School Holidays Day 1

We're off to a great start with the school holidays.

Miss R has commenced the festive season by promptly becoming ill. She has some sort of gastro bug along with a delightfully productive cough.

At least I can leave her huddled up on the lounge for the day and not have to worry about missed school and after school sport.

It's also fabulous weather to be sick at the moment. I, myself am sitting here in a jumper as I write this post and I'm loving it. There will certainly be enough long, hot Summer days for me in January and February I'm sure.

When Rhianna does manage to haul herself off the lounge we are going to attend to this little monstrosity.

This is what I call the end of school typhoon. When teachers like to send home 12 months worth of crap, I mean valuable teaching outcomes and leave the mothers to assimilate it into the house.

Or into the garbage - as is the case at our house!

We also need to make some much needed room for the new things Santa may bring.

And as you know, I do like a good clean out.

My quilt is coming along slowly. I have sewed the squares together into strips - 9 in all. The next step is to join the strips to complete the top of the quilt cover.

Yesterday I felt quilty looking at my very expensive organic carrots wilting sadly in the crisper.

So I found a recipe for carrot cake and got to work. The result was this fantastic cake. The icing was a mixture of cream cheese and icing with some orange zest and juice. So yummy. I will never eat a Sara Lee carrot cake again now I know how easy and yummy the real thing is.

My next baking experiment will be a Christmas Cake from a lovely recipe from Busy Mum's blog. Check out her blog - link on the right hand side of my blog for some great tips on making the perfect Xmas Cake.

Landscaping and Lemon Divas

What a beautiful Queen's Birthday Weekend. Such perfect weather. All the better to landscape in. Not me of course....oh no... I mean other people. We have what I like to call "a dog's breakfast of a backyard" and we are trying to very gradually turn it into at least a dogs dinner.

On Saturday all these ugly tiles came up and lots of earth put in its place. Tomorrow the lawn arrives. I'll do an udpated shot when the project is complete.

The dinner party went well on Saturday and it was lovely to see old friends again - especially those with a small baby that I get to cuddle. The massaman curry was divine. It's an easy recipe and it's in this months SFI if you'd like to try it.

Today we finally got around to those Masterchef Lemon Diva Cupcakes. The best bit? Playing with the piping bag.

The taste test

We decorated in Socceroo colours to try and lift our spirits after our demoralising defeat by Germany. Have to say that the icing was a bit much for us - we scraped most of it off whilst eating. It overwhelmed the cake a bit.

Now I'm off for a long relaxing bath as I've just found some dried up icing in my eyebrow.

Have a nice week everybody.

Love on a Tuesday Afternoon.

Time for a bit of baking.

It's been quite a while since I've baked something new. I really needed something to inspire me and then Donna Hay appeared in the Sunday morning paper. And suddenly I felt some inspiration hit.

She had a recipe for Melting Moments. My all time favourite biscuits. I've been known to pay up to $3.50 for one of these babies in an up market cafe. And who knew they were so easy to make?

The hardest part was making sure that all the bickies are the same size so you can "glue" them together with the icing. Oh yummy, yum yum......


Of course there is nothing better to go with a lovely home baked biscuit than a cup of cold milk and piles of Milo floating on top. It says on the tin its full of iron...so its actually really, really good for you.

And then Miss R who is learning to read and write at a rapid rate presented me with a little plaque for the kitchen. Never have letter tiles been put to a better use. All this love...I'm enjoying every moment.

Easter Cuteness

After a VERY nice sleep in this morning we all got up to invest in some Easter cuteness. The lovely Emma from A Little Crafty blogspot made a whole bunch of these yesterday. The basket was filled with chocolate eggs and a fluffy little chick. Too, too cute.

Then Miss Rhianna and I had a go at our own Easter cuteness. Some chocolate cupcakes with fluffy chick nests. So much fun, so much chocolate and a really nice way to start Easter.

Hope you all enjoyed the time with your family today.

Cooking Competition

Western Star Butter is running a cooking competition for kids.

Kids have to devise a recipe using the butter, cook the recipe and then picture themselves with the finished product.

With Australia day around the corner, Rhianna and I decided to make Aussie Cookies. We even used chocolate icing to detail the states and mini m and m's to locate the capital cities in each state. A cooking lesson and a geography lesson. Put me down for Mother of The Year. LOL




If you'd like to enter too just have a look at Westernstarbutter.com.au

Well time for some baking (according to Rhianna) and we do love to bake here in this house.

Today some smartie cookies.

We love to cream the butter and the sugar, we taste to make sure its not poison and because we both love cookie dough and then we decorate.

Colourful cookies....what's not to love????