brownie bites

Celebrations for the 13 year old

| poppypeach

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What an epic week of celebrations with a last minute cake bake inspired by the Great British Baking Show. The bowl of the week was a Yakisoba inspired recipe minus the chicken and subbing in smoked salmon, which was a winner, winner chicken dinner for everyone – the things you do when you check out the back of a packet of soba noodles. I added in shitake mushrooms and some pickles, it was delish.

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We found this great book at the library called Bakeland jam packed full of inspiring baked goods with a Nordic influence. This is the cake we made but…

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This is the cake after we tweaked the recipe by making 3 layers and added a chocolate mousse cream topped with a raspberry icing. It was incredibly rich and fell apart when cut due to the dense cake of the brownie, what a great experiment.

The celebration is captured on video with the gang of 3 our overnight guests for an intimate sleepover doing things teens do like play computer games, watch Spaceballs, play computer games, eat chips, play computer games!

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As the cake was super rich in even the tiniest slice, the next day I put the cake in the food processor with some hemp seeds, dates and coconut to make the richness bite-sized. I rolled them up and put them in the freezer and they are now little pocket snacks of chocolatey goodness to keep you going during the day. Today I shared them with my friends for a sewing prep party and we got a lot of work done – yay!

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And to top off the good times of the weekend with the teens taking over the house my hubby made this crepe stack from Bakeland with blueberries – absolutely divine to indulge for a Sunday morning brekky.

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And there’s the soon to be 13 year old who has lived his whole life in California and is soon to live his teenage years back to where he was born – in Melbourne. Some fun times ahead for him though I can see that he will miss his buddies who we have all known for so long.

 

Raise a glass to freedom

| poppypeach

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The first few days of the school holidays and yes it has been exciting! No, actually it felt like a very long week, but I had something to look forward to after completing 2 more subjects in my Teaching course I had a goal of seeing Hamilton – An American Musical in San Francisco. As it happened my good friend and her daughter was seeing it on the same day, so we met for lunch before the show. We were all very excited to see Hamilton at last, after listening to the soundtrack many times!!

To pass the time this week – the kids enjoyed cat encounters at their swimming class in the Los Altos Hills.

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I experimented with coconut milk and rockmelon to make this delicious lassi. Another fave food item I found this week was Coconut Manna my neighbour made me buy it to taste it, and it is divine, I made raw brownie bites as a treat! I need to catalogue this as it was too easy to make and way cheaper than buying chocolate as an after dinner treat.

And finally Saturday came around, and I was preparing for my adventure on Thursday as there were little things to organise like making sure I had the ticket!! So it turned out I was sitting alone in the Loge section of the theatre at seat C26, and it was incredible, it was hard to know when you spend so much on a ticket to the show and hope that the seats are good. This turned out perfect, and with my binoculars, I got an excellent view of the whole cast.  The funny thing was in all the seats in the theatre I bought a seat sitting behind friends from Mountain View who had bought their tickets in December – all 6 of them! Now that is a small world :D, and there they are in front of me in the bottom image.

Funnily enough, I actually enjoy going to the theatre but spending the $ and finding a show I love is rare – rare enough that in all the 10 years I have lived in the Bay Area I have not been to one show in San Francisco. I have been to smaller productions here locally but not a Broadway show, and I was blown away by how spectacular it was! Now I really get the amount of cash spent on tickets for shows like this as they are incredible. I really enjoyed the soundtrack, and I realised if I don’t go to see this show in San Francisco when will be the time to see it? I am not going to New York anytime soon, and that show was totally sold out anyway! So I managed to find a seat between some friendly folks and really enjoyed my first Broadway show experience here in San Francisco! The pictures say it all, I was very excited!!

After the show, I met up for a final farewell to my friends before the summer, and we take off to Australia – it was so cool for my friend’s daughter to get a signed autograph and picture of Ryan Alvarado who played Hamilton at our matinee performance!

Sunday was the ice cream social at our park, and the neighbours came out in force getting their free ice cream on a windy, sunny day! I met my lovely friend / ceramic teacher Susan who did the face painting for the kiddos, and her work is beautiful, and all the kids were super happy, I especially loved the huge unicorn on my neighbours face.