Roses from Stanthorpe

We had a lovely trip out to Stanthorpe for Christmas, where we ate potatoes freshly harvested from the earth and played cricket on Christmas day. Before we left my father in law gave me this bunch of roses from his front garden, aren't they gorgeous?

roses from a recent trip to Stanthorpe

Christmas eve harvest of potatoes and zuccinis, and one tomato

Christmas Chilli

I wanted to share a picture of our chilli bush, which is covered with red and green fruit. It looks very Christmassy! We're thinking of extending our patio and this new herb garden which we only planted a few months ago is going to have to go. So we will be trying to transplant this chilli bush at a later date, hopefully it survives, because its looking very happy and healthy right now! Its only been in the ground for a couple of months and its amazing how much its grown.

our chilli bush is covered in festive looking fruit in time for Christmas

Gluten free chocolate cupcakes with Stevia frosting

I was so busy on the day, this is the best photo I got of Tom's birthday cake. We made gluten free chocolate cupcakes. We found the gluten free chocolate cupcake recipe at the Healthy Chef. The recipe says 2 tablespoons of honey but we thought they weren't sweet enough so we added 4 tablespoons of honey instead. They're quite delicious with double the amount of honey. We iced some cupcakes with icing sugar and 100s and 1000s for the kids and my husband who is on a dairy free diet at the moment. But most of the cupcakes had piped stevia butter frosting on it. We found the recipe for stevia buttercream frosting at Wholesome Sweeteners. Instead of lemon flavouring, we added a teaspoon of cocoa. With a lot of diabetics at the party, these cupcakes were just the treat.

most of the cupcakes had stevia buttercream frosting

Handmade Card for a 3 year old boy

Here is the beautiful card my mum made for Tom's 3rd birthday. As you can see, she is very talented at making handmade cards. There was even matching wrapping paper, it was so lovely.

handmade card for a 3 year old boy

inside the card

Chinese Plum Sauce

Well, Tom's party went well, and Pa bright a bunch of fruit with him to share from Stanthorpe, including these bunch of beautiful looking plums. We didn't get to eat them all so we turned them into Chinese plum sauce! We had it with pork steaks, it was very yummy! It was quite tart because the plums were, but yummy all the same. The recipe we used was for traditional Chinese plum sauce from scratch. We didn't have any ginger, so we simply skipped it.

plums from Stanthorpe ready to make plum sauce

Chinese plum sauce cooking in the pot