365 Day 2What I would like to work on for my 365 effort is landscapes, I think. I am currently doing some research on how to get good results with landscapes. Any tips would be great!!! :)
Today's effort is a discarded snail shell I found in the backyard taken with my poor man's macro. I also added a texture in photoshop as that is something I am curious about too.
365 Day 1I am so thankful that one of my facebook friends gave me the nudge to do the 'photo a day' challenge this year. It is a chance to try to extend myself and hopefully to force me to notice more around me and to hone my eye for composition.
The reality is that a lot of my photos will probably be last minute, like this one.
Here is day one:
Baby Harper
The other day, we set off with great anticipation to see the new delicious addition to the Rutherford family. Raven is a little earth mother and so relaxed with her growing brood. Harper is such an alert little girl. She gazed at me with very knowing eyes, and wanted to see everything I was doing. She narrowed her gaze at me as I rocked her slowly. There was no gentle lulling to sleep for this little one. Several feeds later, Little Miss Harper still wasn’t having a bar of falling to sleep and letting me contort her cute little body into the obligatory newborn poses. As it turned out, she granted us about 4 minutes of shut-eye. We sprang into action. All the other precious rosy-cheeked Rutherford sisters gathered around for a couple of pictures. Raven popped into the frame as well. Daniel unfortunately could not be coaxed into a photo. :) World's Best....
World’s Best…..
Many years ago I began the world’s largest collection of cookbooks. Thankfully *Goggle (*names has been changed to protect something from whoknowswhat) saved me from going down that path. Goggle is great. I use it to discover most of my dishes and then I print them off and file all the crowd-pleasers into my own folder for future use.
How do you get a great recipe? Well, you can do what I often do and type the following in front of the recipe you are seeking on Goggle: ‘World’s Best…….’
Don’t snicker. If you are going to go to the trouble of cooking; spending all that money on ingredients, using all those utensils, dirtying all those dishes….the result needs to be worth it. Do I hear an Amen? You don’t want to go and break your back and your piggybank for an only so-so dish. I want to be rewarded with a triumph, a crowd pleaser.
So Goggling ‘world’s best’ is often a good starting point. Now of course, there is the occasional issue of a recipe-giver being a little too self-complimentary, and just imagining they have a recipe worthy of the title. Thus it is helpful that most recipe-sharing sites implement a user-rating system and I research THAT as my guide to the authenticity of the World’s Best title.
And through this means I have found World’s Best Brownie (which I have not cooked yet), World’s Second Best Brownie and World’s Best Choc Chip Cookies, both of which I make all the time and have shared with you. Today I bring you World’s Best Banana Cake!
World’s Best Banana Cake
 
Ingredients:
125g salted butter, softened 1 1/2 cups sugar 1 rounded cup very ripe, mashed banana 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 3 large eggs ( Yes, I added one extra egg to the world’s best banana cake recipe; trust me on this Sometimes I even add 2! *gasp*) 1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon buttermilk ( I used plain milk) 1 1/2 cups self-raising flour 1/2 teaspoon bicarb of soda Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius fan-forced. If you don’t have a fan-forced oven, preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease the side and base of a 22cm diameter round cake pan. Line base of the pan with non-stick baking paper. Place butter, sugar, banana, vanilla and eggs in a food processor. Process for about 2 minutes. Scrape down sides of processor. Add buttermilk and pulse to combine. Sift flour, and bicarb of soda together into a large bowl. Add flour mixture to food processor and process until just combined. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake for about 50-60 minutes, or until a skewer or knife inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Leave cake to cool on a wire rack. 
Spread cooled cake with cream cheese icing. Store cake in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
Cream Cheese Icing 90g cream cheese, softened 45g butter, softened 1 2/3 cups icing sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice Beat cream cheese and butter with an electric mixer until creamy. Add sifted icing sugar and beat until smooth. Add lemon juice and beat to combine. Spread icing over top and sides of cooled cake. 
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