This was my breakfast this morning. Home made bread and home made apricot jam with a cup of tea and the magazine from the weekend Australian.

This is the Helen size loaf of bread before I cut into it

Oh it is so very nice and I achieved a very nice translucent crumb which is the goal with slow rise breads.

Did you see the table?

It started off life with me looking like this.

A thorough sanding, a dose of deck clean, some garden furniture oil, another sand then then two more coats of garden furniture oil and it looks like this now. Yes, those are casalas, I searched high and low for outdoor chairs I liked but in the end casalas won me over. Oh so comfy

One day I’ll get round to stripping and painting the legs but that doesn’t need doing just yet.

Also I went to my first auction on Tuesday night and I bid on one item all night and I won it, it was a touch scary. When I arrived I did a quick case of what else was on show then had a quick look at the Countess before sitting down in a position where I could see if anyone else was looking at it … The bidding was between me and one other lady. Oh hello Royal Doulton Countess, I do love  you so. I finally have bowls (and cups and more plates). I’m really quite happy about this win because I got it for a very good price and it means I don’t have to find a seller on UK Ebay who is happy to send bowls internationally.  I may be known for my love of Figgjo Flint Lotte but I share that love equally with Royal Doulton Countess.

Now though, I must fold the washing and get ready for a short work week since Karl and Kata arrive early Thursday morning

The birds reappeared in the Silky Oak this morning. I woke up, looked out the window and there they were; preening their feathers in the early morning light. As per usual it has been about a week since they were last in the garden.

What else have I been up to since then?

Making use of one of my Christmas presents – a jam funnel, thanks Mum!

Using the above leads to this. Mulberry Jam, yummo.

Stocking up on mangoes, then slicing and freezing so there will be golden mango goodness way past the mango season. A whole tray of mangoes for $8 <– that’s my kind of bargain.

Look at all those bags of goodness.

After a few years of umming and ahhing over different digital radios, I finally picked one up. A Pure Elan II, whilst I dearly loved the Orla Kieley and the look of the other Mio radios they didn’t offer a pause feature. If I was getting a new kitchen radio I wanted to be able to press pause and come back to the radio when I’m off the phone/finished shooing away the sales person/bible promoter at the door etc.

I’m loving it, it’s great having ABC Jazz in the kitchen without either having to have the TV on or having my laptop on the kitchen table.

The house currently looks like a cross between a bomb site and a warehouse as Mum packs up as the ticker counts downs the days till she departs, we are almost in the single digits!

I leave you with this.

That’s my attempt at making a Mango Juice Bali style -> mango, ice, sugar syrup. Blend it together and drink up the sweetness.

I’ve made Loftkökur, Sugar Biscuits, Christmas Cake Pattycakes, Gingerbread, Rum Balls, Sunshine Balls (Apricots Balls with dried pineapple and mango added as well) and Vanilla Rings.

Loftkökur
This time of year the traffic to my blog goes through the roof as people come for my Loftkökur post from 2006. Four ingredients, some magic and then you have quite possibly my favourite Christmas baked good. Londoneats also made Loftkökur this year and I’ve contributed to the comments thread over there. I’m going to do an updated Loftkökur recipe post next Christmas and will provide spoonfuls of the magic ingredient to Australians who want to try making them.

Christmas Cake Pattycakes
These are new this year and I’ll be making these till the Christmas before I die I do believe. All the niceness of Christmas fruit cake without the dryness or stodginess. I found the recipe in an advert for Lucky Nuts via the Coles magazine (I must say I love the Coles and Woolies magazines, they are the main place I get new recipes these days).

Christmas Cakes
Makes at least 24 muffin size cakes or 48 patty pan size cakes, I suggest halving it)

1 cup roughly chopped silvered almonds
5 cups assorted dried fruit roughly chopped into pieces about thumb nail size (I use sultanas, raisins, dates, pear, peaches, apricots – probably half sultanas and raisins and the rest other fruits)
1/2 cup (at least) of rum, I use Bundy Red and strongly recommend it for all Christmas items.
a good shake of mixed spice
250g butter, softened
250g brown sugar
4 eggs
1/4 cup marmalade or citrus jam (I use my Mandarin jam and just realised that I never blogged about it or my other jam making – blame mobile uploads on Facebook, it’s so quick to take a photo on the phone, add a caption and upload it to Facebook)
500g plain flour
blanched almonds to decorate

Combine the rum, dried fruit and spice in a container and leave at least over night, making sure to give it a good shake every so often to make sure that rum is soaking the fruit nicely. You made need to add a little more rum here.

