Well, thanks very much, and thanks for inviting me to present today and join the meeting. I'm a medical oncologist, and so what I'm going to talk about today is related to precision medicine, but in cancer precision medicine, specifically thinking about somatic genomic alterations and how we use those somatic genomic alterations to think about choice of therapies. But I hope that the approach that we're taking to improve our understanding of cancer precision medicine is actually, you guys think it's broadly applicable to other pharmacogenomic research. So as you all know, there's been a paradigm shift in how we think about cancer, where we've moved from just thinking about the anatomic region where a cancer arises to now including the key genetic and molecular dependencies that we identify in a tumor, and this shift has been catalyzed not only by the continued discovery of key genetic dependencies in various tumors listed here, but also the development of targeted therapies that hit those vulnerabilities as well as genomic and molecular profiling techniques that allow us in real time to interrogate patients' tumors to be able to find those vulnerabilities. And so here's an illustration, a dramatic illustration of this in practice. This was a patient who we studied some years ago. He was a 38-year-old man with metastatic melanoma. He had these terrible deposits, subcutaneous deposits all over his upper torso and really was not responsive to any therapies that he received, no immunotherapies. This was now eight years ago, and so using sequencing and choosing a targeted therapy was not standard of care, but as part of a clinical trial, his tumor was sequenced. It was found to have an activating mutation in the gene BRAF, and because of that discovery, he was treated on a phase one clinical trial of a drug at that time called PLX4032, now the FDA approved Vemurafinib, and you can see this really dramatic response. And so this is a very dramatic example of cancer precision medicine and choosing a therapy based on a somatic genomic alteration, but this is really our goal for every patient with cancer. And I'll say that we've made advances and we've been able to do something like this in many more patients over the years, but this is still the minority of patients, and for the vast majority of patients, we haven't identified those targets and those vulnerabilities or haven't developed the appropriate drugs for those patients and can't recreate this scenario in as many patients as we would like. And so our ultimate goal is to be able in every patient to understand what drives cancer, interpret every patient's cancer genome, identify the optimal treatments, and anticipate and preempt resistance before it arises. And as I said, we've made a lot of progress over the years, but we still have a lot more work to do and discover a lot more of these dependencies and implications of somatic genomic alterations. And what many of us think it will take to get there is really amassing and characterizing many thousands of tumor and germline samples connected to clinical information. So we really can be able to develop a database that we can learn from and understand who responds to which therapies and who becomes resistant to which therapies. And Dr. Rodin earlier in his talk mentioned the study of outliers, and that's proved very useful in studying responses to targeted therapies in cancer as well. Studying patients with extraordinary responses has allowed us to find some of these dependencies and vulnerabilities by studying far fewer patients, by studying those patients who have rare but exceptional responses to therapies, drugs that when in most patients either don't provide a response or provide a minimal response, and a handful of patients may have to provide some extraordinary response, those in when we've studied one or two or three patients with a response to a particular drug have identified particular genes or particular pathways that have been altered that then allow us to develop a general principle which help us think about this now as a biomarker to find additional patients where this might be relevant. And so a lot of us in the field think that studies of extraordinary responders could help develop methods for optimally matching patients to drugs to highlight effective uses of what are otherwise considered failed therapies and also to aid with the development of new therapies or new therapeutic strategies. The problem is that when we have started to study patients with extraordinary responses, we often rely on someone at our institution saying, by the way, I have this interesting patient who had an extraordinary response, we should study them or we should find out what happened. And it's very challenging to find patients this way. It's really by happenstance or even if it is in a systematic way, if you do it at one institution, by the very nature of the responses being rare and extraordinary, it's very hard to find patients like this. Part of the reason that these times of studies have been challenging is that the vast majority of adults in the U.S. with cancer don't participate in clinical trials. So less than 5% of adult cancer patients in the U.S. are enrolled in clinical trials and even amongst those patients enrolled in clinical trials, the vast majority of those clinical trials don't collect tissue and don't study the patients who might have had a great response to a particular drug. And even more importantly, the vast majority of adults in the U.S. are treated in community settings and so they go to their local center, they get care, their tumor tissues may be stored in their pathology departments for future clinical purposes, but no one studies that tissue and the main reason that no one studies that tissue is that no one's really asked those patients, those 85% of patients, if they would be willing to contribute their tumor tissue for this type of research. And so most tumor samples have not been readily available for study and over the last several years, multiple groups have started to think about how to address this issue and how to expand our ability to analyze the very many thousands of tumor samples that are stored in pathology departments around the country. The NIH started approaching this a couple of years ago with their extraordinary responder initiative where they reach out to physicians around the country and ask physicians if they have a patient who meets certain criteria of extraordinary response that they can contact the NIH and that starts a process for those tumors to be submitted to the NIH for further study and over the last couple years, I understand that there's been quite a few of these such extraordinary responder patients that have been identified in this way. Around the same time a few years ago, we thought about taking a complimentary approach, which incorporates the use of technology, social media, and cultural changes in which patients are now more empowered to advocate for research in their tumors and advocacy groups are more organized than ever and take some of these changes and really use this opportunity to engage cancer patients directly and partner with them in this type of research. So in late 2014, early 2015, we decided to pilot this type of approach of going directly to patients in one particular disease and metastatic breast cancer, which is what my lab studies. And what we did is we went and we met with lots of patients and patient advocates. We hadn't started a study. We hadn't even really conceived of what the study would look like. We really just went around the country and started talking to patients and advocacy groups saying, if we did something like this, if we wanted to partner with patients and advocacy groups around collecting tissue and samples and medical records, is this something that you would be interested in and you would want to participate in and you could help with? And over that several month listening tour, we learned a lot about how patients felt about this, about what type of messaging we might use, about what type of images we might use on a website. And along with the patients and advocacy groups, we built a project and we built a website and the project is called the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project. And this is what the website looks like. So it's at NBCproject.org and you can see it says help transform our understanding of metastatic breast cancer. And if you scroll down the website, it says your tumor and medical records could help unlock discoveries. And it asks patients to become part of a research movement and have a direct impact on the future and tells people how they can participate. And so if patients read through this and are interested in participating, they click this little button in the top right corner that says count me in. And when they click count me in, it asks for their first name, their last name, and their email address. And then they check a box that says I have metastatic breast cancer and I would be interested in answering some more questions and potentially sharing my medical records or my saliva or my tumor samples. And so we launched this in October of 2015. Hopefully that patients would sign on because we had developed this and designed this with many patients. And in the last 18 months, 3500 patients, men and women, women and men with metastatic breast cancer from around the US have signed up. And we have now patients in all 50 states. We have some patients outside the US have signed up as well. And there's been real enthusiasm in the metastatic breast cancer community to join and participate in something like this. So I'll walk you through our approach. And so once people sign up, we send them an online consent form. And the online consent form asks for permission to obtain and analyze their medical records, a saliva sample, a portion of their stored tumor sample, and most recently a blood sample. And when they sign the consent form, they also tell us their home address and they tell us the names of all their doctors or what hospitals they've gotten their care at. So then we send them a small kit which has a saliva vial to collect saliva. We send that to their home, they provide a saliva sample and they drop it back in the mail. It's already addressed to us, it has postage. And so they can drop that in the mail. We then contact their physicians and their hospitals and we ask for copies of their medical records. And so then