from somewhere in my imagination

Orange, Almond & Polenta Cake

I love flourless cakes.  I've actually been keen to make another one of these Chocolate, Date & Walnut ones but tonight I needed something I can slip into their lunchboxes this week and I have a pile of juicy organic oranges in my fruit bowl.

Plus, I felt like something citrusy.  It is super simple, no fancy techniques or hours of mixing.  There is also no butter involved.  A delicious grown up kind of cake that will still make the kids happy.  You could easily substitue the oranges with lemons or even a mix with limes.

Orange, Almond & Polenta Cake - Serves 12

Ingredients

250g Almond Meal (I blitzed my own using the same weight of raw almonds in a food processor)

150g Honey

250g Greek Yogurt

2 Tsp Vanilla

Zest & Juice of 2 large Oranges

4 Eggs

200g fine polenta

2 tsp baking powder

Method

Preheat Oven to 160C

Line and grease a 20-ish cm Spring form tin

In a large mixing bowl mix together the yogurt, honey and vanilla

Mix in the almond meal then add the eggs one at a time, mixing to combine after each addition.

Stir through the orange juice and zest

Fold in the polenta and baking powder until everything is combined.

Pop it in the oven for about 45 minutes.  Honey has a tendency to caramelise and burn so make sure you keep an eye on it, turn down the temperature if you think it is browning too much and cook for a little longer but don't dry it out.

Pull it out of the oven and give it a few minutes to cool in the tin before removing to a cooling rack.

If you wanted you could douse the cake with a simple orange syrup like this one while still in the tin that would make it sublime.

Serve wedges with greek yoghurt and a drizzle of honey and perhaps a few scattered almond flakes if you have some kicking about.

I had mine with a cup of T2 French Earl Grey.  My taste buds were thoroughly spoilt.

Hope that you have had a lovely weekend and have a fantastic week ahead of you!

Tatum xx

 

Planning a Trip to Disneyworld

When I am telling people about the 6 week USA adventure we enjoyed last year they are often perplexed by the fact we spent as many nights at Disneyworld as we did. Disneyland in Anaheim is generally the place Australians are more familiar with and I think it is safe to say that if you spent as many nights ay Disneyland as we did at Disneyworld you would definitely have done everything.

Eight nights at Disneyworld is not enough time to do everything.

Disneyworld is made up of 4 parks plus 2 water parks and the downtown Disney area that is open to the public. We did not include the waterparks in our magic your way package, and that was a good thing. We barely had time to swim in the pool at our resort, we would not have had time to spend in the water parks.

There are many many resorts to choose from at Disneyworld. We stayed at the Beachclub and I would choose to stay there or the Yachtclub or at one of the boardwalk resorts if we went back. They are central to both Epcot and Hollywood Studios meaning that you are less reliant on buses for the whole time you are there. Getting between parks during busy times around opening and closing can be a bit of a slow process.

The Animal Kingdom resort looks fabulous but it puts you far away from the rest of the parks and there are no night time shows inside the Animal Kingdom so you would end up finding yourself travelling much more than by staying there than at one of the more central resorts.

The budget all-star resorts have been given thumbs up by both a friend who stayed at one and an old school friend who was lucky enough to work there for a year.

Include food in your package. You are highly unlikely to be going anywhere else to eat and it is cheaper and infinitely more convenient to have it prepaid and included. Make sure you book some of your meals before you go.

I still dream about this mexican meal!

There are some really nice restaurants (especially at Epcot and at Downtown Disney where you food package is still valid) and it's easier if character meals are prebooked. That said if you arrive at the start of a meal session it isn't all that difficult to get a table at a character meal.



Don't expect to get too many early nights. With the exception of The Animal Kingdom the parks are alternately open until quite late. Guests staying in the park also get extra hours, I'm talking 3am close in the Magic Kingdom some nights.

Make good use of the fast pass system and plan your days.

Once you are at Disneyworld it is hard to get out. We wanted to spend a day at Universal studios. That involved hiring a car, just getting to the car hire place to pick it up was tricky. It is also expensive. Between car hire and the park tickets for Universal and paying for the days' food it cost us the best part of an extra $1000 which would have paid for another couple of days park entry, accommodation and food at Disneyworld.

It's sliding scale, the longer you stay the cheaper it is per day.

If you are planning on doing some shopping for clothes do that first so you don't need to pack more than you need. Stay outside the park near the outlets if you are going to be shopping in Orlando.

It's a 4-5 hour flight from LA to Orlando. We left Sydney around lunchtime which got us in to LA mid-morning. We then had a red eye flight from LA to Orlando. We checked ourselves in to the Holiday Inn express and tucked ourselves into bed for the afternoon before heading back to the airport. That was a sensible move, next time I would prebook the accommodation so we knew where we were going.  You do actually pay for the room overnight even though you are just there during the day.  The airport hotels don't seem to do day rates.

April and October seem to be the cheapest times to stay at Disneyworld. I'm told you are best to avoid it at Christmas when it is crowded and during summer when it is really hot and crowded. Ideally it's best to visit before the American school year finishes but after Spring Break or after school has gone back in August but before Thanksgiving. We were there at the beginning of May and the heat some days even managed to affect us, seasoned hot weather dwellers that we are :)

I can't tell you how highly I rate a family trip to Disneyworld and I would take us all back there in a heartbeat if I could.

