Mmm mmm

It's Creative Director Lee's birthday today, so we treated him to some home-made fairy cakes. As you can see they went down very well indeed.

Snow-capped chocolate + raspberry cup cakes:

Ingredients
200g self-raising flour
2 tsp baking powder
200g unsalted butter , softened
4 eggs
200g caster sugar
3 tbsp milk
2 tbsp cocoa powder
zest of 1 medium orange
150g punnet raspberries, lightly crushed

For the icing:
1 egg white
4 tbsp orange juice
175g icing sugar
Fruit jellies, hundreds and thousands or whatever you can find, to decorate

Method
Heat oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with paper muffin cases. Tip the first 8 ingredients into a large bowl and beat with electric whisk until smooth. Fold the crushed raspberries through the batter.

Divide the batter between the cases (they should be about half full) and bake for 20-25 mins or until golden and just firm.

Remove the cupcakes from the oven and allow to cool a little.

To make the icing, put the egg white and orange juice into a heatproof bowl, sift in the icing sugar, then set over a pan of simmering water. Using an electric hand whisk, whisk the icing for 7 mins until it is glossy and stands in soft peaks. Remove from the heat, then whisk for a further 2 mins until it is slightly cooled.

Spoon the icing onto the cakes, swirling it with a knife, then decorate with anything you can find. Leave to set then EAT!

Recipe cobbled together using two from from BBC Good Food

Mobile Youth talks about the future of mobile advertising

...thanks Mobile Youth

Chuck Levine's Mobile Presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mobile advertising)

The dramatic rise of branded content

To quote a recent article at Contagious, ‘After years of BMW films being just about the only example of branded content that was ever cited, there’s now a flood of sponsored short-form online TV series coming to a site near you’.

..how exciting! Online drama is something we at MWorks have been looking at particularly closely over the past 9 months...and it’s come a long way. The early stuff had low production values + pretty poor acting, but as online drama proves to be extremely successful at engaging with audiences, brands are becoming more confident and are spending more money. As a result we’re seeing big improvements in these areas. The production values seen in Sony Ericsson + Virgin Mobile-sponsored The Secret Life of Sam King have certainly moved on from those of Kate Modern, for example.

We’re also seeing more and more use of digital innovation within the online drama to increase the digital footprint + reach broader audiences. Sam King offers widgets to amplify and reach audiences outside of Bebo, Sofia’s Diary offers mobile updates to maintain interest offline, and the 2nd series of KateModern built Google maps into the storyline to get users interacting in other online environments.

Now the guys behind LonelyGirl15 + Kate Modern have moved things on by breaking away from Bebo to create their own social network http://www.lg15.com/. The LonelyGirl sequel, LG15: The Resistance will launch here in September, driving traffic in by distributing content to the various networks + channels. Definitely one to look out for.

It feels to us like the next step must be to deliver deeper interaction through viewer involvement. Particularly among the ‘yoof’ audience, interaction + engagement will increase when viewers are given some control over the narrative. Some have had a go already – the BBC online drama ‘To be continued’ currently playing out at Switch! offers viewers the chance to write + direct the next episode..nice. It’ll be interesting to see how popular it is.

Yahoo! is doing it slightly differently by asking viewers to text to vote for what happens next in their (cringeworthy) drama, Will Harry Date Sally? It looks like this one is designed to demonstrate to a slightly older audience how easy it is to use the internet on your mobile. It’d certainly be easier to bear on a smaller screen!

But finally, we’re reaaaally excited about Sony’s new crime drama, Coma which takes things to a whole new level. The fact that it stars Michael Madsen + George Hamilton gives it instant credibility and guarantees great acting (for once!). And the dark, comic book production values blow away everything that came before it. The drama which will feature careful Sony product integration, will play out through Sony’s Crackle channel + will be amplified across YouTube + Hula.