Fiesta, Siesta, sprinkles, cake truffles!

Sprinkles! Coconut! Chocolate! Ricotta! Accidental good stuff! Did I mention sprinkles?

It’s cake truffle time in Casa Gander when I make too many of these Turkish coffee brownie layer cakes:

Or these coconut-mango bundt-lettes from last Fiesta:

Or gluten-free chocolate layer cakes (one from the archives!):

Or other good things that haven’t made it onto the blog, like the most sensual banana cake. (I’m calling it cake, because something with so much butter, cream and sour cream really couldn’t hide under the misnomer ‘bread’.)

Ode to le weekend: coconut mango bundt-lettes

Week-end. Sleepy eyed morning, sun-bathed cafe.

Being a dilettante, flaneur, lady of leisure.

A wake-up-in-the-morning-and-jump-in-the-car day trip to Mittagong and Bowral. Where we ooh over antiques (a Indo-Persian chain mail helmet? Yes please), eat an intriguing tart (shiraz-poached pears and proschiutto, suspended in a barely-set, brie-enriched custard), and have a cheerful coffee:

(The coffee was in the Bradman Museum, aka Cricket International Hall of Fame. Yes, Mr Gander is a cricket fan. Yes, we bought a souvenir cricket ball. Yes, I still want that Indo-Persian chain mail helmet.)

A tropical thunderstorm on the drive back! While we wound our way down to that pretty little dam on the Nepean River, across a bridge that fits one car at a time, and up the other side.

That evening, making a promise to bake a layer birthday cake, while maybe mildly under the influence of the prettiest Pimms cocktail I’ve ever seen. Spending Sunday making and eating a coconut-mango cake (recipe below), before remembering the Pimms-enriched promise about a birthday cake. Dang.

Mo’ fabulous mango tarts

It’s Angie’s Fiesta Friday, and Saturday is the Mardi Gras parade – a time of unicorns and sequins and more colour than you can poke a rainbow at. A bank here has decked out some ATMs to become GAYTMs, including this Village People wannabe:

(Speaking of ATMs, just read about a bitcoin ATM in Singapore. Them crazy kids in Singapore.)

I was on my way to Angie’s fiesta with a platter of mango tartlets. Wanting to be mo’ fabulous, the mango tartlets tried this:

I managed to convince them that, while they looked great, giving party goers a hairy mouthful is not the way to foodie stardom.

So they went back to being plain ol’ mango tarts. And I’m wearing the mo instead (kinda itchy…want to sneeze…how do guys do this??)

So mo’ve over people (geddit??), the fabulous tartlets are in town.