Catalan Easter Cake

Rainy day sunday in the Blue Mountains and I decided to do some baking. Lots of easter recipes are starting to appear and so I chose a lovely decadent looking cake - a Catalan Easter Cake from this months Masterchef magazine. According to the magazine "in Spain this cake is given to godchildren and decorated with eggs to indicate their age" . With I thought was a smashingly lovely idea. A special ingredient used in the cake icing is orange-blossom water - a scented water made in the middle east made purely from Orange blossoms infused in water. I found a beautiful one at our local deli from Iran - brand Pariya (www.pariya.com).

Here's mine...

Raspberries are here!

After several months of working on the raspberry garden that actually started about a year ago (see this post) we now have a full crop of Raspberries flowing. The sucklings from the community gardens have taken off and are fruiting like mad! Also the bed preparation - 3 months of growing buckwheat as a green manure to prepare the bed before planting must be paying off. I am very happy as this is my long term goal to have a full raspberry crop every year. I have been saving Raspberry recipes for a few years...so smiles all around.

And on another note - who knew Ducks loved succulents. I now have banned our ducks from coming anywhere near the succulent garden.

Progress

With the very wet summer, followed by incredible heat my garden hasn't been as inspiring as it was last year. The tomatoes have only just started to ripen - the cucumbers are struggling (this time last year we had a huge crop). The corn and beans are doing well... The berrys (raspberries mainly) started fruiting this year..so hopefully next year it will be bumper.

Garden and Ducks

The garden is finally getting some sun after what feels like weeks of cloudy wet weather. The bean arch has almost connected in the middle! Here are a few shots of my vege patch. Followed by a photo from today of our remaining duckling of the two that have been born so far to the ducks. (versus the ducklings born to the chooks! - read back on entries!)
And the duckling (around 4 days old). The 2nd died yesterday.

New ducklings

Very exciting news. Our new ducklings have been hatching over the past 24 hours. The first one was discovered when I picked up our black chook off the nest just to get new chook eggs that have been laid (the chooks have been laying on top of her - quite undignified and we need to collect them each day) , quite expecting to see our duck eggs still under her (our fertile duck eggs that were placed under her when she went broody a few weeks back). And instead a small tiny black duckling was sitting there staring at me! Looking under the other chook soon revealed a couple of others including a cute little yellow one. The remaining two were hatched over night, and now we have 3 very clucky chooks, with 5 baby ducklings between them. We have had to put one of the more nasty bully mum chooks in a 'cage' for a couple of days - as she kept kicking one of the other 'mums' off her ducklings. She was even spied pecking at the yellow one. So she's been banished. We now just have quiet little Plum (our Araucana) and Blackie (an Australorp), looking after the brood. Plum has done the full hard yards, being broody for 28 days. Blackie has been broody for about 20 days, and Pearl - the one who has been banished, has only been broody for about 10. So in fact she's still broody and probably it's why she's getting nasty. (although A believe's she's just a plain nasty chook, born like that, will die like that!) We read that putting them in a cage for a couple of days can stop the broodiness. We'll see.

In the meantime, the actual two ducks - who have been broody for about 3 weeks are happily guarding another set of eggs, with Charlie their drake always near by. Those girls are quite happy sharing the one beautiful nest. And with all this rain, it's slowly getting flooded!

The ducklings...


The Ducks....

Bushwalking

Bushwalking in Spring in the Blue Mountains keeps providing us with little suprises. Last week we spotted an awesome stick insect on a branch, and today we stepped over a Blotched Blue Tongue Lizard, and soon after spied a hoof print - either a wild pig, or wild deer. Neither of which I knew hung out in our local bush. :)

Beans running away!

The runner beans are off and running. It happened overnight - a couple of days of hot weather and it's literally grabbed the string and run up about 30cm in about 30hours. Is that possible? Both sides. (here it is about a month ago when I first built it) I'm very excited to the prospect of having a living arch of beans this summer.