A wedding

My brother was married in October (which still sounds strange – my little brother, married), and I took some photos.

His wife-to-be looked beautiful.

I made the cake, with a fair bit of help putting together the tiers and the flowers. It turned out quite well, and after the happy couple left for their honeymoon we had quite a few very pleasant morning teas.

It was a gorgeous day, and lovely to see them both so tremendously happy. I particularly enjoyed spending some time with my extended family, my beloved tribe of aunts, uncles, cousins and babies. I adore them all, particularly the babies.

Gonzo

Gonzo the puppy came to the choir spring picnic on the weekend, played with his cow toy in the corner and was cruelly prevented from eating an illicit sausage passed to him by a couple of children who were being particularly generous with their lunch.

The choir I’ve been singing with for the past few weeks has worked out really well – conveniently close to home, and a repertoire I enjoy. I have really missed group singing, which I haven’t done since University. And I haven’t been a student for quite a long time now. Alas. Although it’s not really the studenty bit of being a student I miss but rather the great swathes of free time I didn’t properly appreciate.

The Great Wedding Cake Experiment

“Oh, we’re not planning on having a cake anymore,” said my brother. “But! Cake! Wedding! Cake!” I spluttered at him incoherently. And that’s how I came to be researching wedding cakes prior to his wedding, which is three weeks away.

I knew I didn’t want to do the traditional fruit cake under hard icing, because fruit cake isn’t really my area of baking expertise, and cake decorating really isn’t. I am of the rustic school of icing cakes (slap it on, she’ll be right). But thankfully for anyone looking around online wondering how to make a wedding cake, Smitten Kitchen baked a cake for a friend’s wedding and wrote a series of posts detailing the recipes, the experiments, and the grand feat of engineering that is creating tiers of cake. So in an honourable effort of plaigarism, I decided to follow closely in her footsteps.

This was the test run of what will be the top tier of the two-tiered cake – a vanilla buttermilk cake with mango curd and buttercream icing. Gloriously rich, with a tang of tartness from the mango curd.

Putting it all together with the icing was a bit more difficult than I anticipated. I think I may have overwhipped the icing, which was a little lumpy, and parts of the cake kept emerging from the smooth blanket of icing that I was attempting to create. But apart from lacking skill with a spatula, the rest of the construction went well, and I feel reasonably confident about doing it again (along with the bottom tier, which is chocolate cake with a ganache filling) in a couple of weeks.

September Wallpaper

It’s spring!  The last remnants of winter chill are disappearing, and we have had our first night of rain after months of blue skies.  The cats are starting to shed their enormous winter coats, which I’m sure is more comfortable for them but means that I am more likely to look up and see a large tumbleweed of cat hair drifting by.

I’ve made a wallpaper for September, using a photo of one of my yellow grevilleas, which is flowering at the moment, and a calendar for the month.  The thumbnail on the left is a 1280 x 1024 picture, and the one on the right is 1024 x 768.  Click on the thumbnails to see the pictures, then right click to save them and use as wallpaper.  (And if you’re not sure what your screen resolution is, I think that statistically it’s more likely to be 1024 x 768.)

Early mornings

I have decided that I live too far from Brisbane to do the Bridge to Brisbane again. I am not sufficiently enthusiastic about the event to make getting up at 3.45am worthwhile. I don’t particularly enjoy hanging around in a crowd of thousands of people, waiting for everyone to start making their way over the bridge. And having to honk at drunken revellers still enjoying their night out and staggering around in the middle of the road is just depressing.

As I was getting into the car to leave, there were about four small explosions from a neighbouring property, followed by the sound of every dog in hearing beginning to bark. And there are a lot of dogs around here. It was a very noisy way for the day to begin.

As there were no further noises, like screams or shouts, I thought it probably wasn’t necessary to do anything further about it. Life in a rural area – breezes in the trees, bird song, and the occasional explosion at 3.45am.