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

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.

most awesome collosal mess. link to full size pics here

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

Recipe + Pics + Variations after the jump…

Rhubarb & Yogurt cake

125g butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup yogurt
2 cups chopped rhubarb (or apple or banana)
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Cream butter & sugar. Add eggs one at a team beating until fully mixed in each time. Stir in yogurt, fruit and vanilla. Add dry ingredients and fold in. Spoon into floured round cake tin (about 10″). Sprinkle with topping (if desired, I used the icing because I know how good it is!!) and bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes or until done.

Optional Topping

1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp melted butter
1/2 cup chopped walnuts.

Passionfruit Icing

1 cup icing sugar
1 tbsp butter melted
pulp of 2 passion fruit.

Pineapple/Passion fruit variation.

Swap all of the brown sugar for 1 cup of white sugar and all of the fruit for 1 tin of crushed pineapple + the pulp of one passion fruit. Ice while still warm with passion fruit icing (reciepe above just stir together ingredients).

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.

1 more pic + recipe after the jump

These ones, however, were pretty yum. And after 3 days with muffins for breakfast and dinner.. the scales say I am one kg worse off for it. Ah well, what is the gym for anyway.

White Blueberry Apple Muffins [original recipe here]

3 1/2 cups high grade flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1 1/3 cup granulated sugar (I actually used 1 3/4 cups icing/confectioners sugar as I had run out)
140 grams unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
1 cup milk, at room temperature
1 cup creme fraiche or sour cream, at room temperature
2 large eggs, at room temperature

1 cup fresh/frozen blueberries
1 cup diced apple

Preheat oven to 180 degrees centigrade/350 celcius. In a large mixing bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; mix well. In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the sugar, butter, milk, creme fraiche or sour cream, eggs, and egg yolk until well combined.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and fold gently with a rubber spatula just until the dry ingredients are mostly moistened (the batter will be lumpy)–there should still be quite a few streaks of dry flour.

Add apple and blueberries and mix until there is no large patches of flour, do not over mix or your muffins will be rather unappealing in texture.

Fill your muffin tins and bake for 20 mins for normal size, 30 for texas/big-ass muffins:) ENJOY:P

Sorry hardly any piccies as my camera battery died. New DSLR soon hopefully

new jeans

update ahhh I missed out on the best camera on trademe ever, sigh.