Okay I know most of my international viewers are probably looking at this title and pictures and thinking I'm crazy for sharing a homemade slushie at this time of the year!







3 Granny Smith Apples
3 Lemons
1/2 cup Passion Fruit Cordial
1/2 cup Lime Cordial
1 1/2 cups Sugar
1 cup Granadilla Pulp

• I prefer green apples over the red for the drink.
• I also have tried different brands of cordials but I love the brand Rose's over the rest.
• You can use fresh granadilla but you also get them prepacked in tins or tubs. 

1. Cube your apples with the peel but remove all seeds.
2. Liquidise the apples with 750ml water and strain.
3. Next cut the lemons with the peel again removing all the seeds.
4. Liquidise the chopped lemons in 750ml of water as well and strain. 
5. Thereafter, combine the strained apple and lemon mixtures.
6. Add the sugar, both cordials and the granadilla pulp to the mixture and stir well.
7. Next freeze the mixture in a closed container till semi frozen.
8. Serve as slush and garnish with mint leaves. 

• Add to a pot.

Summer is coming to an end, this is a dessert that you can end it off with, or if you're from the part of the world that's just welcoming summer you can start with this recipe (btw check for other dessert recipes I have shared). My aunty shared this recipe with us when she came for holiday, there was a bit of a glitch so she fixed the recipe so it would taste perfect.

1 litre milk

OMW! This sponge cake melted in my mouth when I ate it. I've said it once and I will say it again I'm not a baking person, so mum (Aysh Dok) made this and it was amazing!! I did the garnish, took the pictures and enjoyed every bite lol




125g butter or margarine (softened)
250ml (210g) castor sugar
4 extra large eggs (separated)
5ml of vanilla essence
45ml granadilla pulp
500ml (280g) cake flour
10ml baking powder
1ml salt
120ml milk
80ml water
5ml cream of tartar

1. Cream the butter and sugar together.
2. Next, add yolks; one at a time, beating well after each has been added, until it is light and fluffy.
3. When fluffy, add the vanilla essence and granadilla pulp.
4. Sift flour, baking powder and salt together,
5. Than, add the egg mixture, alternately with milk and water.
6. Beat the egg whites with cream of tartar, until stiff peak stage, and fold in lightly into the creamed mixture.
7. Turn out into 2 greased 20cm round cake pans.
8. Baked in a preheated oven at 180 degrees for 30 minutes. 

Those that know me know I am so not a dessert making person unless its the fridge kind!! Which this is :D oh the joy lol. It was super easy easy to make and was finished in seconds. You can make them in individual servings or in one big dish which you can serve from. Either way loved this recipe, mum made it this weekend when we had family friends over, I was the taster and photographer lol

And while I was taking pictures I think my kitty wanted to be in the picture and so his in a couple of more shots even. Super cute :p

• 100ml of lemon juice is quite a lot, so mum used way less that that, around half because lemon is a strong ingredient and it can over power the whole dessert. 
• We did 3 layers, not 2. Also, we ended up using 1 and a half pkts of tennis biscuits. 

Holiday's everywhere, festive season so you can imagine the braai/bbq parties, this is a quick recipe to marinate your chicken with. Served with salad, and/or the side dish recipe posted before this called Creamy Sliced Potato Baked and will be linked here so you can find it easily. Mumsie marinated the chicken I was there watching and taking pictures obviously lol .

Okay let's be honest, summer or winter if you're in Southern Africa the braai/bbq stand is always out, regardless of the season.

I will go as far and say hands down this is the most amazing ice-cream in the world. Mum makes this all through summer in like bulks cause we all eats so many bowls a day lol don't judge. Recipe credit goes to family friend Farhana Desai. 

I would say that having an icecream machine makes it so much easier to make, and you nowadays get super affordable ones, and small ones as well so you don't have to go all out and buy a huge one. Also I will say married couples check your wedding gifts maybe you got one and didn't even know and its like stored in the back of the cupboard, yes that is what happened to my mum.

INGREDIENTS 
1L milk
200g (1 Pkt) woolworths original soft eating licorice 
2 eggs 
1 tin nestle cream
1 condense milk ideal milk

PREPARATION

• Boil the milk and melt the licorice. 
• When cool than add; the eggs, nestle cream and condense milk and beat well. 
• Make it in the ice-cream maker.
• Top with black and white sprinkles when serving.