Cream the butter till pale, add the sugar and continue to mix till the sugar is dissolved. This will take some time but it makes all your baking better if you take the time to cream your butter and sugar well. Add the eggs and marmalade/jam in and continue to mix. Then add half of the fruit mix and half of remaining ingredients (flour and chopped almonds) mix it well and then add in the rest of the fruit, flour and almonds and mix till well combined.

Spoon mixture into cake papers, decorate the top with blanched almonds and bake at 150°C until a skewer comes out clean and they are lightly coloured on top (~ 15-30 minutes depending on the size you are making)

Eat with a good cup of Christmas tea

Sugar Biscuits
This is the only recipe I’ve ever used for sugar biscuits and can’t fault it. It is easy to double, freezes well and is very easy to make.

Sugar Cookie Recipe number 2
Makes a heap.

1.25 cups caster sugar or white sugar
225g butter, softened
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla (I probably use more like 2.5 tsp of vanilla normally)
2.5 cups plain flour (sifted)
1 tsp bi-carb
1 tsp cream of tartar (If you don’t have cream of tartar don’t rush out and buy it. Over the years I’ve made these with bi-carb and baking powder as well and they are just fine)

Cream the butter till pale and then add the sugar, continue to cream it till the sugar is dissolved and it doesn’t look at all grainy. Add the egg and vanilla and mix again. Add the flour and rising agents and beat till it comes together. Form dough into at least two discs and wrap in either glad wrap or a plastic bag and allow to cool and harden in the fridge (I normally make the mixture one night and bake the biscuits the following night). Remove the dough from the fridge and allow to warm up a little. I normally divide the each disc into about four pieces and work each piece with my hands warming it up and making it rollable. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to an even thickness (I aim for about 5mm) and cut out shapes with your cutters. For best baking results only use one shape per tray or if you must use different shapes you should make sure they have the same surface area because smaller biscuits cook quicker and you don’t want over cooked biscuits. Cook on glad bake lined trays at about 160°C for about 8 minutes. Remove them from the oven just as they start to colour. Allow to cool and then ice with your preference of icing. I’m a royal icing girl. Store in an air tight container and if you find they are a softening in the container put a slice of bread in the container to harden the biscuits back up.

Gingebread
I probably should call this Spicebread, as I do like to be quite heavy handed with the spices.

Gingerbread
150g golden syrup
110g butter
100g brown sugar
375g flour, sifted together with the bi-carb and spices
1 tsp bi-carb

Spices (the more the better but make sure the ratio is ginger heavy)
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp all spice

In a medium size pan, combine the syrup, butter and sugar, bring to a gentle boil and make sure the sugar is dissolved before removing from the heat and stirring in the flour mixture, when the mixture has come together, let the dough rest in the pan for a couple of hours. You don’t need to place this in the fridge, on the bench is fine. I made my mine in the morning before work and left the pan on the bench all day. Roll out to about 8mm thick on a floured surface and cut out your shapes. Bake at 180°C for about 10 minutes or until they spring back when touched. Cool and decorate with melted chocolate or royal icing or just leave as they are.

There we have it. Recipes for all the goods I’ve taken photos of so far. I’m yet to take photos of Rum Balls or Sunshine Balls (probably because I keep eating them!)

I’m now off to start organising the house for Christmas Eve tonight and get things sorted out for Woodford after Christmas.

I made a rainbow cake, not the style of rainbow cake I had planned to make a year or so ago but an easier one both to make and to consume. I used the butter cake recipe from *that birthday cake book*, doubled it, split it in to a number of bowls, added a liberal amount of food dye to each bowl, stirred that food dye in very well, dolloped it into a bundt pan, baked it, covered it in yummy chocolate ganache (the secret to shiny ganache is a little dollop of a plain veggie oil) and then sprinkled gold sugar over the top.

It was well, it was smile material.

In progress shot.

One of the girls at work is a day younger than me, so to celebrate our birthdays we made each other a cake. Oh it was a day of cake last Monday at work.

This is the oh so so so yummy double layer chocolate cake she made me.

mmm rainbow cake.

Spring Flowers in waiting.

A sizeable number of Primulas have been planted in the front garden beds so there will be Spring flowers again (I said to Mum just after moving back in that I wished she would put plants in the front bed again – her answer to me of course was something along the lines of “you’re old enough to plant the bed yourself” so I did).

And then there is study.

Best done with a Kit-Kat of course. The flavour pictured is Shinshu Apple. It’s a sweet slightly fake apple taste.

