This recipe is so quick to make and taste delicous too. It uses white chocolate and cream cheese. The addition of dried pineapple and brazil nuts gives it a lovely flavour and texture. I love brazil nuts in fudge. The recipe is below. Make and enjoy.

Ingredients
250g white chocolate broken into small pieces
220g cream cheese
2 1/3 cup icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
a pinch of salt
3/4 cup brazil nuts chopped
1/4 cup chopped dried pineapple pieces
Rectangular baking tin

Method
Line the baking tin with greaseproof paper. Sieve icing sugar into a large mixing bowl. Add a pinch of salt, vanilla and the cream cheese to the sugar. Beat these ingredients with an electric mixer until smooth and fluffy. Melt the white chocolate in the microwave using a low setting and heating at 20 second intervals. The chocolate should be soft enough to work into the cream cheese mixture. Take care not to burn the chocolate. Beat the melted chocolate into the cream cheese mixture. Stir in the fruit and nuts. Spread the mixture into the prepared pan.  Freeze for an hour and then transfer to the fridge for another 2 hours before eating. Store fudge in the fridge.

This is how I feel today. I want to crawl into a corner and tell the world to leave me alone until the weekend.

On the eve of completing my third chair restoration, I can't help but remember the very first chair I stripped and made new again. The most important lesson I learnt then was to take pictures! I don't have any record of the sanding, stripping and recovering process.  All I have are pictures of the finished chair ( on the left)  and how it looks in its new setting (on the right).

I bought the chair at an auction at Lawsons in Leichardt. They have some nice pieces for restoration, but it is competitive and I've lost out on more pieces than I've been successful. The fabric was purchased from The Remnant Warehouse in Alexandria. It's a subtle check design and its so comfortable to sit against. 

My latest project is very different from the first and I hope to be able to share that with you very soon.

Ha! I love it when a plan comes together.  My sister just sent me these pictures of the eggplant seedlings I planted in Sydney, four months ago. There are five fruits on the little plants!

I planted it about four weeks before I left for Kuala Lumpur. I watered it everyday and fed it with seaweed fertiliser weekly and hoped for enough rain to sustain it after I left.

Really really pleased with the result, even though I will never get taste these vegetables.  Just goes to show what a little planning can achieve. I can see more flowers in one of the shots and I hope the little plants will keep producing more eggplants in the coming months.

PS In case anyone was wondering, that's pennyworth (and some weeds) growing in the background. I thought that patch had died off after the hailstorm that hit the inner west last April, but it looks as though it has come back with a vengeance. It's great in salads.

While walking around Bunnings this weekend, I came across a plant I'd never seen before. It's called a Cape Goosebery or a ground cherry. From what I read it grows well in Sydney. So I'm going to give it a try in the new backyard that is sunny and bright and not shaded by huge gum trees.

This is what my gooseberry bush looks like after I brought it home and planted it into a larger pot.

I layered potting mix on top of compost. Hopefully that will give it a boost of nutrients to get established and produce an abundance of fruit. The plant is called a cape gooseberry as each orange coloured 'berry' is covered with a papery lantern like sheath.  It reminds me of a weed we used to have growing around the house when I was a child. I loved peeling the papery lanterns to pick the seeds within. There was no berry  as such in my childhood version.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this plant survives and that have something to show you later in the season.  I would love to hear from you if you have any experience with this plant. 

PS.  I have neglected this blog for more than a year but I am determined to be more active from now on!

So on the weekend we went for a drive along the coast to check out a few craft markets. I was trying to identify some to take part in for the new year. We had just checked out one near Bundeena in the Royal National Park and it was a beautiful day. Warm and sunny with just a hint of cloud. It made a nice change from all the rainy overcast days we had recently.

Our next destination was Wollongong and we were driving down the Princes Highway when we happened upon a sign that said “Heavy fog ahead, use hazard lights”. There wasn’t a wisp of mist to be seen about the place. Clear skies and sun all around. We figured someone had forgotten to change the sign from the morning.

A couple of kilometres down the highway, there is another sign saying the same thing and the sun is still shining. Then as we progressed a bit further we started to come across misty conditions and there was heavy fog hanging around the trees and land on the side of the highway.  The day was suddenly overcast and the temperature had dropped about 7 degrees.

From perfect weather to fog in two minutes flat and this was at 2.30 in the afternoon. My only experience with fog has been in the early morning. It clears by 8.30 or 9.00am at the latest. I’d say eerie was an understatement. I felt as though I had been transported to the moors of Devonshire and the hound of the Baskerville’s was about to come galloping out of the trees.

But I needn’t have worried. As we neared Wollongong, the weather cleared up and the sun came out again. I have heard that it is quite common to have foggy conditions in that stretch of highway around Bulli. It was just unexpected on a late afternoon in summer.