o frabjous day!

Author: Celia

  • Brown Sugar Chocolate Cake

    This recipe is from Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet, and makes a wonderfully unassuming loaf cake with a rich chocolate flavour and molasses-like sweetness from the brown sugar. He notes that cakes with a high proportion of fat and sugar to flour are susceptible to sinking, which as you can see mine did. Lepard’s suggestions…

  • On the full moon

    My daughter was born on a full moon. This was not due to some mystical cosmic alignment, but rather to the fact that the hospital had space on that day for an elective caesarean section. Placenta previa had upended my easy pregnancy and plan for a relaxed drug-free birth, and meant that the hospital was…

  • Baby-To-Be

    The changes to your body are much less interesting during a second pregnancy. I don’t take enthusiastic bathroom-mirror photos of my expanding girth, and my feelings towards the pregnancy mostly consist of eagerness to reach the end of it. My recollection of the first months of parenthood with my son is that they were grindingly exhausting,…

  • Reading Round-Up for 2015

    My reading mojo officially returned in 2015, for the first time since having a child in 2012, and I finished 86 books. This comes just in time for me to have a second child during 2016. Hopefully Baby No. 2 is less of a shock to the system and it won’t take me as long to…

  • Macadamia, apricot & chocolate biscuits

    This is another recipe from Annabel Crabb’s Special Delivery cookbook. These are fairly sweet and more of a gift biscuit (in keeping with the theme of the cookbook) than an everyday sort of biscuit. You should be able to substitute any combination of dried fruit, nuts and chocolate you like – the original recipe uses…

  • Moroccan chickpea & haloumi bake

    Mum gave me Annabel Crabb’s cookbook “Special Delivery” for my birthday, and I’ve been happily marking recipes that I want to try – this chickpea and haloumi bake was one of the first, because a) haloumi and b) it’s really quick and easy. ingredients: 1 red onion 1/2 tsp cumin 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1/4 coriander…

  • Noisy friarbird

    Each day when the husband parks his car, a noisy friarbird flutters down and perches on the side-mirror, overfilled with delight to see its beloved reflection again. It sings, swings acrobatically around the mirror, flutters over to the other side of the car to the other mirror and joyfully realises – oh! you’re here as…

  • Concert

    We sat on the hill overlooking the stage, near the mixing desk. Intermittent lightning of a storm to the south flashed on the horizon, highlighting the scattered clouds above us. People around us talked about whether it would rain, and what songs they hoped to hear, and in tones of mild dawning horror, how many…

  • 3 years

    Someone foolishly showed Edward the classic Women’s Weekly birthday cake book and he flicked through every single page, eyes gleaming avidly. “I would like… that one! And that one!” he said eagerly, until I informed him that birthdays were a one-cake-only kind of deal. Naturally he eventually settled on the cake that graces the cover…

  • Up north

    Some scattered memories from our recent holiday: Edward and I left a chilly winter morning in Brisbane, and arrived to warm sunny weather in Cairns. Mum picked us up from Cairns airport in a borrowed car. “The air conditioning doesn’t work,” she said. “I mean, you can test it, but I turned it on and…