give ya some some some of this cinnabon

February 7, 2011March 11, 202014 Comments

These Norwegian cinnamon buns went straight to my head.

Not like I wore one of them as a dapper, yeasted fascinator. I mean that for a short time I got really up myself, alarmingly egotistical from my own excellence at having brought something of this level of deliciousness into the world. However, I have to acknowledge that in fact I was just conduit, a mere flume for someone else’s excellence. It was Nigella Lawson who actually provided me with this recipe (via her book How To Be A Domestic Goddess, not via her own velveteen voice during a cheery, injokes-aplenty tea drinking date, alas). Should probably also acknowledge Tim for not sneering when I’d say things like “I can’t believe how delicious these are. Why aren’t you showing more outward amazement? Do you feel about me like I feel about myself right now?” If you think you can handle this potential vaingloriousness, plus a little light kneading and rolling, then please feel free to give them a go yourself, too.

It’s just that the smell of them baking was so intoxicating, and then on top of that they absolutely delivered on flavour, providing a heady one-two punch of buttery crumb and sweet, spiced centre which left me almost woozy with happiness after eating one, still warm from the oven. Hence the spiralling vanity to match the spiralling dough.

I really love making bread and have worked my way through most of Nigella’s yeast-related recipes, but this one was new to me. Something about creating cinnamon buns en masse like this pleases me and despite having a few steps, the recipe itself is actually surprisingly straightforward – there’s no long rising time, the dough comes together quickly and all the yeast makes it stretchy and pliable – and the rolling and cutting can’t be that difficult otherwise I would’ve mucked it up somehow. Important to note is that you’ll probably need more than 600g flour, and also that I’ve lowered the baking heat a little and cooked them for slightly longer instead.

Norwegian Cinnamon Buns

From Nigella Lawson’s floury tome of essential-ness, How To Be A Domestic Goddess

Dough:

600g flour (you’ll need more, so bring more)

100g sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

21g – as in three, yes three sachets – of dried yeast

100g butter

400mls milk

2 eggs

Filling:

150g soft butter

150g sugar – I used a mix of white and dark brown

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 roasting tin approx 33cm x 24cm, lined with a big piece of baking paper that extends over both ends of the tin.

Place your flour, salt, sugar and yeast in a large bowl. Melt the butter and whisk into it the milk and eggs, and then stir this into the flour. However, you can save on dishes by melting the butter in one large bowl (either in the microwave or set over a small pan of simmering water), stirring in the eggs and milk, and then measuring in the flour-etc ingredients. Mix to combine, and then knead until smooth. I found that I needed to add quite a bit more flour at this point – the dough was just far too soft to knead successfully otherwise. Just sprinkle and push as you go till the dough feels springy and soft, but with solidness to it.

Cover with clingfilm and leave to rise for 25 minutes. Which it will do with gusto, having so much yeast within it. Then: take 1/3 of the dough and stretch/roll it to fit the base of your tin, which will in turn become the base of each bun. It will fit, but if you’re having trouble, let it rest for a bit before continuing to stretch it.

Above: Like this.

Roll the rest of the dough across your bench till it’s roughly 50cm x 25cm. Beat together the filling ingredients – oh deliciousness – and then paint this across the top of this dough, trying to get it even and right to the edges. I used a spatula, it was great fun. Roll this up carefully from the longest end, so you get a very long, thinnish coiled of dough. Carefully slice this roll into 2cm slices, and sit them on top of the dough in the tin. They will rise, so don’t worry if it’s not quite full.

Above: I considerably overestimated what 50cm was, hence the fold in the dough above. A measuring tape is pretty handy here.

Above: arghdelicious

Above: rolled up, ready for slicing.

Above: proving.

Nigella uses egg but I just brushed them with a little milk, and then while your oven heats to 220 C/430 F, allow the buns to sit there and prove for 15 minutes. Pop them in the oven for 25-30 minutes, keeping an eye on them as they can burn easily with all that sugar. Cover loosely with tinfoil if necessary. Allow to cool slightly before eating by tearing off each bun as you need it.

They are seriously, so extremely good. The dough is buttery with a soft, flaky crust and smells like croissants. Its filling retains a little pleasing sugar-grit, without being tooth-dissolvingly sweet. They remain tenderly delicious days later, and as I said, smell absolutely incredible. When I was a kid one of my favourite meals was buttered toast with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on it, and this is, in a way, like a much fancier version of that, the comforting heat of the cinnamon dispersed through every bun.

Seriously. Smug-ity justified. In my mind at least.

If you’re in Wellington this week, on Thursday and Saturday Tim’s going to be in this opera called Mozart’s School For Lovers at Mighty Mighty, it’s like a cool, funky reworking of Cosi Fan Tutte (just click the link, I always make it sound awful when I try and explain it) and it’s only $5 a ticket, yay! Opera for all!

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Title via: inspiring brilliance-generator Missy Elliot and her 2002 song Work It from Under Construction.

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Music lately:

Mayer Hawthorne, Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out, as well as being a modern soul man with a gorgeous voice (whose Wellington show we’re unfortunately missing because we’re saving for our trip, but still: bigger picture) he is also apparently also something of a food blogger, logging videos of his adventures with/during food – swoon.

Tony Award winner Alice Ripley’s song of praise to mysterious Suburbia from her album Everything’s Fine. This woman is amazing.

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Next time: the ginger cut-out cookies get their day in the sun.

sugar dumpling, you’re my baby, i love you in every way

November 20, 2010March 11, 202012 Comments

I drank a massive amount of coffee before photographing this dumpling, it’s verging on miraculous that the pictures turned out alright.

Sometimes I find recipes that are so full of things I love dealing with that I can hardly concentrate till the time I get to create them for myself. I recently discovered the delicious Sasasunakku blog written by Sasa, a New Zealander living in Austria, and the first recipe I found therein was Germknodel. My eyes became wider and wider as I read through it – Austrian snack, yeasted dough, butter, sneaky jam filling, steam-cooked – I like the idea of all those things! At the point where you’re instructed to pour even more butter over them and sprinkle over poppy seeds, my eyelashes were near-on touching the back of my head (no mean feat, when you’ve got my stumpy lashes and high forehead). Yeah, this might all sound a bit dramatic and ridiculous, but just imagine something you really like – shoes, for example – and then imagine you found a way to make a shoe that you didn’t even know existed – actually I don’t think this is an idea that’s open to analogies. Just…bear with me.

It would be a big bad lie to tell you these are straightforward as to throw together, but they’re definitely not too difficult either, if you’re up for a bit of kitchen adventurism. If not, you could always just have jam on toast. They’re practical in their own way – each jam-filled ball can be frozen before cooking, and then steamed back to life direct from the freezer. I had it in my head (“oh well”) that we’d just have to eat all ten dumplings after they’d been steamed, but this is obviously also good.

Germknodel

With thanks to Sasasunakku – and please see her blog post about these for much clearer instructions than mine with several handy pictures.

Gently mix the following in a bowl and leave for 10 minutes:

80ml (5 tablespoons or 1/3 cup) lukewarm milk
10g fresh yeast or 1 sachet dried yeast (I used dry, was what I had)
1 teaspoon sugar
30g flour

While that’s happening, weigh out 500g flour and set aside.

In another bowl, place the following:

40g sugar (3 and a half tablespoons)
Pinch salt
2 eggs plus one egg yolk
Zest of half a lemon
80 soft butter
125g (1/2 cup) room temperature milk

Pour the yeast mixture into the flour, briefly mix, then add the other ingredients and mix into a dough. Note: My butter just wouldn’t soften, so I measured the 500g flour into a bowl, rubbed in the butter, then mixed in the rest of the ingredients listed with the butter, followed by the 10-minute yeast mixture. This might be inauthentic, but it still turned out fine, and solved the problem of my solid butter (plus less bowls to wash!)

Knead this sticky mixture till it is springy, smooth, and resembles the lump of dough in the picture above. You can knead it inside the bowl if it’s big enough. I always forget that I now live in a place with a bit of benchspace and so took great joy in kneading it on the countertop. Place this dough-ball in an oiled bowl (I just rinsed out the bowl I mixed everything in) cover with a clean teatowel and leave to rise for 30 minutes. Doesn’t have to be in an overly warm spot – if you heat it too much, the yeast will give up on you. I used to sit bread dough on our hard drive before we got our new computer, but anywhere not fridge-cold is fine, really. A hot-water cupboard is great, I’ve lived in three different Wellington flats and never had one though.

Meanwhile, cut out ten squares of baking paper. Once 30 minutes has passed, roll the dough into a large, fat log and use a dough-cutter or a knife to divide it into ten roughly equal pieces.

