Cupcake dilemmas!!

Please have a good look at the above photo and you can clearly see how the cupcake patty is heaps smaller then the baking tin (a muffin tin) but do you think that I am able to find a cupcake baking tin? Nup, I have searched far and wide and I swear I have been to every baking/catering website in the world, from Canada to the UK to no avail - WHY?

Why in the hell make cupcake patty's that do not fit into muffin pans, yes I know they make muffin patty papers, but why make cupcake patty papers with no tin to cook them in. I asked the store where I get my cupcake papers and they state that I should just double line my cupcakes and place on a standard try - rubbish, I want a tin, I want two!

I will not be satisfied till I have one, for the time being I will just have to continue having crappy lopsided cupcakes, barrr humbug!

If anyone reads this and knows where I can buy a cupcake tin with a base of 45mm diameter and 32mm high, please share!

French Macaroons

I tried and although they tasted great I do believed that I failed. The process seems relatively easy but there is heaps of waiting going on and fiddly piping, I just assumed that I could whipped them up in a hour or two but it's more like a 24hr process if you want them perfect.

All piped and ready to sit about to rest...
My camera is giving me the craps at the moment in macro, so apologies for the blurry shot.

My Macaroons:

What they are meant to look like:

I do not give up easily, I will try them again, this time when the kids are not around as the more I said "don't touch" they couldn't help themselves.

Why buy when you can bake at home!

My entire family loves Arnotts Full 'O Fruit Slices and they are not that cheap when you have to buy several packets and to me they seemed rather simple and so I thought it would be really easy to find a recipe and make it at home.

Well finding a recipe that seemed to match wasn't that easy, some looked like big slices others were like cakes, nothing that even remotely looked like it would turn out the biscuit I wanted. Well I don't give up that easy and found a recipe on a playgroup forum and gave it a go:

This is the Arnotts version:

My version: (yet to be cut up)

Although I haven't tasted it yet, it smells great but it feels slightly crumbly and not as hard as the biscuit should be, but it's similar enough, easy peasy and quick too.

During the baking time I kept searching for other recipes and found this one, it sounds like it may be the one, it's called a Fly Cemetery which doesn't sound appealing at all, but I will give it a go next time.

Now The Man said that my Napolitains didn't have enough Jam in them last time, so I made some more adding heaps of jam and they looked just awful - why do I listen to that man!

These are my son's favorite homemade biscuits, they are requested more then anything else I bake. The recipe was from the book "Honey Biscuits":

I tried to pipe them rather blob them as normal (you are meant to roll them into balls and then into cinnamon sugar - but I'm lazy, I just sprinkle on top) but my piping bag broke, so blob away:

Umm, I forgot them in the oven, they are not meant to be that golden, but they still taste great!

Diet baking?

Is it even possible?

The following biscuit/cookie is a Mauritian sweet, it was something that my grandmother made and only on special occasions and they are just melt in your mouth butter YUM. The reason that they are melt in your mouth butter is because they are 70% butter. Traditionally they are iced pink, but as I have males in my house who refuse to eat anything iced pink, I had to ice a few plain. They are relatively easy to make, but as with most pastries it took forever to have the final product.

Find the recipe here: Napolitaines

Napolitaines:

Now the following is a diet sweet treat that I made as I'm trying to shed a few kilo's before our breach holiday in March and were having guests coming over. In essence it is just a huge scone cut up, rolled with sugar, cinnamon and sultana's. I found it dry and very unappealing, something I am very unlikely to make again, but my guests loved it... I still don't like it. Recipe taken from A.Sym "Symply Too Good to be True" Book 3 pg 64

Fruit Scone Rolls

Bye Bye 2009!

Well I haven't been around at all, have I?

I'm alive though, reasonably healthy, could still shift a few kilo's that progressively keep creeping onto my body, but I am still about.

I guess I was so boring for so long that blogging didn't seem necessary, my life was moving forward but it was so much of the same old over and over, but I intend to do more in 2010.

