It was Chuck Norris’ birthday this week, so here’s a celebratory Chuck Norris chopping board. Did you know that Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door? Oh, Chuck.

Oh pretty birdy mugs, you’re nice. I like snobby birds. Via weebirdy

Amazing balloon sculptures by Hans Hemmert, love the deflated tank. Via booooooom

Some of the best tattoos I’ve seen in a while, from New York tattoo artist Amanda Wachob. I’ve been trying to pin-point the style I want my foot tattoos in, and I wanted a kind of washy japanese/chinese ink stroke style. The bird here is just a perfect example. So, do I fly to New York or find someone local who works the same way?! hah.

RGB light by designers Fabien Nehne and Martin Meier. via dailytonic

HADOUKEN! erm.. Hoboken. Some photoshop wizard came up with this cute adjustment to a New Jersey road sign for Hoboken… which sounds a lot like Ryu’s HADOUKEN! via thetanooki

Polyamory is wrong T-shirt, via tcritic

!!!!! on etsy

Adam, don’t be afraid if one day you come back and our cats are sharks… or mother fucking space ships!

Some geeks transformed a room into an amazing dungeons and dragons den, it even has a sounds system and a fog machine (FOG MACHINE!). All it needs now is a gunge-machine for when that huge fucking gelatinous cube comes at you. Dude. Via boingboing

Cayuuuuuuttttties!

Also on unplggd this week there’s this sweet Mario and Luigi styled furniture. I know I’m like 25 and all that, but I would SERIOUSLY consider this for my next house. Altho I’m still wanting a raptor bed. Almost bought dinosaur bed covers in tesco. Amazing.

• Hopscotch Rug! I’d love this, but we have no where to put one. Plus it’s ridiculously over priced… uh…

• Great round-up of digital illustrators from Smashing Mag

• Cullen get’s pwned by the count, thanks BoingBoing!
• Also on BoingBoing this week, how to build a backyard chicken coop. I bought I book about keeping hens last week..! I WILL CALL ONE JAWS II!
• 10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone from the Oatmeal

• Gummy bear chandelier! via craftzine blog

• Find me something cute than a smiling Fennec Fox cub… I dare you!
• Future of CSS typography, from smashing mag.

• You’ve more than likely already seen the new OK Go video, but here it is. Purely genius.
• Past photos in the present. Nice photography project!
• Visualisation of which health supplements are worth it, interesting display of data!

It’s all books! This pretty t-shirt came from tilteed (this one!), and was chosen by the hipstery based on my quiz answers. Look at all the stuff they send with it, too, stickers, an old photo (?), 3d glasses. Cute! So, there’s a discount voucher on my package 10% off with code ‘goforthandmultiply’ … I guess you guys can use it?

So, bread. I know bread, you know bread… it’s nice. The basic bread recipe is so unbelievably versatile, the same ingredients that go to make delicious pizza bases also create such delicacies as bagels. Who’d a thunk it? Certainly not my Physics Boy ‘Hey, you know, this recipe is totally like those pizza bases I made’.

It’s all in how you handle the stuff, how much you get the gluten pumped and how you go about baking. Bread science is epic fun!

Onto the bagels (not beagles, which my fingers seem determined to type). Contrary to popular belief, bagels aren’t just a generic bread dough shaped into a ring, no no, they’re a different entity entirely! They should be chewy and soft and squidgy, with a thick consistency (no fluffy white buns here, hell no!). They should also go perfectly with lashings of cream cheese. Unguguhg.

You want them now, right? That image of a toasted bagel with an inch of cream cheese just set your saliva glands going? Ok…

See how simple? I bet you have most of these things in your cupboards already!!

You’ll need..
1kg Strong white bread flour (please don’t just use generic plain flour, this doesn’t have the right gluten content and your bagels will end up pathetic and lame)
1x 7g sachet of Easy bake Yeast
1 tbsp Vegetable Oil
1 tbsp Sugar
1 tsp Salt
300-350ml Warm Water

Optional extra
Someone with bigger muscles than you OR a food mixer with dough attachments.