Find: A jar of jam – I used Jok’n’Al’s sugarfree Blackcurrant and Apple Spread (what with Tim’s diabetes and all) but Sasa recommends Powidl, an austere Austrian plum spread – she also suggests Nutella, hello!

Flatten each piece slightly in the palm of your hand and place about 1/2 teaspoonful of jam in the centre. Pinch the edges together to make a round, jam-filled pocket. This dough is pretty forgiving so if you’re too rough and the top splits, you can easily patch it up. It’s best to use only a bit of jam though to make sealing each bun easier. Repeat with the remaining portions of dough.

Place each jam-filled ball seal side down on a square of paper on a baking tray, cover with the teatowel and let them sit for fifteen minutes, where they will rise up once more and become puffy. At this point, you can freeze them until you feel like eating them – OR – set a large steamer over a pan of simmering water and steam as many dumplings as you can handle for about fifteen minutes.

Once steamed, pour over a little melted butter, and sprinkle with icing sugar and poppyseeds. I didn’t have any poppyseeds on me but found a bag of black sesame seeds which I figured would provide similar dark nutty crunch. I was right. A teaspoon of plain sugar stood in for icing sugar, which I also didn’t have.

Yes, these are a bit of a mission, but each stage is relatively easy – the dough comes together quickly under your hands and patches up easily during the jam-filling, it only has to rise for half an hour, and you don’t even need to cook them right away. In fact the hardest thing was typing out the long recipe. Even cooking them is easy – unlike baking which can be a bit touch-and-go, steaming is very forgiving. The dumplings could sit in there for 25 minutes and still be edible. Speaking of, I use a large bamboo steamer which we got for about $6 from Yan’s Supermarket which we use regularly for steaming either pork or coconut buns (also from Yan’s) – while it might take a bit of roaming round the neighbourhood, don’t be fooled into paying $30+ for them at fancy cookware shops. Because that’s what they’ll try to charge you!

These Germknodel (say it! “gare-m-kner-dil!” And try not to smile!) taste amazingly fantastically delicious – incredibly soft from their sauna-time in the steamer, but with that gratifying real-bread flavour from the yeast, the murmer of lemon zest and jammy surprise centre – okay, I put it there myself but still, surprise! – providing tart fruity respite from all the buttery goodness. According to Sasa these are typical post-skiing treats for the Austrians. Which adds to their charm. I share Sasa’s inability to ski (inability barely describes me, I’ve had one terrifying go at skiing, trembling my way across the gentlest of slopes, falling over constantly onto the unfairly rock-hard snow while three-year old ski-bairns scooted and Telemarked merrily around me, occasionally backflipping, and Gunter the ski instructer gazed unhappily into the majestic Canterbury ranges. I now live with someone who skis excellently for fun, I am in great awe of anyone who can actually derive enjoyment from it. You deserve a jam-filled dumpling for that.)

Guess what? While I can’t ski (and just as well, ski-pants are really expensive) I can stare into a computer screen and type about myself, and the fine people at The Wellingtonista agree – I’ve been nominated in their The Annual Wellingtonista Awards for “Best Contribution To The Internet From Wellington” which is damned exciting really and took me completely by surprise. Yay for Wellingtonista, yay for the rest of the nominees who all seem to actually “contribute to Wellington”, and frankly yay for ME.

You can feel free to vote for me (or anyone! Truly!) HERE. It’s very, very easy, and even if you’re not from New Zealand you can vote because the only required bits are your name and email address. I won’t hassle you too much though.

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Title via: The lovely Sam Cooke and his song Sugar Dumpling, a mighty happy tune which I can’t help but interpret literally as I gaze at the Germknodel.

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Music lately:

Dudley Benson and the Dawn Chorus with the compelling, call-and-answer song Ruru which you can hear, along with other music creations of his, at his website. Tim and I saw him perform last night at Pipitea Marae before a very supportive audience. You’re probably best to read his bio and hunt round his site rather than have me recreate it here. It was an evening of beautiful music – just Benson, four guys as chorus, and Hopey One, beatboxer extraordinaire, filling the whare with the shaping and manipulation of their voices. Despite his warm, happy-go-lucky interaction with the audience between songs, there was a steely discipline to the performance – with incredible skill, accuracy and genuineness of spirit.

And The Angels Sing from Elaine Stritch’s unfussily named album Stritch. She is just so great.

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Next time: Either some honey-related baking or a salad named after a former beauty queen. Truly.

and if you don’t want to be down with me, you don’t want to pick from my apple tree

November 13, 2010March 11, 20207 Comments

I made these Apple and Cinnamon muffins ages ago – they were the second thing I tried from Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen after the Spaghetti with Marmite (which got slated in a column in the local paper – any Dominion Post readers out there, don’t disregard its deliciousness! I guess that was one opinion, and mine is merely another, but still.) I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to blog about them, but…here they are.

I do agree with Nigella’s emphatic and continued suspicion of the muffins you run into in many cafes and supermarkets. What they lack in tenderness and flavour, they make up for in height and overpricedness. It could be easy to dislike the concept of muffins altogether if your main experience of them is handing over $4.50 for a mountain of foam mattress sprinkled in chocolate chips, somehow dry and oily simulataneously. Maybe you like this, or your experience of shop muffins is better than mine. All good.

However home-made muffins, while less uniform in shape, are very easy to make and as long as you don’t over-mix them, pretty well guaranteed to be extremely delicious. I realise apple and cinnamon muffins might sound like the obvious-est of the obvious but this recipe of Nigella’s is incredibly good – dense and sweet with honey and yoghurt and textured with chunks of apple and almonds. And it probably costs less to make a whole dozen than it would to buy just one from the supermarket.

Nigella uses spelt flour in this recipe instead of regular flour, which makes them more acceptable for some people who eat wheat-free, but not necessarily those who are gluten-free – it’s a little complicated but go with what you know is best for you, I guess. I bought a bag of spelt flour a year ago and never ended up using it so it was nice to have the opportunity to try it out. These muffins are so full of flavour that I couldn’t say they were distinctively spelt-ish, they just came out looking and tasting like muffins should. You could definitely just use regular plain flour rather than rushing out to find spelt.

Apple and Cinnamon Muffins

From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen

2 apples

250g spelt flour (or just plain flour)

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

125g brown sugar

125ml honey (1/2 a cup)

60ml (1/4 cup) natural yoghurt

125 ml oil (1/2 a cup – and I use Rice Bran oil)

2 eggs

75g natural almonds, roughly chopped.

Set your oven to 200 C and line your muffin tin with papers.

Chop the apples into small dice, leaving out the core of course, and put to one side. Whisk together the brown sugar, honey, yoghurt, oil and eggs in a bowl.

Tip in the apples, flour, baking powder, half the almonds, and one teaspoon of the cinnamon into this and gently fold it together with a spatula. Try not to overmix – I tend to lift and shift the batter rather than do a full on stirring motion, if that makes any sense at all.

Spoon evenly amongst the muffin tin, and sprinkle with the remaining cinnamon and almonds, plus a little more brown sugar if you like. Bake for 20 minutes. Let them stand 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool.

While the comfort-food element of cinnamon and apple obviously works, the almonds, growing smokily nutty under the oven’s heat, and honey, complementing the diced apple’s clean but layered sweetness, keep these muffins from being predictable. They take minutes to throw together but stay good for ages in a sealed container, if anything becoming even more delicious with time (although that could be a product of imagination and anticipation, waking up thinking “OHBOY a delicious muffin for a mid-morning snack.”)

In fact, one of the excellent things about muffins is that they’re really just cake, but you can eat them any time of day including breakfast, without getting strange looks – in the sort of way that a pavlova or ice cream might. Not that avoiding strange looks should be your main motivation in life, not at all! It’s just a nice thought…breakfast cake.

Tim and I went out to Petone yesterday and at the record shop partway down Jackson Street, I found the original Broadway cast recording of Company on vinyl. I didn’t even think it existed in New Zealand – considering the juggernaut that is Amazon.com only has about 6 copies, one for US$90…and now for relative pennies I’ve got Elaine Stritch barking “she’s tall enough to be your mother” as people originally heard her the first time round in 1970. I had to keep taking it out of the bag and looking at it on the bus back into the city in case I’d just done a really good job of imagining it. But it exists. It’s damn exciting.

Speaking of, I am seriously anticipational about Tiger Translate on the 26th of November, if you’re in Wellington around this time you should most definitely give it your time of day. Even though I feel like I don’t quite have a grip on what it is, there’s a whole lot of creativity that’ll go down and there will be some amazing locals performing. We’ve been lucky to witness many of them in action already over the last year or so, with their powers combined who knows what kind of fresh mayhem will occur. TrinityRoots’ stunner drummer Riki Gooch, Julien Dyne and Parks who we saw just last week onstage with Ladi6, Homebrew, whose lyric-memorising male fans still astound months after we saw them with David Dallas at Watusi, Adi Dick who despite being in a squillion different music projects we’ve never actually seen live, the mighty intriguing Orchestra of Spheres, the amazing Electric Wire Hustle who we saw back in February and have since been galloping round the globe, Tommy Ill, Alphabethead whose happy style we love, Scratch 22, Fried Chicken Sound System, The Jewel School plus particularly special guest DJ Zooloo from Mongolia. Tim and I are going to be there and if you get a move on the first 500 people to register online get free tickets – not sure if this has filled up but either way check out their website for more info.

