Vanilla & Chocolate Hazelnut Cupcakes

Last weekend we went up to Toowoomba to celebrate my Nan’s 80th Birthday. As part of the bring and share morning tea, I made some cupcakes. The chocolate hazelnut ones worked a treat and looked quite nice, while the vanilla ones were overfilled a bit and ended up looking a bit monstrous. I had to finish making the vanilla ones the morning of the party, so unfortunately I didn’t get a shot of the completed product, but I decorated the top with a vanilla buttercream and sprinkles.

The chocolate hazelnut ones worked a bit better I think. They had a Nutella and chopped hazelnut centre, which broke up the dryness of the gluten free sponge.

To finish, I sprinkled the top with more chopped hazelnuts, which I think looked quite nice.

I look forward to making these cupcakes again, though hopefully I won’t overfill the vanilla ones…

Lemon Drizzle Cake

Our kitchen renovation is nearly done (just splash-backs and down-lights to go!) and so today was the perfect time to try out my new Kitchenaid stand mixer, which I bought last week. I’d seen various people make lemon drizzle cakes recently, so I thought i’d give it a go! You could use pretty much any recipe, as lemon drizzle is a classic. For this one I just substituted in gluten free flour and lactose free milk

I was really happy with how easy it was to use the kitchenaid, and how well it brought everything together. It was rather hypnotic watching the paddle combine everything to a thick batter consistency.

Our new oven got a workout too. The recipe I used said to cook for 40 – 45 mins at 180C degrees, but I used the fan forced setting on our oven and dropped the temperature to 170C degrees. I’ll be interested to see how the bake changes on a normal top/bottom heating setting, so that’ll be a good attempt for later. The recipe also asked for 1 large tin, but I only had 2 small tins, so I split the mixture and made two smaller cakes instead.

I really think the star of this recipe is the drizzle, just the juice of 2 lemons dissolved with 1/2 cup of caster sugar. It makes the cake very moist, which is useful for a gluten free recipe. The lightness of the texture surprised me as well. As usual with gluten free baking, it does fall apart more easily than its non-gluten free counterpart, so be aware you might be picking crumbs off your counter while you shovel down a slice.

Overall I loved this bake. I’d never eaten a lemon drizzle cake before so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the simplicity of the recipe and how delicious the end result was ensures i’ll be adding this to my baking arsenal.

2013 Reading Challenge: A Summary

Ok, so I am aware that I didn’t do my three quarter way blogpost at the end of September like I should have, but due the complete craziness of University at the time, I didn’t get around to it, so this post will have to include all of that information as well. To start with the books I read for the second half of the year are as follows:

July

1. The White Queen – Phillipa Gregory

2. The Big Over Easy – Jasper Fforde

August

1. The ABC Murders – Agatha Christie

2. The Fourth Bear – Jasper Fforde

September

1. North & South – Elizabeth Gaskell

2. Eragon – Christopher Paolini

3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – JK Rowling

October

1. Eldest – Christopher Paolini

2. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle

November

1. The Man in the Brown Suit – Agatha Christie

2. The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Agatha Christie

3. The Secret Adversary – Agatha Christie

4. The Green Mill Murder – Kerry Greenwood

December

1. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

As you can see, I started to fall quite behind my required number of books per month in the later half of the year. I knew this was likely when I started my challenge in January, but I was hoping i’d be able to push through it. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, so at the end of December 2013, I read 33 of the 36 books I  hoped to. It’s not as bad as it could have been. And i’m still pleased with my self for reading that many, on top of all my university reading as well. So all the 33 books I read this year are available for you too see at my Goodreads page, and you can also see the star rating I gave to each of them.

So my favourite book that I read in the second half of the year was a bit of a difficult one to choose. There was nothing as mind-blowing and laugh-out-loud funny as The Eyre Affair had been in the early half of the year, so it was difficult to pick my favourite. In October I finally got around to reading The Hound of the Baskervilles from my beautiful complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which I got for my birthday this year, and I enjoyed reading it immensely. I at one point was worried when late at night I exclaimed out loud at a plot twist and thought I might have woken someone up. I read a lot of murder mysteries in the last few months, and quite a number of Agatha Christie’s. So i’ve decided that my favourite book for the July-December leg of the challenge was Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit.

