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Toffees

Saturday, November 21st, 2020

A couple of weeks ago I remembered a home-made lolly from my youth called ‘toffees’. I recalled buying them at church and school fetes, but hadn’t had one for decades.

A quick google search later and KLS had found a recipe. It was time to try and recreate this sweet from my youth!

The ingredients are simple: sugar, water, vinegar and cream of tartar. The process of cooking isn’t too difficult either: just mix it together and cook on medium heat for about 20 minutes:

The above shows our first attempt. When it’s ready we poured it into cupcake cups:

And after adding a few sprinkles we were done:

Not bad for our first attempt are they? They tasted great but there was a problem: they were incredibly sticky! As in you could barely open your mouth when you bit one. To be honest, they were scary to eat!

A second issue was that they were impossible to get out of the cupcake cups, and eating one included a good mouthful of paper as well.

Kristin knew the cream of tartar was the culprit and less would result in a harder toffee. It was time for round two! This time she let the mix boil slightly longer until it turned golden, and then when we poured it we used silicon cups as well:

These were much more successful! Not as sticky with a better taste. The one in the top left was sublime since KLS topped it with salt! As a bonus they came out of the silicon mold perfectly:

Alas there was still one issue: they were too big! This made them difficult to eat since they were too hard to bite through and a bit too large in the mouth. It was time for further refinement…

A week later we had secured more sugar and a new set of smaller molds, and we tried again. Golden brown boil, smaller silicon molds, salt on top:

Finally, we had crafter perfection! These are astonishingly good and 100% the taste of my youth.

A great success! Even though they’re basically just sugar, they taste like salted caramels. Next time you visit, we’ll make you some

Posted in Blog, Food, Home | 2 Comments »

Happy Halloween!

Saturday, October 31st, 2020

On Kristins birthday a few weeks ago we went pumpkin picking!

We drove to a farm about an hour away and they had a few massive fields full of pumpkins of all shapes, sizes and colours!

Kristin searched for just the right pumpkin for Jack-o-lantern carving, and I just grabbed any old vegetable

With raw material secured, it was time to carve some Halloween decorations:

As you can see Kristin is quite proficient! My attempts were comparatively modest. Here’s the finished display:

That was 3 weeks ago almost to the day. And now we arrive at Halloween, and our pumpkin buddies haven’t fared so well. I took a photo every few days to document their aging process:

As you can see they’ve been nibbled on by savage beasts and infected by some evil rot. Both are now full of poisonous liquids and smell of death. In short: they become the perfect Halloween decorations!

Right now we’re at the drive-in for their Halloween extravaganza (two films, cider and donuts and some sort of special stage show!). I hope your Halloween is as much fun, and you’re not too scared by monsters

As a bonus, here’s a two-month ‘timelapse’ of a chrysanthemum we bought for our front step:

Posted in Blog, Family, Home, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Trash in the Attic

Sunday, October 18th, 2020

Prices for collectibles of all sorts have skyrocketed during Covid. There’s many theories for why and I’ll not speculate here, but I’ll say it’s made me look at my game collection in a new light.

But the other week I read an article about how old Pokémon cards in particular have seen insane price rises. To explain: Pokémon started (and continues) as a game series, but about 20 years ago become a collectible card game as well. When it did we bought some cards but never really played them, and our cards had languished in a box ever since.

Prompted by the article I got them out for a stickybeak…

In addition to several hundred loose cards I even had some sealed product. These would have collectively sold for quite a bit had I kept the packaging, but as is were worth very little.

But within my loose cards I found a few gems:

Some of above are promos and I no longer remember where I got them. One was a game pack-in card and one (the top right) was pulled from a pack I bought at Target on a whim about 17 years ago. These four shown were worth about $150.

This was my true gem. Note the ‘1st edition’ symbol on the left side: that increased the value significantly. If I had paid to have this professionally graded and sold it myself on eBay I may have got $500+ for it.

But I didn’t do that. In fact I sold the cards to an online store since I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of selling them myself. Aside from the work of sorting it all it was fairly easy just packing them up and waiting for the cheque to come.

And yesterday it did, for $389.92! Not bad for cards I didn’t have any attachment to that were sitting in a box in a closet!

