Afternoon Tea

Today has been a great day, spent with family and friends. My nephew was christened at lunch time at our Parish Church, and we went back to mum and dad's for afternoon tea. My contribution to the food was the Fig Cake I made yesterday, and a pavlova that I whipped up this morning. I love making pavlovas and have actually taken on the "official pav maker" title in my family. I have also inherited my mum's Pavlova Plate to cook the pav.

Loving the 70's feel of the plate.

Here is that photo of the Fig Cake I promised. It looks as delicious as it tasted.

By the end of the day there was only a piece or two left of the cake. Everyone who had some complimented me on it, so I count it a success! Also, one of my mum's best friends is a Home Ec teacher at a high school and I gave her a jar of my Fig Paste. She sampled it on the spot and was very impressed. So Yay! for that too. :)

Speaking of successes, sometimes I just can't get things right. Take my pavlova this morning. I have made this dessert a half dozen times now with no problems, but of course, as soon as I am on a tight schedule, I make mistakes. I was up and in the kitchen bright and early this morning, with my two girls along as helpers. Everything was going fine until I was about half way through the process and my youngest asked if she could lick the beaters. When I looked at the recipe I saw that the next step required folding the cornflour through the mixture, and I thought "oh yeah, I can use a spatula for that", so I gave her a beater and mixed the rest by hand. Normally I would use my electric beaters for the entire process. Today I realised why! What happened was that the cornflour didn't mix through properly and when I added the vanilla I ended up with little brown lumps of vanilla cornflour throughout the meringue mixture. Yuck!

There was no way that I could save the mixture, so the lot was tipped, with the plan being to start again and make another one. Only trouble was, I was out of caster sugar. My super husband dashed out to the shops for me and bought some more, and pav take-two was on it's way. The moral of this story is... don't mix the pav by hand! Anyway, pav take-two was perfect, and apparently delicious. My dad loved it, and said he would have gone back for seconds if it didn't make him look like a guts. That is praise enough for me.