I'm really enjoying baking now, every weekend I try something new and I'm slowly getting better, here is a little recap of some of things I baked in 2009:

Big Little Man's Birthday Cake

A batch of girlie cupcakes

Ravin Rabbid Birthday Cake for Little Man

Honey Biscuits

Milk Chocolate Ganache pods

Sugarpaste modelling - "Shaun" the sheep

Macadamia Caramel Tartlet

Mocha and Cream Muffins

Fairy cupcakes

Caramel bites

Chocolate mousse tartlets

Baby Banoffee

Lemon Meringue Tarlets

Chocolate spiced Christmas Muffins

Fruit tartlets

And so I have decided to blog about my baking, share my recipes and my methods - and maybe what ever else takes my fancy!!

Happy New Everyone!

This will be my Birthday Cake in 09:

Thanks to Bakerella

Food Porn of the day:

Unbelievably my food porn is working for me, I have been eating really well the last few weeks and although the scales are not moving fast in the downward direction, my skin looks healthy, I'm sleeping and having lovely dreams (like myself zipping about town in a purple suzuki swift ??) and I actually enjoy exercising again.

The weather has changed and spring looks to arrive early, so this has also motivated me to return into shape. All is good, still stressing about where I want my life to head as I can't be the SAHM forever!

Weight loss and sweets

Can I lose weight or even maintain and continue my passionate love for all things sweet?

Damn I wish you could, but sadly at this point in my life I'm just not in the mood to burn copious amounts of calories through exercise so that I can enjoy sweets. I would rather starve myself all day to save space for sweets, but that doesn't work either unless I like the headaches and torturous cramps in my stomach till feeding time.

So what to do? Enjoy food porn!

The Repressed Pastry Chef is a nice place to head for some quality food porn. And I also enjoy some savory food porn at Exclusively Food.

I must say I'm rather lucky as I also have a blog buddy who takes lovely Food Porn photo's: Jaybird

My life is in the doldrums at the moment, I think I'm on the edge of a mid-life crisis and food is my crutch.

Club Penguin

Where have I been? Other then consuming too much food and freezing, my boys have taken over both computers to socialize on Club Penguin:

It's rather cute and I was told to have my own penguin so that I could "sled ride" and "eat pizza" in the pizza shop with them.

I'm not a real member, so I can not buy my penguin groovy outfits and join in on member functions, but it's cute and if there was a adult version, I think I would join. But sadly adult version are more like dating sites and so I think I'll just continue to giggle at my boys with their over dressed penguins and funny puffle pets.

Edit: Oh Oh I worked out what Club Penguin adult version reminds me of... The Sims Live, does that still exist?

Update on Big Little Man biting issue:

Well it took 2 weeks for the teacher to work out exactly what happened and it really was an accident. I felt awful when I found out as I never believed BLM and grounded him all that weekend, but it's all sorted now and I doubt he'll ever play that way again with his friends.

If Bublé can't help me

I'm depressed and not even Bublé can get me out of it, I'm heading for ice cream and red wine and hope it works!

Why? Big Little Man seems beyond my reach these days, twice this week I have had calls from the school to advise that he has been fighting or as they like to say "caused an unfortunate incident". They continue to advise that academically his a good student, excels even and no trouble in the class room, but put him on the playground and he turns all "Mr Hyde".

Today he bit the thumb of another child, when you ask him what happened it was all just an accident, but really how does someone's thumb get into another person's mouth by accident? Why did the other child let his thumb even get in my son's mouth? 

The Man thinks it's funny, before he headed off for work tonight he told me take care of Little Man and Hannibal - Not funny :(

ummm

I've been trying to get into blogger for the last 10 minutes and it kept bouncing me out, and now that I am finally on I can't recall what I was going to blog about.

I think it was to announce my pure happiness that the school holidays have ended and my son's have gone back to school.

Maybe it was to say that i have found some fitness motivation again and have been getting up at the crack of dawn to go for power walk with Deaf dog (the lack of brain function right now maybe a result of this mornings early rising and my need for breakfast).

I'm thinking also I may have logged on to tell you all I'm going to try to find another cache today.  Little Man and I did set out again on the holidays but I simply couldn't find the cache, it was getting late and as GZ (Ground Zero - caching lingo I can now use!) was in dense bush land and the light was fading quickly.  We will head out there again, but that is one he wasts to search for, so I'll wait for the weekend.

This cache is just a few minutes from the blood bank where I am also headed to today, so I'll see if I can do this one solo... wishing myself luck!

