Rawrrr...

Eli's 3rd birthday cake!

We got him some wooden african animals for his birthday, so a matching cake was in order..

I must learn to keep things simple in future, cos they always come out better if i don't go overboard with lolly decoration!!

Pancake Day!!

need i say more?!

ok, i will anyway.. shrove tuesday, another classic example of how us agnostics/atheists have the best of ALL worlds, because we can indulge in the culinary delights of any festival that we choose! Afterlife? well, have to cross that bridge later.... ;-)

anyhoo... we had 5 minute vegan pancakes, with choc chips & maple syrup, for lunch today... yum!! the recipe is in the recipes/tutorials tab at the top of my blog - it's a perfect recipe for when you have almost no ingredients too!

not known for my punctuality...

Christmas!!!

yeah, i know, it's march... minor detail.

anyway, in a yarn sampler box i got ages ago there was 12 grams of 2ply alpaca. what are you supposed to do with 12g of anything?! what are you supposed to do with 2ply?!

turns out the answer is bookmarks.

crocheted butterfly bookmarks even.

cos we all know that reading is the ultimate in cool, especially reading books long enough to require bookmarking, and crochet has always been known for it's total chic, so the two together is pretty much a flawless combo.

so i ended up making 5 of these wee knick-knacks as gifts for various people! (i think they're pretty cute actually- but hey, i like long books & crochet)

still had some yarn left over too.. who would have thought that 12g of 2ply could go so far?!

(gold star to anyone who can name the book in that photo without googling!)

on a less successful front, the (compulsory) advent fair biscuit debacle.

stained glass window biscuits = fail.

they overflowed & stuck to the baking paper... and tasted pretty blah too.

i bet martha's snow cap cookies never turned out like this either-

note for future- bake sales are NOT my forte. At. All.

and on an equally successful front- how to make an actually quite cool bag look meh in one simple photographic step-

i made it for my 12 year old step-daughter for xmas - it's a Pleated Purse from this tutorial - and she loved it!! managing to please a 12 year old girl is quite a challenge sometimes, so yay ;-)

and cos i'm a total sucker, when i saw gingerbread house kits in the supermarket i HAD to have one for lexi-

needless to say she had a fantastic time decorating it with her daddy on xmas eve :-)

and with me she made simple paper decorations for our tree!

fun times :-)

i wonder if i can get the jump on easter....

it's the thought that counts.. right?

Proud mummy moment, kind of...

the kids insisted on making me a birthday cake! and not just any cake, a proper themed cake from the original Women's Weekly Birthday Cake book...

an "Old Woman who lived in a shoe" cake. y'know, the one who had so many children she didn't know what to do? yeah. hmph.

anyway, a certain father who was roped into help, on account of children being too young to bake unassisted, was quite convinced that it would be fine to leave cake baking & decorating til around 4.30pm. I can imagine what seasoned cake decorators are thinking right about now...

So they toddled off to the supermarket in search of ingredients & decorations, perhaps losing sight of their vision (goal and possibly eyesight) along the way..

it was a hot day for making buttercream icing that is supposed to function as adhesive AND cladding... and there wasn't much (any) time to let the cake cool before icing it anyway...

and the lolly selection didn't prove particularly useful when it came to authenticity...

ummm yeah-

any sensible woman with too many children is bound to have a couple of sharks guarding the perimeter right?! and a nice brown moat...??!

ah bless.. :-)

luckily i live by the mantra "if it tastes good (and doesn't involve killing anything), then who cares!!" and it did, so yay! and it's the first birthday cake they've made for me, so it's extra special... and uhhh.. memorable too ;-)

on a slightly more unadulterated note- another cakey effort recently was lexi's birthday cake for kindy... the teachers appreciate it if the cakes aren't too over-the-top and, especially, full of artificial colourings & plastered with sugar!

so i made my favourite vegan lemon & coconut cake-

i decorated it by placing some star-shaped stickers around it, sprinkling with icing sugar, then removing the stars :-) i thought it looked quite effective, and with the minimum of fuss!

whenever i make this recipe i also make a tiny star cake as a RAOK, so this one i made to match for lexi's kindy teachers as a thank you-

cute huh?

nyum nyum nyum

school holiday baking-
cheesy-mite scrolls, cinnamon scrolls & chewy muesli sultana bikkies!

