Happy Valentines Day! Raspberry Chia Pudding

Happy Valentines Day everyone!

We are heading off for a 2 week camping trip in the beautiful Hawkes Bay today woop! Super exciting but this means we are packing and on the road for most of Valentines Day.  Not the most romantic date ever so we celebrated instead with a Valentine's themed brekkie: a super healthy, oh so pretty in pink, totally swoon-worthy Raspberry Chia Pudding.

Coz nothing says I love you better than chia pudding.

Lol jokes, we all know chocolate = love. But this is pretty darn delicious and a healthy breakfast in your belly is sure to put a little love in your heart.

But first, cake: Cheat's Orange Blueberry Sour Cream Cake

Before I launch in to my HK foodie musings, I wanted to share with you this amazingly quick and incredibly easy cake recipe. 

I'll warn you straight up that this recipe uses boxed cake mix. I know baking purists out there are horrified right now but a box of cake mix can be a total life saver in baking emergencies.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for making things from scratch. There's a certain meditative quality to measuring out your flour, butter, eggs but every once in a while you need to produce baking in a bind and tout suite and for those situations I always keep a couple of boxed cake mixes in the pantry.  

Think of cake mix as a baking emergency kit. You have a bare bones pantry, a friend is popping round in an hour, what do you do???

Happy New Year and a Sneak Peek of my Delectable Electable Tour of Hong Kong

Happy New Year everybody! Hope your start to 2015 was as delicious as mine!

The end of 2014 and start to 2015 has been an action packed food extravaganza with Christmas, New Years, and an amazing 5 weeks of eating my way through Hong Kong.

{ice cream chocolate fondue: does a more perfect four-word combo even exist?}

Merry Christmas / Meri Kirihimete

The pav is in the oven.

The kumara salad is ready to go.

The strawberries are being cut.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Last minute Christmas noms: Super Easy Gingerbread Men

I love Christmas. I love the decorations, the carols, the festive cheer, the celebrating with friends and family and of course the baking. Christmas has the best baking.

However, Christmas can also be a rather stressful time of year. Fun good stress but hectic non-the less. Multiple family dos fit in. Dishes to make for said-family dos that feed a crowd and caters for the vegetarian + vegan + dairy-intolerant + gluten-free+ only-eats-meat guests. The yearly internal struggle of wanting to go to midnight mass but it being way past your bed time. The age old present buying dilemma of what to get for the work-colleage-who-you’ve-never-talked-to-but-got-as-a-secret santa / person-who-has-everything / distant-relative-who’s-come-visiting / surprise-last-minute-RSVP-to-xmas??

The answer to all of the above is of course 42 sweets/chocolate/baked goodies!

So any Christmas baking that is quick and easy and stress-free is my kind of Christmas baking.

These Super Easy Gingerbread Men have been my godsend this Christmas. They are indeed dead easy/ fool proof / fail-safe. You get maximum wow points for minimal effort. I mean, you don’t even need a rolling pin. They are also completely addictively delicious. Plus just look at them. Adorbs.

Last minute Christmas noms: Christmas truffles

This year's Christmas has been a last minute kinda Christmas.

Got all the prezzies last minute (just finished today whew). Flying up last minute (Christmas eve, evening). Packing for being away for 2 months, you guessed it last minute (aka have not started, yikes).

Only just finished up the last of these bad boys today and managed to get some good piccies...so very sorry for the last minute Christmas noms posting!

Party Time: Hundreds and Thousands Sprinkles Layer Cake

Nothing says it's party time like 100s and 1000s.  And I've had two awesome reasons to celebrate lately.

1) I passed my finals exams for medicine. Wooohoooo! One more year as an intern left before becoming a real doctor. Beyond exciting.

2) A week ago, I turned the big three-oh. I gotta say, the dirty thirties are awesome!

We had a 3 day non-stop eating bonanza.  I am not even kidding - we did high tea lunch, byo dinner, ice cream and pancakes brunch, all you can eat meat Brazilian churrasco lunch, Chinese banquet dinner, and rounded off with a buffet diy sushi brunch. Food, food, and more food. It was glorious.

All weekend I was surrounded by food, friends, family. New friends, old friends. Breaking bread with the people who had known me the longest and knew me the best. I had never felt more loved or more blessed. The whole time I had just one thought running through my head: this is what happiness is.

{sprinkles = happiness}

You know, I’d always thought that once you had reached 30, you’d be all grown up and do proper adult things. As it turns out some things have most definitely changed:

• most of my friends now have a kiddo or two;
• an awesome Friday night is home with the hubby watching Sherlock; and
• I’ve started using eye cream.

But some things stay exactly the same:

• we all still crack up at dirty jokes;
• we still love giving each other stick; and
• I’m still at uni (sigh).

Not to mention even at the ripe old age of 30 we all still think 100s and 1000s equals happiness and parties. So to mark my 30th, to celebrate passing exams and because I am clearly 30 going on 3, I made a Hundreds and Thousands Layer Cake.

One can never be too old for sprinkles.

Snapshots of exam delirium

It's just over a week until the finals and I'm going a little stir crazy so I thought I'd share some insanity love with you all.

I have so many Exam Time Dinner recipes sitting my on my camera waiting to be posted but I've banned myself from photo editing soooooo instead I'm going to share some of the things that have been keeping me amused this exam period.  It's mainly home stuff because I'm a little bit obsessed with The Block at the moment and it's not procrastinating if it's "necessary".

6 Snapshots of Exam Delirium

1. Highlighters light up my life

What are exams without a good set of highlighters. They're just so pretty and these are even named after me.