Author: Marcus Bointon

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Butter crinkle crunch biscuits revisited

A while ago I wrote up my attempt at making a copy of Fox’s butter crinkle crunch biscuits, which are no longer available to buy. In that article I mentioned various things I thought I’d try, and others commented with some suggestions, so I thought I’d revisit the recipe.

Update 2023-03-14: there is a revised version of this recipe.

Since then I have obtained some “Uncle Roy’s” butter flavouring (triacetin). I found that the recommended 5–6 drops did nothing, but I got a reasonable amount of butteriness with about 60 drops (about 1.5 tsp)! Unfortunately the carrier solvent for this flavouring (Monopropylene Glycol) tastes quite harsh and bitter, and a hint of it remained in the end product. Uncle Roy’s offers a “super strength” version of this flavouring that might reduce this effect.

The other suggestions were to reduce the amount of sugar, add more oats, and to add milk powder. There was also a suggestion to use ammonium bicarbonate as the raising agent, but I couldn’t find that.

Unfortunately, putting all these together didn’t work very well. The dough ended up quite dry, though sticky enough to hold together. I think this prevented the raising agent from working properly, as they remained stubbornly flat while cooking, so I think adding some liquid (perhaps a bit of water or milk) or increasing the butter a bit, would help give the baking powder somewhere to react. This drying might have been an effect of adding the milk powder and increasing oats.

Not quite butter crinkle crunches

While I say “unfortunately”, they are still quite nice (I mean, just look at the ingredients!). I think next time I’ll lower the temperature and cook them a bit longer to give more chance for the solvents to boil off, and the raising agent to do its thing, aiming for a more consistent crunchy texture.

Just for reference (as I don’t recommend following this exactly!), here is a revised ingredients list; the instructions remain unchanged from before:

  • 175g white flour
  • 50g white sugar
  • 25g dark muscovado sugar (adds a slightly caramel-y taste)
  • 60g oats (porridge, not jumbo)
  • 50g milk powder
  • 125g butter
  • 50g golden syrup
  • 2tsp baking powder
  • Pinch of salt
  • 1.5tsp of butter flavouring
  • 1/4tsp vanilla powder
  • A small bowl of Demerara sugar (cassonade in France) for rolling

If you have a go at these, please leave a comment, as I’d love to know if you manage to do any better!

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Mud vs Sheep vs Bike, the song

Mud vs Sheep vs Bike (MvSvB) is an event that my friend Fraser and I started in about 1993. I’ve written about it on here before. Essentially it’s just a bunch of friends going mountain biking in Wales, but it has achieved a kind of independent existence in our collective consciousness. It’s loosely named after the famous “Man vs Horse vs Bike” race that I regretted once entering in about 1991. MvSvB has been held at various youth hostels and other group rental accommodations, but most often at what was my Dad’s farm near Llandovery in Wales.

Certain MvSvB traditions have been established, most importantly:

  • Banoffee pie
  • T-shirts
  • Getting wet and muddy
  • Getting lost
  • Punctures and disintegrating wheels
  • Being chased by fierce sheepdogs
  • Beer

Banoffee pie is a critical component of the coping mechanisms required to spend much time in Welsh weather, and is a great source of the calories required for biking up hills (at least that’s our excuse). Some terms for the unaware: liquid sun = rain, Welsh not raining = light drizzle.

I’ve designed most of the T-shirts to date, starting in 1995, when I learned that half-toning really isn’t a good approach for screen printing on fabrics. The designs usually tried to have 1 or 2-colour prints using strong mountain bike themes with in-jokes, references to mud, sheep, bikes, hills, etc. This year I came up with a bold design, based on a picture of a friend on a bike, carefully redrawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad (using Linearity Curve), and printed using a groovy high-tech direct-to-fabric printing process by my friends at Vektor.

Since I moved to France in 2009, I’ve missed out on a few events, Fraser moved to New Zealand, we’ve mostly had growing kids to contend with, the whole age thing, and so MvSvB events have dwindled. But 2023 is the comeback year, the kids are big enough to leave at home, and we can reunite to enjoy a collective mid-life crisis.

To commemorate what we are officially calling the 30th anniversary of MvSvB, I wrote this song about it, celebrating all the nasty weather, excessive eating and drinking, impromptu bike maintenance, and generally messing about on bikes with friends.

