Easter in the Outback

Easter is the second biggest holiday (Christmas is #1) in Australia. It’s comparable in magnitude to the American Thanksgiving. It is an official 4 day weekend and is the busiest travel season of the year. EVERYTHING is closed on Good Friday – even grocery stores and most gas stations. Strangely enough, everything is open again for Saturday and Sunday (which is Easter) and then Monday is a federal holiday and most things are closed again.

As mentioned in my last post, camping is a popular Easter activity, but not really our cup of tea. So we settled for getting together with friends for an afternoon of eating and drinking – Which we did with reckless abandon!

It was a lovely afternoon with good friends, delicious food and amazing wines. If I had to pick a favorite of all the food we had it would have to be dessert. The only Aussie in the group favored us with two classic Australian sweets – sticky toffee date pudding and pavlova – both were amazing. Date pudding isn’t related to American pudding in any way. It’s a heavy moist pound cake sort of thing made with peeled dates instead of a pound of butter. It served with warm toffee sauce poured over the top with a dollop of whipped cream . It’s insanely good and rather sticky – hence the name.

Pavlova is this magical baked meringue confection. The outside barely gets crunchy and inside stays gooey and marshmallow like. It’s topped with whipped cream (cool whip doesn’t even exist in this country) dark chocolate curls and fresh strawberries. Pavlova is one of the few truly Australian recipes and well worth the bragging rights.

As we left that evening it donned on me that the nine of us might have over indulged in more than just the dessert. (one of these was a magnum and the sparkling bottles had already gone out to the bubbish bin)

They don’t color Easter eggs here, so I had to settle for my toes. Which I did prior to getting drunk at lunch.