Baking Anzac biscuits

 

 Today being Anzac Day, I baked some Anzac biscuits. This recipe is from my mother-in-law.

Anzac Biscuit recipe

1 cup each of rolled oats, shredded coconut, sugar, and plain flour.

125g of butter

1 tablespoon of golden syrup

1 teaspoon of bi-carb soda

2-3 tablespoons of water

Melt the butter, golden syrup, bi-carb soda and 1 tablespoon of water on the stove. Put the other ingredients, excluding the water, in a large bowl. Mix butter mixture with the dry ingredients, and add the rest of the water. Add more if required to get it to stick together.  Take about a tablespoon amount of the mixture, and press into a ball, place on a greased tray, and flatten into a biscuit shape.  My mother in law uses the back of a spoon to do this, I find it easier to just use my fingers. Bake in a 180 degree oven for 15 minutes. Once out of the oven, let them sit on the tray for only a minute, then lay them onto baking paper on a cooling rack. Now if you're the sort who like your Anzacs chewy, then bake for less time. 

I'm a fan of chewy Anzacs - but ended up baking them hard.  What sort are are? Do you like them chewy or soft?

Best birthday ever....

Last week, my daughter celebrated her fifth birthday, along with 9 other girls and 1 boy from her class. She described it as the BEST birthday ever....which made me feel pretty proud. I did everything possible to make it the best (like staying up till 1am the night before so the cake was just right!). By the end of the day the adrenalin stopped pumping and I crashed with exhaustion.

 A kiddie birthday party was a wonderful excuse for me to finally do some of those crafty projects I've been dieing to do....with bunting being at the TOP of the list.

So, my crafting began with some bunting. I got my inspiration for the bunting from this tutorial. The best tip in the tutorial was to use fabric sash (the tutorial calls it twill?) to string the bunting flags together. It made it much easier and neater. 

The birthday cake came from the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book - which was first published in 1980 and recently re-released.

When my daughter and I flipped through the pages together she chose a Dolly Vardin cake. I was pretty excited by this choice as one must bake a Dolly Vardin cake once in your life...surely. We had a lovely day trip to Melbourne to a specialist cake decorating shop. They had cake stuff piled up wall to wall.  It was absolute heaven to be there.

While it may look like a complex cake to make, it was very, very easy. I used a packet cake mix, some lovely Vienna cream icing (pink of course) and some edible glitter. And the doll is dressed in Barbie's air steward jacket - giving her a bit of a glamorous appeal.

The party was great fun...an easter egg hunt, pony rides, a craft activity of making Easter bunny ears, face painting (by an auntie), as well as the usual kiddie games of pass the parcel and sit-down-Sunday.  My husband joked that all we needed was a clown and it would have rivalled a small country fair! Oh well. In my family we do these crazy, over the top kiddie birthday parties once every three or four years, so I won't need to do another for a while yet.

The food included fairy bread, cocktail franks with sauce, little cupcakes and sandwiches.

Busy days

My time away from blogland has been busy, busy...

My main focus has been preparing and helping my 4 year old go to school. I really wanted to focus all my energies on her first few weeks of school - the school uniform, the haircut, the new white socks, new school books and stationary, the school bag, the healthy lunch box and tinkerbell drink bottle, the art smock made from dad's old work shirt.

It's been a real adjustment for my hubby and I - rearranging our work schedules to fit around her school times - with my hubby and I dropping her off on different days, grandma picking her up on some days, after school care, before school care, change of work hours...phew!

My daughter is loving school, and loving the days she goes to afterschool care. It makes me very happy and quite pleased with myself that everything I am doing to help her make the transition to school is working.  It helps too that her school and prep teacher are just fantastic.

Meanwhile I have still been busy on the crafting front.

My granny blanket has made some progress, and I've now started joining them together, using the join as you go method.  My plan is to make this granny blanket for my bed.

I'm still unsure about the whole blocking thing.  The previous blankets I've made did not really need it - one was acrylic yarn, and the other was made with this same Vera Moda 8ply yarn.

I really need to investigate options for blocking. My idea is to get a large cork board and block large squares of these as I join them together. In the past I've used a towel or a piece of cardboard, but this time I really need something a bit more user friendly.

Have you used a cork board before?
Or do you use something else... foam mats, or just a towel?

The pattern for these grannies is from here and I've ravelled here.

Some lovely bloggers have recently given me an award, which I'm pretty chuffed about. I'm still a newbie to the whole blogging thing and I'm loving being connected to other crafty ladies around the world. So thank you for the award! I'll be back with more on the award once I've settled back into my blogging. Cheerio!

