baking...with my new Breville mixer

 I got this for $270 at the Good Guys - it has a scraper which scrapes the sides of the bowl but I found that I still had to scrape the bands of mixture that gathered on top of the scraper bit. I'm quite pleased with it after having used it just twice. my old cheap one died after less than 10 uses so i thought i'd get a proper one, and of course, those colourful KitchenAid ones were much coveted! but I couldn't justify spending that much, especially since my baking skills aren't up to that level!

These are from Mrs. Field's chocolate cookbook - I modified it a lot because her recipe involved putting melted chocolate into the mixture which I couldnt be bothered doing... 

One thing about American recipes is that they always end up being too sweet. I've learnt to reduce the sugar but even then it's just guesswork. These cookies still ended up being slightly too sweet although I'd reduced the sugar by 1/5. Perhaps american sugar is less sweet than ours  ? 

but, they were yummy anyhow! 

here's the modified recipe: 

cream 220g butter, 1 1/4 cups brown sugar, 3 eggs + 2 tsp vanilla

in another bowl, whisk 2 cups plain flour, 3/4 cups cocoa powder + 1 tsp baking soda

fold flour mixture in, then stir in 340g chocolate chips. 

preheat oven to 150C, drop by the tablespoons 2 inches apart. Bake for 18-22 mins, cool for 1 minute on baking tray, then move to a wire rack to cool completely.

Olliebollen festival

 The annual Olliebollen festival at Calvin Christian School was on today and we went in anticipation of delicious freshly fried olliebollen...unfortunately the baby whacked it out of my hand after I'd taken only 2 bites of it! so it ended on the ground. to make up for it, i had the waffles with ice cream, maple syrup and berries, above. and some other things below:

presumably "butter cake" in Dutch, above. really nice - it had a rich crumbly texture and fragrant almond scent. I wouldn't call it a cake though, it was more like shortbread.

we wanted to have some of the roast pork that was looking really luscious on the spit roast but alas, it wasn't ready when we were there and we had to leave for another appointment.

apart from that, we were very pleased to have snapped up a boxful of 2nd hand books for just $2. hooray for school fairs!