It's not all glamour, I'm not always working as fridge-cleaner to the stars as mentioned in my last blog. In fact, a rather serious bout of bad-hair day earlier in the week was just what I needed to keep me inside and bring out my inner Domestic Goddess.

My deep love of food makes me a passionate and energetic cooker. My lack of skills in the kitchen and general domestic idleness, however, mean I would much rather skip the hard work and the mess, and be taken out for dinner. Anyway, I couldn't venture out with the hair, and took my inspiration from a recent trip to the 24-hour bagel shops on Brick Lane (if you haven't been and you live in London- I wonder what you do on those crazy nights out which leave you scavenging for food at 4am?)

Anyway, having found this apparently authentic recipe on the web,

I set to work mixing flour into yeasty, beer-smelling water with bare-handed alacrity. After combining all necessary ingredients and spending thirty minutes slooshing around up to my elbows in the apparently unchanged wateriness, it became clear that something was wrong. A re-read of the recipe formally revealed I was in fact using the wrong kind of flour (beware young chefs, there is more to flour than meets the eye) and, as is often the way with my culinary creations, I had no choice but to deviate from the recipe like a rogue cyclist falling out of line in the Tour de France. Except the French can cook.

Hunger, and a small alcoholic beverage, spurred me on until the contents of my mixing bowl began to thicken, at which point I spent a full half hour laughing myself silly over the sticky stringiness of the dough-mess which clung unrelentingly to my hands/arms/clothes/face/house and gave me the distinct feeling of being a Boris Karloff body double from The Mummy.

Pleasingly, it turns out that if you substitute Bread Flour for an inordinate amount of Plain Flour, you can still end up with a big doughy lump that eventually sticks to itself, and not to you. At 2am, I was rather surprised to find myself the proud progenitor of these little babies:

Which unfortunately were so hard I shall be keeping some in my handbag for self-defense, but none the less I think they still illustrate that beautiful things can come from those unexpected Boris Karloff moments.

Talking of the great Mr K reminds me that Halloween is coming up next week which is one of my favourite annual events (mostly to do with the colour scheme), so my next blog will be full of ideas for some ghoulish goings-on.