I've recently picked up something I used to do lots, before I left Copenhagen. Baking. It's taken a while to get back into it, but this time it's even better. Thanks to some guidance and help from good friends and esteemed bakers, Hessam and Rasmus, I've managed to make my own bread much more delicious.

Here's the recipe I've used a few times now with good results.

• 10-15g of yeast (fresh or dried, no matter)
• 500ml of cold to luke warm water. Room temp is fine.
• plain white flour
• 2 teaspoons of salt
• a dash of olive oil

if you use fresh yeast, then crumble the yeast into little bits, and pour the salt over the yeast. Leave it sitting there until the salt has dissolved the yeast. If you use dry yeast just toss it in with the salt, and pour a little water on it to dissolve it.

Then, pour a little oil and water in there, stir it a little bit, and then start adding the water, and the flour. A dose of water, a dose of flour, stir. Repeat this until you run out of water.

The aim is to have a fairly wet dough that will gladly stick to anything it gets into contact with.

Cover it with a cloth, and put it in the fridge for proofing for 8-12hrs. The longer, the better.

When you take it out, it should wobble when you shake the bowl around, and have a surface with bubbles just underneath the top layer. Next, you flour a tabletop generously, and scoop the dough out onto it. It will stick to anything with no flour on it. Fold it a couple of times over itself, don't knead it, just fold it. 5-6 times.

Take a tray or similar (I have a square metal tray for making brownies in the oven), and spread some oil around the bottom and the sides. Scoop the dough into the tray, and sprinkle some flour on the sides of the dough. That way it's easier to get out of the tray later. Cover that little fellah up again, and leave it to proof for another 1-2 hours. The dough will rise again, and get what looks like blisters on the top, very thinwalled air-bubbles. These are our friends!

With around 30mins to go of the proofing, turn your oven on. Mine goes to 250�C. That's what I put it on. Take the lid of the cast iron casserole and stick in the oven to warm it up. I use a 27cm cast iron casserole for this.

When the proofing is done, and both your oven and the casserole is blistering hot, take the casserole out of the oven, and poor the dough into the casserole. Don't whip the dough around too much in the process, because we want to keep as many of the air-bubbles in the dough as possible. At the same time, you want to get the dough in there fairly quickly, so the casserole doesn't lose too much heat while out of the oven. Note that I didn't do anything to the casserole. No oil, butter, or any other jazz. Just heat!

Then, lid on the casserole, and back in the oven with it. After 30 minutes, remove the lid. You should see the dough having risen quite a bit, and look a little pale. That's what we wanted! Leave the lid off for the last 15 minutes until the bread gets a nice crisp and golden crust, like on the photo above.

Cool it, cut it, eat it, and enjoy.

Attended an entertaining night of Crazy P beats and Danielle doing her loop station antics. Turns out that me and my smartphone are pretty good at borrowing the light of pro flash units in the surrounding area.

In Clerkenwell.

This is part 1/6 of a BBC 4 production about Gil Scott-Heron from 2003, just before he was caught and charged with posession of a controlled substance.

I got to know Gil Scott-Heron because of Masta Ace. In 1991, Masta Ace sampled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised for his track Take a Look Around - a remake of the message carried in the original track. Gil Scott-Heron never quite understood how he was being credited with influencing hiphop, and he didn't care much for the label protorapper, which the media liked to imbue him with.

Next week, on the 27th of May, it's a year since he passed away. Enjoy the documentary.

This handful and some are from my first day there, where the local dogsled championship race was held. It's the qualifier for the national championship, and it's a really big thing in Ilulissat. I brought a lens that was a little too wide to properly capture it though, but I'll try to fix it with words.

As you can tell from the photos, there was a lot sleds participating. The rules, as I understood them, are pretty simple. There's a specific route to take. You can use a short sled instead of the normally longer transport sleds. You can have up to 15 dogs in your hitch I believe, and that's pretty much it. A friend of mine from Ilulissat has participated and told me about some of the preparations for the race, which includes training the dogs in interval runs, training them in off-piste racing, giving them treats on the way that they get only when you use a special cry, which makes them connect the cry with an extra treat. This special cry you can then use during the race, to get a bit extra energy from the dogs on the long stretches. A bit like a turbo boost.

The route is somewhere between 30 and 40km, and the dogs run this in less than 2hrs. Because of the weather that day, I didn't go back to see them return, it was very windy, snowing, and cold, but I believe this time they did it in around 1h30mins. Very impressive, considering they were climbing the Akinnaq cliffs with the sled.

The thermometer on the day said -28c, and for the dogs that's close to perfect conditions for running, these animals are amazing! For the sled drivers, it means they have to wrap up a little warmer (:

Motor is a street art/graffiti painter from Copenhagen, now living in East London. This last weekend she was painting in Stockwell, and I went to take a few photos, and wish her a Happy New Year.

I hope to tag along to more painting sessions in 2012 with her and Solo One.

Copenhagen, beautifully captured. Check out cphpch.com for more.

This guy is a genius, not only a great musician, but a musician who has completely reshaped the premises of collaborative music in the 21st century. A couple of years back he did the Thru You project, which I recommend you check out, if you haven't already seen it.

I laughed, I cried, I stood up and cheered. This guy makes Hunter Thompson look like Maria von Trapp.

High fuckin five.

This is a shot looking east, with the Gurkin, The Shard, and Renzo Piano's newly build Central Saint Giles in the front.

I love this idea, would be fun to do in a lot of different countries and cities. My favorite is the guy that listens to Lollipop by Lil Wayne around the 2.05 mark, he reminds me so much of the opening scene in Office Space.

via

The only problem was, that my connection is a modem solution, and not a cable solution, as there's no cable coverage in my area, I guess. The problem with this is, that I like to use my own router, because you can usually make them do more tricks than the one made available by the telco.

I have a Linksys WRT54GL router, which you can hack to bits, and that's why I got it. There are number of great open source firmwares out there for this router, including dd-wrt, tomato, and OpenWrt. I like a good and memorable name, so I went with tomato.

O2 supplies their ADSL broadband customers with a wireless router, the O2 Wireless Box II, connected directly to the wall, to get the ADSL connection. This means there is no modem in between, to which you can connect your router, and be a happier geek.

Except, there is.

The trick is to setup the O2 Wireless II box to function as a bridge, and to do that, you need to do some CLI-gymnastics in a telnet prompt, but if you are up for the task, it actually works!

I found Luke's instructions over on Nothing But Reboots to be of great help in this regard. I followed them point by point, and I now have my O2 Wireless Box II working as a bridge to my WRT54GL running tomato. The only difference is, that O2 seems to have changed the password for the SuperUser account to be the serial number of your O2 box, which doubtlessly makes it less insecure than before.

Happy days, and a more stable wireless experience.

Wait for it...