Alice's Tea Cup Cookbook

I love Alice's Tea Cup's pumpkin scones and have often wished I had the recipe. Apparently I wasn't alone, because recently Alice's released a cookbook including most of their most popular recipes. I was so excited I bought it right away.

Unfortunately after using it, I have mixed feelings about this cookbook (as I explain in depth in my post about the mocha chocolate chip cake). It is a good cookbook but this recipe, and others from the look of things, aren't quite right. That's not to say they aren't good, they just have little glitches. However, as far as I know, you can't get their pumpkin scone recipe (glitchy or not) anywhere else, so it's worth it just for that!

I made their Vanilla Scones, their lemon poppy seed scones, and their earl grey scones (well technically they are meant to be lavender earl grey, but I only had the normal stuff.) I've made other scones and have them come out perfectly, so I don't think that the reason the latter two came out too flat and tough (and had dough that was far too damp) was my fault. The vanilla scones came out quite well though.

Don't know Alice's Tea Cup? Check out my review of the restaurant here.

Testing Blogsy

I know that blogsy is not a book. But I have to test somewhere and this seemed like a good place.

I just bought blogsy for my new iPad. I'm very happy to have an iPad and I'd like to be able to blog from it so I don't always have to get on my laptop. The online interface is a little bit difficult with the iPad and the blogger app is only for the iPhone--which is stupid, if you as me--and not great anyway. I did a bit of research and found two apps that sounded good, they were the same price and Both seem to have good and bad points. In the end it became a decision between an app I could use on my iPhone as well or an app with better customer service, apparently, and potentially slightly wider (but less straightforward) functionality. I decided that I rarely use my iPhone to blog and if I must I can use the blogger free app so I opted for the latter. Hopefully that was the right choice, because I'm not buying another app.

Now that I'm getting to get used to typing on this thing (not too bad in landscape view, by the way) here goes the testing. This should be fun. Or very annoying. I reserve judgement.

I think I'll try adding a photo. Apparently this app went up in price recently because they made this feature much better. Let's see how it works:

So far so good. I'm not sure how to put a caption on the photo. That's a bit annoying. I'll check their FAQ and tutorials before I declare it impossible. I'll live if I can't. On a side note, the photo above happened to be the first one on my food album on my iPad. It's orange pound cake with royal icing flowers and berry sauce--I made it for my cousin's bridal shower years ago. She and her husband are now married and have a lovely daughter, by the way.

Hmmm, what other functionality do I need. Links, I suppose. I'm not sure how to do this. Oh, I figured it out--click and hold like you are trying to copy or paste text and a link option pops up. Let's see if this works:

I will link to my main blog. Well that took me three tries to get right, but I think I have the hang of it now. One more time, this time to... Hmm. I was trying to use the "title" feature, which presumably lets you create a link and the text that it links from all in one fell swoop. Either I'm using it wrong, I actually don't think I am, or it doesn't work that way. Ah well highlight text then click link seems to be the way to go for now. One last time, this time to my restaurant reviews. Okey dokey. That one worked!

For the hell of it here's some font fun:

Italics, bold italics, just plain bold, underline, strikethrough, and back to regular but in purple!

I'm impressed. It's a bit difficult to work with, because I can't seem to tell when the buttons are pressed. But I suppose it isn't that much of an issue.

I'm happy with this so far, just one last thing to test--does it publish properly?

Actually it didn't publish. Apparently I have to specify a photo upload destination...I thought that was my blog. Hmm...settings...upload destination not set... No explanation of how to set it. Okay that's interesting.

By George I think I've got it! Blogger is a google service, as is picasa. There's a picasa icon on the little media dock in the app. Please let that be it!

Well let me set that up with the same google account I have for my blog. Will this publish now?