Lately, we’ve been "cooking" some Apples. As there’s a huge variety out there it’s been fairly difficult to make them taste nice and not too sweet or too sour. But for some reason, more often than not, they end up a little bit too sour for our tech taste… and too expensive considering Apples are now in season (or very popular). But we’re not giving up. We’ll keep looking for that perfect Apple recipe. Until then, here comes an apple cake recipe that’s nearly perfect (and it could easily end up on our Easter menu… it’s that good):

Nanna’s Apple Cake (mmmmm!)

Ingredients

Cake

4 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 cups plain flour
1 cup natural yogurt
1 cup vegetable oil
8g baking powder

Note: Cup here is not a cup measurement. It is rather a "real" cup. Choose one of your smaller coffee/tea/milk mugs (i.e. not bigger than 200ml) and use the same cup to measure ingredients.

Filling

1.5kg Pink Lady apples (peeled, seeds removed, thinly sliced)
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar
50g caster sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon

Method

1. For filling, combine all ingredients then gently simmer (over low heat) until apples are very soft and not too moist.
2. Preheat oven to 180o C.
3. For cake mixture, beat eggs and sugar until sugar is dissolved. Add flour (mixed with baking powder), yogurt, and oil then mix with a wooden spoon until well combined and smooth. Grease a baking dish (25cm x 20cm). Pour a half the mixture into the dish and bake for about 10 minutes. Take the dish out and place apple filling evenly over the cake. Top with remaining cake mixture and bake everything for approximately 30 minutes (or until done as baking time may vary between ovens).
4. Let the cake cool a bit then cut it into diamond-shaped pieces.
5. Dust with powder sugar just before serving.

Spying on browsing and instant messaging activities

A new Mac OS X Trojan referred to as OSX/Crisis silently infects OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and OS X 10.7 Lion. It then spies on the user by monitoring Adium, Firefox, Microsoft Messenger, Safari, and Skype.

The threat installs itself silently (no user interaction required) and does not need your user password to infect your Mac. It exploits Java vulnerabilities, but since OS X 10.7 Lion doesn’t include Java by default, this is suggesting there are other ways for this malware to infect your Mac. Newly released Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion doesn’t seem to be affected by the OSX/Crisis.

The malware allows the person operating it to:

• Spy on Skype audio traffic and record all conversations and phone calls.
• Spy on Safari or Firefox browsers to record URLs and screenshots.
• Record IM messages in both Microsoft Messenger and Adium.
• Send file contents to the control server.

As this is a very advanced threat and since it hasn’t been seen in the wild yet, you’re unlikely to get infected by it. Still, if your work on Apple Mac is critical or you have classified information stored on it, it is very important that your security updates are always up to date and that you’re using an updated antivirus program.

Microsoft also suggests doing something about your Java as Java-based malware sees no end. So regardless of whether you’re using Mac or Windows-based computers, this is what Microsoft asks you to do with Java: "Update it, disable it, or kill it."