Orange Butter Cake recipe

I've tried this recipe out for a long time now and it really works.

The Ingriedients below make one 2 pound cake.

125g Butter
1/4 cup Milk
1/4 cupOrange Juice
2 eggs
3/4 cup Caster Sugar
1.5 cups Self Raising Flour
Orange Zest - from 2 Oranges
One Pinch of Salt
One Drop of Vanilla Essence

Preliminary
Put the Waxing/Baking Paper into the tin. Lightly butter the insides of paper/tin by using the wrapping paper of the butter.
Turn on and Preheat the Oven to 180C.

Make sure the ingredients are at room temperature - otherwise they don't gel so well. This applies esp to the butter. If the butter is stone cold - a problem in Melbourne's colder months - it will take forever for it to be mixed in with sugar.

Step 1.Make sure Butter is at room temp - soft to the touch; if not microwave it for 5 seconds. Cream the Butter and the Sugar ONLY. Stir them around til the Sugar is fully mixed in with the butter and you get that lovely yellow texture look. Don't stir for too long (like 30 minutes) to avoid the butter changing back to oil. Throw in a pinch of salt too.

Step 2.Add Eggs and Stir that in well. Turn on and Preheat the Oven to 180C.

Step 3.Add half a cup of Milk now. Stir well. You can also add in a small teardrop of vanilla essence. Or if you want you can do this when you pour the flour in.

Step 4 Sift the SR Flour and add it in. Once you have added the flour don't stir it around too much. Do this manually by hand and not by machine. As you stir it - add in the *half cup of orange juice (OJ) and the orange zest (taken from 2 Oranges). I like to add in chopped sliced mandarin skin.
Do not mix the milk and the orange juice simultaneously because the OJ makes the milk curdle.

Note on Orange Zest - do yourself a favor and get a nice hand held Orange Zester that can really scrub away at the orange skin. I bought mine from Kmart - a Swiss made one that cost $10. Its fantastic! The trick is to remove the orange part of the skin without getting the white stuff, which like the seed, makes it bitter.

I also like to throw in one Mandarin skin as well but I make sure I remove as much of the white part of the skin as possible. Remove all seeds - they make it bitter.)

(Note on OJ - I don't like adding the milk together with the OJ on account of the juice causing the milk to curdle. So I like to add the OJ and rind last as I'm stiring the flour in.

Step 5: Pour the cake mix into the baking tins. Then place them into the oven.

Step 6: Wait 40 minutes. Open the Oven door and use a small skewer (like a satay stick) to poke into the cake's interior. Examine the skewer - if wet soggy lumps of unbaked cake mix cling to it then close the oven door and bake it for another few minutes. If its done, the skewer should pull out fairly cleanly.

Step 7: Once its done - take the cake out of the oven and take out the cake from the tin immediately to prevent residual baking. And let it cool. Warning. If your cake did not bake properly - it will disintegrate as you dump it out of the tin. That's why you need to use that wooden skewer to test it.

If you don't have Orange Juice or Oranges - I guess you can use Orange Marmalade. Perhaps 4? tablespoons of OM should be ok (I'm really not sure). You should need to be careful adding that sort of stuff as the more liquid/sugar you put inside - the wetter the cake will be etc..)

Generally I prefer to double up on this recipe because butter is usually sold in 250g blocks - its also easier to measure half cups rather than quarter cups. But you will get two 2 pound cakes out of this. So you need two separate cake tins.

So if you use a 250g block. You need

Two baking tins
250g butter
1.5 cups Sugar
4 eggs
0.5 cups Milk
0.5 cups Orange Juice
2 tablespoons Orange Zest (or the zest from two Oranges)
3 cups Self Raising Flour, Sifted
1 small teaspoon Vanilla and salt

Note: Make sure you do not add extra flour.

Ashley Madison in Singapore - whats wrong with a little fun on the side?

Once again the Singapore Govt goes all nuts against a "socially deviant" site. How predictable. Anything to take the public's mind off other troubling matters - like how the new casinos are destroying families or how there is a shortage of affordable properties for couples wanting to get married. Yawn, what soft targets are they going after next? Are they going to start banning all contact between the sexes until they turn 22?

Bashing away at a website is probably a bit more easier than torturing locking up social conscious lawyers and social workers I guess; anyone remember the Marxist Conspiracy in the 1980s? But I find it sad that while the Singapore Govt profess to be all about strong marriages and traditional families - it's business policies and relatively slack labor laws make it easy for businesses to exploit workers and in effect damage marriages.

In Singapore, bosses frequently have no compunction about calling up their staff to work on weekdays and even on their honeymoon - frequently without overtime. That's absolutely ridiculous. Maybe giving the boss all the power she needs without any checks and balances to achieve profit levels at any cost is not a great idea - hello Ms. Saw of SMRT fame. To me it seems very short shortsighted - the boss is of course very happy because he or she is able to achieve massive profit growth by burning out the lives of their staff and  walks off with a fat bonus at the end of the year. This is of course not unique to Singapore - in Australia, the CEO of a major bank which lost over a hundred million dollars got sacked and walked off with a golden slip of $14 million dollars. I wish I could get fired like that. But at least in Australia they have universal hospital cover and people can still afford their own homes without selling their souls to the bank.

If you're going to have a system where they treat workers as cogs in the machine with little rights - you're definitely going to be damaging relationships and marriages and families. Marry that with a worker migration policy designed to lower wages and a foreigner friendly property investment policy - which is cruel to have in a small country with a tight land mass - and you're just going to be make it too hard for many Singaporeans to start or raise their own families.You don't have to be a scholar or highly paid government official to figure that out.

Getting into hysterics over deviant websites will of course please the prudes and the ignorant - but I think that most Singaporeans are smart enough to realize that this is just plain posturing.

Got better things to do with their time meh?
 

The Beauty Myth

http://www.upworthy.com/a-tedtalk-from-a-swimsuit-model-its-one-of-the-bravest-things-ive-ever-seen?c=ufb2

I have mixed feelings watching this. I sympathize with her because when I was in primary school and high school I was bullied sometimes mercilessly. I accepted it because my church going bible believing parents also bullied me and treated me like shit sometimes.

Some of my strongest memories from  that period were the ones where I was abused, yelled at, beaten and made to feel like a sack of shit.

But I watch this video where this rather fat lady wants to let everyone know that she is a swimsuit model and that she is beautiful and I have mixed feelings about it.

In our "visual" society - beauty is often ranked equally with one's self-worth. That shouldn't be the way. But it often is. I confess that I'm guilty of often judging people by how they look.

Polite Society wants everyone to feel that they are beautiful and that you should accept who you are. For fat people - the Spin goes - there is more of me to love.

I'm not sure about that. I think part of this desire to want to be "beautiful" stems from a desire to be accepted and loved - therefore she seems to be saying "I represent the average woman, I am beautiful."

Beauty to me - well physical beauty - has certain rules. Beauty first off is in the eye of the beholder. But there are certain aesthetically qualities about beauty that is commonly accepted.

A certain level of fitness is commendable.

A certain level of discipline with regard to eating junk food is also commendable.

And people's idea of what's beautiful has usually a set range.

But what I really want to ask her is - "Why are you doing this? Are you trying to compare yourself to Kate Upton or some popular swimsuit model?"

There are certain standards for judging beauty just as there are certain standards for judging intelligent or health. 

Some people might find that repulsive. But hey, so does flunking math. Will you laugh derisively at a pretty lady or a handsome man who can't calculate the amount of cash he needs to buy his lunch and catch a bus back home? I bet you would.

That woman saying that she is beautiful seems a bit like me coming out and saying, "I'm a great math genius." (I'm not).

Maybe the approach should be to accept who you really are - "I'm OK but I'm absolutely shit in accounting."

or "I'm OK! But I'm naturally clumsy. But I'm doing part time ballet classes to improve my posture and sense of grace."

or "I'm OK! But I sometimes shy, withdrawn, insecure but thats me and I'm finding ways to deal with it."

or "I'm fat. But I am exercising to become lean and fit." - which I was at one point in time.

or "I'm not attractive, or beautiful in the conventional sense but that's OK. That's me. I have other gifts. My self-esteem is not related to how people see me or how I look."

