Category: Cake

i’ve seen the world done it all had my cake now

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I individually plucked and arranged each leaf, it signifies the passing of time
(you know I’m kidding, I just kind of plonked the cake down by these wilting flowers and liked the look)
Baking isn’t necessarily what I turn to if I’m in a moody bad mood, despite the obvious benefits – you get to eat something very sweet and channel your energy into creating beauty out of raw ingredients – but there’s also a lot of room for error and the amount of times I’ve magnified a bad mood by completely ruining a cake that I’ve made to cheer myself up would make you think twice about letting me call myself a food blogger. But anyway, I had a conversation with one of my best girls Kate over coffee yesterday which essentially went along the lines of “I’m so mooooody, today is not good” “bake a cake?” “oh yeah I like cake.” “something with fruit in it maybe?” “yeah! Like, a plum cake. A cake with canned plums and peaches in it and…and cinnamon buttercream!” “alriiight!” 
(instagram made the icing way purple-er than it really is) (never stop doing your thing, instagram)
This heat-of-the-moment cake got downgraded to a more simple plum cake with a drizzle of icing sugar mixed with juice from the can of plums, but still. It did improve my mood. For what it’s worth, I also freestyled an amazingly compelling potential subplot for Hanna Marin from Pretty Little Liars over that same coffee with Kate, which I then downgraded to “I am not a writer for the show so I guess I’ll just like, carry on watching it.” I do enjoy scheming, even if it’s just a cake or a new life for a fictional character. 

One thing that’s always a good idea no matter what mood I’m in is re-reading my Nigella cookbooks. I picked up her important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess from my cookbook stack and it actually fell open right upon the perfect recipe for what I was thinking of – a very simple brown sugar cake with canned plums and ground almonds in it. I fiddled with it a very small amount, mostly by adding some cinnamon and plum juice to the icing because I’m obsessed with making everything smell like cinnamon at the moment, and the cake worked perfectly.

I discovered some electric beaters at the back of a cupboard in my apartment and tried using them to make the batter, and holy wow do they make a difference. I mean, every single cake that you’ve seen on this blog or in my book has been made with a wooden spoon or a whisk (including the pavlovas) and I can’t belieeeeve how much lighter and volumised the beaters make the batter. It’s kind of embarrassing, this cake turned out one and a half as big as mine usually do. I really like making cakes by hand but yeah, the results are, if nothing else, making me want to do some push ups or something so I can try and beat the machine.

winter plum cake with cinnamon plum icing

adapted a bit from a recipe in Nigella Lawson’s important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess

125g soft butter
one cup brown sugar
two eggs
one cup flour
one 70g packet of ground almonds
one and a half teaspoons baking powder
six plums from a tin of black doris plums, roughly chopped (and stones removed, obvs)

half a cup or so icing sugar
a tablespoon or so of the juice from the can of plums
ground cinnamon

Set your oven to 170 C and line the base of a 20cm springform tin with baking paper. Beat the butter and brown sugar together till it’s all light and fluffy and delicious. Continue, beating in the eggs till they’re completely incorporated. Fold in the almonds, flour, baking powder and plums. By the way, the canned plums are so soft that I just lift them out one at a time with a spoon, and use another spoon to carve off chunks into the cake batter. But by all means chop them on a chopping board. 

Spatula all this into the caketin and bake for an hour and a quarter, although check it out at after an hour has gone by, all ovens are unique and special snowflakes.  

Let the cake cool for a while in the tin, then run a knife around the inside of the tin and carefully transfer the cake to a plate to cool completely. Although, I could not be bothered and put the icing on the still-warm cake and it was totally fine, but general wisdom would suggest that you shouldn’t do this. Either way, mix the icing sugar and a good dash of ground cinnamon with a little of the plum juice – a teaspoon at a time – until it forms something you can drizzle roughly over the cake with a teaspoon. You may get to a point where you’ve been so liberal with the drizzling that you actually have to give up and cover the whole thing, but whatever, it will be fine. 

The almonds make it all moist and springy and tender, the plums taste so rich and dark and liqueur-ious that it seems bizarre that they’re not actually in season right now, and the cinnamon in the dusky pink icing gives it a blast of warmth, that feeling you get when you rush inside from the cold and turn on the heater and feel your bones relax. It’s just a very delicious cake and a good reason to stock up on canned fruit, just in case. You could ice this with something more involved, you could add more fruit, you could leave it plain, but the brief kick of pure sweetness from the icing brings it all together and also makes it look prettier. As for the rest of the plums, either eat them from the can, stir them into yoghurt, serve them with porridge, leave them to fester in the fridge and then shame-facedly dispose of them when you’re quite sure no-one’s home…Seriously though, I cannot get over how the cake was so much lighter and fluffier from being mixed up with the beaters. I shouldn’t be surprised I guess, but nevertheless: sigh!

So uh, I guess the plot and subtext of today’s blog post is that I am whiny and inobservant, but if you were observant yourself this would not be a surprise. I still love my job but currently while this particular film festival is on I’m working a zillion hours and so with it goes my ability to articulate myself, like flour slowly disappearing through a sieve. It’s just two and a bit weeks though, and then I’ll be back to my whiny and inobservant self!

Till then, prescribing myself many cups of tea and about 90% of this cake.

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title from: this is a Lana Del Rey appreciation blog, apparently, and her song Young and Beautiful from the Great Gatsby soundtrack is typically haunting and exquisite.
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music lately:

Courtney Barnett, Avant Gardener. Another of my best girls Hannah introduced me to this song and I knew I’d love it from the title alone but it reeeeally is good.

Janine and the Mixtape, Hold Me. I’ve talked about this a bunch before but it always gets me.

Sugababes, Freak Like Me. Did you know this is one of the best songs in the world? Especially when it’s very late at night and you’re trying to close the bar at work and feel like you have zero upper body strength all of a sudden.
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next time: Probably more cinnamon, to be honest, I can’t get enough. 

leave me with some kind of proof it’s not a dream

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I’m not a particularly good sleeper, but I am very, very good at dreaming. Sometimes too good – waking up and realising oh, Lea Seydoux definitely didn’t txt me, oh, I don’t actually get to go to a private dress rehearsal of Wicked, oh, I didn’t find masses of two dollar coins in the grass and clawingly scoop them up into my handbag, oh, I wasn’t in an episode of Bob’s Burgers where we hung out with people who hadn’t quiiiiite realised their 1960s heyday was over and drove a Kombi van to go shooting paint at trees in rapidly changing layers of colour. (Am not too fussed about that last one not being true: experiencing it in my mind once was quite enough.)

Anyway, dreams are generally only of interest to the person whose subconscious they materialise from, but in this case I woke up and was like, woohoo! I’m a sugary prophet! Because I dreamed I was making a cake without checking if I had all the necessary ingredients (so far, so realistic) and upon realising I was out of cocoa, I used chocolate milk instead. I didn’t get so far as baking it, but the dream-mixture definitely tasted good.

Dreams can come true, ya know. But when I first tried making a cake like the one in my dream, it failed completely – brickishly solid, without having the good grace to turn into a giant cookie, dry and sandy, a miserable waste of ingredients, to be honest. (And then I was like: hey, could make cake pops with this in the future! Not wasteful after all! And then I neglectfully left it on the bench for a week before guiltily binning it.)

Not one to be deterred by my dreams not coming true immediately, I decided to try again and to be a bit more thoughtful – I had a look around at cake recipes that had a larger proportion of liquid in them, I added some baking soda, and so on. And it worked! As if a chocolate milk cake wasn’t cute enough on its own I decided that adding a milk chocolate ganache on top would both amplify the flavour and more importantly, make the cake’s name reeeeally adorable.

chocolate milk milk chocolate cake

recipe by myself

 170g soft butter
one cup sugar
two eggs
one and a half cups flour
half a teaspoon baking soda
one teaspoon baking powder
three quarters of a cup of chocolate milk

 150g milk chocolate
quarter of a cup of cream

 Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Line a 21cm springform caketin with baking paper and grease the sides. This is a simple cake –  beat the butter and sugar together in a large bowl till all creamy and delicious, beat in the eggs, sift in the flour and baking soda/baking powder (if you’re not going to be bothered sifting, which I totally get by the way, at least make sure there are no baking soda lumps. They will taste disgusting.) Mix altogether, stir in the chocolate milk, spatula it all into the caketin and bake for around 40 minutes, or until the top feels firm and springy. 