All told I sold them about 75 cards, and about $350 of the value was in the five shown above. The remainder of my cards – hundreds of them – were worthless (less than $0.003 per card) and I trashed them.

So if you have any mint condition 20+ year old Pokémon cards in your closet it’s time to check them; you may be sitting on a nice little payoff

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

Covid Life

Monday, October 12th, 2020

The purpose of this post is to document the surreal world we’ve now become used to, and to compare life in America today to Australia. I wonder if things has gone this far down there?

Going out now requires a mask. You can’t go anywhere without one, nor would you want to. It’s the best defense against covid if you’ll be near strangers!

Some shops limit the number of people in them, whilst others remind you of the rules upon entering. It’s virtually impossible where I live to visit any store without being confronted with Covid signage.

Once you’re inside any decent sized store you’re continuously reminded of the rules. You’d have to be willfully ignorant (or just malicious) to not be aware of what is expected.

There’s even reminders on the price checkers, shopping carts and cash register screens!

If for some reason you just shuffle along with your eyes on the ground don’t worry: signage on the floor reminds you of social distancing and the one-way rules for the shopping aisles:

And of course the direction signs are on the aisles as well:

The products for sale have changed as well, mostly to accommodate a society that eats more meals at home than they have in decades. But the biggest obvious change is in hand sanitizer. Where before there was a tiny section, now it looks like this:

And it goes on and on. It’s difficult to pay with cash now; stores have all adopted touch-free payment systems. Stores have self-serve cleaning sections at the entrance to clean carts and hands. Meat, fish and deli counters are mostly replaced with pre-packaged portions. PA systems remind shoppers of social distancing rules.

Even the loos have rules posted!

Looking at it objectively it’s so weird and if you could pull someone through time from a year ago they’d be flabbergasted by what they see. But for us of course this is now the new normal, and the day this all goes away will be the new strange.

Let’s hope that day isn’t too far away.

Posted in Blog, History, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Mint In Box

Friday, September 18th, 2020

I bought some clear plastic boxes:

“What the hell are these?” you ask? These, my friends, are polyethylene terephthalate protective cases for retro game boxes! I bought 150 of them: 25 each for NES and SNES/N64 and 100 for GB/GBC/GBA/VB. Since my collection has value, I reckoned it was time to add a little extra protection to the more expensive titles I own.

The protectors ship flat and fold into boxes very slightly large than the game cases. Insert a game, close the tabs, and you’ve got yourself a game protected from the grubby hands of the typical gamer!

Every game above I purchased myself new. I’ve kept them in astonishingly good condition over the years as they have appreciated. I paid $20 for Dragon Warrior IV 25+ years ago; it’s $200 now. Final Fantasy cost me $14; it’s $150 now. You can see why I put them in cases!

But it gets better with the SNES stuff:

Those three combined would easily fetch $750 today! Possibly more since they’re in immaculate condition (Chrono Trigger alone could probably fetch $500). Keeping them in cases should preserve them for many years longer.

The Nintendo 64 boxes are the same size as SNES boxes so they share protectors. This ‘chrome’ collectors edition of Zelda fetches a pretty penny today and is just one of a few N64 games I own that sell for much more than I paid when I bought them.

If you’re astonished by these prices be mindful it’s all about the boxes. The cardboard boxes Nintendo used for their first few consoles tore easily and many people just tossed them out. At least 50% – sometimes 75%+ – of the value of a lot of these games lies in owning the box and manual, hence the utility of these box protectors.

Box protectors are a bit of a rabbit hole to delve into though. Frustratingly Nintendo used different boxes in different regions so I can’t protect my Japanese copy of Sin and Punishment or any of my Famicom games. There’s also a few (silly valuable) N64 games with custom boxes that don’t fit in the protectors. But I’ve kept them in good condition for 20 years already and should be able to for another 20 at least.

I’ve still got the 100 Gameboy cases to put on. I’ve got about 260 boxes games that they can fit so it’ll be fun working out which ones are worth protecting. Maybe I’ll post an update when I’m done

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, Otaku, Retro, Tech | Comments Closed

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