Farina cake by Pantera

This is recipe for delicious cake based on Petit Beurre biscuits and farina. The recipe was originally invented by my love Pantera. So, let’s make it CC BY-SA :-)

First, you need about 80 Petit Beurre / Leibniz-Keks biscuits. Easy. Second, find Polish shop and get some pack of farina. Might be tricky. Next, make some mess ;-) There are two masses to be prepared and both are mostly based on the same ingredients.

First mass:

  • 1/2 glass of white or brown sugar
  • vanilla sugar (small pack)
  • 1 glass of milk
  • 1/2 cube of butter
  • 3 table spoons of Cacao
  • 1/2 glass of Farina

Second mass:

  • 1/2 glass of white or brown sugar
  • vanilla sugar (small pack)
  • 1 glass of milk
  • 1/2 cube of butter
  • 1/2 glass of Farina
  • You can also add almonds, nuts, raisins, etc.

For the finishing touch, you will need chocolate custard, banana, almonds, nuts, and whatever your own taste would suggest you.

Make the first mass: mix and boil milk with butter and sugar. When milk is boiled, slow down the heat and add farina gradually and continue to mix. Cook all together for 3-4 minutes continuously mixing so farina doesn’t sear (burn). At the end of cooking after 3-4 minutes add Cacao. Make the second mass the same way as the first one with two exceptions:

  1. If you want to add almonds, nuts, etc. add them after the milk (with sugar and butter) is boiled.
  2. Don’t add the Cacao at the end.

The procedure is as follows:

  1. Make a layer of the Petit Beurre biscuits on the bottom of the cake tin.
  2. Pour hot first mass (the Cacao mass) to the tin.
  3. Cover the mass with another layer of the biscuits.
  4. Pour hot second mass to the tin on top of the second layer of biscuits.
  5. Cover the second mass with another layer of biscuits.
  6. Finish covering the top layer of buscuits with chocolate custard and dredge with nuts, almonds, coconut chips, slices of banana, …whatever you like :-)
  7. You can combine as many layers of the mass and biscuits as you like.

Be aware that the hot mass congeals quite fast, so it is important to hurry with making the cake layers.

Schmeckt Gut!

Productive Saturday Climbing

Today, Pantera and I we hit the Castle Climbing Centre early in the morning. It’s nice to have wide range of routes available when the centre is nearly empty as people are recovering after Friday buzz ;-). I am (exceptionally?) weak today. Probably, it’s because the last 2 weeks I conducted endurance oriented sessions only. First, I jumped upstairs to climb a few V1-V3 boulders on the overhang featured bouldering wall. I tried the new orange V5 boulder. It’s beautiful, but I couldn’t prevent my body swinging a bit after quite dynamic move to 4th hold. I’ve put the V5 on my short list, definitely. Next, we hit number of top-rope routes. Pantera was working on technical 5 and 5+ and I was trying to mix strength and stamina problems:

  • The Slabs: 6b (blue), 2 x 6c (pink/green)
  • Tall Walls: 5 (green), 6b+ (green/orange spots)
  • The Fang: 2 x 6b (orange/lilak spots), 2 x 6c (pink s.o.s., including loss of a few layers of my finger tips skin ;-))
  • The Stack: 6c (red), 7a (yellow, made 1/3 of the route, 3 moves only)

No rock rings, no campus. Finished bouldering a couple of V0-V3 on the Panels.

While my muscles were busy pushing enormous amount of ATP molecules through their fibres and cells, my brain was busy solving design issues of how to make C++ interface of GDAL library better. It is clear that neither dataset nor raster band can have semantic of plain value objects. Both, dataset and raster band, represent real world physical resources and they are more like reference objects. In spite of that reference semantic is dominant in the world of GDAL objects, I’d really like to make them CopyConstructible and Assignable. I know it can be achieved straight away:


std::tr1::shared_ptr<GDALDataset> ds(::GDALOpen("file.tif", GA_ReadOnly), ::GDALClose);

But, I just don’t want to make yet another Gigantic Rats Nest Of Pointers. I would be happy to keep all the ugliness out of user’s sight. I think it’s feasible. Perhaps I will even Pimpl my Ride GDAL.

I’ll probably need one or more climbing sessions to finish the design of better GDAL, so I can start slinging some code around. Next climbing on Monday in Swiss Cottage with Jo, Chiara and Pantera.

Endurance Hunny, Move!

Yesterday night, I went to the temple of power where Pantera, my personal trainer recently, arranged 3 hours climbing session focused on endurance :-) So, I had to climb 18 routes with grades (Sport, French), mostly, above 6. Here is the list: 6a, 6b+, 6c, 5+, 5+, 7a (first time attempt, 50%, bloody features), 6c, 6c, 6a, 6c, 6b, 6b, 6a, 6b+, 6a, 6a, 5, 5.

First Climbing in Portland

Last Saturday, Pantera, my friend Roger and I, we spent a wonderful day on the Isle of Portland.

Thanks to Pantera, we have collected quite a nice photo & video log from during the trip including walking, swimming, climbing, soloing (DWS), eating and sleeping. All the stuff available on my Flickr

IMGP4182.jpg IMGP4259.jpg IMGP4351.jpg IMGP0130.JPG IMGP0144.JPG

…and mloskot’s YouTube channel.

It was my first time in Portland and I’ll definitely come back there.

Selling iMac 24-inch

My fiancée Pantera as has brand new Apple iMac for sell. The machine was released in 2008 and bought in July 2008. Pantera has used it for 3 days only and put it back to the cartoon box (boxes from Apple are really cool ;-)). It is standard specification: Intel Core 2 Duo (2.8 GHz); 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM; HDD 320 GB. We have left the machine in our apartment in Poland, but we can ship it internationally.

How much? It’s the matter for negotiation but the prices is surely much lower than average current price.

Here is complete review of Apple iMac (24-inch, 2.8GHz)