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I was craving something with a citrus tang last night so I cobbled together a recipe for a microwavable lemon self-saucing pudding.

Ingredients
1 cup self-raising flour, sifted
1/3 cup caster sugar
2 small lemons, rind finely grated (you can substitute any citrus on hand, really)
60g butter, melted, at room temperature (I used olive oil spread)
1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 egg (replace with apple sauce to veganise)

Sauce
1/3 cup caster sugar
1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (again, substitute this for any citrus on hand)
1/2 cup boiling water

Instructions
You’ll need a microwave-safe bowl with at least a 6 cup capacity. I use the big bowl from my Tupperware red stack cooker set.

Combine flour, sugar and rind in the bowl. Whisk together butter, juice and egg in another small bowl then stir into the flour mixture until well combined. Flatten the surface with the back of a spoon.

To make the sauce place sugar, juice and boiling water into a microwave-safe jug and stir to dissolve the sugar. If the sugar hasn’t dissolved, put jug in microwave for short bursts and stir until sugar dissolves. Pour sauce over the back of a large spoon to evenly cover pudding.

Put pudding in the microwave and cook, uncovered, on 50% power for 8 to 9 minutes or until a skewer inserted around edges comes out clean but centre is still a little sticky. Cover tightly with foil. Stand for 5 minutes or until centre is no longer sticky.

Serve with ice-cream, yoghurt or eat it plain and enjoy the tarty bitterness!

(You’ll notice that the bowl I served it in is also Tupperware, I am such a Tupper-tragic!)

The weekend means mystery flowers from the market! The sign in the bucket said “Lizzies $5 or 3 for $10″, so I bought three for a very plump looking arrangement. I did a bit of a google for Lizzy/ Lizzie flowers but the image search results turned up some flowers that didn’t look like these at all. Apparently Lizzies are part of the Impatiens family, and there are quite a variety of flower heads within the genus so they could well be Lizzies… who knows?! Do you?

Here’s a closer shot so you can have a look at the buds and flowers.

The other week I was introduced to the wonder of kumatoes: small and round tomatos with a brown or striped skin. They taste crisp and sweet, perfect in salads if you want something crunchy and fresh in summer!

I love colourful foods, they make life so much nicer.

These muffins look better than they taste unfortunately. I didn’t have any buttermilk and I forgot to whisk the egg. ALWAYS WHISK THE EGG! It makes things much fluffier.

And now… I must do laundry. Fancy’s on weekend

Today was a busy day! This morning I had breakfast to celebrate my uncle’s birthday and this afternoon we had an epic dessert picnic for dear Kathleen’s birthday tomorrow. We all brought something, so there was too much food. Too much delicious, lovingly made food! Cupcakes, slices, brownies, biscuits and cakes – I’d never seen so much dessert in my life and I’ve been to High Tea! There was also a macaw at the park, apparently his owner brings him down often. He was flying all over the place, swooping people and landing on them but he was generally well behaved. Shortly after the above photo was taken (by Kiki) he landed on my back and started pecking at my hair!

Dutifully reporting in with my OOTD for today! I changed shoes after I went to breakfast though.

Cardigan: City Chic
Dress: Yours Clothing
Tights: We Love Colors (I snipped the feet off)
Thongs: Who knows!
Earrings: Random store in Fortitude Valley
Sunglasses: Valley market vendor

Most of the lovely people.

So. Much. Food.

The zebra cake I made.

What amazing colours!

New Farm Park has a lovely rose garden too

I wanted to bake some savoury muffins for my husband to take to work and for general snacking noms, because I think I have just about hit my strawberry limit (Queensland seems to be having some kind of strawberry explosion at the moment). This recipe is super flexible: you can swap veges in and out and probably even reduce the amount of butter too. The amount of muffins it yields is totally dependent on your muffin/ cupcake tray and how much you fill each hole up, but I got 18 last night!

Click to go to the flickr page – hit “All Sizes” to get the original sized jpg to print out.

Lemme tell ya something about muffins, toots. They’re delicious. They’re delicious and I won’t hear a word against them!
/film noir

Enjoy!

I’ve been slaving away over cupcakes which turned out to be complete duds after I left out the eggs, so I have baking on the brain. Today’s Fanciful Friday is going to be a baking edition!

• A hootie cake! This gorgeous owl cake was made by lady_lala “for a nice boy”. Awww man! I really want to make cupcake owls!

• Superhero groom’s cupcakes! I’m not quite sure what the tradition is with groom’s cakes because I’ve never heard of it before, but these look amazing! There are heaps more if you go over to lookcupcake’s flickr!

• I love how these cupcakes by Sugar & Meringue are all decorated differently… it makes me think that not all cupcakes need to be uniform and precisely like each other, especially when they could all have cute designs like these!

• Bakerella always deserves a mention when it comes to baking… and these apple cake pops look fantastic! I’ve never even seen coloured candy melts in Australia, but I want to try these one day. I wonder if you can make the cake balls out of an apple sponge cake? I think I’d really crave the apple flavour if I tried to make these.

