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.