The big blue green yellow and grey crochet blanket

I love finishing a project! Unless of course I really don't want to finish it, like that scarf. Anyway this one I really did want to finish, and so here it is, all done. It is intended for my 5 year old but I'm having trouble letting go of it, so it's still out on the sofa. 

I wish I'd kept track of how much yarn and time has gone into it, but it was a fairly organic process. I started out intending to use up some yarn from my stash but have ended up with more than I started with! I'd originally wanted it to be mostly shades of yellow which proved incredibly hard to get hold of in cotton. Instead lots of blue and green and just a little yellow was added. Grey (Jo Sharp cotton in Fog) ended up being the background colour.

It is a basic crochet blanket, 140 granny squares, join-as-you-go joining method, with two very simple rounds at the end to edge it - one row of single crochet, one row of half double crochet. It is big enough to decorate a single bed, the last photo shows my husband holding it up, he isn't that tall, maybe 5'7", but as you can see the blanket is bigger than he is.

A week of food

One of the delicious new bakery treats I made this week!

I use a menu planner to keep the week from becoming just too absolutely hectic, and I'm sure many of you do too! However I do just throw the menu out at the end of each week, which is a shame really. It'd be useful to know which weeks worked well, which new recipes were a hit or a miss, and old menus could be useful when I'm having a total mental blank when faced with a new menu plan to fill in!

So here is this weeks plan. I only plan dinners, with the occasional new weekend breakfast or bit of baking thrown in.

Dinners

Monday: Meatballs and pasta
Monday nights I'm exhausted, so this will be an easy dinner, with pre-made meatballs. I'll probably use a pre-made pasta sauce or tinned tomatoes and add some finely diced or grated vegetables to it.

Tuesday: Risotto or barley with chicken, red capsicum, onion and peas
This meal was planned to use up some bits and bobs left over from the week before! Tuesday is our shopping day.

Wednesday: Kedgeree
Cooked by the Mr, recipe from 'Slow Cookers' by Jane Price

Thursday: Pizza, homemade dough
Cooked by the Mr (I know, I'm a lucky girl!), he used our new pizza stone for the first time, I highly recommend getting one! He used the pizza dough recipe that came with the stone. Was fab.

Friday: Baked tuna casserole
I found the recipe here, pinned it here. See I do use the recipes I pin in Pinterest!

Saturday: Black bean tacos

Sunday: Chilli con carne sweet potato cottage pie
This is an adaptation of this recipe. I'm just turning it into a pie by adding sweet potato mash on top.

Other stuff

Bacon and fresh herb muffins, from 'Baking Day' by the Woman's Weekly, see photo above!

For breakfast this week I'm going to try this porridge recipe on the Healthy Chef website. No oats! Not that I have anything against oats, I love them, but looked interesting.

I'm also hoping to make another Pear cake, to refine my recipe, and I'm working on an adaptation of a muesli bar style slice that I hope to share soon.


So that's my week in food! Do you do a weekly menu plan? If you've blogged it please share!

Pear and Oat Cake

Today I was in a baking mood, and had some lovely pears needing to be eaten. Pear cake! Perfect! We love a fruit based dessert here, and I knew a freshly baked dessert would make everybody here happy.

This recipe was based on my strawberry cake recipe, with slight modifications because I wanted to use pears, and have it be more of a dessert cake than a tea cake. Plus I love sticking rolled oats in things. It's an ad hoc recipe, and has only been tested once, if you decide to try it let me know how it goes!



Pear and Oat Dessert Cake

• 100g of butter
•  half cup of brown sugar
• a quarter cup of golden syrup
• half a cup of rolled oats
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 egg
• one and a half cups of self raising flour
• about third a cup of milk - as needed
• two ripe william bartlett style pears
• an extra tablespoon of rolled oats
• raw sugar for sprinkling on top of cake before baking

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees, fan forced. Line a standard loaf tin with baking paper.

Soften the butter, mix it with the sugar. Add remaining ingredients except the milk and pear. Mix to combine, gradually start adding milk, until the consistency seems right. (Sorry about the vague instructions!)

