Peruvian purple potato pizza

Mum grew these strange looking spuds this year, given to her by a friend. Brett commented they look like dog turds when he saw them on the kitchen bench. I thought they looked like short stubby fingers.

The smallest ones I planted in my garden and the rest I boiled up to use on a pizza. Below are the boiled potatoes I peeled and sliced up, check out the colour. 

Potato Pizza

I used my scone dough base.

Firstly I smothered on some oil. Call me strange or clever, but I always keep the jar of oil that is left over from anchovies. Flavour central! I use it for starting onions and garlic for pasta sauce or even for frying a flavoursome egg. If you are gagging at the thought, you could just use plain old olive oil.

Next I scatter and rub in a finely chopped clove of garlic. If you don't want to get your hands all oily, just scatter the garlic over.

Place sliced boiled potatoes on base, you could put them on all fancy like or just willy nilly like I did. I have used left over roast potatoes for this too. 

Scatter on some rosemary leaves and a drizzle of olive oil and bake at 200 deg.  for 15 - 20 minutes.

Eat it like that, or drizzle some more oil over it and eat. Very delicious.

Easter jaffa cake

Izzy wanted to cook a cake. A brown cake. By this I assumed she meant a chocolate cake. I have some oranges to use up, so we combine the two and made a jaffa marble cake.

Marble Jaffa Cake

2 eggs

cream

1 heaped teaspoon orange zest

1 cup SR Flour

1 Tblspn cocoa

orange food colouring

Crack 2 eggs in a 1 cup measure. Fill to top with cream.

Add zest and flour, stir to combine.

Divide mixture in half. Add cocoa to one half, and orange food colouring to the other.

Add half of the cocoa to a lined cake tin in blobs here and there. Add all of orange and then add rest of cocoa mix on top.

Bake for 30 minutes.

My sous chef/bowl licker!

I iced our cake with just icing sugar, cocoa and water. Then went about making grass, carrots and a bunny with fondant we had left over in the freezer, from a Cake to the Rescue cake. This is what ours turned out like, pretty darn good if I say so myself!

Ebb Tide

The rotunda and the perfect tree.

It was a beautiful day. We headed out for a walk to the supermarket, Izzy rode her bike. Quite frankly the kids were rat shit, and it took what seemed forever to get out of the house. Sunscreen, hats, nappy change, drinks, snacks and everything else needed for a venture out. Finally we made it out the gate and down the road. 

After we'd been to Woolies, we dropped into Andy's Bakery for some lunch and walked across the way to the Rotunda, where we sat and the girls ate their watermelon, cocktail pasties and donut. I only buy one donut, Izzy is always horrified when I tear it apart and give the smallest part to Summer. Totally ruins the perfect roundness and beauty of 'her' iced and sprinkled delight.

We had a relaxing, enjoyable time. I will have to bring them back to 'hang' at the rotunda again. It's the first time I have taken the girls and spent any amount of time here. They spent time rolling down slopes on the grass, and walking around the steps of the rotunda, and exploring the trees. The drain that runs through town goes past this park, and of course they had to go exploring along that too. Mostly this time of year, there is no water in it, but it has a couple of metre drop off, which had me running when Summer took off down the hill to go and investigate.

Never taken any notice of the great trees in this park before either. How great they are for getting photos of the kids in. Next time I'm taking my camera. Usually I do bring it along, but I only had my phone this time. Plus, do you think the kids would co-operate to get a decent photo? Nope. They were having too much fun!

This park is popular for wedding photos, it made me wonder how many times this tree has been featured in wedding shots.

Broke 'n' back, a night out

My bestie Elle and I went out on the town last night. The band Broke 'n' Back played at the Community Club and it was just what I needed. It took me a while but I was out there on the dance floor dancing to some great music, and I loved it! My legs are sore this morning, surprisingly and thankfully my head isn't. They were awesome!! Here's just a snippet of the kind of music they played.

Joining Cate over at

{life behind the purple door}

A blustery days baking

Yesterday was as blowy as buggery and the rain pelted down. The thunder and the lightening clapped and cracked the night before. I heard the thunder, it woke me long enough to hear it, I had no idea of the lightening though.

As we left for kindergym early yesterday morning, it poured. I was thankful for the trees covering the gate and I didn't get too wet. By lunchtime when we returned, I was quite wary that the tree branches may come down on top of me, and the car as I opened the gate. The wind was really forceful. A big branch had come down in the library car park and the SES truck siren wailed past as we left. Someone was in a bit of a fix. Luckily no cars were damaged, an hour before the car park was full, probably a good thing, because I may well have parked there. A friend that  joined us for baby bounce was one car park away from having a squashed car. Lucky!

Before we left for kindergym, I filled the bread maker with ingredients to make dough for hot cross buns. By the time we got home from the library it was done.

I have a Sunbeam bread maker, Brett bought it for twenty bucks at a garage sale a couple of years ago. I am not really an appliance freak, but we do get some use out of it. I do bake the occasional loaf of bread and is great for making all sorts of doughs, bread rolls, foccacia or pizza dough . This is more or less the same recipe that I used. I substituted the sultanas for choc chips. They were good!

We made this cake too. It's a blimin' cracker of a cake, I have blogged how to make this one before. Make sure you use something else than bourneville cocoa, it isn't any good for this cake. You will see it doesn't look as good in my previous post here, plus it doesn't have finger holes as well...yet.