One a day project

My new granny square blanket is coming along nicely....well, the granny squares are... as I don't plan to join

them up until I get to 50.

I've done 12 in the last fortnight and I'm liking how the new colours - navy blue, hot pink, mauve, dark grey - are looking. I'm trying to use each coloured ball of yarn equally, but am sure my favourites are coming through.

I carefully stack them up every night to ensure I have some sort of colour balance.

Head on over to Gingerbread Girl and catch up on all the progress the lovely gals have made on their one a day projects. 

There's some amazing work being done.

I love joining in with Gingerbread Girls meme, it keeps me motivated, and I get some great inspiration and crafty ideas from the other lovely gals.

Cheerio.

Summer jam making

My apricot and nectarine trees produced an excellent crop of fruit this year, all due to our 10 year drought being finally over and getting plenty of rain over winter. Good fruit is a result of good conditions at the time of flowering - which is during our late winter/early spring.

I was determined to have a go at some jam making this year and put all this fruit to good use.  I sneakily bought  the Country Women's Association Preserves cookbook whilst Christmas shopping last year - as it contains every possible jam, relish, chutney you could ever think of.  Unfortunately their apricot jam recipe was not very successful for me - too much water and it did not setting properly. 

But the nectarine jam came out delicious.

I slightly changed the recipe - by using equal weight of sugar to nectarines, as I have successfully done in previous years for raspberry jam. I also used less vanilla.

The recipe goes like this...

Put 2kg of peeled and sliced nectarines with 37g pectin. Bring to the boil over high heat. Add 2kg white sugar. Stir constantly during the whole process. Heat to a rolling boil for one minute, then take off the heat. Stir and skim for 5 minutes. Stir in 2 tsp of vanilla. Ladle into sterilised jars.

It's my first time using pectin, and I loved it! There is nothing more disappointing that going to all the hard work of preparing the fruit, boiling the jam, preserving the jars - and then for one's jam NOT to set. So disappointing. So am very happy to used pectin again - as a fail safe method.

Have you done any jam making this year?

The Endless Summer

With only a couple more days left of January 2012, I'm pretty happy with how much stuff I've squeezed into it. My daughter starts her first day of school in a week (both her and I are very very excited!), as a result I've been very keen to really treasure my time with her.

We've been going to Ocean Grove beach, so she can try out the new boogie board Santa brought her. I must confess I felt a guilty sort of pleasure when she got 'dumped' by this tiny little wave. It's a bit of a right of passage to be tossed and turned by waves - I was proud that she got up and wanted to keep on riding more waves.

Also visited a Space in Film exhibition at ACMI and Scienceworks and have been playing lots of board games.

On the crafting front, I really want to finish a knitting project - a kiddies jumper - from this book.  I've banned myself from starting any new knitting projects until this is finished. Is this something you do too?

As a new knitting book arrived two days ago in the post (and it is absolutely scrumptious) there is now a new urgency to finishing this jumper. I'm planning on showing you some of my new book - more on that later....

Last night I blocked out the jumper. I was a bit unsure of how to do this - but after some research from the yarn label/books/blogland - decided on pinning it out, placing a damp tea towel on top, and gently steam ironing it.  This seems to have worked well.

Next step is stitching it all together, and knitting the neckline. Almost, almost finished.

One-a-day project

While I have been busy doing crochet, knitting and other general making projects, I have not been very good at documenting them on blog land. The lovely gingerbread girl has started up again with her one a day tuesday tallies, which has given me the gee up to do some blogging about what I've been doing.

Since I finished my previous giant granny square blanket I've been wanting to start a new crochet blanket project.  One that is BIG enough to fit a queen size bed. I stocked up on my latest favourite, affordable wool - Moda Vera 8ply - compliments of a sale at spotlight - and added it to the left over bits from my giant granny square blanket. All up I have 12 new colour balls, and 9 odds and ends - as well as many balls of white wool.

For the inspiration and pattern I've gone to Sols(tr)ikke, a norwegian blogger who does lovely crochet and knitting. I came across her blog a while back when I was searching for granny square blankets. Aren't the grannies adorable??? (though a bit out of focus)

Her pattern is easy to follow, and introduced me to the idea of doing double trebles in the corners of granny squares for a lovely effect.

So 19 done....many more to go.

Check out Gingerbread Girls blog, and see what other one-a-day activites have been going on. There's lots of new and interesting projects. 

It's late here, so I'm off to bed. Tomorrow I'll check in with the other one-a-dayers and see what they've been up to. You should to!

Cheerio...