Any questions feel free to ask, I know woolworths is in Southern Africa and England, not sure about the rest of the world so you can substitute and use licorice sweets from the sweet shop, just make sure they taste like licorice and are soft enough to melt easily.

We're missing a bit of other fruits like kiwi, oranges, bananas cherries, plum and a few more, but we made do with what we have and made use of lychee season!

Enjoy This Delectable Apple Swan Decoration 

Now it was super easy to make and fun, we stuck some fan palm kind of please on the pineapple and attempted to make an apple swan!

Down below I will show the 2 other cutlery we used to design the fruit, there are so many more styles and cutleries you can use for a more extravagant look. I will also show the picture slideshow off how to make the swan with captions, and I will put the video up from youtube that I used, check out which ever one you prefer. 

We used peaches, pineapple, melons, naartjie, apples, paw paws, missing a few but I used the fruit shells after I scooped them out to serve in. Please note the pictures from the step by step bellow are not mine.

How To Make An Apple Swan

Choose your apple, preferably a big one would make it easier to cut up. You'll need a sharp knife and 2 butter knifes that will be your guide when cutting.

Try cutting you apple at a slight diagonal so that it cuts through the centre of the apple core.

After cutting you will have access to the seeds, take them out and keep so they can be used later.

Take the half of the apple that still has the bottom attached and place it face down on the cutting board. For the next step its best to put 2 butter knifes perpendicular to the top and bottom, it will help with the cutting.

Now use your knife to carefully cut down into the apple from the top, and just to the right side of the apple core. You should be able to press down until the knife bottoms out on the other 2 butter knives.

Then use the butter knives as makeshift spacers to line your knife up, and cut in from the side. When the 2 cuts meet, you may feel a little "pop" as the wedge is released.  If not, it means the cuts haven't fully met yet, so just gently wiggle the blade from both directions until the cuts align.

Repeat the process on the other side of the apple so that you're left with 2 apple wedges similar to those seen in the pictures.

The goal is to cut each of these new wedges into 3 smaller wedges, then layer them together to give the effect of feathers and wings.

The process is very similar to how you cut them before, only this time, rather than slicing in from the side, try turning the wedge over to the left, and slicing down. This should give you more control, and save you a few potential cuts to your fingers.

When both wedges have been cut, layer the pieces back together to form a tear-drop shape, and replace them back into the apple "body". The effect should be two beautiful swan wings.

We still need to make a place for the head to sit, so make a couple of precision cuts near the front of the body (like a rectangle), and remove the pieces to leave a clean, and fairly deep, groove, as seen in the picture.

That is how the cut should look like, and the head which you are about to make next will fit into that space.

To form the head, we can use the other half of the apple and place it in-between our butter-knife spacers as we did the other one, except this time we're not going to cut out any wedges. Carefully cut sideways along the butter-knives all the way through to create an apple slice.

If you repeat this 3 or 4 times, you'll end up with different cross sections that sport a variety of shapes and sizes.

All we need to form the head are 3 strategic cuts into the apple slice.You should be able to see that the top cut was started just on the other side of the apple centre, and this is done on purpose to give the sloped face, and the effect of a swan's beak. If you're not sure about the cutting just imitate what was done in the picture.

Hold it up to see if it resembles the swan beak.

Trim the edges if necessary for a clean cut swan head. Take the pits you saved earlier and place them on the head, press down with a butter knife to secure them down and there you have eyes.

Place the head in the small rectangle you had cut on the body.

Place the head in the small rectangle you had cut on the body.

When it comes to the rest of the fruit platter, we didn't do so much as we could have, I would say if you want to take it a step further, watch other youtube videos.

The 2 cutlery pieces above I used for the designing of the apple swan. The red one I used to scoop mini balls of the melons and the silver one with a brown handle, that has a zig zag edging, we used to cut the pineapple and the rest of the green melons.




As you can see its quite easy to make a fruit platter, quite different from usually making a fruit salad and nowadays everyone is making a watermelon cake, or fruit pizza; (now that I recall, watermelon was also what we missed from the fruit platter). 

Be creative and have fun when making this, I even added some funky mini umbrellas and toothpicks to the platter. I also added some flowers from the garden.
Have fun making this apple swan fruit decoration with your kids and family! Although, be warned, it won't last long if you have all that delicious fruit and many people around :p