o frabjous day!

books, recipes, parenting & other things

About

Cool Links

older post categories

  • On foot

    “Where are you off to?” asked the husband, as I sat in front of the TV lacing up my sneakers. “Out for a run,” I said. And in response to his query regarding available lighting outside, “The moon’s full, it’ll be fine.”

    One aspect of this plan that I hadn’t fully considered was the fact that the moon had not actually risen yet, and was present as a very faint glow on the horizon. My 5k loop from the front gate of our property includes one street light at about the mid-point, and otherwise goes along completely unlit roads. There are also various unimpressed horses, barking dogs, and the odd flock of ducks. This is rural running, yo. Which is fine at dusk, or when the moon is actually above the horizon, but that particular night was quite dark indeed.

    My eyes adjusted a little, but everytime a car drove past not bothering to lower its high beams (thanks neighours), I would lose my night vision completely. At one point I nearly ran into a wheelie bin. I also spent some time glaring suspiciously at a pale patch on the other side of the road, which I suspected might be the bald guy who’s always running at night. I’m sure he’s perfectly pleasant but I wasn’t anxious to run into him on a deserted road in the dark. It turned out to be an innocent bit of paper, stuck to a post.

    There’s a property on our street that gears up every December to win a prize in the Christmas lights competition – it’s a big property with two houses on it and a long street frontage, and at the moment it looks as if a giant elf has been overcome by Christmas cheer and exploded all over it. People come by of an evening, park on the street and hang around the fence, partaking in the blinding jolliness of it all.

    By the time I came back on my run, the onlookers had mostly dispersed, and the house was blinking away in the dark, really faint Christmas music playing from somewhere, and glowing inflatable Santas and elves bobbing in the breeze and watching me. It was quite creepy. I was inspired to spend the last few minutes of the run mentally drafting the outline of a little horror flick about inflatable figures come to life, with KNIVES (come to think of it, a rather danger-fraught method of killing people if one is inflatable). I have now forgotten the major plot points, unfortunately – a tragedy for the movie-going public.

  • Sacred Kingfisher

    One of the frustrating things about not having a super-zoom lens is not being able to get great bird shots – this little kingfisher isn’t really dominating the frame. Although I guess a longer zoom would mean dragging a tripod around everywhere, which I’m not anxious to do.

    I waited for ages focussed on him waiting to see if he’d turn around so I could get the lovely blue-green feathers on his back, but no such luck – he wasn’t going to turn his back on the crazy human crashing about below his branch.

  • Wedding Cake

    Smitten Kitchen’s wedding cake project was an invaluable aid when I was planning and executing my brother’s wedding cake earlier this year. I had never made a tiered cake before, and Smitten Kitchen was a great source of information for recipes and construction tips.

    I used two of the recipes from Smitten Kitchen – the vanilla buttermilk cake for the top tier, and the chocolate butter cake for the bottom tier.

    The vanilla buttermilk cake was filled with mango curd, made from canned mango, and the chocolate cake with a chocolate ganache, with Frangelico added to the ganache rather than brandy. Then, after the tiers were stacked together, supported with thick wooden skewers and a cake board, the whole concoction was iced with swiss buttercream icing.

    These cake recipes are seriously fantastic – they’re dense, moist and taste amazing. The method of freezing the cake layers, individually wrapped in plastic, for a week prior to decorating the cake works so wonderfully that I don’t think I’ll ever make a celebration cake any other way.

    I used the chocolate butter cake recipe to make a cake for my father-in-law’s birthday a few weeks later, using the chocolate ganache to ice the cake (much less forgiving of a clumsy hand than buttercream), and a caramel filling in between each of the layers.

  • A wedding

    My brother was married in October (which still sounds strange – my little brother, married), and I took some photos.

    His wife-to-be looked beautiful.

    I made the cake, with a fair bit of help putting together the tiers and the flowers. It turned out quite well, and after the happy couple left for their honeymoon we had quite a few very pleasant morning teas.

    It was a gorgeous day, and lovely to see them both so tremendously happy. I particularly enjoyed spending some time with my extended family, my beloved tribe of aunts, uncles, cousins and babies. I adore them all, particularly the babies.

  • Gonzo

    Gonzo the puppy came to the choir spring picnic on the weekend, played with his cow toy in the corner and was cruelly prevented from eating an illicit sausage passed to him by a couple of children who were being particularly generous with their lunch.

    The choir I’ve been singing with for the past few weeks has worked out really well – conveniently close to home, and a repertoire I enjoy. I have really missed group singing, which I haven’t done since University. And I haven’t been a student for quite a long time now. Alas. Although it’s not really the studenty bit of being a student I miss but rather the great swathes of free time I didn’t properly appreciate.

  • The Great Wedding Cake Experiment

    “Oh, we’re not planning on having a cake anymore,” said my brother. “But! Cake! Wedding! Cake!” I spluttered at him incoherently. And that’s how I came to be researching wedding cakes prior to his wedding, which is three weeks away.

