Marshmallows and a bit of an update

It's been a while since the last post, sorry folks, been busy and also slightly lost my blogging mojo! But I'm back now!

Some time ago I watched an episode of River Cottage where Hugh makes beetroot tinted marshmallows. We recently tried some raspberry and rosewater marshmallows that I bought from Bennetts of Mangawhai This great place mainly make delicious chocolates, but on a recent visit I spied cute little bags of their marshmallows for sale. After trying these I was inspired to try my hand at making my own marshmallow. I used Hugh's recipe but as I didn't have any fresh beetroot on hand, I used a little natural pink food colouring:

Here is the mix being poured into the cake tin:

When set (took about 3 hours) I "turned" it onto a board heavily dusted with the corn flour and icing sugar mix. Actually it took quite a bit of prying out with a knife as it is very sticky until coated with the flour/sugar but at least it came out all in one piece!

 The finished cut and dusted mallows:

And they taste delicious of course. Fluffy, light and very very sweet! I also had some in my hot chocolate last night.

On the gardening front, we harvested the kumara (sweet potatoes) recently. We got some very large ones, over 1kg in weight! They were really easy to grow to, the kumara sprouts don't look much when planting, so it's rewarding to see such large ones at harvest time. The supermarkets (or their customers) must prefer the tiny ones which take forever to peel if you need a lot of kumara! Anyway, we are sure that the Maori would have grown them as big as possible to use and store until the next season came around.

3 big kumara growing together

They are left to dry a little in the sun and stored in large paper bags out of the light just as you would with potatoes.

Last autumn harvest of strawberries

Amazingly we are STILL getting the occasional strawberry, it's been pretty mild up here in Northland - during the day anyway - nightime is getting a bit cooler, we're down to about 10 deg C at present.

Here are a few pics from around the farm:

Nerine in flower

Bird of Paradise

The last of the capsicums