Mary G. Smith

Mary’s Casanova Slices (gluten free cake)

Mary — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:56:27 +0000

This is a wonderful recipe which I modified for my daughter, who needs to eat food that’s gluten-free. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cake:

6 eggs, separated
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose gluten-free flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 cup ground hazelnuts or almonds

Beat the 6 egg yolks and half the sugar in a large bowl until pale, thick and creamy. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form and add the rest of the sugar little by little until fully incorporated and the egg whites form stiff peaks. Gently fold the egg whites into yolk mixture. Sift flour, cornstarch and ground nuts together. Fold the dry ingredients gently into the egg mixture. Spread the delicious batter into a lightly greased 12″x15″ pan.

Bake 12 to 15 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or until light golden colour. Slice into 3 or 4 long strips to layer on top of each other, filling the layers with your favourite pie filling and cream or butter cream.

Personally I like to fill the layers with cherry or strawberry pie filling and “Fluffy White Frosting” (see the recipe below). I make half this recipe because it’s very sweet and tastes like marshmallow, so I only use it between each layer on top of the pie filling. Then I use whipped cream to top this cake and decorate it. After I’ve covered the whole cake with cream, I like to add fresh strawberries, canned mandarin slices (drained), sliced kiwi or maraschino cherries. Whatever tickles your fancy and tastes good to you!

Fluffy White Frosting

Combine 1 cup granulated sugar, 1/3 cup water, 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar, and dash salt in saucepan. Bring to boiling, stirring till sugar dissolves. Very slowly add sugar syrup to 2 unbeaten egg whites in mixing bowl, beating constantly with electric mixer till stiff peaks form, about 7 minutes. Beat in 1 teaspoon vanilla. Frosts tops and sides of two 8- or 9-inch layers or one 10-inch tube cake.

* I made this cake for Easter, and forgot to take pictures of it! Next time I make it, I’ll be sure to include a picture, so you can see for yourself that it is worth the effort.

Photo Retouching

Mary — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:45:03 +0000

Well, I just spent the last couple of hours retouching a photo that has been thoroughly scratched and yellowed. It was at least 45 years old. Have a look below.

I must admit, I just love to do this kind of work. I can even give people a facelift without inflicting any pain or discomfort! If you ever feel the need to have a picture retouched or enhanced, give me a shout. Not only do I love doing it, but my rates are good!

Computer problem

Mary — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:56:48 +0000

Wow! What a day! I’m just finishing cleaning up Luke’s computer and what a mess that was! Luke is my daughter’s boyfriend. His computer was infected with trojans or malware, whatever …. ah who cares, they’re all alike ….. bad! I’ve been at it all day on and off, scanning, cleaning and more scanning.

There must be a special hell for the idiots who come up with these useless gems. Don’t they have enough to do without ruining other peoples computers? Such a tremendous waste of time, when we could all be doing something better. To top it off, the registry editor was disabled so I spent a good portion of the afternoon looking for solutions, most of which didn’t work. Finally found one from Symantec that actually worked.

After having done everything that I possibly could to his computer, I thought I had finished cleaning it up when I got a message from my daughter Melanie. It seems that our isp had just sent all of us an email alerting us to the fact that there was “unusual email activity” from our IP address and that we should look into it immediately. We were to let them know within 24 hours whether or not we had addressed the problem, or lose our internet connection! It seems that Luke’s computer was a drone that was still infected with some kind of trojan!

Can you believe it? After all the work I had done to fix his problem, not only was the problem STILL a problem, but it was causing problems with our own Internet Service Provider ….. and our computers were CLEAN!

At that point I gave up and re-installed his operating system. Sometimes it’s just best to clean up a mess by starting over from scratch.

Posting to Blog via Email

Mary — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:23:19 +0000

Ahhh … the trials and tribulations of starting my first blog! It was really easy to install it on my web space, but figuring out how to make the theme my own was something else altogether! I think I’ve got it now, as well as how to upload new posts via email. I must admit, I’m really pleased about that part. All I had to do was:

Create a new secret email account on my domain specifically for posting to this blog
Add my new email account to Outlook
Configure the changes in my WordPress Admin settings
Write a test email and send it to my new email account using same account
Activate my new post by going to http://my_domain/wordpress_installation/wp-mail.php

That’s basically all there was to that! I wrote all this out only because I figured it might be of help to someone else struggling to do this. If I can think of anything that might be of interest, I’ll certainly include it as I go along.

And now I’m off to fix someone’s virus infested computer. Ahhhh ….. the fun never ends!