Everyone seems to want to find something in their life in boost their own level of self-esteem.

I'm beautiful. I'm smart. I'm rich. I'm cool.

Maybe a better way than trying to tag ourselves to something elusive - is to simply say - I'm OK. I'm OK because I'm a human being. I have a soul. I have life. I might be fat, not great at math, clumsy, socially awkward, unpopular, but that's who I am. And if there is something I can do about it - I will try it. I don't care whether you accept me or not because my self-worth is not dependent on the popular view. I am who I am. Don't mock me. That's rude.

But I think her problem is to equate physical attraction with personal self-esteem. Not all of us are clever, not all of us are agile, quick, smart etc... we all have different gifts.

Democracy in Singapore: Representational Mismatch

A huge problem facing Singapore now is the problem of housing.

When I read that HDB flats are costing upwards of $700,000, seriously wtf.

And the only one to blame for this is the PAP - (the People's Action Party) - the ruling party who has governed Singapore 100% since the 1960s.

90% of Singaporeans live in HDB (Government Housing) apartments. Sidenote: Unlike most Western nations where public housing is considered the absolute pits - in Singapore, it actually is pretty good. And all praise to the PAP for setting up a good system there.

But back to the angst - the PAP which has controlled the Govt since the 1960s - is directly responsible for land and public property development and to a slightly indirect extent, private property development as well.

Back in 2003 - Singapore actually had a property surplus. There were apparently 80,000 units unoccupied. Now we have a huge shortage - largely due to the Govt's liberal immigration policies.

I think Singaporeans have a right to be pretty angry about this huge blunder - esp when the PAP keeps on harping about how it needs to pay the world's highest salaries to its top civil servants and political leaders. I mean, you pay top dollar and how did this shortage happen?

The problem is due to the huge disconnect that we have with our political leaders and the rest of the public. Now, wait having said that - this is a huge problem with most democracies.

The political leaders do not represent their constituents. In Australia, most of the politicians are ex-lawyers, union officials, for example.

In Singapore, they are all elites, really successful smart people. Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, Accountants, Army officers etc..

How are they suppose to represent the needs of the majority of the people?

If I may use a crude analogy - how do you expect a Shark to understand the problems of a reef fish? Why would a greyhound understand the problems of a mouse?

Doctors, lawyers, accountants, all of them being paid really really high salaries which effectively cocoon them from the tribulations of the masses. When the price of food hikes up by 100%, or the cost of bread rose by $1 - heck, if I'm being paid $10k a month, that wouldn't trouble me much. But for someone on $1k income, that is dreadful news.

The problem with Singapore is the lack of proper representation - esp when the Govt continually redraws electoral boundaries for some "funny" reason - maybe fengshui whatever.

But its also how the Govt draws its political candidates from.

I'm not sure whether the govt is aware of the class divide - Doctors and a normal sales person do tend to think a bit differently.

I'm not advocating anything radical. Just highlighting the need for a wider representation. Maybe what Singapore needs is for a lower house of Parliament to represent a wider group of its citizens. I can hear you laughing about this - but seriously you think the high flying Minister who is earning a million dollars or more a year can really appreciate the problems of a salesgirl earning $1k a month?

We need more people in Govt that can empathize with its citizens.

I'll add a personal story to this. My father was a brilliant man. Hardworking, dedicated, clever, smart, intuitive - but sadly lacking in some empathy. He had a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Manchester Uni which he completed in record time.

I was different. I wasn't smart - let me rephrase that, I was not technically as clever as he was. 

Trying to get him to help me with my Math problems in Primary School was like trying to get a Bear to teach a fish how to wrestle.

I still retain frightening memories from my dad's math tuition lessons - that was over 30+ years ago.

He just couldn't understand how I couldn't do simple math sums. Shouting at me to help me understand didn't help either. I needed someone to help me grasp the problems conceptually. He couldn't help. It was like a Swan trying to teach a dog how to fly.

