App Review: My Town Animals

My Town Animals is an iOS game (you might be able to get it for other platforms as well, I'm not sure). I downloaded it about a week ago, and as a lover of anything that requires a little imagination, where you can create your own town, I was hooked! 

The overall concept of the game is great. You control a little town and you are responsible for fulfilling the dreams o it's inhabitants which are cute little animals - ranging from parrots who want bird-houses to elephants that want to travel to Fiji. The 'create your own town' theme of the game is one that many other apps provide (such as Shipwrecked, The Meego, and My Town 2 Getaways), but this game seems to do it much better, and unlike many other apps it isn't constantly asking you for money. 

The graphics of the game are also really good and the things you need to buy for your town (buy in-game with coins you earn from your businesses, not literally buy) are well priced. 

After only a day or two of playing he game however it was constantly crashing. It started with the odd crash now and then but the crashes became more frequent, and now I can rarely play it for more than a few seconds after loading without it crashing. Whenever the game crashes I also lose all my most recent progress. 

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling, installing it on David's phone and closing down the game completely and nothing works. I've also noticed on some online forums that other people are having the same problem, and can't find a way of fixing it. Now it's just a case of waiting for the next update. Hurry up and update this game Booyah because it's amazing ad I need to play it! 

Overall this is a great game, but it's spoilt by the crashes, making it a truly awful game.

My rating? 

1/5 

Weekly Bargain!

At £8 this hand mixer/ whisk would have been a bargain anyway! But yesterday at Morrisons, I picked this bad-boy up for just £6. It has five different speed settings and comes with beaters and dough hooks. I have only used it once so far, but I was very impressed. It is also very easy to clean. Would definitely recommend, especially if you're like me and have wanted one for ages! Even if you don't like it, I'm sure one of your friends or family will, and if it goes in the bin, then your only losing out on £6! 

Blackberry Picking and Blackberry Cooking

It is typical in Wales, that in September when the kids go back to school, after a summer of rain, that the weather will be beautiful. Yesterday was a lovely sunny day, and David had the day off work, so we all went black berry picking. This is the time of year that the blackberries start to ripen, and we were lucky enough to find some really plump ones, just about to fall from their branches.

It is also typical in Wales, after picking blackberries, to make a blackberry tart, and this was something I delighted in as a child. I and my friends would roam around the neighbourhood like lost boys collecting tubs full of blackberries, then we would take them home, our fingers purple with their juices and our mothers would make blackberry tarts. My mother's fore has never been cooking, and she would roll out two sheets of pastry, throw some berries in the middle and call it a blackberry pie. It was always sour and full of pips and hard bits... But I loved it, and with a lashing of evaporated or 'ideal' milk, Mammy's blackberry tart always went down a treat. 

I am no longer a child however, and since I have a child of my own now, I wanted to be the blackberry-baker. 

Before doing anything with your blackberries you should always give them a nice long soak (at least 1-2 hours) in cold water, salt an sugar, to bring out and kill any bugs. 

I decided to go down the less traditional route and I made a Blackberry cheesecake and some little blackberry tartlets. Yum! 

My cheesecake didn't turn out just as I'd hoped, I adapted recipe I found online for strawberry cheesecake (Google simple cheesecake recipe) and I didn't use a scale to weight my ingredients so the consistency was a bit off on the biscuit base, and the cream-cheese filling.

Here is the finished product! 

My tartlets however turned out great! I used short crust pastry, baked in the oven until golden brown and hard, and filled it with a blackberry filling made by melting butter in a pan, adding blackberries, flour and icing sugar, then I topped them with blackberries and icing sugar. 

The perfect way to end summer and welcome winter!