their medical records are either faxed or mailed to us. We then review their medical records and we abstract all the important clinical information. And we find out where their pathology is, where their tissue is stored. And then call the local pathology departments and ask for a portion of their tumor tissue, which is then mailed to us as well. And then we do genomic analysis on the saliva sample. We do whole exome sequencing on the saliva. We do whole exome and RNA sequencing on the tumor tissue. And most recently, now that we're collecting blood samples, we do whole exome sequencing on cell-free tumor-derived DNA in the blood. And then basically the goal is to take all of this and create this clinical pathological genomic database that links all of the information about their treatments and what they've responded to with both germline and somatic data. And then this data is de-identified and will be regularly shared. And so this is gonna be posted both in databases like DBGAP as well as CBIOPORTAL so everyone can use it for research. So I'll show you a little bit about our enrollment over time, just to highlight a couple of points. And so this blue line you can see here are patients who have registered, who've gone to the website, clicked count me in, and typed in their name and said they're willing to participate. And you can see, we launched, I don't know if this works here. We launched in October of 2015, we had six advocacy partners at the time, they helped us, they emailed all their constituents. They, we posted on social media as did they, as did the many patients that we partnered with. And over the first month or two, almost 1,000 patients signed up. And we were, we were very excited because we were, we were, we were very pleased that 1,000 people wanted to participate in this project. And then it started to level off and we thought maybe the project was done. We found the 1,000 people who wanted to participate and that was it. And then in early 2016, we all of a sudden, without us really doing anything, just started seeing lots of people sign up, hundreds per day over a period of several days. And when we looked around to figure out why this was happening, it turned out that patients who were signed up had taken it upon themselves to go onto Facebook and onto Twitter and into closed, closed support groups and started to talk about this project and tell other patients that they should, they were signed up, they were, they thought this was important and they thought other people should sign up too. And so we got this big bump, a single patient posted on her Facebook page that everyone should do this in February of 2016. We got 300 people who signed up in one day. And really ever since then, this steady increase, I would say, is largely patient driven with patients recruiting other patients to participate. We started sending out consent forms in January and we now have 2,100 people who've consented. And we started sending out the saliva kits in March of 2016 and now we have more than 1,200 saliva kits in the house. Because this is a direct to patient project, we don't have a multi-center IRB, right? We have one IRB, which is our IRB. And there are now 1,000 institutions that are represented amongst these patients. And so you can see there are five big cancer centers that each have 40 patients enrolled, but we have this very long tail of 721 institutions with only one patient enrolled. And so these are presumably the community centers around the country that have a patient who wanted to participate in this. We also asked for patient-reported data, so we have 16 questions that were designed with the patients that they thought patients would be able to answer. Some disease characteristics, some questions about extraordinary responses, some demographic information. And the response rate to this optional survey is 95%, with 98% of questions being answered and an average of six minutes to complete. So we start out with detailed clinical information about 3,300 patients. And we can use this information to identify specific groups that are hard to identify by traditional methods. So patients with extraordinary responses, patients with resistance, patients who present with advanced breast cancer, people who are diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at a young age. And underrepresented populations, groups of patients who may not have been represented in large studies like the TCGA. This is the question about exceptional responses. So have you been on any therapy for more than two years? Or have you had any extraordinary response to disease where your tumor disappeared completely? And you can see a lot of patients answered yes to this. And so we thought this question didn't work, everyone's saying yes. But actually, everyone told us what drug they responded to. So then you can look through the data and you can find these small pockets of patients, 138 patients who had an extraordinary response to the drug xylota, which is a very small number compared to the total number. And probably at least a lot of these are true extraordinary responses. We can also look at how long people are living with metastatic breast cancer. So the average survival once diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer is about three years. But here are over 150 patients who've been living with metastatic breast cancer for more than 10 years. So is there something about these patients that we might be able to learn from? And we're trying. As I said, all the data is being shared. So all somatic and germline genomic data and all the linked clinical data are being deposited every six months in the genomic data commons, as well as the C-bio portal, as well as the fire cloud at the Broad. And we're planning our first deposition for the first 100 to 200 samples in the first half of 2017. So there are a lot of studies we can do, not just studying extraordinary responders. So now that we're collecting all of this data, we think we can study specific patient cohorts, outliers, as we talked about earlier, the epidemiology of metastatic breast cancer, which is somewhat understudied, clinical behavior like response and resistance, side effects, toxicities, particularly important to this group here, and also real world practice patterns. What order of therapies do people get? This is, as I mentioned, a collaboration with now up to 26 advocacy groups. Advocates groups, once we launched this, have been great about coming out and reaching out to us and saying they wanted to help with outreach. And so really, patients and advocates, as I mentioned, have been involved from the very beginning in conceiving, designing, implementing, testing, and continuing to refine this project. And we continue to add new advocacy groups who are partnering with us all the time. And so I just want to close by focusing back on this idea of patient partnered research. One day, sometime in the middle of last year, we started seeing all these selfies appear online. We didn't tell people to do this. This wasn't a marketing plan that we decided to do. They just started showing up. And you can see these are patients participating in the project who are holding up their saliva kit. The saliva kit says, count me in. And I'll read just four of the quotes, of many quotes that we've seen from patients. One patient from Houston said, I want to live and watch my children grow up. But if I can't, then I want to leave a legacy and a cure. From Lake Tahoe, we heard, as someone who does not live near a research center and therefore cannot easily participate in trials, I finally feel like I can contribute. Amazing how happy that little box makes you feel. I felt like a two-year-old. Let me help. I feel a sense of pride and belonging because of this. And giving us hope for the future, and if not for some of us, for our families. And so we're excited about this as a model for patient driven research. About six weeks ago, we launched a second project in a rare sarcoma called Angiosarcoma. In six weeks, we already have 200 patients who've signed up for this project. It hasn't been systematically characterized before. There are only about 300 cases diagnosed per year, and we already have 200 patients signed up. And in a few weeks, we'll launch a third project called the Prostate Cancer Project. So just to summarize, we think that partnering directly with patients through social media and patient advocacy partnerships enables the rapid identification of large number of patients who are willing to share their tumors, saliva, and medical records to accelerate research. And this, in particular, enables the study of rare patients, like exceptional responders or rare cancers, who are otherwise challenging to find with traditional approaches. And because patients are sharing this, sharing their information, we think this is a shared research. So all clinical and genomic data will be shared widely with researchers. And again, relevant to this audience, we think this might be a proof of concept for patient-driven research, not just in cancer, but in general. So with that, I'll close. I just want to acknowledge many people who work on this, in particular, the NBC project team here. Thank you very much. Thanks, Nick. Todd, if you want to move up, we have time, maybe, for one quick question. Pat? Sure. Nick, that was a great presentation. Thank you. I just had a quick question and a little bit more information about the governance structure. Do patients participate at all in the prioritization of research topics using the data that's collected? There is not a formal sort of decision-making body around what the research topics are. And partly, that's because the clinical data that's abstract from the record and all of the genomic data are just going to be made accessible so people can download it and do whatever research projects they want. We do take feedback from patients pretty seriously. And we've already changed the project many times based on feedback from both patients and researchers. So changing the survey questions, adding survey questions, doing follow-up surveys. We have a plan to follow-up survey based on input from patients. So in that way, there's a lot of input from the patients around the research. But in terms of what we're studying or what other people are studying, we're going to leave that pretty open. Great. Thanks very much. OK, next is an ingenious presentation from Todd Scar, Indiana University.


We will talk about one particular speech because I listened to it about how after it was given. And all I have to say is, no, I have a lot more to say about this, but this is a good start. Wow, endavos. Well, anyway, for that matter. Wow, I mean, just wow.  Speeches and Mille just gave a great speech. Now, granted, granted, it had flaws. It could have been better from a number of different dimensions and other perspectives. There were things I really, really, really would have liked to have changed. But you have to focus on the positives because the positives are so overwhelmingly good as compared to the negatives that, wow. I highly encourage you to watch it. I'm sure you've watched a lot of politicians' speeches that you just thoroughly hated. I'm putting it here in the chat. You can go watch it. It's simultaneous translation. So you get the English translation of it. And I just want to highlight a few things. First, let me just say, he really needs to take my public speaking course. This was not well delivered. It was not, I mean, the whole sections of it that I'm sure the audience fell asleep in, it could have been so much better. Just with a little bit of refinement, both a little bit of editing of the talk itself. And I'm not here talking about philosophical points, just pedagogical, public speaking. And then I know how good of a public speaker me late can be. I've seen him. And he's talked on radio and TV. He's brilliant. And he needs to get away from this. I'm a Davos. Therefore, it's a really, really intimidating audience. Therefore, I need to wear my glasses at the end of my nose and read a paper bed speech in a boring monotone fashion. So he needs to get away from that. But the content for the most part, I'll highlight a few things where I think he could have done better. But the content for the most part was just excellent. He starts out by basically saying, all the problems that you have people are because you're moving towards socialism. And OK, this probably makes Scots and other people's day. He's attacking the left isn't this great. But then he does something really, really, really cool to undermine the Scots of the world. He actually talks about what he means by socialism. And what he means by socialism is not just the left. What he means by socialism is the logic of what I'm meant by socialism. He means statism. And he says socialism means, yes, the traditional socialist. But it also means the woke. But it also means the nationalists. It also means all these different forms of collectivism. It's all you collectivists. You're all socialists. It's not just about the left. It's equally about the right. And a number of his examples, when he lists the examples of socialism upon the right. And wow, how many people have that understanding of socialism? A socialism understood as statism. A socialism understood as collectivism. A socialism understood as state intervention. And he says, we used to think that socialism meant the state owns the means of production, but no more. Now the state has discovered that it can control the means of production without owning them. Yeah, fascism. So brilliant, brilliant in a sense that expanding, not being narrow, not affiliating yourself with any political position. On stage, he calls himself a libertarian. Now I don't think that's ideal, but it's so much better than calling himself a conservative or calling himself a right winger or calling himself any of these easily put into a bucket. And he defines libertarianism in a reasonable kind of way without it coming across as wacky or crazy. He constantly talks about freedom, freedom, freedom. Freedom is what makes you rich. Freedom is what I'm about. He talks about the evil of collectivism. Constantly throughout the talk, he talks about collectivism and that it's evil and it's wrong and that the alternative is not some kind of right wing nationalism. The alternative is individualism. He names it. There were parts of the talk, I have to say. My wife was sitting next to me. I was like, either he or speech writers or somebody close to him has watched my videos. There's just stuff that he said and even the structure of a part of the talk. There are two moments where this happens. One is when he talks about, he really structures it. Look, here's the practical case for capitalism. It works, it produces the wealth. But that's not about, it's the moral issue. And that's what everybody attacks. It's the morality of capitalism. But capitalism is moral.  He fails there, which is tragic. He needs to do a much better job there. But he doesn't, it's not all for what he does. But it's just not good. But that structure, that follows my morality of capitalism talks. And then the second one is, it's a throwaway line where he talks about the pie. He says, the pie and the fact that the pie is not static, it grows. And the pie on a static is not grows was, again, right out of my inequality talks. So I don't know. And I've been to Argentina several times. I've given these exact talks on inequality and on morality of capitalism several times. People in the audience, there were a lot of small libertarians, or big L libertarians in the audience, who knows what the connections are, but it's there. He talks about morality. He talks about the fact that the economic case is unequivocal, but the real attack on capitalism is a moral attack. And then we need a moral defense of capitalism. Again, I think the moral defense he provides was weak and a little quick and a little kind of couched over. And the consequence of that is, of course, that he doesn't really, I don't know that he gets it, or I don't know that he wants to give it to the audience. But that was pretty quick. But then the closing of the speech, God, the closing of the speech is so inspired by Inrant. You know, a little bit of Israel Kutzner, who he mentions in the talk, but really inspired by Inrant. The closing of the speech is truly unbelievable. It's not libertarian. Libertarians don't talk this way. Libertarians don't talk about this ever at all. This pure Inrant, she was the only one, to the extent that libertarians talk about it, it's because of Inrant. He talks about the businessman as being a hero. And in this sense, it's the best in terms of getting close to a moral case of capitalism. He talks about the businessman being a hero. The business being the greatest benefactor to humanity. Who says that? Who says that except Inrant? Stunning. I'll give you a few of the things that I think were wrong both stylistically and in terms of content. But he's a politician. He's standing up in Davos. You know who introduced him? Do you know who introduced Millet to give this particular talk? He was introduced by Klaus Schwab, the founder, the CEO, the chief behind the World Economic Forum. One of the most evil status out there. Somebody who is the essence of the kind of socialism, the statism, really fascism, because Schwab is really a fascist. That Millet is arguing against the worst kind of, I don't know, call him an intellectual, that you could imagine. He's the one who introduced Millet. He must have been in the audience listening to this given the context, given the place, given the audience, given all, you know, and given the quality of it.  Sorry, this is one of the great best speeches a politician has given on a broad, kind of as a broad philosophical outlay. You know, again, so what do I, what am I against? I take two points, I mean, really one point stylistically. And a couple of places, he goes into professor mode. I'm gonna teach you how, you know, too many numbers, too many stats, when he's trying to describe the growth of the, of wealth in the West, you don't need those numbers and stats. You can, you can, I mean, you can do it in a much easier, much more easily, digestible way than what he did. He then goes into a long explanation about why markets don't fail, can't fail, which is completely right, but it just becomes too professorial, too a little bit academic, too slow, you know, you lose the audience. So those are stylistic points, nothing he said, but either one of those topics is wrong, both actually right, if anything, he underplays the benefits, the economic kind of benefits that capitalism has provided the West, there's ways to illustrate that it's even much greater than the numbers he illustrates. But he's completely right on both points. It just, it comes across as a little too professorial. He needs to, he needs to, he needs to watch, as Michael suggests here, he needs to watch Milton Friedman a little bit, do economics and do economics for the layman. Nobody was quite as good as Milton Friedman in taking economic concepts and making him digestible to the common person. So that's stylistically mainly because there was nothing, content wrong. Actually the content points, weak on the morality, just didn't get it, didn't get there and it felt like he was rushing it. Again, I think there's an inherent discomfort with a moral point. I think he, you know, he attributes rights to God, it's a quick point. He implicitly, it doesn't make a big deal out of this, but he implicitly suggests abortion is evil. Yeah. I mean, those are the big ones that I can recall right now. The things that I would, I, you know, I love to see gone and redone and replaced. But so, so yes, so there were some weaknesses. I wish he'd spent just a little bit more on the morality and dug a little deeper into that and linked it up to his argument for individualism, individualism, individualism and his argument against collectivism because his argument for individualism against collectivism has to be moral at the end and he needs to figure out what that argument is. He's gonna be troubled by, if you can link it to individualism and then one other complaint I have and this relates to his libertarianism and that is the way he accuses the state of doing things. Sadly, it reveals this kind of anarchism. Reveals his anarchism, it's the hatred of the state which is motivating. I just wish, wish I had, and given that he's new to all these ideas, remember Millet was a Keynesian 12 years ago, he was a statist 12 years ago. He's new to these, I wish had time with him to talk about the anarchy because I really think he's smart enough, intelligent enough to get it and to overdo it and when he says the state, which is, I mean if you limit it to the current state, absolutely, but the way it's said and in the context it's said, it's an accusation about the state per se and I think that weakens your case. It would be great if in one of these talks, he articulated a moral case for a state and the proper role, the proper role of the state and if he did that even in a sentence, then blaming stuff on the state would be fine because the context is the improper state, the not right state. So again, I think that's too bad and it reveals these weaknesses, the anarchist weaknesses, but given all that in particular, his just praise of the businessmen in the last segment of his speech in his closing was so good and very appropriate for Davos in the sense of, I mean some of the best leading, most innovative businessmen are at Davos, you can criticize them all you want, but they are there and to give them that kind of boost and to connect it to liberty, to connect it to an attack on collectivism, to connect it on attacks on statism in all its different forms, to collect is fantastic and I think has the potential to have a real impact on business leaders globally, which would be massive, huge in terms of the potential impact. The speech, I'm sure, will be viewed a lot and that's great. And generally, I'm excited to see how this develops. I wish Millet got himself to the point where he's comfortable in front of an audience like this and the same thing happened in his auguration and other formal speeches and be less formal in his delivery. He needs to loosen up, he needs to embrace his own passion, embrace his own style without swearing, still being dignified, all of that, but just bring out that personality that in the end won him the election, right? In the end won him the election and got people excited about him. I don't think it helps this case to be so stiff and potentially boring. So I hope I get a chance to meet Millet. I'm happy to do a short public speaking seminar for him. It wouldn't take more than an hour and we'd be done. It really isn't that hard because he has all the skills. You know it because I've seen him do it before.


Hello and welcome to a healer home today's video is the Easter weekend vlog where in I share with you the things that I got up to during the Easter break. We were so excited about Easter because it had been quite a long term and the children were in school right up until the Thursday before Good Friday so when Friday arrived we were all so happy and really looking forward to the break. One of the things that we always do at Easter is make hot cross buns and once you've made hot cross buns by yourself at home you will never go back. I will link the recipe quantities in the description box down below if you wanted to try out this recipe for yourself but basically I warm up the milk to about 40 degrees Celsius and then I will activate the yeast by adding the yeast and some of the sugar from the full quantity of sugar that's going to go into the buns and I will leave it to activate for about 10 minutes covered over with a tea towel just on the kitchen counter. There are many steps involved in making the hot cross buns but it doesn't feel that long because I tend to do things in between the processes so on this day I also went out to what are the seedlings that I'm growing in the greenhouse. I currently have two sets of seedlings growing at the moment there's one set that's growing in the house on the south facing windowsill and then I have this set that's growing outside in the greenhouse. Our greenhouse is not fully protected so the ones that are in the greenhouse are the ones that are a bit more hardy the ones that can survive some fluctuations in temperature and they can survive the blusteriness because there are some windowpains that are broken where in the wind comes through so in that regards it does make it a lot faster for them to be ready for final planting unlike the ones that are inside the house and the ones that are inside the house are also the ones that the children have sowed and that's so that they can look after themselves they can water them and do all the bits and bobs. This is a lot of fun. A good Friday weather I wish it had been much sunnier but it was on and off sometimes it was raining and when it was raining the pond looked very pretty because I find the site of raindrops rippling across the surface of a pond to be one of the most calming sites that I enjoy to see. Our Camellia bush is still going strong it's in its second month now of blooming and it was a lovely little 10 minutes to spend in between the hot crossbind making so once the yeast is activated and you tell that it is actually active it will have a little bit of a form on the top of it and then making the rest of the hot crossbinds it's very easy because you just pumpkin all of the rest of the ingredients the caster sugar the bread flour the sultanas the ground cinnamon the old spice the orange zest I didn't have any orange zest so I actually just used orange essence the melted butter and the salt and the vegetable oil and again I will put the quantities in the description box down below this is such an easy one to make and if you have a bread mixer or you know one of those mixes that have the dough hook you can use that and it would make it even faster but I went good old-fashioned in this one I do love kneading dough I find that to be a very satisfying thing to do and basically just mix everything together it will start off feeling sticky at first but that's perfectly fine it is supposed to be initially a sticky dough but the more that you need it and the more that you work it and the gluten strands lengthen it will come together and it will eventually become quite smooth and silky so don't worry about the stickiness and when you are kneading it try and avoid adding too much flour because that will mess up the flour to water ratio or flour to milk ratio in this case and that can cause a denser bun which is not as tasty so I started off with some flour but not added much more beyond that after about 10 minutes of kneading as you can see it's come together and it's quite nice and smooth so I'll just form that into a ball and then I will put it into a lightly oiled bowl because I don't want the dough to stick inside and then I'll cover it over with some cling film and then I'll leave this one for its first proofing in the oven at 40 degrees Celsius and I just went off and I got on with doing some chores cleaning the house and then 40 minutes earlier it had sorry 40 minutes later it had doubled in size and once that has happened just lightly kneaded again just to knock some of those air bubbles out and at this point it's so satisfying because it's so nice and smooth and feels very silky and then after this it's just a matter of forming the buns themselves so I try to use my hand to determine the size because you can go as big or as small as you want to you could even make a hot cross bun loaf if you wanted to or a tea loaf and yeah and so it's just cutting those if you wanted to be more accurate about it you could use a scale in order to get exact measurements but I just sort of eyeball it and then I just sort of cut my hand and roll them my dad taught me how to do this which I'm so grateful for it it also reminds me a lot of my dad when I'm making these buns and and yeah and then just put those into the baking tray which I've lined with the baking parchment and then these are going to go for another second proofing I cover it over with some oiled cling film and that's because I don't want when they rise they will come up against the cling film and I don't want them to stick to the cling film and then when you remove them it sort of ruins the lovely bun shape that they have so I always just put a little bit of oil on the cling film cover them over and then put them in the oven again at 40 degrees celsius and they'll go in there for another 40 minutes or so and then they'll be ready to go while those are proofing I'm just going to go out and do a little bit of gardening I had to buy some more dahlia's yesterday so I have this lovely red one the mixed ones and that's because the ones that I planted last time the ones that I put into the ground I've been reliably told that they probably will not survive the frost I wasn't supposed to put them in the ground I was supposed to put them in a pot in the greenhouse so I'm trying to rectify that mistake I also got some more mini-sized propagators because I have a lot more seeds that I need to sow out and I also picked up some more sweet peas some more marigolds I can't resist and my son wants to grow sweet peppers so we're gonna be sewing out that with him I also got these ones the seedling tray because there's some that now need to be moved over into they've germinated and they need to be moved over into those and I also got more of the seed and cutting compost it's a lot finer which would be a lot better for the seeds so I'm just gonna go and do that whilst I'm waiting for the hot cross buns to for the dahlia's I'm just using a normal ordinary compost I'm saving the seed cutting compost for the sowing off the seeds and before I plant them I have to check each of the dahlia bulbs the tubers rather sorry dahlia's have tubers not bulbs to make sure that they've got some eyes and eyes are basically where you can see a tiny little bud coming through and sometimes when you're buying the tubers from the chain shops like I did with B&Q sometimes the quality is not necessarily guaranteed so I wanted to make sure that I was planting tubers that had a very high chance of actually sprouting and so I labeled them as well because I wanted to be able to keep on top of exactly what variety was what and I put those into the greenhouse and then moving on to the seeds I use vermiculite mixed in with the seed sowing compost and that is the base that I use and over the years I've found that it's the best way to grow the seed the vermiculite helps to hold more water more moisture and it's also very very light so it doesn't cause it doesn't make it too hard for the seeds to germinate for the smaller seedlings like lobilia I will put some sharp sand over them and so here they are in the little propagators that I got from B&Q which I'm absolutely loving because they are small and portable and easy to move and we use this self-facing windowsill for the seedlings that were growing indoors so you can see over there those are the ones that my children did a couple of weeks ago and they've already sprouted but because they're on a wind seal and they respond to the direction of the light every day we have to be constantly rotating them so that they grow straight up rather than bending towards the light so now that that was 40 minutes that took me about 40 minutes to do and it was just in time for me to get the hot cross buns out of the oven to work up the oven temperature to 180 degrees and whilst the oven was getting up to temperature we were working on doing the iconic cross because obviously they're hot cross buns and I'd already made the mixture of it's simply a mixture of flour and water and you put it into a piping bag and then you pipe the crosses some people prefer to use scissors to just snip the crosses on the top so you don't actually have the white line across but you've got the shape of the crosses achieved by cutting in and it was at this point that my daughter wanted to jump in and help because they had walking up it was the first day of their holiday and so they took the chance to slip in as much as is possible and how wonderful it was and they just need to bake for about 25 to 30 minutes in an oven at 180 degrees mine is fan-assisted and afterwards just glaze them with a sugar water to give them that iconic hot cross bun glaze and these oh my days are so delicious they are so good particularly with some butter and the kids loved them and everybody loved them so much that within five minutes of them coming out of the oven they were all gone with people asking for more but I like to keep them keen because absence makes the heart grow fonder so I don't make too much of them so that they do remain special and they come out so fluffy and they're so easy to make and as I said once you go homemade with the hot cross buns you will never go store-bought again and they are so easy to make and they come together so quickly as I said they were finished within five minutes of them being out I didn't even get a chance to put them on a presentation platter everybody just was nom nom and then after I'd done that I also decided that it was the perfect day to work on a sewing machine that I had recently purchased from an auction I love vintage sewing machines I just love how they work I love the engineering and the ingenuity of the Victorians that invented the sewing machines and I love the fact that most of these machines are nearly 100 years old sometimes even older but they still work just as well as they did when the first came off of the factory line when I actually bought this machine at an auction I was actually buying it to get the motor I a few months ago I bought another machine which is a Faf 11 and it's a hand crank machine but I wanted to convert that one into a motorized machine so I was looking for a machine that I could just get motor off of so when I bought this one I didn't know what condition it was in I just knew that it had a motor but then I was very pleasant to surprise after I collected it because the auctions are online so you don't really get to see the items beforehand that it was in very good condition it's a 99k and by the way you can tell when your machine was made by looking at that serial number and looking it up on a single website but the decals which are the little gold trims around the base were just in perfect nick and everything was just looking really good and so I basically decided that I wasn't going to take it apart and harvest it for the parts like I had planned to but that I was going to restore it and actually use it because it is in such good condition so once I've finished wiping off the amounts of dust that normally accumulate from them being kept in the attic or in the garage or something like that and then have to go into the inside bits and just open up the face plate and I'll use my little bits and bobs of equipment that I've gathered over the years to remove the lint and dust that accumulates on the inside I love restoring the machines and bringing them back to working order in terms of difficulty of restoration this is probably one of the easier ones it was more of a cleaning up cosmetic job unlike some of the more complex ones that I've done in the past where I've had to take apart everything and put it all back together but it is a lot of fun and these things were made to last and they're just incredible pieces of machinery the other thing that I also like to do is to oil them using sewing machine oil and that's because if you use any other type of oil it's really not good for them so if you do have a sewing machine and you're thinking you haven't oiled it in a in a bit always making sure that you use the Singer machine oil and I know because I've tried to use the 3-in-1 oil and that was never a good idea and so once that is done it was a mellow screw in the face plate back on and one thing that I have found is with these old machines is that I never have to ask the kids to come and help out they just become naturally interested in them because they have so many moving parts that are visible it's not a like a lot of the modern technology that we have now where you don't see the moving parts you know if you're on a smartphone or if you have a coffee maker you just press a button and then everything just goes but the kids really find the machines fascinating because they see all the gears and the cogs moving and they always end up coming in saying oh can we help maybe can we help it and they help it it's it's it's a lot of fun so on this one I'm on the under bed which is where quite a lot of the action happens so to speak and for these if they've been sat for decades not being used they need to be given a lot of extra oil so ordinarily for just a normal maintenance oiling I wouldn't be putting this much in but because this hasn't been used for decades I would say possibly even close to about 40 years I would say it hadn't been used given the amount of lint that I then found in the bogging case but yeah so it's basically the equivalent of trying to give them an oil bath but not quite an oil bath and then just without taking it apart so for a more complex restoration if something wasn't in as good condition as this I would be taking all of that apart but in this case it wasn't necessary so I was using my tools to try and get some of the lint that stuck between the feed dogs and bobbing case and it's very satisfying when you begin to pull out the lint I don't know it satisfies the OCD in me I guess when I'm going around and pulling out bits of fluff from near impossible places and I have to use things like toothpicks or tweezers it's a lot of fun but once all of that stuff is cleared out the machine was running beautifully and yeah I can't wait to use it for I can't wait to use it for a project and it's really nice during the holidays particularly the holiday days because that seems to be the only time nowadays that I have to be able to to do any of this restoration stuff which is a lot of fun the case of this singer 99k had sections where things were coming off some of the fabric threads on the finishing were coming off so my daughters were using some wood glue to sort of stick them back on and yeah they have fun doing things like this they have their own vintage sewing machines that they were re that they helped to restore and their hand crank ones that they sew on and so it's wonderful after that I had to put them out in the sun for the case and the base to dry out because as I say the weather on Good Friday was very very capricious it was going on and off with the sun but at least we were able to use the sun to actually dry out the machine and I'm showing you there is part of our Easter crafts and adding to our Easter decorations dash we got these lovely little eggs from little and we were using my daughter's paint kids to paint them into fancy little Easter eggs that will be used for deco for decorating stuff and there's my daughter using some of the watercolors having a go at it it was it was a fun activity to do we always try and do a lot of crafty activities together but I needed to move on to do some more stuff with the gardening and that involved the that involved the propagator kits that I got where I needed to transfer to transfer the seedlings into bigger ones the nice thing about the wood blue I think what I'm trying to show there is that it was drying pretty quickly and it just looked a lot neater also had the boys do some seed sowing as well so the problem with these ones was that they didn't have any drainage holes which I found quite annoying I thought I'd got them at a good price but it turns out is because they didn't have any drainage holes but not to worry I got my husband on it using the drill to drill some drainage holes in burgers it's very important and these ones were going to take the sunflowers which had grown up and they needed to be moved over but as well as the peas the sweet pea plants that I had pre germinated by putting into a Tupperware container with a wet towel at the bottom and I pre germinate them because that way I'm not wasting a cell to a duff seed because unfortunately that's a fact of life some of the seeds will sprout and germinate and some won't so if you pre germinate things like sweet peas which are easier to pre germinate than other things then you can kind of get a more efficient success rate so to speak and so when I'm picking them up I'm just picking them up very very gently and then putting them roots down into the little cells and then I'll water them and they'll go back into the house to continue growing sweet peas are one of those that are very frost tender so these ones cannot go out until all threats of frost are completely gone so they'll probably be going out into the ground somewhere around the 15th of May I've been keeping a calendar that records when the last frosts were and for the last five years in our garden we've never had frost beyond the 15th of May the latest we've ever had frost was the 15th of May so now anything that is frost tender I will only plant it out after the 15th of May because each garden each individual garden varies in terms of how sheltered it is and you have a microclimate over there so you can't necessarily just base it on what the weather is in your particular region you kind of have to learn what your garden does and how it protects the flower the plants that you have in it so yeah so these ones will stay safe and secure either in the so they'll start off in the house first of all and then I will move them into the green house as the weather gets continues to get warmer and then I'll move them into a cold frame on the patio to prepare them before putting them in the garden and I'm primarily growing the sweet peas because I love the cut flowers they are so pretty and they are so beautiful so I may have gone a little bit overboard with the sweet peas I've got about a hundred of them currently growing but I do love the flowers they really are beautiful and I got a lot of different varieties as well that I'm excited to try out because I would really love to be able to narrow down on a very specific variety that I can say oh yeah this is the one that I grow every year and it's reliable so some of it is experimentation but there is a lot of fun to be had from growing things and sowing seeds I definitely love that as part of stepping into spring that there's a lot more growth about and we can participate in it the garden is definitely waking up the blue bells have sent off the little spires and we're waiting for the blue bells to actually come out and populate the areas is very very exciting and in the pond so much is happening now the mash merry golds which tend to go to sleep during winter and there's only a few leaves about have just exploded and the yellow is so vibrant it's not like the yellow of the daffodils as well it is a really punchy yellow that looks so lovely against the greens and I honestly can't believe how these grow and they've definitely become one of my favorite water flowers aquatic plants because they're so pretty and the forget-me-nots are just coming out in profusion everywhere with their little winking yellow centers I love forget-me-nots and what I really love about them is that I can't actually control them they don't like being moved and they self seed and I've learned that the hard way basically and so they're just like a lovely gift from nature I got carried away trying to sort out the patio because I hadn't done a patio clean and I lost track of time completely so this is a task that wasn't planned for the day but because towards the early evening the weather sort of turned and it was a bit more bearable outside despite how blustery it was but everything in the garden is waking up and it's very exciting it also makes me feel like my sap my juices are rising up as well and yeah it was just a lovely lovely day throughout we finished off the evening by having some pizzas on the Friday night rather than the Saturday night since it is the holidays and the children didn't have any activities that they had to go to I went to Aldi to get some last-minute items and I found all of these flowers were reduced to clear 50% off so I got loads of them I thought I did the most amazing painting on this black and white printed thing that we had for the Easter menu and I just think that it is so the energy that fresh flowers bring in the house and so I'm always on the lookout for picking up the flowers particularly if they're on special offer it is such an extra it gives an extra special feel to my frugal mentality and I'm using some vases I prefer clear vases because it's easy for me to see that the water has gone down and that it needs to be replaced I have no formal training in flower arranging though it's one of those things on my bucket list is something that I would love to do probably once the children have flown the nest I'll be signing up for I don't know some local night classes or something like that because I do love flowers but I don't always think I'm necessarily good with the flower arrangements so another thing that I like to do is I like to refresh older arrangements so I had an older arrangement that had been around for nearly three weeks because it's made out of chrysanthemums and chrysanthemums they do last a long time and I basically took those out washed the vase clean again and filled it with some fresh water and went through all of the old flowers and got rid of the ones that weren't we're sort of past their prime as you can see that a trick that I like to do is cutting off the leaves because normally the leaves are the ones that die out and show signs of a flagging first before the petals do and so I'll tend to just cut those out to refresh the flower arrangement in that extends the time period that you have it for and yeah so with this one I had lilies I normally don't have lilies because of the pollen you know the stamens they produce so much pollen and we wear a hay fever house hay fever is something that was trouble with but I decided to get them because I really really wanted lilies for Easter and I just made a note to myself that every morning I would be cutting off as each flower opened I would be cutting off the stamens to make them more allergy friendly and as I'm recording this the flowers are still open and still going and it's been wonderful to have them but not have the associated seizing that comes with the pollen unfortunately some of the reduced to clear lilies were you know not in their best condition but that was okay but I ended up with two really lovely bouquets in the house which was such a treat because I normally only have the one and it's so nice to come down the stairs first thing in the morning and be greeted by a bright floral display so on Saturday night I had to pre-make a lot of the dishes that we're going to be having the next day because I was volunteering in kids church on Sunday so I wasn't going to be available for most of the day so it was important for me to do a lot of meal trip which I did after we had dinner and this dish that I'm actually making has become a new family favorite and it is a squash courgette and corn casserole and it is a fantastic side dish and it's basically some butternut squash with some courgette or I think in America is called zucchini although I still think courgette sounds a lot nicer and sweet corn onion garlic cheddar cheese sour cream mayonnaise eggs and breadcrumbs with some parmesan cheese and it is awesome the way I see it is it's kind of like a the stuffing that you make a Christmas to go with turkey and this one is just a lot better because it's got all of these wonderful seasonal ingredients so I basically start off by sauteing the onions on sort of low heat because I want them to cook slowly and to become quite translucent and then I go ahead and I prepare my butternut squash now normally I prefer to do mise en paté which is whereby I prep all of the things that I'm going to cook and then I'll start cooking but because it was quite late by the time I and because I took time to do the floral arrangements which hadn't been planned because when I went to Aldi it was just to pick up some of these extra ingredients that I needed to complete the menu and so I hadn't planned the time of actually doing the floral arrangement and so because I'm kind of trying to catch up I'm actually making things as I go so that's why I had to chop the onions first and whilst they're sauteing and preparing the other vegetables so with the butternut squash I used the slicer on the grater because I wanted them to be nice thin slices it only occurred to me later that I could have used my machine I do have a I can't remember what it's called but you know those machines that you can just stick things in and then they just were things around for you but anyway I did it this way but you want them to be in thin slices I suppose you could grate them if you wanted to but I feel like you lose the texture at least this way you can still keep the texture and so I'll add them to the onions in order for them to just saute with the onions and then next I'm preparing the courgettes who else loves the bright green color of courgettes I can't wait for our own courgettes to come to come in of course some courgettes segments that are growing and always homegrown courgettes is so incredibly delicious but anyway we'll make do with this one for now so I'm slicing the courgettes into like really like very thin slices and that's mostly because they look so much nicer with the little strips of of green there and once I've chopped all of those I will then also add them to the same pan where I'm frying the onions with the butternut squash and also another point to make is that I've used butter for the sauteing so you can't go too high with the temperature because the butter will burn and scorch and that isn't what we're trying to do here we're just trying to saute them and just get them really nice flavor some and caramelized the onions that is and these ones we're adding them in to sort of sweat them and start the cooking process because I find that if you just chuck them all in together uncooked and then just put them into the oven it doesn't have quite the same flavor it's almost like when you sweat them in the oil that you're using it helps them to absorb more flavor and then I'm prepping the garlic just by finely dicing it and it gives a really lovely flavor to it as well and that will go in and these are all of the things that are going to be the hot ingredients so to speak everything else is just going to be added on and by the way I will put the quantities and the recipe in the description box down below if you wanted to try this out this is a lovely lovely meal and you could have it actually as a lunch as well with a salad on the side but we used it as a side dish that went together with the lamp so I'm then transferring it all into a big bowl and then everything else is going to be added the cheese the sweet corn I would have preferred to use fresh corn but I thought they didn't have any fresh corn in Aldi by the time that I went to buy these in these things I was lucky enough to get the flowers on reduced to clear because they were going to be closed on Easter Sunday so they hadn't restocked any of the shelves so it meant that I think it but I used some tin sweet corn that was in the cupboard and so that's the cheddar cheese added and then I'm going to add some sour cream there and the mayonnaise and the two eggs and the breadcrumbs as well as some Parmesan cheese and then I'll add seasoning to our seasoning to my taste which is normally just like a few just like a pinch or so or salt or a few cracks on the salt grinder and then this is all of this is just going to be put into a nice big tray and then it will go into the oven so it does come together really quickly particularly if you use machines to prepare the vegetables which in hindsight I probably should have done and in future I probably will do this will now go into the oven at a 160 degrees Celsius fan assisted for about 40 minutes or so until it has cooked through the next thing that I'm going to make is a starter of cold cheddar bay biscuits and I got this recipe from a website called the cozy cook so I would link that in the description box down below I had to make a few changes because some of the ingredients I didn't have them and it's an American recipe so one of the first things was that it required some buttermilk and we don't actually get buttermilk sold in shops here in England so I made my own buttermilk by adding lemon to some milk and I just added copious amounts of lemon juice until the milk looked sufficiently thick enough so the best way that I could describe these cheddar bay biscuits is that if you're in England they are very similar in recipe format to dumplings except for you're not going to cook them in a stew you put them in the oven so as you can see there I'm adding the lemon juice to the milk and I have no exact formula for this I just keep on adding the milk until it gets to a point where it looks thicker than normal milk and so to all the dry ingredients I then add the grated cheddar I'm using mild cheddar here but if you wanted something stronger you probably could do these are going to work as odors in a way that's sort of like the entrees and then the buttermilk is added to the melted butter which will make it look quite weird with this little I want to say little texture dots and things which to me they seem to resemble a sweat because if you were making dumplings you would use sweat in the you'd be using sweat to to make the dumplings and then you add that to the dry mixture and critically when you're making this you don't want to over mix the the mixture itself so you need to do it very very gently just until everything is combined but no more beyond that and I'm just going to put these on to a tray and pop them into the oven and I'm sharing this recipe here because the kids really like this as an entree they they love it and so I'll just make it into sort of a biscuity type things and because it's nice and savory and it's got this really lovely umami flavor to it it does sort of sweat the appetite to prepare you for the main course and these ones need a higher temperature so that's why they went in after the casserole or I think there was a little bit of an overlap and then I had to increase the temperature for them and the idea was that for both of these things that I would make them on the Saturday evening and then on the Sunday for the Easter Sunday dinner they would just get warmed up and then be served I also needed to prepare a shoe pastry for the cream puff cake so whilst I was gathering all those ingredients together the oven pinged and it was time to get the cheddar bay biscuits out and they looked so good I couldn't help but have a sneaky taste of them whilst they're still nice and hot fresh out of the oven and I think that they are best served fresh out of the oven but because needs must I had to prepare everything in advance they just had to be warmed up the next day so moving on to the cream puff cake I start off by making the roux by having the milk and the butter in a saucepan over medium heat and I will melt those until the butter has just melted using a whisk to keep things going so that the milk doesn't scotch on the bottom of the pan and then I will add the plain flour and mix it in until it comes to a dough and then I'll just keep on mixing for probably another couple of minutes or so just to cook it and then I'll take it off the heat but it will come together it should come together in the way that you're seeing here shoe pastry is so easy to make and it's a wonderful light base for things like profiteroles or eclairs or this cream puff cake that I'm making and so the idea is that I'm going to make the base for it tonight and then I will do the filling tomorrow so I'll now use my mixer to add the eggs in there and so we get the mixer going and I'll add the eggs one at a time and it looks very nice and creamy and that's the butter that you get and I'm just going to pop that into the rectangular tray that's been lined with some baking parchment paper so that it will make it easy for me to lift it out when the time comes and I will just spread it on there and that will go into the oven at 200 degrees because it does need the high heat in order to create the puffiness to go out and it will be in there for about 15 to 20 minutes and then what I'll do is I'll just turn off the oven and I'll leave it in there to cool down for about 10 15 minutes in the oven with the heat and then it will come out and I'll leave it out on the table and because I was cooking in such a rush I wasn't doing my usual thing of the process by which I normally cook is I put things away as I go along but because it was at night and I had a pretty full-on day the next day I was trying to get the food out and then the idea was that I would then clean afterwards so this is now me resetting the kitchen and it is a must to reset the kitchen it's one of the things that I learned from Fly Lady and I know I bring up Fly Lady a lot but that's because that system really really improved my homekeeping and housekeeping skills and it brought everything under control and one of the things that I learned from Fly Lady is that you always reset the kitchen never wake up to a dirty kitchen that is a recipe for a terrible day for me so I always make sure that I do that so even though it was quite late and I was quite tired and I was feeling that I ought to go to bed I I I got on with it and some help came in the form of my daughter offering to be of assistance and she helped with it and it you know it went well but I do find it very satisfying resetting the kitchen so that it's ready for the next sort of baking or cooking adventures Sunday wonderful I've woken up a little bit earlier because here in England our clocks were jumping forward by one hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. so technically speaking I'm one hour sleep deprived but I had to get up early because I wanted to get some of the food done and some of the things that can be prepped as early as possible done because I'm volunteering at the Easter service today so I won't be here for the first half of the day so it's very important for me to get these things that I couldn't expect the kids to do so I'm just gonna make the filling for the cream puff cake that I started on yesterday and that's going to be the dessert and it will have time to set for a few hours so yeah so exciting I ended up going to bed quite late at about 11 but at least I managed to reset the kitchen so that when I came down in the morning it wouldn't be completely messy I don't like starting the day with a messy kitchen so yeah I'm just gonna make that very quickly and then I will get on to other stuff I'm going to be using mostly cream cheese with some double cream going to be using lemon with some vanilla flavouring as well as some icing sugar I start off by squeezing the juice of a lemon just on the squeezer I could use the lemon juice but I sometimes just prefer using fresh lemons and so I've got the cream cheese in there and I'll add the lemon to the cream cheese and that will give it like a bit of a tartness to it and I'm also adding some vanilla this is an optional it's not necessary and the icing sugar and then in another bowl I have the double cream which I'm going to whip so the idea is basically you mix the cream cheese with the lemon and the icing sugar you whip the double cream and then you fold the whipped double cream into the cream cheese very gently and then that will make the filling so I use the electric whisk to beat the icing sugar which was quite lumpy and I really should have used a sieve on it but hindsight is always 20-20 and so once the double cream has been whipped I will then add it very gently and fold it in to the cream cheese because I don't want to knock out those air bubbles that I've worked so hard to incorporate and to give it more texture and more fluff so this comes together so very very quickly and it's basically like I would say it's more like a very lightweight cream cheese filling like if you ever made those no bake cream cheesecakes this probably tastes like that and so that's going to go on to the choux pastry base that I made yesterday and then I'll add a caramel topping on it my son made some caramel that will go over it so obviously this is now a day old so it's sort of sunken in a little bit but it's still quite delicious so I'm just spreading all of that luscious cheesecake-y filling goodness over the top and just to point out that you can make this less thick just by controlling the amount of whipping that you do with your double cream so I I like it to to be so that when you cut into it the filling maintains its shape so I whip the cream until stiff peaks form but if you wanted it to be less stiff you just less of that but it's a really good one because it's quite versatile and you can also use it with a biscuit base instead of a choux base but it tasted really good everybody everybody loved this this was a really popular one and it's a great one for Easter and for spring because it is nice and light it will need to go into the fridge to set it needs a minimum of about three to four hours thank you so much for coming along with us on our Easter weekend vlog I hope that you also had a joyful and blessed Easter and until I see you next time I wish you blue skies health and happiness


Hello and welcome to this session. This is Professor Farhad and this session we would look at a multiple step and a single step income statement. This topic is covered in a financial accounting course as well as the CPA exam. As always I would like to remind you to connect with me on LinkedIn if you haven't done so. YouTube is where you would need to subscribe. I have 1600 plus accounting, auditing, finance and attacks lecture. This is a list of all the courses that I cover. If you like my lectures, please like them. Click on the like button. It doesn't cost you anything. Share them. Put them in playlists. If they benefit you, it means they might benefit other people and please connect with me on Instagram. On my website you will find additional resources if you're interested in supplementing your studies, especially if you're studying for your CPA exam. I have plenty of supplemental material. I strongly suggest you check out my website. So we learn about the income statement and simply put the income statement is revenues minus expenses. Now as we saw when it comes to merchandisers, the income statement will have intermediate steps like cost of goods sold. We might have other items such as gains and losses. So the question becomes how do we prepare this income statement? Gap allows us to prepare the income statement using two different formats, either a single step or a multiple step. So we're going to start to show you the single step. Then I will show you the multiple step income statement. The single step is basically one single step. We take all the revenues and we bunch them together. Net sales, interest revenue and gain. Now we all know what net sales is basically or at least say oh well we also learn about net sales. Net sales is sales minus sales discount minus sales returns and allowances. So we don't show you the whole thing. All what we show you is net sales. Okay so we don't show you the whole formula. Interest revenue is revenue from other sources like interest you have money in the bank, you earned interest or you might have some