DIY - a finished side gate

As with every DIY project, it took us longer than we anticipated, but we've finally finished our side gate. This means we have a fully contained patio, otherwise known as a Little Monkey Catchment Zone.

We still need to clean it up, but that's a relatively easy task that can largely be done with a Little Monkey in attendance, because he is now TRAPPED.

Before and after - at least now you can't see the weeds... 

And finished is a relative term... Well, it is here, anyway. ;-) Sharp eyes will notice that we haven't yet trimmed the gate posts down. We're still debating whether to take them flush with the palings (most likely) or to put caps on them to show the gateway. We will eventually fence off the front boundary of the property with the same style of fencing, and will need to make the entrance obvious when we do that round - so just mulling over our options.

Woohoo, a post!

The build was fairly straightforward, though divided over many naptimes over the past couple of weekends.

First we put two posts into the ground. The boundary fence had a conveniently-placed post we could attach the little bit of fence on that side too, and the fence on the house side is so small that we have just used extra supports on the gate side and left it hanging free on the house side (we could have attached it to the house with brackets but prefer not to drill into the weatherboards).

The gate itself followed the tutorial we found when planning, though our timber was a bit gruntier that what was shown - mainly because we didn't know what to buy and the staff at Placemakers weren't very helpful. Because we're already a bit self-conscious about our skill level (and therefore worried the things we make might break), when we're unsure we tend to go for the most heavy-duty materials, so our gate is probably stronger than is necessary.

We went with costly but durable kid-safe hinges and latch - the hinges are self-closing and hopefully it'll be a few years before the gate stops being childproof (unless our Little Monkey learns from those kids who broke out of their daycare the other week).

We could have done it cheaper but we're pretty pleased with the result and are confident we can do the rest of the fencing in the same style, but faster and cheaper - so a worthwhile project.

Have you been working on any landscaping projects this weekend?

Side gate
Budget: $100 (ha!)
Timeframe: 8-10 hours work (spread across three weekends)
Who did the work: Us
Actual cost: $456 (including a couple of clamps and a new level)
Learnings: The timber for the gate should ideally be the same thickness as the posts; measuring and pre-drilling the palings made attaching them much faster; Bunnings beats Placemakers for helpful service and it's cheaper!

Salted Toffee Crunch

Have you tried Daim? It's a candy common in Europe (marketed as Dime in the UK, I think) which consists of addictively crunchy toffee covered in a thin layer of chocolate. It is amazing!

This recipe is both nothing and everything like Daim. It tastes pretty similar (which is awesome, because although you can get Daim here it's crazy expensive), but it contains crackers.

Yup, think versatile Salada (meal size, bite size, snack size). Or Huntley and Palmers creeeeeeeam crackers. Whatever. Crackers.

This recipe has been banging around the blogosphere for a while, so while weird it's not new. It is highly addictive, though, and folks love eating it.

It's also pretty quick and easy to make, although like most really tasty things is perhaps a touch high in calories.

The only catch with the recipe is watching that the sugar doesn't burn. If it starts to go brown, rather than deep amber, or if it starts to smell bitter at all you should remove it from the heat regardless of the stage its at.

Have you made anything with an unexpected or offbeat ingredient lately?




(recipe adapted from Baking = Love)

6 common baking mistakes and how to fix them

I'm being lazy and refusing to do the dishes at the moment, which means I haven't done any baking because I can't ignore the mountain of dirty bowls and frypans if I go into the kitchen... So in light of my failure at being a proper grown-up human being, I thought I'd write about some possible baking failures (an area in which I am also accomplished).

These are the main mistakes I can think of - let me know if you have any to add!

1. Cake is too dry
This is really, really common - and really, really easy to do. It's not limited to cake, either. Cookies that are supposed to be chewy can end up crunchy and muffins can taste stale almost immediately.

