We used to go and visit my Nana sometimes in the weekend. Her speciality was pikelets. She would stand in her kitchen with the hot plate as hot as it would go, with a little melted butter in a saucer close by to grease it, and flip pikelets very deftly with a butter knife.

Aunty Honey used to stack them up on tiered cake stands with jam and cream wobbling on them. My mother would make them in her electric frying pan and all the while say, “I don’t know what I am doing wrong, I can never get them to turn out like Nana’s, she makes beautiful pikelets.”

I would wander around the baking section of A&P shows and look at the prize winning pikelets wondering if they tasted as nice as they looked.

I’d press my nose against the glass of bakery windows and look at them packaged in cellophane, all lined up like a mini stack of pancakes.

I grew up with these, and I still make them on a regular basis. I think they were one of the first things I learned to make. Today I made a batch for a friend that called around. She brought me something special, which I will share with you after the recipe.

Pikelets with Vanilla Mascarpone

• 1 cup of plain flour
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 1 free range egg
• 1/4 cup of white sugar
• 3/4 of a cup of milk or a mix of milk and yoghurt
• pinch of salt

Beat the egg and sugar in a medium sized bowl with a whisk, until pale and thick.

Add the milk and whisk again

Add in the flour, baking powder and salt and whisk again until smooth and free of lumps.

Drop tablespoonfuls on a hot greased griddle or frying pan. Turn when you see small bubbles start to appear on the surface. Remove when golden and cooked through.

Keep them snuggled under a tea towel until you are ready to serve them - which ideally should be right away.

This will keep them soft and warm and stop them drying around the edges.

Makes roughly 20 pikelets

Vanilla Mascarpone

• 1/2 cup of Mascarpone
• 1/2 tspn of vanilla paste or extract if you have no paste
• 2 Tblspns icing (powdered) sugar

Mix all together thoroughly and serve a dollop on each pikelet on top of berry jam.

You can top the pikelets yourself and serve them already topped or you can let people help themselves, which is what I like to do.

There is something very companionable about sitting smearing pikelets with jam with a friend.

So, I sat and ate these today with a friend, she’s been my friend now for more than 8 years. I first met her at a swimming group with Fynn, (my 9 year old son, who died earlier this year) when he was roughly 10 months old. She has two sons with Cerebral Palsy. Today she brought me around a huge montage of photos of Fynn from the Cerebral Palsy support group to hang on the wall. A very precious gift indeed…

Part Two

You all thought I’d forgotten about this hadn’t you? After lunch there were more wonderful sights to see, so we headed back down to the old part of Oamaru. This is an image heavy post, but I did want to share this with you all.

This wonderful lady was a part of the steampunk exhibit. I did wonder if she was married to Darth ? NB:A very dear friend of mine tells me this is not female, hmm .. I could be wrong ?

A mobile Marshmellow toaster

Oamaru Stone Carving - really there were some beautiful carvings, the talent of the stone carvers really amazes me.

Penny farthing and Dirigible

The fine gentlemen driving the steam train

and here it is - you don’t have to wait for the festival to have a ride on this.

Gurning anyone?

Lots of wonderful crafts for sale, these Ostrich eggs were just beautiful. I have an email address if anyone would like to buy one of these from the woman that makes them.

The Distillery -

The sweet and Toy shop - it was very hard to get the kids out of here.

This was entrance to the local radio station - we walked in here and the chap was in the broadcasting booth, he was not too busy to give us a wave and a smile.

We stopped and watched the Magician and the exotic belly dancer - and Isaac sat on a huge bag of wheat in the sun and ate these. Lovely little hot sugary doughnuts.

I’m going to save some more photos for another day, since there are many to share. So it looks like there might be a part 3!

I wanted to share this with you, because I got quite excited about this discovery. It was a little bit like being 5 years old and finding a shell on the beach that you think no one else has ever seen.

I was driving my little guy home from Kindergarten the other day and I saw something pink in the tangle of trees and scrub growing along the side of the road. I pulled over and parked the car and headed over to where I thought I saw the pink flash.

I was right. This is what I saw

This is a banana passionfruit flower, and on moving some of the tree branches back slightly. I discovered this.

Tons of passionfruit growing on the side of the road. No, they were not hanging over anyone’s fence, they were just growing wild at the bottom of a huge cliff.

I started to have visions of a passionfruit slice, passionfruit vinaigrette, passionfruit and meringue tarts, passionfruit and lemon something-or-others. I would need to wait until there were enough ripe to pick them, what if someone else found them? I would need to check them every day..

Big purple unripe passionfruit. Banana passionfruit are not ripe until they are a golden yellow in colour. They are a cooler climate passionfruit than the purple passionfruit that is commonly found in Australia.

Cut in half when they are ripe, they look like this.

I decided to check some facts on banana passionfruit when I found them. Apparently in New Zealand they are considered a weed, because they encroach on our native forests. The Dept of Conservation destroys these.

So that presented a bit of a dilemma for me, should I wait until all the fruit was ripe, pick it and hope it had not been sprayed? Or should I report my discovery to the local city council. Tough choice …. free possibly poisoned food vs right thing to do. I decided to go with the report it to the city council option, since I really have no way of knowing if the vines have been sprayed with poisons already. I did not think my family would be too keen on being poisoned and I am pretty darn fond of the native forests.

But it also got me thinking. If this grows so well here that it’s considered a weed, why is no one cultivating it in a safe manner and selling it?  We buy Australian passionfruit which cost a small fortune to top our Pavlova’s and Meringues with instead - hmmm something about that does not make sense.

