So. Much. Want.

This is where I wonder if the husband has heard of House of Missoni, and whether he'd buy that it's a Farmers brand if I were to sneak them into the linen closet ...

Probably not. 

Want to know how much they are?

le sigh. 

They are ALL the awesome though.  All of it.  Every last bit.  Except for the bird house shelf of course.  That was also quite a bit of awesome.

Want!!  My bathroom would rock these towels.

morning glory wholewheat carrot loaf

My feeling about carrots is that as a general rule, they have no business being in cake.  Or anything cake-like.  Which includes loaves.  No business at all. 

But, this is a Global Baker recipe (Yay Global Baker Project!), and the (self-imposed) rules are, I have to bake it all.  Sooo, I busted out the carrots. 

The super wet mixtures had me crossing all my crossables, and the not-ginger cranking the oven up to 200 degrees when I wasn't looking (early in the baking process too, little troll), made me hop a bit.  Looking at the picture in Global Baker, my end result was a bit more golden than it was perhaps intended to be, but it is seriously yum and definitely going to be made again.  (I tried it toasted this morning, and toasted is also good).

AND it has raisins in it.  Carrots and raisins, but still yum.  It makes no sense it me at all, but there you go.  I'm going to have to make a chocolate cake next, but to put the world to rights again. 

Naked loaf

Crumble topping

Voila!  A slightly fuzzy looking loaf of nomminess.  The photo-taking is a work in progress.

 

Badass banana bread

See this?  (Yes, I know it's not banana bread. Patience)

This is soup.

Italian bean and pasta soup. With about 6 ingredients.

Impossible to screw up, some would say.

Guess what?

I really do not understand how someone who enjoys food quite as much as I do could be completely incapable of putting ingredients together and creating something edible. It boggles the mind, it surely does. And yet. This bad boy, which looks perfectly innocent, went down the sink because it honestly tasted of nothing but salt.  I had Nutrigrain for dinner that night. Nutrigrain!  (I was far too distressed to even consider baked beans or eggs on toast)  Bad, bad, evil soup.  A souper fail, even (Ha!  Hahahahahahaaaaa a ... aaa ... hem.  Or, maybe a little tee hee, because that was a little bit clever?  Wasn't it ...?  No?  *sigh*)

It is also an awful photo (pre-new camera), which it totally deserves.

And now, the banana bread which was so much more successful because for some reason, putting baking ingredients together is a totally different tin of biscuits to your cooking kettle of fish.  I should've just made this instead of the soup for dinner.  It has bananas so it's wholesome.

Banana cake recipes are the husband's favourite, and I'm pretty partial myself, so they always have to be tried when we come across them.  The variations we have all seem to serve a different purpose too - there's one that's good iced if you want (generally, we don't), one that you definitely don't ice - it has a brown sugar/chocolate sprinkling on top, a layer of it through the middle and is enormous, so a good sharing cake too.  There's another that doesn't need much banana action if you've only got a couple of manky ones hanging about in the fruit bowl ... and so on. 

This little gem just popped out of nowhere when I turned the page in my Kiwi Diary this week (Er, last week.  It was this week when I uploaded the photos).  Sweet!  It's proper banana bread too, not just a loaf tin sized cake.  It's the sort that tastes awesome fresh out of the oven, great sliced the next day (not sure about the other days. I'm really not expecting it to last that long), but also toasted and buttered.  Badass banana bread indeed.  Bam!

Sunday brunch, yo!

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it.  There's not a lot I love more than parking up at The Raumati Social Club on a Sunday for brunch.  Except maybe on a Saturday.  Or Monday.  Or Wednesday through Friday.  Or for coffee, lunch, dinner, Sunday session tacos ...  Pretty much any of those days and any reason at all (or no reason whatsoever) do it for me.  I love it.  They're good peeps.

Happy

Sad

Happy.  So happy.

Happy, so long as I don't have to eat them. Mushrooms. Ack.

More happy.

Also, new camera!  Wooooo!  HAAAAAAAPPY!!  (I just have to take my time with the photos.  I feel like a bit of a dork, and then annoyed that I took photos too fast.  Silly)

Well, hello there, awesome thing which I must have

The birdhouse shelf by Thing Industries.

I spotted it late last night sitting up in bed (late-ish.  Late enough.  I guess not really very late at all.  It sure felt late though) flicking through the latest Urbis magazine.

My office wall requires this shelf.  Requires it.

And yes, I'm quite aware that it costs an awful lot and it's only a shelf.  I just don't care.  It's looks quirky!  And cool!  So very cool!  It's a house shaped shelf and I can put my books on top of!  And stuff in!  Books!  My pen cup!  My coaster when it's not being held down by coffee! My ... I have no idea how big it is.  Were there measurements on the website?  Did anyone notice?

Baking three ways

One. 

Healthy baking ... gluten, grain, wheat, dairy, refined sugar free (Petite Kitchen) espresso fudge brownies.

Except, they're not even remotely fudgey.  The promise of fudge is there, and the picture in the book certainly looks fudgey but ... I fudged them.  They tasted brilliant too which is what made it even more annoying.  I suspect being lazy and using runny honey over proper honey may have sunk me, but I've done this to brownies before.  Somehow, I turn them into cake.  Pah!

The kids liked them though.  Especially the little ginger kid who has food issues.  This everything-free baking and cooking seems to work for him.

Two. 

Not even baking.  I bought pikelets at Moore Wilsons, grabbed jam out the fridge (and didn't even check which jam I grabbed beyond it being red jam) and put cream in the Kitchenaid.  Lazy-pants.

Three.

Almost the total opposite of healthy baking.  Wholemeal oat ginger crunch cookies with ginger icing (Dean Brettschneider).

And, I had to take a photo of this, just because!  First cut into un-wrapped butter.  Bam!  (I needed 150 grams)  It's the little things.  What's a little bit annoying is that I cut it, thought myself a bit awesome, started to cut it up so that it could do its softening thing a bit faster and then decided that no, it was awesome enough to post, stuck the butter back together and took a photo ... but somehow during that process I gained a gram from 151 to 152.  Still,  clever-pants.

So, this is exciting

A few weeks ago, we made a very quick trip to Auckland.  There were a couple of important visits that we needed to make but I was crapping myself about taking the small people away on a tight schedule.  I crap myself about taking them away anywhere fullstop, to be fair.  They were so good though, it was worthy of marvel (which we did, believe me, the entire way home.  We were high as kites on our success).  It was almost ... easy.  Obviously we both felt like we'd conquered Everest and could fall over backwards and sleep for an entire day with no encouragement at all, but it was a lot easier than I'd dared hope in the few weeks of pre-going away anxiety attacks as I anticipated small people in cars then on planes, missing naps and quiet time and getting very excited and over tired and all those things that small people do when they're travelling. 

So naturally the next step is to plan and start working towards taking them on a 14 hour flight to North America for a holiday in Canada next year.  Cos that's how we roll.