Category: Cake

this post has no title

8 Comments

_________________________________________________

It is SO sunny outside. Sure, anyone can talk about the weather, but as Wellington spends 97% of its time shrouded in gale force winds and grey skies, good weather always comes with the element of surprise. This afternoon Tim and I are unfortunately going to be spending several hours of said sunshine on a train to Palmerston North to see his family (the stuck-in-a-train bit is unfortunate, not catching up with whanau which will be awesome). We’re going to be away most of the rest of the week so don’t be alarmed and hold candlelit vigils while singing We Shall Overcome if there’s not a lot going on here or on my Twitter.

While I’m talking about obvious stuff, how about the fact that it’s less than a month till Christmas!? In the words of Mike LaFontaine, “Wha’ happen?”

So, there are cookbooks and then there are, you know, seminal texts that you live your life by. By this I mean any words committed to paper from the pen of (or should that be committed to pixel by the typing hands of?) Nigella Lawson. It has been a little while since I’ve made any specific recipe of hers and I had this real urge to reconnect with her recently. But then at the last minute I had my head turned by this recipe in last weekend’s edition of the Dominion Post. A bit like that flaneur-ish painting where the wife thinks her husband is paying attention to her but doesn’t realise that his eyes are focussed instead on another comely lass. (I’m only describing it in such detail because I couldn’t find the actual painting after a quick Google Image search, if someone knows the name of this painting feel free to speak up.) Actually it wasn’t such a degrading act as that – I just liked the sound of this cake – Nigella remains there for the reconnecting some other time. But what use was that Art History paper I did in 2006 if I can’t make dubious metaphorical connections between Nigella and paintings that I can’t remember the name of?)

It’s a truly simple cake and doesn’t seem to be in any way flouncy or exciting but its uncomplicatednicity is what drew me to it. It’s ideal with a cup of tea, ages well and is a delight to eat – a cake of the old school, buttery and solid.

Sultana Cake

adapted from a recipe by David Burton, found in the Indulgence section of the Dominion Post

225g butter
450g sultanas
3 eggs
145g raw sugar
145g white sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
170g standard flour
170g wholemeal flour

Set the oven to 160 C, and line a square-ish tin of around 20cm square. The size isn’t a deal breaker though so don’t go weeping over your tape measure.

In a saucepan, cover the sultanas with cold water and bring to the boil. Drain off the water and while the sultanas are still hot, cut the butter into pieces over them and allow it to melt.

Whisk the eggs and sugars till thick and creamy, then fold in the baking powder and flours. Finally stir in the sultana-d butter, pour mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Slice when a little cooled.

See? It’s not particularly glamourous, but still rather perfect in its own way. I added a little Boyajian orange oil to the sultanas in the saucepan, which didn’t overpower the cake in any way but added a little heady fragrance to its otherwise matronly aesthetic. I also didn’t use 450g sultanas because I only had about 200g but to be honest it was plenty. I’m not one of life’s gaugers, but 450g does seem like a lot.

As I mentioned last time, we got ourselves tickets to see the Wailers out in Porirua last Friday. It was a brilliant night, with the journey almost as memorable as the gig itself. While heading out to the Te Rauparaha Arena we found $20 which we thought was a good sign. Not so cool was the fact that in our haste to get to the train station, I didn’t bring any ID with me and the gig was strictly R18. There’s something about my face that brings out the skeptic in any bouncer (plus apparently Tim and myself collectively skew very young in the looks factor) and despite pawing through my purse desperately I didn’t have anything on me that identified my age. In the end one of the trawling security police came over, asked me a few questions and radio-d someone who was able to look me up on some kind of citizen database and confirm that I am in fact, 23. Despite the mellow, sunny sounds of Katchafire surrounding us once we finally got inside, it took me a while to chill out.

Katchafire were fantastic though – delivering warm, dynamic sounds and generating an awesome energy. We were under no illusion that the band headlining wasn’t the exact original Wailers but they were still more or less the real deal, featuring original members in their line up, and it was an amazing opportunity for us. Despite seeming to be a bit disjointed – not quite possessing the soul that Katchafire had -they played a fantastic set. Buffalo Soldier was my particular favourite of the night, but the Exodus that they finished with was also an amazing moment. If they’d played Trenchtown Rock or No Woman No Cry I would have also been happy (I don’t know if that’s a really obvious choice of favourite) but there was so much gold in there that it wasn’t until the train ride home, (where a Danish tourist was deeply sick to the point that the train actually stopped and let him out for a bit to alleviate himself) and everyone started singing along together to even more Bob Marley songs that I noticed their absence.

Massive apologies for lacking in lustre (and a proper title) this time round – it has been a busy, busy time and I’ve been completely exhausted! My brain can’t seem to come up with the goods this week. I hate the idea of blogging just for the sake of it but there is also something to be said for discipline and sticking to a schedule. Hopefully next week the blogging part of my brain will have limbered up. Total apologies if you’re a first time reader. This basically happens to me every November – I get tired and panicky. Look forward to it. But be comforted by the fact that no matter how terrible my writing is in this post, the sultana cake is really, really good.

_________________________________________________

Title of this post brought to you by: I’m tired and I’ve got a train to catch. I haven’t got time to dither around thinking up cute food-related puns. And I’m sorry. But even in my uselessness, you bet I’m referring to Elton John’s song from Yellow Brick Road, This Song Has No Title. I don’t care how particularly unhip Elton John may be, this album is amazingly good. Not just relatively good compared to other albums of its time, or compared to other Elton John albums – it’s just singularly brilliant.
_________________________________________________

On Shuffle these days:

There was a guy at Duke Carvell’s last night with a Marc Kudisch-y mustache going on which inspired me to listen to the amazing Central Park from the also amazing See What I Wanna See. (click the link to listen to it)

To counteract this Broadway fruitiness, I’ve also been listening to Shapeshifter’s new album The System Is A Vampire – they’re back with a vengeance and went to the #1 spot with blinding speed which is a bit of an achievement in this CD-eschewing day and age.
____________________________________________

Next time: It’ll be December! And I’ll be planning the great traditional flat Christmas Dinner which is trucking on again this year. Just because we’ve moved house doesn’t mean I still don’t want to force Christmas food onto people. Check out here for 2008’s offering. Equal madness and then some will surely ensue.

cinnamon girl

9 Comments

Even though I’m usually about as rock’n’roll as Rod and/or Todd Flanders today I make an exception: I wrote this operating on about three hours’ sleep, having danced merrily till 5am on Saturday night at San Francisco Bath House to the enchanting stylings of the UK’s DJ Skitz and Deadly Hunta (who charmingly professed a liking for my peanut butter cookies and therefore I’ll not hear a word against him.) However other members of our entourage returned home around 10.30 on Sunday morning which gave me some perspective. Anyway, you have been warned: coherency at this stage is likely to be a joke, at best.

