Turnchapel, Plymouth

Lovely little get away weekend spent in a cottage over looking the harbour. 

Plenty of time seeing family and local attractions including the National Marine Aquarium where I went to their shark talk for little kids (and teenagers wanting to be little kids again) and took some slefies in the glass tunnel, my favourite one being:

#SharkSelfie My cousin and I with a Basking shark, sorry about the poor photo quality - I was using my forward facing ipod camera and the lighting wasnt the best either.

One of my favourite parts was our daily boat ride on the water taxi across the harbour to the town centre. Bobbing along in a little yellow boat with some great views of Mount Batton and usually sat outside 'on deck' in the drizzle.

Not everyone dressed weather appropriatly! The weather was the down side to the weekend, with a months worth of rainfall forcasted to pour during the 4 days we stayed in Plymouth and tempratures barley hitting 18c and not exactly feeling it. 

However, on Saturday the clouds parted and the sun beat down. My family and I set off on a costal walk with some fabulous views of the water and surrounding nature (sorry im lacking photos!). 3 hours and an icecream later and we found ourselves on this little stretch of beach near Wembry where a well deserved sit down on the sand and roam around the rock pools took place. 

 

On Sunday we took a drive down to Falmouth to have a little look at the town and UNI and on Monday we headed to Cornwall to visit more family and celebrate my brothers birthday with a tonne of chocolate cake, scones with cornish clotted cream and body boarding at Polly Joke beach, a great little spot. The weather and waves were great :)

I thoroughly enjoyed a both relaxing and adventurous little holiday only a few hours drive from home!

Crimble Crumble

(I wont bother sharing the recipe as it was just a classic crumble)

I went for aprricot in this one. I also made a plumb crumble but i had a few difficulties removing the stones and it didnt end up as photographic as the other, looks arent everything, i know its the taste that matters. 

p.s Sorry there isn't a finished bake photographs, my family dived straight in after it was baked and not much was left to take a nice photo off but it was scrummy with custard and i was given a 8.5/10, job well done!

Peanut butter cookies

This is my first recipe and i think i've gone for a good'un...

 

                Peanut butter cookies!

Lets get started, in a medium bowl combine the dry ingredients: 

12oz/350g of plain flour

2 teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon of baking powder

7oz/200g of soft demerara sugar

8oz/225g of dark brown sugar

Then in large bowl cream the butter, sugar and peanut butter and vanilla. Scrape down the side of the bowl, add the eggs and blend well.

8oz/225g of soft butter

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract (flavouring)

9oz/250g of peanut butter 

Now, the recipe suggested smooth but i only had crunchy, its worked really well so i leave the decision up to you :)

Next gradually fold the dry ingredients with the wet ones just long enough to combine, try not to over-mix. I'd suggest doing this with a wooden spoon as the mixture is very stiff so a platic one might not be up to the job.

Using a tablespoon create fairly large blobs of cookie dough and place around 5-8cm apart and flatten each so its about 1.5 cm thick.

Bake for approximately 8-10 minutes (I suggest check them at 8 as you dont want to over cook them) or until golden brown. Then transfer cookies to wire cooling rack or surface, wait until cool and enjoy you'r tasty treats!

The recipe also gave a great variation which i think sounds perfect, add chocolate! Around 200g to the dry ingrediants in this recipe and enjoy the chocolatey peanut butter bliss mmmh 

The Wug test (English language Alevel)

Jean Berko Gleason-

(born 1931) is a retired psycholinguist professor at Boston UNI. Gleason has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition (a topic I am currently studying and reading about it Languge acquisition by David Crystal) in children, aphasia (language disorders causes by brain damage), gender differences in language development, and parent-child interactions. 

The Wug test-

Her experiment aimed to investigate the acquisition of the plural and other inflectional morphemes in English-speaking children. The Wug test consisted of presenting the child with a made up creature which Gleason named a 'Wug' then presenting another and asking 'Now there are two...?' On this cue, most of the children had replied 'Wugs', applying the correct plural suffix 's' to the noun despite having never heard of this 'Wug' before. Her test showed that children have productive rules, they don’t learn by hearing every possible form as they hadn’t heard ‘wugs’ due to it being made up but by applying linguistic rules that they had picked up elsewhere and now subconciosuly know. Smart, eh? 

This could be linked to the old Nature v. Nurture debate on how we acquire language as the children couldnt of learnt 'wugs' if they'd never heard it so there must be an element of nature here. 

Gleason's findings also link and could provide evidence for Chomskys theory of 'universal grammar'.

My response-

I found this experiment both fascinating and amusing and spent the next week asking my friends and family of different ages 'now there are two...?' often getting puzzled looked, confused giggles and the repeated question 'but what is a 'wug'?!' But then i spotted differences between different the childrens and adults answers, similar to what Gleason found. Adults were more likely to say 'wug' as well as 'wugs' probably due to their greater grammatical understanding of irregular nouns and their plural suffixes for example the plural of sheep is 'sheep' not 'sheeps'. This is something a younger child may not fully understand yet. 

I also found that in some of the other questions asked in the test (see picture below) adults gave less imaginative answers, its almost felt disappointing! For example my mum answered 'tiny Wug' and 'Wug house' tut tut, whereas my younger brother answered 'wugglet' and 'Wugloo' (inspired by pigglet and igloo. Cute, isnt it?) 

I also decided to do some further investigation by reading online articles and short videos on youtube and found the conclusions of Gleason research stimulating. Take a look for youself at some of the truley brilliant questions Jean Berko Gleason invented and i suggest asking your family members to answer them for a bit of a chuckle. 

My first blog post

(No pressure Amy, its only you'r first ever blog post) Welcome lovelies, to my colourful little corner of the internet. Deep down I think I have known that I am a blogger for too long and so this page is a bit of a wish come true. No longer shall my mind, voice and nibble fingers by contained by the 140 characters of Twitter or a dreary Facebook status and my photos will now not only hang on the walls of Instagram but here also. I am hoping to share my opinions, recipes, reviews, 'top 10s', stories, photos, thoughts and favourites with this buzzing, blogging beehive. Last but not least, i hope you enjoy every word of every post and thank you for visiting my online, written get-away :)