I’ve been on an absolute yeast kick lately. Maybe it’s because it’s summer and that wonderful yeasty dough loves nothing more than to grow bloated and delicate on a warm sunny windowsill, begging to be formed into rolls and breads.
As it would have it, the ever-amazing Daring Bakers have hit the sweet spot with June’s challenge: the Danish braid. The braids were the crowning jewels of these recent efforts - I filled one with poppyseed pie filling and the other with the more traditional apple cinnamon. They were both wonderful and a delight to make!
And this despite the boy thinking that the apple braids was, in his words, “a giant woodlouse”. And despite the fact that some of my less gastronomically enlightened coworkers mistook the poppyseed for caviar :-P
Harry and I had spent most of last week tearing out hair out over the inadequacy of our tools for producing click-through prototypes for a forthcoming round of user testing.
In the end we’ve built a usable prototype of our app in Axure RP Pro but found the product painful and frustrating. Axure RP promises to speed up dynamic panels feature allows you to create DHTML-y onscreen interactions (progressive disclosure, tooltips, whathaveyou) but lacks any panel management ability or even z-index maintainability! Short of tweaking Axure-spawned HTML, you can’t edit various panels without moving interface elements out of the way - and if you haven’t manually labeled your panels you are often taking a guess as to what you’re about to edit it.
We have now looked at (and probably abandoned) Serena Prototype Composer as an alternative to Axure and will probably be going back to the original prototyping ideas: using either an HTML framework with jQuery (or similar) or giving Dreamweaver another spin.
That being said, I’m left wondering if the pitfalls of “quick” click-through prototyping are in the inadequate tools or in the process itself. We set out to build our app, fairly simple as it seemed to us, with all its minute interactions and user error proofing. Adding and removing fields, simulating file uploads, all these things added bulk to what seemed a mere 8-10 page click-through. In the end, the prototype reflected the complexities our wireframes had already shown earlier. Sure, the tools suck, but perhaps we are being naive if we hope that we can mock up the full, rich experience of an application in a few… well, clicks.
If you had told me a year ago that I’d be able to make something resembling an Opera cake I wouldn’t have believed you. Opera is one of the most intimidating-looking cakes out there and the very thought of attempting it in my tiny-ass kitchen filled me with dread.
But I did it. Sort of.
The jaconde was surprisingly easy and, after being trimmed for the assembly, generated a mountain of cake scraps to the great delight of D. who had them with his afternoon tea. The buttercream, swirled through with grated crystallized ginger, was ok. I don’t own a candy thermometer, so getting the syrup for it just right was impossible and it didn’t quite firm up the way I would have expected it to. I should have just made a more traditional (to me) buttercream but oh well! The syrup for drizzling the cakes was tinged with ginger and lemon and moistened the cakes nicely.
I am a bit embarrassed about my lazy decoration of the cake - in the end I just dotted it around with slices of crystallized ginger!
