I’m still a long way from the lovely country I call home, New Zealand. While everyone there enjoys stunning summer days and long evenings, we have rain, sleet, snow, and darkness at 4pm.  The last 6 months have brought an entirely new way of life for me, and one major unexpected change.

You know that saying about plans going astray, well, yeah, I can verify that is true Still, my life is very nice right now, just a bit different from our plans of just a few months ago. We always had planned on coming to London for a few years to work. We planned on having a baby at some stage and coming back to NZ to settle. Little did we know that I was already pregnant when we left glorious New Zealand! So that was one small spanner in the works. I looked for work solidly for a few months once we arrived, but there was just no software development jobs going. In hindsight I should have given up looking a lot earlier and worked in a cafe, but I didn’t, and well, then it became too late because I sprouted a somewhat huge baby bump. Thankfully my husband landed a sweet job very soon after we arrived (and they love him, he has just had a promotion!), otherwise we would have been on the next plane home.

on the tube, blissfully unaware of the baby growing in there

So, here I am, jobless, and growing a baby in my belly. People ask me what I do and I have a hard time answering – what on earth do I do? Well, I spend a lot of time on eBay, that’s for sure. Having a baby has increased my addiction even further and opened my eyes to the designer baby second hand clothing market. Thankfully we also bought a car that turned out to be a piece of crap, because I spend lots of time fixing it or visiting our mechanic, who I am getting to be quite good friends with haha. I go for walks, I go shopping and have hot chocolates, I cook and sometimes I even clean.

Yeah. My life is pretty sweet. And on top of this I seem to have been blessed with the worlds easiest pregnancy. I haven’t had any morning sickness, or anything weird like that, and I’m only just getting to the uncomfortable stage where I walk the poor baby into door frames and stuff.

31 weeks pregnant!

What else is going on….

I’m so itchy. I don’t know what causes it, although I do have a general idea of what trigers it – water, or more specifically taking a shower. Generally I can minimize the itching if I just jump in and out very quickly and then slather some moisturizer on my legs. But – sometimes a quick shower just doesn’t cut it. Like right now. I really needed to wash my hair, and as you probably know, my hair is really, really long. This means it takes me a few minutes to shampoo and condition it, plus shave or whatever else I gotta do, and by the time I get out my skin is crawling.

I literally scratch to the point where I am covered in red marks and lines. It usually takes about half an hour for the urge to scratch to disappear and then about half an hour after that I feel like I can function normally. This has been going on for years and years, and I go through periods of months when I am fine and some where I am not.

I think maybe I have some kind of liver problem, or food allergy. Its getting to the point where I really need to do something about it, because its getting damn hard to scratch certain bits now I’m pregnant! Plus the thought of having a little baby and one hour of itchies freaks me out.

Yeah apart from that not much else. I feel my next few posts will be baby stuff related.. so please forgive me xx

I made the weirdest sauce ever to go with this roast chicken last night. All I have is wholemeal flour, rice, pasta, tiny bit of butter, milk and some vegetables and meat. So I did the roast with some roast carrots, haha, and it was looking pretty disturbingly bland. So I thought I would make gravy, but I couldn’t because a) I hadn’t made the chicken stock yet and b) wholemeal flour does not a good gravy make. So I did white sauce with wholemeal flour lol – I liked it, tastes like a mix between bread sauce and white sauce haha both of which I love but have never made myself.

What other weird things have I done… oh yeah.. hot chocolate with wholemeal flour – HAHA – do not recomend, rice pudding with evaporated milk, porridge with evaporated milk, and washed so many freaking saucepans because there is no dishwasher and no microwave, ahhh, so not used to having to actually do this stuff myself lol.

Anyway most people would probably be a bit disturbed at what I have been cooking but Jonnos pretty good and takes it in his stride although I do wonder what he is thinking haha. I have done some baking and did a batch of cocoa brownies with a layer of ganache which were proclaimed the best ever, made with wholemeal too although you couldn’t tell.

Oh yeah I have been epicly sick so been in bed all day, browsing ASOS.com, learning ASP.NET, reading food forums, deafening myself with dance music, you know the usual. I really need to find a wallet and I am scared of how cold it is going to get and how little warm clothes I have. Never fear. I will survive.

xx L L

2. Ice cream scoop.. one of those ones that have the self release handle thing. These are so good for cupcake batter, basically it allows you to get absolutely even portions in each case with no sticky mess of using 2 spoons or your finger or whatever. The only reason I haven’t bought on of these yet is simply because I have never actually seen one to buy. Maybe millys has them, or a catering kind of place, normal shops only have the basic scoops that don’t have that lever thing.. and I already have 2 of them and they don’t do the business..

I know there is heaps more, like another cupcake tin, a huge circle tin for wedding cakes, a cooling rack.. I could go on, but I gotta find these two in the next little while.