While I’m talking to Wellington, can anyone tell me where to get decent garlic? It seems like even the expensive stuff from the supermarket, with the pretty purple-tinged papery casing is all chomped and denty, gets green shoots quickly, and burns the tongue like raw onion. I guess people selling garlic have no way of knowing what’s underneath the stuff you peel off, but I’m also guessing you can’t return a bulb once you’ve bought it. Sure, there’s the mulched up stuff in jars, but for those times you want whole cloves…?

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Title via: Erykah Badu and her song Appletree from the beautiful album Baduizm. Such an amazing woman – I wish she’d tour on down to New Zealand.

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Music lately:

I Learned The Hard Way, by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, from the album of the same title. Now there’s an amazing woman who is coming to New Zealand, and luckily for us we were able to buy tickets. Can’t wait.

Obviously, have got Company doing many revolutions right now. Can’t get enough no.

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Next time: I am on a prawn high right now, watch out.

don’t have time for things unsaid, for baking bread

October 3, 2010March 11, 202010 Comments

Stumbled across Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course book recently with the opportunity to take it home – someone was having a cleanout-of-stuff. While I was initially pretty taken with Ms Smith gazing mildly out at the reader from the cover picture while holding an egg aloft (I’m not even exaggerating), a quick flick through didn’t really show me anything hugely exciting (not even her recipe for ox kidneys) and my cookbook-shelf is both narrow and overflowing already – to have a book I wasn’t completely in love with lurking round trying to fit in would just be annoying. So I left it. But not without photocopying one recipe first.

Her Soured Cream Soda Bread made significant eye contact with me – I love the Jilly Cooperish way she calls it ‘soured cream’ which somehow sounds posher and more petulant than regular sour cream (not to mention “bicarbonate” which Nigella often calls it too, is this a British thing? I remember seeing it once in a book when I was younger and didn’t realise it was the same as baking soda, I pronouced it “bicker-bonnet”…anyway). Soda Bread is a traditionally Irish creation, and according to Wikipedia, it all kicked off when baking soda was introduced to Ireland in 1840. It doesn’t indicate who specifically had it in their head that what the Irish really needed in their lives was a boatload of raising agent pulling into their harbour, but nevertheless they ended up with it and this is what they cleverly made of it.

Like a giant scone, soda bread is quickly made and benefits from minimal handling and fast eating. Delia’s recipe is a bit unusual in that it uses sour cream instead of butter, and while I’m normally like “BUTTER WHERE IS IT WHY ISN’T THERE MORE IN FRONT OF ME” I was also a bit interested in what the sour cream would bring to the table.

Soured Cream Soda Bread

From Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course

450g/1lb wholewheat flour (I used white, it’s all I had)

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

150mls sour cream

150mls water (plus maybe a little extra)

Set your oven to 220 C/425 F. Mix the dry ingredients together thoroughly, whisk together the sour cream and water and pour into the dry ingredients. Stir together with a spatula, adding a little more water if needed. Carefully, lightly knead, turn it onto a baking tray lined with paper or a silicon sheet. Slash a cross in the top with a sharp knife and bake for 30 mins. Cover with foil if it darkens too much. Cool a little first before eating – this will help it slice easier.

Delia very coolly tells you to knead the dough. What she doesn’t tell you is that it’s difficult to work with, to the point where you half-expect it to don a feathery leotard and insist Miley Cyrus-like that it can’t be tamed. By the time I’d finished attempting to shape it into something that resembled any shape – let alone the “round ball” with “the surface smooth” that she talks of – there was dough clinging to my arms and hair and I looked like the guy at the end of the Comfortably Numb segment of The Wall. Once you’ve got that out of the way though it’s delicious stuff – the soda and sour cream giving it a distinctively light, slightly tangy tang that goes mighty well with the salty creaminess of butter. It’s quite a dense loaf but – and I don’t know if this was just because I didn’t get the top smooth – quite crumbly round the edges. It goes quick – Tim and I basically ate all but a small remaining shoulder of the loaf for dinner with cheese, hot sauce and gherkins.

The next day a person I work with handed me a recipe they’d photocopied from a newspaper for American-Irish Soda Bread, which is apparently what happened to Soda Bread once people started arriving en masse from Ireland to American and looked distinctively sweeter, eggier and fruitier than its ancestor-recipe. I very unhelpfully left the recipe behind on the day I was determined to make it and managed to cobble together a rough recipe from what I could remember plus a bit of online research. Ended up with a completely different finished result to the previous bread – but still seriously delicious in its own way. Of course I didn’t write down the recipe I came up with so what follows is me trying to remember something I’ve already forgotten once before – you’ve been warned.

Irish-American Soda Bread

4 1/2 cups plain flour

3 tablespoons sugar

50g butter

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon caraway seeds (I just happened to have these, but leave them out if you don’t)

70g currants, golden sultanas or just plain sultanas

2 eggs

1 1/2 cups milk

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

Set your oven to 200 C. In a large bowl, rub the butter into the flour, then stir in the sugar, baking soda, seeds and fruit. Make a well in the centre and crack in the eggs, pour in the liquids and using a spatula, carefully draw it all together without overmixing to create a soft dough. This stuff really can’t be kneaded, so get a baking dish – the sort you’d make brownies in – and either sit a silicon sheet inside it or get put a piece of baking paper in it extending over both sides – and dump the dough into it. Dust the top with excess flour and try cutting a cross in it, although it probably won’t show at the end. Bake for around 30 minutes, although keep an eye on it – might need less or more time.

This is completely different to Delia’s recipe – it spreads out into an enormous loaf with a golden crust. The strangely anise-like caraway seeds pop up occasionally to stick in your teeth but give a sophisticated flavour to the loaf while they’re at it. The relaxed sweetness and dried fruit make it seem like a morning-with-cup-of-tea kind of creation, and it toasts well in a sandwich press or under the grill (and then spread with butter and honey!) which is just as well because it loses its springiness quick.

Tim was out on Tuesday night when I made this, and it wasn’t till a full 24 hours later that he tried it. To be fair, the loaf was most definitely on its way to stale-ville. His reaction was something to the effect of “Mmmm, this isn’t dry at ALL!” and I replied “Well if you hadn’t abandoned me and my unleavened bread,” and wasn’t sure where to go from there and even though neither of us were being overly serious I started laughing anyway because that’s not the sort of thing you get to yell at someone every day of the week.

Speaking of Tim, he and I saw Exit Through The Gift Shop on Friday night at Paramount cinema, it was in the Film Festival earlier this year and as time went by it racked up considerably positive reviews from people whose opinions I take notice of. Luckily Paramount has it on offer because we completely missed it first time round. It’s directed by difficult-to-pin-down artist Bansky and follows Thierry Guetta, a man who feverishly films everything around him, and his attempt to…well I don’t know, just get by and enjoy himself. Naive that I am, it didn’t even occur to me that it would be a hoax but theories are scooting round the internet from various reviewers that it’s all a giant fake. I don’t really care – it’s brilliant to watch whether it’s true or not, and if it comes to a neighbourhood near you I definitely recommend it.

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Title via: the incredible Idina Menzel singing Life of the Party from Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party. It’s hard to talk about this musical without mentioning the rest of the amazing cast (Julia Murney, Taye Diggs, Brian D’arcy James) but this song is a big moment for Idina alone in the show. Feel free to humour me (but benefit yourself greatly!) by listening to the shinier album version as well as viewing footage of her actually performing it hard. The ending is mind-blowing.

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Music lately:

Cold War by Janelle Monae from her album The Archandroid. I love the urgency, and how the words in the chorus are repeated in different ways with emphasis on different parts, and also the whole thing. She’s doing well for herself, but how this lady isn’t the best-selling, most-awarded artist right now (along with Idina Menzel, naturally) is beyond me.

Benny Tones feat Mara TK, Firefly from Chrysalis – silky soulful local goodness.

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Next time: I did not get ANY baking done this weekend. Partly because I ended up being kinda busy. But also for a very stupid reason, which I’ll probably tell you about again next time anyway, but the short version: I got the new Nigella Lawson cookbook, was so excited about my weekend revolving around it, and then I left it at work. D’OH! And next week I have something on every single night so it’s even further out of my reach. But the next thing I make in the kitchen will absolutely be from it.

johnny all she does is lies

September 26, 2010March 11, 202011 Comments

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about cornbread (apart from the fact that I really really love it) it’s this: the only way to take an oven-hot slab of cornbread with a two-by-four sized slice of butter melting quietly on top and make it more fun, is to transform it into pancakes.

