Le Petit Paris “Viennoiserie”

Posted on by Ian C.

I returned to our local French Bakery Le Petit Paris today to have some fun learning about and making “Viennoiserie”, a bread-like dough with added eggs, milk, butter, sugar making it sweet and delicious!

We began with chats about what we would be doing then Stefan mixed the dough (which took a while and a strong mixing machine!)

We began by rolling dough into a ball to make a “brioche” then rolled more dough into skinny sausage shapes with added chocolate drops to make “Chocolate Viennese Bread” …

We then moved on to making “Nutella Twists” which is rolled out dough with a spread applied and then plaited; we used Pistachio Spread since Stefan didn’t have Nutella available (I used much too much filling here but it was delicious!) …

By now the brioche and bread have proofed for a good while (and we gave the twists some proofing time); time to get everything into the oven and cooked …

And here is what I took home (the “sugar tart” was a fourth thing we made but I changed Stefan’s recipe so I’ve not described it here):

The Wizard of Oz Museum

Posted on by Ian C.

We took a drive to Cocoa Beach to visit the newly re-located Wizard of Oz Museum (we’d tried to visit a month ago but they were in the middle of relocating). It’s a somewhat pricey visit but there is so very much to see that I felt it was good value for money (we spent about 1-1/2 hours there).

For me the main focus was all the Frank L Baum and Wizard Of Oz artifacts; there were hundreds of older (and less old) books including many in the Wizard Of Oz world that I’d never heard of before:

There were many many non-book trinkets, collectibles, tie-in merchandise, and more; something fascinating for everyone surely!

Additional to all this memorabilia is a separate “immersive” experience, a huge room with many projection devices showing images on all walls and the floor. The immersive “Wizard Of Oz” part was a bit odd with strange not-quite-human animated figures and a curious selection of “locations” (the moving yellow brick road on the floor was effective). But I really enjoyed the more artistic / peaceful immersive Van Gogh part … each part lasts maybe 15 minutes and the room is on continuous repeat from one to the other and back:

Here is a few video clips from the immersive experience:

[After] The Big Freeze revisited

Posted on by Ian C.

It’s been a while since The Big Freeze killed most of our garden plants back in January this year (while we were away); Margaret did a lot of trimming, digging up / discarding and replacing, and Florida has since done a lot of growing … much of our front and back garden now looks good (though many plants are not yet as big as they used to be). Here’s a look at how things are now (and a bonus pic of the potted plants on the back patio, which suffered less but are also recovering):