 Allow the cake to cool. Break the chocolate into squares and gently melt it together with the cream, stirring plenty so it doesn’t catch and burn. Tip the lot onto the cake, spread it around with the flat side of a knife, and festoon with sprinkles or in whichever manner you find pleasing-est. I used rainbow sugar that I bought in San Francisco. 

Dreamy as this cake undeniably is, I’d have to describe the actual chocolate flavour as…aggressively mild. It’s like the slightest, barest hint of cocoa warmth against the comfortingly plain, buttery cake. It’s really good though, and seriously, potential cuteness is a good reason to do something, okay? But if you don’t have chocolate milk in your fridge or the energy to obtain some, regular milk is fine, especially with the soft sweet flavour of the cream-rich milk chocolate ganache tying it all together. It’s delicious. Oh, I really did make a good cake. 

Is it worse to never have a particular dream come true, or to have it come true and then thoroughly un-materialise itself? As I’ve said before, I’m more of a do-it-then-worry-about-regretting-it type than a don’t-do-it-and-wonder-forevermore type, but. Look. Okay. May was a difficult month for a ton of reasons, some within my control and some of them dizzyingly, confusingly, out of my control. This one thing though, I really can’t tell whether or not I could’ve changed it: once the last copy of my cookbook is sold from the last bookstore…it will be out of print. And my publishers, Penguin, won’t be publishing another one with me.

I’m not telling you this to garner sympathy (note, I love attention but hate pity, there is a difference – pity is mortifying, attention is wonderful) and I’m not telling you so I can vent unprofessionally about Penguin, because that would be really stupid of me, and I’m so grateful for the start they gave me. I’m just telling you because I really can’t hide much and it’s my nature to be all “hello there perfect stranger, let me tell you about my childhood triumphs, tragedies, and grass-related rashes” and because my cookbook sprang from this food blog, it would feel fake and strange to be carrying on writing to you as if nothing had happened. This is a big deal. This cookbook has been my life, years before Penguin even approached me to write it. I just knew it had to happen.

Whenever anything else was getting me down, I had this cookbook to comfort me: I’m a real published author, like Nigella Lawson and Ann M Martin and Virginia Woolf, my words can be bought, my recipes are on paper in peoples’ homes, becoming part of their lives, my name is on a cover page, I’m real. And so when I received this news, I felt like an utter, embarrassed failure. Like the fabled Emperor upon having his lack of New Clothes pointed out. Like maybe if my book had sold better, if I’d done more, if I’d quit my job sooner, if I’d not been so honest on here, if I’d been in Auckland, if I’d been richer with more resources, if I’d been better…then things might be different.

So uh, luckily for you all I held off from writing this blog post while I was entrenched in that particular swamp of miserable self-pity (I’m the only one allowed to pity me, thank you very much.)

This is where I’m at now: still really very unhappy, which I think is quite understandable, yeah? But pragmatic. Dignified. I’m not actually a failure. A major publishing house approached me, I wrote a book, a team of wonderful talented friends helped give it life, it was published, I can still go into bookstores and find myself immortalised alongside authors who have had a massive impact on my life (okay, alongside Nigella) and it’s still a really, really brilliant book. I mean, it has references to Homer Simpson and Ron Swanson and The Big Chill, but also to classic French sauce techniques and traditional hand-made ice cream and what I imagined to be Americana. It has a chapter of recipes you can make when you might be kinda tipsy. It has halloumi cheesecake and apple crumble for breakfast and a cake with sachet juice powder in it and a vegan chocolate cake that I’ve been making since I was about eight years old. It’s so excellent and I’m still so proud of it and of myself. It was not an overnight success (okay, some might say it was not at all a success, but some can go stand on a piece of Lego) and I will not be an overnight success, but I’m gonna get there.

At times like this I like to think of one of my idols, Broadway star Idina Menzel. She got a record deal off the back of her being in the cult-hit/actual-hit Broadway show RENT. She made the most amazing, confessional stream-of-consciousness overproduced album, the record company didn’t know what to do with her, and after a vaguely successful lead single, they dropped her. Now she’s got a Tony award for being Elphaba in Wicked, she’s the voice of a lead character in Frozen, one of the most successful Disney movies yet, and she’s performing in Radio City Hall in New York this month. Original copies of her debut album now sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. And look at another idol of mine, TV character Leslie Knope. In the face of adversity, budget cuts, uncooperative gatekeepers and incompetency, she Did A Lot Of Stuff (I’m getting tired here and don’t want this blog post to go on forever, so just watch Parks and Recreation, okay? Start from season 2.)

