Onion bread, crocheted princess crowns and milk tart!

I had to post a picture of this onion and cheese bread that Champ made. It smelled delicious and was just perfect with our butternut squash soup. Yummy!
Kiki came to me to show off her princess crown :D it did made me giggle. It was a little frustrating for her as it kept slipping off
so I crocheted her one quickly.
she was so very happy with it :)
And once her sister saw it, she wanted one too. Here they are playing princesses and doggies.
I also decided to make a South African milk tart or melktert. Here is the recipe that I used.

For the crust, use whatever base you like; puff pastry, shortcrust pastry or a cake pastry.
The pie is quite small so you might want to do 1 and half times the amounts.

500ml (2cups) milk
1 piece stick cinnamon or grated yellow rind of an orange
60ml (1/4 cup) sugar
45ml (3 tbsp) plain flour
15 ml (1 tbsp) cornflour
1 ml (1/4 tsp) salt
30 ml (2 tbsp) butter
3 eggs
cinnamon sugar

Make and cook your crust.

Preheat oven to 220 oC (425 oF)

Boil milk with cinnamon stick.

Combine sugar, flour, cornflour and salt.

Gradually add hot milk stirring all the time.

Put back in pan and cook for about 5 minutes until the mixture has thickened nicely.

Remove from heat, remove cinnamon and add butter. Cool slightly

Beat eggs and add. Pour into pie dish.

Bake for 20 minutes and reduce heat to 200 oC (400 oC) after the first 10 minutes

Cool slightly and sprinkle cinnamon and sugar mix over the top.
Although you can eat it warm, we all love it cool.
For you Kelly x

Making rusks

I loved rusks as a child and thought that they would be a great snack food for the kids especially since 1) they keep for so long (turned out that didn't matter so much) and 2) they take a while to crunch though them.
So getting out my South African cook book I found a few recipes. I was already to make a bread like dough with yeast but I found this recipe that is more cakey. I halved the recipe but when I do it again I will keep the full recipe as it takes a while to dry them out in the oven, so you may as well have a bigger batch.

Buttermilk rusks
250g butter
200g sugar (4/5 cup)
2 tsp salt
2 cups buttermilk (500ml) - I didn't have buttermilk so I used regular milk with 2 tbsp of white vinegar
1kg self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
2 large or 3 smaller eggs

preheat oven at 190 oC and grease 2 loaf tins

Slowly melt the butter and add the sugar, salt and buttermilk, mixing well.
Sift together flour and baking powder
Add the eggs to lukewarm butter mix and then stir into flour mixture until very well blended. Knead lightly.
Roll them into balls
and pack them closely in the tin. Bake for about 30-45 minutes until cooked through
Googs playing with 'jelly beans' while waiting.

lovely and risen
break pieces apart. Rip don't cut. place on baking tin and cook in 100 oC oven until dried out ( couple of hours)
all ready for snacking

Next I want to try the yeasty ones. yummy!

Mish mashing again :)

Getting some fresh air and a chance to go riding in between the snow and ice.
Clearing an area for.........chickens!!!!! We are hoping to get chickens in the next few weeks! We have been talking about it for months...maybe longer and finally decided to take the plunge.
The kids were very eager and worked hard to clear weeds and branches. Champ even managed to find 3 rotten squashes in there that he had planted last year.
Boo was pacing out where the coop was going to go.
Warming up with an apple and blackberry crumble with walnuts.
A batch of chocolate chip cookies. Due to the fact that we are back on our diet after the Christmas feasting, I gave most of the cookies away. It's weird, as soon as I go on a diet all that I want to do is read cookery books and bake. At least the house smells good :)
And it has been good to start having friends over again.
Boo reading to everyone
'School' time! and a chance to try out their new painting boxes.
Goog's painting of rocks.
Kiki's monster


Googs spent almost an hour mixing colours
Kiki soon had enough and played duck that layed marble eggs which obviously required safety goggles :)

Playing flying penguin.

And building houses

Almost every outfit that Kiki has worn recently has been inside out, back to front ...or both. I ask her if she wanted me to change it and she ALWAYS answers "NO"! I am still learning to hold my tongue.
And here are the paintings that the kids came up with today. I think that they are really excited about the chickens :)
This is Champs
and Boos
Kiki's monster
and Boo's swans.

Back to 'school'

So here we are, all excited and motivated to learn at the beginning of the year.
Our home ed group had activities on every day this week, but we are all still very calm after our wonderful laid back Christmas, so we decided to not throw ourselves back into everything straight away and have this week off. The kids did spend HOURS chatting to their friends on the phone and even wrote a couple of letters (snail mail).
Kiki wanted to sort out some fun buttons that my Mom gave us.

She said that it looked like a party :) Googs took this picture...
and this one of his brother and sister writing some silly rhymes/poems.
Making a slide. The reason that the left hand side of the picture is fuzzy is because Googs had progressed (or regressed) from taking photos of his family and toys, and started taking pictures of his nose and inside his mouth :)
And yes, there are a LOT of pictures of pjs. I think that it may be our school uniform - they are comfortable and warm and we have lots of them :D
A late Christmas present arrived this week too. A magic kit. I loved the way that the younger two sat in front of Boo in anticipation of some real magic....they were a little disappointed :P until, of course, she perfects the art.
Googs being roped in to be the audience again and Kiki playing with little white rabbits.
We managed to complete a WONDERFUL puzzle in a couple of days.

Some friends popped in to visit so we decided to make a sticky toffee pudding.
It was very sweet and gooey, simply delicious.
We had so much sauce left over that I didn't want to waste it so I boiled it some until until it turned into toffee.

Since we had left over dates from the other night, and I needed an activity for Googs and Kiki while the older two did their work, we decided to make a date cake.

Googs wanted to do the chopping
Kiki the stirring

and they BOTH licked the bowl :)
Waiting for the cake to bake by finding Wally.
and playing string games
We broke up some of the toffee and added that too so it was extra yummy.
And it snowed again! I love this picture of the boys watching it fall.

The cold weather was perfect for a movie.
And I played around with the waterpaint. After I took this pic I realised that I hadn't shaded under the fairy and now every time I look at the pic it bugs me :) oh well...