Sweet treats...

One of the great benefits of finishing your Christmas shopping early is that it gives you time to make all those little sweet treats that make the festive season so special. Today I managed to make three different kinds of chocolate truffles (hazelnut, orange and peppermint); a batch of Rocky Road and two batches of Snowballs.

The first batch of Snowballs I made using cup measurements and I could tell they were spreading too much as soon as they had been in the oven for just a few minutes. So I made a second batch using weight measurements which resulted in a much stiffer paste and rounder 'snowballs'. If you like ameretti biscuits you'll love these. They are incedibly easy to make and if you use pure icing sugar rather than icing sugar mixture they're gluten-free to boot!

Snowballs

60 grams almond meal
60 grams hazelnut meal
120 grams pure icing sugar, sifted + extra to coat
1 egg white

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees celsius and line a baking tray.
2. Add almond meal, hazelnut meal and sifted icing sugar to a large bowl.
3. Add egg white and stir until mixture forms a stiff paste.
4. Take teaspoons of mixture from the bowl and roll into approx. 18 small balls.
5. Roll each ball in icing sugar to cover thoroughly.
6. Place balls on baking tray and bake for 10 minutes.
7. Allow to cool on tray then store in an airtight container.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Return of the Christmas Spirit...

I'm feeling very Christmassy this year. I've finally found the right settings on my oven and have been baking every chance I get. I've been shopping locally and early to avoid any unnecessary present-buying anxiety and I've even given in to neighbourly pressure and installed some solar Christmas lights!

This resurgence of Christmas spirit has really bought home to me just how hard the past few Christmases without Mum and Dad have really been. When I look back now I've endured the last three Christmases rather than celebrated them. I've put on a brave face for the kids but in all honesty I've been relieved when the day itself is over and I've managed to hold it together. Things haven't been made any easier by having to spend parts of the past three Christmas/ New Year periods in the Emergency Department of the local hospital with Henry battling to breath after severe asthma attacks (a tradition I'm really not that keen to continue!).

So this year I'm hoping to start afresh. Rather than trying not to think about Christmases past I've leapt right in and bought a real Christmas tree for the first time in years. Surely nothing smells more like Christmas in Australia than a good old pine tree? Last year that smell would have reduced me to tears but this year it's helping me bridge the before and after grief gap. Decorating the tree with the kids is also balm for the soul. It's such a special time especially as we bring out each ornament and talk about where it came from, who made it or who gave it to us. I have a soft spot for two ornaments (a stocking and a bauble) that I made using a 'stained glass' craft kit when I was about eight but my favourite decorations are these funny little reindeer. The reindeer faces were made by tracing around the kids feet and the antlers by cutting around an outline of their hands or stamping them in paint. Henry's was made when he was only one year old so it is teensy tiny and it reminds me how important it is to grasp every moment of their childhood before it slips away.

So how are your Christmas preparations coming along? Do you have any favourite rituals to help kick-start the Christmas season? Any fabulous Christmas baking recipes I should know about?

You know Christmas is coming when...

:: the agapanthus burst into life...
:: you can finally put the hot water bottle away...
:: the first day of Total Fire Ban is announced...
:: there are butterflies just like this one all over the place...
:: you have an unstoppable urge to preserve things in jars...

Little Dancing Queens

I cannot tell you how many times my sisters and I listened to this album with when we little.

When I was about eight I used to 'choreograph' routines to my favourite ABBA songs then I'd rope my friends into performing them with me in front of the class (and any other class who'd let us in if I remember correctly!). Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that one day I'd have a daughter of my own who would be doing the same thing. Well, it seems some things never change. Today Bella is playing out the same scenario performing 'Dancing Queen' to her classmates with her her friends from the ABBA Club.

Bella and her friends started their own ABBA Club some time ago so they could write out lyrics at lunch time, talk about their favourite songs and do the odd performance. It intrigues me to think that ABBA still holds sway over little girls after all these years. What's really interesting is that it's all about the music. They don't seem to attach themselves to the personalities the way we did (I was definately a Frida girl) and I'm sure they must wonder why on earth they're dressed that way!

They love their Lady Gaga, Katie Perry and Adele too (I'm glad they're not writing down some of their more colourful lyrics!) but there is just something about ABBA that they all love. Is it the music, the lyrics, the harmonies? Perhaps I'll never know but it is a lovely link with the past for this aging ABBA fan who doesn't mind joining in when no-one is looking...

Books vs apps...

You may (or may not) have noticed that things have been a bit quiet here in Golden Seed Land. That's because I've been busy teaching one family member to read and spending seemingly endless hours setting up iPods and Kindles for the other two. It's been an interesting time caught between an old-fashioned school reader and navigating the e-reader world (which has so far failed to excite much enthusiasm!).

Do you remember a time when you couldn't read? I must say I really don't and I can't imagine looking at a page of English words and not being able to interpret their meaning. Ours is a reading family. We live in a house with books in every room and spend many hours a week reading, visiting bookshops and thinking and talking about books so you can imagine my excitement when the jumbled letters on the page suddenly started to make sense and Henry started reading.

Henry's favourite book to read is Book 1 of the Victorian School Reader (pictured above) which was used by all Victorian children from 1928 to 1950. It's not like we don't have any other books to read but there is something about the way the story builds with a mixture of familiar and new words that both Henry and Isabella have found irrestistable.

