Well in a couple of short hours I will walk across a stage in the city and graduate. Here is a sneak peak of the dress Mum and I have made. You will have to wait till after I graduate to see the whole dress.
In other news last night I lost a tooth I never had. That is right my false tooth broke off my plate, so just like my formal photos were in High School, my graduation photos will also be toothless. Luckily, it was just the tooth part that broke off, so I will be able to keep wearing my plate till I can get to the Orthodontist. Not exactly how I wanted the day to start but I guess that is life with a false tooth.
Christmas is coming. The other night I heard a Christmas Beetle buzzing about outside and I rushed out to gaze at him for a little while, drawing on the memories I have of these little fellas. A Friday night at swimming club was rarely complete without someone catching a beetle or two and placing them on someone else’s back, knowing very well that those little legs would stick to the lyrca of our togs.
Of course Christmas Beetles are not the only sign that herald the nearing of Christmas. The most obvious thing in our house would be the baking that is done. All sorts of goodies picked up from the Christmases that Mum spent in Iceland when she was a new bride in a houseful of kids in a fishing village in Iceland’s Northwest Fjords. The first two recipes in our (Mum’s) biscuit book (which incidentally is in an Icelandic exercise book with stÃlabók on the front cover) are two Icelandic/Nordic Christmas biscuit recipes. One is Vanilla Rings and the other are Loftkökur.
Loftkökur are a quirky little biscuit that you either love or dislike, Mum falls into the dislike category but for as long as she has lived with Pabbi she has made them for the rest of the family to enjoy at Christmas.
Loftkökur
Looking at the recipe Mum has written down in the book it is funny to see the mixing of Icelandic and English used either for measurements or the names of ingredients
750g icing sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp hartshorn salt (Hjartasalt in Icelandic or Ammonium bicarbonate – you can get this from some speciality grocery stores or the chemist)
5 tbsp cocoa
This can easily be halved, and I would probably recommend halving it if you are making it for the first time as it does make a lot of Loftkökur.
Mix the ingredients together and refrigerate the mixture overnight.
If you have a biscuit attachment for your mixer use that and ideally you would use the zigzag attachment. You would then feed an arm’s length onto your arm and then carefully flip it onto a well greased baking tray and cut it into thumb size lengths.
If you don’t have a biscuit attachment you will need to roll the mixture into sausages a bit thicker than your thumb and slice it every 1/4″. Then press down on the flat side with a fork to give it some decoration. This is also what we do with the leftover mixture that the mixer can’t process.
Place on well greased trays and cook at about 150°C. They are cooked when they slide on the tray when pushed. Probably 10 minutes or so.
They are best drunk with cold milk and if you are feeling adventurous have a Loftkökur Slammer (just like a Tim Tam one).
This is Mum feeding the shaped mixture onto her arm, ready to be flipped onto a baking tray.
Look at that uniformity in size as Mum cuts the mixture to length, you can tell she has been doing this for close on 28 years!
With the leftover mixture Mum normally lets me “create” with it and this year I decided to make Loftkökur Staws by feeding some of the mixture through the large mincer plate on the mincer.
Just a few photos from around the garden yesterday.
The African Tulip Tree is a tree that has provided children all over the world with hours of fun, from using the flower buds as water pistols and boat races with the open seed pods. I was reminded of all this as the tree up the street has just finished flowering and the seed pods have started to make their journey away from the mother tree. You often find them in gutters as the summer rains have carried them like the boats they resemble down the streets. This fellow however must have grown a pair of wings to end up in our backyard as he would have had to fly over a couple of houses. Whichever way he went to reach our backyard, I welcomed him with reminiscing hands as I picked him up and turned him over inspecting for any structural damage he might have obtained in his journey. His boat load of passengers had long flown away on the breeze searching for some fertile soil and he was left to slowly decompose on our lawn.
Look at how the lines in the dead Agapanthus flower head match up with the dividing line between the cement and the grass. As a child and even now I like to pull out the dead stalks and swing them round pretending to be I guess a swashbuckling pirate or perhaps a club.
This is the sign of the drought and water restrictions in our garden. The hand fork lays in the garden bed begging to be used but until the rains return (if ever) the garden is left to run wild and survive on what rain does fall. The days of planting new plants in the front garden beds are left to our memories and we have all forgotten what it is like to actually go to a nursery and pick out new plants.
or perhaps I should say 3 months is a little late but then it is my party and I’ll cry if I want to.
Yesterday, I had a party. There was rain, friends, food, fairy lights and good times. Leading up to yesterday evening I knew it was going to rain at some stage but I was wishin’ and hopin’ that it would hold off. It didn’t and it rained as people arrived and it rained as we ate nibblies and it rained again as we had dinner. By then all I was wishin’ and hopin’ for was that it would clear for dessert so we could bathe in the speckled light of 928 fairy lights strung up on the verandah. It did clear and we then finished off the night in a magical atmosphere on the verandah under the sea of fairy lights. As we eat the leftovers and take photos of the food I will post them. I can say now though that I was happy with the food and Karl’s Sangria recipe is very very very nice indeed.
