Yes, I love jaffa cakes too, but please, calm your slot for a second and let me speak.

Here’s the thing about my husband – I love him very much, but he can be an absolute liability. He’s managed to get me temporarily banned from interacting on Facebook, which is vexing because there’s a child out there awaiting a heart transplant and if the doctor gets 1,000,000 likes, they’re going to operate on him, and without me as the millionth like, I guess it’s into the soil for poor wee Jimmy Fictional. Let me explain how. On a Sunday, we set aside an hour or so to schedule some links to our older posts via our Facebook page, which has just shy of 85,000 people on it. It’s simple enough – write a bit of blurb, post the photo, add the link and then diarise it so it gets posted automatically on a set time and date. We forgot to do it this week, so we’ve had to do them the night before in a bit of a rush. Paul was given the task of doing Friday’s posts and in his haste to get them done before the chips were cooked, he managed to not like to a tasteful picture of our lovely steak with hasselback potatoes, but to this:

• click here if you’re not easily shocked and FAIR WARNING it’s rude and grim and gross, but oddly hypnotic; or
• DON’T click, and just imagine a close-up of someone’s bumhole going in and out.

Yes, he managed to put a link to a three second film of a sphincter. Not his own, I hasten to add, but one that he’d found on the Internet to whatsapp to his nursing friends for a joke. Thankfully, it’s a lovely clean balloon-knot as opposed to some pebble-dashed wormhole, so it’s not all bad, but when I reposted the tale in our group, I got automatically banned for 24 hours for sheer filth. Aaaah man. So: if you’re a fan of ours and you love our Facebook page and happened to witness a giant arsehole instead of a steak dinner, I can only apologise. And laugh. Oh my how I laughed – when I spotted the mistake at work, I had to leave my desk and go sit in the gents for fifteen minutes with my fist in my mouth trying not to laugh out loud. Good times.

Anyway, some exciting news. The cat is much better and has stopped licking away at his bellend like it was made out of Kitekat. Definitely worth the expense just to say him back to his normal self of punching the other cat about and showing us his anus.

I spotted, somehow, that Big Brother finished last night, and I’m just amazed it is still going. How? Whenever I catch it it’s full of self-aware knackers mooing and braying and playing up to the cameras. Lots of bronzed folks walking around in undeserved vests showing arms that couldn’t snap a wet cigarette and tattoos that mean nothing and look awful. By far the worst, for me, is our lovely local representative Marnie, who got her gash out on telly, sucked someone off and swore like a trooper. Listen, we’re not all like that. I mean, I don’t even have a gash. But Big Brother is ruined now, yet it used to be genuinely interesting TV.

I remember where I was when the original series went big and everyone started to watch it – on the Isle of Arran with the world’s most boring family in the world’s most boring cottage with the world’s most boring set of activities to do. You know the type – lots of corduroy trousers, thick sex-offender glasses and rustling rain-wear. At no time, either before or since, have I ever been closer to dashing my head against the rocks on the beach just to liven things up.

The deal was that my family took my then best friend on holiday with us to Portugal and I’d then get to join his family on their holiday. My family’s holiday was full of food, fun and sunshine (although he elected to stay inside the apartment and watch Sky News), his family’s holiday was lots of earnest discussions over turnip dinners and early nights. Not the good type of early nights where you might get your end away, no, the type of early night where the only excitement comes hoping you’ll die in your sleep. Seven nights I spent on that island surrounded by four people who couldn’t entertain a thought, nevermind a guest. They wouldn’t allow us to have the television on because “we were on holiday” so the only outlet I had, after I’d walked around so much my feet were one with my shoes, was copies of The Sun that I bought in Blackwaterfoot, and all of the salacious Big Brother stories they carried.

Listen, it was very much a last resort, buying The Sun, but that’s what got me into Big Brother and prevented me from becoming so depressed I’d have my own Livejournal and emo haircut. Paul and I went back to Arran as a couple a few years ago and it was a marvellous place, not the grey cesspit I remembered it as with my jaundiced eyes, so it just shows that it’s definitely the person you’re with that makes a place. Actually, I’ve got my notes from our Arran trip way back when, so if I can be arsed, I’ll turn them into a blog entry.

Right, enough chitter chatter. Jaffa cakes.

Look, the only reason I’ve made these is because they were on Bake Off, and I thought to myself that they could be made faintly Slimming World friendly. They probably can, but it would take a better baker than me to make them look good. To be fair, I was in a rush today, hence the sloppy presentation, but I reckon you’d still eat them, you filthy minxes. This makes ten or so.

to make taster night jaffa cakes, you’ll need:

• 25g of self-raising flour (4 syns)
• one large egg
• 2 chocolate freddos (10 syns)
• one sachet of orange no added sugar jelly (1.5 syns)
• 25g of caster sugar (5 syns)
• a shallow bun tin (or, do as we did, use a Yorkshire pudding tin, who cares am I right?)

You don’t use all of the jelly so I’m going to call this as 20 syns for ten cakes. Much thicker chocolate and bases than normal Jaffa cakes which come in a 2.5 syns each, plus you get the fun of baking them. You could knock the syn count down by using sweetener, yes, but why would you do that to yourself?

to make taster night jaffa cakes, you should:

• make the jelly up as instructed, then pour into a container big enough so you get a layer of jelly only about half a cm thick – I find using less water than instructed gives a firmer jelly, but as you can see from my pictures, I forgot to do this…
• whisk the egg and the sugar together until it’s full of air, pale and frothy, just like Mary Berry herself
• it’s easier to do this in a wee bowl rather than a stand mixer, just because there isn’t much mixture
• gently fold in the flour – you’re not trying to put out an electrical fire with a doormat, use a bit of finesse
• pour ten equal amounts into your baking tray (make sure to give that a squirt or two with oil, just to make it non-stick if you’ve only got cheap-o pans)
• bake on 180 degrees for about eight minutes or until they’ve gone golden brown
• allow to cool
• once the jelly has set, take a glass or a circle cutter and cut out ten discs of jelly
• pop them on top of the little cakes
• melt your Freddos and spoon the chocolate on top – we’re not going to win awards for presentation here, but you’re just going to turn it into poo anyway, so come on

Enjoy!

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J