Shimmin Scones

I've been asked for the sugar-free scone recipe I mentioned in May.

This is a set of variations around the theme of my parents' recipe, which they have from my grandparents. It may be centuries old for all I know, although I suspect not because self-raising flour is pretty modern.

Sugar-free scones

You'll want the following ingredients:

• 8oz self-raising flour
• 2oz margarine (or butter)
• Spices to taste
• 1/4 pint water or milk
• 2oz dried fruit

Mix the flour, spices and marg together, then slowly drip in the liquid. It should start to gather into a ball of dough with a claylike texture - it'll never get quite dry, but it should get easy to handle. If it becomes really tacky you'll need to add more flour.

I use a food processor which has only a blade (no blunt stirrer) so I throw the fruit in at the last minute. You can add it earlier if you've better equipment than me. If you add it too early, it can be ground up so small it's no longer noticeable, and it'll also upset the balance of the dough because it's basically adding sugar and water.

Although scone recipes normally include sugar, I find a reasonable amount of fruit and spices give it plenty of flavour. If you use butter or jam you should be fine. Personally I don't, but then I make these scones deliberately as a convenient but relatively healthy breakfast - quick to eat and with minimal mess, which means I can eat them at work.

Milk supposedly makes for a more luxurious recipe, but water always does fine for me. The milk recipe doesn't keep as well so that's another reason I avoid it.

Good combinations I've tried include the old staple of cinnamon + raisins, and cocoa powder + cherries. Cherries have a fair bit of sugar in, of course, so that's less healthy; on the other hand it offsets the bitterness of the cocoa. It's quite easy to overdo cocoa, it'll look very pale in the raw mixture but darkens on cooking. Mixed Spice is also a good bet.

I've also had a successful savoury recipe: poppy seed and rosemary, with a dash of salt to bring out the flavours.

Because I tend to make these as handy breakfasts, I divide the dough up into large chunks. You can normally get 3-4 large scones from one set of mixture, squash them out into a flat lump and they'll rise nicely (no need for kneading). Smaller ones work just as well, but need a little more watching because they burn more easily.

Put them on a greased tray and cook at preheated GM7/220C without fan/200C with fan for about 10 minutes. It's worth quickly separating them from the tray when you take them out just in case they stick; slightly tricky as they'll still be a bit soft. I find carefully shaking the tray side to side is often enough to dislodge them. Don't put them in a box straight away, as they'll release a lot of moisture as they cool and it'll fill with condensation. Leave them to cool (maybe with a dishcloth over them) and then box them up. Mine last a working week without going off, which is as long as I've ever tried it...

Basel: Last Day and Departure

By the morning of my third day in Basel, I am rather fed up. I'm still tired and ill from whatever blight has afflicated me. I've spent a good part of two days wandering aimlessly round the city, seeing the main streets and landmarks. I'm sincerely wondering what I can do with the rest of the day.

I take the bus into town, where I find a backery and pick up a couple of things to eat: Grättimaa Schoggi (chocolate chip pastry man) and a Schoggiweggli (some kind of chocolate chip pastry).

It all looks so delicious, and there's only one of me to eat it.

Today, I decided to head up through the Old City, which I'd only checked in passing previously. I avoided bringing a laptop so as to keep my bag light and allow for plenty of walking. I decide to turn off after the bridge and take a fairly circuitous route through various back streets. They're mildly interesting, but not in a photogenic way for the most part.

This mural is on a random wall. I have no idea what it represents, but it's both cool and trippy - could easily be early roleplaying game illustrations.

There's a large building ahead which attracts my attention. This proves to be the Congress Centre, which I can't actually get inside. There's some kind of events going on, but there are security - presumably you either need a pass or to buy a ticket. On the plus side, there's some restaurants around too, and one of them is a relatively affordable Japanese restaurant! Hooray. I leap at the chance.

Weird hole in the middle of the roof; it lets in a reasonable amount of light and presumably lightens the roof as well. Kind of cool.

Not pictured here: very numbers of people breathing smoke all over me from all directions.

This was perfectly pleasant. It came with lamb, which I've only seen at a Mongolian restaurant in Japan, but was quite nice.

Refreshed, I head back towards Barfuesserplatz and the Historical Museum, which was closed yesterday.

I wander inside and find a handy locker to store my stuff. Some confusion ensues, because I'm under the impression that the museum is free, but as I try to wander down a set of stairs to check out the basement gallery, a staff member pounces on me. I apologise and go to buy a ticket I don't especially want. I think the setup may be that the basement part is ticketed but the upstairs is free? I'm confused. Maybe none of it is. Anyway, I pay and get on with it.

A town model

There was an exhibition of chemistry, innovation and its social relevance.

I believe this is a coal-bearing rock, or some such.

Looks pretty groovy to me.