It was also at 10.30 yesterday morn when I quietly photographed this Kumara (sweet potato) Spice Cake, making the most of the crisp, chilly Sunday light. I pilfered the recipe from the lovely lovely Hayley’s blog, knowing as soon as I read her post that I’d have to recreate it as soon as possible, because it sounded so fantastic.

I adapted the recipe slightly. I added some cinnamon. I didn’t have any white chocolate in the house so dark chocolate was drizzled over instead. Now, I love me some white chocolate – I’d spread it daily on hot buttered toast. But I do think that the dark chocolate I substituted contrasted so awesomely with the sweet earthiness of the cake and its spices that it would be hard to use anything else. It’s a complete breeze to make and happily requires a bundt cake tin, thus justifying me actually owning one.

Kumara Spice Cake.

The title is a bit dubious, so if you know you have fussy people to feed I’d just refer to it as spice cake or something. The rest of the world knows the secret ingredient as Sweet Potato but here in New Zealand we call it by its Maori name, kumara. Your word is more universally explanatory but I like ours better.


Ingredients

1 large Kumara/Sweet Potato, peeled and chopped
125g soft butter
75ml Maple syrup (I used mostly golden syrup and a little maple flavoured syrup because I am a bad person and real maple syrup is ridiculously expensive. Unfortunately maple flavoured syrup doesn’t give a lot of flavour so it was a slightly pointless excercise.)
75ml Golden Syrup
1/2 cup tightly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 and 3/4 cups plain flour
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp bicarb soda

White chocolate icing

2 T cream
100g white chocolate (or dark!)

Cook sweet potato in a saucepan of lightly salted water for 15-20 min until tender and drain well, running cold water over the colander to cool it down faster. You should be able to mash it with a spoon but feel free to puree it in a blender, either way it needs to be smooth with no lumps.

Preheat oven to 180C. Lightly grease and flour a 6 cup bundt cake tin.

In a bowl, beat the butter, maple syrup, golden syrup, and sugar together until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time beating well after each addition. Fold in sweet potato puree. Sift flour, ginger, bicarb soda into the bowl and fold in gently till combined. Spoon batter into prepared pan, smoothing top. Bake for 45 min until cake pulls away from sides and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean and dry. Cool in the pan for 10 min or so.

This is just our kitchen bench. It’s wide enough that it creates a kind of limitless visual space on film, ideal for when I want to attempt fancy-looking photos. I am still in wonder at how decent our new kitchen is.

Meanwhile, melt the chocolate and add the cream then drizzle over the cooled cake. Watch out for the chocolate running down the wavy dents in the cake – fun! Using a silicon spatula, scrape out the bowl with the icing in it and eat the rest once you’re done. Magical stuff.



Not a bad job considering I was drizzling chocolate, taking photos and trying to remain standing on two feet this whole time.

There is something strangely alluring – to me at least – about cakes which have vegetables in them. It’s fun to tell people after they’ve had a bite, and to think about cake offering nutrients (the actual kind that a food nutritionist would recognise. Not emotional nutrients.) It also opens a new world of texture and flavour possibilities. This cake is amazingly good so don’t be scared of the vege content. The kumara keeps it amazingly moist, offering a subtle but particular flavour, and an absorbent, softly sweet carrier for the more strident ginger and cinnamon.
_____________________________________________________

The title of this post is brought to you by everyone’s favourite model train enthusiast: Neil Young and his song Cinnamon Girl off the crunchier-than-cornflakes album Rust Never Sleeps._____________________________________________________

On Shuffle Whilst I Type:

A dirty great ton of RENT.

I’ve been watching the RENT final performance DVD. It’s beautiful and beautifully done. It should be required viewing for everyone in the world. In the words of Lars Olfen, it’s a mitzvah. I’m so glad someone decided to make this happen. I say this now because I’m on a dirty great RENT high, give me a few days to calm down and get cynical.
_____________________________________________________

If you are in Auckland and get the chance to go to the I Love The Islands benefit tonight, do it! There’s a lot of horror in the world but the earthquakes that deeply damaged Samoa and American Samoa recently have stuck with me, I guess because New Zealand has not so much close ties with Samoa but a total overlap, a weaving of the fibres of our fabric that make up some metaphor of what we are or…something. Basically, it’s completely terrible what’s happened, the line up for I Love The Islands is amazing and it’s for a really good cause. Do it if you can.

lava you should have come over

10 Comments


_______________________________________________________

We’ve all been there. Quietly eating your wet polenta, but secretly thinking “Alas! If only this polenta was glutinous and significantly higher in fat and lower in nutritional value. Then I’d know real happiness.” Or maybe not. I have this yearly dalliance with gnocchi where just enough time has passed since I was last traumatised by it that I delude myself into thinking I can make it successfully. But every year, I fail.

For 2009’s attempt my head was turned by a recipe in a magazine for gnocchi which sounded delicious – a basic choux pastry mixture with cottage cheese added. It seemed pretty non-terrifying and so I gave it a go. The gnocchi was pillowy and light and slowly rose to the top of the pan of water. I pinched one out of the pan and tasted it – argh, so good. Smooth and creamy and yet gratifyingly unstodgy.

Then came disaster. I tipped the pan into a large colander and…the gnocchi broke. All completely flattened. Nary a solid pasta nugget to be found. After putting all this effort into it I was determined that the show would go on but seriously…

…that’s not gnocchi. The squashed gnocchi was kind of delicious, with the exact soft, grainy texture of polenta, just, you know, now with a higher GI rating and all the goodness of no cornmeal! After many years of failure, I’ve decided that gnocchi is like haircuts and half-marathons: best done for you by other people.

Let us distract ourselves from this ugliness with a ridiculously flamboyant cake – Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Coffee Volcano.

To mark the occasion of Tim’s birthday we threw a small shindig at our place on Sunday afternoon, inviting all of our closest friends (a very small, but mighty bunch, minus a few exceptions not based in Wellington naturally). I’d only been back in Wellington for an hour, since I spent the weekend up in Auckland for business meetings and the Smokefreerockquest finals (all of which went smooth as failed gnocchi). Instead of my usual post-travel mode, which is to put on my $6 grey trackpants and stare at the TV, I got stuck into making homemade custard and stuffing softened rice paper sheets like some pearl-wearing housewife from Bonfire of the Vanities.