At the moment though, I’m pretty much “head in textbooks” or “fingers on calculator”, I’ve got a exam tomorrow and I want to get the best mark I can possibly get.

My study set up doesn’t so much look like this any more (I do miss my balcony and all that light) but is a corner of my room. Will have to take some photos of my room shortly.

Still study is study and it must be done.

Study of course makes you hungry. I won’t however be eating the below pictured. I may be a big supporter of adding a spoonful of Milo to corn flakes/any breakfast cereal but pre-packaged porridge sachets with the Milo already in it? sigh.

Went to do some grocery shopping with one of my flatmates and snapped this picture on the walk back up Edward St.

Now it’s time to finish off some practice questions and get ready for bed.

Can you spot the Figgjo Annemarie plate? I also put a little surprise in these with a spoonful of crushed pistachios in the centre. Also I only used pistachio meal in the shells instead of blend of almond and pistachio meal that I saw in some recipes.

The pistachio ones looked the most like commercial macarons, they had a better foot and the top was glossier but some of the tops were domed and cracked. My reading would indicate that this is because I may have over mixed the pistachio meal and sugar into the egg white mixture. The chocolate ones I believe I the eggwhite mixture was too stiff and thus they mixture wasn’t as quite as runny as it should be. This is all a big learning curve and most importantly I can say that they all tasted delicious.

Chocolate, Chocolate and Chocolate

These of course are on a Figgjo Lotte plate Some of these had a squirt of ganache in the centre and then butter cream round that or vice versa with butter cream in the centre. My favourite ones to look at though are the ones where I piped ganache on one side and butter cream on the other side.

I ended up with 60 odd macarons and they certainly didn’t last long at work.

I made the Iced VoVo cake from Raspberri Cupcake last night/this morning for an afternoon tea at work today and it went down quite well. I used the strawberry jam I made before Christmas on the cake as well

and that is all for Wednesday 02FEB11.

I made Strawberry Jam in December which I gave as part of my Christmas boxes. I finally got round to taking a photo of one of the jars! The felt topper changed between jars depending on what I had at hand but they were all tied up twine and finished with jingle bells.

All my baking and creating has now come to an end for a year as I handed out presents and parcels to friends and co-workers over the last few days.

All the staff in my section received a little goodie bag, which consisted of 2 Christmas Tree sugar cookies, 1 Lebkuchen Man and 2 little chocolates.

The front.

The back.

My girls all received a double stack of decadent goodies. Which was filled with a jar of my Strawberry Jam (which reminds me I must take a photo of one of my jars – they looked so pretty), sugar cookies, vanilla rings, rum balls, sunshine/apricot balls, 3 types of nut brittle (hazelnut, peanut and almond), loftkökur and lebkuchen. That also reminds me, I’ll have to take a picture of of what the little bags inside the boxes look like -that will have to happen next year.

The boxes.

oh so pretty. They are all tied up with bakers twine from Bespoke Letterpress. To continue in my theme of using my Figgjo Flint Lotte collection to hold assorted bits and pieces, here is what I am using as a dispenser for my twine – a milk jug. At work I have a butter dish holding my staple remover, paper clips, white-out etc, at home I have a soufflé dish that holds my jewellery tree, a jam container that holds teabags, a little serving skillet that holds a candle and coins etc etc.

I leave you with two pictures from the “Hard Crack Factory”

mmm brittle.

It’s this time of year that I am thankful for having an oodle of Tupperware cake/biscuit/slice containers. Tomorrow afternoon is going to see the return of Operation Icing for this year. Which will see all available flat surfaces in this house covered with iced biscuits. so much sugar but oh so good.

I’m doing things slightly different from last year instead of doing the 25 cake boxes of I’m going to make little packages similar to what I did for “Super Hornet Day” for most people and continue to provide some morning tea each day and a few very close people will get a box like last year. I’m very proud of what I did last year but it was a mission and a half and I want my sleep this year.

Less of this.

More like this.

This is the morning tea “basket” that I took to work on Wednesday.

I found the Pyrex dish at one of my favourite op shops a couple of weeks ago and with that festive gold trim, I knew it would get a work out over Christmas. I put an old glass jelly mould in the middle of the dish and filled that with white chocolate drizzled Lebkuchen men and filled the dish with Rum Balls and Sunshine Balls.