I was in denial at the time but
these are definitely overcooked

Why does it happen? Overcooking - probably the baked goods should have been taken out of the oven five minutes earlier. If you're making a cake, use a knife or skewer to check - the probe doesn't have to come out clean, but if the consistency has changed from gooey batter to cooked-looking stuff it's probably good to go. Lightly touching the top of a spongy cake to see whether it springs back is another good test - but doesn't work for denser things like mud cake.


For cookies, usually they will form a slight crust around the edge, so gently touch the side and if it seems to have gotten a bit crisp they're probably ready. It does vary by recipe so check the instructions for clues on when they're done - but cookies usually finish cooking after they've been removed from the oven so they'll probably be ready to take out earlier than you think.

And if you discover after the fact you cooked a cake for too long you can bring a cake back into the tasty zone by making a simple sugar syrup and drenching the cake in it.

2. You can taste the raising agent
This can really ruin otherwise delicious baked goods, and unfortunately you can't tell for sure until you take a bite of the finished product. Usually baking soda is the culprit.

Pre-activating the baking soda can resolve this, and many recipes call for this in their method - usually with a combination of liquid and heat (my favourite chocolate cake recipe dissolves the baking soda in warm milk).

The other thing you can do if you have an otherwise-awesome recipe that has a bit of an aftertaste is to reduce the measure next time. Try using half or three quarters of the recommended amount and see what happens - it may take some trial and error to get it just right but you might be pleasantly surprised!

3. It doesn't look like the picture
Apart from the fact that you haven't spent hours on styling your food with fancy props - remember that the pretty picture on the recipe has probably had quite a bit of special treatment - there are a few things that'll help your baking come out looking fancier.

These macarons were intentionally hideous...
That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Baking a cake or slice in the wrong size tin can make a big difference to appearance - taller cakes tend to look fancier but most people only have one or two sizes of cake tin so you can't always exactly follow the recipe. Personally I would always go smaller if I can, or even make a double mixture if I only have a big pan (or if it's for a large gathering).

Being in a hurry can also cost prettiness. If I'm in a rush I often make mistakes with the recipe, or just don't have time to let it cool before decorating or cutting or whatever, and that generally means the end result will be sloppy.

A few bonus touches: trim the edges off things with obvious crusts (then eat them, obviously - no waste here); trim the top off dome-topped cakes and flip them upside-down before icing; use a hot knife to slice anything gooey, and wipe it down between slices... And remember that so long as it tastes good it doesn't really matter, so feel free to disregard all of the above.

4. It's tough and chewy
Gluten, that much maligned protein in wheat, makes things chewy when it's developed. It's developed by working - think kneading when making bread - and that's awesome when it's wanted. My favourite brownie recipe relies on a bit of gluten-development for its va-va-voom.

Unfortunately it means if you overmix cake batter it's likely to get chewy, too - so when instructions say to fold in the flour until just combined, that's what you should do. Just the bare minimum to get everything mixed together. Lovely.

5. It doesn't rise the way it should
Raising agents can be rather fickle so there's definitely heaps of room for failure here (reassuring, right?). Did you beat enough air into your batter? Are the raising agents fresh? They can eventually lose their efficacy. Did you add too little or too much? Too much can sometimes cause baking not to rise enough, counter-intuitively, so make sure you measure accurately.

6. It's just an all out fail
Oh dear! I'm so sorry for your loss.

It was supposed to be a cake!

First question: did you substitute or add any ingredients? Baking can be a balancing act and a simple change like adding frozen raspberries to a cake (my most spectacular cake fail - unless you count burning stuff) can destroy the chemistry altogether. If you want to switch out ingredients it's wise to start with a recipe with similar properties to your desired end state and make subtle changes. For my raspberry white chocolate cake I should have started with a recipe designed to include fruit, instead of just throwing some berries into a white chocolate cake. The mixture looked great and it seemed perfect when I took it out of the oven, but five minutes later it was more shrivelled oily pancake than decadent cake.

It could just be a terrible recipe. In these days of unqualified bloggers filling the internet with delicious-looking photos there are plenty of those about (hopefully not here...).