and you call that a garlic clove?!
THIS is a garlic clove!
heh heh heh, simple joys....

another birthday

we have a few of them, luckily spread nicely throughout the year, apart from certain awkward people not long after xmas... (one of which would.. uhh.. be ME)

and partially because of that we like to keep them fairly simple affairs, with little touches making them special...

like a decorated chair for the birthday person, our special birthday banner, the shared birthday candle, and the presents wrapped in our gorgeous playsilks!
this year (again) was a birthday away from home, so i needed to go for something simple for the birthday cake, like icecreams!
'cept because i like CAKE, they're cupcakes decorated like icecreams, to match the ones in the book that was one of the presents-
heh heh...
and the birthday was a success!!

the Real Reason why doll play is good

because they have birthdays too.

Vegan Chocolate Banana Cupcakes

prep time: 10 minutes | cooking time: 20 minutes | makes 12 cupcakes

Ingredients
3/4 cup sugar
5 Tbsp vegan margarine, softened
1 tsp vanilla
1 banana, mushed well
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup soy milk

Directions
Preheat oven to 180°C

Combine first three ingredients in a large bowl, mix well.
Add banana, stirring well to combine.

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cup and level with a knife. Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt, stirring well with a whisk.

Add flour mixture to sugar mixture alternately with 1/2 cup soymilk, beginning and ending with flour mixture; mix after each addition.

Spoon the batter into 12 muffin cups lined with paper liners.

Bake for 20 minutes or until cupcakes spring back easily when touched lightly in the center. Allow to cool, and frost if desired.


Recipe from the awesome Post Punk Kitchen, the people behind our much loved Veganomicon, and such other fabulously titled books as Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar!

sucker

yes i am.
after the previous complete disaster, for some mysterious reason i decided to have another go at the cake balls.

yup.

but because i do have a modicum of sense i used my favourite quick chocolate cake recipe, and (a lot less) chocolate icing, and dipped it in melted chocolate drops for good measure.

a VAST improvement!!

and this time there were only around 40 of them, which is a much more manageable amount!

great balls of...cake.

paul has had a few morning tea type events recently, one for staff & a kids class party, so i thought the previously spied red velvet cake balls (the precursor to the oh-so-cool cake pops) would be an interesting & festive option....

i was kind of right....

i started with this recipe for red velvet cake... oh my goodness it uses a WHOLE BOTTLE of red food colouring!!!
and almost no flavouring. ??! it tastes to me not unlike generic pancake with no topping...??
there is a hint of vanilla & 2T of cocoa, which i can only hazard is just to add the depth of colour rather than having a pink velvet cake...??

then i mixed it with the required amount of cream cheese icing, which honestly seemed like too much, cos they were pretty gooey (starting to see a trend here?!), and as much as i love cream cheese icing, it tasted like a slightly odd combo..

but hey.. i mixed it up & started making little balls, which paul tells me are about the size of an unshelled macadamia (ie with shell on), because i had read that smaller ones hold together better... instead of the 50-60 it supposedly yields using the box mix + 16oz of icing (and remembering that i used 16oz of icing & it seemed too much) i got around 140. umm...

so we started the task of dipping them in white chocolate... note for future: do cake pop version, the built in stick would really help, especially not having to take it out.. we used all kinds of combos of spoons & skewers...

and gave up after 111 balls. a little after midnight.

once chilled they were pretty enough.. the white chocolate with bright red filling was particularly impressive...
but.. ummm.... perhaps it is some kind of ginormous culinary cultural difference between us and the US.. but geez the flavour was spectacularly unspectacular, to the point of being Rather Dull, with touches of Kinda Weird, and the texture seems to vary between Meh and Ugh depending on who you ask.