I wanna sit and talk and laugh with you all
sugar and spice and all things nice
This was my birthday cake, but we didn’t sing Happy Birthday so is it still birthday cake or just a celebration cake? Hailing from the wonderful pages of the Dec 03/Jan 04 issue of Delicious is this very yummy Rosewater Cream Berry Meringue Stack. Raspberries, Blueberries, Strawberries, Cream and Rosewater, need I say more?
Out on the patio we would sit…
We’d watch the lightning crack over canefields
singing hail, hail, the gangs all here
From the school girls to the Indo Girl, to the 2nd year girls and then the 3rd year girls, these are the girls (plus a few absentees) who have in some way or another had an in influence into me growing into who I am today.
side by side one for all together we grew
Five years in bottle green, soccer/cricket/football games, sitting on the hill, playing music, doing group assignments, laugh central. Where else but in high school do you form a group of friends where the girls all have boys names for nicknames and are still used today? Fred/Candy, Doug/Kaliope and Guido/Dina and myself as Bill, I don’t think those times will ever be forgotten.
Hey Joe
Concerts, Movies, and lots of chilling and chatting. One year of Indonesian together, four years and counting of fun filled adventures and laughs.
they’re fun to have around
Really where do you start? The sweet little Nural who is both a 2nd year and a 3rd year girl who can always say something cute or Andrea, the girl who is me but not me (in her own words) or Rachy Rach (Marky Mark/Richie Rich) who is always up to having a rant about something and a good time.
one and one and one is three Some say she’s from Mars, I just say she does Law, Swinin’ down the street so fancy free, I just say she always has a smile. Clare and Georgie, the perfect pair to share my last year of uni with and the laughs have just kept coming since exams have finished.
It wasn’t so much a 21st birthday party 3 months late but a celebration of where I have come from and where I am going now, a celebration of the end of schooling for the current time, for the girls who have I have met along the way and for the old to meet the new and to kick back and have a nice time.
Well the clock says its time to close now
I know I have to go now
I really want to stay here
All night, all night, all night
(3 months is a leaky boat is of course a of course a play on the title of the fabulous Split Enz song Six Months in a Leaky Boat)
(and big props to anyone who knows any of the the songs where the captions come from)
In our household Honey Cake usually refers to a dense Icelandic cake that Mum makes for Father’s Day and Pabbi’s Birthday, she dislikes it, I love it, Pabbi likes it and Matthew is indifferent over it just as he is with pretty much everything. After a busy morning spent on the computer researching my last assignment I decided to make myself a cake for afternoon tea and when I saw a recipe for Honey Cake in the wonderful Tessa Kiros book Apples for Jam, I said to myself, I will have to cook this. The best thing, we all like it.
Honey Cake
Apples for Jam, p. 279
The recipe also lists 1 tbsp of finely chopped rosemary but I didn’t have any so it is absent and it tastes quite fine without it.
150g butter
0.5c brown sugar
0.5c honey (place the bottle in warm water for a while so the honey is easier to measure)
1 2/3c plain flour
1.5tsp baking powder
0.5tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
Line and grease a 22cm springform tin. In a small saucepan over a low heat melt the butter, sugar, honey and 1tbsp water, stirring once or twice until sugar is dissolved and butter is melted. Leave to cool for 10-15 mins. Preheat oven to 180°C.
Sift flour, cinnamon and baking powder in to a bowl; add the eggs and butter mixture. Mix until smooth. Pour into to the cake tin and bake for 30-40 minutes or until cooked. Leave to cool in the tin.
Icing
The recipe lists a lemon butter cream recipe but I just made a simple lemon icing sugar icing. A a couple of tablespoons icing sugar, a teaspoon of margarine and two of lemon juice, the zest of half a lemon and enough hot water to produce a spreadable paste. Ice the cake and sprinkle the zest from the other half of the lemon on the cake.
When I was in high school, I used to take a cake to school when my friends had birthdays. When it was my birthday the other month, Georgie Girl brought a slice of cake to uni for me. Her birthday is tomorrow so she is getting a slice of cake 🙂
I had a book out of the library the other day of the most coolest camera obscura photographs by Abelardo Morell funnily enough called Camera Obscura. I can’t descirbe how much eye candy was in this book, so you should race straight down to your nearest library and borrow the book out (Dewy Decimal – 779.092 MOR, Library of Congress – TR268 .M67 2004). Most of the photos in the book are eight (8) hour exposures!
My original plan was to black out one of the rooms at home and observe the world but following what was set out on this page, I just grabbed a cardbord box and some tracing paper/vellum for my first trial. I figured our pretty quickly that I needed a couple of blankets over the top of me to block out stray light so I could see the projected image better.
The resulting projected images whilst simple, upside down and dim are so cool!! Go grab a box, some tracing paper and a couple of blankets and play with it yourself, fun for the whole family!