    I knew I didn’t want to do the traditional fruit cake under hard icing, because fruit cake isn’t really my area of baking expertise, and cake decorating really isn’t. I am of the rustic school of icing cakes (slap it on, she’ll be right). But thankfully for anyone looking around online wondering how to make a wedding cake, Smitten Kitchen baked a cake for a friend’s wedding and wrote a series of posts detailing the recipes, the experiments, and the grand feat of engineering that is creating tiers of cake. So in an honourable effort of plaigarism, I decided to follow closely in her footsteps.

    This was the test run of what will be the top tier of the two-tiered cake – a vanilla buttermilk cake with mango curd and buttercream icing. Gloriously rich, with a tang of tartness from the mango curd.

    Putting it all together with the icing was a bit more difficult than I anticipated. I think I may have overwhipped the icing, which was a little lumpy, and parts of the cake kept emerging from the smooth blanket of icing that I was attempting to create. But apart from lacking skill with a spatula, the rest of the construction went well, and I feel reasonably confident about doing it again (along with the bottom tier, which is chocolate cake with a ganache filling) in a couple of weeks.

  • September Wallpaper

    It’s spring!  The last remnants of winter chill are disappearing, and we have had our first night of rain after months of blue skies.  The cats are starting to shed their enormous winter coats, which I’m sure is more comfortable for them but means that I am more likely to look up and see a large tumbleweed of cat hair drifting by.

    I’ve made a wallpaper for September, using a photo of one of my yellow grevilleas, which is flowering at the moment, and a calendar for the month.  The thumbnail on the left is a 1280 x 1024 picture, and the one on the right is 1024 x 768.  Click on the thumbnails to see the pictures, then right click to save them and use as wallpaper.  (And if you’re not sure what your screen resolution is, I think that statistically it’s more likely to be 1024 x 768.)

  • Early mornings

    I have decided that I live too far from Brisbane to do the Bridge to Brisbane again. I am not sufficiently enthusiastic about the event to make getting up at 3.45am worthwhile. I don’t particularly enjoy hanging around in a crowd of thousands of people, waiting for everyone to start making their way over the bridge. And having to honk at drunken revellers still enjoying their night out and staggering around in the middle of the road is just depressing.

    As I was getting into the car to leave, there were about four small explosions from a neighbouring property, followed by the sound of every dog in hearing beginning to bark. And there are a lot of dogs around here. It was a very noisy way for the day to begin.

    As there were no further noises, like screams or shouts, I thought it probably wasn’t necessary to do anything further about it. Life in a rural area – breezes in the trees, bird song, and the occasional explosion at 3.45am.

  • Oranges

    I went down to some disused train tracks this afternoon to have my photo taken with the choir I’ve been singing with for the past few weeks. We must have looked a bit odd, wandering along beside the road with our orange silk scarves blowing in the breeze. I watched the photographer’s equipment with some envy, but reflected that herding a group of people with wildly differing heights into a nicely balanced shot was probably not the most relaxing way to spend your Sunday afternoon.

    I drove home listening to The Inimitable Jeeves, which I have read before but, like many others, I never tire of PG Wodehouse.  I was choked with laughter (while concentrating fiercely on the road, of course) at the point where Bingo directs a children’s Christmas pageant in an effort to win the heart of his latest hopeless love, which naturally goes disastrously wrong:

    I take it you know that Orange number at the Palace? It goes:

    Oh, won’t you something something oranges
    My something oranges,
    My something oranges,
    Oh, won’t you something something something I forget,
    Something something something I tumty tumty yet:
    Oh—

    Or words to that effect. It’s a dashed clever lyric, and the tune’s good, too; but the thing that made the number was the business where the girls take the oranges out of their baskets, you know, and toss them lightly to the audience. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed it, but it always seems to tickle an audience to bits when they get things thrown at them from the stage…

    But at the Palace, of course, the oranges are made of yellow wool, and the girls don’t so much chuck them as drop them limply into the first and second rows. I began to gather that the business was going to be treated rather differently tonight when a dashed great chunk of pips and mildew sailed past my ear and burst on the wall behind me. Another landed with a squelch on the neck of one of the Nibs in the third row. And then a third took me right on the tip of the nose and I kind of lost interest in the proceedings for a while.

    When I had scrubbed my face and got my eye to stop watering for a moment, I saw the evening’s entertainment had begun to resemble one of Belfast’s livelier nights. The air was thick with shrieks and fruit.

  • In the vineyard

    I went down to Thumm Estate this afternoon to celebrate part of Kat’s hen’s weekend – we lunched on bruschetta and smoked salmon terrine, with a sparkling shiraz, then headed over to have a tour of the port barrels.

    There was much hilarity.

    I bought some coffee liqueur which was just divine, and a sparkling rose which tasted of summertime and honey (and which I am plotting to drink outside, preferably while picnicking).