My hubby put one in my bag to surprise me (yeah, I know, so awesome) and it is super cute. I have always loved Jelly Belly’s (especially the flavour that most people hate: buttered popcorn) ever since my trip to America when I was about 10.

So no new baking for now, I spent a few hours on Sunday making a huge brownie platter for an event we went too, 2 batches of regular brownies, 1 batch of caramel brownies, whipped cream and a rich chocolate sauce.

There was less than 10 people at the event and about 2/3rds of the brownies got eaten so definately a success, pretty much my backup plan when I need to bring something sweet and I don’t have much time or energy.

These have 60-70 calories (depending on which type you get) and around 10-13g of carbs. ZOMG. So good. So my stand by dinner is:

1 piece of mountain bread
100g (approx) of chicken or 2 tenderloins
Iceberg lettuce shredded
Carrot grated
Shallot grated
Fresh herbs (parsley, corriander)
Capsicum or tomato

add mustard, shredded cheese (tiny amount) or sour cream and roll up. OM NOM NOM. Bring on healthy dinners/lunches/whatevs.

How to turn sweetened condensed milk into this after the jump…

I used a method that is very widely documented online, pour one can of SCM into a glass pie dish and put in a baking/roasting tray filled with water to halfway up the side of the pie dish. Cover pie dish tightly with foil. Bake for 200 deg C for about 2 hours (Check after 1 hour) until deliciously thick and brown.

David Lebovitz has some more precise tips here

This is my second batch so I can pretty much guarantee that if you like coconut and dense cakes then you will like these. And cherries. I have more of a glace cherry addiction than I like to admit and nothing beats biting into what appears to be a plain cake and finding hidden whole glace cherries in there. Ohh baby.

More after the jump incl recipe + lotsa pics

(one with not so hidden cherries from my last batch)

190g flour
200g sugar
1tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
70g coconut (1 level cup)

125g cream cheese
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/4 cup juice or milk
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond essence (makes these so good!)
150-200g glace cherries

Beat all wet ingredients excluding cherries together. I use the kitchenaid for this or you could just use a bowl if you soften the cream cheese first.

Chuck all the dry ingredients on top and mix until no pockets of flour showing. Then add the cherries and mix through until everything is nice and even. Do not overmix!

Fill muffin cases or pans and bake at 200 degrees celcius for about 12 minutes or until lightly browned and firm in the center.

Now something is really wrong with my oven. These two were right in front of each other and the one closest to the door got crazy white and high.  Weird. Nothing like an oven from the 1940s or so lol..

Instructions and Pics after the jump

I photoshopped up a Porsche logo outline and printed it out multiple times and then attacked them with scissors. I then rolled out some brownish fondant and placed the logo on top and began to trim away…

then the smaller middle piece

I then dusted the fondant with gold luster (edible) and a drop of yellow food coloring to get it more yellow gold colored, and left it out overnight to dry.

then the fun part (not). Decorating. This gave me insane hand cramps lol…

And then I made a Nigella Lawson Chocolate Fudge cake (which happens to be the best chocolate cake ever btw – I will post it later) and placed the Posche Crest carefully on top and shaped it a bit with my fingers because it was still a bit soft and the top of my cake was by no means flat (stupid icing skills)

I probably could have taken more pictures but I was so so tired and grumpy when I had finished I just wanted to go to bed lol.

Now there are literally thousands of recipes out there for cream cheese muffins, but in most of them the cream cheese is beaten in to the wet ingredients. The perfect cream cheese muffin to me requires delicious chunks of cream cheese goodness.  The recipe below I use when I need to use up any fruit, you can use whatever you have on hand or in a tin (I used canned strawberries lol).

Recipe and Pics after the jump

Chunky Cream Cheese and Strawberry (or any fruit) Muffins

2 cups High Grade flour
3/4 cup sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 teaspoon of your favorite ground spice (I used cinnamon and a bit of ginger)

75g butter
1 large egg
1/2 cup light sour cream (or milk, yoghurt, even juice will do)
1/4 cup juice (use what you can extract from the fruit you are using or have in your fridge)
1-1/2 cups fruit,  chopped into whatever size pieces you fancy

125g firm cream cheese, cubed

Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celcius.Prepare your favourite muffin pans.  Mix first 4 dry ingredients in a bowl with a fork until well combined.

In another bowl, heat the butter until liquid and mix in the sour cream, juice, egg and fruit pieces with a fork.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. Add cubed cream cheese and fold together until just combined (there should be no large patches of flour, do not mix further) and cream cheese is evenly distributed but still in chunks (be gentle!).

Spoon mix into prepared muffin pans (I got 14 out of my batch) – if you are a real cream cheese fan (- I am!!) add a teaspoon of cream cheese in the center of each muffin.