Everything of course went down a treat and the last two days I’ve taken Vanilla Rings and Loftkökur which have equally gone down a treat. One of the ladies I work with reckons my Lebkuchen men are the best “gingerbread men” she’s ever had, that was really nice to hear.

mmmm Loftkökur

I love Christmas. Without a doubt it is my favourite time of year. The last few days I’ve been working on some of my Christmas crafting and I’m doing my first batch of Christmas baking tomorrow. In saying all that though, this Christmas is going to be oh so very different to any Christmas past. There’s no Pabbi to dish out the rice pudding or to hand out presents from the tree. When we were in London on the way home from Iceland, we came up with the idea to go to New Zealand for Christmas to hang out with Mum’s sister and her family. Mum, Grandad and I are going (Matthew was not interested in the idea and is staying home) on the night of the 23rd and return on the night of the 31st. Will be great to catch up with my cousins and get to see the first great-grandchild.

I’m so tempted to start putting up decorations in my room but I’ll wait till Dec 1… though I’m going to hang a few porcelain snow flakes in the next few hours. They are white, you’ll hardly be able to see them hanging from the white shelf against the white wall …

This Saturday is the Christmas BBQ for the Icelandic Club -> hence the Christmas baking tomorrow. Really looking forward to the BBQ especially to catch up with one of my good friends who I’ve not seen in an obscene amount of time. I’m going to take along a big container of Loftkökur … mmmm. A funny note to mention, google Loftkökur and my recipe is normally the first or the second result to appear . When I was in Iceland a few months ago, one of my sister’s told me that someone she knew had been raving about this Loftkökur recipe that she had found on the net and how great it was. She sent the link to my sister and my sister replied – that recipe is from my sister so funny.

In order to make Loftkökur, though I need the secret ingredient so I made a trip over to Mum’s today to pick up the Hartshorn salt, I also “borrowed” two of her biscuit trays … and I brought home some of my Christmas decorations.

mmm Hartshorn salt, there’s nothing quite like a sniff of Ammonium bicarbonate.

In other news, I go back to work tomorrow! yikes. I’ve got some crutches which make getting around easier. The first thing on the agenda for me to do tomorrow at work will be finish organising the Christmas Party – it’s next Saturday night. It’s themed, the 20th Century. There was too much debate amongst my two other planners between doing a 20′s theme or a Mad Men theme. I ended up suggesting let’s do the 20th Century instead. People can come dressed from whichever era they wish and if they don’t want to put much effort in they can just come as the 90′s.

I’m doing an early 60′s/late 50′s theme. I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a few essential packages to arrive early next week for my outfit. All I have left to do is figure out my jewellery (will probably try to find some “pearls” at diva or the like) and practice my hair. I’m going to have to do some op-shopping before then though to find a shirt for N to wear. I’m so excited, can’t wait to see what outfits people put together.

I had almost the best weekend after my exam. I got the CityCat home, did all those jobs round the place that I had put off for the last two weeks, went to the markets, purged stuff from my room, made a really nice turkey and pork bolognese for dinner with N on Saturday night, went to Finders Keepers with G on Sunday arvo (we think it should have been called the Brooch Market as I think the majority of stalls had broooches for sale). Then since Mum was leaving for Patagonia and Antarctica on Monday morning for the next 7 weeks, I headed over for a bon voyage dinner (cold roast lamb, fresh roast vegies, chocolate self saucing pudding and custard – so so yummy).

This is all sounding pretty good isn’t it? but here comes the event that changed the best weekend to the almost the best weekend.

I went to the sewing room to borrow a sewing machine to fill in my time that was formerly occupied with study … Then I stood on something and let out a few words. A sewing room of course meant that I stood on a sewing needle. I looked at my foot and couldn’t see anything but a itsy bitsy teen drop of blood. I ran my hand over the carpet and pulled out a needle fragment – about 1cm long.

Ok I thought, I must have just stood on that spot in the carpet and it poked me and didn’t do anything else …. you can see where this is going can’t you ….

I walked back out to the kitchen, grabbed an ice-pack and numbed my foot for a while and then it was time for me to head home and for Mum to pack her bags.

I woke up Monday morning in pain, so much pain. I called Mum at sparrow’s fart to wish her will on her trip but the call was mostly me sobbing in my pain about my foot. Poor Mum, here she is heading half way round the world for the next 7 weeks and she has a 25 year old daughter sobbing down the phone line in pain.

I took Monday off work, went to the local GP and got a tetanus shot and he told me just to keep my foot elevated and stay off it. By the way, tetanus shots are so painless now – nothing like they used to be. I’ve had no bruise or arm pain – bonus. At this stage I had no reason to think that there was any part of the needle in my foot.

