This weekend I went up to my friend Alistair's holiday house in Red Hill to celebrate his 21st birthday with a group of friends from my old work. I hadn't seen any of them in ages, but it seems that in my absence, my brother Daniel has been bigging up my cooking to them.

I made the birthday cake (a simple sponge), some chocolate biscuits and some beer-snack-stylee cheese stars. (Detailed descriptions to appear on my How to Eat Blog shortly).


joe with stars


Jo, Al, Jaffe with stars


symone reading my article


the cake


allstar w cake


box o' cookies


1/2 cake

The food I made went down pretty well - we ate the cheese stars by the pool with beer (see above), and the cake & chocolate biscuits after dinner. They went in a flash! It was a 25cm cake (275g butter, sugar, flour, 5 eggs) and it fed 15 of us.


people like icing

Symone, Chantelle and I also made up a batch of Cadbury's Cherry Ripe muffins which we found in the pantry. We couldn't, sadly, find a muffin tin, so we made it in a square tin and they became brownies. They were pretty good, especially for a packet mix, but it could easily be made without the packet. It's basically a chocolate muffin with coconut, glacé cherries and chocolate chips.


stirring


chan tasting mixture


cherry ripe brownies

Late at night, Nick & Jerome made nachos, which were totally awesome.

Me: Hey, these are good nachos!
Nick: Hey, did you hear that? We got a compliment! The gourmet chef likes our nachos!


Nachos

Michael made pancakes (Defiance shaker pancake mix) for breakfast, which were good too! I put nutella on mine and also strawberry jam.


michael made pancakes

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALISTAIR!