Merry Christmas!

Well, after all my very very best intentions, I didn't get around to putting up all the christmas posts I had hoped to! I'm now in Melbourne, and after a stressful few weeks, VERY very ready to relax and have a holiday.

All the photos I had hoped to post are up on flickr and my facebook page, and I'll be back in the new year to go over the details of them! Just a good excuse to prolong my favourite season a little longer :)

Thanks for all your support this year! your comments, questions, feedback and emails have been really encouraging, and I look forward to being much more organized next year!!!

A random selection of photos from our Family Christmas party are below:



























To see more photos of our family Christmas party, you can see the facebook photos here or flickr set starting here

A random selection of photos from the Book club Christmas party I planned:

All the dishes were based on books from the book club collection! Lots of fun to plan and make.

To see the rest of the photos on facebook, visit the album here or the flickr set beginning here

And last but not least, the Christmas cupcakes I made to photograph for my Christmas cards!:



















So that's all from me for this year. I wish you all a VERY happy Christmas and holiday season with your families! May you have a safe and relaxing break, and I look forward to seeing you again in the new year!

All the best - B xxx

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

These are a few of my favourite things

I can't believe it's literally been WEEKS since I last updated, especially when there's been so much to update! I wonder if it's possible to get writers block even though you know what you want to say.... Maybe it's just called procrastination :)

The end of October was a bit of a mad house for us - my mum had a birthday, and I left the next day (Halloween) for a week in Melbourne. I'm gutted I wasn't in a position to have a Halloween party! but there's so much around on the internet even now with details of fantastic Halloween events, I figured I couldn't do something half hearted. I still have the gorgeous Monkey Moo Moo printables I won from Following Phubie and think I may still use them to do a practice table spread so they get some love, and have a late Halloween :)

In the meantime, we had a dessert buffet for Mums birthday that we themed "These are a few of my favourite things" from The Sound of Music. I threw it together on the day for a night of sugary goodness with some of mums closest friends.

The frangipani canvas at the back was what I gave mum for her birthday, and the food was a combination of all her favourite desserts - as well as some for our neighbour Tony who shares her birthday (the duck cake back right was for him)

We had chocolate and cream fairy cakes (with chocolate icing, too yum)

Vanilla and cream butterfly cakes - mums special favourite AND her

specialty

And these vanilla slices/custard squares which were DELICIOUS. I've never tried to make them before, and found this recipe for Denheath Custard Squares over at Mrs Cake . We changed them a little bit and left out the coconut, but they are still ridiculously good

Look at all the custardy goodness. EEK.

Mint slice truffles for a twist on my usual truffles using mums favourite biscuits, and the green candy melts I won from Mrs Cake

Probably shouldn't have used so many green melts this close to Christmas... But you can't have mint and not use green...!

These were plain chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing, and the little circles of fondant were crazy easy to make using some new impression mats I got from Kiwi Cakes

There were a few dessert favourites (including chocolate self saucing puddings) which we left out because we wanted to keep everything to finger food and/or one serve and easy to eat on your lap, so we ended up using shot glasses for the chocolate mousse from some of Mums favourite places to visit

Ridiculously easy to prepare and set up, and actually a really good size serving!

The cake was plain chocolate with a layer of cream and a really rich chocolate ganache

Because it was only done on the day, and because of the layer of cream it was too complicated to cover the cake in rolled fondant like I usually would, but it actually ended up looking really cute with just fondant details - raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with strings, white dresses with blue satin sashes

And little Maria (who was much easier as a nun!) is still sitting in our kitchen keeping an eye on things

Was a good night had by all - and the leftovers were even better!

Happy Birthday mum!

- B xx

P.S - Since the party I came across this ADORABLE Sound of Music party at Sew Weekly - it warrants a visit! The little kiddies in their curtain-outfits are far too cute.