Staying in

A wet, cold and windy Queen's birthday long weekend here.  Three out of the four of us are in various stages of recovery from a runny nose lurgy that swept through our household last week.  We are inside with the heater running and the oven on making chocolate cake, meringues and grilled cheese sandwiches.  Later I'll be putting in some lamb to slow cook with potatoes.  When it's cold go for comfort food I say.

The floor is strewn with Duplo, kid craft paper offcuts, baby toys and sandwich crumbs.  The dining table is covered with sewing, sheet music and recipes and the coffee table is covered with my crochet granny squares.  

This weather is great motivation to try and get to the finish line with my crochet blanket. I've got 18 squares done and I'm aiming for 20 squares to make a small 4 x 5 blanket.

I have to get those spaghetti ends woven in and then work out how to join them together and do a nice edging around the outside border.

  

I'm also working on my couch dint in the process.

Are you having a cozy long weekend too?

Sweet treats

Christmas baking was somewhat curtailed today as not a can of condensed milk was available in the supermarket yesterday.  But hey, we've probably already consumed enough sugar in the lead up to Christmas - last weekend I went to a Christmas dinner with friends toting along a cheesecake, a trifle and Christmas themed chocolates.

So today we did some low key cookie baking - most especially because Santa will need some sustenance on his way through our corner of the world tonight.

Last night I also whipped up a batch of these felt cookies for the food play set.  Absolutely perfect if you are watching your waistline - look and play, but don't eat - maybe I should leave these out for Santa instead?

And of course, we will be leaving a few of these out for the reindeer (on the finest English china)...

...so in reality you know what I am going to be munching my way through before I head off to bed this evening...not one my favourite vegetables, but I'd better do it with a smile on my face, hadn't I, in the spirit of the season and all that.

Happy Christmas to you all!

Hot cake

A sudden "cold snap" in Brisbane today.  The sun is hiding above the cloud layer and the temperature is refusing to budge more than about 17 degrees.  AND BEFORE I hear any whining from you southerners I would like to point out that I am not acclimatised to weather much colder than this, and that Queensland houses aren't built to deal with cold weather either, the warm air from the heater dissipates out the walls and windows faster than you can actually add it to your rooms, thank you very much.

This considered it was lucky that I started last night to prepare the following recipe for Irish fruit loaf, perfect timing for a warm slice of fruit cake and a hot cup of tea this morning.  Its one of my grandmother's recipies, a strange combination of ingredients, lots of sugar and flour, but no butter....you put that on top, when its hot out of the oven, you know.

Irish Fruit Loaf

375g mixed fruit

250g brown sugar

add 1 cup of warm tea  to the above ingredients and soak overnight (or the best part of a day)

The next day add:

2 tablespoons of marmelade

1 egg

500g self-raising flour

Mix well and divide between two loaf tins (greased or lined with baking paper, however you like to do it).

Bake in moderate oven 50-60 mins.

Weekend bake up

That just seemed to be one long weekend.  Singularly responsible for entertaining a four year old is pretty mentally taxing.  I was craving that down time I get when he usually goes for a bike ride with his Dad, those snipets of weekend time that just allow you to de-focus on everyone and everything I find pretty important.  I think I have earned my "time off" thanks to kindergarten this coming week.

My little one did suggest "making shapes" as a weekend activity and so I cleared the kitchen bench and rumaged in the pantry, he insisted that we both don aprons and away we went amusing ourselves for a couple of hours with the ritual of making basic biscuits.

He's done this activity many times with his Grandma and a few times with me and he's getting very proficient with mixing ingredients and handling dough. 

I just let him go with it in terms of rolling dough and deciding what shapes to cut and just hovered a bit making sure the dough was rolled thin and even enough, helping with the flouring of fingers and equipment and getting the biscuits from board to tray (and of course the actual cooking).

And then when we were all cleaned up we had a little biscuit feast (pity he didn't offer to make me a cuppa as well!).

And we were happy!