Boring admin!

I've decided to change the way subscription works on the Infinite Weekend blog.  I know that the current system works OK from the subscriber's point of view (if you've succeeded in jumping through the required hoops to get on the subscription list), but it does have some snags from my point of view - the main one being that I have no idea who gets an email.  I can't even find out how many people are on the list, let alone whether anybody actually reads the post.  I get to see how many hits the actual blog site has (very few, thanks for asking) but after that it's all a mystery.  I'm sure all this secrecy is intended to stop me from blackmailing my subscribers (imagine if your boss found out that you read this sort of stuff!) but it's no good for me.

Hence the change - which is to use MailChimp to send the subscription emails instead of Blogger.  That way, I get complete control over the email content, as well as stats on how many emails are sent, and even (if I want to) how many people have actually opened their email.  Slightly spooky, me looking into your inbox like that, but it's honestly nothing compared to what Google et al already do, let alone what they have in mind for you in their brave new world of 5G-enabled globally-integrated universal track'n'trace.  Did you know Microsoft have a patent for a cryptocurrency mining system which works by measuring people's physical (or even mental) activity, and reporting back to their server exactly how hard you're working? Hard to imagine that being used for anything other than benign purposes, isn't it?  But since the virus, this sort of intrusion into your very being is now vitally important for your (and everybody else's) health, as well as the usual global domination.  Honest.  Anyway, we can't let the Chinese have all the big data, can we?

But I digress.  The important thing is that to make this subscription thing work, I need everybody who's already taken the trouble to subscribe, to do so again, using the new form, which now includes spaces for your name.  I presume that, as before, it only appears on the "web version" of the blog (not the email or mobile version), although I haven't checked that properly yet.  If you do manage to find it, (if you are on the website, it should be just to the right of this text >>>) you just have to fill it in, and you're done, thank you very much.  No silly "I'm not a robot" nonsense.  Also, if you fill in the First Name field, your emails get a personalised greeting!  And if you fill in the Last Name field as well, I won't have to guess who you are...

If you can find it in yourself to be so kind, I'd be enormously grateful.

I suppose you will also have to unsubscribe yourself from the original list too.  I'd love to help, but since I don't even get access to the list, I am powerless!


Now that that's done, it's time for more frivolous things!  It was the lovely Jackie's birthday the other day, so I made her a cake.  After the brilliant success of my recent best-cake-I've-ever-made carrot, walnut and ginger cake (Nigella Lawson's recipe, but with no cream cheese in the icing), I went for a somewhat own-recipe beetroot and chocolate cake with soft chocolate icing.  Here's what it looked like:

no-name beetroot cake

The cake was a little bit denser than intended, but the icing was a bit of a triumph, even though I do say so myself.  It's made from double cream that had been in the fridge long enough to go solid and start to slightly resemble cream cheese (150g), mixed with melted 70% chocolate (100g).  No added sugar.  Or actual cheese.  It's not as greasy as butter icing, but it has all the other desirable qualities, and it's extremely chocolatey.  Mmmm.

Anyway, the lovely Jackie suggested decorating the thing with dried raspberries (which we have in stock), and since it was her birthday cake I obviously agreed, which resulted in this:

Covid-cake

...which we instantly renamed Covid-cake, for obvious reasons.

Then my brother Alan and his wife sent delicious hand-made chocolates, one of which looked just like the Covid-cake in miniature.  So in the final rename it became Pacman-cake...

 

Pacman-cake

 ...and then we ate it.