I love recipe books. There is something magical about sitting down and opening up a recipe book, and discovering, sometimes rediscovering, a new dish or a new dessert. Even better, is receiving a brand new book that you’ve been waiting for that is literally fresh off the press. That was me, about a month of so ago, beaming from ear to ear upon receiving my new ‘Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream at Home’ book. I bookmarked pretty much every page in that book to try and told myself that this is one book that I am committed to work through every single recipe! I finally managed to set aside time two week’s back and test ran my first recipe from the book – an American classic, the Buckeye State.

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Happie 2011 all! I hope everyone had a fab start to the new year, and spent day one of the year twenty eleven doing something you love. I definitely did, as my first day was spent plodding around the kitchen. With good friends coming over for new year’s day dinner, G and I kept ourselves happily busy the whole day, what with grocery shopping, slicing and dicing and getting all the goodies ready. The entire dinner was cooked in our trusty oven (the best way to cook in my book!), from the homemade oregano rolls to the roast chicken and apple crumble. Dinner turned out fab, and not to toot my own horn, but I found the crumble to be the highlight of the evening!

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For all you die hard chocoholics, this post is for you. I’ve recently gotten my hands dirty with chocolate making and am proud to showcase some of the simple chocolate creations that I put together for the holiday season. It really isn’t too difficult to get these cute little chocolate dinos together….it might get a tad messy but other than that, it really is quite a lot of fun and I am utterly addicted!

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With just nine more days till Christmas, I am beginning to panic. So much for the grand plans of getting the shopping done early and setting aside weekends to bake! I am only a third way done the shopping list and have yet to even get together all my ingredients needed for all the planned kitchen messings! Punching out this post, I am secretly hoping that there are at least some of you who are somewhat facing the same adrenaline rush of Christmas as I am and like me, have vowed to do something about it right away. I’ve decided to get things in motion today and will be heading out to go a little wild at the supermart after publishing this post, but before I go, I thought I’d share another one of my favorite ideas for homemade gifts – the choc-chip meringue.

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It was after dinner and over some snowskin champagne truffle mooncakes last year when Auntie T suggested having a go at making our very own mooncakes. We were all excited and made arrangements the weekend before the festival to get messy in the kitchen but were unable to get hold of all the ingredients as everything everywhere was literally sold out! So the plan was postponed to this year and over the last couple of weekends, we messed around with flour, dough and moulds, and really had quite a blast!

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