The whole evening was very relaxed once this was out of the way. Let’s face it, no matter how many times you make custard there is still always the nagging fear that you’ll end up with sugary scrambled eggs. Luckily no disasters this time, particularly fortunate considering I’d substituted coconut milk for the stipulated cream, in a bid to make the pudding dairy-free for one of our friends who swings that way. (By the way, the cake uses oil, not butter. Do not consider for a SECOND that I’d stoop to margarine.)

So yeah, marvelous evening all round, good company, good nibbles, and particularly excellent cheese provided by Dr Scotty. Having it on a Sunday evening gave it a chilled out vibe wonderfully conducive to sitting round eating enormous quantities of food and light quantities of alcohol. Tim took over in the kitchen when the sausage rolls needed baking and the pork buns needed steaming (yeah, there was no real unifying theme to our nibbles) and they were pretty exciting, but the cake was the real star. Probably because I would not shut up about it and about how awesome it was that it was dairy free.

Let me describe it for you: a large, deep, undulating chocolate bundt cake (which, thank all that is good in the world, turned out of the tin neatly this time). The hole in the middle is filled with walnuts. Into said hole, over the walnuts, you pour rich custard, caramel brown with espresso (I actually forgot to add the coffee in the heat of the moment but no harm done as there was still plenty going on). Finally you sprinkle over brown sugar and using some kind of fire-producing implement, torch the sugar till it forms a caramelised, speckly creme-brulee surface on top of all the madness, all of which flows like magma once you slice into the cake to share it round.

It should probably be mentioned here that Nigella uses the words “infant-school easy” and “pa-dah!” to describe this cake. She uses these words…slightly carelessly. I wouldn’t be the first to volunteer a two-year old’s services in making a bundt cake which requires separated egg whites beaten to a meringue. Just sayin’ is all. But, if you have a few years’ experience behind you this cake is not impossible, as demonstrated by the fact that I could actually get it happening at all. It just requires a little focus and forward thinking. A kitchen blowtorch helps, I was given one for my birthday this year and was really excited about using it on something so worthy expending a little butane.

It does resemble a volcano, right? Eating it was an intense experience, and the reason the photos look so hastily snapped is because…they were. The cake is light in texture but very dark with cocoa. The caramelised sugar and hidden walnuts provide a crunchy respite against the rich, flowing custard. It’s just…marvelous. It’s the sort of thing that you have one bite of and decide that you want on a weekly basis. I realise it looks and sounds like there’s far too much going on. But it works.

Chocolate Coffee Volcano

Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess

CAKE

300g caster sugar
140g plain flour
80g cocoa
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 large eggs, separated, plus 2 more egg yolks (this is where it gets confusing if, like me, you have trouble counting to ten)
125ml vegetable oil (I used rice bran)
125ml water

Preheat oven to 180 C and lightly oil a 25cm Bundt tin.

In a large bowl mix together 200g of the sugar, all the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda. In another bowl, beat together the water, oil and 6 egg yolks. Pour over the dry ingredients gradually, whisking to combine.


Take yet another bowl and whisk the 4 egg whites till stiff. Keep whisking and slowly add the sugar spoonful by spoonful. Gently fold this into the chocolate mixture a third at a time. Pour mixture into the oiled Bundt tin and bake for 40 minutes, although it may need a little longer and covering with tinfoil.

CUSTARD

6 egg yolks
225mls double cream
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon instant espresso powder.


Note: I used four egg yolks and 1 tin coconut milk, using the same method. Whisk egg yolks, sugar and espresso powder together lightly. Heat up the cream in a pan but don’t let it boil. Slowly whisk it into the egg yolks. Wipe out the pan and transfer the mixture back into it, cooking over a low heat till it thickens significantly into custard.

Finally, sprinkle Tia Maria over the cake if you’d like to (another thing I forgot), fill the hole with walnuts, pour in the custard, allowing it to overflow and run down the creases of the cake. Sprinkle over about three tablespoons of brown sugar and torch it till it resembles the top of a creme brulee.

See? Infant-school easy! Pa-dah!

To go with I made another coconut milk custard into which I stirred melted dark chocolate and cocoa and froze into ice cream. As guests peeled off we were left with a few hangers on. There was a joyfully primal moment when we all stood round a kitchen countertop digging spoons greedily into the container of ice cream. Things got a little strange after that and, (poor Tim, was it ever even about him?) as some kind of signifier of this, Defying Gravity was played at great volume for Dr Scotty who had hitherto been living half a life and had never heard it before…

______________________________________________________


The title of this blog is brought to you by: Jeff Buckley, singing Lover You Should’ve Come Over, okay sure, but maybe a little Eden Espinosa too…Yes, Jeff Buckley was special and all but I’m more of a Tim Buckley gal myself. And let us never forget who was the author of Hallelujah…
______________________________________________________


On Shuffle whilst I type:

1: Like a Pen by excellent Swedes The Knife from their album Silent Shout. This song was regularly thrashed chez nous circa 2006/2007 but I heard it again yesterday while streaming George FM and was immediately taken back to those damper times. Had a nostalgic flashback to Alicia the Canadian teasing us for calling it was called “like a pin” with our New Zealand accents.
2: Cars by Gary Numan from The Pleasure Principle. Spurred on by marathon sessions of watching and listening to The Mighty Boosh I really had an urge to listen to this again. It’s blindingly glorious and swirly.
3: Cornerstone from the Arctic Monkeys’ latest, Humbug. It’s really good. Who would have thought back in 2005 that they’d be here now?

____________________________________________________


Next time: Well, hopefully the next post will (a) arrive sooner and (2) have better photos. Like I said I’ve been travelling round the place, hence the yawning chasm between the last post and this one, but I got to touch base at home and catch up with all sorts of lovely and important relatives and get lots of important meetings done in the city AND act as sponsor representative at the fantastic finals for Smokefreerockquest. Plus make dairy-free custard after being back in Wellington for nary an hour. You try blogging after all that. Also, hopefully I make something that really succeeds. Either that or it’s time to get a ‘fail’ tag to add to my list.

freecurd!

11 Comments

__________________________________________________

Not everything has to have a story. Some things are begotten, not created. This cake is somewhere in the middle. The flat that Tim and I currently live in used to be home to an ex-colleague of mine, from my program team at work. On the night of her farewell party, another colleague in the heat of the moment gave me two sample sachets of Barkers lemon curd. I don’t know where she got them from or why they were bestowed upon me. She didn’t say. We certainly haven’t mentioned it since. Lemon curd is hardly an illicit substance, but I don’t expect to have it conspiratorially pressed into my hand late at night and I could never quite figure out a way to bring it up again without sounding strange. Or at least stranger than usual.

