I have decided to put an end to the I shouldn't eat pizza mentality. A pizza craving is a fight I'll never win. Besides rolling out pizza dough, knocking it back and then hitting repeat is possibly the cheapest therapy there is. Am on a wee bit of a deadline so recipes will be up tomorrow along with a few desserts and some brioche experiments but until then....

Traditional and unbeatable Margherita

Labne, smoked chicken and lachs schinken (cured pork) pizza

Things that took my fancy

The best thing to do when you are feeling a little uninspired and stabby-with-a-sharp-implement-at-the-world is blog trawling. Oh the prettiness and general lovely things that waste away the day. Here are a few taking my fancy. These are not my images (if only they were). And if anyone knows how I can get my mits on that dress, I'll be your new best friend.

Why can't this be me? I want to wake up tomorrow with her camera and that dress. The only thing I'd give back is the hair and that's only because brunette shades don't suit me. Love.

Cookie Dough Brownie

Call it Sydney's average weather or my fledgling excuses for eating slabs of chocolate in all its forms, but I felt the need for a completely crass take no prisoners kind of brownie. Enter the cookie dough. Not a fresh make at home variety but that completely dodgy but weirdly delightful stuff in the supermarket aisle. Chop it. Freeze it. Add it to brownie and, well....yum. Happy Friday

This brownie mix is great - with a significant parched lands kind of crust on the top with that fudgy I don't know if I want to be cake or chocolate goo in the centre.

Ingredients
450g cookie dough ( I used the one with mini m&ms)
250g butter
500g caster sugar
200g dark (70% chocolate) melted
4 eggs
30ml corn syrup
1 Vanilla bean, seeds scraped
2 1/2 cups plain flour
Pinch salt


Method
Preheat oven to 150C.
Cut the cookie dough into chunks and freeze while prepping the brownie. Combine butter and caster sugar in a bowl and beat until pale and creamy. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well after each addition. Add the melted chocolate, corn syrup and vanilla bean. Stir gently to combine. Sift over flour and add pinch of salt. Stir until just incorporated and pour into a baking tin lined with baking paper. Gently push the pieces of cookie dough into the mix and then bake in the oven for just over an hour. Allow to cool in the tin before cutting. 

Without a kitchen...

I've been a lax blogger of late but I have ready "the dog ate my homework" excuses - I have had no kitchen and I have the photos to prove it. You see we bought a house and the kitchen was teeny. I mean teeny tiny - if you opened a cupboard there was no room to get around it and as far as I was concerned definitely not enough room to cook. There were more than a few Derek Zoolander moments of "What is this, a kitchen for ants" So we took it upon ourselves to rip it out. At first the deconstruction was mildly therapeutic...then the plumbing went to shit (not literally) and to cut a long story short, we are still trying to build a new kitchen in another part of the house. But hip hip hurrah, only another week or so and off I will go. Many a recipe from the new kitchen to come soon.


Oh and any suggestions for what to do with the weird hole we now have where the kitchen used to be would be greatly appreciated. It currently looks like some weird concentration camp inspired isolation cell.