Baking with OLD New Equipments

Two days ago, I made these - chocolate banana cake and banana muffins. Both were delicious. :D

So, I already have 2 cake mixers. The Kenwood (white) mixer is quite old, probably more than 5 years and I send it for repair once last year and it's not that good now. I bought a new Faber mixer when I had the Kenwood repaired, so now I have 2 mixers.

Guess what? A kind elderly lady in church noticed my interest in baking and decided to donate her old heavy duty Kenwood mixer to me. She bought it 2nd hand for RM280 in the 1970s. She hasn't been using it for many years now and thought of giving it away.

Well, I'm the happy recipient. :D I always wanted to own one of these heavy duty mixers but my little interest doesn't justify paying so much, plus the very fact that I already have 2 mixers. 

It's a Kenwood Chef model A.701A.

Look at all the extra stuff it can do on this mixer. Gosh!! Anyway, I only received the machine (obviously), along with the "K" beater, whisk and the jug liquidiser. It's good enough for me. :)

Oh yeah, have I ever told you about my oven?

This is my first oven. It was given to me by my dear friend, Ruth, when she bought a bigger oven. Hmm... what was the year, I can't recall, but I guess it's probably in the year 2006.

And then last year, on the 27th of March, my aunt gave me her old oven. It's probably 30 years old or something.:) I love it. It bakes very well, much better than the small oven and I am able to bake more in a shorter time. 

I also got this cooling tray recently. It's so useful because I bake a lot of cookies at a time. I first spotted it in a kitchenware type of shop and it cost about RM49. I thought it was too expensive so I didn't get it at that time. After a few weeks I saw the exact one in a DIY shop. It was only RM25.90. I grabbed it and was very pleased with how much I saved. :) 

Volleyball

My sister and I were once volleyball school players. Even after we left school, we still played every now and then.

I think the last time I played in a real game was 10 years ago.

I played for my company in the year 1999 and 2001. They had the sports event every two years. Come to think of it, if we didn't win any medal, I would have forgotten that I played at all for my company.

As far as I can remember, I always had a personal volleyball ball (hmmm, you get what I mean) during my Secondary school days, since I was in Form 2 if I'm not mistaken. It was always shared with my sister. And when the ball got out of shaped (always due to them being rolled under a car), we would get another one, though maybe not immediately.

After our final exams in Secondary School (High School), we didn't play much and soon when the ball was old and worn, we threw that away but never got another.

This year, during our Kids' Sleepover party in March, we played volleyball with a BASKETBALL after the children went to sleep. There weren't any net, just passing the ball from one person to another- volleyball style.

Our forearms hurt like crazy.

It was then that we decided to get a volleyball, a cheap one. Cost only RM30. :)
Oh, we did ask about the Mikasa volleyball, a very famous brand during our time (and still is, I presume). It was priced at over RM200 now! Used to be worth only RM40.

So here's our brand new ball. Looks good and it was easy on the forearms. We didn't play with it until during church camp in May.

We only played 1 session.. and look what happen to the ball....

It got torn at the seams. :(

I think the guys did some kicking with it too, so yeah.

It was still "playable", but the direction of the ball wasn't accurate.

Then, a friend from US came to visit. It was her summer holidays and every year she comes back to see her relatives. It seems she played volleyball for her school and she wanted to practise her serving.

My sis discussed with me and we decided to get another ball.

So, we went back to the same shop again and told the shopkeeper what happened to the first ball. He was sympathetic and introduced another brand, a slightly more expensive one. I noticed, this ball has a bar code stamped on it. :D

We played only once with this ball, so let's just see how long this ball lasts. :)

Been busy scrapping...

What have been busy with lately...scrapbooking... :)

It was a time-consuming and expensive hobby; a type of craft my sister introduced to me in the year 2003. Back then I was really reluctant to spend so much on acid-free materials. I used wrapping papers and thick cardboards. After a while I compared my scrap pages with my sister's. Hers was so much nicer and attractive. To lure me into buying acid-free papers, she gave me some of her "I'm-not-going-to-use" papers. After a while I decided to choose my own acid-free papers and started buying acid-free stuff from America. My little collection grew and now I've so many papers, stickers, embellishment and other acid-free stuff that I thought, hey, I need to use them, not collect them!!!

Those who know me would know that I spend a long time just creating 2 pages of memories. If I had 2 hours of free time, I would choose to read a book or .. yeah... read a book. I wouldn't start or continue a scrap page. My sister, on the other hand, could finish 2 or 4 pages of scrap page in 2 hours. She would think of ways not to spend more that necessary time for a scrap page and yet manage to show her creativity in that page. I always wondered how she did it. She did tell me that most of her layouts were copied from various scrapbook magazines and she would modify a little to suit her photos. I was like... uh...um.... how to copy? We don't have the same pattern paper or embellishment... etc.., how on earth can our scrap page be as nice as the ones in the magazines? Oh well.... I think I'm not good at copying. :(