It was one of the few Christie novels I haven’t seen an adaptation of or already read, so it was thrilling to have absolutely no idea what was going to happen. I found the protagonist Anne Beddingfield to be quite interesting, and even until the last minute I had no idea who the murderer was. It was a really fun and compelling read and is probably my favourite Agatha Christie novel.

So, next year starts tomorrow, and i’m renewing my 36 book challenge for 2014. I’m starting quite ambitiously and hoping to re-read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I haven’t done since I was 10. Hopefully i’ll reach the goal this time, or at least try to read and update regularly. As always, you can connect with me on Goodreads, and let me know there or in the comments below what  your favourite books of 2013 been, or if there are any books you’d recommend.

Review: The Beginning and the End of Everything

A few months ago I mentioned in this post that Josh Pyke was releasing a new album this year, and he did just that about 2 weeks ago. Now that i’ve had enough time to listen to it, I thought i’d give a quick review of my feelings about it.

The Beginning and the End of Everything is Josh Pyke’s 4th album. In the years since his first album Memories and Dust was released, Pyke has matured his writing style, added layers and depth to his music. But what strikes me first about this new album is how it seems to feel a lot more like his debut album than the last two releases. There is optimism in the songs, but also the underlying insecurities. This is most notable in the song “Feet of Clay” a reference to the dream by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon in which he saw a man dressed entirely in gold and steel but had feet of clay. The analogy has comes to mean a character flaw or weakness. The lyrics of the song capture this perfectly…

But like a pin in the wheel we spin
And all of them fears they come back again
Look at me now, what a state I’m in
So how can I walk on my feet of clay

Other stand out tracks on the album for me were the title track “The Beginning and the End of Everything” and the lead single “Leeward Side”. All of these songs are catchy and upbeat, with layers of hand claps, well timed percussion and occasionally piano. A slower and more soulful song is “All the Very Best of Us” which is done as a duet with Singer Songwriter Holly Throsby. This song is very similar to the song “Punch in the Heat” from his last release, which featured Little Birdy singer Katy Steele. It’s a beautiful song with gorgeous harmonies, and it definitely one of my favourites on the album.

Contrasted with the very balanced and gorgeous songs is the third last track on the album “Order has Abandoned Us” which pretty much speaks for itself. The song is quite shambolic and all over the place to start with, and it took me quite a few listens before I liked it alongside the rest of the album. However, when the horns kick in later in the song, it’s hard not to at least tap your foot.

My only other criticism is that it’s quite a short album, at only 36 minutes – the shortest of any of his albums. It would have been nice to see a bonus track maybe, and Josh himself has admitted there are a few tracks that didn’t make the final release which he quite liked, so maybe we’ll see a b-side release in the future.

I’m giving The Beginning and the End of Everything by Josh Pyke 4 out of 5 stars.

2013 Reading Challenge: Halfway There!

It’s the end of June, which means i’m halfway through my Reading Challenge for this year. So far i’ve read 19 books this year, and you can check out the first three months at this post. So, at the end of March I had finished reading D.A Carson’s Basics for Believers, but due to my excitement about receiving the final book in the Infernal Devices trilogy, I didn’t actually wait until April to start (and finish) reading it, so I actually read 4 books in March. So this is how the last three months have looked!

March (Bonus round!)

• Clockwork Princess – Cassandra Clare.

April

• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
• The Jane Austen Bookclub – Karen Joy Fowler
• The Autumn Castle – Kim Wilkins

May

• The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
• The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
• Lost in a Good Book – Jasper Fforde

June

• A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle
• Well of Lost Plots – Jasper Fforde
• High Fidelity – Nick Hornby

So this brings my tally up to 19 books! It was a bit of a mixed batch this quarter. I enjoyed Jane Eyre and loved re-reading Kim Wilkins’ Autumn Castle, but The Jane Austen Book Club and The Time Traveler’s Wife both left me a bit disappointed. But by far my favourite book of the last three months was…

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde! I’m going to say The Eyre Affair because it’s the first in the series, even though I actually think the whole Thursday Next series is worthy of it. So The Eyre Affair introduces us to literary detective Thursday Next, a woman who lives in a a parallel England where Dodos have been brought back to life, Wales is a Republic, and England has been at War with Russia for hundreds of years. Next’s job is to police crimes relating to literature and when someone starts stealing characters out of original manuscripts, she has to act quick. Add in the mysterious Goliath mega corporation, represented in this book by the loathsome Jack Schitt, and a handful of characters from Bronte’s Jane Eyre and you’ve got an amazing mix of intelligent and eventful plot devices that will stop you being able to put the book down. I will say this though, if you want to get the most out of these books, a basic understanding of classic literature is helpful. I had read Jane Eyre very recently and so the references were absolutely delightful when they cropped up. Another thing I really loved about the book was the excerpts at the start of each chapter from Thursday’s autobiography, written presumably quite some time after the events of the book. This particular excerpt explains the colourful Next family…

