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Leftover bread should never be thrown away just because it is a few days old. It may have lost some of its moisture content but that means it’s perfect for making bruschetta, croutons and breadcrumbs. Croutons require frying cubes of bread in a pan. For bruschetta, fry sliced bread in olive oil, then rub the crispy surface with garlic and ripe tomato. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could also create a rich and decadent bread pudding, French toast or garlic bread. (more…)

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Ganache makes for a beautifully finished cake. Professional cake decorators use it to achieve clean and sharp edges. What’s more, it tastes a whole lot better than buttercream and then it lasts longer too. The best chocolate for ganache-making is a couverture that contains between 53 and 63 per cent cocoa. Alternatively, dark chocolate from a supermarket’s baking section can be used. In this article we’ll tell you how to make a good white ganache and a good dark ganache. (more…)

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Planet Cake is a step-by-step course in beginner’s cake decorating that will have you decorating like the professionals over time. As owner Paris Cutler says, ‘there really is no secret to becoming a great cake decorator other than solid skills in ganaching and covering, an eye for colour and proportion, practice and patience.’ A trainee at Planet Cake will spend a year ganaching, covering cakes and mastering shapes. Beginners are advised to start with round cakes and cupcakes. (more…)

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‘There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate, and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise,’ writes Eckhart Tolle in his book Practising the Power of Now. Suffering comes from holding on and not going with the natural flow of life. ‘Dissolution is needed for growth to happen,’ continues Tolle who believes that upwards cycles can’t exist without downward cycles. (more…)

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The world’s population stood at approximately 300 million around 2,000 years ago. It reached a billion in 1800 and the second billion in 1927. 1959 saw the world population reach the three billion mark. There were five billion folk on this planet in 1987 and an extra billion came along by 1999. How many people live on this planet today? No less than seven billion! The United Nations Population Fund’s’ The State of World Population 2011 sheds light on our world’s population figures. (more…)

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Not only can trail running spice up your training programme but it will nurture your soul too. As Matthew Frazier of No Meat Athlete says: ‘Trail running satisfies a primal need for movement through nature, presumably left over from our days as hunters.’ He adds that running in the woods is one thing one can count on to be the same as it used to be. But then he admits that the truth is this: it makes him feel more ‘badass’ than he is. (more…)

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A trip to Italy will quickly convince you that a formal dining room is perhaps not as important as one might think. Even if there is a dining room in an Italian home, it’s not where visitors naturally gather. They are more likely to head straight to the kitchen as soon as they walk through the front door. In Italy, everything happens in the kitchen. Even here, formal dining rooms are not used as often as a kitchen is. (more…)

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Is it possible to make money out of blogging? Steve Pavlina believes it is, as long ‘your blog provides genuine value’. He goes on to say that if you do provide your readers with great value, ‘you fully deserve to earn income from it.’ To make a success of your blog, it’s important to write about what you know and about what you’re learning. Don’t be afraid to share your mistakes and yourself because readers want to know about you. (more…)

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This recipe for biscotti biscuits should yield about 30 slices. The biscuits are rich in fruit and nuts like dried cranberries, dried apricots, medjool dates, pistachio nuts, blanched almonds and hazelnuts. Other ingredients include cake flour, castor sugar, baking powder, eggs and the zest of a lemon. Biscotti means ‘baked twice’ in Italian which is appropriate because these biscuits are baked twice. Serve the biscuits with tea, coffee or dessert. Use sweetened dried strawberries or other dried fruits instead, should you wish. (more…)

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If you tend to spend most of your day trying to get through vast amounts of information, consider Albert Einstein’s words: ‘reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.’ Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon believed that information ‘consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention’. Find out more below. (more…)