Also – I mean – at least I had my dream come true at all, for a little bit. It’s not like everyone who did buy my book has to throw it in the bin by law now. The recipes are still great. And to be fair, this is ultimately something that just affects me. It’s not like I have a failed charity or…other failed good thing. It’s just one person’s cookbook. You don’t even need to care that this has happened to me. It’s one of those “You are Lisa Simpson” moments and there will be other publishers and other opportunities and other huge, spectacular things. I’m so unsure and yet so sure of that at the same time.

My ambition to be a Lorde-Kanye-One-Direction level famous cookbook author has not wavered in the slightest, in fact it still hasn’t occurred to me that I might have any other path in life. (There’s an upside to studiously ignoring logic! Strident self-belief!) But if nothing else, it’s good to know I can still make small, chocolate cake-sized dreams come true, all by myself.

And I am now what you might call “professionally single”. Which is my spin doctor way of saying “deeply unemployed and set adrift upon a cruel river of uncertainty”. But yeah, I am still full of words and ideas and recipes and ice cold brilliance and if anyone important is reading this and wants to make something of it, you know who to call. (Call me. Just in case you’re so important that you’ve forgotten how to pick up on subtle hints.)
And uh, speaking of framing things so they suit you, I guess I could call my book a cult hit now? An underground sensation? A huge, important point on my timeline, but not the last one. With that in mind, there’s no better time to rush into shops or online to buy this book, if you haven’t already. It’s so good, and nothing will ever change that.
PS: a terrific radiant humble thing that happened to me lately is that I had writing published on The Toast! Which I correctly believe is one of the very best websites on the whole internet. 
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title from: Paramore, The Only Exception. I love song, with its mix of learned doubt yet unwavering hope. 
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music lately: 
Ida Maria, Oh My God. Her voice is all husky and aggressive and gorgeous and so is this song. 
Spice Girls, Too Much. Viva forever! 
Frank Ocean, Bad Religion. His Channel Orange album remains perfect and this song remains burningly, achingly, hurts-to-listen-to-it good. 
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next time: hopefully some really cool news or even slightly cool news. Or just news that is neutral but not sad and involving a long drawn-out blog post about my many feelings regarding it. Also: I made halloumi and hash brown burgers AND jam so it will likely be a recipe for one of those cool things. 

it’s been this way, since christmas day, dazzled, doused in gin

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For all that I’m really messy, inside and out, and will spend long stretches of time putting my nailpolish bottles into order by colour spectrum while ignoring, say, the dishes, every now and then I can really Get It Together and Be Organised. 
Every year, commencing 2006, I’ve held a big dinner party for flatmates and friends, which started as a way to toast ourselves and do something nice together before we all part ways for the summer. And that’s how it continued, because it’s a pretty decent concept that doesn’t require messing with. Last year Tim and I couldn’t have one because we’d just moved house and everything felt too difficult, but I feel like a good tradition should be malleable and flourish, rather than rigid and immoveable. 

And then, because why be merely fancy when you could be fancy in italics, Kate helped embiggen everything with her beauteous hand-made menus and table-setting ideas. It was dreamy, which is my favourite way for things to be or have been or have potential to be.

I was proud of myself at how it all worked out – it was a very last-minute fandango, but I managed to cook everything myself (including FOUR KILOS of pork belly, I mean really) and have it all appear ready to eat at a reasonable hour. Which may not sound like rocket science, but y’know, my oven is small while my ambitions are sky-high.

Speaking of, every year I use this as an opportunity to make a significant pudding. Like the year I made Baked Alaska. This year’s concept was not as impressive as I’d have liked, but luckily my concept of “not as impressive as I’d liked” is a bit like my concept of “corporate, office-friendly clothes” – quite, quite different to most other people’s.

So: berry ice cream pavlova layer cake! Two hastily thwacked-together discs of meringue, some insta-ice cream, and some preturnaturally glossy red pomegranate seeds, and you have yourself a rather fascinatingly-textured and terrifically-flavoured and most crucial of all, monumentally instagrammable pudding.

