Bring a plate

‘m going to two different events over the next few days to which I’ve been asked to bring a plate.  No, we’re not suffering from some sort of national crockery shortage – “Bring a plate” is a lovely little New Zealand English phrase meaning bring some food to contribute to a shared meal (usually afternoon tea or supper).  In the bad old days it was usually phrased as “Ladies a plate” (sometimes with the addition, “Gentlemen a bottle”), but nowadays the wording has become less sexist (even if the underlying assumption hasn’t – if a couple turn up to a “bring a plate” type event without one, you can bet it won’t be the man who people are looking askance at…).  It’s a phrase that catches out foreigners occasionally – even if the stories of immigrant families turning up to events with a box full of actual plates are apocryphal, I think every New Zealander has had to at some point append “…of food” to an invitation to a new arrival after getting a puzzled look.  It’s certainly a common enough misunderstanding that an explanation of the phrase was included in the pack of “Living in New Zealand” materials the Immigration Service was handing out to new residents in the late ’90s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still there.
Anyway, as I said, I have to bring plates to two events over the next few days, so I’ve been baking this afternoon.  I’d been trying to think of something that I could make a double batch of and that would keep for a few days, so I settled on gingerbread (of the loaf variety, not the biscuits).  Of course, do you think I could remember which recipe book the recipe I’ve used successfully in the past was in?  I went through half a dozen books and none of the recipes I found looked quite right (including the trusty Edmonds book), so in the end I just picked the one that I had all the ingredients for and hoped for the best.  It’s in the oven now, and good smells are drifting out, so hopefully it will turn out ok.
In other news, I finished sewing the last block for my randomly stripy quilt last night, so now I’ve just got to decide what order to put them together in…

Don’t worry, I won’t subject you to all the possible variations while I try and make a decision 🙂 (hmm, 25 blocks, each with 4 different possible orientations, that would be about 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations… yeah, probably don’t have enough space in my Flickr account for that many photos)
Meanwhile, the sun is shining, and Parsnips as usual has the best seat in the house: