Answer Me This! Podcast

** Click here to listen to EPISODE 47 **

Thanks ever so much to all of you who’ve been sending us questions. It has been a great treat, and very vexing for us that we haven’t been able to answer them all in the podcast. So here are a few in non-audio form, starting with one from Chris in Kansas:

In your January 9th YouTube, Helen, you were working away with knitting needles in the car. So, Helen, Please answer me this…What were you knitting?

Well spotted, Chris! Indeed I was passing the time on the way to our Amazing Adventure In Luxembourg by knitting a kangaroo for my niece’s Christmas present. It turned out something like this:

And if you fancy making your own woollen marsupial, the pattern is in World of Knitted Toys by Kath Dalmeny.

Meanwhile, David in Maldon asks:

I want to know how come my 13-year-old daughter can spend hours getting her hair and make-up just perfect but her room always looks like an explosion that blew up a branch of Claire’s Accessories inside a New Look store. How can I make her keep her room tidy?

If bribery and pleading have thus far not worked, try taking all her possessions away. That should do it.

In other questioneering, George from London wonders:

Jaffa Cake: Cake or Biscuit?

This is a highly contentious issue, given the Jaffa Cake‘s cakey texture but biscuity dimensions and appearance. However in the 1991 court case of McVitie’s vs HM Customs and Excise, Jaffa Cakes were ruled to be cakes not biscuits, on the grounds that like a cake they go hard when stale, whereas biscuits go soft. Which leads us to a question from Sean from Paris:

Why when you leave bread out does it go hard and why when you leave biscuits out do they go soft???? I have been agonising over this for years and at last the route of enlightenment may be ahead…

Get ready, Sean, for the mystery of your life to be solved! This phenomenon arises because biscuits are designed to be hard, with the moisture baked out of them; thus they have lower water content than the surrounding atmosphere, from which moisture infiltrates an uncovered biscuit, rendering it uncrunchy. In contrast, bread (likewise cake) is moister than the air, so if you neglect to use your bread-bin, the water will evaporate leaving a big bready brick.

There. We’ve all learnt something, and it’s barely even lunchtime.

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