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.

It’s not from these birds (Trichoglossus haematodus or Rainbow Lorikeet)

and it’s not from these birds either ( Cacatua roseicapilla or Galah)

nor is it from this bird (Egretta novaehollandiae or White-faced Heron)

It’s not from my magpies either (Gymnorhina tibicen), the magpies (and the butcher birds) are something I’m going to dearly miss with my upcoming move from the balcony suite to the master wing, no more will the magpies on the washing line be the first thing I see and hear in the morning.

It’s not from the crested pigeons (Ocyphaps lophotes) either

nor is it the Pale-headed Rosella (Platycercus adscitus) who sometimes comes to visit and it is most definitely not from the Blue-faced Honeyeater (Entomyzon cyanotis), it is also most definitely not from the  Noisy Miners (Manorina melanocephala) who think they rule the roost in the front yard.

The feather comes from the birds known as Podargus strigoides, which bird is that you ask? Why it is this delightful creature.

Yes, that is a Tawny Frogmouth, well not just one but two! The above photo was taken on Christmas Day, we were patching some holes in the tent before my departure for Woodford the following morning when I looked up and saw these fellas in the tree. The one at the front of the above photo is a juvenile whilst the mature one is in the background. Mother and I were quite tickled pink at seeing these birds in our yard, if Pabbi was still alive he would have been tickled pink to see these as well, he adored taking photos of the birds in the back yard. On that note I’m sure Grandad would have been chuffed as well knowing we had Tawny Frogmouths in the the yard as well.

The parent bird is watching us.

We weren’t sure how long they would stay in the yard so imagine my delight when I came home from Woodford and saw this face in the Silky Oak. It’s the juvenile! Hello you Tawny Frogmouth.

Oh hello Tawny Frogmouth!

Sadly though, I’ve not seen them in our yard in the last week, each day I scour the trees hoping that at least one of them has returned. I do so hope they make an appearance when my brother Karl and his partner Kata come to visit in February. I am so dearly looking forward to not only finally meeting Kata (she was unfortunately in Russia when we were in Iceland last year in 2010, we met one of her sisters though!) but also to having Karl “home” for a little while. Whilst Kata is going to see sooo many things on their seven week jaunt to Australia as Karl shows they lady who has his heart Australia the country in which he was raised it would just be quite something special if there was Tawny Frogmouths in the backyard when they arrived. I’ll just have to talk to the trees and see what they can arrange.

I remember the first time I saw a Tawny Frogmouth, were were on a pre-school excursion to Coochiemudlo Island and there was one perched in the rafters of one of the toilet blocks. We were ushered in ever so quietly by our teacher to look at it.

Well that is the story of some of the birds who like to hang out in the back yard. Their stories are not quite as adventuerous or humerous as the blue tounge lizard clan that resides over at MMMC but I wouldn’t trade my birds for all the world.

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.

This Christmas season has seen many, many changes in our household. A couple of months ago, after Mum had come back from exploring the bush in NSW, a conversation was resurrected from one we had had years ago about why we (really my parents) live in Brisbane. It was about Grandad of course and nothing could have taken my mother or myself away from SEQ whilst my grandfather was alive. With his passing in June and the passing of my father in May last year; that conversation could be had again as those events have changed a lot of things in our lives. I moved back home. We purchased an investment property. We’ve taken on a boarder (who may have had a Lotte bowl slip out of his hand and land on the floor in more than one piece … My Lotte is now more secure in where it is stored) and that’s just the billboard changes. Mum has had the chance to revisit that conversation we’ve had a few times over the years about leaving Brisbane and teaching somewhere else, I always used to suggest WA but that is an awfully long way a way. Mum though discovered a place closer to home though and next year she will be still be a Maths teacher but in NSW in a country town situated in the north west region. The town she is moving to is about a 7hr drive from Brisbane, luckily it is also on the Melbourne to Brisbane bus route so she will be able to hop on a bus to come home for a visit! Most importantly there is plenty of bush walking and an active club to keep her weekends occupied.

This has meant that Mum is packing up her life or perhaps I should say “culling her life”, there has been items leaving this house left, right and center. Some via Lifeline, some via Gumtree, some via Freecycle, others via the rubbish bin, some to people here and there. Some times it feels like that unless it is bolted down, it won’t be there when I get home from work!

Another change this year is that for the first time in the sixty years my mother has lived we have an artificial Christmas tree!!!! And we put it up on Dec 18!!! My father and my maternal grandmother are probably rolling in their proverbial graves (well more accurately, their ash particles are probably vibrating at a higher frequency than normal …)

However, it’s not just any artificial Christmas tree. It’s a 6ft Mistletoe Pine Aluminium Christmas Tree made by Raco. Yep, how many people do you know in Australia who are rocking an Australian made Aluminium Christmas Tree? Very few I would wager to say. I normally see two or so appear each year on Ebay and one of the ones that appeared last year made its way to me. I then gave the tree as part of my present to Mum last year (Well actually it was to both Mum and the house. Do you do that? We have often over the years had presents to the the house from the kitchen or to the fridge from the stove etc). My reading of the date codes on the box say it was made in 1964 and the price label reads £6/15/ which according to our friends at the RBA that is about $84 in the money of today.

