Entries from January 2010 ↓

Who remembers Madeira cake from their childhood? Me! Another favourite from A Treasury of New Zealand Baking.

Mother made the Plum & Cardamon Shortcake on our last night in Awakeri which was a delicious mixture of sweet short cake and tart plums.

Then last week I made the Madeira cake. Didn’t have any lemon essence so I improvised with a bit of lemon rind and juice. It’s got to be one of the lightest, fluffiest Madeira cakes I’ve had. Really good.

So that’s 5 successes from the new cook book so far!

So you’ll have noticed by now that I have got all my photos uploaded to Flickr – well, all photos since May 2009 when I lost access to my original hand-made photo website that lived at orangethings.com for the last 10 or so years.  However, as an archive, I’ve kept the site as it was online at orangethings.com/archive if you want to look at photos as far back as October 2005.

A random sample of my Flickr photos is shown over on the right of my blog and you can click on a photo, or the ‘View all’ link to go to Flickr.

So, for Flickr newbies, some things you might like to know:

• The main ‘home’ page for a Flickr account is referred to as a photostream i.e. the constant stream of photos, and the main stream is sorted from most recent photo uploaded backwards. My photostream is flickr.com/orangegirlnz so you can bookmark that if you like.
• Photos are organised by ‘collections’ (like albums I guess) and within that ’sets’ – in my case my collections are very high level i.e. Family and Travel for now and perhaps 1 or 2 more eventually if I end up with sets that don’t seem to belong, and my sets are generally time-based by months because that’s how we’re all used to me presenting my photos and in travel the sets are by trip.
• Your choices for browsing the photos are by reverse order by just clicking through the photostream, or by a particular set by choosing the set you want (e.g. January 2010) from the right-hand side on the first page of the photostream.
• Once in a set you can choose to view a particular photo by clicking on the little thumbnail version of it, or use the ‘Detail’ link under the title of the set to see them all in a medium size. You can click again into a photo to make it even larger and see information about the photo e.g. date it was taken, tags (or categories) I’ve attached to it. To to leave a comment you have to have a Yahoo account.
• From a large individual photo you can click on the ‘All sizes’ button under the photo title to get a range of other larger sizes, including one good for printing. For best print quality choose ‘Original’ and use the ‘Download original size’ link that displays above the photo.
• You can always return to the first page of the photostream by clicking on the orange graphic or link that says ‘orangegirlnz’.
• From the photostream you can use the options under the title ‘orangegirlnz’s photostream’ to explore the photos by collection, by set or by tag. Tags are quite fun – every photo I’ve uploaded I’ve tagged with a topic like place names, people names, activities, food etc so by choosing a tag you can see all photos belonging to that topic.
• Remember, Flickr is an online service that millions of people use to upload their photos to so in your clicking around you may end up back in the general Flickr site – just get back to my photostream using my link flickr.com/orangegirlnz – the search box on the homepage of flickr.com is to search for photos, not people.

Finally had the constant rain since 2am this morning that the Bay of Plenty desperately needs. Family are busying themselves with rainy day activities.

My Mother the pyromaniac

The Mister is making raspberry jam

The niece is making jewellery under the supervision of Father

Now we cross off the 3rd recipe from A Treasury of New Zealand Baking. Last night The Mister decided to give the all-in-one pav a go. He had to become acquainted with Mother’s 42 year old Kenwood mixer (appliances don’t last like they used to, although having said that at the end of the 10-minutes beating time it leaked machine oil into my hand when I removed the beater) which made him feel like it wasn’t really hand made seeing as the mixer did all the hard work.

It was a great success! I drew a circle on the baking paper to help him with a nice round shape.

It rose up and up and only cracked a tiny bit – Mother was jealous!

It was a great mound of light crisp meringue outer and delicate marshmallow inner.

And I’ve just found this photo from Christmas 2005 when The Mister actually  made his first pav, and the niece was supervising back then too! (She’s very amused to see this photo, “look how little I am and look how long and funny his hair is!!”)

I know it’s hard to see in the photo but we went down to the Whakatane Heads yesterday to see Moko the dolphin who’s made his home on local beaches around the East Cape and Bay of Plenty, after seeing on Twitter that he was in town.

Lots of people crowded to watch him frolicking with kids on flutter boards and swimming alongside the tour boats coming back from White Island.

You can just see him above the head of the 3rd person in from the left.

Last night I ended up making a second thing from A Treasury of New Zealand Baking – for dessert, plum cake with spicy plum sauce. This involved a trek to get the plums first (with the niece egging The Mister on to check if the electric fence was going with a blade of grass (which he did! (it wasn’t))).

Then The Mister kindly cut and removed stones from 1.5kgs of them. Bit of a palaver making the sauce, picking out cloves, cinnamon stick and vanilla pod, sieving it, reheating and it remained very runny but tasted SO good and soaked into the very buttery cake.

And behind every good photo is a photographers assistant, if you’re wondering how the book was staying upright in that last photo, here’s what was going on behind the scenes!

So that’s 2 for 2 that ended up looking pretty much like the picture in the book! And all made from the cupboard and our own harvesting – didn’t go anywhere near a supermarket!