“…I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My Brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton – go figure. My mother was called Wednesday but was born on a Sunday – I don’t know why – and my Father had no name at all – his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn’t exist at all. It didn’t matter. He was always Dad to me…”

So that’s the first 6 months of my Reading Challenge. Once again, if you’ve got a recommendation feel free to leave it in the comments, and i’ll try my best to read it! And if you want to check out what i’m reading throughout the months, and what I rate books – you can connect with me on my Goodreads profile.

Books, Books, Books!

This weekend has been a very book-tastic weekend. I celebrated my birthday on Friday and received two of the most gorgeous books ever from my Parents! The first was The Complete Sherlock Holmes in a green cloth bound edition with gold embroidery, which was released for Arthur Conan Doyle’s 150th Anniversary. The second was Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales in a similar edition, with gold lined pages and illustrations. I’ve been eying off both of these books for some time, and was thrilled to receive them on Friday.

Then on Saturday was Lifeline Bookfest in Brisbane, where I scored eight books for only $33.00! Among these were two Agatha Christie books (The Man in the Brown Suit, and The ABC Murders), High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde (whose Thurday Next series i’ve been reading and will blog more about in my 2013 reading challenge update at the end of June), Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (which I discovered I already owned when I got home, d’oh!),  two Phillipa Gregory novels, The White Queen and The Red Queen which are set during the War of the Roses, and Ben Elton’s Dead Famous (which was recommended to me when I was 14, and i’ve only just got around to buying). Overall an impressive haul. I could’ve found many many more, but I’m trying to pay off the new hard drive I had to buy when my computer unexpectedly died a week ago.

Favourite Things: Memories & Dust

Going to get a bit experimental with a new series of blog posts about my favourite things, ranging from book, music, toys and things that have meant a great deal to me over the last 20ish years of my life.

Memories & Dust

The first thing I wanted to talk about was an album that meant a lot to me while I was in high school. I’ve made no secret of the fact I didn’t enjoy High School, and this album and artist really helped me through a lot of it. Josh Pyke’s first album Memories & Dust, was a complete brain explosion when I was 13, going on 14. Up until this point I’d very much listened to whatever everyone else was listening to, without a discernible music taste of my own. But Josh Pyke was my first musical love and Memories & Dust was the album that would define most of my music taste for the rest of high school and onward.

I saw Josh Pyke live for the first time in late 2007, when he supported John Butler Trio at Riverstage, to which I mercilessly dragged my family and friend Sophie along to. As it turned out they were all very keen to see JBT and didn’t care much for Josh Pyke, imagine that! The only thing greater than being in the mosh-pit for my favourite artist was actually meeting him afterwards. It was the greatest moment of my 14 yr old life. Over the next five years I met Josh Pyke again at several concerts, and despite my best efforts, I’ve never been able to communicate to him how much his music meant to me in a very difficult time of my life.

This week Josh Pyke announced his fourth album The Beginning and the End of Everything which will be released on July 5th this year. I’m really interested to see what direction the new album takes, and even if it sounds nothing like the album I fell in love with 6 years ago, I’m sure it’ll be brilliant.

Josh Pyke and Me – May 2012

2013 Reading Challenge: The First Quarter!

Happy Easter everyone, I hope you all get some time off over the break to relax! I finished my last March book today, so it’s time to reflect on the first 9 books i’ve read this year!

January

• City Of Bones – Cassandra Clare
• City Of Ash – Cassandra Clare
• City Of Glass – Cassandra Clare

February

• The Hobbit – J.R.R Tolkien
• Clockwork Angel – Cassandra Clare
• Dracula – Bram Stoker

March

• Clockwork Prince – Cassandra Clare
• Atonement – Ian McEwan
• Basics For Believers – D.A Carson

Nine books already! I’m pretty sure that was about how many I read all of last year. I really enjoyed re-reading The Hobbit in February, and Basics for Believers (lent to me by the lovely Danae) was definitely some food for thought! So the challenge is going well, and i’ve already got my first book lined up for April, the last book in the Infernal Devices Trilogy by Cassandra Clare – Clockwork Princess. In the mean time, I thought i’d talk a bit about my favourite book for the first quarter.

