A Simple and Delicious Cake base … for fresh plumS or fig or apples

PLUM CAKE RECIPE

Ingredients:

Cake mixture

125g unsalted butter
125g or 1/2 cup sugar or coconut sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup rye flour (or buckwheat or spelt)
1/3 cup almond meal
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch salt

Fruit Topping

5 or 6 round dark plums or Granny Smith apples. You can also add handful of blueberries (or sultanas) if you wish
1 lemon, grated zest and juice
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teas vanilla
1 1/2 tablespoon brown sugar

Instructions

Preheat oven at 180oC

Grease a 23cm (9") pie plate or spring form pan

Slice the plums or peeled, cored and sliced the apples. Add a good squeeze of lemon or lime to stop browning and a tablespoon of brown sugar and mix it all up.
In another bowl mix together the dry ingredients: almond meal, sifted flour, baking powder and salt.
Melt butter in medium saucepan, mix in sugar, egg and lemon zest then beat well with a wooden spoon.
Spread the mixture in the bottom of the pie dish.
Place the fruit generously on top of the base including any juices that have formed
Sprinkle with cinnamon and 1/2 tablespoon brown sugar.

Bake 40-45 minutes or until golden and cooked through and serve warm with whipped or double cream

RENOVATION TIP: The Joy of an Outdoor Shower

There’s nothing better than returning from an ocean swim and coming home to an outdoor copper shower under a canopy of lilly-pilly branches and surrounded by panels of reclaimed wood (planed into multicoloured panels by my clever partner). We created ours in our front courtyard with the help of Ruby our wonderful plumber (www.roseriver.com.au). The copper piping and taps are available in most plumbing supply shops but we took a while to find the right copper shower head which I’ve linked here. Underneath the wood base made with gaps so the water flows well away, we have a shower tray, similar to this one – the tray links to piping which flows and spreads into the garden.

What’s your personal colour palette?

This is a question photographer @LuisaBrimble asked me one day. Such an intriguing idea - she wasn’t talking about my ‘brands’ colour palette … but mine .. what colours and textures am I drawn to? I like to think … well, everything! but when I looked closer I could see that there were colours which I resonated to, were drawn to more than others. Then asked me to put together a storyboard or mood board of my own personal colour palette. Of course I could have spent days on it ,but I decided to create a quick sketch: screen grabs of images I’d photographed or seen in galleries, textures or photos of loved objects around me. This is what my colour/texture palette looked like.

What would yours look like?

AVALON: A sense of place and A little story about The Circle of life ..

The time between Christmas and New Year was spent cleaning out boxes, sorting, curating …the story of things … I came across an old aerogramme letter I’d written my parents when I was about 6 years old. I was staying with Mama and Papa in Brisbane for 3 months and attending Junction Park Primary School while my parents were overseas.

It made me smile to see the handwriting - carefully executed first attempts at “running writing”. When I turned the aerogramme over there was “an Australian beach scene”. I stared a little longer - it was Avalon beach which that distinctive and familiar ocean pool and rock shelf - how amazing and here I am years later now living in that Australian beach image!

Seed Crackers

Crunchy, nutty, yumminess. Perfect with cheese or humous, avacado or dips. I make a batch every week and if we’re traveling I place all the dry ingredients in one zip lock bag and bake them when we arrive (just adding boiling water to the mix)

RECIPE

Pre-heat oven 200 c - then turn down to 180 to finish

Ingredients

3/4 cup pumpkin seed
3/4 cup sunflower seeds
3 tablespoons ground flax seeds
2 heaped tablespoons hemp seeds
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
3 tablespoons chia seeds
2 heaped tablespoon rice flour
good pinch flaky salt
1 cup boiled water

Instructions

Place all the ingredients in a bowl and use a whisk to makes sure everything is well combined - the rice flour sometime clumps so this step is important.
Then pour cup boiled water and over the mix and stir through well
Then let rest for 20 minutes
Please baking paper over an large baking tray
pour this mix onto the baking paper and with a meta spatula spread evenly across the paper - there shouldn’t be any holes in the mix so you may need to work back and forward until it is evenly coating the baking tray - I try and spread mine quite thin
Then pace in the over at 200c for 10 minutes and then reduce down to 180c - keep an eye in it because depending on your oven it maybe begin to burn at the edges or where it’s thinner.
You can check progress by breaking off a corner - if it breaks easily then it is ready if its still a bit floppy and cant break then keep it in longer. If the middle is soft you can break off the edges into cracker sized pieces and then pop the middle bit back in the oven.

And a final poem to leave you with ..

By Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. I often reflect on the words of this poem when I look far to the horizon in our sunrise place above Avalon beach. The here, and now, the yet-to-be, and the yesterday, all fully felt in the moment just before the earth bows to the sun.