Chocolate Oat Biscuits

Chewy and full of chocolate, these are good biscuits.  I’ve made these lots of times but have only just managed to take pictures of them.  Details below.

• 150 g butter
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup plain flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 2 cups oats
• 100 – 150 g milk chocolate (choc chips, or roughly chopped)

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Cream butter and both sugars until light and fluffy.  Add vanilla and egg and mix till well combined.  Mix in the flour and baking powder.  Add the oats and chocolate and mix through. Place tablespoon sized balls of dough on lined baking trays and bake for 12-15 minutes.  Cool on a wire rack.  The recipe suggests you can get 24 biscuits out of the mixture and I managed 21.

mmmmmm chocolate.....

Chicken Village

Chicken Village, also known as Lang Dinh An, can be found just outside of Da Lat in the Central Highlands.  When I travelled to Vietnam we visited the village as part of a day long motorbike tour.  The village is mostly know for its immense concrete sculpture of a chicken (hence the name although I think it might be rooster) but the local women also produce beautiful scarves and other woven products on hand looms.

We had a wander around the village and talked to a few of the locals.  The village is matriarchal which meant it was the women we chatted too and they explained that in their village it is the women who give dowries (generally buffaloes) to the men when they marry.  One of the guys in our group was informed that he’d be worth four buffaloes, much more than some of the locals apparently.

This isn’t a great picture but they had a decent sized school room and it seemed to only be the younger children who weren’t in attendance.

These little boys followed us for a while and posed, so we could show them their pictures on our cameras.

This lady acted as one of our guides in the village and demonstrated using the hand loom to weave.  The finished product can be seen in the background.

Last day at work today!

Apologies for the lack of posts this week but it’s been an interesting time.  Getting ready to leave somewhere has its ups and downs.  I’ve been going through all my piles of stuff at work, which is making me think I should have had a spring clean a little bit sooner.  I’ve baked a few things this week though, so I might get around to posting the recipes sometime soon.

I finally bought my ticket!

I finally psyched myself up to pick a date to travel to the UK and went and bought my ticket.  I was finding it difficult to choose a particular date as it was all quite arbitrary and I didn’t want to pick the wrong date.  Whatever, now I have a date and will have to stick to it.  I’ll be arriving in London in mid August, just in time to see out the British summer which is apparently about as warm as our winter. Every time I look at a website with a weather forecast, it always seems to be raining, drizzling, with showers, or chance of showers or some such indicator of imminent precipitation.  I’m only  just beginning to understand the truly numerous words that can be used to describe rain.

Friday night brief

I’ve been swimming in job applications for the past few days and my brain has turned to mush.  So, I have found a short little video that is lovely to listen to and doesn’t take much brain power.  Click here to listen to Neil Gaiman narrate a promo for the Newberry winning The Graveyard Book.

EDIT: My brain was such mush that I somehow managed to forget to schedule the post, so here it is now. This is not the most stupid thing I’ve done in the last 24 hours

food, glorious food…

One of the best parts about travelling is eating all the fabulous food you encounter in different places.  My trip to Cambodia was no different.  On our day trip in the countryside around Battambang we visited a number of homes and businesses that produced different staple foodstuffs. 

The lady here was making sticky rice in the bamboo.  The hollow bamboo was filled with sweet sticky rice and cooked in the bamboo over coals.  The rice turned out delicious and chewy.

This picture is from the fish sauce factory.  It does not truly convey the delicate aroma of slowly fermenting fish in the midday sun.  To make the fish sauce, the ladies would gather a few handfuls of the small local fish together, get a cleaver in each hand and chop the fish into a paste.  This paste would then be put in large buckets to fully ferment and get that lovely fish sauce flavour.

This is the house where they made rice noodles.  They kept the threads of dough soft in buckets of water while they were making them all and used the husks of rice to fuel the fire.  The fire heated water to boiling point so that the fully formed noodles could be set before being parcelled up and sold fresh to other local businesses.

And this is the house where they made rice paper for spring rolls.  The rice was ground down and mixed with water to form a paste.  The paste was used to make the rice paper on the container you can see the lady using.  It was applied to the very fine mesh on top of boiling water (sort of like a steamer) to set the paper.  When this was done the paper was laid out on the mats you can see in the front of the picture in order to dry out.

It’s Monday and I haven’t done anything interesting

So, I’ve listened to over half of the Triple J Hottest 100 of all time – what a trip back to High School that was.  I was having flashbacks to school dances and of being unsociable in my room listening to Jeff Buckley and The Cure.  It was a good afternoon of music on Sunday topped off with a Nirvana classic – oh to be a misunderstood teenager again. 

But I didn’t go anywhere, or take any pictures. I did successfully manage to apply for two jobs in the UK (successfully as in the online application system appeared to send away my files to wherever their destination may be) which took some time and I’ve got a few more to go over the next few weeks.  Hopefully the effort will be well received.  I think I’m in need of practice doing up job applications, as I haven’t had to do one for a few years now.  I think they were ok but time will tell.  Maybe I’ll trawl through the archives and find some colourful pictures to post till I get around to doing something more exciting.

60 songs down…

…and has the the hottest 100 of all time been Rickrolled yet?  Not that I can see, but I am rather tired today.  There are however some awesome songs in the list so far.  Jeff Buckley, Smashing Pumpkins, Bowie, The Clash, The Smiths, Massive Attack, Blur and Pulp among heaps of others.  The only disappointment to date is Coldplay making number 87 with Yellow.  I don’t know how people could vote for just one of their songs, seeing as they all sound the same. How do people tell them apart?

Ah well, eyes and ears open, you could hear the dulcet tones of Never gonna give you up yet   Bring on the top forty.

I wish this worked in reverse

Check out this new promotion to get more working holiday makers into Australia.  I could do with a cheap flight to the UK – no swapsies available ?????

Cheesecake brownies

Mmmmmm.  They’re delicious and combine two favourite foods – chocolate and cheesecake.  The recipe is pretty simple and they don’t take too long to make.  And in any case, they are more than worth the effort.  Here are the details.

• 150 g butter
• 300g cooking chocolate (Milk or dark depending on your preference, I ‘ve made the brownies with both and in combination)
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 1/2 cups plain flour
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 250g cream cheese

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Melt butter and chocolate in a small saucepan on a very low heat until they are fully combines.  You could use a double boiler if you’re worried about the chocolate seizing but it should be fine as long as the heat is low.  Set aside to cool. 

In a small bowl mix together the room temperature cream cheese and 1/3 cup of the caster sugar.  When they are fully combined, add one of the eggs and mix thoroughly. 

In another larger bowl whisk the two remaining eggs and then mix in the remaining 2/3 cup sugar.  To this mixture, add the chocolate mixture and combine well.  When the ingredients are smooth and glossy, add the flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing well after each addition.  Then fold in the sour cream until well combined. 

Line a brownie pan or 20cm square cake tin with baking paper and spoon the chocolate mixture in.  Make sure it’s spread into the corners.  Spoon the cream cheese mixture on top of this and use a knife or spoon to create marbling in the mixture.  Bake for 30-35 minutes and set aside to cool in the pan afterwards. I found this made 18-21 brownies depending on how you divide up the pan.

the finished product