Happy Mother’s Day

Today is Mother’s Day here in Australia. My husband and children are concocting breakfast for me. The kids don’t know, but I already guessed what its going to be – I hoped for eggs benedict, and that’s what its going to be. I love the tangy, creamy (dairy free!) sauce… mmm….

Yesterday afternoon we hosted my husband’s family here for what I called “a posh afternoon tea”. I didn’t want to call it high tea, because I think that involves sandwiches, and quite frankly, they don’t excite me much at all.

We had been baking for days, making lots of yummy sweet things, in small sizes so that we could all have lots without stuffing ourselves silly! We had little lemon tarts, mini almond friands, mini apple maple syrup cinnamon cakes, chocolate and date panforte, and our version of cannoli.

The lemon tarts were apparently very nicely tart (I couldn’t have any as they have dairy in them), and the cannoli apparently were delicious (couldn’t have them either).

We couldn’t come at the idea of deep frying the cannoli cases, so we made tuiles instead, on our cream horn cases, and filled them with the crema pasticcera (I bet that’s spelt wrong.) The tuiles were slightly honey flavoured and the crema pasticcera has been a hit in our family with the dairy eaters ever since I found a recipe on the internet while we were in Ethiopia. You make the vanilla egg custard, then leave it to set, then whiz it to make it smooth again. In Ethiopia, we only had a whisk to mush it up, so rather than being smooth, it turned out looking like scrambled eggs. One of our friends’ kids loved it so much that we now refer to it as Noah’s custard. It also makes me think of good times in Ethiopia whenever I make it. Sigh…

The maple syrup cakes were FABBO! I got the recipe out of Donna Hay’s Seasons book, which we were given for Christmas, and then didn’t really have the chance to look at until we got back from Ethiopia. Yummy recipe, which we did in mini muffin pans rather than bundt tins.

The friands were nice, but paled into insignificance against the other yumness. The panforte was rather forgettable, and after all the effort I went to to make it, was a bit of a disappointment. May I say that glucose syrup is a disgusting substance that is designed to tie people in sticky knots?

We’re doing it all again this afternoon with my side of the family. We made enough of each yumness to do the two events. Looking forward to round two.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mums and those wishing to be mums!