The museum is inside a church, and most of the fittings are still here. There are also some displays of historical church silverware.

The basement contains a more general set of historical goods. Most of them are the usual generic artefacts - bowls, coins, bits of bone and so on. All fine, but I've seen plenty before.

These are incredibly thin stackable bowls.

I think this is a coconut turned into a dispenser of some sort.

Animal samples in a cabinet of curiosities.

There were also plenty of tapestries, bits of mediaeval artwork (including rescued fragments of a huge Dance of Death mural) and samples from various local crafts.

This room is preserved as it belonged to a famous theologian, but embarrassingly I can't remember which and it's not on the website.

Museumed out, I stride off into the steep streets to the south-west, randomly doing a circuit and just scoping the place out. There's not a huge amount of great interest to see here - various shops, lots of houses, but it's fairly ordinary stuff and the lighting isn't very good.

To be fair, most places are not fundamentally particularly interesting. I've learned this more and more as I travel more. Many places are interesting to visit with other people. Some places are very scenic, although that often fades after a while. Most places have a few specific points of interest, which you may or may not be able to appreciate. I suspect it's a little easier if you're very much into restaurants or bars or something, because you can find that sort of thing more or less everywhere.

There is a large barometer in this street. I don't know why. At least, I think it was a barometer.

Roothuus

There's a big, distinctive red building in the town centre. This is the town hall; "Roothuus" is the local dialect term for Council Hall (elsewhere "Rathaus"), and a handy homophonic pun on "Red House". It's not particularly striking in the low light conditions that prevail, but when the sun strikes it's very pleasing.

With the night creeping in, I find a My Thai restaurant in a nearby shopping centre. I was actually planning to buy some bits from a supermarket, but it didn't have a suitable set of things (shopping for one meal for one person in a generic supermarket is suboptimal). So instead, I go for further noodles and nice green tea.

Once I get back, I write for a while and decide on a walk. I'm getting bored and want to get out. I deliberately head away from town, and meander nowhere in particular. It's not hugely interesting, being just a generic residential district, but my podcast is good so it's fine.

The following day, my flight is in the afternoon. For breakfast, I eat my cakes.

I lock up, hand over the keys, and head off into town. Here I find a luggage locker to tuck my case away, and have another wander around. There's not a lot of excitement; I take further photos of the red building, and have my lunch back at My Thai to save the effort of hunting around too much. At that point I see no particular advantage in hanging around and decide to just head to the airport. There's a few intriguing-looking books, but given the extortionate prices here I see no reason to buy them; I can always pick them up from German sources. And I really, really don't need any more books right now.

I sit around bored for a while, having several hours to kill before the flight. I sensibly brought some basic food, because the airport is sparse and extremely boring, though it does have a cafe. And now for the tedious journey back to Manchester.

Several hours later, I get into Manchester. The flight has not provided any form of liquid, and I've had no opportunity to collect any. My luggage takes so long to arrive that I have to sprint through the airport and down the stairs to the station, in the hopes of getting the 9.45pm train home. My hopes are dashed when, although I arrive a couple of minutes early, the train's arrival time slowly ticks back minute by minute. Before long, it's evident that there's no point getting it as I'll miss my connection and be stranded in the middle of nowhere overnight.

Thank heavens, the shop which earlier seemed to be closed has reopened. It's an all-night concern, apparently, and they were just restocking! I manage to buy a tea and muffin (eventually ferreting out my British money) and collapse at a table to wait two hours. As I do so, I realise that the foil-wrapped chocolate I was kindly given by my host at Aaron's Sleepwell, and hastily tucked into a pocket, has melted in my coat and seeped into the fabric, bestowing a large oily patch and a strong scent of chocolate which (SPOILERS) remains months later after several bouts of scrubbing and treatment.

I hate Basel.

I eventually get back well after midnight, pay for a taxi (almost unprecedented) and stumble into my flat around 1am. I'm so glad I took today off work.

A quick announcement on posting habits

Public service announcement: if you're reading this blog, but just keeping an eye on the latest blogposts, you're probably missing some.

For quite a long time I've been going back and filling in various posts which either I never quite finished (in some cases, as far back as my original trip to Japan in 2014) or didn't have time to write at all. For the sake of my blog making sense, I tend to date these on the actual date of the event, rather than letting them float up months or years afterwards and throwing the timeline out of whack. But that means they won't show up as the latest thing on the blog.

If that's the case, first off I recommend you get an RSS feed reader.* I use Brief, an add-on for Firefox, or Feedly with my Android phone. If you are not already using RSS feeds, but you read blogs or listen to podcasts or basically anything that publishes (ir)regular content, I really recommend investigating. They've significantly improved my life.

* This is a small program that tracks when websites you choose have new content available - new blogposts, episodes, articles and so on. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. The RSS Feed that's being read is just the list of recent content produced by the website, which most blogs and so on create automatically, just like this one does.

