Christmas Baking

For several years now Bubbles & I have been doing baked goods as Christmas presents for the extended family & friends. Some years we cook/bake a variety of cookies, or slices, or cupcakes.
This year it was cupcakes.
I wanted to try a few new recipes and decorations this year, so in early December I did a few ‘trial’ bakes of different recipes, most of which worked out well and were taste tested by some of the doctors at work and also everyone at swimming competitions.
So, for the Christmas presents I went with:

Oreo Cupcakes, with mini Oreo on top

These were made using a buttermilk recipe that I have adapted from a Lemon Buttermilk cupcake recipe. I used about 2 box's of Oreos inside the cupcake.


With the cookies, I first halved about a dozen of the cookies, placing the half with most of the cream on the bottom of the cupcake paper (cream side up), the other half and left over cookies went in the food processor and were cut up and then put in the cupcake batter.


The kids (and adults) at swimming loved this cupcake when I first made it, especially when they found the Oreo at the bottom.


For the decoration, I made a buttercream icing (from the Crabapple bakery recipe book), swirled it on to and added a mini Oreo.

Gluten free chocolate Cupcake, with chocolate ganash

I love this recipe (and so does ‘The Teacher’, Bubbles mum). The recipe is from the Crabapple Bakery recipe book and almost sends Bubbles into a diabetic coma when he helps to make it!


For decoration, I made Chocolate Ganash, again from the Crapapple bakery book, and added broken up Peppermint crisp on top

Caramel mud cake cupcake
This recipe was from the Women's Weekly Cupcake book and was something new for me, but wasn’t difficult to make, unlike some other caramel cakes can be.

I just dusted the top of the cupcake with some icing sugar, and stuck a gingerbread man on top using some buttercream icing from the other cupcakes. I got the handmade gingerbread men in a container of 20 from a seller at our local Sunday market.

Sponge cupcake

I was a bit let down by this cupcake. Almost all the cupcakes sunk, so after the first group came out of the oven and sunk, i made sure to turn the cupcakes from the second tray upside down on the cooling rack so they wouldn't sink on the top.

The cupcakes themselves were ok, although i don't think i will make them again.

I had great fun doing the butterfly's on top for the decoration though! I followed the directions from the "Hello cupcake" book. I made the Butterfly's the day before i baked the cupcakes.

Low sugar Berry Cupcakes

These little lovelies were a last minute addition as i realised i hadn't made anything Bubbles could happily eat, and therefore needed something also for a set of Aunt & Uncle.
 

 

 
So, after they were all made and decorated, i put them into these lovely boxes that i had ordered weeks back when we had chosen to do cupcakes this year.
 

Everyone loved the boxes, and the cupcakes were eaten up quickly

Blinds!!

Blinds that came with the house

Ok, so we moved into our house August 2009. We now finally have blinds in our rooms!

What we have been using as blinds/curtains for the last year.

About 3months ago I got a couple of companies in to give us measures and quotes. One company wouldn’t give us type of blinds that we wanted, so that took them out of the running, that left one company, who we were happy with on cost and why they provided and they came recommended.

So, in the middle of October, when I was off work for a few days cause Maggie had been desexed & I had an exam to study for, they came and installed the blinds.

The Lounge, Kitchen & Meals area blinds were put in first and they looked great! It was as good as I was hoping they would look. We chose to have Cellular blinds put in these rooms as they are good insulators (keep heat out in summer, cold out in winter) and when pulled up they sit very slim and are pretty much un-noticeable.

When I went to see the study and bedrooms blinds, they looks nice and how I was thinking they would look, the only problem was that the front (they are double rollers) sunscreen one was totally the wrong colour! It was a black colour and I had chosen an off white that was pretty much the same colour as the full block out.

So….. 6 weeks later and it is all sorted!! Yah!

Main bedroom

 Spare Bedroom

 Spare Bedroom

Study

We had some issues with the main bedroom blinds as they had to be spilt into 3 because of the window size, and while one of the rollers was, the other was not, so we had our outside blind down for 6 weeks so that people couldn’t see in.

But its all good now.

Just in time for Christmas!

Maggie Update

This weekend Maggie turns 7 months old. She has grown so much since the last photos posted of her.

She is almost finished her basic obedience training, and has been doing very well. We practice with her most days after work, either when we take her for a walk, or after dinner.



She was de-sexed in October. With everything going very well. It was hard to try and keep her from running around, and she was very slow on the back steps for the first day (Spanky often carried her down).



 

 

She has her good days and her ‘devil’ days. Every day when the first person gets home, they go out side and see which type of day its been. Some days there is no damage to the yard, its trees/bushes, and any objects in it. Other days there is holes all around the place, Camellia plants with no leaves left on it and a cardboard box torn to shreds.

Maggie also has now got half a clam shell (from Bonnie) to use during summer on the hot days. She had yet to sit in the water, but loves walking through it and getting her paws wet and drinking the water. She also puts her toys in there too to get them wet then plays with them.