The problem when you get a brilliant successful person as a leader - he might not be able to relate to the problems of ordinary people or devise workable solutions for them.

Let me end this with a joke:

So there was a bartender and two guys at a bar - the New Asia Bar at the Swisshotel. 70th floor.

This dude tells the other two - "D'you know the air is so thick up here that I can walk out into the open air and not fall?"

The other patron said, "I'd like to see that."

So he walks out the window, stands, and walks back in again. "Try it!" he tells the other patron.

The other patron is amazed and walks out the window and falls immediately to his death.

The bartender, glumly tells the surviving patron. "Superman, you ought to stop that party trick."

Simple home recipes: Steam Brown Rice +Sweet Potato +Salmon

I usually eat at home alone. And its hard to prepare something healthy for yourself. I'm trying to avoid eating packet noodles or any ready to eat meals. Once you spend some time working out at the gym, the idea of consuming crap just hits home.

I try and make simple easy to cook meals for myself. This is a simple easy to do meal for all you bachelor and bachlorettes. I made it today.

Ingredients:

1. Steam Rice Cooker
2. Brown Rice
3. Carrot
4. Sweet Potato
5. Salmon Belly
6. Basil, Kalle or Rocket or some kind of leafy vegetable
7. Soya Sauce
8. Wasabi

I chose the Salmon Belly because it also happens to be the cheapest cut - $3 for 1kg - and its tasty and is rich with  good omega3 oils. Its bony but easy to remove when you eat it. If possible I try and avoid farmed fish because they've been swimming in their own crap for too long.

Summary: Basically steam the rice+carrot+sweet potato first - then add in the fresh raw salmon belly to cook for a minute before eating with fresh basil, kalle, rocket. Portion sizes are up to you.


So first - cut the carrot and sweet potato into the portion that you can eat. I had a large sweet potato +carrot that would have fed 3 people. So I just cut it into 3 portions - and put the 2 into the fridge and used the 1 for today's meal.

Scoop 1 cup of rice and add roughly about 2 cups of water into the rice cooker. This will feed one person. If you don't eat too much rice, add less. But 1 cup is plenty already.

When you cook the brown rice - also put in the cut portioned carrot and sweet potato in as well. When the rice is done - the carrot and sweet potato will be cooked too. As a rule of thumb the portion should fit in your hand.

When the rice is about to be done - put in the salmon belly inside. If you forgot and the rice is already done - never mind, just put in the salmon give it a stir. The idea is to simply use residual heat to cook the salmon.

I used fresh Atlantic Salmon - which is available in Melbourne where I reside.  It should not be cooked for a long time, 1 minute inside that hot steam rice cooker is OK. If its been frozen, you obviously need to thaw it out first.

If it bothers you to eat uncooked meat add a splash of water and turn on the cooker again to heat it up for another 5 minutes.

OK all done. Add in the fresh Basil and or Kalle (wash them first) etc... for the greens. I try and not cook my greens and eat them close to raw to get the best nutrition  - and also soya sauce and wasabi for taste. Bon appetit!

No cooking oil was used at all. Everything was cooked in the same rice cooker pot.

Star Wars Prequel, Darth Vader and Lee Kuan Yew

If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication. Then, no law should permit those democratic processes to be set at nought, and no excuse, whether of security, should allow a government to be deterred from doing what it knows to be right, and what it must know to be right Lee Kuan Yew, Legislative Assembly Debates, April 27, 1955

If it is not totalitarian to arrest a man and detain him, when you cannot charge him with any offence against any written law – if that is not what we have always cried out against in Fascist states – then what is it?… If we are to survive as a free democracy, then we must be prepared, in principle, to concede to our enemies – even those who do not subscribe to our views – as much constitutional rights as you concede yourself.
Opposition leader Lee Kuan Yew, Legislative Assembly Debates, Sept 21, 1955

