When I was young, all I wanted was a surprise party and to this day, I have never had a surprise party. My parents didn’t really fuss much about birthdays and celebrations. To them, it’s an excuse to eat great food and give a red packet of money to a child. That was much easier than traversing the minefield of buying teenager’s and adults gifts. The elaborate planning necessary for a surprise party plus the secrecy which is against my mother’s genetic makeup (she blurted out to many of our wedding guests on my wedding that I had forgotten to bring along my underwear-discretion is not her forte) meant that a surprise party would never eventuate.
Still, would it have killed them to throw me one surprise party? 
I am of the opposite thinking. Life isn’t quite as fun without the occasional surprise. And if it’s in food form and it’s not a surprise like “Oh guess what? You just ate a fermented yak’s testicles” then all the better. I was pondering pavlovas, as you do when you’re hungry and have a few egg whites in the fridge. I originally wanted to make a trifle with a meringue top burnished with a blowtorch but ever since Donna Hay put a trifle on her current magazine cover and eight trifle recipes inside, trifle bowls are about as scarce as a quiet night at home in December.
So I said to myself as I was shopping “Stuff it!” and stomped off and out of the shop. Hmmm stuff it? Could I possibly take my own advice and stuff a pavlova shell with fruit and cream? After all the pavlova does rise and create a cavernous hole just begging to be stuffed with goodies.
Click here to read the full story
| December 21st, 2010 by Not Quite Nigella
My Dearest Readers, this week I unwittingly gave myself an early Christmas present. I finally got my Provisional Driver’s License after over 30 years of age! I was of course going for the title of oldest person on their Ls and imagined swerving back and forth in a large vehicle at age 80 and only getting my Ps out of sheer sympathy due to the fact that I had sat the test 50 or so times.
I purposely didn’t tell anyone that I was sitting my Ps as it is so easy to fail-two points and there are plenty of instant fail things and you’re out. Just before my test I took some professional driving instructor lessons and I felt like it was a good omen as my driving instructor sounded like Franck Eggelhoffer (although the similarity ended there). Then when I met the tester he looked like Tom Skerritt’s character from Top Gun, one of my embarrassingly favourite movies. So that was good omen number 2. Then we went the route that my instructor aka Franck took me on just that morning which was good omen number 3.
It wasn’t easy, it seems that with Christmas coming up people are more frazzled and dopey than usual and there was a man who just stepped out onto the road without looking and luckily I hit the brakes before hitting him (apparently avoiding addled individuals like this earns you one bonus point). I went for my first drive alone today and I was very nervous. It seemed that Sydney’s already congested roads were even more clogged and it took about 10 minutes to drive the two blocks from outside of our house. The first day was (relatively) incident free. OK there was a garbage bin that I accidentally backed into (who put that there?) and I had to call Mr NQN when I couldn’t park the car in the garage but I was just relieved that I managed to turn my lights on. Baby steps dear readers, baby steps…
I also gave myself another early Christmas present by making these Swiss Roll Christmas Cottages. I have already made and frozen some things (a crostata and a stollen went into the deep freeze last week to be served for Christmas dinner). These Swiss roll cottages are also perfect to freeze. I used a blackberry and durif jam that I picked up from Blue Ox berry farm on a recent trip to Milawa in Victoria which gives it a lovely boozy red wine flavour. The swiss roll is light and fluffy and the chocolate buttercream icing is a lovely sweet contrast to the fruity jam. And it’s in the shape of a house-call it my adult baker’s version of Lego.
Click here to read the full story
| December 16th, 2010 by Not Quite Nigella
It’s easy when busy to take things for granted but this year has been a year of fantasy. I have no idea what the next few years will hold so I want to remember this feeling of excitement and anticipation of things to come. I do appreciate every lesson that I’ve learnt and everyone that has taken the time to leave me a comment, to write me an email or sit down with me. Christmas is a good time to contemplate such things in the absence of Thanksgiving traditions.
Every year I learn things. Take for example last year when I went to Austria I discovered stollen. Now my experience with stollen up until them had been unremarkable. Stollen was something that sat on a supermarket shelf and tasted like stale fruit bread with icing. Then I visited Austria where stollen were made fresh and it was a revelation. I was then served stollen in Dubai at the Burj Al Arab’s 7 star afternoon tea and was blown away. Now that is stollen I thought to myself. Freshly baked fruit bread with a delicious icing top, surprise marzipan filling and served in thin slices.
The delicious marzipan centre
Click here to read the full story
| December 14th, 2010 by Not Quite Nigella
This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was an exciting one for a couple of reasons. Two of my favourite bloggers were hosting: Anna from Very Small Anna and Y from Lemonpi and they had chosen something that I had been dying to make for quite a while: a gingerbread house. This year Christmas crept up on me and the excitement I had at making this quickly faded when I glanced at the calendar. You know the movie scene where the pages are ripped from the calendar in fast succession signifying the rapidly passing time? I swear every time I looked at the date I felt like Christmas was running away from me in blocks of days or weeks.
Occasionally Y would email me and ask how the Gingerbread house was going. I’d answer her that it was going well and last week I told her that it was scheduled for the weekend but then the date came and passed. You see I had to battle fellow Christmas shoppers in the Bondi Junction car park (which never has enough spaces at the best of times, let alone Christmas time). I’d come home from Christmas shopping exhausted, hot and irritable. Not a good time to turn on the oven to make gingerbread.
Click here to read the full story
| December 23rd, 2009 by Not Quite Nigella
I first saw this Salted Pretzel Toffee recipe on my lovely blogger friend Faith’s fabulous blog Thought 4 Food. I already have a slew of recipes of hers that I’ve bookmarked but the moment I saw this recipe I knew that I had found my Christmas Baking gift. Yes this year Christmas totally crept up on me. In fact I was fast asleep and Christmas had literally stolen into my house and screamed “BOO!” at me. It was the 17th of December and I was only just sending out my Christmas cards. For someone who always gets organised and puts the tree up on the 1st of December this was very embarrassing.
I needed to make this quickly as this was destined for my friends Gina and Teena as we were meeting up for the yearly present exchange ritual. Reading through the recipe I was surprised at how easy it was, even though there was toffee involved. There were only two paragraphs worth of instructions and I have everything to hand except for the mini pretzels so I bought these and made the whole thing in the space of 30 minutes (not including setting time).
OCD Pretzel sorting
Click here to read the full story
| December 22nd, 2009 by Not Quite Nigella
What is NQN up to now? 
NQN on Facebook
RSS
