.
Let it cool down before adding the sugar coating.
Optional: make white fondant icing. For each Swiss bun, dip only the top, the lift it, let the fondant to drip by one side and then with a finger, clean the fondant drip without leaving the finger mark.
Chelsea Buns:
With the left-over dough and using a rolling-pin, spread the dough into a big rectangle. At least 42x25cm.
With a brush, cover the dough with the melted butter.
Mix sugar and spice, then spread it over the dough.
Spread evenly the chopped currants and sultanas.
With the roll, push a bit the dry fruit.
Make a roll with the dough, start by the “long” side. Be sure it is tight but dont break it.
With a sharp knife, cut both end until you have an even form. Then cut 12-14 pieces from the roll.
Put one piece in the middle, then put another at 5 or 6 other pieces around as it were a flower. Be sure the end of each piece points to the middle.
Put for tins to prove again. Aprox 25 minutes. They should grow until there is no space between each piece and raise a bit too.
Bake until the top is golden brown. At 180C, aprox 15-20 minutes.
Glaze with the sugar syrup as soon as the tins are removed from the oven. Remove the buns from the tin!
This is a book recommended by a good friend. He had watched some documentaries about octopus and was amazing. So I was curious about it and gave it a go.
The book is not just about octopus and cuttlefish but about intelligence based on the evolution of our nervous systems. It seems the octupus developed their nervous system in a different way from mammals. And even between cephalopods seems to have evolved in more than one way.
Another things I was quite surprised is the life span of the octopus is around 2 years! There is a part of the book quite interesting about ageing. Why are there organism like sequoias that can live over 3000 years and then octopus with a very advance nervous systems only last 2? I need to re-read it again. As per my understanding this is related to the our evolution, we reap the benefits quickly but there is always drawbacks that turn up later.
There were parts were I didnt engage enough but I think it was worth it just for the two points above.
CML: I actually struggled in this one regarding how to authenticate….. Checking some pages I worked out. I was trying to use the theory from DevNet but no joy. The idea is to restore a lab after you have made many changes. The script log into CML, delete the lab and restore with a provided backup.
Vsphere: This is even simpler…. at least in this one I didnt struggle with the auth as the documentation was quite clear. But the original goal of restore a VM from a snapshot looks like is not available via API.
I guess this is a bit old news already. But I wanted to test it for some weeks. I have just made one question so far (and it failed a couple of times until I got an answer.
And my very first question was to list the most famous quotes from Aristotle to his actual writings. Why? Because you read many quotes from many famous people that are not actually true and it is very hard to really track if you dont read all books from that person. And to be honest, philosophy is not easy to digest.
Here are a few famous quotes from Aristotle that reference his actual writings:
"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." - Nicomachean Ethics
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Metaphysics
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Nicomachean Ethics
"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." - Metaphysics
"Nature does nothing in vain." - Politics
Please note that these quotes should not be taken as direct verbatim from Aristotle's work but rather as a representation of his thoughts.
Apart from that, I wonder how is the infrastructure of this company? Is on premise or cloud? How is their DC network design? TCP? Checking one of the open positions it seems they have a pretty big cluster. Although they mention cloud platforms. And the company has some kind of agreement with MS (so Azure is going to be used)
100ml boling water + 100g sugar + cinnamon stick + star anise
jam
double cream: whipped + vanilla essence or 1tsp of coffee.
Process
Warm water and milk at body temperature. Then add yeast and mix.
In a bowl, mix flour, salt and sugar. Then rubber the butter until you have a breadcrumb look mix.
Add egg to the milk and mix.
Add liquid mix to the flour.
Mix all together until forming a ball.
Knead on the table until you have a smooth ball. When you poke it, it should spring back in slow motion. For 7-10 minutes aprox.
Put the dough in the bowl, with a bit of oil, cover with cling film and let it prove until double in size. This is the most difficult thing to do at home. Try to put in a switch-on oven with a bit of boiling water in a small pan to simulate a proving machine (40C?). In a proving machine takes 1h.
In a lightly flour surface, tip your dough and roll it as a long ping. Use a scale and cut 12 pieces. It should be 92g each aprox.
With each piece, make a ball, with one plant of your hand, push to the table and start rolling releasing pressure until a ball forms. Put each ball in a tray with baking paper. Cover the pieces while you make the balls.
Prove the balls again until double in size. Try the oven again with a bit of boiling water. 1h aprox. You can as well, try donuts with a whole. Just with a dusted finger, make a whole in the middle and spin the dough. Be sure the whole is quite big in diameter and when it proves may close.
Second most difficult part. Deep frying. Keeping the temperature is critical so your will need a temperature prove and patience. Be sure the oil is at 170C. Add two balls (max) in you have a deep fryer. If you use a sauce pan, fry one ball at each time. Fry aprox for 1 minute each side. Ideally you should have a white lien in the middle. If the oil is below 170C the donuts will get soggy, too hot, they will burn. So again, be patience.
As well, you can bake in the oven, aprox 10 minutes at 180C. Just give it an egg wash and bake until golden. Use a toothpick to check they are baked inside. Then give it a sugar-water coating immediately after taking out of the oven.
For the deep-fry donuts, let them cool down. Then coat them with a mix of sugar/cinnamon.
Now you can add the fillings. With a knife, make a hole in the white line and pipe your filling. For the oven ones, cut in the middle around 3/4 and pipe your fillings.
This is my outcome:
I filling some with coffee cream, jam and plain cream.
They were really nice. I didnt expect this result. Again, critical is the proving and deep frying at the correct temperature.
