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Day: 19 October 2011

Time to bake cake

It appears that we’ve reached that time in first term when we all begin to realise how much work we have to do this year. It can all get a bit depressing, unless we use the medium of cake to momentarily ease our burdens. Here are three simple recipes to bake your way out of despair.

 

Five minute chocolate mug cake

 

Alas, cake now takes a dangerously small sliver of time to be in your belly. Here’s how:

Mix 4 flat tbsps caster sugar, 4 flat tbsps self-raising flour and 2 flat tbsps cocoa powder. Add an egg, 2 tbsps oil (anything but olive) and 3 tbsps milk. Mix again then add optional chocolate chips or broken up chocolate bar. Heat in 700W microwave for 3 and 1/2 minutes or a 1000W microwave for 3 minutes. Hey presto, immediate cake. Probably best to save for cake emergencies.

 

Exceptionally easy chocolate cheesecake

 

Ingredients

250g digestive biscuits

250g ginger nut biscuits

500g cream cheese

400g chocolate (200g dark, 200g milk)

100g butter

 

Method

Smash biscuits in a bag until they’re in crumbs. (The perfect way to relieve some stress). Melt butter in microwave and mix in a bowl with crushed biscuits. Press mixture firmly into base of serving dish.  Simmer a small amount of water in a pan and melt the chocolate in a bowl placed on top of it. When melted, mix with cream cheese. Spread over the biscuit base. Place dish in the fridge until the top layer has set firmly.

 Adapt to make a white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake by using 400g white chocolate instead of dark and milk, and splash out on a box of raspberries. Crush the raspberries and mix them into the cream cheese and white chocolate mixture.

 

Bloaf! (Banana loaf)

Bananas always seem to be lurking in the back of someone’s kitchen cupboard in our house, and last year I made this cake almost every week – and it always disappeared within the space of a few hours. Banana cake is always better if the bananas are getting a bit old, brown and squidgy – so you’re performing a service, really, by not wasting them!

 

Ingredients

 60g butter

100g Demerara sugar

2 eggs, beaten

2 tablespoons milk

3 bananas, mashed

250g self-raising flour

 

Method

Preheat oven to 200oC. Grease a bread-loaf tin (or ordinary cake tin, if you don’t have one). Cream butter and sugar then add beaten eggs a third at a time. Combine milk and mashed banana in a separate bowl and add mixture alternately with sifted flour. Pour into prepared tin and bake for 25 minutes, or until a skewer comes cleanly out of the cake.

Perfect slathered with butter cream and topped with sliced bananas.

 

 

Asia Triennial Manchester 11

You might not have heard, but Asia is upon us. Yes, yes, China’s economy is growing faster than a social network whilst the ocean is evaporating. But the real earth-shrinking news is that the Asia Triennial is back and bigger than ever. The festival that launched 23 commissions and five exhibitions back in the last decade (2008) has now thoroughly invaded Manchester.
Over 20 ‘community-based venues’ have thrown open their arms, and their walls to Asia-related art; new contenders include MadLab and Manchester Cathedral. The second tri-annual festival looks at contemporary issues facing Asia and Asia-in-Manchester: themes of immigration, city-dwelling, connectivity and all in one hegemonic, cohesively-glued package labelled ‘art’. And the really unique thing is that as well as representing Asia, the Triennial represents, creates even, contemporary art. And whether or not this platform for East Asian issues is so pervasive and widespread here in Manchester, due to the large Chinese community, is not as relevant as the fact that this conglomerate is providing Manchester with some really interesting, thought-provoking– you might even say cutting edge– art.
Take your time, Asia Triennial is on until the 27th November. Check out specific listings and events at http://www.asiatriennialmanchester.com/ and our reviews for our writers’ recommendations.

Body Positive art show: Vegans go native

The people behind nakedvegancooking.com (remember them food-lovers?) organised a two-part event to challenge the unrealistic images of beauty endorsed by the media at every juncture. Art and food mix once more, this time in the name of social change. The group wanted to reinforce that individuals need to be proud of and embrace their body the

From Kashmir to Kandy, at the John Rylands Library

There is still time to see the exhibit, From Kashmir to Kandy: A South Asian Odyssey at the John Rylands Library. However, for those of you like me who have little knowledge of Asian history and culture, you might be better off staying at home.

The library has brought together a fascinating and eclectic mix of beautifully ornate religious texts, and esoteric documents from across Asia. The obvious flaw was the unfortunate lack of literature to help gauge the significance of these (presumably) marvellous items.
I was excited to see that the exhibit included a section of the Mahabharata written as a palm-leaf manuscript, yet the information given was not sufficient if you had no previous knowledge to help you contextualise the documents.

The exhibit, An Inestimable Treasure – 400 years of the King James Bible, which as well as housing The King James Bible housed also ‘related materials’. This collection included: a 15th century Biblia Pauperum from Germany and documents spanning everything from cholera and Body-snatching to zoology and astronomy.

I was able to connect most with the exhibit of personal letters and papers spanning 200 years of correspondence between gay lovers. The exhibit was touching and revealing, and included writings by such famous individuals as the war poet, Wilfred Owen.
In essence I did spend a very pleasurable afternoon in the library. However, the curators missed a real opportunity to connect the audience with the exhibits.

Everything happened at once – Rashid Rana at Cornerhouse

Everything Is Happening At Once is an exhibition of duality and deception. Or, in the words of Rashid Rana, an ‘attempt to translate the physical, psychological and temporal access of our current epoch into the idea of two-dimensionality’.

So far, so pretentious. But perhaps we can let him off. Rashid is, after all, one of Pakistan’s foremost contemporary artists, and a leading light of Manchester’s Asia Triennial.

In gallery one there is a series of boxes printed with large pixelated images of every-day objects: a fridge, a stack of newspaper, flowers in ceramic vases. The combination of 3D boxes and the flattened 2D images creates a sort of trompe-l’oeil in reverse. This sense of irony and fun contrasts drastically with gallery two, though disguise and trickery still reign.

The title, Between Flesh and Blood and a warning on the door of ‘graphic imagery’ ahead forewarns a more visceral dimensionality to be flattened. Two large-scale photomontages, one of women in burkas, the other a Pakistani rug, are on closer inspection compiled of documentary photographs of blood, violence and death.

The horrific pictures are miniaturized, hidden within the giant images of cultural stagnation that spells out themes of deception in religion, media and politics today. There was something less 2D in gallery three, an incredible mirage-like installation called Desperately Seeking Paradise II. I worried about what happened to Paradise I- things didn’t look good for it.

Plastic Flowers in a Traditional Vase

Tiny photos of houses in Rana’s native Lahore are assembled to appear as giant skyscrapers. Perhaps a comment on the East- West divide, buried behind a grid-like structure of mirrors. This exhibition is a pretty powerful inspection of the world today and despite such grand designs the works are not daunting nor overly intellectual. It might even make you think, and not just about yourself. Rana does the Cornerhouse proud: catch it before it’s gone.

Rashid Rana: Everything Is Happening At Once is on at Cornerhouse until Sun 18 December 2011.

Diffusion: Daksha Patel at Cornerhouse and Piccadilly Station

Sat enjoying a drink in the bar of the Cornerhouse, you could be easily excused for failing to notice your own, eye-splitting proximity to one aspect of this year’s Asia Triennial Festival. Likewise, alighting from the metro at Piccadilly station many commuters, in the daily rush to get from a to b, may miss the way in which their journey has been quietly invaded by one of the city’s local artists.

We often unconsciously filter out the majority of the environment that surrounds us, swallowing exactly only what we expect to see or are looking for. This is one element that Daksha Patel is attempting to express and undress with her quietly invasive works- which themselves call for us to look again.

Her work, a series of gentle, intricate etchings, drawings and photographs, plays upon the (oft-unnoticed) two-way street that runs between city and inhabitant. Working closely with Manchester Metropolitan University she has set about collecting and interpreting a range of data focusing on the ways in which we construct, live within, and are affected by our urban surroundings.

This information has then been transformed into a series of curious and intriguing images, which can only be described as the love child of cartography, cellular microbiology and abstract design – it was only a matter of time before that happened. Thus the mass of numbers which statistics often become are given new meaning as they are presented in a striking and thought-provoking manner.

Displayed at the Cornerhouse the images are graceful and inquisitive, put out in the cold of a station they are polemic (in the best possible way). Patel takes a step further in her quest to make us engage more fully with the conditions of our city and puts her work right in tripping distance of the daily grind. Displayed using a series of light boxes lining the tram-tracks at Piccadilly station, Patel’s art doesn’t just talk the talk, it gets all up in the grill of city life.

Taken out of the serene context of the art institution and placed within the alien realms of a crowded station these works confront the very population they are based upon – the people of Manchester. I only question how many will notice.

Daksha Patel’s work will be on show at the Cornerhouse until 18th October and at the Piccadilly metro stop until 27th November.