Monday night I was still in agony. Tuesday morning, I drove into work (no way could I walk to and from the train station) for a couple of hours to sort out my work and then I made an appointment with my family GP on the Northside for that arvo. A bit of a chat, a script and an x-ray referral later I was heading down to the local x-ray clinic for a few scans as the amount of pain I was in was indicating that something must be in there.

A few jokes with the radiographer later and ohh look at what we have here. Yep, there sure is a needle in my foot. I must have stood on the needle, part of it went into my foot and then broke off (thus the part I found in the carpet). A call to the doc to tell him that I yep I’ve got a needle in my foot. He then went into organising me to see a surgeon to remove it as it is not something that a GP can remove due to possible complications with the bone/nerves etc. Fun times.

Why hello sewing needle, what are you doing in there?

I had today off and will have the rest of the week off at least.
I’ve got a consult with the surgeon tomorrow morning and hopefully they will be able to fit me in for surgery on Friday…

I’ve spent the better part of the last three days, in bed with my foot elevated and an ice-pack strapped on it at times. Laying down in bed the pain is only there in the morning. I wake up to the most excruciating pain.

As I type this now, I would only be able to tell you that I had a needle in my foot by the fact that I can’t move the smaller toes on my foot or the fact that it is slightly swollen.

If I stand up though, that is a whole different story … that is when the pain kicks in and the needle starts to make its presence known. I’ve become apt at walking on the heel of my foot.

I’m sooo looking forward to the consult tomorrow morning. I just want that thing out of my foot! I’ve spent a fair bit of my life walking round bare-foot and I think after this I will be wearing shoes a bit more than I used to. I don’t want a repeat of this adventure any time soon.

The lesson to learn from this post? Wear shoes when walking round a craft/sewing room.

To be continued …

For everything that the last 364 days have brought me, from the good, the bad, the ugly, the forgettable, the unforgettable, the amazing, the challenging, the one thing that I think will always be a hallmark of my 24th year is of course Pabbi dying. My 25th year starts to unfold tomorrow and as the year passes it will be interesting to see what it brings. I’ve got a number of things I want to complete/accomplish next year but mostly I’m here to live and to make the most whilst doing just that; living life.

and to move away from birthdays but onto happenings of the last week.

For the past week I’ve been literally overdosing on strawberries.

I am very pleased to announce that I got 80% for my accounting exam last week, it put me in the top 9% of the class, I aim to improve on that as the semester continues. The exam was Saturday morning and Saturday evening was Riverfire which we watched from a hill in Wooloowin. Oh sigh, we had 3, yes 3 dump and burns this year from the one plane. Oh the F-111 is one special plane.

Tonight after work N and I had “dinner” at the 40 Days and 40 Nights of Chocolate Buffet at the Bistro Allure. Oh I’m just recovering from chocolate and sugar overdose. I’ll go again in a couple of weeks with some of the girls from work and I’ve got a game plan worked out. The plan from which I shall not deviate is to get one piece at a time, eat that piece and then go back for more. mmmm chocolate ….

One of the many cases of goodies

N’s plate

My plate

This is one of the adorable presents I got from one of the girls at work today. A mini tea set. The perfect desk accessory for a tea fanatic like myself. I had received the little sugar pot at Easter and was told that I would get the rest of the present for my birthday. Total gold. The best thing is that the tea pot actually pours

This is the last year for the F-111, well so they say since last year was meant to be the last as well, frankly I’ll believe it when it doesn’t do a flyover next year …. There are no Roulettes this year which is quite a for me. I love seeing them doing all their formations etc instead there’ll be some Black Hawks flying about …

I made pizza muffins earlier – basically this recipe but with more veggies in. They’ll be snack food tonight along with some Lebanese pastries I picked up on the way home from uni this morning.

I had my first uni exam this morning, 9am on a Saturday … I was fairly confident going in, going out well, I’m still confident I’ll get a decent mark but not as confident as I was going in.

Some collected links from the last little while which I’ve been meaning to share.

Loving this photo of my brother for everything that it is and everything that lies behind it and ahead.

The Cath Kidston August “magazine” arrived the other day and oh so many pretty things. Kind of makes me wish I had picked up another bag whilst I was in London

If Historical Events Had Facebook Statuses 1 and 2

this amazing blog which puts the fun back in the sky

Scratch It World Map – I so want one of these (me and everyone else on the net it seems)

Amazing collection of photos from Russia circa 1910

Amazing interactive panoramas

Fish Apartments, makes me want a fish

New York, the tale that was