Nothing makes me happier than sunny, warm weather, exploring open spaces, taking photos in magical light, spending quality time with my boy and indulging in good food and wine. Luckily for me, I was able to have all of it on the weekend.

I have just returned from a weekend getaway to the Yarra Valley in Victoria’s north-east. This place is known for its lush greenery, wonderful regional produce and fabulous wineries. It is only 45 minutes from Melbourne, yet it feels like a totally different world and is a fantastic place for a foodie/wino to visit, even if it’s just for the day.

The weather was so lovely and warm and on our last day there, I wanted to finish with a simple dessert which wouldn’t take too much time to prepare.

As there is nothing better than seasonal fresh fruit, we happily consumed a big bowl of fresh local strawberries with a rich cinnamon mascarpone cream. Just perfect for Spring!

I hope you enjoy the random photographs that I shot whilst in the Yarra Valley too :)

Strawberries and Cinnamon Mascarpone

500g strawberries, washed

250g mascarpone cheese

a few big tablespoons of icing sugar

ground cinnamon

1. Mix the mascarpone with the icing sugar and cinnamon to taste.
2. Serve with the strawberries. That’s it!

After last month’s nasty incident (see here), yesterday I finally managed to visit the Collingwood Farmers’ Market with my great friend Bree. The market is held at the Collingwood Children’s Farm and it’s a good place for young children to interact with the herd of animals that call the farm home. The children are able to feed the animals, milk the cows and search for eggs in the chicken cage.

The market is rather small, but there is plenty of produce to buy. Fruit, vegetables, cheese, eggs, bread, meat, poultry and more – just don’t forget to bring your own bags/baskets to carry it all home.

Shown below are a few of the goodies that are available at the market:

Free-range eggs and the menu for the ‘Farmer’s Breakfast’.

Homemade biscuits made by Michel’s Fine Biscuit Co. Castlemaine were absolutely delish! I was very close to buying a packet of pistachio white chocolate biscuits, but I knew that if I did, we would have eaten the whole packet before we got back to the car! The company also produce a gluten free and savoury range of goodies.

Dawson’s Honey had four types of honey on offer and they were more than happy to let us sample them all. I purchased a 500g tub of Yellowbox honey at the bargain price of $4.50 (1kg tubs were $8.50 each).

Parsley and Swiss brown mushrooms from CERES. CERES host their own organic market every Saturday and Wednesday in Brunswick East.

Mountain River Berries’ jams to taste (and thank you to my lovely hand model, Bree). My favourite was plum and raspberry.

I was tempted to purchase a few herb seedlings to grow my own herbs at home, but I don’t have a big pot as yet, so I will have to buy these next time. The Tiny Tim tomato variety was so cute!

After a busy morning browsing the stalls at the market, we went to Brunswick Street, Fitzroy in search of a good coffee and picked up a loaf of bread from the always busy Babka. I know I could have purchased a loaf at the market, but the yeasty parcels of goodness from Babka are simply magnificent. Babka produce several types of bread, from white sourdough to multigrain, rye and more. I went for the classic casalinga – with a crisp and chewy crust and beautiful crumb on the inside, these loaves are fantastic! The wait for breakfast can become very long on the weekend and the queue often snakes its way out the door! Their shoo-fly buns are a must too. Full of currants and oranges, they are perfect with a cup of Earl Grey tea. :) If you’re after a good feed and need to pick up a few loaves of bread, Babka is one of Melbourne’s best bakeries/cafes.

How to get there…

Collingwood Farmers’ Market

• Located at the end of St Heliers Road, Abbotsford.
• The market is held between 8am and 1pm every second Saturday.
• It is located only 5km from the CBD and there is plenty of off street parking available. To get there by train, you will need to catch either the Epping or Hurstbridge line trains and depart at Victoria Park. It is a short 10 minute walk from the train station (the train timetable can be found here).

Babka

• 358 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.
• The bakery/cafe is open from 7am to 4pm, Tuesday to Sunday.
• It is located just over 2km from the CBD and the easiest way to get to Babka from the city is by public transport. You will need to take the 112 tram and get off at the Johnston Street intersection and walk (the tram timetable can be found here). If you’re taking your car, let me warn you that parking can be difficult to find on weekends!

One last thing… My lovely friend Bree kindly offered to pose for me and yes boys, she is single. If you would like her number, just send me a quick email and I’ll see what I can do! ;) Haha!

Answer: nothing!

After 18 looooong years, my parents have finally decided to update our kitchen. Currently it is an empty shell, with bits of plaster and tiling just lying about… Gone are the cupboards, the sink, the oven, the tiles, the benchtops, the fridge, the rangehood, the shelves, everything! I have no idea why it’s taken them this long to renovate, because seriously, who wouldn’t want to keep the poo brown laminex benchtops, a broken Mistral rangehood and 80s beige cupboards? (that’s a rhetorical question, people!)

So, no kitchen = no oven = no baking = something non-baked for the blog. We have an additional kitchen outside in our carport/garage (all of you who have Asian or European parents will understand) but the oven isn’t all too flash, so I can’t use it.

In anticipation of summer, I decided to make ice-cream this week. Many people scoff at the idea of going to all the trouble of making your own ice-cream, especially with so many good-quality ice-creams on the market. But real ice-cream, made from scratch, lovingly stirred and whipped, is quite simply, one of the greatest pleasures in life (oh, I’m in love!).

Homemade ice-cream is easier than it sounds. It is easy as making a custard base, adding a few flavours, popping it into the freezer and taking it out every few hours and beating it up. The constant beating breaks up any ice crystals that form and incorporates air, giving it that dreamy and light mouthfeel. If you own an ice-cream machine, it’s even easier, less labour intensive and much quicker (I’ve had my eye on a few on eBay, so fingers crossed I can get one soon!).

