Lunching & more baking

Well I promised more baking & here it is. Today I had Megan & Thomas over for a relaxing lunch, my first lunch invitees in the new place. For lunch I threw together some bacon, egg & feta tarts, the recipe is in the latest Delicious mag. I used South Cape Persian feta which I absolutely adore, has anyone out there tired it, I love it & could go through buckets of the stuff if it weren’t so expensive? In fact the best way to eat it, I believe is simply smothered on some fresh bread, thanks to Megan (another Megan) for introducing us! Anyway back to the tarts, really easy & I loved them, it was basically some puff pastry filled with crisp bacon, feta, an egg & topped with parmesan all baked in the oven for a short time. I served it with a roast cherry tomato, basil & rocket salad.

For desert I made a Sour Lemon Cake from the latest Donna Hay, the cake was delicious & moist though it did need patching together with the icing as it stuck to the tin, suspect this is the old crappy tin’s fault & not my favourite new oven’s. Again I made the cake with traditional bake function & baked the tarts with fan forced which seemed to do the trick, I think that fan forced just cooks too quick for cakes & you can sometimes end up with the end result being a little overcooked & dry.

A lovely way to spend a sunny autumn day & it is so cute to see the kids finally playing together a bit though there are still a lot of snatches & tears to get through yet. At least now they kiss & make up.

More baking to follow soon & I might even cook something on the stove top too!

Welcome home me & first cake out of the oven

I know it’s been a while since you last heard from me. Since then I have been busy, busy, busy! We have finally moved back in to our newly renovated & extended house & I am very excited to say the least. It’s been a week and a half & everything is pretty much unpacked, we just have a few odds & ends to sort out, ie hanging pictures, finding the perfect spot for everything & ebaying all my old junk that people love to buy. This long weekend I hope to get stuck into the garden too, there is a lot of work to do, including getting my veggie beds ready for some Winter planting, I have some 5 color silverbeet, coriander & nasturtiums to get going amongst other things.

I also managed to bake my first cake. It took me a week before I had time to actually unpack the oven shelving, etc & put it all together for the inaugural cake bake. I made a delicious Limoncello Plum Tart from Australian Good Food Magazine. I chose traditional bake rather than fan forced & it seemed to do the trick. There are so many options on the new oven that I don’t quite know what will work best for what, the manual recommends traditional for baking so I will stick with that for now unless people have any other suggestions. The cake was delicious & also gave me my first burn from the oven, can you believe it, first go, it must be those clumsy pregnancy hormones in action.

The next few weeks should see in a marathon of baking now that the drought has been broken, I have many people to entertain & show through the new house before the new arrival comes along & makes entertaining once more near impossible (for the short term at least). Bookmarked I already have a sour lemon cake, banana & maple muffins and a date, pecan & chocolate torte. Hope to show you the results soon