The mighty Nigella Lawson has this recipe for Johnnycakes in How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and while Wikipedia reckons the name of this American creation was adapted from ‘journey cakes’ I’d like to think there was an original Johnny, who wanted to blaze trails by combining the golden grittiness of cornbread with the circular fun-ness of a pancake. I was away up in Rotorua over the weekend (plus chasing the hour lost in Daylight Saving) but I managed to cobble these together without any trouble for a late lunch when I landed back in Wellington on Sunday afternoon. This recipe is forgiving – only a few Johnnycakes turned out bung, either buckling or sticking to the pan – the rest obediently slid onto the spatula and flipped over easily.

This one’s for you, generous, possibly non-existent Johnny.

Johnnycakes

From Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

150g fine cornmeal/polenta
100g plain flour
4 teaspoons baking powder (gotta admit I was all “really? four?” about this, and put in only three teaspoons)
2 teaspoons sugar
pinch salt
2 eggs
300mls milk
30g butter

Stir together the dry ingredients in a bowl, then whisk in everything else till you have a thick, yellow batter (don’t worry about any small lumps.) Heat an oiled griddle or pan and drop tablespoons-ful into it. Once they’re thoroughly bubbled on top, carefully turn them over to cook on the other side. Transfer to a plate and cover with tinfoil till you’re finished.

When I was a kid I always impressed by those Disney movies where a character would have a whole stack of pancakes with butter and maple syrup on top, and then eat the stack all at once with a knife and fork. I’m sure it was Disney movies anyway, it must have happened a lot in order to stick in my brain like that… Johnnycakes are too stubby for this practice, so I unstacked them after these photos and ate them the best way – two sandwiched together with maple syrup.

While there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from making actual cornbread or actual pancakes, both being more practical in their own special ways, Johnnycakes are so good that it’s worth a bit of potentially dubious fusion (fusious?). The cornmeal gives a textural presence to the Johnnycakes which the average pancake sometimes lacks (like chewing through a foam rubber camping mattress if you’re unlucky) and you get a hearty jolt of bright yellow cheeriness without the need for pesky e-numbers, useful if you’re the sort of person who gets nervous around them. Their lightly perforated surface is an ideal conduit for ferrying lots of butter into the mouth. They’re slightly sweet and very light, and work with both savoury and sweet stuff on the plate. How To Be A Domestic Goddess is amazing – the Johnnycake recipe being just one example of the gems to be found within its pages. If you’re casually thinking about getting into baking intensely good food, you couldn’t do much better than finding this book.

Funnily enough when I last blogged about cornbread-related issues I was thinking about what my favourite food was in case I got asked in an interview with a cool magazine. A girl can dream, but nothing wrong with dreaming in a hubristically prepared kinda manner, right? Anyway this morning I had the mighty good fortune to have my first ever radio interview over the phone with Charlotte Ryan on 95bFM’s Morning Glory show. With the job I’m in I try to keep relatively non-partisan about NZ media but Morning Glory has most definitely been a favourite of mine for a while now. It was the first time I’d ever been on the radio (although I have this memory of requesting some Nirvana song from the late Channel Z years back) and I was nervous as, but Charlotte was so nice that I rambled away quite happily, sharing this recipe, my tooth-rattling nervousness while the endless intro song played through the phone forgotten. I’ll post a link to the podcast when it’s up so you can listen if you like. Just before I got the call I realised I might be asked what I love about cooking. I had this frenzied moment of panic where my mind blanked and the closest thing to a coherent sentence about why I loved cooking was “there’s so much deliciousness in this world and I like making it happen in front of me”. Luckily that specific question didn’t come up. An enormous thanks to Charlotte and bFM for having me on the show, the excitingness of it all can’t be underplayed, truly.

Title via: Salmonella Dub’s cautionary tale Johnny from their 1998 album Killervision. I have a feeling this was the first song of theirs I ever heard.

Music Lately:

Late Sunday afternoon Tim and I went to Embassy theatre to see a special screening of Hair. Having seen the movie before, I knew it’s pretty painful in places (and cuts out some of my favourite tracks – it’s gratifying to know that the creators of the musical it’s based on hated it) but I love the source music intensely, and I like having the opportunity to see a musical on the big screen. One flawless moment in all the awkwardness is Cheryl Barnes singing Easy To Be Hard. Heartfelt – not just belting for the sake of it (although if I could sing I’d be melisma-ing up a storm, daily) it’s one of my favourite recordings of this track. Apparently she did it in one take.

While we’re down the flawless lady/Hair road, and I’ve probably linked to this before, but here’s Nina Simone singing Ain’t Got No/I’ve Got Life, taking two songs from Hair and sieving them together to create something incredible. Her vibrato-y voice delivers the lyrics in her incomparable way (by incomparable, I mean I haven’t come up with a word to describe how good it is) over a fantastic music arrangement while her dinner-plate sized earrings sway.

Also: while I was up in Rotorua Tim went to see Lil Band O’ Gold at San Francisco Bath House. Apparently they played for two and a half hours and were seriously awesome.

Next time: I’m a Nigella lady to the core, but tried my first ever Delia Smith recipe last week, and that’s probably what I’ll put up next.

big cheese, make me

June 13, 2010March 11, 202018 Comments

I’m still pretty excited/jittery about being nominated for CLEO magazine/Palmolive Wonder Woman (excited/jittery for reasons outlined here.) If you’d like to help out someone who’s not likely to win but wants to win heaps, kindly email cleo@acpmagazines.co.nz with WONDER WOMAN in the subject line and “voting for Blogger: Laura Vincent (hungryandfrozen.blogspot.com)” in the body of the email. If you want. I’ve been pretty humbled by all the niceness that has poured forth from people already, considering there’s no real benefit to anyone but myself (and Tim, for what it’s worth) if I get anywhere in this. Much love and appreciation to everyone that has voted for me.

FYI, I’m watching the Tony Awards while I’m typing this. CBS isn’t streaming outside of the USA so I’ve got this pixelated postage-stamp sized square of live feed that I found with some judicious searching through Twitter. In 2010, that just feels wrong. Live streams should be for everyone! Nevertheless it’s still very exciting. If things get a little bit “Cream the butter and sugar till fluffy ANGELALANSBURYILOVEYOU and then add the eggs ITHINKISAWIDINAMENZEL one by one” well, you’ve been warned. That said, Broadway and food blogging already co-exist most harmoniously here, so with any luck you probably won’t even notice.

So, I found this recipe for homemade ricotta cheese. It’s eyebrow-raisingly simple and after making it once you’ll be so enthralled with the deliciousness of the results, that you may consider throwing in the job to become svengali of your own small-time cheese conglomerate.

Homemade Ricotta Cheese

With thanks to Bell’Alimento for the recipe.

2 litres (8 cups) blue-top/whole milk (I used organic milk even, yusss)

250 mls cream (it comes in 300 ml bottles here, so I just threw the lot in)

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice.

Get a colander and line it with muslin, cheesecloth or plain cotton (I went out and bought a big, undyed cotton serviette) OR, if you have it, a big coffee filter. Sit the colander over a large deep bowl and set aside.

Pour the milk, cream and salt into a big stockpot (seriously, use a big pot – it rises up a bit) and bring to the boil, stirring all the time. When it’s at a good solid boil – don’t be afraid to just let it bubble away, I know it looks freaky! – add the lemon or lime juice. Reduce the heat, and continue to stir while the mixture separates into curds and liquid. I continued stirring over a low heat for about a minute after adding the juice.

Carefully, carefully (with a buddy if you’re clumsy like me) pour the whole contents of the pan into the cloth-lined colander. The liquid will flow through to the bowl underneath, leaving soft, white ricotta cheese in the colander. Allow this to drain for at least an hour then transfer to the refrigerator. As soon as it’s properly cold, you can start eating it.

You should end up with about 500g of pure, fresh ricotta cheese. And how! It emerges from its cloth wrapping like a surmountable mountain of dairy joy, the only incline I’d be inclined to climb (long story short: I had a school camp once where we had to hike, and plough through plantations of cutty grass and so on – never again! Cheese mountains only for me from now on thanks.) It’s tender, incredibly creamy but with a lemony lightness that makes you want to just eat it by the fistful.

While I have a lot of time for cheese, we never really eat all that much of it, because it’s so expensive. Which is understandable – companies need to make money, and small, artisinal, niche products use a lot of dollars. You should totally support the companies who make the food you love, but now and then it’s superfun to support yourself and get a giant pile of beautiful cheese for about $5. It’s at its best eaten within around 48 hours but that’s probably the one kind of pressure-filled environment I could thrive in.

