If you're anything like me, when it comes to cooking, baking and creating any particular "special occasion food", you do it last minute. You know and are fully aware that said special occasion is approaching, nearing and almost here... and that along with it comes that special-occasion-food you love, but you still manage to actually put two and two together and go "Let's create a recipe a week early". Nup. It's just not how you roll. So it's last minute, you've got to work around public holiday shop closes, an just follow someone else's recipe, coz hey... You know it already works.
How was your weekend? I suppose it's still going isn't it? Gotta love long weekends.
As most of you would know (if you're my newsletter subscriber - if not sign up here or Twitter follower) I flew down to the Sunny Coast last week for an extended Easter getaway, visiting mum and my step dad, and then having both my sisters arrive too.
I was so excited to get to mums on Tuesday as it meant my (10 huge) assessments would all have been done and emailed off, my last college class would have been attended do (for the next 2months), our place would have all been boxed up and put in storage, my last days at work and saying bye to friends would have been done, and my bag packed ready for Thailand. And. it. all. was.
So flying down was bliss. I could breathe again. And every moment at mums has been bliss. I love it on the Sunny Coast. I might just end up there at some point. ..
Our Easter weekend was fabulous; plenty of laughter and mucking about, intertwined with delicious chocolate munching, sunshine bathing, forest walking trails and creek splashing, coast jogs that my body loved, a quick catch up with a girlfriend and baby snuggles, and of course a multiple cafe escapades (a favourite past time of all us females in the family it seems)
Buderim State Forest
But now here I am in SYDNEY! And the reason none of you knew about this was because I had to keep it the biggest secret ever as my best friend had no idea I was coming. Her husband grabbed me from the airport last night and I rocked up at her doorstep with a bunch of flowers, super-super excited, and she greeted me with arms, screaming, huge hugs, more screams, disbelief, and questions about the how's and why's I was infact at her doorstep... It was so so good. Just the way we wanted it.
I'll be in Sydney town til Thursday morning when B and I are then flying to Singapore. We were initially flying from Melbourne but with the thought of totally surprising my bestie who is always super busy as she is getting her amazing new biz off the ground... I had to do it!
Opting to crash on her floor so B, my girl, her hubby and I can all get maximus cuddle time, eating time, laughing time and catching-up in, I am so excited to be here!
So Thursday we fly to Singapore for a night, then on to Bangkok where our Thailand adventure will begin, and later onto Burma, we cannot wait to get over there. I will try my best to get your regular posts to you all, and in Thailand I think it won't be too hard, but in Burma - I think you'll have to live without me for those couple of weeks. I've read it's pretty much no-outside-world once you enter Burma. And to be honest I couldn't be more excited!
Until then though, You've still got me for a while.
These have no added sugars, no dairy and no gluten, which will leave you feeling good after having one of these. Enjoy this Easter with these delicious, healthy Hot Cross Buns.
White Cross on the top 2 TBS rice flour A little water
Method 1. Place the dates in the blender and chop 2. Add yeast, warm water, stevia and honey and blend until mixed up 3. Set aside in a bowl for 10 minutes 4. Place the other ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly 5. Add the yeast mixture to step 4, mix well and leave to rest for 5 minutes 6. Cover the mixture, then leave in a warm place until the mixture has doubled in size 7. Break the mixture up into bun-sized portions and place on a lined tray close together (I made my very rustic and just put them there with a spoon rather than rolling into a ball) 8. Leave the dough to rest for 5 minutes 9. If you wish, add a cross placing the mixture into a zip-back and cut a small hole in the corner. Pipe cross across the top. 10. Sprinkle / spray with water to help the dough go brown 11. Bake in the oven at 200 degrees for 10 minutes 12. Turn the oven down to 180 degrees and bake for a further 15 - 20 minutes 13. Remove from the oven, and leave to rest for 5 minutes before serving
This delicious recipe is from the relauncher
Sit down and put your feet up with one of these buns... and perhaps team it with this delicious mocha below.
David Wolfe's Sacred Mocha Coffee
+ Brew a hot pot of coffee with spring water (about a litre) and put aside
+ Add almond milk to the blender as desired if you like creamy mocha coffee
+ Add 1-3 teaspoons of honey to the blender if you like a sweetener in your mocha coffee
+ Pour the hot coffee into the blender directly onto all the ingredients. Cap and blend immediately. After 10-15 seconds, stop the blender, and pour the hot mocha through a strainer into coffee mugs. Taste and enjoy!