Tatum xx

Eat and the City

There is skinny, and then there is New York skinny.  I suspect you aren’t considered to be skinny in New York unless you are actually a waif.  I assume that term comes from wafer thin?  Just to be clear, skinny is not a status I desire.  Having another school mum come up to me and say ‘wow, you look fit’ that rocks my world, that’s exactly how I want to be seen. 

It became clear that an American size 0 (that’s a 4 here in Australia) really is the ultimate goal for many fashionable ladies in NYC.  If not 00, part of me can’t quite believe that size actually exists and what’s more people strive to wear it.

What I was horrified by was the way in which many fashion conscious Ney York ladies apparently maintain their weight.  They don’t seem to eat, well, not in public anyway.  What shocked me equally is that it wasn’t just the ladies who didn’t appear to be eating it was the men too.

Our first morning in NYC we breakfasted at Balthazar, a reasonably well known French restaurant in SoHo.  My bowl of latte, French toast and bacon with a side of berries was just what I needed to fuel me for the day of shopping we had planned.  I was hungry and I ate every last bit.  The fresh berries were especially delicious.

At the table next to us were a man and woman, probably doing business over a late breakfast, with barely touched bowls of fruit and yoghurt pushed to the side.  It didn’t seem quite right to me.

The following night we returned to Balthazar for dinner.  By the time we got there I could have eaten a horse I was so hungry.  We had an 11pm booking after a Yankees game.  I hadn’t eaten at the baseball because there wasn’t a single thing on offer that I remotely felt like eating.  We’d walked 15kms from SoHo to Battery Park and up the Westside to Chelsea that day.

We ordered the last of the fish special.  It was a whole salt dough baked fish served with saffron rice, bok choy and a lemon buerre blanc and it was seriously yum.  We devoured it when it finally arrived to our table after its 45 minutes lead time.  It was worth waiting for.

Being a fashionable place they pack the tables together at Balthazar.  The couple next to us were dining on steaks with pommes frites and something green and wilted.  The lady, about my age, and of reasonably slight build and stature had eaten maybe 5 bites of her steak and perhaps a frite?  I can’t say for sure because I didn’t see her eat one and the pile of them is pretty large so if she had eaten four or five there wouldn’t have been an appreciable dent.  Her dining companion hadn’t eaten much more.

Part of me really wanted to ask if I could try.

When the waiter eventually came and cleared their plates, maybe he was waiting for them to eat their dinner too, he asked if they wanted to see the dessert menu and told them it would be on the house.  WTF?  Obviously his mother never told him that you had to eat all your dinner if you wanted dessert too.

So, they ordered some.  And, I watched in great pain as they picked at them.  I put more on each spoonful when I started feeding my babies solids than this lady had on hers.  It was criminal.

Is this really how women in New York stay so thin?  Perhaps the absence of carbs in their diet explains their propensity not to smile and appear so critical of the world?  The lady next to us at Balthazar seemed generally bored with life, or perhaps she was just sick of her date talking about himself?  If they weren’t actually hungry why not order a salad instead?  Or at least just split the one steak?  It’s the waste of food that pissed me off as much as anything else, it’s both excessive and unnecessary.  Do people go to these places to pretend to eat and be seen.  I don’t understand.

The next night at La Esquina we saw a repeat performance of the New York diet as the tables of women around us picked at their food without actually eating much.

Sunday night we decided to eat in the restaurant of our apparently quite trendy hotel.  I am more than impressed with Steven for choosing such a great place to stay.  There was a modelling shoot in the courtyard our last day there and I am fairly certain I was in the lift with a female singer or rap artist.  I couldn’t tell you who it was but she had two minders, was en route to the penthouse and had that ‘don’t fuck with me, I’m famous’ look about her.

It was an Italian trattoria styled menu.  Steven had pasta and I ordered tuna.  I’ll start by saying that my dinner was delicious.  Slices of tuna on neatly shaped pieces of watermelon with some delightful basil infused oil and a few pinenuts.  It was great and I am sure I will endeavour to create a dish inspired by it during summer.  However, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t leave me hungry.  The dessert menu wasn’t really that fantastic, and I suspect we were scared that all we would be served was a flourish and a breath of thin air, so we decided to venture a few blocks east to Little Italy for cannoli.

It didn’t take long to find the home of both New York’s, and, reportedly the world’s best cannoli. 

We weren’t about to do the research to either confirm nor deny the New York claim.  However, the world claim is completely trumped by my favourite lunchtime coffee place Caparezza.  Their cannoli are better than the best in the world.

We ventured in and ordered a cannoli tasting plate each, we later agreed that the peanut butter one was the best.  I asked for a skinny latte, the waitress said ‘we only have whole milk’...I thought she said ‘we only have cold milk’.  Confused, we clarified things and I ordered a macchiato.  I don’t like whole milk.  Clearly there are others who think New York women need a bit more substance in their bellies and are quietly waging war by shunning the skinny stuff.

How does it make you feel seeing good food go to waste?  What’s the best restaurant meal you have had lately?  Do you prefer custard or ricotta in your cannoli and is peanut butter filling a criminal twist on a classic?

Tatum xx