There's a button on the top right of this page (under "Subscribe") which shows the Posts and Comments RSS feeds for this site. You can click those to get the feed itself, and then depending on your browser and so on the technique for using it will vary. In my case I see a button called Subscribe, and I save it in a bookmark folder that I've associated with my Brief add-on. You can also manually add this feed to your reader with the following URL: http://a-shimmin-abroad.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Secondly, you might want to head back and check out the March and April posts from this year, at least, as I've been catching up on my trip there and still have some posts to go.

There will be more actual posts forthcoming soon, as I'm travelling right now. Stay tuned for exciting updates on which Starbucks I visited and whether any of the staff gave me cute things.

Basel: Aimless Wandering

Replete with Satiated Having consumed organic matter to maintain my metabolic processes, I leave Burger King, turn on my podcasts, and begin to wander around the Old Town.

A useful street with a whole swathe of eateries, but I went in the Burger King I saw first because I was way, way too tired and hungry for faffing about.

Or at least, that was the general idea.

Having located one of the Old Town landmarks, the history museum based in an old church, I realise that it's shut. I haven't been eating for that long, have I? No, it's just shut on Mondays. Like most museums.

A very typical scene, with prominent trams.

Oh dear.

Circling the museum, I strike north-east towards the river, where I plan to walk along the Rhine looking out for Rhinemaidens (one can always hope) and taking in the scenery. In mere minutes, I find myself gazing upon the sparkling waters of the legend-haunted river a McDonalds I know perfectly well to be almost directly south of the museum.

Retracing my steps, I manage to cross the spatiotemporal anomaly that is Barfuesserplatz and progress in a series of unwieldly arcs towards the north, constantly checking my map. My host advised me to check out the Pollock exhibition at the Kunstmuseum (but he's an artist so that's not surprising), which I do successfully find but choose to skip. Taking the road north towards the Wettstein bridge, I find myself gazing suspiciously at the historic townhouses about me, whose continuing ranks become ever more implausible as adjuncts to "being in the middle of a river" as I walk onward.

This is a particularly cool postbox, in my view.

I'm used to seeing 300-year-old buildings around, but I'll admit the 600-year-old houses are impressive.

Finally concluding from encountering a park that I am in fact going directly east, I turn sharply to the left. Sheila from the Food Programme is interviewing some hospital staff about hospital food.

I'm pleased to discover a random stretch of what appears to be mediaeval wall, or possibly a facsimile of it. Switzerland has a lot of very old stuff, but given a lot of it's wood and it doesn't look that old, I'd say it's at least been refurbished relatively recently (in historical terms at least).

I know this is near the paper museum, so I circle back to check that out; it's closed, of course.

The machine doesn't respond to the button, of course, because the museum's closed and presumably it's been turned off.

I begin to wander back approximately along the river, appreciating the adequate views of distant buildings over some greyish water in the mid-afternoon winter twilight. Hey, I'll take what I can get at this point.

Along one of the sidestreets I find the Cartoon Museum! It sounds intriguing; if only it weren't closed. In this case, not merely for Monday, but for a renovation. It's almost like there's a conspiracy against me in Basel. I am entirely willing to believe this.

That's a shame, as I expect it would have been interesting, and also I might have found some cool stuff in their shop (according to a sign, there is a shop with lots of comics and stuff).

I don't know either.

There is a red sandstone church nearby, where renovation work is being carried out. I'm listening, by this point, to a podcast about microbakeries and the work of some microbakers in helping at-risk young people take control of their lives.

At last, my efforts are rewarded as I find the bridge I was looking for an hour ago and set off across the Rhine.

Around the centre is what I think is a shrine. People have done that irritating padlock thing for some reason.

After a quick look round, I realise it's nearly 5pm and about to get dark. I'm a bit cold, somewhat tired and have been walking around for ages. Rather than immediately start exploring the far side of the river, I decide to cross back and find a cafe. I'm here for basically two more full days; there's really no need to exhaust the full walking-around potential of the city. And who knows, tomorrow I might even be in a better mood.

On my way back I pause to listen to a street violinist. This is Mia Renfer and she does sweepy atmospheric pieces while I'm sat there. She's got an album out, go and listen to some samples, see if you like her music. I go up to get her website details, and drop some money in her case, with the usual awkwardness of this transaction exacerbated by the usual awkwardness of being British, now coupled with the unusual awkwardness of being in a foreign country.

After a couple of hours sat in a Starbucks I realise I should probably go back to the B&B. It's dark and I'll have to eat at some point, though the very late lunch means my body clock is all thrown off. I manage to make my way there without any particular problems, but struggle to find anything particularly suitable for a solo uncooked tea for one in the local shop. I end up eating the remains of my Fladenbrot, now rather stale, washed down with yoghurt. The glamorous life of the European traveller!