So unfortunately there is no passionfruit recipe to share with you since apparently this lovely fruit is a weed.

My little Isaac turned 5 today. I can’t believe it. That means starting school is just around the corner and from there it’s a quick trip to whiskers in the bathroom sink and girls calling on the phone. It goes so quickly!

Isaac and I made a variety of things for his birthday party, but I thought I would share the cupcake recipe that we use for this kind of thing, which is quick and makes a nice plain cupcake base. It can be easily varied with other flavourings if you want to do something a little different. But it’s a good base to start with. This recipe is adapted from Nigella Lawson’s ” How to be a Domestic Goddess”

Birthday Cupcakes

• 125 grams butter - softened
• 125 grams sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 125 grams self raising flour
• 1 tspn vanilla extract
• 2-3 Tblspns buttermilk (or milk)

For the Royal Icing

• 1 egg white
• icing sugar (powdered sugar)
• food colouring
• 1/2 tspn vanilla

Preheat the oven to 200C.

Place all the ingredients for the cupcakes in the food processor and pulse until mixed. Don’t be tempted to whizz it for a long time because it’s fun to watch, this will make the mix tough. Add the buttermilk last to make a smooth mixture. Divide evenly into the cupcake pans (I like to use a paper liner) and bake for roughly 10-15 minutes, until golden on top and cakes spring back when touched.

Cool on a wire rack and ice with Royal Icing when cooled. Don’t be tempted to ice them when they are still warm, or your icing will not set nicely.

To make the icing: Place the egg white and vanilla in a small bowl, add in icing sugar a little at a time until you have a spreadable icing. I can’t give you exact quantities here because it will depend on the size of your egg white. Just go with your instincts.

If you would like pastel cupcakes - make sure that you only use the teeniest amount of colouring to get a nice soft colour. spread evenly over the cakes and add on any decorations that you would like. I cheated for these ones and just used bought decorations.

Isaac and I also had fun making some tropical fruit kebabs, which are really not worth posting a recipe for because they just involve sticking fruit on a skewer. A combination of watermelon, strawberries, pineapple, rock melon and marshmallows looks pretty and is usually pretty quickly devoured by small people. It’s also a nice way to have children helping in the kitchen.

I’m a firm believer that healthy eating habits and skills in the kitchen start at an early age, so I am all for finding ways of getting kids into the kitchen to help with food preparation.

Isaac had a great time making these fruit kebabs.

I have to finish this post with something that made me laugh. Isaac and Granny went out shopping for some shoes for his birthday - with very scant instructions from me to just get something that would be fine for school, some gym shoes or something like that. So they went together and bought something and I completely forgot about it until Granny came with his gift on his birthday.

Isaac kept telling me that his favourite colour was black as he was opening the package.

You’ll notice the slightly satisfied smile on his face as he opens his package.

This was the result.

A pair of Converse All Stars - exactly the same as his older brothers! Perfect evidence that children learn from those around them and that big brothers are completely awesome.

I’ll leave you with this today.

Happy Birthday - my little pirate!

Part One

Last weekend we hopped into the car, and put the coats in too, since it looked like a very dreary day in Dunedin. We travelled north a little, up to Oamaru for the Victorian Fete and Steampunk Exhibition. In Oamaru the sun was shinning.

What a great day! We ended up spending from 11 am till 5.30 pm wandering around all the things to see and do there. I am going to let the pictures do most of the talking here, but I do want to give you a little history too. Oamaru has been celebrating its Victorian heritage for the last 20 years, and each year they seem to get more and more elaborate.

The Steampunk exhibition this year was a new addition, they had the most amazing Rayguns made by Weta Workshop, a time machine, a giant Steampunk chopper (as in motorbike), a Theremin, and even a steam powered coffee cup. I took so many pictures, but it’s impossible to share them all. Guess what, you can buy the Rayguns! If only I was a wealthy millionaire with nothing to spend my money on. Just like a real raygun, these little beauties are expensive!

Oamaru has some beautiful buildings made from the local Oamaru Whitestone.

It’s easy to believe you have stepped back into another age here. In the old part of town you will find many buildings like this, some restored completely and others in the process of restoration.

Penny farthings were winding their ways through the street, and the Cycling instructor that Kit got a lesson from said there were about 26 Penny farthing riders in Oamaru. Pretty impressive. This is Kit having his Penny Farthing riding lesson. He has a certificate to prove it! Isaac and Adrian watch with great interest. I think they were hoping he was going to fall off.

There were a lot of people in costume. I am definitely going to dress up next year, but I am going to go the Steampunk way I think. These gracious ladies posed with Isaac for a photo.

This was one of my favourite exhibits - check this guy out! The chopper had its engine running and he was cracking the whip in a pretty darn impressive way. The kids were scared.. I was scared….

Good thing that Victorian Guy came to talk to Steampunk guy!

Well, that told him!

Awesome Steampunk tractor, you would not want to be in front of this if it was going.

I’ll have a flat white and a light beer thanks! This is a steam powered coffee cup and behind it a steam powered tankard.

Want to turn some heads? I’m pretty sure this would do it.

It was about this time we stopped for a bite to eat at a cafe. Isaac was quite taken with the small rooster on the table that was holding the sugar. He’s ready for lunch and a little tired. The next instalment of the Victorian Fete and Steampunk Exhibition will be up a little later in the week.