A goodly wedge of the cheese went into these gorgeous Ricotta and Polenta Hotcakes from Cuisine magazine. The recipe is can be found here (I didn’t make the syrup, by the way) They’re straightforward enough to make but still a bit of effort – if you’re looking for something more storecupboardy, that you can throw in a blender and make with your eyes closed then try Nigella’s recipe instead. They were a completely delicious start to the day – the toothsome grit of the cornmeal with the warm chunks of ricotta bound in a soft, crisp pancake spiced with cinnamon and orange.

So, the Tony Awards. Watching them via some non-authorised stream is frustrating, CBS, but it still feels exciting to be watching it at the same time as everyone else. In 12-second increments.

You don’t freeze up and start loading when Idina Menzel’s on. Learn from this.

I’m really not much of a Tony commentator because I’ve never been to New York to see any of these musicals or plays, and generally the only coverage I get is whatever goes on Youtube. I enjoyed Sean Hayes (star of Promises, Promises on Broadway with Kristin Chenoweth, or you may know him as Will & Grace’s Jack) as host, and there were some wonderful moments of theatre, but it does feel this year that they’re being really heavy-handed with the Hollywood celebrity presence (and the fact that Glee’s Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele were performing – they were on Broadway first, you know!) but what ya gonna do – they’re bankable.

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Title via: Nirvana’s Big Cheese from 1989’s Bleach. I just plain love Nirvana, and this is an excellent yet relatively underexposed example of their sinister sound.

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Music lately:

Lunatic Fringe by Auckland’s Drab Doo-Riffs. We caught them headlining at Mighty Mighty the other morning (ie, their set started around 1am) and they were a ton of fun. It’s a scrappy mix of surf, punk, rock, probably some other stuff, and as I’m a sucker for surf-rock drums they suit me just fine. The two frontpeople Karl Stevens and Caiomhe Macfehin kept things moving at a cracking pace, and were both incredibly entertaining to watch. I’m sure they’ll continue to do well, a) because girls can dance to it in that hunched-shoulder, foot-stampy way (hey, I was doing it too) b) their live sets are many and excellent and c) it’s such good-time music.

Sherie Rene Scott’s beautiful interpretation of Ricky Lee Jones’ Rainbow Sleeves from her semi-autobiographical musical Everyday Rapture. I’ve never even seen Sherie Rene Scott live so what do I know but I was a bit sad to see she didn’t win the Tony (Catherine Zeta Jones did, FYI…)

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Next time: Mum sent me a giant parcel of giant, fragrant green limes which is very exciting as limes tend to also be really expensive. I was going to say that unlike ricotta cheese, there’s no way of making your own limes, but then I remembered you can, you know, plant a lime tree. Sometimes I worry myself. Anyway, I’m looking forward to sussing out lots of recipes.

"eggs milk and flour, pancake power"

January 26, 2010May 9, 202012 Comments

Without wanting to sound like Kristy Thomas pitching for the Kid-Kit – do you remember when you were a child, and you went to a friend’s house, and it was so much more of a heightened experience than your own existence at home? Their toys seemed cooler, they had a haybarn, they were allowed to stay up later, they called their parents by their first names… Sometimes there was the disquieting reverse of that where leaving home for someone else’s affirms how comparatively safe you feel in your own space and how you just have to hold on and let the minutes pass until you can return – ah, childhood. I realise of course that I’m looking at this through the fairly privileged gaze of someone who grew up with loving parents and so on.

But anyway, I have this distinct memory of being down the road at my then best friend’s place, and her mum made us pancakes in the middle of the day for lunch. We ate them with sugar, lemon juice, whipped cream and – and this which I remember well over a decade on – leftover chocolate icing. For lunch. Have you seen Scarface? (I’ve been in the same room while it was on, which was plenty.) You know that scene where he’s surrounded by mountains of cocaine? These pancakes-for-lunch with chocolate icing were like the equivalent of that for 9 year old me. But you know, somewhat less alarming.

Living away from home means these childhood thrills can be recreated at your leisure and while it’s obviously not the same, a decision to have pancakes for dinner still comes with a certain satisfaction, a feeling that you’re Pippi Longstocking or something. Whimsy aside, pancakes do make a fantastic unconventional dinner – filling, cheap, easy to eat with the fingers, sociable, not too fussy. Tim and I decided it had been too long, too, too long since we’d seen Thoroughly Modern Millie (possibly I was the stronger force on this decision being made) and we invited our friend Ange over to watch it. For some reason the idea of pancakes for supper seemed amazingly delightful too – so that’s what we had.

I used a recipe of Nigella Lawson’s from Nigella Bites. I replaced the milk in the pancakes with soymilk to make them dairy-free and truly, these were the best pancakes I’ve ever made. I’ve made some sad, rubbery pancakes in my time and these reaffirmed my faith in the practice. They were fluffy, light, well behaved, quick to bubble, and a pleasing even nut-brown. I’d like to think it was the magic of soy that made this happen.

American Pancakes

From Nigella Bites

30g/2 Tablespoons melted butter (I replaced this with 1 T Rice Bran oil)
225g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon sugar
300mls full fat milk OR magical soymilk
2 eggs
Butter for frying (again – used a little rice bran oil)

Beat all the ingredients together, or just blitz them in a food processor. Heat a good non-stick frying pan, add a little butter or oil, then get pancaking. You can make these as large or small as you wish – I kept them relatively small but do as you please. When you see bubbles emerging on the surface, flip them over and cook for a minute or so on the other side. I find a silicon spatula useful for this.

I piled them onto a plate covered in tinfoil and they kept perfectly happy until the mixture was used up, so don’t feel you have to feed everyone but remain slavishly chained to the stovetop. Makes enough to thoroughly satiate three hungry people, could probably feed four really. Nigella reckons “25 pancakes the size of jam jar lids”.

To go with I made the blueberry syrup from Nigella Express. Had some bloobs (as I’ve been calling them, not annoying at all!) that I found on special at Moore Wilson’s and it seemed like as good a use of them as any, as well as making the pancake dinner seem like a bit more of an occasion. It took all of five minutes to make but tasted relatively complicated – what more can you ask from a recipe?

Blueberry Syrup

From Nigella Express

Not just for pancakes – this would be brilliant on vanilla ice cream and as Nigella says, it does become rather jammy the next day and is perfect spread on buttery toast.

125ml (1/2 a cup) maple syrup or honey
200g blueberries

Put both ingredients into a pan and bring to the boil. Let it bubble gently for 2-3 minutes then pour into a jug. Like so!

I can’t afford maple syrup – not even with my shoes from The Warehouse and op shop sweaters – and I have a feeling that even if I had some I’d be too scared to use it. I’m okay with this, and used honey instead. I wouldn’t recommend using fake maple syrup, as there’s only two ingredients and blueberries are so beautiful that you don’t want to be gumming them up with synthetic flavourings.

Ange provided the lemons from her bountiful tree. The pancakes were, as I said, pretty fabulous. The satiny blueberry syrup was gorgeous – thick and sweet and studded with juice-bursting berries. It was a good night.

Am heading up to Auckland tomorrow for meetings, then going home to see my family, then on Monday Tim and I are back in Auckland for the Laneway music festival. Which would be why it’s 10.36pm and I still haven’t packed yet…I’m getting really pretty hyped up for Laneway, the line up is both ridiculous but manageable which is a kind of a miracle for music festivals these days. It’s going to be an intense day but I’m really, really looking forward to it.

Title brought to you by: the Pancake Crimp from The Mighty Boosh, Series Three. Howard Moon enters Vince Noir’s bloodstream to save him from the Spirit of Jazz, and has to remind his protective white blood cells that they’re friends, reminding them of the good times they had making pancakes. You know?

On Shuffle while I type:

Cornet Man by the superlative-worthy Barbra Streisand, from the Original Broadway Cast recording of Funny Girl. Bought this from Slow Boat the other day, had been meaning to for a long while and did not regret it. Her voice is just gorgeous, all rich and sinuous.

Tender by Blur from their album 13. I love this song so much and have since the moment I saw it for the first time on Video Hits back in 1998…actually I wonder if I saw it on MTV Europe? Maybe it was too late for that. Anyway, I don’t really care if the lyrics are a bit appalling or whatever, it’s such a lovely tune – it almost seems broken up into hooky compartments which come at you one after the other – and every time I hear it I feel all comforted, like I’m wrapped up in a woolly blanket.

Walk on Gilded Splinters, by Paul Weller from the Wire Soundtrack …And All The Pieces Matter. Because the music in The Wire is 99% diegetic, it’s nice to hear the music stretched out comfortably in a compilation like this. I love the guitars in the song and how it shuffles along but not without punch…I just love this song.