I know, pavlova is not necessarily that simple, but the good thing about this is that you can be a lot more confident about the making and baking, since it’s going to be buffered up with ice cream and covered in icing sugar and it doesn’t matter in the slightest if it cracks or deflates or, heck, breaks in two, because everything can be squished back together.

While my patriotism at the level of “New Zealand, it’s okay I GUESS” it is nice to graciously nod to the classic pavlova and time of year that xmas falls upon – high summer! – with this cold, fruity confection. You can use an electric beater, obviously, but all I have is a whisk and I managed just fine, and there’s nothing like standing in your underwear on a humid day furiously whisking egg whites to a stiff meringue to make you feel tantamount to Xena, Warrior Princess.

berry ice cream pavlova layer cake 

a recipe by myself. It looks complicated but that’s just because I’m the hand-holding type (hand-holding sounds much nicer than micro-management, yeah?) You could use cream or yoghurt instead of coconut milk but now it’s entirely dairy-free, which seems to suit a lot of people I know, so hurrah!

4 egg whites
200g sugar
1 teaspoon cornflour
2 teaspoons lemon juice or white vinegar

2 cups frozen berries (I used a packet of frozen mixed berries since they were cheapest, but plain frozen strawberries would be rad)
1/2 a can (although possibly more) coconut milk

Set your oven to 160 C/320 F and line a baking tray with baking paper. Using a 20cm caketin, or your own circle-drawing prowess, trace two circles on this sheet of baking paper. It doesn’t matter if they’re very close together. 

In a very clean, non-plastic bowl, whisk the egg whites briskly with a pinch of salt until soft peaks form. This means that the egg whites will be foamy and thickened, but not shiny, and when you lift the whisk up some mixture rises up with it but sinks back down into the bowl – if that makes sense. 

Continue whisking, despite your sore arms, and as you do this, slowly add the sugar a tablespoon or so at a time. The mixture will thicken and get shiny and bright white, continue whisking in the sugar and as hard as you can until the mixture is stiff and when you lift up the whisk, the mixture follows but stays quite still. Spread the mixture evenly between the two circles you’ve drawn on the baking paper, piling up the meringue mix and then smoothing it out so that they’re fairly evenly flat on top. You can be pretty aggressive with the mixture by this stage, so don’t worry.

Place this in the oven and bake for around an hour, although check at 40 minutes – it should look firm and dry and a little browned. Turn the oven off and allow the pavlovas to slowly cool in there, although I admit, I got impatient and took them out after half an hour of cooling. 

To serve, place one pavlova half on a pretty plate. Blast the frozen berries and coconut milk together in a food processor till they turn into a magical purple ice cream. Spoon/spread this immediately on top of the pavlova on the plate, and top with the other pavlova. Dust with icing sugar to cover any inevitable cracks and pile on some pomegranate seeds if you’ve got ’em, although fresh strawberries, raspberries, or simply more icing sugar would also be rad.

It may just be all the Poinsettia (fizzy white wine, cranberry juice, Cointreau) that I’d allowed myself to consume by this point, but this was damn spectacular. There’s something deliciously fun about the soft, dissolvingly sugary crispness of room temperature pavlova against creamy, freezing, tart berry ice cream. The juicy crunch of pomegranate seeds on top provides further antidote to all the sweetness, while still being friendly with the berry flavours in the ice cream. And they look SO pretty. The pavlova layers are a little bit of a pain to slice through, but by the time people get to pudding they’re not going to mind a hasty scoop of this in a paper bowl.

It was a wonderful, happy, lovely night. We listened to old xmas records and ate candy canes and talked good talk and also amassed a large pile of food brought by everyone to drop off at the foodbank. Even though I was a little oddly apprehensive that I was being pushy and annoying at trying to make this happen, perhaps mostly because everyone’s so busy this time of year and frankly a lot of my reasons for doing this are highly selfish, it was just a dreamy, excellent night and I’m so glad it happened.

And then on Saturday I went on a wedding dress shopping montage! Mostly with Kate, although I was joined by Kim later, with a cameo from Sarah-Rose, and man it was a strange but amazing day. Something about trying on dresses to get married in – I mean, I could marry Tim in the next five minutes very casually and not think twice about it, yet I could hardly look at myself in the mirror while trying on these beautiful dresses and when asked what occasion I was shopping for, I was all “a wedding…mine…pretty much…”

I did dally with the idea of a black wedding dress but ultimately what I was really wanting is just EVERY glorious dress I tried on. You’d think I’d get used to vicarious thrills sometime since there are so many in my life, but nope. There’s a particular ache at trying on a perfect garment then sadly putting it back on the rack.