*drumroll*

Atonement by Ian McEwan! I honestly didn’t expect to enjoy this book as much as I did (if you can in fact enjoy a book like Atonement). What hit me first about the book was how beautifully written it is. The book focuses on the events from several different point of views thoughout the book, and I was surprised at how well the mental state of the different characters bled into their accounts of events. My favourite part of the book was when the youngest sister, Briony, decides to leave behind childhood at age thirteen.

No longer a playwright and feeling all the more refreshed for that, and watching out for broken glass, she moved further round the temple, working along the fringe where the nibbled grass met the disorderly undergrowth that spilled out from among the trees. Flaying the nettles was becoming a self-purification, and it was childhood she set about now, having no further need for it. One spindly specimen stood in for everything she had been up until this moment. But that was not enough. Planting her feet firmly in the grass, she disposed of her old self year by year in thirteen strokes. She severed the sickly dependency of infancy and early childhood, and the schoolgirl eager to show off and be praised, and the eleven-year-old’s silly pride in her first stories and her reliance on her mother’s good opinion. They flew over her left shoulder and lay at her feet. The slender tip of the switch made a two-tone sound as it sliced the air. No more! she made it say. Enough! Take that! (Atonement, Chapter 7)

I had seen the film of Atonement, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy long before I decided to read the book, which in a sense was a bad idea, because it’s slightly harder to read if you know what’s coming. Again, it is a very heartbreaking book- somewhat similar to watching a train crash in slowmotion. But it’s my book of the quarter anyway, because despite all that, I found that I couldn’t put it down.

I’m looking for suggestions of books to read, so if you have one leave it in the comments and i’ll add it to my queue!

2013 Reading Challenge – January & February

At some point in January, I decided that I was going to try and read three books a month for the entire year. It mostly came about when I decided to re-read a trilogy of Young Adult fantasy books I read years ago. I read the entire trilogy in three days. So I knew it was possible, and I wanted to see if I could do it for the rest of the year. So far, the year has looked like this:

January

• City Of Bones – Cassandra Clare
• City Of Ash – Cassandra Clare
• City Of Glass – Cassandra Clare

February

• The Hobbit – J.R.R Tolkien
• Clockwork Angel – Cassandra Clare
• Dracula – Bram Stoker (Currently Reading)

With about 12 days to finish Dracula and only a few chapters in, i’ve really got to get a move on. I’m not sure what i’ll read later on in the year, but i’ve got Cassandra Clare’s next book in the Infernal Devices series on its way to me from the UK at the moment. I know I want to re-read Lord Of The Rings at some point though, because I haven’t read it since I was ten. I’ll post a new blog every two months, so you can see what i’ve been reading. It’ll also hopefully encourage me to keep to this challenge.

Wild Weather Woes

January hasn’t been a good month for weather in previous years. In 2011 we had the worst floods Brisbane had seen in four decades, and this year it looked like we would be dealing with the same sort of thing. Thankfully for people in South-East Queensland, things weren’t that bad. But people living up the coast weren’t so lucky.

One of the hardest hit places was the costal town of Bargara, about ten minutes drive out of Bundaberg. Ironically, we spent a week on Holiday there only a month and a half ago. Back then it looked like this:

Bargara, December 2012

But after being battered by cyclonic winds and rain for two days, Bargara looked like this:

Bargara, January 2013 (source: Courier Mail/ Ten News)

 

And this is before it flooded. This photo is of the resorts down the road from the one we stayed in for a week. It feels harder for me to watch the news and read the paper when so many of the worst hit areas are ones I still remember fondly from a holiday not too long ago. I can barely imagine what the people who live in Bargara and Bundaberg are feeling now.

Back in Brisbane, we’ve been moved onto drought-like water restrictions because the water treatment plant has been flooded, but most people in the greater Brisbane area have been saved the pain of a second major flood cleanup, so it feels somehow wrong to complain. We were only without power for twenty-two hours, which wasn’t even long enough for the food in the freezer to fully defrost.

I’ll leave you with a photo taken by Commander Chris Hadfield aboard the International Space Station, who took this photo of the floodwaters in Bundaberg flowing back out into the ocean.

Bundaberg flood from ISS. (source: twitter @Cmdr_Hadfield)