Repression, Sir is a habit that grows. I am told it is like making love-it is always easier the second time! The first time there may be pangs of conscience, a sense of guilt. But once embarked on this course with constant repetition you get more and more brazen in the attack. All you have to do is to dissolve organizations and societies and banish and detain the key political workers in these societies. Then miraculously everything is tranquil on the surface. Then an intimidated press and the government-controlled radio together can regularly sing your praises, and slowly and steadily the people are made to forget the evil things that have already been done, or if these things are referred to again they’re conveniently distorted and distorted with impunity, because there will be no opposition to contradict.
Lee Kuan Yew as an opposition PAP member speaking to David Marshall, Singapore Legislative Assembly, Debates, 4 October, 1956

****
Quotes thanks to   http://trulysingapore.wordpress.com/2013/10/19/revisiting-congratulatory-messages-to-lkys-90th-birthday-part-3/

 I'm a big Star Wars fan. Or rather I used to be. I simply loved Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back and ROTJ. Loved them. I watched Star Wars then Empire... totally blown away. I remember re-reading my ESB comic book like a million times. And then ROTJ came and I started to feel a bit of thaw in my love affair with the saga. I think the Ewok chorale symphony finale was just too saccharine.

When the Phantom Menace came out - it was like Jesus Christ 2nd coming. I watched the brilliant short tome video clips and it looked like it was going to be unbelievably great.

I wouldn't say i hated it straight off. The feeling sort of sunk in after I watched it. Its a bit like hearing rumors when you were a kid that the Santa Claus wasn't real etc.. Then suddenly the logic of it all hits you on the head. And you can't go back. Wow, it had amazing billion trillion dollar special effects, Natalie Portman was in it, Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor too, but... wow it really... sucked.

Let's cut to the chase: the prequels were badly written. They had an abysmal plot, dialogue, direction, characters. Awful. There was very little tension in the scenes. When Anakin finally went over the top and killed Jules Winfield, and the entire Jedi kindergarten class - there was very little drama. Compare those scenes to the death of Obi-wan, or when Luke gets his handcut off by Vader who also let's him in on a little family secret.

The prequels have to be essentially a big classical tragedy - on the scale of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and the classic Greek Tragedies - basically essentially good honorable people falling from grace and doing terrible things because of their essentially good or positive character. That is tragedy.

The prequels should have been about how the Senate was corrupt to its core, and how Civil Wars were flaring all over, genocides and religious terrorism were just proving too much for the Jedi to handle. Disorder is the law of the day.

Along comes Anakin, messanic, brass, bold, charismatic - he fixes everything - he becomes powerful - and eventually his love for his wife, peace and order prove to be his undoing.

That should have been the overdriving theme of Star Wars - and it was a story that should be told well. Lucas should have spent half of his multi-million dollar budget hiring better directors, writers, better writers, Neil Gaiman, etc.. to work on this. Instead because he's so egoistical and mega rich he took it upon his own hands to do it - and it was fucked. FUCKED. He absolutely forgot the effort that other collaborators - like his wife Marcia - had in making his original story great. If he had his way Greedo would have shot first. Han Solo would told Leia that he loved her too very much etc.. What's the point in becoming so rich - a movie tycoon - if it makes him the very person he is said to detest? He might have made billions of dollars from the Prequels but he basically shat on his own legacy. Seriously, wtf for?

Any how how does this have to do with LKY ?

LKY, Lucas - they seem the same. They both started out as idealists, dreaming of a better fairer world.

When I read LKY's early speeches - I believe he meant what he said. But then when he got into power - he changed his earlier positions. Its not being flaky. Its about power. And absolute power has a tendency to corrupt so the saying goes.

No doubt about it - LKY did a lot of good for Singapore. But to assume that he drew on a blank slate seems to be forgetting the effort that a lot of other people did as well Goh Chok Tong, Goh Keng Swee, etc.. even the good will of the Malaysian Govt back then who could have easily have placed a blockade or a high tax embargo on Singapore during its formative years.


LKY like Lucas had a lot of helping hands - how come we only remember one guy now? Its not helpful to our nation that we should be so driven to worship one leader.

Both of them had great ideas and were great creators. But then something happened and things started falling apart. Why?

Ego, pride, self-belief, a lack of humility....

People living in a Glass House - the dude is so lucky.