Sunshine-y Day

Sadly the sun is starting to set for today :-( but the sun today reminds me that winter is beginning to wind to a close and (hopefully) I will have a few nice months before the full heat of summer arrives.

Sunday morning I headed back to Ballarat to hang out with my parents and Darwin (and various other pets). A friend of mine is currently packing up her life and preparing to head overseas. I caught up with her on Fri and Sat and both days we spent some of our conversation discussing spring cleaning and how much stuff we seem to have accumulated over time. I have been thinking about having a good clean out of everything for awhile as our household will be expanding next year. I also remember the ridiculous accumulation of stuff that we had to clean out of our last rental property and I don't want our current place to be the same.

I began by going through some of the stuff stored in my old room at home. I came up with a few items that I can easily part with....looked hopelessly at a pile of things that I am not yet ready to part with but have no real everyday use for.

Then I got started on a project that Mum and I came up with a few months ago when we were cleaning out her fabric stash. The first stage of the process looks like this -

The project is a rag rug. These two balls are made up of cut up strips of old clothes and the un-usable scraps of fabric in my stash that I could never bring myself to throw out. I probably half way through joining all the fabric and clothes that I already have for this project before I start attacking my wardrobe for more items to cut up.......

While I was searching through things I found some VERY OLD craft projects of mine -

This is probably my first attempt at crochet (which I now can't remember how to do) from either the summer before or after Year 12 (which is ten years ago now - yikes). I also found three nice sized balls of wool with these squares so maybe I will finish making something from this.

I also found these squares which I think I started at some point in the middle of high school.

In need of some desperate blocking but I was interested to see that my tension had settled down by this stage in time. Not sure what I will do with them - maybe sew them into the learn to knit afghan that I started at the beginning of the year and put aside in a huff after about four squares.

Well better push on with the rest of the days tasks.

High Tea and other ways to spend election day

I am sheepishly reappearing as I have obviously been very slack!!!!! Here is some pictures of cupcakes I made for my friends birthday on Saturday.

On Friday I made gluten free chocolate cup cakes. Gluten free cooking is something that I have very little experience with and am frankly a little intimidated by it!!!! So to get around this (and as always being short of time) I brought a packet mix (Naturally Good Moist Chocolate Mud Cake Mix) and followed the instructions on the back (too easy :-)). I cooked the cakes for about 25 minutes.

I am pretty sure that my Mum dreads when I call her up and start the conversation with "Mum I've had this great idea." as it generally means I am about to embark on some crazy unobtainable quest. This however is a very rare occurrence where the idea worked perfectly. I wanted to decorate the cup cakes so I piped melted white chocolate on baking paper.

And with the addition of some rapidly setting chocolate ganache and walnuts. I got these -

I also wanted to make Maple Syrup Cupcakes (from Donna Hays Modern Classics Book 2 I think) that Mum and I had made the week before for RSPCA cupcake day at work. So Saturday morning (after I remembered to vote). I got started creaming the butter and sugars together and had walked away for a moment. All of the sudden the kitchen was filled with thick smoke emanating distressingly from our beloved mixer.

This mixer is the mixer that Mum made all of our delicious treats on when we were kids and my brother and I inherited when she got her lime green kitchen aid a few years ago.

After I turned the power off and stamped my foot a little I went and found my brother to rescue me :-). He came in turned it on and off a few times and it stopped smoking and started working again. I was then able to continue on and produce my cup cakes (phew not sure what I would have done if it had died permanently).

I think the break in mixing meant that the butter had time to reset a little as the cupcakes didn't rise as much as last week (and I was missing the trifecta of Mum, her kitchen aid and her oven). I made white chocolate ganache and dark chocolate swirls for decoration.

And if you look closely you can see from right to left the ganache going from runny to almost set as I iced.

My friends birthday party was a high tea with lots and lots cake and cucumber sandwiches and scones. It was a lot of fun and the birthday girl seemed to enjoy herself. I got lots of compliments for both sets of cupcakes. As a present I gave her a copy of the cupcake recipe and the main ingredients in a new cake container (as you can never have enough of those).

After stopping off at another friends housewarming I got home and watched a little of the election coverage to see that Australia has its first Greens seat in the lower house (Yayyyyyyy). (I promise that will be my only political comment ever).

Today I have spent studying, restraining from eating the remaining maple syrup cupcakes (I had one for breakfast), getting a little cleaning done and enjoying a sunny winters day. Oh and drinking lots of cups of tea of course.