Australia Countryside

Lately I needed a bit of peace so I went to the Australian country side for a weekend.

In Australia this involves quite a bit of driving as distances can be very big. The further you are going away from the wet coastal regions, the dryer the landscape. But don’t confuse this with the real outback, you need to be prepared to go there, especially if you want to leave the highway.

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Night at Rosebud and Arthur’s Seat

Yep, another night in which I couldn’t find sleep. So I drove up the Mornington Peninsula and made some photos.

 

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Hot Chocolate

I have some problems finding my favorite Chilli Sauce here in Australia. Most of them are produced in the US and don’t seem to have a distributor over here.

But the good news is that I found a couple of local producers which have very fine hot sauces. My recent discovery was the Chilli Factory from the Hunter Valley. They are producing one of the hottest Chilli Varieties, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T and make a very good tasting sauce from it, the Scorpion Strike .

 

One of my favorite recipes is home made pancake with Chocolate Cream and a lot of Chilli Sauce. Just roll it and don’t hesitate …

 

 

If you try this yourself, brace for impact and a wonderful taste 🙂

 

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Night at Frankston beach

Another night in which I could not find sleep. It was so bright outside that some of the pics look as if they have been taken during dusk or dawn but it was actually more around midnight.

 

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Lemon Curd

Every now and then I am asked for one of my recipes which is why I will start to publish some of them on my blog. In general I am more interested in a result than in complicated processes which is why I often alter the process of cooking into a more convenient and less time consuming way as long as the result stays the same.

When we moved to Australia we suddenly had lemon trees in our garden. Being a big fan of lemons I started to make all kind of things from our lemons. Here comes my recipe for Lemon Curd.

Ingredients:

75 g Butter

225g Sugar

3 Eggs

3 Lemons

For the preparation I use a metal bowl which fits onto one of my pots in which I heat water. The heating over a hot water bath has the advantage that the content is heated slower and more even.

 

Preparation:

  1. Melt the butter in the metal bowl.
  2. Add the sugar and stir until its equally distributed
  3. Wait until the butter and sugar is not hot any more!
  4. Add the eggs and beat everything frothy with a whisk
  5. Grate the Lemons. Make sure that you grate off enough of the white skin as well. The white skin contains most of the Pectin of the lemon which is needed as gelling agent for the Lemon Curd.
  6. Press out the lemons
  7. Add the juice and skin into the bowl.
  8. Heat the bowl over the water bath and stir until the Lemon Curd thickens. This can take a moment as you don’t want to push it and heat the pot too fast. There is a danger that the egg falls out and you end up with lemon-egg soup if the curd gets too hot or heats up too fast.

 

Once the gelling process is far enough you can take to bowl from the water bath and let it cool down. Stir from time to time to avoid that a skin builds up on the top.

If you intend to fill the bowl I am using in the picture you have to multiply all ingredients times 4x !

Enjoy!

 

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