The Cache is discovered!

Whoo Hoo, we headed out again to look for Kayla's Cache dragging along my friend Fishlips and her son's and we found it!

My short 5'3 meant that Fishlips had to hoist Little Man onto her shoulders to retrieve the cache, I'm curious to know what I would have had to do if it was just I and the kids, some possible tree climbing?

With all the excitement, the boys took 3 things from the cache and I replaced them with 3 new items. I'm not sure if this is the norm and am still learning the correct etiquette of it all but we did CITO and logged.  It was great fun, the iphone was very accurate for this one but if we really get into it, The Man has promised to buy us a real handheld GPS.

The Boys with their cache find

What we left in the cache.

YouTube funny

This guy has been around forever, but I saw this last night and it really made me laugh... and I was having one of those crap nights.


and 5 sec of LOL

Geocaching virgin

This article has show me how easy I can geocache with my iPhone 3G GPS function. I have joined Geocaching.com so that I can find the details of hidden caches and the kids and I are going to give it a go!

I thought that we should start with a really close one; Kayla's Cache, in the hopes that we would find it easily as it was local, well I did I hope so!


The boys on the hunt!


A bit of the area we were looking in.

The GPS details seem to get me to the area the cache was in, I stupidly assumed that it would show me exactly were it was and even though we followed the details described.. no luck! We aren't disappointed and the kids seem very interested to go treasurer hunting again. What I think I need is to learn a bit more as there is codes and a bit of jargon I'm just not familiar with but it's was really exciting although all we did was head up and down a dirt track.

Also I was not prepared and think my thongs were not appropriate footwear as the creek area seem a lovely habitat for Australian creatures with fangs.

Picket Fence

When we bought our house we decided that it needed a front fence as we don't live too far from a main road. So my husband put up a picket fence and it was my job to paint it. At the time I was pregnant with Little Man and so 5 years later it still is half painted!

After our adventures at the cycle way and a pit stop at the playground for a "job well done" iceblock, the kids started the bored chant and I needed to get them to do something - why not paint the picket fence!



I was an idiot to assume my 2 could paint the fence without painting each other... the experience has scarred me, it will likely be another 5 years before I ask them to help me paint again.

Bike Riding

It's time! The school holidays are on, the autumn weather, although rainy every other day is rather gorgeous and screaming to be outdoors, so it's time my boys learnt how to really ride a bike.

Big Little Man is way to old to still be on training wheels and I'm tired of his silly excuses. Little Man is slightly more interested but I can't take one without the other. I also have read that the GPS on my iphone may be able to be used for geocaching which is something I've wanted to do for ages - that is another post as I have yet to learn the function of my iphone for it.

So the training wheels have been removed... lets go!

Update:


I am trying the Bike New York method as I've tried all the other standard ways and it seems rather logical and simple:


Big Little Man shocked me and really gave it a go, Little man had hissy fits throughout the training as his brother was ahead of him, was going too fast etc.. They are enthusiastic to try it again and hopefully by the end of the week (I have high optimism) I can put the pedals back on or hopefully by the end of the holidays.

Happy Easter!

I hope that all the blogger people of the world had a wonderful Easter with all the treats that it deserves!

The kids had a great time of course with a big family lunch and all their cousins over, too much chocolate and late nights. Thankfully the easter bunny didn't over do it at all this year and the chocolate supply ran out after 2 days (although there is an entire batch hidden in my wardrobe which they never need know about!)


I put on some delicious Easter desserts of my own and I think sadly this will take more then 2 days to work off my body!

Happy Easter!

Slow but steady

It took me a while but I did give myself heaps of time to make sure that I would have it finished by Easter and I'm really proud of the final result:



Re: The start of Captain Underpants

Clearing the way

Thought I'd keep a record here of all the things I'm setting free from my home and life. I think it will be interesting to see in the end all I de-cluttered.

Today:
A big Frij - some sort of bottle esky (why did I keep this?) - C
A broken pasta maker - B
5 x Handbags - C
V- Smile Game System & 6 games - R
A box of cutlery, glasses, toast plates - C



C= Charity item
B = Bin Item
P = Pass on to someone I know
R = Offered on Freecycle