Drive by Houses - Avoca Street, South Yarra

I often drive up Avoca Street on my way to the Tan for a run.

This is my absolutely favourite street in all of Melbourne. I know there are more perfect streets, and more well known streets, and more paved with gold streets, and this one certainly has its share of 1970's brick 3 storey apartment blocks. But it is on a hill, and is a short walk to the Royal Botanic Gardens, and it has some amazing houses.

I do love a good sticky beak at the outside of houses. It is why I prefer being a car passenger than driving. I am sure I have almost had many near misses, distracted by some wonderful facade as I drive past. In some ways gazing upon the outside is more satisfying than seeing inside a house. I often don't like the inside of people's houses. Especially those houses owned by people with lots of money. Sorry but it's true.

My way, one can furnish the house oneself. Elegantly, sparsely and relatively true to the period, with lots of modern touches thrown in.

Anyway, I thought I would take some sneaky photos to see if you agree with my assessment.

All the food groups are represented in Avoca Street:

Early Victorian 

Georgian 

Victorian Terrace (at the end of this row (called Lee Terrace) is Waterloo which I wrote about here)

Spanish Mission

Melbourne modern Palladian

1930s Georgian revival

Palm Springs

 Italianate

Forbidding and Inaccessible 

Colonial

Do you see why I like it so much?  

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Biscuits for the Medici

On a windy Sunday recently I turned my hand to some Florentine biscuits, part of a life long search for biscuits which maintain the interest of both children and adults.

I remember these biscuits being rather popular in the 1970's and feeling quite grown up when I ate them as a child.

I adapted a Karen Martini recipe for these, and had to road test some of the ingredients on my daughter.  She didn't like the glace ginger so I took it out. 

A tip - this is sticky and messy to make, so much so that it is almost impossible to form a biscuit to put on the baking tin by hand.  I scooped spoonfuls into 10 cm metal rings, pressed down and then lifted the ring off.

Ingredients

395 ml condensed milk

250 g cornflakes

150 g unsalted peanuts coarsely chopped

100g dried cranberries coarsely chopped 

100g dried apricots coarsely chopped

finely grated zest of one lemon

1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg

1/3 teaspoon ground cinnamon

250 g melted dark chocolate (I used milk to satisfy small children)

Method

Preheat oven to 180 degrees.  Line two or three baking trays with baking paper.
Combine all ingredients save the chocolate in a large bowl and mix well.
Press 1 to 2 tablespoons of mixture into 10 cm scone or biscuit cutters and place onto trays. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until golden and cooked.  Remove and when a bit cooler, cool on wire racks.
Spread melted chocolate on the flat back of each biscuit.  Leave to set.
They keep for about 7 days in an airtight container. 

So why Florentine biscuits?  Some say the biscuits are actually Austrian in origin. Another story has it that a master confectioner created them at Versailles, in the kitchens of King Louis XIV of France, in honour of the Medicis of Florence when they visited.   Those who are up on their Medici history will recall that Catherine de Medici married Henry, Duke d'Orleans who later became Henry II in 1547.  Louis XIV reigned between 1654 and 1715.  By this stage the Medici family had waned in power and I think they were quite unlikely to have been visiting Versailles.  

In any event, can you imagine that a little cornflakey biscuit would have impressed or delighted the likes of these people?  Somehow I just can't see it.   

Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492) by Bronzino

Giovanni (Lorenzo's son, later Pope Leo V) by Bronzino

Guilio (later Pope Clement VII)

One thing my European History studies taught me is that you do not mess with the Medici.  They would probably see conspiracies galore in such a frivolous biscuit  

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Giveaway Winner

It is Father's Day here in Australia.

Just a quick post to announce the giveaway winner.   I know a lot of you who commented said you didn't have an iphone but you all went into the truly random draw which was drawn by a small Spiderman.

The winner is Amanda from Small Acorns.   Amanda - email me with the best address for you and I will post it to you tomorrow.

And now, when you are walking coolly down the streets of Auckland like Lauren Santo Domingo, you can be certain that when you drop your phone it won't break!

For all of you having a Father's Day thingy, have fun.  To all of you having a double Father's Day thingy (for your father and then for your children) don't let the family organisational stress get too overwhelming...

My children have given their father a tomato plant, and a plastic container of Worm Wee.  It's true.  It looks like cranberry juice and smells like wee.  I don't know where it came from and I don't want to know.   And of course then there is the mind boggling concept of how they get the wee from the worms in the first place.  I am wondering if perhaps worm wee is a euphemism for pureed worms.   



xoxo

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Barrow House Bathroom ...

Do bathrooms usually age well or badly?

I think of all the rooms in the house they can be the most prone to dating.  We did our bathroom before we had children and didn't pay that much attention.    I won't make that mistake again.   

It therefore has some deadly features:  square knobs on the cabinets which are apt to slice little hands open, tiles which are too pale and too creamy to keep particularly clean, and a tap which hangs elegantly over the bath in just such a spot that the children keep catching and bruising their backs on it.  You should see my son's back.  

I spend a bit of time sitting in the bathroom doing bath supervision.   For a range of reasons but mostly back protecting.   The splashing makes me a bit crazy but I am working on controlling my Bathroom Rage. 

But if I am going to spend time in the bathroom, I wish it could be in this one.   In front of the fire, with a glass of aged Reisling (that's a little joke).

This bathroom used to be a living room and you can tell.   I think I prefer it during the day because that overhead light it a bit too laboratory for me.  

What are your bathroom mistakes?  Surely I am not the only one who is brain dead in the practical bathroom department? 

