Vegetate on this: haloumi with red lentil, tomato & spinach dhal

My partner marvels at my ability to devour a cookbook or food magazine from cover to cover in mere minutes, whether vegetarian or not. I am a devoted fan of delicious. magazine, which does great food porn. They include vegetarian recipes in every edition, but even their non-vegetarian recipes lend themselves to this way of eating with some minor tweaking. As this recipe shows, just because it isn't vegetarian, doesn't mean you can't make it so (see the Chef's tip at the end).

Here's what my version looks like - this is one's on high rotation on my family table. I find I use slightly less stock (700mL) and garam masala (1 heaped teaspoon). The dhal is tasty by itself on rice (in fact, we do this for the kids so we can keep all the haloumi for ourselves, ba ha!).

Yo Gabba Gabba!

My boys love Yo Gabba Gabba! (as do we) so for their birthday party last year, I made my 3 year old son a Brobee cake. In the lead up to the baking I got very technical with the pattern, researching various images of Brobee available on the web and planning to do some serious scaling and sculpturing to render a close likeness of the character. The day before the party, exhausted sanity prevailed and I edited my original idea into this rectangular cake. The icing is butter cream icing coloured with green food colouring, the furry stripes consist of shredded coconut laced even more heavily with the green food colouring, the mouth is raspberry liquorice, the eyes white fondant icing topped with giant chocolate buttons and the outlines are thin, peeled strips of black liquorice strap. For the cake itself I used Nigella Lawson's Sour Cream Chocolate Cake recipe (1.5 times the original as I made this in a large lamington tin - 33 x 22.9 .5.1 cm). I was very happy with the result, as were my boys.