I'd like to say the classic lemon bar recipe I'm going to share was made using lemons from my lemon tree.
But that would be lying.
In fact, a few weeks ago I went outside to the garden and found an absolute lemon-scented mess littering the ground - apparently, the birds in my area had thought it quite fun to take a single bit out of every. single. lemon on the tree!
So this recipe was made using shop-bought lemons, but don't let that deter you - you'd be hard pressed to find a better lemon bar recipe than this one (I'll back up my claim with a lemon bar - care to try some?)
I adapted my recipe from Joy the Baker and here's how you can make your very own:
1. Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350F) and line an 8x8" tin with baking paper.
2. Cream 113g of butter with 1/2 cup sugar using a stand-mixer (I use the KitchenAid) for about 3-5 minutes until light and fluffy. Add 1 cup of plain flour and a pinch of salt and don't forget to scrape down the sides of the bowl!
3. Pour the crust mixture into the tin and press it down evenly over the base of the tin with your fingertips. To smooth it out, I used the back of a spoon and rubbed the crust.
4. Bake the crust for 15-18 minutes until browned. Make sure you bake it in the top third of the oven, else it will take a lot longer for your base to bake (and that would mean longer until you get to eat lemon bars, so we can't have that, can we?)
5. While the crust is baking, whisk 2 large eggs with 3/4 cup white sugar until the mixture gets slightly thicker. Add 1 tsp fresh lemon zest (from your lemon tree or otherwise - pesky birds!) and 3 tablespoons of plain flour and 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice.
6. Take your crust out of the oven once its 15-18 minutes are up, and pour your lemony liquid on top!
7. Bake for a further 18-20 minutes until the top layer doesn't jiggle in the middle. Again, make sure your tray is in the top 1/3 of the oven!
8. Leave to cool completely while still in the tin, then take the slab out of the tin and cut into squares, dusting with a heavy dousing of icing sugar - the sweet really does help the sour.
1. One month with this boy <3
2. Lucky enough to see Vivid Sydney on a Harbour Cruise with family
3. Goats at work to mow the lawn (hehe they love all scraps!)
4. Played barefoot lawn bowls at Paddo Bowls for a friend's birthday
A few weeks ago, on a chilly and grey day, I skipped Uni and spent the day instead with my dad - we'd won a competition for an airside tour of Sydney airport, and boy was it great!!
We hopped on a bus and began our way out onto the live runway...
Standing behind some barricades, we all snapped away, wearing fluro yellow vests and barcoded-name tags (admittedly we look a bit dorky hehe).
From this vantage point we got some fantastic photos, with the planes landing right over Airport Drive and in our direct line of sight.
The only thing threatening our day was the rain - and when we had had our fill of this area and jumped back on the bus for a spin around all three of Sydney's runways - our bus stopped. A blue light was flashing on a pole above us: lightning within a 10km radius.
Luckily for us, the danger passed and we moved onto a part of the tour I wasn't particularly looking forward to, but I was dead wrong. The bus pulled up into the parking bay of Sydney Airport's Fire Service, and the fluro yellow beasts within were exposed.
One lucky member got his name called out, and was firing that strong stream of water from the firetruck. Despite the light but persistent rain chilling me to my bones, it was still fun to be hit by the truck's water 'spout' as it was moved from side to side to create a sort of hazy-water-spiral.
As the rain began to get heavier, though, we moved onto our final plane-watching spot, which was the closest to a live runway we had gotten all day!
I had a brilliant day - could not stop talking about it for the rest of the afternoon, and hardly wanted to give back my safety vest hehe!
If you fancy a day well-spent at the airport, the day is run by the YSSY forum, and was not limited only to this day. The Sydney Airport open day was run for the Friday and Saturday, with a trivia night and dinner also available to win! If you don't live in Sydney, never fear, for the open days run Australia-wide :) I'll definitely be putting my name in the draw again next year!
It's been a week or two since Easter now (how was everyone's Easter, by the way? Mine was a little hectic with both sides of my family - Greek Orthodox and Catholic - coming together on one weekend!) so I think it's about time we began to think about the healthy intentions our year started out with.
But I have my own brand of healthy - and that means not missing out on a thing! So why not have your pizza and eat it too?
I've been meaning to make a cauliflower crust for a pizza for quite a while now, and when I found the simple and, in the author's words, 'BEST' recipe around (I've adapted my recipe from http://www.theluckypennyblog.com/2013/02/the-best-cauliflower-crust-pizza.html) I just had to make it for dinner last night!
And it's super simple, though I found it a little time consuming probably because I'd never done anything like it before.
Firstly, cut a cauliflower head into florets and wash thoroughly, then blitz in your food processor (it took mine quite a few go's so don't fret, pet!)
It will look like this, now:
Then just cover with cling film and microwave it for 4 minutes, before dumping it on a tea towel and leaving it for about 5 minutes to cool slightly. Too hot to handle!