The dough mixture is the simple part, seriously simple. Sieve all the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. I’m using my most favourite batter bowl, she’s pretty.

Give them a good mix through. Create a well in the middle of the dry stuffs, you know, just part the dry stuff a bit. Done that? Good, I’d worry if you found that hard…

Righto, the wet stuff. In your measuring jug you need 300ml of luke warm water (luke warm, tepid, not hot… you’ll kill the yeast babies!). In the same jug just add 1tbsp of vegetable oil and 1tbsp of sugar, stir it around a bit.

Dump this whole wet mixture into the dry stuff well, and then get your hand in. AGH sticky! It’s ok, it’ll get better. Just work it baby! Mix it all up good until you have some weird half-dough half-flour monster.

Flour a surface with some of the strong white flour and dump the dough-monster on there, this is where it gets tough. You see that nasty looking dough-monster, with the flaky dry bits and flour falling all from it? Yeah, you need to get that to look like a beautiful smooth doughy lump. KNEAD! KNEAD IT! you really, really have to go for it with this dough. I tried, oh god I tried, but my weak arms were pathetic. I passed it over to the boy after about 5 minutes (this thing needs at least 15 minutes of manual kneading, less if you’re using a machine).

Want me to make it harder for you? Yeaaaaah. You need to add more flour to that dough now. Ouch, sorry. But you do. We did this by just putting more on the surface and continuing to knead it in. This will be this thickest, most elastic dough you’ve ever made. Seriously.

TADA! You should now have a wonderful dough baby. Make it into a ball and then put it into an oiled bowl for an hour for the yeast to work it’s wonders, it should double in size. Go have a beer, play scrabble, I dunno.. something fun.

Oooo see, doubled in size. Poke it, go on… poke it. Did it leave a dimple? Yeah? It’s ready for the next step. Otherwise, leave it longer.

You now need to flatten all that air out of it. Punch it, Chewy!

Now we need to separate the dough into 15 lovely balls, you can do this however you want, but going through a series of fractions will probably work in your favour (split into 3, then split each 3 into 5). You’ll need to use a knife to cut the dough, it’s just way too stiff to pull apart. GLUTEN POWER! Lovely little dough balls, roll them into bagels! like this…

Sausage, wrap and pinch. Repeat this for the whole 15, laying them on a greased baking sheet when you’re done. Preheat your oven to it’s maximum temperature.

Leave your raw bagels for 20 or so minutes to swell up a little, cover them with some kitchen towels to keep them snug. Meanwhile, get a big pan of water on the boil.

This is the fun part, we need to boil the bagels. So, we did this two at a time, which is a good number if you’re only just starting out. They need about 1 minutes worth of boiling on each side. This gives them the lovely shiny appearance of a bagel. Nice. When they’re done, lay them back on the baking trays.

Put the trays into your preheated oven, and after 10 minutes (or when they’re golden brown) you’ll have 15 deliciously homemade bagels!

Oh, if you wanted to add any toppings to them (like sesame seeds, sunflower seeds etc) then do so just after they come out of the boil. Just have a plate with the topping on and kinda plonk it on in there!

Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? ENJOY!

Source: Adapted from How to Be a Domestic Goddess and ‘Homemade Bagel Recipe‘

If you’re viewing this via an RSS feed you’re missing out on the option to print a simplified version of the recipe! Click here to view the post

Vivienne Westwood has designed a limited edition t-shirt in collaboration with Fashion For Relief which will be unveiled at the Fashion for Relief show to be held on 18 February in London. The t-shirt will be sold exclusively at the show as well as on www.viviennewestwoodonline.co.uk and in the Vivienne Westwood Conduit Street and World’s End stores. It is a fact that women and girls are particularly vulnerable in emergency and crisis situations and are frequently neglected during initial efforts to provide food, water and shelter. Late this January a UN report stated that in Haiti 240,000 pregnant and lactating women will require nutritional support. Proceeds from the sales of the Vivienne Westwood designed t-shirt will go to The White Ribbon Alliance which supports the health needs and rights of women and girls around the world, with special focus on its partners in Haiti at this time who are helping to rebuild the healthcare system for mothers and babies.