I just love material possessions so much, okay. 

I’ve narrowed it down to two and a half potential definites, and if you’re curious, I don’t care if Tim or indeed all of the internet sees the dress before the wedding, but I do – now – want something very pale or white. Basically, it was a weekend as swoony as swoony can be, and I’m very pleased with that, even though now that it’s Monday it all feels like a million half-remembered dreams ago…
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title via: Placebo’s moodily terrific Taste In Men.
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Music lately:

Planet Z, Idina Menzel. Admittedly my love for her and my fondness for her early music is perhaps more boundless than most, but if there’s a song more bonkersly endearing and mid-nineties than this then I’ll probably listen to that too.

Frosty the Snowman, Fiona Apple. Have I said the word dreamy too many times in this post? I care not. This is the dreamiest.
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Next time: I’m gonna make a list of every recipe I know that is good for xmas presents and so on and so forth and it will be ever so much fun! 

i found my freedom on blueberry hill

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Blueberry muffins may seem kinda basic, in every mean sense of the word. But there’s no need to frown at yourself for making life as easy as possible. And sometimes all I want is something simple. I want a decent blueberry muffin recipe that’s going to be fast to make, while being so much nicer than tough old cafe versions, yet reminding me how they became such a ubiquitous comestible. I have had no time or energy over the last ten days to blog – which makes me so frustrated but also there’s not much I can do about it – so these muffins kinda fit where I’m at currently. Also, I should’ve known from the start that my queen Nigella Lawson would have a perfect recipe in her important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

While most of my tiredness and inability to blog is because of work, I did have a rather distracting and tiring weekend away with friends in New Plymouth. It’s a five hour drive, which, in the burning summery heat that everyone but me loves, felt like ninety hours, and either way takes it out of you. Admittedly I was a passenger, knitting and drinking cider with a friend who was also a passenger, while Tim was doing allllll the driving, but the point is, I’m the hero here.

We were in New Plymouth for the annual NZ Tattoo and Art Festival, which was so much fun – okay, if there had been more food and air-con and more places to sit that would’ve been good, but apart from that: lovely. Everyone was friendly, there were older people and younger people and families with toddlers and children, really old people with tattoos and couples with no visible tattoos and people with full Ta Moko and people wearing head to toe leather or fancy dresses or whatever, really, and so many amazing tattoos and stunning artworks. It was all just rather non-judgemental and nice. There were artists from all over the world there, including the talented and babein’ Lauren Winzer, whom I was highly thrilled to have booked for a beautiful tattoo. It was interesting lying there on a bench as hundreds of people walked past, but also oddly relaxed – the occasional thumbs up or smile from interested passers-by broke through the general blur and hum that they all melted into as I zoned out.

I could go on about tattoos, but all you really need to know about our weekend is that we saw a person walking two llamas, who were wearing leis, just casually down the street. As if walking a llama through town isn’t whimsy enough, let’s give them some flower garlands. And also that we spent our Saturday night knitting, laughing at the increasingly ridiculous mash-ups on the one terrible radio station we could find, wincing at our fresh stabs, and eating pizza. 

But blueberry muffins though: don’t dismiss them. I forgot how tender homemade muffins are, like a cake but with none of the potential toughness of crumb that you can get – not to sound like the start of an infomercial, where some person in a black and white video is crying elaborately because their cake is too firm to eat easily – just buttery, soft, barely containing the juicy bursts of blueberry. And also ideal for freezing and taking to work and microwaving back to life as a day-embiggening snack.

Also…I’m not sure if you can work this out on your own or not, but don’t feel like you have to use blueberries here. I mean, if you don’t have them, you could always replace them with raspberries or diced apple or chocolate chips or even just leave everything out and add lots of cinnamon and vanilla. Don’t be held back by your lack of blueberries.

blueberry muffins

from Nigella Lawson’s important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess

75g melted butter
200g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
75g sugar
pinch salt
200ml buttermilk (or plain yoghurt, or milk and a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar)
1 egg
200g blueberries (or thereabouts)

Set your oven to 200 C/400 F. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with paper cases, or grease them confidently. 