Sure you can teach your kids to read with any number of apps on an iPad but for me it just wouldn't be the same (KJ Dellantonia seems to get what I mean here and I wonder if the Silicon Valley moguls sending their kids to no-computer Waldorf schools do too). I love books as things as much as for what they contain and I want my kids to know about dust-covers, endpapers and fontispieces. That's why I love the idea of the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. Imagine getting a free book in the mail (personally addressed to you not your mum or dad) every month from birth until you turn 5 - bliss!

Obviously, we're aiming for the best of both worlds here. Isabella loves her new iPod Touch (which she saved for two years to buy) but even though she knows she can download books onto it she hasn't shown any interest in doing so and far from taking up reading time she has read more books in the past couple of weeks than ever before (thank you Roald Dahl , Jeff Kinney and Megan MacDonald.) Tom's Kindle, however, lies idle and yesterday we bought 6 new books between us so we're not there yet!

How about you? Book, e-reader, both or neither?

My new kitchen...

'On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it'.

(E.B White)

Welcome to my new kitchen! It's not quite finished as you can see (still needs painting and a bit of decorating) but I couldn't be happier with it especially the way the new bamboo floor contrasts with the all-white cabinetry and the way the oven is given prominence by doing away with any overhead cupboards. I'm not so convinced about my choice of a smaller pantry (what was I thinking?) as I didn't realise just how much room you lose with those nifty slide out shelves. Still, it has led to some pretty ruthless culling (way past its use-by-date fish sauce anyone?) which can't be a bad thing.

One of the things that used to really depress me about our kitchen was the view from the front door. You'd open the door ans see a blank paling fence out the window and a freestanding dishwasher with a basket on top that we used to put recycling in. You then had to shimmy past that dishwasher to get to the toilet (before we closed off the doorway as part of the bathroom renovation). All most unsatisfactory!

Now I see this when I come in the front door at night...

So much more satisfactory! Some of the best changes have been small ones . The view out the window is so much more welcoming now that it includes a burst of colour from a hanging basket and some little red window boxes. The window boxes are full of my favourite herbs which means I don't have to go out into the backyard in the dark anymore to pick those essential last minute herbs. I also love my new sink and tap (really!). Again it's not a big thing but the previous one had hot and a cold twist taps which always seemed to end up covered in cake batter or schnitzel crumbs especially when cooking with the kids. It also had a fixed faucet so you couldn't swing it out of the way when you were washing up (many a plate met its maker after accidently colliding with that damn faucet!). Now we have a mixer tap with a flick control and a double sink with strainer plugs and it's amazing how much more streamlined that little detail makes things.

I feel slightly embrassed about the size of my enormous new oven (900mm) in such a small kitchen but it's so much more efficient than the old one (so much so that I've already burnt my first batch of biscuits!) and I figure if you love cooking as much as I do (and increasingly the kids too) it's worth the investment.

There's still plenty of room for improvement - I haven't worked out where to put the recycling station yet and we have a space on one wall for a nice dresser/ sideboard or bookcase but for now I'm just going to enjoy getting to know my new oven and using up all that new bench space...

What Lies Beneath...

It never ceases to amaze me just what's lurking beneath the surface of our everyday surroundings. While ripping out our old hot water service last week we found this amazing remnant of floral wallpaper underneath the pelmet of an old sliding door (the romantic in me likes to think it might be from the original 1950s version of the house but of course it could be from a little later) and when we had our fairly revolting 1980s kitchen ripped out we discovered all sorts of goodies including yellow and green striped enamel paint and lots of 1970s faux-tile lino.

The archaeologist in me loves unearthing these reminders of past lives but also shudders at the destruction. There wasn't much I could do about the floor (and let's be honest it wasn't any great loss) but I made them leave the wallpaper which now lives happily behind my new pantry. No-one can see it but I know it's still there which makes me very happy. Thankfully, not all urban archaeolgy ends so brutally. I recently came across this amazing online project The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia 1920-1925 in the New York Times. If you love that period and its eccentric writers, artists, poets and entertainers you will love this site. The door is signed by over 200 bohemian types who frequented Frank Shay's bookshop during the early 1920s and the University have slowly been identifying and linking all the signatories. Like all good 'discovery' stories the door could so easily have benn lost. When the shop closed in 1925 the manager took the door home where it stayed until 1960. It was donated to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas after 'a dealer spotted an ad in the Saturday Review asking 'Want a door?'

Old-fashioned or not...

The tiles went in today and I love them. I chose them against all advice to the contrary (all the tradies told me they'd make a new kitchen look too old fashioned) but the way I see it it's an old house and a totally contemporary kitchen would look out of place. Only three more sleeps until it's all finished!

Surprise lunch...

The other day the kids offered to make me a salad for lunch. Lovely I said thinking that they were playing their favourite game, 'cafes'. About 15 minutes later I wandered into the kitchen only to see Henry cutting up carrots with a sharp paring knife and Isabella cutting up a tomato with a butter knife! Not wanting to rain on their parade (but praying that no fingers were going to end up in the salad) I allowed myself to be shoo-ed away. A few minutes later they brought me a lovely salad of tomatoes, carrots and marinated fetta finished off with french dressing and some basil they picked themselves. It was the best salad I've ever tasted...

Twinkle, twinkle little star...

Over the weekend my little star won her first ever award. Her team placed 2nd in a state aerobics championships and she just couldn't get the smile off her face. Well done baby!