o frabjous day!

o frabjous day! books, recipes & other things

  • Scone Pizza

    This is very barely adapted from Hungry and Frozen’s scone pizza recipe (I added some thinly sliced zucchini and crumbled feta to the original recipe) and is very much as it sounds; a delicious scone-like base (although significantly easier to make than scones, as it doesn’t involve rubbing butter time-consumingly into flour) with a gorgeous…

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  • Buchteln (or Sweet Bread Twists)

    “They strolled back to their pension where a meal was awaiting them of wonderful pastries, ivory butter piled thickly on fancy bread twists, and what Mary-Lou called “lashings of coffee and cream”.” (from Theodora and the Chalet School) Sweet bread twists are frequently mentioned in the Chalet School books, either being served to students during…

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  • 3 months

    Baby number 2 is three months old. It seems far longer than that, like she’s always been around, hanging out in one of my arms while I do everything else one-handed. Things I’m enjoying at 3 months: The one tiny laugh we’ve heard, a throaty “haHA” accompanied by a wide gummy grin. She’s quite a…

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  • At the Chalet

    The Chalet School books are a series of 59 children’s novels by Elinor M Brent-Dyer, published between 1925 (with The School at the Chalet) and 1970 (finishing with Prefects of the Chalet School). I had several of these books when I was young, and read as many of the others as I could find in…

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  • Bitter Lemon Gelato

    Originally I thought that this wasn’t really a gelato because it has cream in it, but I’ve since looked it up and realised that gelato does indeed usually contain cream/milk fats, just less than what we commonly term “ice-cream”. I have therefore spent my whole life living a lie when it comes to the definition…

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  • Dark Chocolate Chunk Biscuits

    This is a recipe from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet which is actually entitled “Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies”. I know this is much more alliterative than my version, but saying “cookies” makes me feel un-Australian. Biscuits it is. They’re extremely chocolatey and rich and magnificent. Lepard suggests using them for ice-cream sandwiches, but honestly despite my…

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  • The hours

    I make notes about the baby’s sleep patterns. When she’s had a string of bad nights I like being able to look back a week and reassure myself that she is capable of sleeping for five hours at a stretch when certain mysterious circumstances align. What those circumstances might be are between Frances and her…

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  • When the rain comes

    Our back verandah stretches the length of the house, and if you stand at the top of the stairs you can look down into the garden towards the rear dam. When the water is low, you can sit on the back stairs and watch wading birds picking their way along in the shallow water. After…

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  • Things I found in my pantry

    When I’m on maternity leave, I clean out my pantry. I do not, as a rule, clean out my pantry at any other time. You may think to yourself that this does not sound like a particularly good idea, and indeed, you would be correct. Recently I had a baby and subsequently in accordance with…

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  • 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…

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