If you have seen the promo ad , the 3 minute long sneak peek or the first episode of Masterchef Australia 2011, then you may have noticed a familiar face. Yes, It is Shannon Smyth from Bake & Bloom!!!

On behalf of Shannon, I would like to inform you all that she will be absent from this blog temporarily and will not be able to discuss or mention her involvement in Masterchef Australia until the final episode airs on TV. In the mean time, on behalf of Shannon, I’d like to thank you all for visiting and add that you’re more than welcome to leave comments below to show her your support. 

Sincerely,

Shane, AKA- Mr Bake & Bloom.

I am writing today to tell you, for now at least I will no longer be blogging on Bake & Bloom.

I am sure any Bride to be will tell you it is a big task to plan a wedding, and l have a lot of commitments to meet in my personal life  at the moment including my veggie garden which is now huge! Changing jobs & finally getting really into floristry & trying to be more active in my family life which I have neglected for for quite a while now. Finding the time to commit to make this blog all it should be has become fairly difficult.

I would like to thank each & every person that has ever stopped by to say Hi or read a recipe, and especially my regular loyal readers & friends.

In particular I would like to thank my friends Mel (From Bread n’ Sniff It) & Christie (From Fig & Cherry) for making me really feel like a part of of the blogging family. You’re both a total inspiration to me!

Rest assured I will be back some time next year.

So for now my friends, goodbye. Keep cooking & know that I love you all. Thanks for making my life for the last year & a half a little sweeter & I am sure we will speak again soon!

xoxo Shannon Smyth

This is the dream

Have you ever opened your pantry to look for something & quickly thereafter decided it isn’t worth the effort?  I have been doing this for the last 4 years. Instead of looking I will just go to the market & buy more of whatever I was looking for. Even when we moved house I decided it would be far too traumatic to actually look inside containers or clean anything.

Such laziness has resulted in dozens of unsorted health food store bags full of nuts, cocoa, salt, assorted flours. Hundreds of random spice packets, loose tea, half empty bags of rice. You name it I have it hidden away in the dank corners of my pantry.

It was the perfect system, until a bucketing wet weekend meant I was too afraid to drive my dodgy little hatchback to the only store in my area that stocks gelatin sheets rather than the awful powdered kind. I knew they were in there somewhere.

This was  a search & rescue mission.

Step 1)

Remove every single item from pantry. Recoil in disgust at several containers containing more weevils than food. (I found  a sheet of lasagna & that looked like someone shot it with a tiny shotgun)

Notice how every single bench space is occupied with crap?

Step 2)

Thoroughly clean shelves & remove any sticky goof that might have spilled from honey/glucose/vinegar bottles. Gumption or any other gritty cream cleanser will be useful, heck even bicarb soda & water will work a treat.

Step 3)

Ruthlessly kull any expired, unused or unknown mystery items. This totalled about 40% of my pantry inventory. It really kills me to throw anything away but I really wasn’t going to use 1/3 of a cup of mouldy pumpkin seeds was I?

Step 4)

Wash out any plastic storage containers & clean the bottoms of any bottles.

Step 5)

Any items previously in opened packets or brown paper bags  & place in zip lock bags labeled with a sharpie. This was great as it consolidated all my inventory. You know I found 5 separate packets of raw almonds? Place like items in plastic containers together. (I now have one plastic storage bin for each of the following – grains (barley, a few kinds of rice, quinoa, couscous), pastas, baking items, chocolate buttons)

Is there anything sharpies aren't good for?

Step 6)

Contain all sticky items in a shallow flat bottomed bowl or serving tray & repeat for all oils, vinegars & other bottles. This is great because if anything spills you just clean out the tray..not the whole pantry.

Step 7)

Place “random open spice packets” alphabetically in an index box like this (I forgot to get a photo) I got this tip from Better Homes & Gardens. I think they deserve a Nobel Prize for that idea.

Step

Fill big plastic containers with bulk items such as  flour, sugar, almond meal ect & attach labels.

Step 9)

Rearrange all items as you see fit & sensible. For me it was Cans on the bottom shelf, bottled items & some baking items on the second bottom shelf, Bulk baking items on the 3rd shelf & pastas, grains, tea, international items on the top shelf.

Step 10)

Scream bloody murder when you realise the 6 hours you spent looking for gelatin sheets were in vain, you don’t have any after all. Oh well, at least the pantry is clean for next time.

Clean for now. I wonder how long this will last?

I am aware my pantry is still not the most attractive of spaces, but I am proud to say it is now dirt, mystery goof & weevil free. Some day I will rip out the shelves & replace them with those pull out wire contraptions to ensure nothing is ever forgotten about in a dark corner but for now zip-lock bags & a sharpie are all I need.

Why did I need gelatin so badly you might ask? Well a certain somebody may have an audition for a certain reality TV cooking show tomorrow. More about that later, wish me luck!

xoxox Shannon

I realise I am no authority in these things. I have never had a genuine Parisian macaron from Laduree or the genius Pierre Hermes. But I confess myself stunned, stupefied & disappointed.

There was such promise when Shane & I were walking around Canberra, nosing around for the best places to eat when I stumbled upon a small  charming patisserie Croissant D’Or. Had I blinked I would have missed it entirely.

