After another hellish exam week I find myself completely void of any necessary task or hindrance. In short: I’m Free!!! My summer has yet to begin, as I have an upcoming group project to attend to, but I have no details about what that entails or when it begins, so for now, I can do whatever I like.

After a small amount of experimentation, I found that a pursuit for diabetes was the key to me enjoying this newfound (and incredibly rare) spare time. Prior to exams I had a thing called “Chocolate Tuesday”, where every Tuesday I would make it a point to make something delicious involving chocolate. It lasted a good month, featuring truffles, shortbread biscuits and various other things, but was cut short because of exams and my terribly dull priorities.

With the pain of revision over, it returned with a bang featuring a project I was thinking about since Easter: the solid Easter Egg. The key is in the chocolate, filling it with solid chocolate would make it impossible to eat, so instead I used truffle chocolate, which is about 40x richer and 800x more unhealthy (95% of all statistics are wrong).

Recipe: Bring about 250ml of double cream to boil while cutting up 300g of dark chocolate (at least 60% cocoa; no one likes wimpy truffles). On completion, you should have at least 250g of chocolate left, which you place in a bowl, pouring in the double cream and mixing. One you have a consistent delicious colouring in the bowl, rehearse a two minute acceptance speech for a food based award you will soon win for these treats and then add 50g of unsalted butter in two stages. Mix until they have completely melted and then pour into two easter egg halves. Quickly put them together and tightly wrap in foil. Fridge for at least 3 hours, turning occasionally to avoid pockets of air. Once done, you’ll need a calving knife and a round of insulin injections to serve

Thanks for reading,

Chris

xx

Epic Chocolate Time

Tuesday was an irritatingly busy day. It began with the battle I always tend to lose: the 9 o’clock lecture. Swiftly after banging my toe against the the bathtub, jumping into a freezing shower too early, fumbling around for a matching pair of colourful socks, grabbing a food-like substance from the fridge and staggering out the door, I force myself awake with the walk to uni, and then try to force myself to stay awake with 2 hours of vector mathematics. Were I to chart my productivity throughout the day, I really would need a negative y-axis from 6 till 12.

This drowsy morning was quickly followed by a Student Staff Meeting and a two hour lecture. Again, wiping a good portion of the remaining energy cells left in my body. Fortunately, I ended my day with a pleasant stint with the Chocolate Society.

This week, we went to Rococo, a lovely little shop tucked behind Harrods, for some chocolate tasting. This was the most professional tasting session I’ve ever been to, as the employees there explained the history behind the company, as well as some of the basics of making chocolate, all the while feeding us some of their delicious produce. Our taste buds were put to the test, as we tried to identify the odd mixes of sea salt, lime, cardamom, passion fruit and cocoa nibs incorporated into the various samples they had for us. The result of this game was that bar 2 members, none of us can really meet the specifications necessary to call the muscle in our mouths a tongue, but nevertheless, we all had a great time.

When the session ended and we were about to make our way out, everyone grabbed a few bars of what they liked, or what they thought sounded interesting, and we had a sugar-infused journey back to our respective homes.

Like I’ve said many times before, the chocolate society is great in that it’s not such a serious club to join. We meet every few weeks, have a lovely time chatting to everyone and leave with a belly full of rich, exotic chocolate. Without it, this post would have been a depressing spiral of sobbing; so be glad and raise a bar to Choc Soc

Thanks for reading,

Chris xx

It’s been an incredibly productive week thus far. The library has predictably taken over my life, as the Christmas cheer has been thoroughly bleached away by my coursework, and I’ve got a fair bit of work done. I have also had quite a nice bit of down-time this as my society life has been a bit more active than usual.

EPod

Thrillingly, my voice is now available for download through iTunes!! Much to your dismay, this isn’t because of my singing voice landing me an album. Earlier, I posted about EPod, the podcasting team at Imperial I am a part of, and the difficulty involved in doing spot interviews with students without seeming strange and scaring them off. Well, the ePod team have finally compiled together the first podcast of the new season and we are all immensely proud of what we have done. It was a load of fun for all involved, although I have grown quite a hatred of my own “Radio-Voice”. Please give it a listen and tell us what you think and how we could improve the show. (Click here to subscribe through iTunes or to download the mp3)

ChocSoc

Last Monday, I had another chocolate tasting with the lovely bunch at ChocSoc. Chocolate is such a fundamental part of my diet, but it was never something I would think about or explore. A craving will lead to the purchase of a Chocolate bar (or slab on a particularly good day) and 10 minutes later (regardless of size) I am incredibly satisfied with the contents of my stomach. With the Chocolate Society, I get to think about chocolate and enjoy it on a more analytical level. Each week we get quite exotic pieces from round the world and you notice the big differences in tastes. For example, chocolate from Madagascar is usually quite fruity, whereas chocolate from Central Africa is a bit more bitter and earthy. On Monday we tried odd mixes like peppercorn chocolate and aniseed chocolate. It’s great to find and taste all these bizarre things you never thought existed and, of course, free chocolate is the fastest way to my heart

Robotics Society

This was the most fun society meeting I’ve ever been to. One of the people on my course started up a Robotics Society and a bunch of us went to show support. Personally I had no intention of joining, but that was quickly reconsidered after we got stuck in to a “Scrapheap Challenge” style drag race. The room of about 60 people were split into teams and each given a small kit including: two motors with wheel axel attachments, a battery pack and two (horribly manufactured) wheels. We had that and a box full of cardboard, cups, lollipop sticks, blu-tack, tape and other office scrap to produce a car that could travel as fast as possible in a straight line. Being the tight-knit group that we are, all us ISE students stuck together. Using the extensive knowledge of Formula 1 we pretended to have we built what we thought would be good.

<WARNING: If you have no interest in cars, model making, or my nerdish tendencies, skip to [END]>

0 to Awesome in 3.5secs!!

Both motors were used in parallel to maximise torque and we made the wheels bigger to ensure they ran at an increased same speed (as the ones supplied were horribly made). The car was long and quite wide to limit it’s turning ability and the car was rear-wheel drive with all the weight at the back to push the wheels into the floor to get the most power out of them.

<[END]>

It was a lot of fun and resulted in us producing the fastest car and the only one to have two successful runs. As much as the hours of work I missed was annoying me afterwards, I felt like a child again, which is all I hope to get out of any society I join.

Society life is great at university. You meet a lot of very cool people who share your interests, and you do things you always wanted to try, but never had the means to do. What societies are you part of, and which ones do you think I would enjoy?

Thanks for Reading

Chris xx

Hello Again,

This is going to be a horrible week. I wanted to do a fair amount of blogging, as the buzz of getting this page is still alive and thriving. Unfortunately, my course has decided I’ve been getting far too much sleep lately and coursework after coursework after coursework has been piled onto my plate. This means I will not get any free-time whatsoever this week and thus, I am sitting in the back of a Digital Electronics lecture on my laptop

Even though this was not at all planned, it links on quite nicely to a series of David Attenborough style “observational blogs” I plan to do when I have the availability or the ignorance to do so. I want to go round to each department’s recreational areas and blog about what I see. The chances are, each visit will be a lot of people hunched over computers glaring at a mathematical equations, but I’m still hopeful for a bit of eaves-dropping and gossip. This is partially because I want to explore more of the college. When we were all given the job of “Imperial Student Bloggers” we were told to explain what it was like being, working, living at Imperial. However, I honestly couldn’t tell you anything more than my old halls, the Electronics Department and the Union. The reality is, most of us stick to our own groups; the only people I spend my time with were my fellow ISE colleagues and my hall mates.

Two weeks ago, I went to a Chocolate Society event (and am now a member). As well as the sugar-rush and very interesting conversation, I had a great time on the balcony of the 8th floor of Blackett. I was completely unaware of amazing places like this around Imperial. The balcony there is huge, as big as some lecture rooms, and boasts a brilliant view of the Royal Albert hall. I want to find more places like this, and let you know the beauty of the campus.

Right, must be off. Tomorrow (Wednesday, blog edited and published shortly after. It went great!!!) I have a rehearsal for a 10-min presentation I have to give for a scholarship application next week. It’s entitled “My greatest achievement to date and why”, so effectively it’s two minutes of content, eight mins of waffle to try and impress important people with money and job opportunities. Not looking forward to it at all!!

Thanks for Reading,

Chris xx