Next time: I made these fantastic raw cookies the other day – it’s not often I get enthused about the concept of raw baking but these were not only easy and practical, they were seriously good tasting. Once I get back to Wellington…you’ll be hearing about them.

raw into gold

October 31, 2009March 12, 202010 Comments

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I realise most food is better for you in its most untampered, natural, unadulterated-by-animal-products form, but some things about going full raw don’t quite sit right with me, and it’s not the obvious (no butter). Take that stalwart of the non-meat eater’s reportoire, lentils. Lentils are so good for you it’s almost obscene, but how are you supposed to eat them raw? Hmm? And then what about potatoes? How do you eat them without applying heat of some kind?

Though, complex being that I am, I can get every bit as excited about the rawest of raw vegan recipes as I might over some butter-thick seven layer chocolate cake. Sometimes you read through an ingredient list and everything just makes sense. This happened when I was perusing Elle’s New England Kitchen and found this recipe for Cinnamon Rolls. The name is basically correct – there’s cinnamon in there and you roll them up – but don’t go getting a mental image of some kind of buttercream-smeared sticky bun. This is a whole different beast, and it’s probably better to think of it as a Cinnamon Roll in its own right, rather than a substitution for something else. Funny how you often have to go through these mental processes when eating ridiculously healthy food – “this is exciting, this is a treat, I’m not missing out at all“.

Anyway, I was reading through the recipe and realised I actually had all the ingredients in my pantry – even the agave nectar, which was a Christmas present last year. The method sounded fun and Elle painted an enticing picture of how the finished product tasted. So on Monday I set aside my buttery prejudices for the time being, and gave these Cinnamon Rolls a go.

It’s slightly terrifying in places – the sushi-style rolling of the mixture had me worried, plus the slicing of the now rolled up log, which threatened to crumble every time the knife came near it – I guess I’d go to pieces if someone was trying to cut me up too, haha – but overall it is very do-able, with plenty of faffing and stirring and mixing and measuring to make you feel like you’re actually doing something in the kitchen.

Raw Vegan Cinnamon Rolls

You can just, of course, simply call them Cinnamon Rolls, but I like to keep the “raw vegan” bit there at the start in the same way that if I actually wash the dishes I like to tell Tim about it repeatedly – why yes, I would like a medal for it, and thank you.

Don’t go freaking out at the list of ingredients – it’s all pretty simple straightforward stuff really, and most of it can be found very cheaply in both supermarkets and health food shops. Substitute honey for agave nectar if you like, if anything it would probably add a more complex depth of flavour – agave nectar is viciously sweet and not much else.

1 1/4 cups ground flaxseeds (I actually used whole, but we’ll get to that)
1 1/4 cups ground almonds
1 1/2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 pinch sea salt
1 cup soft pitted dates
1/4 cup water
1/8 cup olive oil
1/8 cup agave nectar
1/4 cup sultanas (the original stated raisins, but um, ew. I shall irrationally prefer one foodstuff over another very similar foodstuff.)
1/4 cup nuts of some kind

I am not the hugest fan of ground flaxseeds – the texture and flavour can be all murky and gluey. However – lesson learned – whole flaxseeds don’t really grind themselves down in a food processor. If anything, the whizzing blades make them ever more defiantly whole. Luckily this didn’t affect the finished product, however I imagine the texture would be a bit different – and probably less crumbly – if you use the ground flaxseeds that the recipe actually asks for.

Tip the flaxseeds, almonds, 1/2 tablespoon cinnamon and pinch of sea salt into a large bowl.

Blend the dates and water till very smooth. I actually soaked the dates in boiling water for about half an hour beforehand just to make them super soft. Scoop out just over half and mix it into the flaxseeds/almond mixture, along with the olive oil and agave. Mix really well – it shouldn’t be too dry but add a tiny bit more date mixture if it does.

Carefully flatten this mixture on a sheet of baking paper, making a good sized square of around half an inch thick. Add the rest of the cinnamon to the the date mixture in the blender, along with the sultanas and pulse briefly to mix. Spread this thinly and evenly over the square of mixture, making sure all surfaces are covered to the edge. Sprinkle over the nuts and a few extra sultanas.

Here comes the tricky-ish bit – using the baking paper for help, carefully roll the mixture into a tight, fat log. Don’t be afraid of it – the mixture should hold together. Keeping the log wrapped in baking paper, refrigerate for an hour or so to let it get good and firm. Slice into discs as thin or as thick as you like, using a very sharp knife. The good thing about this mixture is that if a slice looks like it might fall apart, you can simply press it back into shape using your fingers.

“Icing”

If you want – feel free to top it with this intriguing mixture.

1 cup raw cashews, soaked in water for at least four hours
1/8 cup water
6 Tablespoons honey
Juice of an orange

Blend the cashews thoroughly with the water. Add the honey and orange juice and continue to blend till the mixture is thick and smooth. What with my palate being used to buttercream and such I wasn’t sure how to take this, but as you can imagine something that full of cashews must taste good. 6 Tablespoons seemed like a lot of honey to me, but you need it for the texture – I stopped at three though. Instead of the orange juice I used a couple of drops of Boyajian orange oil, basically because I have some in the fridge and like to think it’s a useful purchase. This becomes a thick, hummus coloured mixture that is strangely good…I think next time I make these I’d be just as happy to leave the cinnamon rolls uniced.

These are actually…completely delicious. Nutty, rich, wholesome but toothsome, and warm with cinnamon. One roll is pretty filling – I guess it’s all the protein and such – and keeps you full of energy for a long time. Of coure, let’s not get carried away, these are possibly hugely calorific, what with all the nuts and dried fruit and oil and so on…but – and I hate focussing on calories anyway – you can be assured that every particle, every last molecule of these is doing you good. They’d be sweet as without the topping but I guess it makes the finished product more aesthetically pleasing, as well as providing a bit of textural contrast as you bite into each disc. I’ve been eating them for breakfast for the last week and I definitely make it through to lunch without wanting to eat my body weight in chocolate – not a bad litmus test of any foodstuff, really.

Last night we saw Mamma Mia, of which New Zealand was lucky enough to host the international touring cast. A friend of ours from England is in the cast and got us tickets to their final show. The story is more lightweight than a baby kitten holding a helium balloon but it’s great fun, the cast was gloriously talented and classy and we spent the whole time grinning away, even though neither of us are what you’d call ABBA fans. Hilariously, one of the male leads was played by Michael Beckley, known to New Zealand audiences as Rhys from Home and Away…It was also a bit mind-boggling just catching up with this friend of ours in the cast – she’d been a student at the performing arts school in England that Tim and I worked at in 2005, and now she’s in the international tour of a top-selling musical. She’s the first person we’ve seen (in person, Facebook doesn’t count) from that time of our lives and it felt a bit like Glinda dropping in to see Dorothy in Kansas or something – a strange overlapping of worlds. But fun!

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Title of this post comes to you via: Straw Into Gold, a bewitching song that doesn’t really see the light of day that much from Idina Menzel’s debut album, Still I Can’t Be Still.
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On Shuffle while I type:

Junk – a collaboration between Eyedea and Abilities from their album By The Throat. I love it. It’s one of those songs that cleverly combines minty freshness with the feeling that you’ve heard it a million times before already.

Goodbye Until Tomorrow/I Could Never Rescue You sung by Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz on the original off-Broadway cast recording of Last 5 Years. This song. Those driving piano notes…the way Sherie says “I open myself one stitch at a time”…it’s almost too good to listen to, except that would be silly.
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Next time: Everything’s been a bit plantain-heavy lately – I do get overexcited by stuff – and so I have lots to show for myself. Will try and get on to it a little swifter than I was with this post!

complainte de la bundt

August 4, 2009March 12, 202010 Comments

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that cakes look more exciting and complicated if they’re baked in a fancy tin. It just seems more impressive if it’s shaped like castle turrets or a giant rosebud or the Trevi Fountain. I mean, it’s not like you actually painstakingly sculpted the cake into this particular form with a palette knife while wearing a beret. But there you go.

I was predictably excited to buy on sale recently a good sized silicone bundt caketin. I feel as though a bundt tin falls comfortably between practical and largely dust-gathering on the kitchenware scale. It’s really just another cake tin, not as usable as a 23cm springform but not as confoundingly quixotic as, say, a madeleine tray (nothing against madeleines – every time I make them I end up wondering why humans haven’t evolved to make small, honeyed cakes a staple food). A bundt cake just looks so majestic with its undulating curves and waves and towering hilltop form, so much more than your perfectly serviceable but normal looking regular round cake.

