Rant 206 / How To Mix?

3pm

Again, bought grapes, apples and bananas. No marshmallows, too much sugar. I'm going to have too much sugar today already even without it. Caramel, caramel, caramel!!


All hail the mobile modem!! After weeks of observing the Bittorrent program, I've concluded that the school servers do not block downloads. Direct downloads work perfectly, but not torrent downloads. The problem with Bittorrents in school is that they cannot update their trackers. I believe the school servers only block trackers. How they do it, I cannot tell. All I know is that they do not block everything, only 95% of the stuff I download.

So today, I tried using my Starhub mobile modem. Speed sucks to the core, but voila! Trackers updated! Seeds and Peers FOUND! From now on, I'm going to stick it in once in a while to update trackers, which tells my Bittorrent the IPs of the seeds (uploaders) and peers (fellow downloaders) and pull it out.

Somehow, sticking in the modem slows down my speeds drastically such that I can't even maintain a stable connnection with IRC servers. So I'm just going to use it to update my trackers.


3.45pm

Making the caramel now. All the stirring is tiring. Can't wait for the result. 20 mins and it's turned slightly yellow. Good! Room's getting warm though.



4.40pm

Now I see why I have to keep stirring. Not because it may get burnt unevenly, but because after enough water has evaporated, it can just suddenly solidify into a giant chunk of crumbly sugar in 15mins. Added water again and stopped playing Mass Effect now. Simple but not easy. Luckily for me I can sit next to the stove.

12.55am

Ate a freaking heavy meal of steamboat meal using soup made of a can of chicken broth and soy sauce ( no salt). All those "baby bok choy" better give me enough dietary fiber. Also used fish, pork, chicken, oyster mushrooms and needle mushrooms. Think this meal cost me about 20 dollars. LOL!

Steamboat meal while watching the Bleach movie and 6 episodes (2 of which were 1-hour-specials) of Naruto was fantastic.

Next came the continuation of my caramel making session. I halted it at 5pm because all it gave me was a chunk of sugar no matter how I stirred. I gave up then, and continued again after the meal, this time without water. And it worked, albeit slowly. But eventually it gave me CARAMEL. But strangely, it didn't splutter when I pour in the water later. Maybe it wasn't hot enough. But then again, it softened the plastic fork I used to stir. I had to go to the hall kitchen and use a public metal fork to stir after pulling out a twisted fork out of the caramel.

After the water came a third of a can of condensed milk. The caramel totally hardened when the milk cooled it down. Had to wait another 15mins before it started softening again. After an hour, it finally began to boil. Good thing I had 5 episodes of Bleach to watch. When it boiled, I stirred it till it was almost all mixed.

Finally, the chocolate was dropped into the bowl. It melted very quickly, but DID NOT DISSOLVE. Instead, it became really tiny bits of chocolate semi-solids less than 1/2 mm long and 1/10 mm thin. All estimates. And all these formed a later of bitter chocolate on top, like oil on water. I had no idea why, but decided not to chop up my fruits to dip. Instead, I tore some bread, dipped it in the bowl of caramel milk cum chocolate and tried it.

It was very good. Not what I expected, but it was good nonetheless. I wonder what I did wrong. Probably began with the caramel. It was probably supposed to still contain some water before caramelizing. I'm guessing that because it didn't splutter when it should.

Caramel milk chocolate FUCK YEAH!!!

Here are the photos I took out of boredom in between all that futile stirring. (Next time I'll use the pot.. if this bowl isn't too hard to clean. Will find out later)




The beginning: Just hot thick syrup, oversaturated because some sugar didn't dissolve.



Slightly yellow now. BUT IT NEVER BROWNED!! GRRRRR!!!



After a break, I returned to the task using no water. And see? CARAMEL!!



Almost pure caramel. Too bad you can't smell the delicious aroma of fresh pure caramel.




Caramel, now with milk and choclate. Note it's not homogeneous because the chocolate is not part of the solution - IT IS PART OF THE PROBLEM! Why doesn't it dissolve or mix? How to mix it? Now it's just caramel milk with chocolate topping. Delicious but not what I was trying to make.