A week in the life of Maggie

On Saturday morning, Bubbles called me outside and told me to bring the camera. So out i go, and what do i find? A puppy stuck behind a fence that is there to keep her out. The lattice plasic fence is about 1.5m tall and is around 3 ivy covered poles (as ivy isnt ment to be good for dogs). This would have worked except that we have a smart little puppy who happens to love leaves!

So she had managed to push up the lattice enough to crawl her way under, but the plastic wont bend back for her to get out. She was quite happy to be in there though, because there were leaves for her to play with.

We got her out, but had to get her to crawl really low as we couldnt bend the plastic much even with 2 of us doing it (we couldnt reach in and pick her out either cause the fence is too tall).

After all this fun (and a visit from Uncle Lucielle), she later had her first bath.

Which went pretty well, although she almost managed to get away from us twice. She didnt seem to mind the water too much (likes going to the pool and seeing all the kiddies from the Club who make her all nice and wet).

Maggie even had a hairdryer blow dry after her towel drying to get all dry. Then she got a nice pigs ear to eat infront of the heater for being so good.

When we came home from work yesterday and went outside to take her for her walk, we found a not so clean dog.

It was raining on and off all day, and the yard was pretty wet, so it looks like she had spent the day digging small holes and laying in them. Her whole belly & legs was just black with dirt and so was her white mo-hawk She had also gone around and put some of her toys in her holes, but not burried them at all. We just talk her for her walk to dry her off, then when we all got home we cleaned her up a bit, but she is still a bit dirty as we figure she could do it all again today!

Introducing Maggie!

This is our energetic 13 week old black & white Border Collie. She has now been part of our family for 4 weeks.

We got her from a breeder in Broadford, about an hour drive away from home.

She is settling in well, knows where to pee and where not to pee, knows her ‘sits’, ‘stays’, ‘drops’, ‘comes’ and ‘OFF!’.

She is a fair devil close to dinner time and will chew on anything she can think of!

Well, we’ve been home about a week and a half now.
We are definitely back in the swing of normal life.

The day after we got home, Bubbles was coming in from out in the backyard and he yells out to Spanky, “Where are you? This is the furthest away I’ve been from you in about 5 weeks!”. It was strange to realise that for 5 weeks we had been with each other pretty much 24/7.

Before we left the US, Bubbles swore that he wouldn’t eat a French fries/Chip for at least two weeks after we got home. So far this has been pretty easy to do, helped by the fact that when we went food shopping we didn’t buy any.

Although it has been easy not eating fries, Bubbles has had Onion Ring withdrawals. Often at dinner, we would share a plate of onion rings and were becoming quite the Onion Ring Connoisseurs.

We really did have a wonderful trip, although it is hard to sum it all up in a quick answer when people as “how was your trip”.

We both loved our time at the beach. It was very relaxing, restful and a beautiful area. Probably most like our normal holidays are.

Our favourite city was New York City. Although it is busy and has lots of people, we never felt unsafe and had a wonderful time there doing everything we did and we weren’t rushing around too much.

Spanky got very used to driving on the other side of the road and since coming home has struggled a few times when driving. Window wipers on rather than indicator, wanting to do a long left rather than a short left etc.

We made another trip out to the airport on the weekend, to pick up The President and First Lady, who arrived home from their 3wk trip to South America and the Galapagos islands. We had Sunday lunch with them, Spankys grandparents and brothers to catch up and because Spanky’s brother, Patrice, headed off to the US yesterday and he will be gone for about a year.

In other news, Bubbles’ sister, The Keeper, is in the new tourism Australia ad. Funnily enough, she is the zoo keeper holding the Platypus. Good singing!

Day 36 - Sunday 23 May - Travel/Sydney/Melbourne

Now there is no mistake in the date, we left on a Friday night and got home on a Sunday morning due to a little thing called the International Date Line.

The flight was fine but Bubbles didn’t sleep much and ended up with a stiff neck, so he was grumpy and tired by the time the flight was over. Spanky on the other hand was pretty chipper. She fell asleep shortly after takeoff, woke to eat dinner, then went back to sleep and only woke when we were about 2.5hrs away from landing.

We arrived in Sydney and had our first case of having to wait a long time for our luggage. When we finally got it we quickly got though customs and headed for the transfers desk with about 45 mins before our domestic flight to Melbourne was meant to leave. There would have been more time, but V Australia/Virgin Blue in their wisdom changed our flights a week before hand and moved us to a domestic flight 45min before the one we had booked on.

After waiting for about an hour at the transfers desk, we were given seats on a different flight (funny that as our other one had already left) and headed over to the domestic terminal. We boarded our flight for our final flight of the trip.

We arrived in Melbourne at 1115am and we met by The Golfer and The Teacher who chauffeured us home. Thus ending our five week journey.