Macarons are not easy to find where I live so when I come across some I have to buy them. They also had  a nice looking range of tarts, cakes, cupcakes and other baked goods. I purchased a chocolate, vanilla, hazelnut & raspberry macaron along with a petite chocolate cupcake & petite blueberry almond tart from the french owner who was somewhat short with me & seemed annoyed I had interrupted her conversation with her daughter.

The delicacies were placed unceremoniously in a plain white paper bag (I am quite unaccustomed to this as every time I have purchased a macaron anywhere else they were lovingly encased in a posh presentation box)

I should have advised Shane not to purchase the cupcake because it’s dryness was evident even from the Cabinet (I wouldn’t even begin to speculate on it’s age) however love makes us do foolish things.

We saved the macarons for dessert later in the hotel. Before I could so much as even unzip my camera case Shane had inserted (much in the manner the “reach” toothbrush man unhinges his jaw) & shortly thereafter rejected the chocolate cupcake from his mouth. It is a dark day indeed that my man spits out anything chocolate.

To be fair my little blueberry tart was amazing, the frangipane was moist & fragrant, the pastry short & not to sweet. Bliss. In hindsight I would have also purchased a lemon curd tart also because it was one of the more impressive looking creations in the shop topped with spun sugar & a macaron shell.

Shane & I checked into the hotel, debated over restaurants & eventually booked a table at Tosolinis which I will never regret. We enjoyed roast garlic bread with balsamic vinegar, the lightest, most melt in the mouth gnocchi ever & a beautiful spaghetti bolognaise. The service was rather rushed but they were fully booked & we enjoyed our meals so much it hardly mattered.

We raced home, 2 Queenslanders braced against the chilly Canberra night. My flimsy red felt berret long abandoned in my handbag, such a foolish choice for an evening walk.

I raced to undress & wash, jumped into bed to enjoy my guilty bedtime pleasure….. macarons (what were YOU thinking?)

Alas.

• Chocolate: Crunchy, chalky, scant amount of chocolate cinnamon ganache, huge air pocket.
• Vanilla: Chalky, crunchy, huge air pocket, tiny scraping of some flavourless filling.
• Raspberry: Terrible feet (the worst of the bunch) chalky, crunchy, big air pocket but I will admit the filling was lovely. A fleeting burst of raspberry freshness followed by creaminess & almond.
• Hazelnut: The best of the bunch, decent shell, no air pocket, good foot & nice hazelnut flavour. Almost no filling though.

Overall a good exercise in how to waste $10 & ruin a lovely meal.

I confess I feel  awful to post such a scathing review of any small family owned business however I would feel worse letting any of my readers waste their money on anything I know to be quite inferior.

Whilst my macarons are by no stretch of the imagination perfect yet, they are certainly much better than these. That’s just not good enough.

There was snowboarding, bike-riding, a romantic picnic & then there was the sweetest proposal ever uttered. 

“Marry me honey” 

Shane & I are getting hitched! 

20 Months in advance & I am already planning like a maniac! Almost immediately upon our arrival home I was racing down to Kikki K for a wedding planning folder & bridal magazines.

We officially set the date this morning. It is a long time to wait but we have big dreams of a romantic French & Italian honeymoon in the spring that will require lots of saving. I want our wedding itself to have lots of beautiful homemade touches & I am lucky enough to have my florist friends, my dressmaking mother in law to be & lots of help from everyone.

My friends & family could not be more amazing or supportive. The phone call to my best friend went something like this:  Shannon- “Shane & I are getting married!” Maggie- “OMG, Congratulations! I-am-soooo-jealous!” After will you marry me, these are the second most important words a gal can hope to hear.  My younger sister Brooke went into high pitched screaming I am sure only dogs & I could hear.

I think Shane is slightly horrified at the pace of which things are being planned in the 3 days since he proposed. Little does he know I have been planning for years, the proposal was simply a formality.

Proposal aside we had an excellent holiday. We saw the newborn pygmy hippo at Taronga zoo, there was an epic dump of powder at Thredbo on our last 2 days of snowboarding, a free M TV concert in the snow with Operator Please & Bliss n’ Esso, a spectacular room at Diamant in Canberra & some insanely good food.

Now for the slightly bad news.

Food blogging is the natural enemy of the bride. We have dresses to fit into & skin to make glowingly healthy. I have decided for now that there is going to be a lot more healthy stuff on Bake & Bloom for the next 20 months.

I want to lose 20kg to put myself in a more healthy weight range before our big day & buttercream can only get in the way of that.

You can probably expect to still find at least 1 sugar laden fat fest on Bake & Bloom at least once a month (which I plan to feed to people in my office & sniff longingly), but you will also be finding more things like homemade  wholemeal English muffins, granola bites, quinoa pancakes, sugar free oatmeal cookies ect.

I think we can get through this diet together.

In other exiting news my Step sister Rachael is getting married to her partner Adrian (aka- funniest man alive with the best smile I have ever seen) on the 17th of October & has kindly asked me to make her cake & flowers! I can’t wait for their wedding & picking up ideas & advice from them.

One last thing.

I am so incredibly happy right now I could just die! xoxoxoxo