Recipes - The Student's Guide to Boston Cream Pie

Actual cooking time: 1 hour
Preparation: 2 days

Ingredients:
For the cake:
1. 4 eggs
2. 1 1/4 cup flour
3. 1 1/4 cup sugar
4. 2 cups milk
5. 2 tbsp unsalted butter
5. 1 1/4 tsp baking powder
6. 2 tsp vanilla essence

For the filling:
1. 4 egg yolks
2. Sugar (I forget how much)
3. 3 tbsp cornflour
4. 2 tsp vanilla essence
5. 2 cups milk

For the glaze:
1. Chocolate - lots.
2. Cream - even more.

Equipment required:
1. An oven
2. Something to heat things on
3. Kindhearted friends who will lend you their mothers' cake tins, sieves and measuring equipment.

Procedure:
1. Plan ahead for days to the point of obsession to make sure you know exactly what you have to get. Go shopping for ingredients the day before, forget the butter.
2. Wake up, swear at yourself for forgetting the butter. Borrow the hostel kitchen's keys from the mess secretary. Laugh at the sign that tells you to return them in 4 hours because everyone knows you will take three times as long.
3. Haunt the corridors like a spectre by daylight to borrow a baking tin before everyone leaves for class. Borrow tin, realise that your measuring cups still haven't arrived. Swear again.
4. Walk to friend's house, borrow measuring equipment and sieve. Stop to check your mail, buy butter, return to hostel.
5. Carry ingredients down, open kitchen. Experience a moment of dismay because (a) it's small (b) there is no cooking range, only a hotplate and (c) because there's no source of running water in the room.
6. Realise (c) is not too much of a problem because of the bathroom next door. Experience another moment of dismay when you realise that the only vessels in the kitchen are a few ladles, a wok, a non-stick pan and a sauce pan, and you will have to whisk your eggs with a knife.
7. Arrange ingredients. Switch on the electric oven, to preheat. Switch it off again when you realise the hotplate uses the same plug and you can only use one at a time - a realisation that dawns simultaneously with a knocking sound that seems to come from the oven.
8. Prepare creme filling, stirring constantly. As it cooks, hope and pray that the recipe really does require that it turn into a glutinous tumour-like mass. Take off the heat. Taste. Taste again.
9. Let it cool and transfer to another container, refrigerate. Wash saucepan.
10. Prepare cake batter in wok, whisking eggs and sugar together with a ladle. Substitute knife for ladle because there is no fork to be found this side of the veil. Impale yourself on the knife while rinsing. Swear again.
11. Heat milk and butter, add to egg mixture while praying that it will not congeal. Be glad when it doesn't. Add flour. This time it does. Mix vigorously.
12. Pour into lined, buttered (borrowed) cake tin. Bake for 35-40 minutes at 350 degrees.
13. Prepare glaze - heat an obscenely large quantity of cream, bring to boil. Pour indiscriminately on broken pieces of a chocolate bar in a plastic(!) bowl. Stir. Let cool.
14. Once cake is ready, let it cool. Slice horizontally into two largely unequal parts.
15. Assemble - spoon creme filling onto the bottom half, cover with the top half. Top with glaze, letting it drip down to the sides. Eat any glaze that isn't directly attached to cake, and some that is.
16. Chill in your newly-purchased refrigerator for twenty minutes or until you are ready to serve.
17. Consume, with the gratifying realisation that it actually tastes and looks pretty good. Store in above-mentioned refrigerator, eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack for the next three days.
18. Join the gym.

For a real Boston Cream Pie recipe, check out:
http://www.marthastewart.com/best-boston-cream-pie

The Pitfalls of Evidence-based Medicine

Randomised Controlled Trials are supposed to be the gold standard of clinical trials.

Here's what happens when you carry a good thing too far: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/327/7429/1459

The Amazing Technical Dreamtown

Gandhi Road, opposite the hospital's second gate, is known for dirt, crowds, an outbreak or two of amoebiasis and the place where most of your shopping gets done. Walking down the small shop-lined street I was dazzled by Dawn Bakery, newly painted, that stood out against the bleak greyness of the sky in bright yellow paint with orange edges. I could be classy and call it marigold with a tangerine trim, but either way it would still hurt.

There seems to have been a revolution in housepaint sweeping the town. Standing on ASHA terrace you can pick out a house in fluorescent green, a pale blue, two yellows and a lavender. From a distance they seem forgivable. Up close, it takes some getting used to. There's a house on the 2 route that's a deep, dark blue. Pleasant, though unorthodox. There's another one that has a hot pink facade. I've heard rumours of a bright yellow one behind Schell, the eye hospital, but I haven't seen it yet. I'm not sure I dare.

Leaving housepaint alone, some of the houses have - interesting motifs on them: there's one, again on the 2 route, that has two huge human eyes carved into its parapets. Or rather, the parapet's carved into eyes, with blank spaces where the sclera ought to be.

Although a lot of house owners seem to be opting for unorthodox colour options, not all of them choose to dazzle - one of the most common is the colour of the hospital - a blue-grey that makes the building look a little like a large, sprawling thundercloud. Superimposed upon this are the temples at the streetcorners, which have large ornate figures of mythological characters mounted on their roofs. All painted. Brightly.

Few of these would meet any demanding aesthetic standards, but they're always interesting to look at. And if they make the people who live in them happy, I suppose that's all that matters.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/327/7429/1455

A Change of Mind

I never wrote of love, I never once
Wrote of the things I ever wished to keep.
Never of all I chose to leave undiluted,
Not once among those things I pressed so carefully
The flattened petals among the brittle leaves
Of heavy books, did I count those bouquets
Whose heady perfumes brought to mind
Autumns long past, or longing that was so scarce
I could not afford to adulterate or lose it.

I never wrote of love, I never
Had enough to have enough to give away
Never enough of anybody's heart
To commit to paper, to lose a part,
To leave it behind to gather cobwebs.
They would grow their musty stories
Weave in glistening bands of brittle steel
Wind tighter, tighter still until they snap
And hang in mocking streamers, gather dust.

I never wrote of sunlight as it filters
Through gulmohar leaves, or when it mingles
with the ripples in the stillness
To lap at the concrete of its containment.
I never wrote then, nor when I lay
Enveloped in the true, the rare, the fleeting.
What torrent this that sweeps away the habits
Of twenty years?

A First

My first study proposal - submitted. : )