(All Images from Andrew Maynard's Barrow House) 

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Office Brown to Wishing Chair Whimsy

I tend to launch my shopping raids on Ikea in military style, swooping in with my printed out page of catalogue, storming the ramparts of the yellow paths which force you to walk past every single room display, searching in a focused, targeted way, more often than not dragging unhappy children behind me who only came because they thought I might buy them one of those enormous stuffed toys from the children's section.   If I plan carefully, I can do the whole in and out thing in 45 minutes.
  

My distaste for the whole Ikea experience means that if I have gone there to buy something I Will Not Leave Empty Handed.   When the shelves I wanted for my daughter were only available in pale dirt brown (I think they call it Birch), did I sensibly retreat?  No, I allowed a 7 year old girl who wants dinosaurs to come back to life persuade me that it would look fine in her room.  Well you know, it didn't look fine.  It looked terrible. It looked like someone had accidentally dumped a piece of 1970s office furniture in a pink elves' forest. 

So I decided to refurbish it.  

I chose last weekend to do this task, armed in advance with lots of advice from the man from Paint Spot.  Never mind that I had the worst hangover 'food poisoning' I have had since university. (Never, never, ever, drink aged Riesling. I think that was how the Germans managed to overrun Alsace those two times last century.)   

One thing I know now is that it is not easy to paint a veneer.  It needs to be sanded (which I did, lazily), it needs two coats of undercoat, it then needed a further two coats of our chosen paint.  I thought I could get away with two coats in total. I was wrong. 

And then I wallpapered the outside. I know that that is not the usual way, and that people  usually wallpaper the inside of shelves, but that meant that the pattern wouldn't be seen that much given all the books intended for the shelves.

And are you wondering about the green? I was.  It is called Green Thorns.  It looks almost florescent in a darkened room. I confess my idea was to go with pale pink or cream but I felt my daughter should have some say and this is what she chose.   And she was quite adamant so I went with it. 

And here it is all filled up.  I call the dolls on the top the House of Representatives.   They sit in judgment on what goes on in this bedroom.   If you look carefully can see Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop.  

And here is a shot of a sequined basket I found for her a few months back.  I think I like it more than she does! 

A perfect accompaniment to dreams of the Wishing Chair.   Wouldn't mind one of these myself. 

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Wandering about Whiteley

I have recently been spending a bit of time with a medical professional who has a reproduction of this painting in her rooms.

Brett Whiteley needs no introduction to most Australians, being one of the most successful, award winning and prolific artists of the 20th century.

This Archibald Prize winning 'Self Portrait' was painted in 1974.  That is the artist in the mirror.  Through the window to the left is his beloved Sydney Harbour and in the foreground a distorted odalisque in the manner of Matisse.   I could look at this painting for hours and hours.   Brett Whitely died, alone, of a heroin overdose in a motel near Woolongong in 1992 at the age of 53.  He flies in the fact of my visual artists live long lives theory.   

He said 'art is an argument between what a thing looks like and what it means'.

Here he is in the 1960s with his wife Wendy and their only daughter Arkie:

Arkie was a beautiful woman, creative and gentle.  She is famous for appearing as an actress in Mad Max, and for zealously guarding her father's legacy.  She died of adrenal cancer in 2001 at the age of 37. I remember seeing a story about her in one of my mother's Australian Vogues in the early 80's with a feature on her completely white and pastel apartment in London.  White and shabby chic long before everyone else started doing it.

The only one left in this little family was Wendy Whiteley.  She said this:

“you can go two ways with grief. I could have given up and slid into an abyss of depression, or become suicidal…..I just felt an overwhelming desire to do something positive…doing something creative, right here, would be the most freeing thing I could do”.

So Wendy created a garden at Lavender Bay in Sydney.  She planned and designed it and has cared for it for years now.   The garden is not hers, it is on public land.  But it is known to locals as Wendy's Secret Garden. 

The garden was overgrown and unkempt and filled with old railway parts and carriages.   This tree is a Moreton Bay fig, a wonderful climbing tree which is prolific in Sydney.  Willy wagtails, kookaburras and parrots chirp and chatter away whilst magical bendy paths go hither and thither.  This is secret Sydney at its best.  Surrounded by high rise buildings, a little place of peace.

How wonderful is her positive and creative approach to the vicissitudes and tragedies which life has thrown her way?

(Images: (1) Gallery of NSW (2) John Tranter.com (3) The Age (4)(5) Galeriaaniela.com.au)

 

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196th Post - Cath Kidston Giveaway

I wasn't planning on doing a giveaway for this post.

(outside of case)

But life got in the way.  What happened was this (in chronological order).

1. Some weeks ago, I ordered a Cath Kidston IPhone case from the UK.

2. My replacement work IPhone to replace the one I dropped and smashed developed a completely battery that wouldn't charge.

3. I got new replacement IPhone and IT ordered me a new IPhone 4 (presumably stop all the property damage).  They said the new phone might 'take a while' to arrive.  I promptly forgot all about my pending new phone.

4. I had small but terse email tiff with Cath Kidston over slowness of delivery of my order.  ('How can you charge so much and take so long to deliver your stuff? Australia is not the moon' That kind of tiff.)

5. My new IPhone case finally arrived on Wednesday (I do generally find that things arrive the day after a complaint about slow mail service is made).  Hooray.  It was beautiful and fit snugly.

6. I enjoyed my IPhone case for 1 whole day.

7. On Thursday my IPhone 4 arrived.  I then discovered that my 24 hour old IPhone case does not fit new IPhone.

8. I cried.   Well not really, after all it's only a phone case.


So, here's the deal.

If you want this amazing case -  used for one day only - it is very simple.  

(inside of case)

This is what you need to do:

1. Leave a comment below. 

2. Become a follower if you are not already.

3. Live anywhere in the world.

I will draw it in 7 days.  

Happy Weekend. xoxo

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