Advance Australia Fare

Yes, that is the correct spelling of fare!!! 

"When the steaks are burning fiercely and the smoke gets in your eyes, 

Your sausages taste, like fried toothpaste and your mouth is full of flies....

Its a national institution, its Australian through and through, 

So come on mate and grab your plate, lets have a BBQ...."

I wish. 

For Australia Day this year, I missed home. A lot. I bought myself a G'day Australia CD of all the greats: Click go the shears boys, Home among the gumtrees, Aussie BBQ and of course, I still call Australia home. I had Australian flags and scarves hanging around the house and even managed to find fresh wattle at a florist at Liverpool Street Station, so the house even smelled like home to me. (For any non-Aussies, Wattle is the floral emblem of Australia and grows in the wild with a very distinct fragrance, and it is thought to be where our national green and gold colours "stem" from).

Without a BBQ or hope to BBQ in this weather, I decided to make a few little treats that are still very much Australia to us (and, well, to everyone I guess, they weren't too off the wall!!). 

There were meat pies and chips for dinner (If only I had procured some 4-and-twenty crinkly plastic bags to stash them in....

And there were Anzac biscuits.....

And I made biscuits that I grounded macadamia nuts into...

And for the first time I made a version of Lamingtons....

I can't eat chocolate, so haven't had the pleasure of a regular Lammo in many years, but felt inspired by a blog I read, which was about re-inventing the Lamington by playing with the flavours. So, this is a Salted caramel lamington with marscapone cream cheese. 

I used a madeira cake as the sponge, spread marscapone between layers and then dipped each finger into the salted caramel icing. To make the icing, I used some Salted caramel sauce that I bought in Paris. But, you can make a regular butterscotch sauce with cream, butter and brown sugar and add some salt for a similar effect. You then add icing sugar until it is quite a drippy consistency, but that hugs the cake as you coat it in it. 

Once you have coated the cake in the caramel, simply roll in desiccated coconut and leave to set for half an hour. 

And then eat.... Well, guests in my house have to wait an additional minute for me to photograph everything, which can be too much sometimes....

I wish this was a video blog so that I could capture some of the priceless reactions to various treats. I can't quite remember Holly's precise words, but lets just say they were complimentary. 

All food was finished. And for Australia Day, I wouldn't have it any other way.