I came up with the first line first; always a good start. I wanted to have a sparse, slightly gloomy sounding verse so that I could pair it with an excessively happy chorus. Of course It just would work without rain ambience and bike and sheep noises. Next up came the bass line; I’ve never really played slap bass before (on my Sire Marcus Miller M2 bass), but I am pretty happy with the result – I’m sure it sounds better than when I played it due to the wonders of Logic Pro’s flex pitch editor! Next was the guitar, which is very simple. Drums are courtesy of Logic’s excellent Drummer instrument, which I got to follow my bass part in places. I had quite a lot of lyrics for the chorus, and despite the 130bpm tempo, it manages to sound fairly leisurely. The timing of those lyrics gave me a pattern which led to a melody, which led to some very basic chords, and voila, one functioning chorus!

I’ve been very keen to try out Synthesizer V, which I had bought at fair expense earlier this year, only to find that it’s borderline unusable in DAWs like Logic. However with a little perseverance I found it was workable so long as I didn’t even consider touching the tempo. This gave me the first set of vocals – two backing lines that I made in a similar style to how I worked in Tailwind, except with these synthetic voices. I had planned to sing the main parts myself, but found it just really didn’t work, so I enlisted the help of Lucas H on Fiverr who did a great job with a quick turnaround. With all these working together, I’ve ended up with 5 vocal parts in some places, and it makes for a great ensemble sound that I wasn’t quite expecting, but I’m very happy with.

I don’t care if it’s raining,
get back on your bike
I know you’re hung over
from drinking last night
But that’s not my problem
there’s mountains to ride
and there’s no way I’m
letting you stay inside

Sheep getting restless
and puddles so deep
there’s mud to my elbows
and I’ve had no sleep
but I don’t care
‘cos we’re here to have fun
to every last drop
of this liquid Welsh sun

There’s mud and there’s sheep and there’s rides with our friends
There’s banoffee and T-shirts and hills without end
There’s maps and confusion and roads to nowhere
There’s mud and there’s bikes and that’s why we are here

No punctured excuses
or unspoken wheels
we’re chained to the bars
as we grind up the hills.
We’re spinning for summits
and covered in grime
leaving tread on the tracks
of a great mountain climb

There’s mud and there’s sheep and there’s rides with our friends
There’s banoffee and T-shirts and hills without end
There’s maps and confusion and roads to nowhere
There’s mud and there’s bikes and that’s why we are here

Pedal, pedal... up the hills
Pedal, pedal... up the hills

There’s mud and there’s sheep and there’s rides with our friends
We always come back here, again and again
There’s mountains and rivers and crates of cold beer
There’s mud and there’s bikes and that’s why we are here
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Laravel duplicate key error despite unique validation

In a Laravel API, it’s really common to create users with an endpoint like this in a user controller:

public function store(Request $request): UserResource|JsonResponse
{
    $validator = Validator::make(
        $request->all(),
        [
            'email' => 'required|string|max:255|email|unique:users',
            'name'  => 'required|string|max:255',
        ],
        [
            'email.unique' => 'That email address already has an account.',
        ]
    );
    if ($validator->fails()) {
        return response()->json(
            [
                'error'   => true,
                'message' => $validator->errors()->all(),
            ],
            Response::HTTP_UNPROCESSABLE_ENTITY
        );
    }
    $user = User::create(
        $request->only(
            [
                'email',
                'name',
            ]
        )
    );Code language: PHP (php)

There’s a problem here though – that unique validation on the email field is subject to a race condition. If two requests are received very close together, both can pass validation, but then the second one will fail with a duplicate key error on the User::create call. While that sounds unlikely, it happens for real sometimes, and you’ll see something like this in your web logs when it does:

192.168.0.1 - - [06/Oct/2023:07:08:54 +0000] "POST /users/ HTTP/2.0" 201 1276 "-" "okhttp/4.9.2"
192.168.0.1 - - [06/Oct/2023:07:08:55 +0000] "POST /users/ HTTP/2.0" 500 17841 "-" "okhttp/4.9.2"Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The 201 response is a successful creation, but it’s followed a second later by a 500 failure for the duplicate request. The Laravel log will then contain one of these:

[2023-10-06 07:08:55] staging.ERROR: SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry 'user@example.com'
 for key 'users.users_email_unique' (Connection: mysql, SQL: insert into `users` (`email`, `name`) values (user@example.com, Test)Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

To deal with that we can trap the creation error, and return an error response that looks the same as the validation error:

try {
    $user = User::create(
        $request->only(
            [
                'email',
                'name',
            ]
        )
    );
} catch (QueryException $e) {
    //1062 is the MySQL code for duplicate key
    if ($e->errorInfo[1] !== 1062) {
        //Rethrow anything except a duplicate key error
        throw $e;
    }
    return response()->json(
        [
            'error'   => true,
            'message' => 'That email address already has an account.',
        ],
        Response::HTTP_UNPROCESSABLE_ENTITY
    );
}Code language: PHP (php)

This way, as far as the client is concerned, it was a straightforward validation failure with an appropriate 422 error code, and we don’t get spurious 500s clogging up our error logs.

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Ode to a ski pole

My 125cm ICE Lightning carbon graphite ski poles get an honourable mention on my “ski equipment I have killed” page, praising the fact that I have failed to kill them, and I thought I’d expand on why I like them.

My ski poles, standing up, stuck in the snow

Ski poles are one of those things you don’t tend to think about much, until you break or lose one, and you find yourself feeling rather lost and annoyed. Poles are vital for balance and propulsion on the flat. Back in the pre-carving days, they were important for timing too, something that still applies a bit in powder and bumps.

“The best ski poles ever made”

Unofficial Gear Review

These poles were made in the USA by ICE Composites, based in Park City, Utah, who no longer seem to exist, though they could have morphed into this ICE Composites. I bought them in Vail, Colorado in 1998 during a very nice 10-day Christmas ski trip with my wife. Prior to these I’d had many other pairs of aluminium poles, all of which had failed in some way. Aluminium poles are light and flexy, and usually die by being bent near the middle, then break when you try to bend them back, because aluminium just doesn’t like that. They’re also prone to being sliced off by ski edges just above the basket.

The reason these poles have lasted so long is that they are made of carbon fibre. Carbon fibre is associated with super-lightweight ski touring and race equipment, which is often very high performance, but also not very strong because all the extra strength the carbon gives is traded against weight. These poles take a different approach: they are not light, but they are very stiff and incredibly strong, still solid and dead-straight after 25 years on the slopes.

The bottom of the pole just above the basket has a plastic sleeve to protect the thin bottom section from damage by sharp steel ski edges.

The handles are pretty unremarkable – a softish, grey, rubbery material. The straps are nice and strong, and very firmly attached (straps rarely break, but their attachment to the pole often does). My only complaint here is that the exit of the strap from the pole is vertical rather than horizontal, which means that the strap doesn’t sit flat against your palm.

That white bit below the handle is a bit of Sugru I used to increase the diameter of the pole from the standard 18mm to 22mm. Why do that? Because that’s the standard size for bicycle handlebars, and I use it for mounting a bike light for night expeditions! Pole-mounting a light is generally better for night skiing than a head torch, because with a head torch the light source is very close to your line of sight, so you get no shadows to see surface relief and texture. The offset position on the pole means that it casts useful shadows, and also means you don’t shine your light in friends’ eyes when you’re talking to them… This can also be used as a camera mount, but hopefully you’ve seen that there are better ways of mounting cameras.

I’m not the first to wax lyrical about these poles – back in 2012, Unofficial Gear Review described these as “the best ski poles ever made”, and I’m not going to argue!

I’ve used these poles for about 800 days of skiing, and they have accumulated a few scars, but they’re so strong that they’re still as solid as ever.

Even carbon fibre isn’t indestructible

One thing that has become a bit annoying is that the tips are wearing out. These are made of hardened steel with a kind of crown shape, however, the points wear down on rocks and ice, and lose grip, something that’s especially annoying in lift queues and icy conditions. I have tried to resurrect them by reshaping the crown shape using a Dremel-like tool, but I’d really like to replace them with more pointy race-type cylindrical tips.

I’ve had about 4 sets of baskets, as they just wear out; I tend to go for medium size ones.

Nobody seems to make bombproof poles like this any more, so I’ll just have to make these last another 800 ski days…