Well... I don't know where to start but I suppose it would be nice of me to sayHello
after so long! Over 8weeks now since I was last on here with you guys
and thank you for those that did contact me to ask where I was, what I
was doing, and why I wasn't blogging - knowing full well the joyI get from blogging!!
I've been so busy with my studies that I literally
forgot about my blog for a few weeks, and then just didn't have the time
to blog thereafter. I've had assessments and exams coming out my ears,
along with continuous worry, stress, and mild panic over how I was going
to get it all done! Of course it always get's done, but I have a
tendency to worry worry worry, which gets me nowhere but into a tizzy.
Distance study has it's pro's and con's - one con being there's no-one
but yourself to push you through the tough sticky bits. But it is
getting done and I'm feeling good about it :) Learning more new and in
depth topics to get those gears moving up top. It's been great and the
thirst I have for new knowledge is what keeps me going. The excitement I
feel when I begin to understand something and can regurgitate the
information to someone else. I love it!!
Apart from burying my head in the books, I've
had nothing too too exciting happen since my last post. A few things that have been wonderful though...
- I have done a Laughter Yoga course that I loved, have fun with and look forward to doing more of in the future. Have a look at this video where CNN news had a segment on it! Amazing!!
- Level 1 in Australian Bush Flowers which I fell in love with, and cannot wait to
incorporate, play with, experiment, and help others with! I've got a small delivery coming to me today that I cannot wait to get my hands into and start making up remedies for friends and family to try!
- a 5-day Easter weekend tripdown South; Brock and I drove to Tilba
Tilba with another friend, to stay at Brock's mate's place on his
eco-life property! Rolling permaculture gardens, spring water on tap, so
much greenery, beautiful people. There was the annual Tilba Festival on
the Saturday so we spent all Friday making risotto tarts, veggie
curries, raw power balls and muffins, before a break with live music
20mins away in a seaside town called Bermagui (love that place). Then
all day Saturday having fun selling out creations, chatting to locals,
listening to music, checking out the local honey guy and other
produce... lots of fun! Easter Sunday was a bit emotional for me for
different reasons but I did end the day smiling which is the most
important thing. Then Monday night we went to visit another friend and
stay with him in Batemans Bay. Amazing place. We had so much sensational
food, went on bush walks and bay walks, chilled out with tea and DVD's.
Bliss :)
- more social gatherings with friends have been great! I'm making
this more of a priority coz it's very easy for me to do nothing but
study and then wonder why I'm so stressed? No time to rest and have fun!
So a few dinner parties (always amazing with raw friends!), tea and
gossip catch-ups, phone chats with my sister in Cairns, quality time
with my man...
- I
made amazingly delicious mini triple-choc-tarts for the birthdays of
beautiful friends of mine
And yep, whatever thoughts are running through your head right now - they're spot on!
A delicious choc base (always my favourite part of a tart) with sweet soft velvety filling of 3 different flavours
And these mini versions were dessert for a dinner party with friends. Yum!
I'd love to give you the recipe, but as I tweaked it from the Cafe Gratitude recipe book, I Am Grateful, it'd be easier for you to just follow their recipe. If you can't find it anywhere, shoot me a line and I'll post it to you :)
- making decisions about moving to Cairns!!Yep. I want to do some face-to-face study and that's where my campus is. I'm excited at the thought of living with my big sis for a while up there in the heat of it all too! Having only been there once, I quickly fell in love with the place and cannot wait to get back!
- making decisions about starting an online site with health, food, well-being, fitness, info, tools, talks, products, the lot (very very exciting!!) Hard to contain myself on this one!!
- exploring herbs more and about to embark on a regime that I feel will do wonders for my skin, and the rest of my body (will tell more when I've worked it all out)
- enjoyed a few Hot Cross Buns over Easter. Yep, that's right! The amount of cooked food I eat is so minimal it's not worth mentioning but a good organic hot cross bun with coconut butter (generously spread) ontop is so delicious I look forward to it ever year! My gut is fine with wheat so no issues there. I've just gotta be prepared to not feel hunger pangs for about 5hrs instead of my usual 2hrs :)
Everything is rather exciting and a little hectic but I'm trying to focus more on the exciting bits! My little nephew is coming to visit next week, I hope to visit my dad in Bowral the week after, and get back to blogging for you and me regularly! I've got 3 dinner's on this week where we all eat raw food so I always love seeing what we all come up with!!
