event | Absolutely Ayana

It was a super sunny Saturday as the weather cooperated with us and I, armed with a tray of strawberry Santa’s headed down to Centennial Park for the 2nd Annual Sydney Food Bloggers Christmas Picnic. Having recently attended the Sydney Food Blogger Mad Hatter Spring Picnic, I was more relaxed and excited having previously met tonnes of great people, but with such a huge turnout, I unfortunately didn’t get around to saying hi to every one of you.

I brought along huge strawberries on steroids which I had dressed up as little Santa’s – I was afraid no one was going to know they were actually Santa’s as my sister had no idea what they were… but everyone knew straight away hoooray! It only took 10mins to make these – just whipped the cream (I added some peach liquor to the cream too 😉 ) and painstakingly placed black sesame seeds as eyes with tweezers.

There was an abundance of food, some with a Christmas theme and some with Christmas colours and others were just plain tasty (my favourite was the greek beef meatballs)! They also held Sydney Food Bloggers Olympics and Kris Kringle.

I had an awesome day filling my belly, met a lot of friendly new people and came home with Boiley a microwavable egg boiler – thanks KK!
A big thank you to Helen from Grab Your Fork and Suze from ChocolateSuze who had co hosted and organized the shindig.

My army of Strawberry Santa’s

Christmas Tree Meringues by Jacq from Penguin says Feed Me

Chocolate Hazelnut Christmas Tree by Lisa Perkovic

Christmas Tree Marshmallows by Steph from Raspberri Cupcakes

These kind of look like holly right?? Made by Helen from Grab Your Fork

Pancakes with Chicken and Kimchi

Keftedes by Demos and sign by Gianna from The Empty Fridge

White Chocolate Wontons w/ pinenut and rosemary praline from He Needs Food

Macaron Christmas Tree by Cleony from I Eat Sweet

Sydney Food Bloggers Olympics

Chopstick Challenge transferring 50 soy beans from one bowl to the other

Taste Test challenge

Kris Kringle

photo credit Simon from The Heart of Food

Merry Christmas everyone!!
Naw don’t we have such a nice food blogging community here in Sydney 🙂

So I can be terribly shy, but I worked up the courage and spent 5hours of my Saturday mingling and meeting great new people and making new friends, as well as taking loads of food photos and devouring various goodies, joining 40 or so food bloggers at a "Mad Hatter" themed Sydney Spring Picnic. It was held at Centennial Park on a gloomy looking Saturday, which may have been a blessing in disguise – if it was stinking hot my fresh cream would have melted…

It was a potluck picnic, so I had spent the night before making macarons for the 2nd time – this time I made raspberry, lemon and white chocolate macarons. The first batch I made failed and were overcooked and too crunchy… so I gave them to Helen and she loved them crunchy yay for no wastage. The batches after this were perfect but still lacking the pinkish colour I wanted, perhaps more food colouring next time. To make up for the lacklustre colour I decorated them each with a small edible rose petal. Macarons weren’t enough so I also made a chiffon cake using a blend of Earl Grey and Exotic Fruit tea (both from Taylors of Harrogate) and topped it off with fresh cream and a sprinkling of rose petals.

I had a freakin fantastic time on Saturday, all thanks to all the very friendly food bloggers. A big thank you to Karen from Citrus and Candy and Billy from A Table For Two (you can watch an awesome video of the hats at A Table For Two)
Also, my name tag kept falling off, so if you were there and I didn’t get around to saying hi – my name is Ayana and I was wearing Minnie Mouse ears 😀 It was nice to meet you all.

Of course being a food bloggers picnic, you’d expect the picnic spread to be amazzzing – and it was!! Everything was delicious!! Take a look for yourself as you drool over the next few photos…