Or maybe it's something that's quite sensitive and something was slightly off - your oven temperature is out by 20 degrees, your ingredients weren't at room temperature, or the humidity is too high.



So, tell me about your worst baking fail... Please? It'll make me feel better...

Recycling - stuff you (maybe) didn't know

A wee while back I went to a Waste Free Parenting workshop with the Nappy Lady, who works with councils across New Zealand to help people reduce waste.

I went because I was interested in learning more about cloth nappies, but she also inspired me to think a bit harder about other household waste. One of the most compelling things she said was that if a load of recycling was contaminated with something messy, say food waste, that the whole load could end up going to landfill because it's just not viable to clean everything.

While we want to reduce our waste as much as possible we're easily confused - we thought we couldn't put pizza boxes in because they had food on them, and the recent news about plastic bags had us thinking we couldn't put those into our recycling bin, but here in Wellington we can (but Aucklanders can't).

It turns out it's not just us: confusion is rife, and easily explainable because what you can recycle varies a lot across different regions. Here are a few important tips which will help ensure your household recycling is actually getting recycled.

General tips:

• All recycling must be clean, as if it's not it can contaminate the load (and unclean items won't be recycled anyway). It's also hand sorted, so pretty gross for the sorters if you don't wash it! 
• Items should be loose inside the bin or bag.  



The plastic recycling categories


• Plastics should have a recycle symbol on them and a number - which numbers are 
• accepted varies by region although many regions now take all numbers from 1-7. Check with your council if you're not sure. 
• Styrofoam meat trays can't be recycled here. Some supermarkets are moving to recyclable trays, though!
• Pizza boxes are okay so long as pizza scraps are removed (we've had a few debates here about this).
• Glass must not be broken, and generally only glass jars and bottles from consumables are accepted (not kitchenware or other household glass). 

Each region has specific rules and exclusions. I've compiled a table of few of the key things for the three big centres - I wanted to do a more exhaustive chart but it would take me weeks! So sorry to those of you outside these areas - but at least it demonstrates how variable it all is.

Recycling in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch

It's a fairly mundane part of life but important, I think, to minimise waste as much as we can - and since we all eat and most of us create a lot of waste I thought this might be useful.

And if nothing else I've learnt a few things. For one, I've always put plastic milk bottle lids in the recycling - turns out that in Wellington they should go in the rubbish. Oops!

Are you surprised by any of this? Are there any other important pointers that I've missed?


Sources: Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch City Council websites; The Nappy Lady; Wellington City Council Waste Education Team

Chocolate plum clafoutis

This is my new favourite dessert. That is a big call.

And... I have been meaning to make it for seven years.

Clafoutis first hit my radar in 2008, courtesy of a blog event called "Hay Hay It's Donna Day," which was a monthly blogging event featuring a Donna Hay recipe. The April 2008 challenge (which I read about on many blogs but did not make) was hosted by the amazing Bron Marshall, who chose Donna's plum and chocolate clafoutis as the recipe of the month.

(incidentally, it is pronounced, roughly, klafuti - I have been saying it phonetically in my head for seven years so thought I should clarify)

At the time I was an impoverished university student, with a poorly-formatted blog promoting my side-business selling cakes. Clafoutis seemed simultaneously a bit posh and somehow not ambitious enough - these were days of spending 12 hours decorating wedding cakes, proving pastry dough from scratch, and constructing layer cakes which required seven different components. So I read about it and moved on.

Then on Saturday we needed a dessert for dinner with friends, I was flicking through Donna Hay's amazing Seasons book, and out popped that same clafoutis recipe.

It's a pretty simple recipe, though very decadent; traditionally it is made with cherries (and no chocolate), which I'm keen to try, but the chocolate version (naturally) resonated with me so that's what we went with.

The recipe calls for both cocoa and dark chocolate, so I don't recommend going too dark on the chocolate; we used Whittakers' 50% and it was pretty deep and rich in chocolateyness. Any darker I think would have been a bit much.

Since it's not exactly plum season around here we opted for tinned black doris plums, which did a pretty awesome job.

My only quibble with the original recipe is that instead of giving the number of servings, it says to divide between two 500ml pans to cook, and then at the end says "makes two." Well yes, but how many people should each pan serve? From the ingredients I rather hoped it would be at least two servings to a pan, but it's an unusual way to make a recipe and I didn't want to risk being short of dessert (heaven forbid!). So I made double, cooked it in one very large pan - and as we're still eating the leftovers, I can comfortably assure you that it will serve at least four, and potentially six.

The final result is halfway between a baked custard and a cake - fudgey, decadent, not too heavy but still substantial. The chocolate mostly sinks to the bottom and provides an extra touch of magic. So very good!

Have you got any recipes on your to-make list that have been lurking for years?


Plum and chocolate clafoutis (adapted from Donna Hay's Seasons - serves 4)
1/3 cup / 50g flour
1/4 cup / 30g cocoa powder
1/3 cup / 75 caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1 cup cream
175g dark chocolate (50% is good), chopped
20g butter
6 fresh or half a tin of plums, halved

Preheat oven to 180 C.

Sift flour and cocoa into a bowl and add sugar.

In a separate bowl, stir to combine vanilla, eggs and cream.

Mix wet and dry ingredients together, and stir in chocolate.

Divide the butter between two 500ml ovenproof pans and melt. Pour the mixture into the pans, top with plums and bake for 20-25 minutes until puffed and set.

Alternatively use 4 x 250ml ramekins and cook for 15-20 minutes, or 1 x 1 litre pan and cook for 25-30 minutes. 

DIY - A floor story

This post was originally posted on A Kiwi Dream, my short-lived separate reno blog. Over the next couple of months I'll be migrating the content there here so please bear with me if you were following me there. 

One of the most depressing things about this house when we moved in was the upstairs carpet. What had once been a pristine, high quality wool carpet was completely threadbare in places (we know where the previous owners had their furniture!), was grungy and grubby, and had a giant hole in the middle, roughly patched with secondhand underlay but no carpet, where the fireplace had at some point been removed from the house.

 Putting a picnic rug over a small patch of the old carpet wasn't really enough, somehow... 

We knew that where the fire had been the floor was chipboard, but the condition of the floorboards under the rest was lucky dip.

I think the carpet came up from the old living room/new kitchen on day 11 of ownership (the first seven were consumed with getting the downstairs liveable, day eight was moving day and days nine and 10 were consumed with organising). We had just gotten some semblance of order, our son was having a nap, and we felt like doing something. It wasn't practical to start bashing holes in walls but ripping up carpet seemed like a good option.

If you haven't tried it, it's dusty and can be hard slog (depending how well it's fixed down), and moving big rolls of it requires a bit of brute strength (which I lack... Working on it though!).

I recommend using a face mask (for the dust), some gloves (we used our gardening ones) and you'll need pliers. A flatbar or similar can be useful to get under tricky corners but mostly it's just yanking it up, and then working around the edges with your pliers to remove tacks and staples left in the floor.

 The more of the staples come out in the carpet (left) the less annoying, fiddly work you have to do with the pliers. 

It's one of those jobs which, though a bit gross and not at all glamorous, can be transformative, especially if the floor underneath is glorious native timber. We were rewarded that afternoon with the revelation of matai floorboards in pretty good nick.

Before and after pics provide satisfying evidence of an afternoon's work

Unfortunately the patched area in the middle of the floor from the old fireplace was chipboard - and naturally that area will be the most used and visible part of the room. So we set about searching for a company specialising in timber floor repairs.

Chipboard - not exactly a character feature in the traditional sense.

This job was definitely beyond our DIY abilities - stitching the planks in sounded too tricky even to our builder so this was definitely a specialist piece of work. 