The sachets sat undisturbed in my handbag for a while – a good month and a half after the farewell party of the person whose house we now live in. This is just how I roll. Things sit around forever. But while the sachets began to irritate me with their presence I couldn’t quite work out what to do with them. It was around this time that another Wellington-based gal I know began a blog and posted a recipe for, of all things, lemon curd cake. I made it. I tasted it. Everything suddenly made sense.

Seriously, this is a really nice cake. Just thinking about it is making me wish people thrust preserves upon me more often of an evening. I have to be really frankly honest here – Barkers lemon curd isn’t my first lemon curd of choice. I think there isn’t anything nicer than homemade stuff, and Barkers can be a little too sweet and viscous. However it was absolutely perfect stirred into this cake batter. This might also be nice if the lemon curd was replaced with jam, or marmalade…

Lemon Curd Cake

Thanks to Olivia at Berry Bliss

  • 170g butter
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 4 large eggs
  • zest of one lemon
  • juice of one lemon
  • 1½ cups flour
  • 1½ tsp baking powder
  • 100g lemon curd

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then add each egg one at a time, beating between additions. Add the zest and juice of the lemon. I didn’t have a lemon on me but instead I added 2 teaspoons of Boyajian orange oil just for kicks. It added a subtle fragrant intensity to the finished cake. Sift the flour and baking powder into the mixture and fold together. Add the lemon curd and mix. I mixed it in quited well but not completely incorporating it. Pop into a 22cm lined and floured cake tin and into the oven at 180ºC for about 1 hour or until a knife comes away clean.

I overcooked it slightly and was a little worried by the look of the brown exterior, but it was gloriously sunshine yellow within and still tasted fantastic. All cakey and tangy on the inside but with this sugary-chewy crust which was so good. I’ll definitely be making this again.

Bonus cake!

It was Tim’s birthday on Friday night and at his request I made him Nigella Lawson’s chocolate Guinness cake. I suspect this cake has magical properties. Recipe here.

We went out for breakfast first thing the morning of his birthday (before I scooted to work) and I presented him with tickets for ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. Who is not related to Joe Cocker, but they’re both from Sheffield! That night we had dinner at Sweet Mother’s Kitchen -(where the slab of cornbread comes with a slice of butter the same size – I’m home!) and played card games in the corner while eating pecan pie. Then we went to see The Soloist using some vouchers we had. It was pretty lovely – Jamie Foxx did a great job and Robert Downey Jr, my latter-day crush, is doing well for himself these days – although it did feel a bit heavy handed in places and a bit “trying really hard to be Oscar worthy”. We then hung out all night at various classy bars and people watched (and on a Friday night, there were most definitely people putting on a show for the watchin’) and finally came home at 4am. Easily the first time we’ve done so all year. It was an excellent night.

It’s Mum’s birthday today, (Feliz cumpleanos!) and I couriered up some of Nigella’s gingerbread muffins for her afternoon tea party she was having yesterday. It’s quite fun sending food through the mail, I felt like some benevolent far-off mother from What Katy Did or a jolly Enid Blyton novel.

_________________________________________________

The title of this post is brought to you by: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s FREEBIRD. It’s a beauty. For those of you who have been living inside a cockerel’s boot, they also do Sweet Home Alabama. You know, that song from the Forrest Gump soundtrack.
_________________________________________________

On Shuffle Whilst I Type

Yellow House by Grizzly Bear. Ange came round and gave it to us to listen to, am liking what I hear but suspect I would be stupid not to.

Llewellyn from the album Straight Answer Machine by local bearded gem Samuel Flynn Scott and the B.O.P. Any song which includes lyrics about being “a custard pirate lost at sea” is clearly golden.

Diamond Dogs by Beck, from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. Obviously there’s the David Bowie original which is fabulous, but this is quite the cover. Plus this soundtrack was my LIFE a few years back and that is not to be sneezed at. Is it bad that this is basically the only Timbaland-produced track that I like? (Yes, there is Come Around from M.I.A’s Kala which is all well and good until his verse starts and it just gets awkward.) Well so be it.

_________________________________________________

Next time: I fail at gnocchi. I strain to remember ever making successful gnocchi. But still, at least once a year, I try it. This is me ticking the box for 2009.

ginger baker

10 Comments


How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson is possibly the only baking book you’ll ever need, supposing some fascist authority figure imposed a rule of only one baking book per person (and would they really be all that fascist if they at least allowed you to bake brownies?). How To Be A Domestic Goddess is not one of those compendiums that you can buy for $10 at Borders – you know, big illustrations, no obvious author, step-by-step recipes for the same old same old banana cake and sticky date pudding and double chocolate muffins. Practical but no soul. No ma’am. HTBADG is so intensely baking-y that its pages practically come pre-glued together with buttercream.

I received How To Be A Domestic Goddess in 2006 under fairly auspicious circumstances – it was a gift from Tim. We were living in our first place together, this bloody awful flat in Kelburn which was not so much damp as ankle-deep in water, presided over by a horrible landlord who lived on the same property. It was our first year at uni. Tim was working graveyard shifts at McDonalds and I was struggling to be employed full stop. We weren’t flush, to say the least.

I had excitedly bought my first pair of skinny-leg jeans for a significant sum (remembering this was early 2006 before you could get them everywhere) only to have them promptly stolen unceremoniously off our washing line, along with a pair of vintage white and red Adidas shorts that I’d bought at Camden market in London and worn to the Greenday concert at Milton Keynes in 2005. In one fell swoop I’d lost something excitingly materialistic and something pricelessly sentimental. As if I could afford another pair of jeans – as if I could replace the shorts and everything they represented. It was a pretty miserable time (rejected by supermarkets, unable to deal with the mathmatics section of the KFC employment sheet.)

Tim gets home from work one day soon after – miraculously in the middle of the day and not 4am – and hands me How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson, a present to make me feel better about the stolen clothes and life in general. If ever a book could comfort the soul, if ever a woman could make you wonder why you even care about jeans in the first place, this book is the one.

Remember, this is years before we would go out casually purchasing DVD box sets and espresso machines. This is back when the minimum wage was $10.20. Nigella Lawson is not a cheap idol. The first recipe I made from it was the Chocolate Coca Cola Cake, not for any particular reason other than we had most of the ingredients to hand and coke is cheap. It’s a complete joy of a cake, (better than it sounds) and was ideal for scaring away the last remnants of misery at the missing clothing and unemployment.