Our tree has always been real and has always gone up around the 23rd or so and then comes down on the 6th of January or shortly there after (A major pet peeve of mine is when people talk of the twelve days of Christmas as been the twelve days leading up to Christmas, I grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. You seriously think the three kings got an early warning that Jesus was been born and started their journey twelve days before he was born ??? I’m a by no means a believer but it riles me when people talk about and use an idea that they clearly seem to have no idea what it actually means).

Moving on from that point. This is our tree. Click to see it larger of course!

Have you seen such a beauty? It makes such a lovely sound as you brush past it and oh I love how the lights reflect off it and dance on the ceiling. I actually lay under it on Sunday night whilst on the phone to a friend like a child, watching the light dance on “the leaves” … It is so smile inducing.

I had my last exam on Thursday night so I’m at the moment I’m loving not having to open my uni books for a few months! I went out yesterday morning and took some photos of one of the ladies I work with and her family. This one was just too cute not to share

On spring flowers, here are mine. I planted primulas in the front bed and oh it is so lovely to have flowers in the garden again. As a kid we used pick the flowers and spin the stalks round and round between our palms pretending they were Catherine wheels.

I didn’t plant the clover but looks almost as pretty.

When I mowed the lawn, I couldn’t stand the thought of mowing down all those pretty clover flowers so I left a square of flowering clover in the front lawn

Now for a collection of links and the likes.

Ten People Who Observe Birthdays on 9/11 – Whilst American based, I can certainly attest to quite a number of statements made.

I can’t stop listening to this cover of Back in Black by Will Shine
Will Shine – Back in Black (AC/DC cover) by the3penguins

The Iceland AFL team recently hosted Norway in the first ever international game in the country, my brother was of course there to capture all the action. I particularry liked how they rigged the goal posts up.

Shiney Flaggy Purse also available with more Union Jack and less stars.

Now I’m off to spend the day with my head buried in the AASBs.

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.

We ended up seeing a lot of places, doing a lot of shopping (oh the shopping), eating all sorts of things (Kobe beef!!! OMG), talking to a random mix of people and most of all enjoying the plum blossoms. We did see some cherry blossoms but personally we prefer the perfume from the plum blossoms (we were talking to a volunteer guide at the Osaka Castle Gardens and he said that that preference is quite common amongst westerners).

Plum Blossoms in the Osaka Castle Plum Orchard.

3 pictures for now because everything else will have to wait till I get back from Japan.

Saying hello to Grandad after the ceremony

This photo just about sums up the wedding 100%. The beach, playing in the water, having a picnic and a wedding as well.

and the cake, mmmm flourless chocolate cake and a very very good one at that. With the mountains of Freycinet in the background

Tomorrow – I have work (of course), I get my tooth implant, I’ve got postgrad orientation stuff to do at uni and then I have The Whitlams with the QSO tomorrow night.

Friday – Work and then straight to the airport to catch a flight to Hobart.

Saturday – Wedding of my cousin on the beach at Coles Bay/Freycinet

Sunday – Post wedding activities and flying home Sunday night.

Monday – Work and first uni lecture

Tuesday – Fly to Japan for 2 weeks. (Yeah, I’ll be missing four classes – two for each subject, whilst I’m away)

I’m so crazy looking forward to going to Japan. G (one of my best girl friends) and I are going to have a blast (literally as they having a bit of a cold snap at the moment and it is forecast to snow for the days we are up in the alps!!!).

It’s going to be crazy. I bought a new lens the other week, the 28mm 1.8 which will be one of the two lenses I’m taking to Japan, the other will be the 50mm 1.4. I was thinking of taking my 16-35mm 2.8 but it is a heavy piece of glass. I took a few photos with the 28mm the other day and I’m impressed

Yep, some more of my Figgjo Flint Lotte. Here you see a creamer which doubles as a bobby pin and nail utensil holder, a sugar pot that holds bracelets and hair clips and my soufflé dish which holds jewellery.

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.

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The other week at the farm I took the 135mm, sigh that is one lens I sure do love.

My exam is on Friday, this is what my desk looks like at the moment.

Do you spy that plaque near my tea cup? This is a scan of it. It’s a Figgjo (my favourite Norwegian company) Utfart wall plaque. The discolouration in the glazing is most likely from where it has been hung with a wire which has leached into the glaze. If I ever hang this baby it will be with good strong string or similar.

And that is the end of this short post of pictures

Oh this is so funny