The Birthday Bower

The feasting continued Boxing Day as we celebrated the 100th anniversary of my Nan's birthday and my youngest daughter's birthday. Much of the warm afternoon hours were lazed away under the trees in the cool and the babes dozed at intervals.

There are a couple of dishes for the day that were outstanding that I want to note the recipes for.

The first,

Macadamia, Mango and Haloumi Salad

(This is my recipe for 12 people)

 3 cups of prepared cous cous

700-800g of Halloumi 

300g of macadamias 

3 ripe mangoes

Very large bunch of mint and parsley

Macadamia oil

Salt and pepper

Dice the mangoes, chop the mint and parsley and add to the prepared cous cous.

Slice the halloumi and cook in a med-hot pan then quickly pan roast the macadamias

Cut the halloumi into bite sized pieces and roughly chop the macadamias.

Mix all the ingredients together with a drizzling of macadamia nut oil.

This makes a sweet, nutty, minty dish with a texture explosion of the cous cous and the soft mango with the hard meaty nuts and the chewy almost squeaky fried halloumi.

Visually it is bright and festive too.

The roulade is a bit more fiddly and complicated but Izaac and Camilla volunteered to do this one and equated the process to something a bit like childbirth; a bit complicated with many stages and sweat with a great end result and after about three years the memories fade and you are ready to tackle it again.

They used Delia Smith's online recipe here

We spent a lazy four hours outside under the trees sipping sparkling wine and cutting the beautiful flourless orange cake. It is a Nigella Lawson recipe and a light refreshing morsel after the two days of feasting.

A family game of quoits and a bit more chatting and snoozing...

bowers of roses about our beds...

This one is called "Coral Dreaming"

(The rose in the top picture is called "Dark Desire" and is for making rose petal jam, The rose featured in the middle is the very popular"Pierre de Ronsard") 

Happy Birthday Nan and Emma x