For some reason I’ve never returned to it, but the other day a thought tickled my brain, that by replacing the Coca Cola with ginger beer it could turn out really quite nifty. I was right. And then I got to thinking about how I ended up with the book in the first place. And now I realise that I’m still really annoyed about those shorts. I want them back. I don’t like the idea of wishing actual ill upon people (in a public forum like this anyway) but I hope whoever stole them…always catches every red traffic light. And get constant phone calls from telemarketers. And their CDs always skip. Lots of papercuts. I could go on.

Ginger Beer Cake

Adapted from How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson

200g plain flour
100g caster sugar
150g brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 large egg
125mls buttermilk (or 1/4 cup plain yoghurt, 1/4 cup milk)
125g butter
175mls ginger beer (I used Phoenix Organic, a light and gingery drop)

Preheat oven to 180 C.

In a good-sized pan, gently melt the butter and ginger beer together. Remove from heat, and sift in the dry ingredients, then mix in everything else. Pour into a lined 22cm springform tin, and bake for 40 minutes. This is a very liquid batter so it might pay to slide some foil under the cake tin.

Leave to stand in the tin 15 mins before turning out. If you like, you could make a buttercream by beating together soft butter, icing sugar, a little ground ginger and a tablespoon or two of the remaining ginger beer. Or I imagine a cream cheese icing would be wonderful here. We left it plain because I thought we were out of icing sugar (we weren’t but never mind). And it was absolutely excellent plain so no need to go to any great lengths to drape it in further sugary concoctions if you don’t want to.

This cake has the most beautiful texture – maybe it’s something in the bubbles? It’s both light but dense, squishy but solid, gingery but flirtatiously so. It’s not one of those cakes that needs 12 eggs or a large amount of butter to get by, making it ideal for when you don’t think you have much in the pantry. By the way to make the original version, replace the ginger beer with coca cola and the ground ginger with 2 tablespoons of cocoa.

Speaking of originals, they’re remaking Fame. WHAT. Wikipedia can’t explain why this is happening which in this day and age means there’s not much hope for it. I do love musicals – and did not Hugh Jackman claim ‘the musical is back’ at the Oscars this year? But this just seems pointedly unnecessary. No Gene Anthony Ray and his pelvic thrusts that will drive you insane! No Red Light! No Anne Meara who 20 years later went on to play Steve’s mother in Sex and The City! No I Sing The Body Electric! And I very much doubt that there will be a Garfunkel-esque ginger ‘fro as sported by Montgomery MacNeil in the original. Travesty! Travestyyy!

On a more serious note, ie this actually matters in the grand scheme of things more than shorts and movies, Tim has been staying with his family for the last week because his paternal great grandmother died, and they were travelling across the country yesterday for her funeral. While I never met this lady I hear from Tim she was pretty awesome and could farm harder than most men back in her day, and is also the line through which Tim gets his Maori heritage. It is sad news for his family indeed though I do think he’s fantastically lucky to have known his great-grandparents, not something I can lay claim to… In his absense I’ve been eating nonstop tofu and soybeans, business as usual really.

_____________________________________________________________________

On Shuffle whilst I type:

Never Alone by the Contemporary Gospel Chorus from the Fame soundtrack. That’s the 1980 film by the way, kids. Listen to this song once and see if you don’t want to recruit your own choir just so you can get them to perform this track.

I’m Alive In The World by L.A Mitchell, from the Fly My Pretties latest release, A Story. Pretty, pretty, pretty stuff. And there is a giant portrait of Ms Mitchell on my lounge wall which gives the listening esperience an extra something.

Alone Again Or by Love from the album Forever Changes. Those mariachis! This song is hauntingly fabulous. Arthur Lee, RIP. (Also doesn’t the fact that one user review on fishpond.co.nz says “There is only really one way to describe this album – hippie crap” actually make you want it even more?)

_______________________________________________________________________
The title of this post is brought to you by: A cheeky salute to a member of Cream. See them here performing White Room, introduced by the delightful John Peel…
_______________________________________________________________________
Next time: Nothing specific on the cards yet, but I’ll get to it all in my own mystical time. The latest issue of Cuisine Magazine arrived in the mail though so I look forward to spending some quality time with it.

complainte de la bundt

10 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?
.
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.
_______________________________________________

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.

__________________________________________________

This blog title is bought to you by: Rufus Wainwright
__________________________________________________
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.

twist and stout

14 Comments

________________________________________________

Cheers everyone for your enthusiastic well-wishing for Tim’s and my big move, I’ve built it up so much that soon it will surely have its own snappy title, corresponding font, and swelling theme music.

I feel as though every time Old Frau Winter hobbles into town on her icy boots, I complain that it’s the coldest one we’ve had yet. Even though I suspect it’s human nature to largely block out any past discomfort and focus on what’s happening to the body right now, hot damn if it isn’t the coldest June in living memory. It’s a particular quality of temperature – that bone chilling, dry, Nordic chill, which, combined with the damp, windy climes of Wellington, makes for quite the experience.

With this in mind, we’ve been doing a lot of that bolstering, sustaining style of eating lately. While I love sponteneity in the kitchen I hate cooking in an entirely reactive way every night (as in, “cripes I’m hungry and it’s 7.30pm! Why did I spend all that time looking at Tony Award performances on youtube instead of making dinner? Now I have to cobble together something incoherent from what’s in the cupboard!”) One of the nice things about this season is sitting down with recipe books, post-it notes and a notepad, planning out slow-cooked winter meals and writing a shopping list accordingly. One such planned meal was the following casserole, taken from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. (I think I refer to it as that every time. It’s like one word in my head: seminaltexthowtoeat.)

Beef With Stout and Prunes
I realise that the words ‘stout’ and ‘prune’ aren’t overly come-hither. Nigella says this is a version of Beef Carbonnade which is possibly a better option if someone fussy asks what’s for dinner tonight.