Doh.

so yeah, spectacular failure.

so if you are thinking of doing these this xmas, don't. Or at least choose your favourite cake, and favourite icing, so at least they taste good, add *just* enough icing to hold it together, no more, and definitely do the cake pop version both for ease of dipping & cos they're cuter.

however, mysteriously, lexi & eli really like these cake balls, so they aren't ALL going to waste...

last minute gifts

i received an email yesterday informing us that our gifts for the kindy teachers are expected in by friday, so they can be packaged up nicely together... eeek!!

luckily some friends had been checking out the Cowgirl Cookies at Bakerella, and extra fortunately i had been gifted a few large Agee jars a week ago...

so i made a xmas version!
it has red, green & yellow M&M's (which you can barely see - early morning, running out the door photos aren't the best!) to make it festive lol..in case you're thinking of doing some, it took a 200g bag to get barely enough of the three colours for each jar, i think i would have been wise to get at least one more! and to make it look prettier than i did make sure you put the M&M's just around the walls of the jar & fill the middle in with choc chips, rather than a flat layer like everything else ;-)

with it's M&M's, choc chips, pecans, oats & lashings of brown sugar, it sounds like a very nice cookie mix indeed!

finish off with some labels - mine were printed with the red circle, then cut out & matted onto some green paper, and a little silver star added - a 6" square of fabric, some ribbon & a handmade card (in this case a white card inside a green one with a star punched out of it, bound with shimmery yarn), and you've got a pretty cute, useful, and most of all quick xmas gift!!

Cupcakes & competitions

firstly- absolutely awesome (vegan!) chocolate banana cupcake recipe found here - super simple & fast, delicious & moist, and best of all we have all of the ingredients in our house 90% of the time. except for cupcake papers, but one must take responsibility for forward planning sometimes...

and secondly, if you haven't discovered GardenMama before, go check out her blog now! it's not actually all to do with gardening or anything like that either ;-) just beautiful, wholesome, old fashioned without all the downsides kind of living.. with lovely photos & competitions.. like this one!

breakfast... chocolate pancakes!!

5min vegan pancakes!

Ingredients

* 1 cup flour (whichever kind you prefer)
* 1 tablespoon sugar (I used organic cane sugar)
* 2 teaspoons baking powder (maybe more?)
* 1/8 teaspoon salt
* 1 cup soymilk
* 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Directions

1. Set out all your ingredients.
2. Set a stove element with a pan to medium heat.
3. Combine the 4 dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, salt) in a bowl.
4. Add the soy milk and vegetable oil to your mixture.
5. Mix until smooth.
6. Now the pan should be ready for your batter, so spoon one pancakes' worth of the mixture into the pan.
7. Flip [carefully] when you see bubbles in the middle of the pancake, or if the edges are looking stiffened.
8. Repeat until the batter is gone, and try not to eat them all while you're cooking them.

(stupid blogger rotate-y thing!!!)
once i had flipped it once i sprinkled choc drops over the top to melt, then once the 2nd side is cooked, lift it out of the pan, fold in half & drizzle with chocolate sauce!!
awesome....

(gypsy if the kids, and me, are going troppo at playgroup today, well know you know why!)

(and we're away for a couple of days, so no blog posts, but hopefully i'll have something to show for it!)

Encrusted

now there aren't many times when the word "encrusted" is used in a positive context - "with diamonds" being the obvious exception (as long as they are ethical diamonds!), but encrusted with chocolate drops is another!

Eli & I (yes you read that right) made this lovely, simple chocolate cake for father's day on sunday :-)

we used this recipe-

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 tbsp cocoa powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tbsp vinegar
• 5 tbsp melted margarine
• 1 cup cold water
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, and baking soda. Add the vanilla, vinegar, margarine. Add the water and mix well.

Pour into a medium size baking pan, and sprinkle the chocolate chips on top.

Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean

<~>

Easy peasy! we almost always have these ingredients on hand, and it's a fantastic basic choccy cake that can be whipped up super fast!

Lunch

homemade bread and butter.oh yes indeedy.

just perfect with tomato & creamy local-ish camembert!(and yes, another attack of the random blogger rotator! grrr...)(and it looked way nicer a minute later once the hot bread had melted the cheese..just use your imagination)

If you want to try making your own butter, just pour some full fat cream, a pinch of salt + a couple of marbles into a large jar, shake like mad, then give up & beat it in a bowl with an electric beater or cake mixer. Squeeze & pat the butter to get all the buttermilk out, then refrigerate.
Just like that.

Don't eat the marbles.