I was initially going to make a fabulous sounding orange cake from Annabelle White’s Annabelle Cooks, which sported a large, fetching image of an orange bundt cake. However the recipe specified a 26cm springform tin and the disparity between instruction and image made me far too nervous. Not on my first bundt.

Instead I went for an equally lovely sounding Spice Cake from my charmingly eighties (if it moved, they set it in gelatine) Best of Cooking For New Zealanders cookbook by Lynn Bedford Hall (look for it in your local charity shop – I could use it every single day). As well specifically requesting a ring tin, it also used less eggs than the spurned orange cake. It was all going just peachy. You know me, always happiest when messing around with cake batter. I piled the cinnamon-spiced, nut-spiked batter into the tin, put it in the oven, marvelled as the house filled with the warm, happy scent of cinnamon…Oh how wrong I was. Fate (and possibly Annabelle White) were standing behind me, pointing and laughing the whole time.

Because then this happened.

What now? That’s just not fair. You know how there’s that saying? Pride goeth before a fall? Well with me it’s excitement goeth before a fail. If I had a dollar for every time… Seriously, I don’t know what went wrong. Half the cake just decided it wasn’t ready to leave home yet. Any guesses from seasoned bakers out there? The tin was silicone and everything. I wonder if I didn’t leave it long enough before turning it out? Maybe I left it too long? I’m in a quandary!

Aesthetics aside, the cake itself is really delicious though and very, very easy to make. Whatever I did wrong – presuming it was my fault at all – I definitely won’t take it out on the recipe itself. If you want to recreate this psyche-damaging disaster in your own home feel free, may you have better luck than I had…

Spice Cake

2 tsp baking powder
350g brown sugar
2 eggs
450g flour
345mls buttermilk
250ml (1 cup) plain oil, like rice bran or grapeseed
2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp baking soda
175g sultanas (I used currants)
125g chopped nuts (I used walnuts)

Set the oven to 180 C (350 F). Place all the ingredients except for the nuts and sultanas into a large bowl and mix with electric beaters for one minute.

If you don’t have electric beaters (like me), mix together the oil and sugar, then the eggs, then everything else till it’s incorporated good and proper. Then, fold in the nuts and sultanas.

Spread this thick mixture into a bundt tin and bake for an hour, covering loosely with tinfoil if it starts to darken too much. Stand for five minutes (which I did!) before inverting onto a cake rack.

As you can probably tell from the ingredients this makes a large, moist, delicious cake that keeps well and has a gentle warmth from the spices used. Which means I can overlook the fact that it had a total breakdown in front of me. And I will carry on bundting.

For my sake at least, so I don’t feel completely like what the French call les incompetents, here below is an example of something I actually achieved without a hitch.

I’ve made this caramelly, oaty slice before, blogged about it even, but whatevs. I’m calling upon it again. And at least you know it’s good.

Breakfast Bars

From Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson

1 can of sweetened condensed milk (roughly 400g)
250g rolled oats
75g shredded coconut
100g dried cranberries
125g mixed seeds (sunflower, linseed, pumpkin, etc)
125g unsalted peanuts

Preheat oven to 130 C, and oil a 23x33cm baking tin or throwaway foil tin. Warm the condensed milk gently in a pan till it is more liquid than solid. Remove from heat and then add the rest of the ingredients, stirring carefully with a spatula so everything is covered. Spread into the tin, even out the surface, then bake for about an hour. Let cool for about 15 minutes then slice up. I swapped the expensive cranberries for a handful of currents lurking agedly in the pantry and left out the peanuts because I just didn’t have any.

Nigella reckons this slice gets better with age and I agree – it just sort of settles into a chewier, nuttier, caramellier bite the longer you leave them. Super easy and good to have on hand to assuage any dips in blood sugar.

For what it’s worth, and I realise there’s little more nauseating than couples who start talking in their own cutesy language, but we’ve ended up pronouncing the word slice, as in oaty slice, “slee-che”, inspired largely by Dr Leo Spaceman (pronounced spa-che-man) from 30 Rock. It’s funny how many words you can start manipulating in this way. Face, place, rice, ice…it’s like a Dr Seuss book here sometimes. Actually I have a really bad habit of mangling words when speaking casually. Such as ‘whatevs’ instead of ‘whatever’ which is a bad enough word in itself. I like to lengthen the ‘i’ in chicken so it rhymes with ‘liken’ and drop the end of ‘decision’ so it’s just ‘decish’ and frequently substitute the letter ‘j’ with a ‘y’ or an ‘h’…it’s all a bit obnoxious really but I like to think of it as taking a simple joy in linguistics. Look at this, I haven’t even been tagged with an internet meme and yet I’m revealing a bizarre fact about myself. Is that allowed?
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The big news in our lives right now is that Tim is walking around looking all medieval, as while I was in Auckland one of his teeth just crumbled on him like an uncooperative bundt cake. He didn’t tell me till six days later when we met up again as he couldn’t figure out how to explain it in a txt message. Fair enough, I guess. As per usual the dentists want him to mortgage the tooth against our house with his liver as bond (ooh, I’m typing all heavily just thinking about it, the prices dentists charge get me all fired up.) Because he couldn’t afford a root canal and I couldn’t even afford to support him for it, he instead paid a smaller (but still hefty) sum to have the tooth pulled altogether. It’s causing him no small amount of pain, and we’ve been eating very soft, liquidy dinners over the last couple of days – soup, long-simmered, falling apart stews, that sort of thing. Luckily it’s not an entirely visible tooth but nevertheless, I’d like to think he has the panache to pull off looking like a Renaissance-era minstrel.
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Amen by Jolie Holland from Escondida. We were lucky enough to see her in a beautiful, intimate gig earlier this year. If the idea of Appalachian folksy blues appeals to you then you would do well to look her up. This particular song is simply stunning.

John The Revelator by Son House from The Roots of The White Stripes, a compilation of the original blues and folk songs that the White Stripes have covered either live or in albums. Sounds tacky as hell but it’s not – it’s a fantastic listen packed with gems both dust-covered and well known.

Why Can’t I Be Like The Boss a song cut from the 2006 Tom Kitt musical High Fidelity. I kinda love this song, especially when the Bruce Springsteen character really gets going.

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This blog title is bought to you by: Rufus Wainwright
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Next time: I got it in my head that ice cream flavoured with palm sugar and kaffir lime leaves would be pretty sassy. So I think I’m going to make that this weekend. Hopefully Tim’s teeth, or lack thereof, are up to it. And one day, I will make another bundt cake.

house of the rising bun

April 18, 2009March 12, 202010 Comments

While in my last post I extolled the joys of the five-day Easter weekend, I spent this whole week at work scrambling to get up to speed with everything. Hence, my lack of presence round here. The intention was definitely there, but the time didn’t materialise. Anyway the upshot of this is that if the food blogging world was a party, my hot cross buns would be Kate Moss, arriving scandalously late and with a fabulous rockstar on their arm, making everyone else wish they’d dared to be so louche and devil-may-care.

At least that’s what I tell myself.

As well as my seasonal buns, you can also look forward to a surprising amount of cafe reviews and a little shoutout to myself for being born upon a particular day (yesterday, if you’re wondering).

To provide a bit of context, I made my initial batch of hot cross buns on Easter Sunday. I’d just flown back to Wellington from Auckland where I saw The Winter’s Tale. It was a spellbinding production, for a three hour play it flew by and stellar performances were delivered by all, despite the fact that the theatre was far from full (cough ‘economic climate’ cough). I’ll be frank, I wasn’t wildly taken with Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet (and much less taken with Julia Stiles’ Ophelia) but in The Winter’s Tale he was fabulous, playing his character like the lovechild of Bob Dylan and Captain Jack Sparrow. But Shakespearean.

Before I went up to Auckland I scoured through my Cuisine magazines and sussed out where some fun foodie shops were so I could hunt them down and possibly part company with a business card or two for my blog while spending time and money therein. The fates (and possibly stupidity) were against me as I just couldn’t find a bus to Mt Eden, where said shops were located. I can’t say it served to endear the city to me, however I did spend a happy hour or so at the art gallery taking in the delightful Yinka Shonibare exhibition.

I also met a friend at Alleluya Cafe in St Kevin’s Arcade on Karangahape Road. Apparently it is the sort of place that attracts the sort of people that attracts the sort of words like “hipster” and “scene”, but it wasn’t intimidatingly so when I arrived on Saturday afternoon. My coffee, a long black, didn’t arrive but the guy behind the counter looked so shocked – nay, crestfallen, when I told him I’d been waiting for a while that I didn’t harbour any animosity, especially when it finally arrived with a complimentary biscotti and was the smoothest, mellowest black coffee I’ve had in forever. My friend and I shared a slice of lemon yoghurt cake, which was pleasant, and a piece of Jewish ginger cake, which was way good and still haunts my dreams a week later.