I’ll be honest, my copy of How To Eat is buried under a lot of other cookbooks in a neat pile behind another hefty pile of cookbooks and it does not behoove me to disturb the order of things and dig it out. Plus I’m feeling lazy. You hardly need a recipe for this though, so allow me to guide you through the process gently but firmly. Dust sliced beef in mustard-spiked flour (I used beef shin from Moore Wilson’s, basically you want a cut that requires long cooking) and sear in a hot pan. Transfer into a casserole dish with some carrots, sliced into batons, finely sliced onions, and prunes that have been hitherto soaked in some dark stout. I used Cascade, an Australian stout from Tasmania, because it’s what they had at the local shop and wasn’t heinously expensive. I also added some whole cloves of garlic. Cover this and place in a slow oven, and cook for as long as you like but no less than two hours. I served over plain basmati rice. It can be a little brown and plain to look at, so by all means sprinkly liberally with chopped parsely which will please both aesthetically and…tastebuddily.
Et viola, a rich, hearty, deeply flavoured casserole for you and your loved ones. And if ‘your loved ones’ means just you and your stomach, then so much the better. Freeze in portion-sized containers and microwave it back to life when you need a fast dinner. This recipe actually comes from the low-fat section of How To Eat, as long as you don’t fry the floured beef in six inches of melted butter, enticing as that now sounds, it really is a trim meal all up, with the only fat coming from the meat.
The Cascade stout came in a six-pack and while Tim was happy to quaff the unused five bottles, he impressed upon me how a chocolate Guinness cake would be an economical, ideal, nay, the only logical use for the remaining stout. So I made one. I always forget how utterly stupendous Nigella’s Chocolate Guinness Cake is. It’s so ridiculously transcendent that it makes me type excessively in italics like some overexcited damsel in an LM Montgomery novel.

The Cascade Stout was not as abruptly bitter as the stipulated Guinness but more than held its own as a worthy understudy for the part. The above photo was taken on the bedside table, as Tim has had some blood sugar antics happening in the middle of the night lately and so that’s just where the cake was sat. Because he has had nocturnal low blood sugar with soothing regularity, a lot of the cake has been eaten by him while I’m in a half-asleep state and so I only managed to secure about two slices to myself after all that. It really was as delicious as it should be though: large, dark, densely chocolately and like Angela Lansbury, even better with age.

Chocolate Guinness Cake

From Feast, by Nigella Lawson. (It has a chocolate cake chapter, so, you know it’s good)
250mls Guinness
250g butter
75g cocoa
400g sugar
145mls sour cream (one of those little yoghurt-tub sized, er, tubs, or roughly a 1/2 cup)
2 eggs
1 T real vanilla extract
275g plain flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
Set your oven to 180 C and butter/line a 23cm springform tin. First of all you want to get a big pan, pour in the Guinness and add the butter – cut into small pieces – and gently heat it so the butter melts. It shouldn’t bubble, keep the heat low. Now, simply whisk in the rest of the ingredients and pour into your tin. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on your oven. The kitchen will smell heavenly, I promise you.

Once cool, ice with a mixture of 200g cream cheese (NOT low-fat), 125mls whipped cream, and 150g icing sugar folded together. I refrained from icing it this time round as I just couldn’t be bothered spending exorbitant amounts on dairy products, but the combination of sharp icing and dark, damp chocolate cake is incredible, the icing really makes it sing.

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the other key player in this cake: (apart from the stout and Tim’s persuasiveness) the cocoa. And not just any cocoa – proper Dutch cocoa from Equagold. The very first time I’ve ever used it. Don’t act all shocked, I’ve only just started working full time and in the food world there’s so much to keep up with – do you spend your money on the vanilla beans, or the premium brand happy pig bacon, or the Himalayan pink salt and if you let one ball drop is it tantamount to subterfuge meaning that you are forever shunned by food bloggers worldwide? I know I add fuel to the fire myself by going on about vanilla beans vs vanilla essense. With that in mind I’m lucky enough to have a wonderful whanau who will often give me such treats for Christmas and birthday presents. I’m not sure quite where I’m going with this rant but before I carry on shaking my fist for no good reason any more I’ll get back to my original point: proper Dutch cocoa has until now eluded me because it is really expensive. But as Led Zeppelin say, now’s the time, the time is now, and so I decided to buy myself a jar last week from the delightful La Bella Italia cafe/restaurant/deli on The Terrace. The woman behind the counter was impeccably helpful and friendly without being the slightest bit pushy and I emerged a very satisfied customer.

And when I opened the jar for the cake…My word. The first thing I noticed about it was the incredible cocoa scent, the second thing was how rich and dark the colour is. The deep-toned flavour of this cocoa stood comerade-like against the strident flavour of the stout and made for a surprisingly complex chocolate cake, to the point where I felt I should be eating it like one would drink a really expensive and fancy glass of wine – slowly and with reverence. What more can I say – this cake is begging to be made! Oh the feuds that could be ended with a slice of it (unless the parties who have beef with each other happen to be gluten-intolerant).

In smashing news, I interrupt this waffling to say:

My dad Mark, (el presidente of the Otaua Village Preservation Society – OVPS ) received a phone call from the OVPS’s lawyer today to say that WPC have withdrawn their appeal to the Environment Court. This means that they are no longer considering relocating their business to the Otaua Tavern site.

To reiterate: this is an “unofficial” withdrawal by WPC. There are still the lawyer’s bills to pay so the fund-raising continues. And the Otaua Tavern site is still vacant and who knows that a group even more shadily heinous and heinously shady may want to move in?

But for now: an enormous, enormous THANK YOU from the bottom, sides, inside and outside of my heart for everyone who helped by watching the video at my behest, for your supportive comments here and on youtube – it really did make a difference, and at last not just to our morale. I shudder to think of what might have had to have gone down if had the sorry WPC had their way and moved in (does that sentence even make sense? I’m a little excited, sorry for the nightmarish syntax). I have been so touched that people all round the world, people who enjoy making elaborate cakes and beautiful roasts and who have nothing to do with the woes of a tiny, clout-less village in New Zealand, have been so actively supportive. Though I am often conflicted in what I believe in (well, I’m only 23, I’ll ‘find myself’ in good time yet) I am pretty well certain on something: good deeds reap more good deeds and positive thought can have positive impact. One doesn’t want to get too mawkish and Miss World-like in one’s thank-you speeches so I’ll endeth it here, but it is an absolute relief and a triumph to be reporting this news to you all. Kia ora.

Am pretty sleepy after a weekend spent attending Smokefree Rockquest events here and in Lower Hutt, which may go some way towards explaining why my writing is so scatty but it could just be that this is how I write and you’re all dooooomed to deal with it forevermore. The students performing in Smokefree Rockquest here and in the Hutt basically melted my brain with their seriously fierce talent. I look forward to seeing some of them blaze a musical trail in the near future. Oh and I got to present an award last night. I’d like to think my many years on stage as a dancer/etc stood me in good stead, but as I was announced there was a perceptible milisecond of awkward silence that I feared would stretch into a yawning wave of quiet indifference from the audience. Luckily Tim and my godsister were there as my plus-ones to cheer and get the momentum going…

_________________________________________________

On shuffle while writing this:

Overture, from Jesus Christ Superstar, 1994 New Zealand Cast recording (just try and find it in shops. Your loss.)
Watermelon Blues from The Legend Of Tommy Johnson, Act 1: Genesis 1900’s-1990’s by Chris Thomas King
Das Hokey Kokey (Original Version Vocoder Mix) from Das Hokey Kokey by Bill Bailey