Up in Awakeri I received a late Christmas gift A Treasury of New Zealand Baking – a collection of kiwi favorites from well known New Zealanders. With the family around it’s always tempting to bake because everything gets eaten pretty much straight away and you don’t have to wait a week before trying something else – so today I started.

Blueberry scones for lunch.  Nikau is serving these at the moment in place of date scones (noticed they did this around this time last year as well so perhaps an annual summer tradition) so I just had to try them. The mixture was very sticky and I was quite concerned they’d be very doughy and solid.

But they were light and delicious and just like the ones I’ve had at Nikau! And just like the picture in the book. Even my niece who announced she doesn’t like scones but seeing as I was making them and they had yoghurt in them she’d give them a go liked them!!

In December I went to a lunch held by the NZ Marketing Association where 3 twitterers spoke about their experiences using Twitter as a marketing tool, peppered with their advice on how to use it. I think the audience were generally intrigued by Twitter and judging by some of the questions I was asked before the speeches started when people at my table heard I ran a corporate Twitter account, were there to hear about how to use Twitter in business.

I wrote down some of my thoughts at the time (was very pleased to see that I already thought/did most of this stuff myself esp with regards to the Xero account) and have meant to record them here since then – great holiday job to get done! As I’ve just using our Xero Twitter account based on my own ‘rules’ I’m still in a phase of being totally paranoid that I’m doing/saying the wrong thing and in sponge mode when it comes to seeing how others are approaching it.

Speakers were: Anthony Gardiner (Web Content Admin, NZ Army), Andy Blood (Exec Creative Director TBWA) and Duncan Blair (Brand & Comms Manager, Orcon).

• Not just teenagers & young techies – actually biggest age-group seems to be 30’s
• Generally people who already blog were the early tweeters
• Judging by the level of whinging you can see on Twitter people either expect that their relative anonymity makes them comfortable doing this or that the immediacy of tweets means that someone will see it and do something about it
• General feeling is that if you want Twitter to build an audience or create a community for your company you should use it for conversation and value, not brand blasting
• Twitter needs a human voice if you’re to building any kind of audience – audience=trust+reputation so it’s no good getting an agency to tweet on your behalf or use any kind of animated response – the one exception to this might be to announce blog posts depending on how prolific your blog is. And how do you get the reputation and trust – be relevant, be interesting, be honest, be there.
• A lot of large companies are using it to build brand and sometimes by the obsequiousness of their tweets and give aways I sometimes wonder if it’s to save brand face more. In that regard, it does give you a quick way to change people’s perceptions which can be pretty powerful on a one-to-one level when word of mouth is still a huge factor in brand choice
• All feedback your company gets needs to be acknowledged without getting into the teen-phone-trap of who hangs up first, you don’t always have to have the last word and you don’t always have to comment back and say ‘thanks for tweeting about me’ etc so you need to develop that knack of knowing when to leave it alone, when to take it to email, when to admit you’re wrong
• Occasionally it’s OK to tweet inane observations, if this goes towards showing your personality, and people on Twitter are used to a sea of this
• Be honest & transparent (that’ my already famous orange presentation slide!) – whatever the principles of good customer service are you can’t beat old fashioned product knowledge and honesty, even it this means you’ll find someone else to help or you don’t know. And you definitely need to have a tough skin to deal with bad feedback and criticism (and having said that I’m not sure why I’m in this job HA! although it’s amazing the acceptance/forgiveness when you find the right way to agree/commiserate without putting down your own product)
• Twitter is not a fad – everything is moving online and there are growth stats for Twitter that suggest it will be around for a while, perhaps not in it’s current form but as part of some larger converged online service
• Twitter doesn’t have to have one objective or be used for one stream – if your brand or you are included in conversations or have questions directed at you on any topic, then that’s where you’ll go. This might take the form of general Q&A, sharing useful information for value-add or building personality, informal market research, entry of your brand into a competitor’s space and sometimes promotion
• In an age of satisfy-me-now it’s not surprising that modern attention spans mean that 75% of people that rushed to get a Twitter account have tweeted less than 10 times, and without the staying power of building an audience and interest have an average 42 followers
• And lastly … there is a difference between Facebook and Twitter – Facebook is a stream from your life (what you are doing/eating/wearing/feeling) and Twitter from your mind (what you are thinking/working on/delivering/researching) <– haven’t quite figured out how to explain what I mean here very eloquently, trapped in my head somewhere!

Interesting to note that no-one was ‘live-tweeting’ the presentation meaning that everyone was there to find out what it was – at Wordcamp (blog conference) I went to earlier in the year there was a constant tickertickerticker of laptop and cellphone keys as people tweeted snippets constantly as presenters were talking; sometimes verbatim, sometimes their own interpretation

Went for a wander today up to Aro Street – I can’t believe how relentless the wind is at the moment and I certainly wasn’t dressed for summer. Aro Street looks a bit like small town New Zealand in this photo – not a city suburb.

This is the first photo I’m bringing you from my Flickr account. See how you get on … you can click on it.