bond that earned interest and gain on a sale of a building basically the company sold a building that they don't use anymore. So this building is basically peripheral. It's incidental to their business. They no longer want to have therefore they sold it. Let's assume for the sake of simplicity it had the cost of 750,000 and they sold it for 752,500. So the additional 2,500 is in is the gain. It's a gain. Now why don't we call it sales? Because this company is a merchandising company and is not in the business of selling their building but they happen to sell a building and it increases it generated a gain. Therefore we list the gain different than sales because it's not sales. Sales is what they do on a day-to-day basis. So what we did here is we bunch all the sales, the revenues and the gain together and we call them total revenue. Then what we did we took all the expenses including cost of goods sold, all the selling expenses of general and administrative and interest expense. We bunched them all together. We took revenues minus expenses and we got the net income. This is called the single step income statement. It's one single step we took revenues minus expenses. Now remember this number here 14,900. Now we're going to take the same information that we have on the slide and we're going to prepare the multiple step income statement. So the multiple step as the word suggests it will have more than one step in preparing the financial statement. First step is we look compute sales or net sales. How do we compute net sales? Net sales is sales which is 321,000 minus sales discount minus sales returns and allowances. This is net sales. Then we're going to from net sales deduct cost of goods sold. Now if cost of goods sold is not giving to you this is the formula to compute cost of goods sold. It's beginning inventory plus purchases or net cost of purchases gives you goods available for sale. So we had 19,000 of beginning inventory. 232,400 is the net purchases what we purchased. Therefore what we started with plus what we purchased what we called goods available for sale. It means the total amount of goods that's available for our customers to sell it 254,400. Now did we sell anything? Not at all. We still have 21,000. So if we had 251,400 the maximum amount we can sell to our customers goods available for sale and we still have 21,000. What does that mean? It means we still have left. If we still have left 21,000 it means we sold 230,400. Now in this course and in financial accounting usually this amount is given to you 230,400. So if we take net sales minus cost of goods sold we compute the gross profit. So the gross profit is kind of step one in the process computation of the gross profit and you need to know how to compute gross profit. It's very this formula is very important. So the formula is net sales minus cost of goods sold equal to gross profit. Now you need to know how to compute net sales if you are not given that figure and you need to know how to compute cost of goods sold if that figure is not giving. Otherwise if net sales and cost of goods sold given net sales minus cost of goods sold. Now we're done. Now from the gross profit we are going to deduct what we called our operating expenses because gross profit is only covers the cost of the goods that we purchased. After we cover the cost of the goods what we have to do is we have to cover our operating expenses paying salaries, paying utilities, paying grant, paying insurance, paying salaries but what's going to happen for operating expenses? We're going to break them down into two categories. Category A and Category B. Category A it's going to be selling expenses. So Category A I'm going to call it selling expenses and what goes under selling expenses? What goes under selling expenses are all the expenses that are that directly support the effort of selling? What are some of these, what are some of these expenses that support the effort of selling? Well one obvious example is advertising expense. What does advertising expense is? Advertising means you are spending money, you are spending money to generate sales. So clearly advertising is a selling expense. Now also sales salaries expense you pay certain employees money solely to help you sell the product like salespeople that's selling expense. Now if you are renting a space for your salespeople you have rent expense for the selling space the salespeople might consume supplies in the effort of selling the product like they might need packages to put the product and when they ship it out that's also a selling expense. Also if there's any shipping cost shipping out if they ship any product out if there's any shipping cost that's a selling expense. Also they might be using equipment like computer equipment in the effort of selling you're going to have depreciation expense for the computer equipment. So simply put what is a selling expense is any expense that goes into the effort of making sales. It happens to be for this company 42,100 that's the first category of operating expenses. The second category of operating expenses is called general and administrative expenses. Those expenses they don't support the selling effort they support the company as a whole like what? Rent expense office space hold on a second didn't we use rent expense selling space well this is office space and this is selling space what is the office space it's think of it where the CEO the payroll HR all those positions that serve the whole company not selling so they might have they might rent a space to operate this is rent expense office space. Also these individuals might consume supplies that's office supplies expense hold on a second we have also store supplies there whether depending on the supplies whether it's for selling or not for selling insurance expense well also we could have insurance expense up here if we are ensuring any items that we use for selling purposes notice salaries but those are office salaries office salaries are salaries maybe for the secretary for the staff support those are general and administrative and we do also have depreciation expense for office equipment for the equipment that are used at the office not for the equipment that are used at the store where we make the sale so we break those operating expenses into two categories a and b then we're going to take the gross profit and deduct the gross deduct this total selling and total administrative expenses which is in total 71 400 and come up with an important number income from operation income from operation is an important number because this tells us whether you are making a profit or not making a profit from operating your business we call this whole section income from operation computation okay it means from operating the business from opening the store every day and operating the business are we making a profit are we incurring a loss here luckily we are incurring a profit generating a profit now right after income from operation we would list other items such as other revenues and gains expenses and losses so those are other revenues and gains they have nothing to do with your operation like interest revenue you might have interest revenue in the bank because you have money in the bank but that has nothing to do with operating the business but you generated a thousand dollar of revenue you sold that building gain on sale of a building and you generated a gain of 2400 because you sold it more than its basis more than its cost now if you sold it less than its cost rather than a gain you would have a loss but here you have a gain and interest expense interest expense like interest revenue it has nothing to do with operating your business it has to do with the money you are borrowing for the business that depends on your interest on your credit on the reputation of the business so it has nothing to do with operating the business therefore interest expense is listed separately so we net this category out for other revenues and expenses and usually that's not a large one and the net is positive 2000 now we take income from operation we add to it the 2000 and we come up with net income of 14900 now if we if we have if we are having taxes taxes will be listed on a separate line but here we happen not to not to not to assume we have taxes so notice this section here this section right here is called non-operating activities computation non-operating means those activities has nothing to do with those activities which are operating and when you evaluate a business you are concerned with operating activities not non-operating activities and notice net income is 14900 i told you to remember that number because if we go back to the single step income statement net income is 14900 so either use the multiple step or the single step net income should be the same however the multiple step income statement will give you more information about the company more information about the company as for example what's their selling expense in relationship to sales what's their general and administrative in relationship to sales the single step it gives you all the information but it's it's kind of it's giving it to you an aggregate it's not really very helpful last but not least the classified balance sheet for a merchandiser just like the classified balance sheet for any other company except that we are introducing a new account called merchandise inventory because merchandise inventory represent a large portion of a merchandisers therefore it's a new account that we are being introduced to in this chapter in the next session what i'm going to do i'm going to look at the periodic inventory system and how we would journalize entries using periodic rather than perpetual up to this point we were dealing with perpetual inventory system as always i would like to remind you to please like the recording subscribe visit my website for additional resources if you are studying for your cpa exam and you want those extra five to seven points my website might be the solution for you may push you above that score that secret score of 75 to help you pass study hard and good luck accounting is difficult it's challenging let me rephrase it's challenging but it's worth it so study hard