Once cooled, wring the life out of your cauliflower 'flour'. I was so surprised at the amount of water that comes out of a cauliflower, and to ensure I got a crisp crust that I could pick up and eat like a pizza, I wrung mine twice - first in a thick tea towel, then a much thinner one.
Pour the cauliflower into a bowl, then add 2 eggs, a pinch of salt, 1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese + 2/3 cup grated 'pizza'/mozzarella cheese, plus a pink of dried oregano. Mix, mix, mix with your hands to form a sort of dough! The dough is wet, and you won't be able to roll it out like a normal pizza dough, so just halve the recipe and pat the dough down on two separate lined baking trays to form a circular pizza shape (you know what a pizza looks like!)
While you're doing all this, pre-heat your oven to 250 degrees Celsius. Bake the two pizzas for 15 minutes until nice and crisp - do not rush this baking process because once you put toppings on the pizza the base will not crisp up anymore!
Add your toppings (I used pizza sauce, cheese, peppers, pequillo peppers) and bake once more for 10 minutes or until your cheese has melted. Et voila! A much lighter version of a pizza - in fact, I could probably have eaten the whole thing on my own!
Not much to post today - just one of my favourite holiday snapshots from England. It truly does represent the calm I had in January before the 'storm' of work and catching up with busy lives once the year well and truly kicked off.
As promised, I have the first of my England holiday posts, and to start off I'd like to talk about the best decision we made when on holidays.
Initially, we were planning to catch trains around the country, but when we discovered the insanely high prices of cross-country travel, renting a car seemed the best option. And it delivered on value a hundred fold!
Here's our little car!
After four brilliant days in London, we drove to Liverpool, and got to see so many sites and little corners of England that we would never have seem otherwise.
Before we even left London, we visited St. John's Wood to see Paul McCartney's London home, as well as write on the walls of Abbey Road Studios and be total tourists by crossing that famous pedestrian crossing.
We hadn't expected to see much but Motorways, so when we began to find little nuggets of interesting places, it became one of the most memorable days of the entire holiday.
Sorry for the blurry photo of Birmingham above - we didn't actually stop in the city itself but rather drove through on a quick sight-seeing tour.
It was on this first road trip that we were able to see an English sunset, since until this fifth day in England, as the sun sets near 4pm, we'd always been inside at the time of the sunset, only to emerge once night had well and truly fallen.
By far my favourite stop-over on this drive to Liverpool was in the pottery-town of Stoke-on-Trent. I was very happy to find that an antique thimble I bought in Plymouth later on was made in this town! It was gorgeous, and we walked through some of the streets before it started to get late and we began to get hungry...
... which is of course when we bought some Gooeys! I was obsessed by these biscuits and over the trip we tried other flavours but nothing beat the Hazelnut flavour pictured above!
All the places I've mentioned so far were those that we saw on that first day of driving, but after leaving our car at Liverpool Lime St Station, we eventually picked it up again four days later and used the car for the rest of the trip.
It allowed us to see so much, and go so many places:
We ventured out of Liverpool centre of the John Lennon Airport... and Speke!
...and we can't forget the opportunity to visit Stonehenge twice because the first time it rained so much we couldn't get many good photos, and the second time the rain held out until we reached the carpark again...
...we visited so many gorgeous little villages and hamlets, including Salisbury, Kingshead, Dartmouth, Bath and Axminster, and were able to deviate from our planned itinerary and choose to go to Cardiff, Bristol, Plymouth and Oxford...
Driving around England was a magical experience and one that I treasure above all else on the trip (although driving on those tiny hedged-in 'B' roads in the night was a little thrilling for me!)
Hello! It's been a long time since I've last blogged, but that's because...I WENT TO ENGLAND!!!! (and had the best time of my life ever!)
I have a host of posts lined up for you all, as I said in my last post, but for today I thought I'd share probably one of the best bonding-time walks I've ever had with my dog, Cloe.
We began with a routine walk to the park, where instead of going along our usually track like we usually do (to get our walk over and done with - tick! - for the day) I sat down on the grass and called her over. She was utterly confused, probably thinking 'I thought this was a walk!'
She didn't seem to mind too much, though - this yawn shows that she was rather happy to sit down for a minute after our efforts to get to the park itself.
But then....this look started to happen. The 'alright now, let's not be lazy, please let's keep walking!' look. (This is actually my favourite photo of the lot!)
And to my complete surprise, Cloe began to run, tearing across the grass until...
...she found something to rub herself against. I always find this an amusing thing that dog's do, and the fact that she did it while I had my camera made me very happy indeed :)
Eventually, after one of the best and most refreshing walks we've ever shared, we made it to the bay area just off the park, where Cloe enjoyed some good ol' digging and I found a jelly blubber or two to throw back into the water.