_________________________________________________

Next time: Tim and I have one episode left on our DVD of season 1 of The Wire and if it turns out as traumatic as I think it will I may need to go to ground for a bit. Believe the hype. It’s incredible. But don’t let your kids watch it, there’s violence and cussing and whatnot by the spade-load. (And by ‘whatnot’ I mean low-level nudity.) But otherwise, have I got some stuff for you. I made the bread and butter pudding to end all bread and butter puddings. Stale, defrosted hot cross buns, Marsala wine, no recipe…could have been a tear-inducing disaster of Anne Shirley proportions but sweet fancy Moses it turned out delicious.

schmalentines

9 Comments

With the briefest of glances o’er the foodblogosphere (yes, that is a word…now…) I observe that there is a plethora of pink-tinted, heart shaped, chocolate festooned Valentine-themed food going on. I personally don’t go in for Valentine’s Day myself, considering it a bit commercial and far too likely to inflict bitterness upon the firmly un-coupled out there. However there is a tiny, miniscule part of me that secretly wouldn’t mind being whisked off to Paris for the weekend or being presented with a sculpture of my own head made from chocolate mousse, or being forcibly thrown by forklift into a rose garden or whatever it is they do for Valentine’s in the movies. My actual day involved, would you believe it, nothing of the sort. Instead Tim’s friend, sister, sister’s friend, ex-flatmate, and flatmate’s friend all appeared for drinks. Fun – fantastic to see ex-flatmate again – but hardly condusive to heart-shaped food. Nevertheless, people need feeding, and drinkers need blotting paper, so I made an enormous vat of pasta (Nigella Lawson’s Penne Alla Vodka from Feast, it is seriously good) and for dessert, in a nod to the season, I made a tray of chocolate brownies.

Most of the time I feel that a brownie is a brownie is a brownie, there are forty squillion recipes out there for them, all promising ultimate-ness and all being fairly similar. Nigella’s recipe is, in all honesty, cut from similar cloth to anything you’ve read about brownies before…only the proportion of ingredients is roughly quadruple anything you’ve ever fathomed. They make for an incredible finished product, but I’m warning you, don’t read the recipe if you are faint of heart and don’t have your smelling salts handy. They will cost you about $300 to make. There is no coy concession of this from Nigella herself of course. And it does make quite a lot…

Above: Doesn’t the batter look good? I mean, I’m not just looking at it, I’m positively leering. Don’t you just want to buy it a drink, tell it to “get in my wheelbarrow, you cheeky vixen” and take it home? Quoting the Mighty Boosh here by the way – that’s not my own personal pick up line (although you’re welcome to try it…)

Brownies for An Economic Recession (sarcastic title my own, Nigella goes for the somewhat more fanciful “Snow Flecked Brownies”, admittedly this book was published in 2004 so she wasn’t to know about the grim future. From Feast.

375g butter
375g best-quality dark chocolate (don’t go using cheap compound buttons now)
6 eggs
350g caster sugar
1 tablespoon real vanilla extract (as above, if it’s fake, leave it out)
225g plain flour
250g white chocolate buttons

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Line the base of a 33x23x5.5cm roasting dish with baking paper. That’s right. A big, proper roasting dish that you’d normally cook a side of pig in. This is serious, y’all.

1. Melt the butter and chocolate together gently. I tend to let the chocolate melt a bit first before adding the butter so they both finish at the same time…
2. In a big bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together. Carefully pour in the slightly cooled chocolate mixture and vanilla extract.
3. Fold in the flour, stir in the white chocolate buttons.
4. Carefully spatula the whole lot into the roasting dish, smoothing the top. Bake for 25 minutes. Don’t be tempted to go for longer. After spending half a week’s pay on butter, chocolate and eggs, you don’t want dry brownies. Cut into squares when cooled some.

These are really, really good. I’m getting a little twitchy now just looking at pictures of them, knowing that they are right there in a tin in my wardrobe and I could grab one right now…yes, in my wardrobe, and hey, don’t judge, the kitchen in my flat is not quite visible to the naked eye and therefore one has learned to be creative with storage space. Which is why canned tomato, dried pasta and black beans jostle for position with my Swiss ball and my collection of high heels. If I call the whole set-up ‘charmingly bohemian, like RENT’ it’s not so annoying. Although it would be much easier to actually be charmingly bohemian if I lived in a loft in New York. Anywho…

I could just eat the whole lot…no one would need to know…

If Valentine’s Day is something you go in for, I hope it went well for you. Tim was working more or less all of the big day so I looked out for number one and went shopping. I bought myself some books with a voucher I had – The Cook School Recipes by Jo Seagar and Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. Both just jumped out at me, I didn’t set out with anything in mind to use my voucher for. Jo Seagar – despite her heavy use of sweet chilli sauce in everything – has always endeared herself to me. She seems to particularly excel at writing inspiring recipes for nibbles and baking, and since those are my two favourite food groups it makes sense that I should gravitate towards her. Plus I like the idea of supporting NZ cooks in these uncertain times. As for Everything Is Illuminated, I casually picked it up, read the first couple of lines, and knew instantly that it was something special. I’m only halfway through but – unless it descends into a chaos of derivative rubbish – I highly recommend it.

It is worth mentioning that on Friday night we caught up with our friend Dr Scotty who is finally back from his sojourn to Thailand and Cambodia. He returned looking all sleek and tan and it was SO cool to see him again. The fact that he got to New Zealand on Thursday and yet was able to converse to me about watermelon sorbet the very next night is testament to the rare breed of cool that he possesses.

Next time: I make beetroot soup, and it’s really really good.

Fruit ‘Em Up

10 Comments

Christmas shopping: 3 Laura: -100,000,000,003.
I’ve attempted to Christmas shop every weekend for the last month and have ended up with very little to show for myself. I know it’s not all about the gifts, but after a lifetime of getting presents for my family, I can’t just stop now because I can’t find much of anything. I have one weekend left to scour Wellington for trinkets. Wish me luck. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in this sorry boat.

Melodrama aside, we have been eating remarkably well lately because, to my endless happiness, summer fruit and vegetables are finally getting cheap, properly cheap, at the local market. I’ve eaten more fresh fruit in the last two weeks than I have all year and I am loving it. Strawberries for $2 a punnet, and three mangoes for a dollar more than makes up for six months eating uncrisp apples and canned peaches. Not that canned peaches don’t have a special place reserved in my heart, but there is something so exciting about summer fruit.