Eat cake.

now let me preface this by clearly stating that i have of late become rather a fan of a little blog called Cake Wrecks. Yes, a website dedicated to when professional cakes go horribly, deliciously, hilariously wrong.

and for part two of this tale, it was the day before the m.o.t.h's birthday, and he wanted a banana cake with cream cheese icing. no problemo.
and we needed to be packed for the weekend, cake included, and out of the house by 2.15pm. i can do that at a pinch..

so lexi is helping me bake the cake & asks what kind of cake it will be, i tell her "just a plain cake". see where this is heading?

sure enough 1.45pm, cake is out of the oven & iced, and a little girl is crying because daddy's cake isn't an aeroplane. So under much duress to decorate the cake somehow, i take my inspiration a) from Cake Wrecks, and b) from some of the glorious "Descriptive Writing" efforts that he has the pleasure of translating, sorry, reading on a daily basis... thus -

Wobbly writing? Check. (had to conciously fight myself from trying to do it nicely!) Phonetic Spelling? Check. Words bending or heading off the page? Check. Overuse of the word "and"? Check. flicks on the end of hair? Check. Mysterious but ever-present comment on personal happiness? Check.

awesome.

and would you believe that it only took me 8 minutes to do, and that *includes* making a piping bag?!

ah well.. it was enough to satisfy lexi anyway ;-)

and completely at the other end of the scale, check out the cake that his mother made for the baby shower!!!!
that baby is EDIBLE!!!

what is red & black, and has webbed feet?!

Spiderman!!!!
my step-son has been requesting a chocolate spiderman cake for his birthday for months!

so (despite having a nasty cold boohoo) you gotta do what you gotta do!! :-D

heh heh heh heh..

"i was a banana!"
(spot the quote ;-p )


we also had a go at "wet on wet" painting today
(ie watercolours on paper that has been soaked for 15min or so..)
painting isn't umm.. exactly my forte, but it was interesting for lexi to see the colours spread & mix :-)

Guilt freeeeee!!

my fantabulous friend sharon surprised me a little while back with an awesome gift - the vegan holy grail...
a marshmallow kit!!
so yesterday lexi & I mixed it up, deciding to do the mint variation from the Angelfood website, and they came out really well! And very, very minty!

paul doesn't like them at all, likens them to eating toothpaste.. but the rest of us do, so more for us!

thank you sharon!!! no more pesky HOOF to avoid now ;-)


eta- i've been quiet recently because i'm busy with something secret.. hopefully will be revealed in a couple of days!

mmm.. sacrilicious...

frustrated by the presence of egg in every hot cross bun recipe i could find, i decided to improvise my own version!

(always a grand idea don't you think?!)

the result being my Sacrilicious Vegan Frankenbun recipe!

it's based on our usual wholemeal (or not) bun recipe, but with the essential eastery touches thrown in... into the breadmaker that is ;) so it's pretty easy too!

so just for my own records, and for anyone else desperate for a vegan hot cross bun recipe, here it is-

400ml tepid water
2 Tbsp oil (i like rice bran)
1 tsp salt
4 Tbsp brown sugar
4 cups flour (wholemeal or whatever)
2 Tbsp gluten flour (omit if you like, but don't blame me!)
2 Tbsp (soy) milk powder
1 heaped tsp of mixed spice
3 tsp "sure to rise" yeast
pop all above into breadmaker pan, in that order... turn on to dough cycle.

if your breadmaker has a special time to add fruit/nuts/whatever, chuck 1 cup of sultanas in at that point, otherwise around 30min into the process should be ok.

once the dough cycle has finished, divide the dough into bun blobs, knead a bit with floured hands, and place onto a greased tray...
leave to rise somewhere warm for 30min or until doubled in size..
bake in a preheated oven at 200 degrees celsius for 12-15min or until cooked & golden brown.

For a glaze mix 2 tablespoons muscavado or brown sugar & 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon with 1/4 cup boiling water. Microwave for 2-5 minutes, however long is takes to get to a suitable brushable stickyness.. brush glaze over the top (and bottom if you like, i think it's worth it) of hot buns, then munch with plenty of dairy-esqe spread!

if you want to put crosses on, then find out how elsewhere, cos i don't know! ;-)

(if you want a nice wholemeal (or not) bun recipe, omit the sultanas & mixed spice, and swap the 4 Tbsp of brown sugar for 2 Tbsp of white.. and don't glaze it of course!)

sweet as..

my birthday cake - baked by paul & the kids, decorated by me (playing with piping icing for a laugh!)

i didn't have a theme in mind for this cake, so sent the tribe out to get some lollies for decorating it... which automatically bought a concept to mind... no prizes for guessing what! (or you could just google it ;-) )