Happy Belated Turkey Day!

Happy Turkey day!!!

Whoops, I'm about a month behind :) Plus y'know, in the wrong country... but the sentiment still stands!

Thanksgiving was one of the things I loved most about my visit(s) to the states, and easily some of the most delicious traditional food, so we started our own tradition down under. (For those of you who are Kiwis and object to being referred to as "down under" like our (superior) Aussie cousins, I assure you that "down under" is all the same to Americans!)

Enter problem number 1: Pumpkin pie in the states = Pumpkin in a can, which we don't get here

Problem number 2: Yams are out of season here, so candied yams are suddenly more difficult than they sound

Problem number 3: Turkey here is RIDICULOUSLY expensive and somewhat hard to find

Problem number 4: Reeses peanut butter cups, Candy Corn and double-stuff Oreos are non-existent down this end of the world (luckily a bag of Candy corn arrived just in time, and just as well - I have NO idea what could ever replace Candy corn!)

So here is our improvised shopping collection:

Looking at that now, I seriously wonder a) why we bought mini mint treats, b) what we had INTENDED them for, and c) where they ended up.... A Thanksgiving mystery I can no doubt trace back to my mum.

But lets go through this step by step.

No party would be a party (or so I have discovered) without some well placed, gorgeously coloured, custom-designed printables. Since I've been planning a Thanksgiving for.. well actually... since LAST Thanksgiving, I had some really cute ideas for some printables - and I had optimistically intended to design and make them myself....

Gorgeous aren't they!

Wish I HAD made them myself!

But in reality, throw in a bit of a life, two OTHER events in the same fateful weekend, and a much-longer-than-expected saga with my first experience making mini toffee apples from scratch (My apologies AGAIN to the ruined stove top, the black saucepan, and the teeny tiny sugary burn on my arm) and I found myself with 45 minutes to go before the first guests were due to arrive, and no printables. Thank God for regular blog-stalking, Google Reader, and lots of other - much more prepared - paper-printable artists.

These little cuties I found through Michelle at Maddycakes Muse , and were designed - and provided FREE - by Carli over at DimplePrints (cutest name ever!)

Unfortunately I had neither the ink, nor the inclination to print EVERYTHING out - we're talking pages and pages and pages of autumny-turkeyish goodness! - But it turned out that the cupcake toppers and the label tags were enough to set the stage for a rediculously filling and festive evening.

Thank you again to the lovely Carli for saving my butt at the last minute!

Now THESE on the other hand. These I've been drooling over for months. Literally. Drooling over the cuteness ALONE, don't even get me started on the chocolate side of these little guys.

These I found over at Our Best Bites - they're well worth a visit. And actually that's the same place I found the Glass Block Jelly recipe I used for our Christmas party! Lots of fantastic ideas, photos & recipes that are (relatively) easy to follow - if not at least gorgeous to peruse.

Sans Reeces and Double Stuff Oreo cookies, and with a little improvising with Ferrero Rocher, I think they turned out to be my favourite thing on the table! I still can't bring myself to eat mine... though I hear they were delicious.

Last year I spent Thanksgiving with some good friends in Florida and was able to try some really delicious traditional recipes first hand. I had a recipe from my good friend Alyssa for her families traditional Yam Puffs with marshmallows recipe - YUM!! With Yams out of season down here (being summer) we used kumara instead - and it turned out to be DELICIOUS! I'm a complete sucker for anything sweet, and seriously can't think of anything better than covering ALL my veges with marshmallows... What a wonderful holiday.

Note also our "honorary turkey" (aka chicken), Turkey, cranberry and brie filo pastries, Cranberry stuffing patties, meatballs & noodles, and lots of yummy veges. Lots of too-good-to-be-true dishes that I think are the beginning of a very delicious tradition.

My favourite part of the night (and the rest of the week, with the leftovers) was the pumpkin pie. I was lucky enough to have a sweet potato pie (my first!) made for me by a co-worker when I left Disney last year, and I nearly died. So obviously I had to find a recipe to make one myself - which incidentally is quite hard to do without a can! Luckily, Rosa over at The Culinary Explorations of Mrs Cake stepped in at just the right moment with a really easy, extremely delicious recipe that I am concreting into my recipe collection. Go and have a look at the recipe here

Mmm mmm mmm, almost too good to be true. Even if my dad didn't like it. Pssh.

I think most important to the holiday is that it really genuinely - uncommonly - is a holiday that's all about spending time with people - no presents, no commercialism (at least not down here!) and a whooooooole lot of very full tummies. Sounds perfect to me.

But then what am I saying, Christmas is my favourite time of year :D And now that my obsessive-compulsively-chronological needs are satiated, I can get onto all the Christmas goodies waiting patiently in my flickr account :D

- B xx