• Panda cakes! These were made by Coco Cake Cupcakes.

• I’ll leave you with the emo slice I made for my brother. I’ve realised that the red velvet recipe I posted here a few months ago is missing something crucial… the bit where you add eggs! I’ll amend the recipe eventually – I hope I haven’t completely ruined anyone’s cupcake snacking plans! Basically what I did to salvage this is mix a bunch of cream cheese into the crumbled cupcakes, spread it over a slice pan and then ice it. The “Emo Bigotry” design is an in-joke

Don’t forget! If you like baking stuff, you can follow our Eat, Sleep, Cupcake tumblr blog.

• Animated gifs that are fancy! Go see this full screen – so awesome it will make your nose bleed.

• Amy Winehouse – Me and Mr Jones. I love Amy Winehouse without shame, she is an incredible vocalist who writes the most poignant lyrics. This song is one of my favourites just to belt out randomly at any given moment and because of that, it’s fancy.

• Directors Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland, Magico Nakamura and Masayoshi Nakamura developed one of the most inventive video clips I’ve ever seen for Sour by using the band’s fans to create the video. It’s so finely choreographed – now that’s thinking with your fancy!

• Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland – fancy by name and fancy by nature. This lady is one of my heroes, and I’ve never read any of her books. I just love her incredible countenance, and I hope to grow up to be just like her.

• Ice cream cookie sandwiches! I’m not a huge fan of ice cream, but Makia sent me a link to Bakerella’s blog on Twitter and I had to post it because Bakerella’s food photography is so edible.

• I found this video the other week because I was on the hunt for calligraphy demonstrations, and I was stunned at the confidence in this artist’s hand. Letterarte does some beautiful work, and you should check out his channel for more!

• This. Just because it’s hilarious.

I’ve never been very big on cooking, and since being diagnosed with juvenile diabetes I developed a strained relationship with food. It’s a bit of a chore, really. Gorging on a delicious treat needs to be calculated against the amount of insulin or exercise I will need to do in order to bring my blood sugar down to an acceptable level. A low blood sugar means I have to force feed myself even when I’m not hungry. I guess it’s because of this strange and forced friendship with food that I never really got into cooking… which doesn’t really make sense but it’s something I’ve just realised in the last 6 months or so.

When I first started learning about Health at Every Size principles I realised that my relationship with food would have to change. In order to eat intuitively I’d have to actually drop my food defences and think about the things my body wanted me to eat. A part of my self motivated “food counseling” has been taking photos of the things that I make. I’m also a big fat perfectionist, so I find myself making really fiddly things instead of just slopping stuff on a plate. Maybe I should work on that too

I started by making cupcakes, because everyone was making them and I wanted to join in. They’re fun and it’s easy to do pretty and creative things with them, but I think I’ve almost exhausted the humble cupcake. It was by making cupcakes that I discovered the joy of sharing food – something I have never really experienced until I started baking. Some people assume that I make these cupcakes just for myself, but they don’t see how I share them with my friends and family whenever I go visit!

In the next few months I want to learn more and more recipes, and take photos along the way of all my results. I find that when I take a photo of something I can properly document it and pat myself on the back! It might sound like a very simple sort of thing to most people, but I really struggle with food sometimes and I’ve found that cherishing my meal has helped me so much. Maybe a similar approach can help other people who feel similarly… but at the very least you can make pretty things to eat, share and reflect on!

It seems heaps of people are getting in to MasterChef Australia and I try to watch it every few nights just to see if they’re being taught any new recipes, but often I completely forget. Despite this the show has inspired me to cook more desserty style dishes. I’ve been perfecting the cupcake thing for a while, but it’s nice to try something different! Though first, we have cupcakes, because… they are delicious and I can’t quit them

Milo cupcakes with butterscotch frosting
If you want the recipe for the frosting, just click the image to go to the flickr page.

Dried fruit french toast with berry compote and yoghurt
I made Nick breakfast today, and it was delicious! The recipe is from here.

Om nom nom, you want to see another view.

Neiman Marcus cookies
You can find the recipe for these anywhere!

Do you have any delicious sweets/ dessert recipes to share?

I bought the domain eatsleepcupcake.com to start a group authored cupcake tumblr – for people who make cupcakes and like to show them off. Unfortunately I failed to realise that the submission tool used around tumblr is only for private beta testers, not for me, so my plan collapsed

Eat, Sleep, Cupcake is now running as a group tumblr, authored by Kathleen, Heather and myself. You’ll see photos of our baking, and our inspirations, as well as recipes we want to try out!

These were the most delicious Milo cupcakes ever, and the goodies in the first photo are cupcakes I’ve just finished making today! They’ve got crushed Tim Tam bits in them, and they’re iced with Cedar Creme liqueur.

So yeh, you should follow Eat, Sleep, Cupcake. The End!

If I had a cupcake shop, I would have so much fun designing the packaging. Actually, I don’t want to own a cupcake shop really… I just want to design fun stuff. So I guess I’m in the perfect job already. ha!

I made some cupcakes for my friend Ellie’s birthday!

I think that smug little grin means she liked them