Peel and roughly chop the pears into inch dice. Gently fold the pear through the mix, and tip into loaf tin, smooth the top and sprinkle with extra rolled oats and a sprinkle of raw sugar. Bake for about 60minutes, but keep an eye on it and check with skewer when it appears done. The skewer may not come out clean if you pierce a lump of pear! So check a couple of spots.

I intended this cake to be quite dense with fruit, quite 'desserty' so it was lovely served warm with a dollop of plain yoghurt.

yellow still rocks

And because yellow still rocks we have our party 'theme' sorted. It's just got to be yellow. I've started to get preparations underway, although I think I should have got more done by now! Pretty sure I need way more straws too. A visit to Little Paper Lane helped my Loot Bag ideas crystallize, I picked up those snazzy little brown paper bags with windows and I'm going to make some tags to match the invite and sew them to the bag as I sew the top of the bag shut. I'll have to take a photo and show you that later, hope I'm making sense!

1. Wooden forks for the fruit salad, from The Party Studio
2. Biodegradeable gelato cups for the fruit salad, from The Bio Packaging Company on Ebay
3. Adorable polka dot baking cups (not sure for what yet, chocolate crackles?) from The Party Studio
4. Yellow stripey straws, from The Party Studio
5. Mini yellow chevron snack bags for my smartie cookies, from The Party Studio
6. Loot bags from Little Paper Lane
7. Scalloped kraft paper baking cups for blueberry and apple oat muffins, from Little Betsy Baker

the fluffy kookaburra

I captured a few (okay about 50) photos of a kookaburra that had decided to perch awhile on our deck railing yesterday. So fluffy! And big! We wondered whether or not it was okay for a bit there, as it seemed completely unconcerned as I gradually sidled closer and closer, trying to get a better view. In the end it sat there long after I took all my photos, just keeping the occasional eye on the young fella as he showed him various toys that may have been of interest to a kookaburra.

"yeah, close enough lady..."

a quick status update on blankie

Believe it or not, 80 squares are now done! I'm slower than I hoped, but not too surprised - I always hope I'll get more done than I can. I've introduced some more colours since the last update - but have been quite frustrated in my search for a good range of colours in cotton yarn. Does no-one else find wool itchy?

At this stage I am planning to do the final join-as-you-go round in the same grey that edges all of the squares. I think introducing white at this stage would be a bit jarring, or better suited if it was a babies blanket. Here's a quick photo of my stacks of squares - there are ten squares per stack, and then I'd better get back to it!

mmm macarons!

It's been all about macarons lately! You know when that coincidence thing happens, when you hear about something or bump into someone three times in a row? Well that's what happened to me with macarons! First I spotted the Donna Hay Macaron Kit in the local supermarket, and couldn't resist. I've been wanting to try making them but been too intimidated, the kit provided the perfect opportunity.

Not too shabby for my first macaron!

Yes, they were completely and utterly scrumptious!

Super easy to make, and impressively delicious, I'd highly recommend giving it a go unless you already know how to make them! Here's a tip from a pro if you do - instead of waiting the ten minutes recommended on the box before putting them in the oven, wait until they don't stick to your finger when you lightly touch them. And here's a tip from me - check out the instructions on the website because I think they instruct you to make the ganache filling after baking the biscuits, rather than on the box where they tell you to make it before. I made the ganache first, and I took so long doing the biscuits I had to add more cream over low heat to the ganache to get it back to a spreadable consistency.

Then, I received the Woman's Weekly Macaroon and Biscuits cookbook for my birthday! I'm so loving my Woman's Weekly cookbooks, (and my Donna Hay ones too actually), and this new cookbook not only has macaron recipes, but loads of other traditional biscuits too, like Monte Carlo biscuits, just like my grandma used to make. Watch this space, I'll be reporting back on recipes from it soon! Meanwhile checkout the cover and the chocolate macarons inside, lovely right?

And finally, on my birthday my son and I went to Manly and stopped in at Adriano Zumbo's, and took home a selection of five delicious little crispy treats. Salted caramel was by far our favourite flavour! Unfortunately I didn't take a photo of the Zumbo macarons, but follow this link to his website for the Manly patisserie, and check out the super cool floor detail in the shop. Monkey was completely impressed with the miniature building site under the clear section of floor, which gave me lots of time to make up my mind about which macarons to buy!

So that was the week that was all about macarons!