Friends for Lunch

On Sunday we had two of my university friends, their partners and children over for lunch. One of my friends lives in wellington and I hadn’t seen her for two years, and I don’t get to see the other one all that often as she lives an hour on the other side of Auckland, so it was a nice catch up. I made a tart for lunch. I think that is a good kind of thing to make for Sunday lunch. It is fairly light and also it doesn’t matter if it is served piping hot, warm or room temperature, it will still taste good.



I used another recipe from Rachel Allen, Bake for this tart, amending it somewhat to my tastes. The tart as written in the book was a goats cheese, spinach and potato tart. My tart was a feta, spinach and kumara tart, mostly because I don’t really like potato, but love kumara and goats cheese is a bit of an iffy thing to serve people for lunch as people tend to either love it or hate it. Instead of stirring the parmesan through the egg and cream custard used to fill the tart, I sprinkled it in the base of the blind baked shortcrust tart, covered that with spinach, then the kumara slices, dotted with feta and poured over the custard (4 eggs, ½ c cream, a pinch each of cayenne pepper and freshly ground nutmeg, salt and pepper). The tart was lovely. We had it with a baby spinach, chickpea and feta salad with a raspberry vinaigrette dressing.

I made the cute little cupcakes pictured above for pudding. They were lemon and poppyseed cupcakes with cream cheese icing and topped with some little flowers I made at one of my cake decorating classes last year (they last forever in an air tight container). They looked very sweet and were greatly appreciated by my friend’s almost 3 year old daughter.

Oh, and the two people I randomly picked to pay it forward to are Megan (who doesn’t have a blog but told me about the cake shop in Howick that I must visit) and Gaye from Laws of the Kitchen. Can you guys please e-mail me to confirm that you want to play (you will each need to agree to pay it forward to two people within 365 days) and if yes, your addresses. My e-mail is tcmatdavenportsharbourdotcodotnz