‘It’s good isn’t it?’… yes, Mum, it is good. So I bought one.

• D’ya like flowers? photography? Check out these 50 pretty epic examples of flower photography.
• How the internet works cartoon, tbh I struggle with this whole internet thing… uh, that can’t be right? hah!

• Quit hiding your cables, dress them up! Via unplgged
• Annie’s eats does chicken and shrimp jambalaya, we’re having a deep south cook-off in our kitchen in the next couple of weeks. We’ll have gumbo, jambalaya, red velvet cake, corn bread, sweet p’tatos & all manner of cajun goodies. Think we’re doing a sausage jambalaya!
• FinestImaginary were featured in a cuteable cowboy round-up this week, check it out!

• Loving this fox plush by Sara Carr, on etsy.

• How to make homemade taffy, definitely one I need to try!

• T-rex garden statue, echoing the geekologie writer’s view — DO WANT!

• This is well cool, a nissan cube frozen in water and etched. Neato, see more at the indie quarter blog.

• The lost art of Inglorious basterds round-up on OMG posters!

• If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the Photoshop Cook video above.

Ok, maybe not Alice, but the first thing I thought when I saw this outfit from the Vivienne Westwood LFS show was ‘Dude, Mad hatter!’ … maybe not ‘Dude!’, definitely ‘Mad hatter’. I haven’t blogged about the fashion weeks this year, I usually do a couple of posts on my favourite collections. I’ve been watching though, maybe not as much as usual, but still. I can’t watch too hard, else my bank account starts gently weeping at the lack of funds to buy anything!

bah! Stupid having to pay for a house thing with windows and a kitchen :(

Maybe next season…

PS. I made a few tweaks to the blog design over the weekend, did you see? I have another cool feature coming up soon, too.

Oh noes, our pretty fish bit the dust today. We found Sir Terry floating on his side this morning, and soon after his gills stopped flapping and his eyes stopped rolling. We scooped him out and burried him in the garden, Adam made him a little cairn on top of his grave. Neil looked like he was ok, until this afternoon when he started to go the same way. Alas, it wasn’t long before he joined his friend in the ground. No idea if they were just old, or something weird happened to the water. We’ll be getting some smaller shoaling fish for the biorb in the coming weeks.

This is a neat idea, submit your size and take a short quiz and they’ll send you a ’scientifically calculated’ shirt. I’d love to see the shirts people get, and if they like them! Hipstery.com

• Straight into it this week, check out the video above. It’s amazing.
• The BBC website/visual identity is changing, they’ve got one of my most favourite designs on board (Neville Brody, I heard him speak once and he basically told us that Uni didn’t mean shit… I still stand by that statement) to help see it over. Super interesting stuff if you’re into web design, or graphic design, or anything remotely related to technology I guess.
• Web designer wall looks at the fun things you can do with CSS3, nice.
• And on the subject of geeky web-stuff, I went to a conference last week in Leeds called Speak the web. Well, I say conference, it was more like a group of speakers in a relaxed pub environment, it was neat. So maybe I should do a write up about it? Maybe.

• This photo of a snowy dog belly made me laugh quite a lot the other day, maybe more than I should have.  Via cuteoverload.

• More amazing illustration found on Pikaland, you can find Jenni Saarenkylä’s haunting forest inspired prints on etsy. I bought the set of 3 for our art-landing :D

• The british library are holding a special exhibition for all things Alice in Wonderland, they have this original manuscript of ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ written and illustrated by Lewis Carroll. Neat, hey? You can find out more and see more of the scan on the CR blog » Curiouser and Curiouser.

• Hot sauce embroidery on craftzine!

• Tiny dinosaur figure on boingboing

Let me know if you have anything to add! :D