So thank you for your patience and hanging in there for me to return. Thank you again to all those who contacted me and left comments on my blog. I was very touched, and initially surprised at how much you guys wanted my posts! That was so beautiful to realise. Drop me a line anytime, always love hearing from yet-to-be-friends :)
I could say I went slightly carrot-mad last week, but I felt like my body was craving the orange beauties so I kinda went along with it. I was having between 500ml and 1L of fresh carrot juice everyday as an experiement to see how my skin conditions would fare having read so much on carrot juice recently (check out a blog post I did for the Raw Divas here). My skin didn't turn orange but my acne looks better :)
And with left over pulp from juicing so much I also made a big batch my my favourite carrot soup, and my favourite carrot falafels of Gena's you can find here, but never got 'round to making these delicious individual carrot cakes here. Another week perhaps coz you can freeze vegie pulp until you've got enough for what you want - or until you've got time to get in the kitch again!
If I can tune in and listen to what my body wants I'll run with it - so when it was screaming CARROT JUICE, that's what I did. And I feel amazing from drinking it! The only problem I have is when my body feels like chocolate - alot of chocolate - then I'm not so sure if my body is telling me the truth or playing little white lies :)
So with Easter just around the corner I've spent the last 2 days mucking around in the kitchen trying to make some choccies. I had a couple of recipes to try and a whole load of different ingredients to experiment with I was like a little kid in a lolly shop full of exciement!
So what was the outcome? Well let's start with the question "What did I learn?"
To trust in my own abilities more that's what. To not put all your eggs in one basket (no pun intended), and to make sure whatever happens when you're in the kitchen, remember to LAUGH!
Why? Because even when I followed each recipe they both turned out horrible! One tasted disgusting. One wouldn't mix properly...
Then I had problems where my chocolate wouldn't come out of the moulds (more than once which really did my head in). I mixed the ingredients too much in the second lot which made my once glossy silky mixture turn kinda chewy and thick ...
and ontop of that going wrong I was thinking about the deadlines I had for other things going on in my life, college work, packing that I still had to do to go away, and the house was a mess... ARGH! I felt like I was wasting time TRYING to be the Easter Bunny and make yummy choccies but it wasn't working!
It's been a stressful last couple of days (with a head cold trying to rear its ugly head at the same time but I'm not letting it) but I have now made my choccies!
And you know what? It was the laughter that made the biggest difference! That and deciding to poo-poo the recipes I had and come up with my own. TRUSTING in my own abilities and you know what? The best tasting ones are the ones I came up with myself! They were the smoothest, silkiest, easiest to work with look amazing!
Easiest Tastiest Choccie Recipe Ever!
1/2 cup coconut oil 1 cup cacao powder 25ml maple syrup 1/8 cup cacao butter, melted (you can omit this)
Melt the coconut oil and cacao butter down then slowly whisk in the cacao powder and maple syrup (or any other sweetener you like - by the time I got to this recipe after mucking up so many others, maple syrup was pretty much all I had left but it does give a beauiful depth to the flavour).
Pour your choccie into moulds or into a container to cut up into pieces or squares later on.
You can add anything you like to these too. Be creative! Nuts, seeds, goji berries, bee pollen, buckwheat crunchies... I also made a bunch with a few drops of peppermint oil for a minty surprise!
The hardest part of waiting for them to set!
(Another super easy recipe that also worked amazingly well and tasted sensational - if you can get your hands on CACAO LIQUER, melt that down and add sweetener to taste. That's it. And it sets at room temperature. The taste is incredible! I ran outta that stuff real quick!)
This recipe is so damn easy coz alot of people would have coconut oil in the panrty, but not alot of people have cacao butter lying around. And to be honest with you - as I am yet to perfect a chocolate recipe using predominantly cacao butter, coz I just don't like the taste of it! At all. So I need to find a ratio where I do. Where as coconut oil - now you're talking! The only down side is that they can't be kept at room temperature or they'll likely melt. Cacao butter wouldn't. But the health benefits of coconut oil versus those of cacao butter - ENDLESS (and you can read a little here) !!
So when my body craves choccies that I have made from my own recipes with lots of coconut oil, there's good reason and I will listen intently :)
But from tomorrow I'll be goingn away on retreat for 6 days and consuming nothing but GREEN SMOOTHIES which I am SO EXCITED about!! So I wont be doing any blogs for at least a week if not a few days more, but will be sure to SPILL ALL when I get back! Have an awesome long weekend!