I took some of both today for morning tea at playgroup. Usually we just have cut up fruit for morning tea. Silly me just assumed with it being the week before Easter, and a Friday, it was the last week of term. It wasn't! We always have party food the last Friday of term. I took it on a panic and a whim. My usual party food take is popcorn, easy as a bag of microwave popcorn! The kids loved it anyway, and at least one of the adults couldn't resist chocolate cake. Looks like I will be making popcorn in a couple of weeks, when it really is party food day.

Bucket List

I have seen a few posts lately about bucket lists. I am sure in the past I have had things I would have loved to achieve, experience or conquer. The only problem is I haven't written them down anywhere, so when I try to think of things, I draw a blank. I thought it may be time(in my 40th year!) to set some things down and get some stuff done!

img cred

1. Make ravioli. Successfully.
2. Volunteer for something. A community project maybe.
3. Go cable hang gliding. I had psyched myself for this one when we visited Tassie. Too bad the day was too windy and it never happened.
4. Get to 60 kilos and stay there! I haven't been below 60 since before I fell pregnant with Izzy. Sixty seems maintainable to me, just have to get there.
5. Take the kids to a cinema on mums and babies day. Sucker for punishment, I know. 
6. Get enough stuff together to one day have a market stall. Just once. Whether it be used stuff or made by me crafty stuff.
7. Take the kids to a circus.
8. Go and holiday on the NSW south coast.
9. Holiday in Tassie, again.
10. Enter something into the local show for judging. A rose out the garden or maybe a photo or two.

Hoping to tick some of these off this year, and adding some more to achieve and strive for.

Best Friends(most of the time)

God save the Queen

If you didn't see my last post, my first Sunday Session, then you didn't see the awesome Freddie Mercury vid. It made me realise how great Queen were. If you haven't had Freddie Mercury aka Queen belting out your car stereo full blast and sang along in full gusto, then you haven't lived!! (Feel free to let yourself go and join in joyful chorus at any time) ;P

I have fond memories of my dad chiming in when the lotto ads played "I want to break free', with a joyful and happy "cross lotto!". I swear without my dads weekly punt he would be lost, his greatest joy is announcing a tiny cheque in the mail nowadays from SA Lotteries :) Love him to bits xx

Turn it up now!!

Friday inspired sesh

Friday night we sat down to watch some telly. Izzy was up but Summer was already asleep in her cot, she hadn't had a sleep all day, well, very, very briefly in the car on the way home from Izzys gym class.

We watched the end of a Scooby Doo movie, Izzy laughed at Scooby's childlike antics. Might be a movie I will have to get around to downloading in future.

Shrek Forever After came on after and we settled down to watch it. Izzy was excited, she loves Shrek, and we hadn't seen this one yet. I loved hearing this song. I recall hearing a lot of The Carpenters music when I was a kid.

I thought it was great when Puss in Boots sung this one. Go Antonio!!

Tiredness overtook Izzy not long into the movie and she fell asleep. She had a big morning with two, one hour gym lessons, broken up with morning tea in between. We were playing catch up after missing the Friday before when we left for a long weekend in Warrnambool. 

Izzy has been walking up the walls (even the fridge) practicing her handstands. She was so proud to show her Dad when he got home from work.

Little old rough and tumble having a go too. Clown. She's a goer!

We watched highlights of last years Olympic gymnastics on YouTube when we ate lunch. When I think of songs from the Olympic Games, Amigos Para Siempre always comes to mind, sung by Sarah Brightman and Jose Carreras at the closing ceremony in Barcelona. The following song was played in the opening ceremony, unfortunately Freddie died the year before, in 1991 and wasn't there to perform it.

Brett and I really enjoyed watching Shrek. One of the rare times we sit down and watch anything together without the kids. I was a bit excited when Paul Blarts Mall Cop started after Shrek, but with a few wines, was ready for bed and couldn't stay awake to watch all of it. This was one the first songs in that movie.

Linking up with Cate at {life behind the purple door}

 for my first sunday session ever! 

Jam Drop biscuits

The weather has cooled down a bit, from 40 on Tuesday to 23 yesterday. It's more baking friendly, plus the bickie barrel was bare. While Summer slept, Izzy and I whipped up a batch of these beauties. We used the same recipe to make all the biscuits, it made about 65ish, possibly more. Izzy ate the occasional ball of cookie dough.

I remember making these with my mum when I was a kid. She used to call the jam drops 'sore eyes', and they kinda look that way.  In past experience Izzy hasn't gone nuts for jam drops, so I made most of the mixture into plain biscuits and joined them together with icing.

Mum taught me to use the fork to make the pattern(dip the fork in flour) for the top of the biscuits and join them together. I made more of these sort(with pink icing, at Izzys request). They would totally give a Kingston biscuit a run for their money with a good chocolate icing, if I hadn't been out of cocoa I would have made some. Probably a good thing, I ate about 5 or 6, too darn many. There goes the diet. I put on a kilo and a half on our long weekend away, I can't afford to be taste testing biscuits!! 

Jam Drops

350 grams SR Flour (about 2 & 1/4 cups)

250 grams margarine

180 grams sugar (3/4 cup)

jam of choice

Sift flour, add sugar. Melt butter and mix in.

Roll into balls, place on greased tray and press finger into centre to make a hole(not all the way through).

Spoon a little jam into the holes.

Bake at 180 for 12-15 minutes.

Instead of making a hole and adding jam, you could press a blanched almond in the middle and then bake. Very tasty.

The icing I used to join the biscuits was just icing sugar and water with some colouring.

Warrnambool and the Port Fairy folkie

Motor boat on Lake Pertobe

Lake Pertobe adventure playground

Izzies view on the way home

Joining Trish for

Wordless Wednesday :)

Big sister, little sister