Bread 'n' lamingtons for Father's Day

I made THE most amazing bread yesterday, if I say so myself. This is going to be one of those ones that I'll want to play around with and perfect.

Recipe for a good sized loaf:
4 cups plain flour
2-3 cups warm water
1 tsp dry yeast
1 tsp salt

Mix the water and yeast in a large bowl. Add the sifted flour and salt to make a thick, but sticky, dough. It shouldn't be as thick as regular dough but not runny although it's this stickiness or wetness that creates the telltale chiabatta "holes". Do not overwork it. Mix until combined and that's it. Cover with gladwrap and leave for 12 hours. That's right, 12 hours!

Preheat the oven to around 180c. Turn the dough out onto a floured baking tray (you can use polenta instead of flour). Bake for around 1 hour - the colour should be a really deep golden brown.

You can add anything to the dough before you set it to rise - caraway seeds might be nice.

This is gorgeously chewy and dense chiabatta!

So that was the success story. Now for the disaster.

How could the Australian Women's Weekly let me down??? I followed their recipe for lamingtons and while they look great (in fact, I reckon they look better than the AWW ones), and they tasted great too, the cake was so thick and dense! Lamingtons should be light... (oh, yes, I MIGHT have forgotten that I didn't use cornflour - didn't have any - so maybe it wasn't the recipe's fault. Whatever.)

The garden - stage uno

The weekends have been cool but sunny, so Jeff and I have been out in the garden getting the veggie patch ready for the first planting. And Dad's been lending his farming expertise and his 72-year-old muscle, which is quite remarkable. The front garden's also a work in progress after we ripped out the "lawn" a few months ago. I use the term "lawn" loosely because the draught over the past decade or so has turned the grass in most neighbourhood lawns into dust bowls. We've ripped out the grass, put down a layer of weed mat and the new soil is arriving this weekend. We have 20 or so succulents waiting to go in as well as a tonne of potted plants and succulents that have been waiting for a permanent home for years.

We built the raised beds in the backyard a few weeks ago out of untreated hard wood. HEAVY WOOD. But well worth it. The herbs have been transplanted into other parts of the garden for now. Check out my collage of events.

I replanted some of the herbs, lettuce and silverbeet and we've been eating a lot of green over the past week.

This last weekend we lugged 3 square meters of soil down to the back yard for the veggie patch - in a 700 square meter block, that's a mighty long way. Dad and Jeff did the wheeling while I mostly filled the two barrows we borrowed from neighbours.

We discovered beautifully composted soil in our two bins and had a few bags of horse poo that we picked up near Daylesford. The prep work is done for the veggies.

Look at that compost! I'm going to put a little container in the kitchen and everything is going to be saved. Although I do want to make a couple of bigger bins.

I've ordered a bunch of heirloom seeds that should arrive in the next week so it's not quite over. I'm so excited about the seeds! I picked some crazy tomato varieties.

So we'll see what happens. I must keep up the momentum. After all, even David Hicks is a horticulturalist now.

Masterchef has a lot to answer for...

Masterchef Australia has really raised the bar in thousand of houses around Australia. Raising it so high that mealtimes can become a mystery box Olympics. Invite me for dinner and I'm seriously expecting you to serve Twice baked cheese souffle, Roast Duck Breast with Wild Flower Salad, Chocolate Fondant with Amaretto Milkshake and Pina Coladas. Forget steak and three veg.


Recently Jeff and I went to the Lindt shop on Collins Street and had their macaroons, that they like to call Delice. Call em what you like, they're delicious! So yesterday, Jeff and I decided to venture into the newly renovated kitchen determined to make French Almond Macaroons. I found a recipe on taste.com for macaroons with orange blossom and mandarin rind buttercream and another with rose and berry buttercream fillings. It all seemed easy enough, but, visually, the result wasn't exactly what I'd hoped for. Here's what they're supposed to look like.

photo courtesy Ricoeurian

So what went wrong? The piping of the biscuits, for sure - note to self, try not to make biscuits look like dog turds. They were slightly overcooked, looking at the colour. The taste, however, was perfect and the texture was nice and crunchy on the outside and wonderfully squidgy and chewy towards the centre.