• dinodestroyermummymenaceOh! I forgot to mention that the first two books of my new series, Monster Boy, were published on the third of this month by Orchard Book, whith whom I have an awful lot of books published.

    Monster Boy is half monster half human and has a way with monsters, so he is the number one agent for the Ministry of Monsters – It’s a lot of fun.

    There are eight books in the series. The hardbacks are coming out two a month and the paper backs will come out next year.

    It’s been a lot of work over the last year. The artwork is all done on Adobe Flash. I worked out a style with Flash when I wrote Ricky Rocket. Since then I’ve got cleverer at the software, but have made it harder on myself too.

    My next two series will be drawn by hand on paper – Hooray! You can drive yourself crazy staring at a screen all day – give me paper.

    My next two series? Yes, I’m just starting out on an eight book series called Axel Storm and today I heard that Orchard have agreed to acquire another eight book series set in ancient Greece, so my holiday was a research trip too!

    Now I’d better try and find a bit of time to bring my website up to date and get some Monster Boys stuff on there.

  • Hair-dried Barbecue
    Hair-dried Barbecue

    Us chaps do like to be in on the lighting and coaxing of a barbecue. I’ve seen various ways of doing it, dried kindling, fire lighters, petrol, meths, paper – all these methods then require a bit of blowing to get things heated up.

    Personally, I’ve started to use a blow torch! That gets it alight pretty quick. I build a pyramid of charcoal and light it, then I tear up a piece of corrugated cardboard from a box and use it to fan the flames until it’s red hot and going nicely. Then I spread the coals out and fan some more so that they are evenly distributed.

    Vasilis, our host and landlord on holiday in Greece, had his own ideas. His barbecue was made from an old water tank cut in half lengthways. I’m not sure what he used to help get the fire started, but I came across him at the hair drier stage! Yes, he was blowing the flames with a hair drier – and boy did it work well? He had to cover his arm because there were so many sparks and it got up to a pretty roaring heat very quickly. The whole thing is designed to take a lamb or a piglet for roasting.

    We had home made Greek sausage and Souvlakis which were fab, accompanied by roast vegetables, stuffed vegetables and baby okra. What a meal!

  • Victoria Sponge Pasta Cake
    Victoria Sponge Pasta Cake

    Pasta Cake Cut Open
    Pasta Cake Cut Open
    Wanting to surprise my wife for her birthday recently, I followed a link sent to me by stumbleupon. TheCiao Chow Linda blog gave me a brilliant recipe for a cake that looks like a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese! The only trouble was that it was in American measurements and terms so I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

    So I made it up as I went along. The original cake required chocolate meatballs with chopped nuts. The recipe seemed a bit complicated for me, so I made the meatballs out of Rice Krispies and chocolate. I could have made them a little smaller or the cake a little bigger to get the proportions right.

    The cake is a basic Delia Smith Victoria Sponge Cake and the icing is a softish butter icing that I forced out of an icing bag. The biggest hole I had in the piping set was vermicelli sized, so it was quite hard work. Try to get a spaghetti sized hole if you can, it will be much easier. The sauce is Mrs Beetons strawberry and gooseberry jam. I warmed it up so that it would pour more easily, but this did kind of melt the icing in a couple of places. It also made it very sweet.

    Anyway, she was suitably surprised – as was everyone else. You get a lot of impact for relatively little work. It is a little odd having something that looks savoury being so sweet, though!