now a thirtysomething from Brisbane
This is my Kit-Kat currently as it stands on day 4. We have 5 regional packs, 1 standard and a fun size bag which has two types of green tea Kit-Kats. We will pick up a miss soybean paste regional pack when we head back through Nagoya in a couple of days.
We are really hoping to find cherry blossom Kit-Kats in Tokyo as we can get cherry blossom frappacinos at Starbucks and pink noodles at some grocery stores.
Here us to Kit-Kats
A very dear friend and co-worker has her last day at work on Friday before jetting off to the other side of the world to join her fiancé. For months and months she has been pestering me to make macarons and for months and months I’ve been delaying. Well I made them on the weekend and took them to work on Monday. I met my deadline and I made macarons for the first time. I made two types. Pistachio with a chocolate butter cream filling and chocolate with a double chocolate filling (chocolate ganache and chocolate butter cream).
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’ve thought about staying up till TC Yasi crosses the coast watching the twitter feeds but at the end of the day there is nothing I can do down here yet and I do have work tomorrow and the braces come off tomorrow as well. The people I know up north are all prepared as they can be so all we can do is sit and wait for the train wreck to happen.
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.
Well, I’m sitting at my Mum’s house as I type this as in a few hours we’ll be heading to the airport to go to NZ for 10 days to hang out with my Aunt and her family. It’s funny, at work people have been asking why I’m going to NZ for Christmas to which I reply I have family there and the response is always the same or similar “Helen, you have family everywhere” (in matter of fact not really, just Iceland, London, NZ and Tassie but it does seem like everywhere).
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.
I sat on the deck earlier this evening as I expected it to start bucketing and re-drafted my Christmas countdown plan. From tomorrow morning till when I fly out to Kiwi Land on Thursday everything that I need to do is written down; what I have left to buy, when I need to do, which days I’m delivering gifts to people etc. It’s all there.
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