There were plenty of search results but Total Timber Flooring stood out because they had a photo showing how they had repaired a big area of flooring, like ours, by stitching the new boards into the existing floor, instead of just butting the pieces up against the existing square edge, and therefore making the patch almost undetectable (I'm sure other companies exist that do this, but not all will go to the effort).

Nathan came out to check out the job and provided the quote within a few hours of his visit. It ended up being a touch under $2,700 in total - that includes supply of the recycled boards for the patch, all the repair work, filling and sanding, and three sealing coats on 34.5sqm of floor.

I was around for most of the process so I annoyed the crew a lot by asking constant questions and taking lots of photos. :-D

 

Day one was all about the repair - before they could put the new boards in they had to run some joists at the right intervals, as there weren't enough underneath. Then they carefully removed the short pieces of board to permit the stitching, and fitted the jigsaw together. They managed a quick sand of the patched area before packing up for the day.

Day two involved lots of filling of gaps and holes, and lots of sanding. It looked pretty amazing by the end of the day, though:

Once it's sanded back it's best to minimise use as the wood isn't protected from stains and spills. We'd arranged to move out for a couple of days in anticipation of the stinky sealing coats, which was a good move - no risk of us messing it up.

Day three started with another round of sanding, followed by a very thorough clean-up to ensure nothing got stuck in the sealing coats. The first coat is a protective sealer that soaks into the wood and dries in about half an hour (it took a little longer, actually, due to the brisk temperatures in Wellington that week).

The second coat is a gloss polyurethane - Nathan told me that even though we're going with a matte finish, the gloss is harder so he uses it for the middle coat to better protect the timber.

The third coat won't go on until we've finished installing our kitchen cabinetry, so that we don't risk scuffing it up - and that'll be a few weeks away yet. But it already looks pretty good so here are the obligatory before and after shots:

Looking towards the kitchen

Looking from the kitchen towards the dining room - you can see the boards used for the patch in this one but it's less obvious in real life

The entrance passage (I didn't take a picture of this last week so a few other things have changed since the "before"!)

We're thrilled with how well it's come up - we knew it would look good but hadn't quite imagined how good. And I highly recommend Nathan and his team - they clearly know their stuff!

Oh - but I do recommend sussing out somewhere to stay for a couple of days - you can't walk on it for 12 hours or so while it dries, but even if you can work around that the smell is fairly strong, even in distant, closed off parts of the house.

Are you a fan of timber floors?

Zesty Lemon Muffins

Usually the baking around here is more decadent than the humble muffin, but even the muffin(!) has its place in the world, especially when we're trying to spend less (I'm not really anti-muffin, I just seem to gravitate more towards the cake end of the spectrum, sorry muffins!).

When I was a teenager there was a woman in our community who hosted a weekly potluck for teens. She was basically everyone's honorary cool aunt, and as well as being guaranteed plenty of complete silliness and fun, freshly baked muffins were part of the package.

Looking back it was pretty cool of her to let us take over her house like that - and I'm sure our parents were relieved to simultaneously have us out of the house and to know we were out of trouble.

I'm pretty sure the muffins were generally from Alison Holst's Marvellous Muffins. My favourite was fruit salad muffins, which sound horrible now but I haven't had them for 15 years so perhaps I would still enjoy them.

These lemony ones are based on an Alison Holst recipe, and (to fit with the budget theme) are inexpensive to make (if you have your own lemon tree even better!).

My mum's blueberry muffins always come with a liberal sprinkling of cinnamon sugar, added just before baking. This has ruined soft-top muffins for me, and though cinnamon would be a bit overpowering here, I felt the principle could still be applied so I've added a raw sugar/lemon zest baked topping, which takes them up a notch.

These are best enjoyed fresh from the oven, or gently reheated - cold they're a bit heavy and the lemon flavour is dulled. So I guess not great picnic fodder, but since they're very quick to make they're the sort of thing you can whip up for surprise guests.

Did you have any honorary aunts or special hangout places in your teenhood?