Alleluya Cafe
St Kevin’s Arcade, K’Rd, Auckland CBD
09-377 8424
Verdict: Ignore the sneaking suspicion that you’re not cool enough to be there because the coffee is gorgeous and it was worth the plane fare for that Jewish ginger cake alone.

Back in familiar Wellington and on a Shakespeare high, I got stuck into the joyful task of making hot cross buns following Nigella’s recipe from Feast. Everything was going well until the final hurdle. I burnt the sodding things. Considering they took the better part of the afternoon I was mightily unhappy, but I could only blame myself for letting them bake for too long.

Having said that it took only a bare amount of convincing to make another batch the next day. Upon closer inspection the burnt buns were still salvageable – I cut off and discarded all the severely blackened parts, bagged the lot up and put it in the freezer, where they will one day become the base of a warm, spicy bread and butter pudding. I can’t wait. For round two I tried an Alison Holst recipe, partly because I was intrigued by her method and partly because there’s something suspiciously trustworthy about her.

Hot Cross Buns

As I said, the method is a little unusual but don’t be scared – it’s seriously easy and the finished buns have a marvellous texture.

1 cup milk
½ cup hot water
2 T sugar
4 tsps/1 sachet active dried yeast
2 cups high grade strong bread flour
100g soft butter
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon salt
1 T mixed spice
1 T cinnarmon
1 t ground cloves
1 cup currants/sultanas
2-3 cups high grade strong bread flour

Place the first four ingredients into a large bowl, making sure that the liquid is neither too warm nor too cold before you add the yeast. Stir in the first measure of flour, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm place to rise. This won’t take a heck of a long time – maybe half an hour.

Meanwhile, cream the butter and sugar together, add the egg, salt, spices and dried fruit. Following a suggestion of Nigella’s I added some cardamom seeds here which worked beautifully. The spices get really diluted in the dough so don’t worry about the fact that the measurements look large. When the original mixture has doubled in size and is looking spongy, mix in the fruit mixture and the second measure of flour. Knead till it comes together in a springy ball, then form into 16-24 buns. Arrange on a paper-lined tray, cover with plastic wrap and leave to rise, which they should do significantly. Don’t leave them for too long – trust your eyes.
Alison recommends a mixture of flour, butter and water rolled into thin strips for the crosses but I found that they tended to fall off after baking. Anyway, brush the buns with milk and lay the crosses o’er them. Bake uncovered at 225 C for 10-12 minutes till browned lightly.

Well Alison, you win this time. These hot cross buns were immensely delicious, filling the kitchen, as with many kitchens across the world, with a warm, cinnamony scent, like a hug in perfume form. I flagrantly added a handful of chocolate chips to the dough and…I liked it. A lot.

Needless to say, they were at their best still warm from the oven and liberally buttered. I’m thinking this recipe is definitely a keeper and would like to make these buns in other forms – without the crosses – throughout the year, as the basic recipe is too good to keep confined to one day in April.

Speaking of one day in April, yesterday was my birthday and I gotta say, I didn’t have high expectations. I almost forgot that it was coming up – it felt as though it was a shadowy date in the vague distance as opposed to being on the immediate agenda – and I’ve had a hearty cough getting the better of me this week, not to mention the fact that I was working. Nevertheless it turned out to be one of the nicest self-anniversaries I’ve had in a long time. Everyone at work was lovely – there were balloons and flowers on my desk, a coffee appeared out of nowhere, I was taken out to lunch and a homemade banana cake replete with candles was produced at the beginning of a three hour meeting in the afternoon, all completely unexpectedly. Extended family members from home sent me a kitchen blowtorch, which I’m quite wild to use on a crème brulee pronto, I had cards sent from dad and my great-aunty, and there were text-messages a-plenty. Mum, who is in Argentina, put a video of her charming classroom singing Happy Birthday to me in Spanish and English. With all of that it’s amazing I wasn’t weeping sentimentally the whole day. In case you are wondering, I am now 23, which is hopefully still young enough to be ‘interesting’ as a food blogger.

After work Tim and I bought a bottle of cheap red and found this adorable middle Eastern BYO called Casablanca to quaff it in. The service was perfect, the food was cheap, plentiful and fast, and the atmosphere was delightful. It’s not very fancy, but it’s fun, and the food tastes comfortingly home-made as opposed to assembled. A small plate of complimentary bread and dips appeared after we sat down, and we were asked if we were ready for our mains to be made after we finished our starters, both nice little touches that made the dining experience that much better. I wish I’d had my camera to take a photo of my taboulleh which was particularly delicious – full of verdant, fresh parsely and juicy tomato.

Casablanca
18 Cambridge Tce (off Courtenay Place)
Wellington CBD
04-384 6968
Verdict: It’s not the Logan Brown but it’s probably more fun (unless some kind benefactor wants to shout me dinner there and refute this opinion). The menu could charitably be described as succinct, but what’s there is nicely done. I can definitely see myself returning.

From there we spent a significant amount of time at one of my favourite haunts in town, a themed bar called Alice, tucked away down an unassuming side road off Tory Street. You tunnel through a quiet, curtained corridor and emerge into a softly-lit, split level room which seeks to recreate some kind of Alice in Wonderland experience. The drinks are expensive but classy and potent, and you can make them worth your while if you get one of the cocktails for two which comes in a teapot. The bar is much lower than the floor itself which adds to the surreal effect and there are framed illustrations from the novel and distorted mirrors everywhere. I’m not describing it very well but it’s a great place to sit for hours having cosy discussions about things that seem very important at the time, which is exactly what we did.

After concluding that the only way we’d get away with sitting there any longer would be to spend a small fortune on another cocktail, we decided to hightail it out of there for a fortifying coffee. I have to say, betraying my country village background maybe, that personally there is something hugely exciting about getting a coffee or a bite to eat late at night – it makes me feel deliciously sophisticated and worldly, and of course by being so excited about it instantly renders me distinctly un-sophisticated. But there you have it. We chose to patronise Deluxe, which is apparently something of a Wellington institution. It has so far always passed me by, because it’s only fairly recently that I’ve had more of an income to spend recklessly on coffee from funky cafes.

Deluxe is hugely popular in Wellington, even at 11.00pm we had to strain to find a table. I’ll be honest, our coffee wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but I suspect this was due to the fact that it was late at night and we’d had a couple of drinks and were therefore perhaps not a priority for quality control. Which is a shame, if this is true, but it’s better than the idea that their coffee is generally below average, yes? I’ve certainly had worse, and the delicious chocolate brownie that Tim and I shared raised our opinion of the place. We sat there for about half an hour, pretending to be hipsters as we drank our late night black coffee and chuckled over the pithy content in Vice magazine. I think I’ll definitely try Deluxe again, as 11.00pm on a Friday night is hardly condusive to a thorough, well thought critique of a café.

Deluxe
10 Kent Terrace (Next to the glorious Embassy Theatre)
04 801 5455
Verdict: This place probably is too cool for us, but that won’t stop me returning to give it a proper scrutiny. As it is, my opinion doesn’t matter since it is constantly packed with customers.

This morning Tim and I met with our friend Dr-to-be Scotty at Roxy Café. I hastily snapped some photos of what we ate, the images aren’t great but the food was. Special mention must be made about the hash browns, which were large, crunchy without and deliciously potato-ey within, and quite the nicest that I’ve had in a long time. Good friends and hash browns is a winning combination and we had a lovely morning talking smack with Scott.

Above: My French Toast with fresh fruit (and I ordered a hash brown on the side.) The toast itself was great, and generous at three pieces, although I felt that the chopped apple, pear and banana that made up the bulk of my “fresh fruit” was a little cheap, could they not have stretched to a stone fruit or something? The hash brown was fantastic.

Above: Tim and Scott ordered big breakfasts with extra hash browns. According to Tim his poached egg was perfect, and of course you already know about the hash browns at this place. Although I was comfortably full after my meal, I found myself looking wistfully at the small but intriguing lunch menu, which features some delicious sounding choices. The service was fine, I like that they brought out a carafe of water right away, and the cafe itself was a cool and airy respite from the heat of the outside world this morning.

Roxy Cafe
203-205 Cuba St
Wellington City
04-890 3939
www.roxycafe.co.nz
Verdict: All I can think about right now is their hash browns. This place is very nice and I’d definitely like to try it out again, the pricing is pretty reasonable so this shouldn’t be an issue. They get an extra star for serving butter on a little dish with the big breakfasts. This sort of behaviour is to be encouraged.
If you made it through all that then congratulations. And I mean really reading it, not just looking at the pictures. There’s gold in them thar paragraphs.

Next time: While up in Auckland I bought a fabulous Italian cookbook which I’ve already delved into and of course you know how excited I am about my kitchen blowtorch. I forsee a creme brulee on the horizon…