A magic thing!

I have discovered a magic thing! I have discovered that there’s a way of talking and your laptop/computer will write what you’re saying without you using the keyboard at all! I’m being a little frivolous because of course I knew there was a voice activated typing thingy, a voice to text app, but had never used it. But today has been the day – today I have started “writing” something by talking to my laptop. This new skill is being used for a specific reason, I came across a dairy/notebook I kept while we were in Tasmania seven or eight years ago. I knew I had it, but it was stuffed away in a bag of other things and I came across it this afternoon while looking for something else.

I flipped through it, reminding myself of things we had done, places we’d visited, Tasmanian beer we had drunk, thinking that I really ought to write it out, but what a chore. When I’m writing creatively ideas fly from my fingertips, but when I’m copying something – even a recipe to share here, I miss words or jump lines, or inexplicably write the wrong thing. Now I’ve discovered that I can read my Tasmanian diary out loud, and my laptop writes it for me – and no typos unless I mispronounce something.

No doubt I will share extracts here, but in the meantime, here’s something I wrote once we’d returned home:

Charles Wallace Alexander Napier Cochrane-Baillie… what a splendid name! He was born in 1860 and reached the grand old age of eight, and his title was 2nd Baron Lamington, GCMG ( The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George) GCIE (Knight Grand Commander, Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire) The first Baron Lamington, Charles’s father, was a politician who became a baron; the country estate was in Lamington, a small village in South Lanarkshire in Scotland.

To give you a clue why I have been finding out about Baron Lamington the second – he was   Governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901, and various geographical features in Australia are named after him such as  Lamington Plateau and National Park and Lamington Bridge in Queensland, Mount Lamington a volcano in Papua New Guinea and Lamington Road and Lamington High School both in India where he was also governor after leaving Queensland.

So there is the Australian connection… but the real reason (if you don’t already know) is the lamington which is practically the national cake of Australia! It is a delicious sponge cake, cut into squares, dipped in chocolate or a jammy sort of sauce (raspberry) and then dipped in desiccated coconut. I have often seen recipes for them, but never tried them before… until our recent holiday in Tasmania and Queensland itself, the home of the lamington.

Although there are apparently several similar cakes which were appearing at the end of the nineteenth beginning of the twentieth century, the lamington was supposed to have been created by Baron Lamington’s chef, Armand Gallan.

There are plenty of recipes for lamingtons on-line, I haven’t yet made any but I certainly am going to; the thing which interests me, having eaten them without seeing a recipe, is that in most recipes I have looked at since trying them have little or no butter in the mix… I must experiment!