Vegetables too – I finally got my hands on some of those sugar snap peas that everyone talks about, $1.50 for a big bag (but they cost $4.95 for about 6 beans in the supermarket), a whole bag of red, swollen tomatoes for a dollar, bunches of asparagus for a song, and the top story in my world this week, beetroot has gotten really really cheap again.

Inspired vaguely by an orzotto in Nigella Christmas, I wrapped two large beetroot in tinfoil and roasted them at 200 C for about 45 minutes. While that was happening, I did the usual risotto thing – sauteed onion and garlic in butter, added vermouth, let the arborio rice sizzle (I know, arborio is the least culinarily desirable of the risotto rices but it’s also the cheapest), and ladled in vegetable stock, stirring all the while. I diced up the now soft and roasty beetroot and folded it into the risotto, which promptly turned the whole thing a garish (but pleasing!) pink and made the frozen peas which I’d added seem particularly green in contrast. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: pink goes good with green. A spoonful of sour cream and a sprinkling of basil from the garden finished off this almost ridiculously colourful dinner. Bright? It’s phosphorescent! And delicious too, but any reader of this blog will already know that I am a fan of the beetroot from way back.

We always seem to have a swag of overripe bananas kicking round. And, I’d found myself a very cheap ring cake tin at the Newtown Salvation Army store and was amped to make something in it. I’m not going to even try and present this cake to you as if it’s anything new and revolutionary, but who could possibly turn up their nose at a slice? I based the recipe on the Banana Breakfast Ring in Feast by Nigella Lawson. It’s a little more spongy and springy than your trad banana cake, but still moist and delicious and very simple to make. And is it just me being irrational, or are ring cakes way easier to slice up than normal ones?

Banana Cake

60g butter, melted
3-4 ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs
150g brown sugar
50g white sugar
250g flour (I actually used 200g flour and 50g cornflour, but whatevs)
1 t each baking soda and baking powder
2 heaped tablespoons sour cream



Mix everything together gently, bake in a buttered and floured ring tin for about 45 minutes at 180 C. I iced it with a mix of butter, icing sugar and cocoa and it was perfect. Some kind of lemony icing would be equally marvelous, I’m sure. The cake may or may not keep well, it didn’t really sit round long enough for me to find out.

Well, well, well. Wellity wellity wellity. I hope to get another post in before Christmas, it has been quite slow here lately but my excuse about the slow computer still stands. Conversely, time is going so fast. I finish work for the year on the 23rd and then shall commence the annual war with my luggage in that (a) I have to cram everything in and (b) I have to pay exorbitant excess baggage fees on my flight home because they weigh too much, apparently saying bitterly, “Hey lady, it’s Christmas!” doesn’t really help the situation. Even though I’m only just getting home this side of the big day I hope to fit in a ridiculous amount of goodie-baking. New Years will be very quiet for me, and Tim will be in Wellington working through at Starbucks, but we will be hitting the ground running come 2009. In a matter of weeks -admittedly, several weeks- we will be seeing Neil Young and goodness knows who else at the Big Day Out, Arctic Monkeys (that’s right, we bought tickets to their Wellington gig even though they’ll be at Big Day Out), Kings of Leon AND The Who. Oh yes.

I haven’t been on Twitter for a while, once again the slowness of the computer prevents such frivolousities, but here are some random thoughts:

– I heard my neighbour singing the other day. Does this mean they heard me singing Defying Gravity while no-one else was home?

– What did we use for the saying “recharge your batteries” before the advent of electricity? Did people take mini-breaks or book facials because they needed to “stoke their coalrange” or somesuch?

– I wonder if Leonard Cohen ever got called Leotard as a child. Admit it. Now you’re wondering too.

Banana O’Rily

11 Comments

I’ve started full-time work this week, so you’ll have to forgive me if I get a little drunk on my own power and come over all megalomaniacal at you. I’ll try to keep it in check. Leonard Cohen tickets were selling on Trademe today (NZ’s Ebay-lite) for over $600, so as yet it looks like I’m really not going, and thus my dream of seeing my Canadian triumverate (Leonard, Neil, Rufus) is not quite going to come to fruition. No need to go listening to “Who By Fire” on constant loop just yet however, because I found out on the weekend – care of a certain lovely father of mine – that I’m going to be seeing The Who in March, and I am just ridiculously excited. For those of you who have been so unfortunate not to have had your ears blessed by their music…think of the CSI theme tunes. The original and the Miami and New York spin-off themes are all Who songs (who? I hear you say…)
We went to visit Tim’s parents over the weekend and they sent us back to Wellington with a large bag of ripe bananas, with which I decided to do the obvious thing and use them in some kind of cake. I made banana bread using a much-repeated recipe from Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess, a book so imbued with the spirit of baking that its very pages, were you to lick them, taste of cinnamon and nutmeg. Although that could well be because I’m so messy and schmeer batter everywhere.

It’s a non-threatening but diverting recipe, the batter spiked with luscious, rum-soaked sultanas (although I use Marsala al’uovo for preference, it’s flavour is impossible to better) and irregularly sized chunks of chopped chocolate folded through at the end. Rustic but elegant, easy to make but looks like you put in lots of effort…

Banana Bread


100g sultanas
75ml bourbon or dark rum (or Marsala, which makes it smell heavenly)
175g plain flour
2 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
125g melted butter
150g sugar
2 large eggs
4 small, very ripe mashed bananas (about 300g when peeled)
Optional – about 60g dark chocolate, chopped roughly



Put the sultanas and chosen alcohol in a small saucepan and bring to the boil, then let cool. Or, if you’re lazy like me, just zap them in the microwave. Mix the butter, sugar, eggs and bananas together, then fold in the dry ingredients. Finally, fold in the drained sultanas and chocolate and pour into a well greased and floured loaf tin. Bake at 170 C for about an hour, although it may need longer. I reserved the remaining dribble of Marsala that the sultanas had been warmed in and poured it over the cake as soon as it emerged from the oven.

Eat by the generous slabful. Not that I’d know or anything, but even if you overcook it slightly so it’s a bit too dark on top, it doesn’t seem to do any harm. In fact this cake stays serviceably moist for a couple of days after baking.

Surprise! A short, succinct post. It’s so short and lacking in banter that I don’t quite know what to do with myself, but since I’m not feeling overwhelmingly zany right now I might as well not try and force it. To be honest I’m pretty exhausted from travelling two weekends in a row and then starting full-time has been taking a lot of my brain-space. (“just because I get around”) I haven’t had any time to cook from the gorgeous Nigella Christmas yet – have hardly had time to cook at all to be honest – but I can’t wait to start chutneying it up – her chapter on homemade gifts is seriously inspiring!