I decided to make strawberry ice-cream because after visiting the Queen Victoria Market today, strawberries seemed to be everywhere, and luckily, they were rather cheap. To be honest, I used to hate strawberries. I was even given a strawberry adorned cake for my 17th birthday (or was it my 16th?) by Z (bought, not made) and I turned my nose up at it. Of course I ate it with a smile on my face, but I didn’t enjoy it (we’ll see if he mentions anything – I don’t believe him when he says he reads this blog).

So as I wait for summer to approach me with the sunshine and heat, I’ll just continue to make batches of ice-cream, sit outside and eat it all.

I made Vanilla Bean Ice-cream and a variation: Strawberry Ice-cream. The vanilla flavoured ice-cream is fantastic on its own, but I use it as an ice-cream base for different flavours.

Vanilla Bean Ice-Cream (makes 1 litre)

(adapted from a recipe in Delicious magazine)

5 egg yolks

125g caster sugar

400ml milk

half a vanilla bean

300ml cream

1. Place egg yolks and sugar in a large bowl and using an hand-held mixer, beat until it is thick and pale yellow. Pour the milk into a small saucepan, scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean and put the whole bean into the milk. Cook over medium heat until the milk comes to the boil. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the pod to infuse its wonderful flavour into the milk for 15 minutes.
2. Add the milk to the egg/sugar mix and whisk well. Strain this custard base into a new saucepan. Place the saucepan over low heat and stir continuously until the custard is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon – unfortunately this can take up to 15 minutes, but be patient! Don’t let the custard come to the boil and if it splits, plunge the pan straight into a sink full of cold water and whisk madly.
3. Once the custard is thick, place a large metal bowl in the kitchen sink, half full with water. Let the custard sit in its bath to cool down. Add the cream and mix until well combined.
4. Pour the custard into a shallow plastic container, cover and freeze until it is frozen at the edges (approximately 3 hours).*
5. Beat the ice-cream with a hand-held mixer until smooth and repeat this process four more times after every few hours.

* If you have an ice-cream machine, churn the custard at step 4 for approximately twenty minutes or according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Strawberry Ice-Cream

1 quantity of Vanilla Bean Ice-Cream custard mix

500g strawberries

1. Process the strawberries in a food processor or blender – I like to leave it a bit chunky as it adds a bit of interest to the ice cream. Add this fruit puree to the custard at Step 4 and continue on from Step 5.

I originally intended to make Strawberry Ripple Ice-cream and I even prepared the syrup to mix into the vanilla ice-cream base, but I fell asleep and it was too late to marble it through. Oops! I’ve still included the recipe though:

1 quantity of Vanilla Bean Ice-Cream (partially frozen)

250g strawberries

75g sugar

1. In a small saucepan, combine the sugar and 60ml of water and heat until dissolved. Set aside.
2. Process the strawberries in a food processor or blender and strain the puree, removing all the seeds and lumpy bits.
3. Add the strawberry juice to the sugar syrup in the saucepan and return to the heat. Boil the syrup for around 2 minutes. Allow to cool and place in the fridge until you are ready to use it.
4. Once the ice-cream has been placed in the freezer and beaten a few times, it should be partially frozen and quite thick. Remove from the freezer and alternate spoonfuls of the ice cream and syrup to another plastic container. Using a spatula, stir through the syrup and ice cream to create a marbled effect. Freeze and beat the ice-cream with a hand-held mixer until smooth and repeat twice more every few hours.

Spring is almost here! Warmer weather, beautiful sunshine, flowers in bloom and longer days. I am so over Winter and I am glad that Spring is just around the corner.

Yesterday was such a glorious ‘Winter’ day that I thought an early dinner and some quality chill-out time in St Kilda with friends was in order. The temperature peaked at 22.7 degrees and it was just perfect.

My originally intended having a Spring-inspired recipe to accompany this post, but I kind of got distracted and decided to stay all night at the beach instead of coming home early to bake (can you blame me though, when the weather was as glorious as this?) So, this will just be a short post, full of random photos. Enjoy!

One of Acland Street’s patisseries displaying their wide array of yummy treats…

And you can only top off the day with a big cup or cone of gelati from 7 Apples (75 Acland Street, St. Kilda). Try the pannacotta flavoured gelati – it’s my favourite!

The Esplanade…

Of all Melbourne’s beaches, St. Kilda’s beach doesn’t rank that very high at all. It is rather blah (it has lumpy/pebbly sand and the gross murky water isn’t very attractive), but this sunset just made my day…

Embarrassingly, I purchase a copy of Delicious, Gourmet Traveller and Donna Hay each month. Usually I don’t even make anything out of these magazines, I just enjoy looking at the food styling and photography and keep up to date with the latest food trends, or learn what’s in season. I like to flick through my books and magazines when I need some inspiration or want to re-visit a favourite page.

I like cookbooks… Below is part of my collection (I’m terrible I know):

I also never miss a Tuesday edition of The Age newspaper either – I love reading Epicure and discovering where new Melbourne foodie places exist.

As geeky as this sounds, I love heading down to Fitzroy and visiting Books for Cooks. This place has hundreds of books about food, often hard to find books or good quality seconds. From books solely about potatoes and eggs, Moroccan cuisine and Korean food, Pierre Herme to the Roux Brothers, this place has it all. I’d happily spend hours sitting on their comfy couch flicking through a tall pile of books and dreaming of what to bake/cook next (which I have been known to do).

Every now and then, I will randomly post bits and pieces that aren’t really baking related (for example, this one!) but they will usually be food-related and describe my adventures in exploring new foodie places in Melbourne!