In a mixing bowl, stir together all the dry ingredients. Tip in the buttermilk, the egg, and the blueberries, and carefully mix together as briefly as you can – I recommend using a spatula, to really dig everything together with the minimum of agitation. Equally, don’t get nervous and just gently pat it or something, I mean, it needs to be mixed together. Just not beaten or whisked, you know? 

Spoon even quantities into each muffin hole and bake for around 15-20 minutes. These are perfect after about ten minutes of cooling, split and spread thickly with butter. 

They’re gonna be all unevenly shaped, due to them being homemade and all, but the only problem this poses is “what’s your strategy to grab the biggest one without looking too uncouth in front of your guests”.

So wow, huh, thirty days hath November and all of a sudden we’re at day thirty. Did you know that I have a cookbook? And that it would make a really great xmas present (or other seasonal holiday present, or indeed, just a “hi I think you’re pretty excellent” present) for pretty much everyone you know? Including babies, who might as well get learning about pop culture references and halloumi early, and who can strengthen their gums by chewing on the softly embossed hardcover?

I’m not going to try and push it to the point of alienating you all, but it would be pretty foolish not to do it a little, right? I know this cookbook is amazing and I want it to be a ridiculous, life-changing success, and ’tis the season for buying stuff heedlessly.

(PS: in case you’re wondering, my tattoo is at the bafflingly glamorous healing stage, where it’s scabbed and itchy, but once it’s healed you’ll probably get to see it, if you like. I adore it, and while it’s just one of many ways to express yourself, I rather love the feeling of being in control of my own skin and of it being a canvas – might as well, since there’s so much of it, not going anywhere – and seeing little flashes of colour and beauty out of the corners of my eyes every day.)
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title via: Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill, both mellow and sorrowful at the same time. And generally excellent. 
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music lately:

Idina Menzel, Let it Go, from the new Disney movie Frozen. OH WOW. I mean, I’m never-not obsessed with her, but this song is amazing, and I feel like it could be – okay, not a new Defying Gravity. But it’s really something. Just get through the first verse, which admittedly could just sound like any other things-are-about-to-get-heartfelt-here song. And then the chorus! Oh, the chorus.

Kanye West, Bound 2. Kimye 4 life! 
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next time: hopefully it won’t be another ten days till the next blog post. In fact, it definitely won’t, if I have to wear my laptop like a jaunty hat. So that it’s always there to take the opportunity to write on, I mean, not because I think that wearing my laptop on my head is the solution or anything.

like lorne green you know i get paid, like caprese and with the basil

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“I’m so tired! This sucks! I should’ve got up at 3am when I had the chance and used that time to blog!” – a thing I just said, at 6.52am. With more imprecation. From which you could deduce that while I’m very dedicated to this blog, my brain is not always that dedicated to my being a human. Yes, my sleeping has become worse than ever, leaving me oddly nostalgic for the time when I was merely a terrible sleeper. Yes, I’m going to go see a doctor about it. Yes: I will talk about cake soon. 
This weekend was the ideal mixture of ridiculous and spontaneous yet cosy and involving a lot of sitting down in my own house. There were spontaneous beers and a launch party and a photoshoot for a local magazine, but there was also a lot of Bob’s Burgers and pizza, a trip to Holland Road to buy more yarn for exciting new knitting projects, and a Sunday evening watching Fire Walk With Me  with some babefriends. 
I needed some basil for the magazine photoshoot. They always come sheathed in plastic at the supermarket, so when I unwrapped it, it turned out I’d scored the most abundantly leafy plant. Basil in everything! Summer is coming! That, plus the fact that I wanted to bake something for the friends coming to watch the movie, but also knew we had dubiously meagre ingredients in the pantry, led to some creativity: A tin of black doris plums plus some sugar with an explosion of basil leaves in it might be the perfect early Spring cake. The wintry stewed plums, handily seasonal all year round in their can, plus the musky, smoky hint of summery basil – the faint spicy pepperiness of the leaves providing warmth while also heralding the warmer weather to come. Or something. I told you I haven’t had much sleep. I stand by the use of “heralding” in regards to a cake. 
I’m really sorry that this cake uses a food processor – if you can work out a way to get the basil all up on the sugar efficiently without one then by all means, do it, and then mix the rest of the ingredients by hand. In my defense, I do have a lot of recipes that don’t require a food processor. And you could always hunt around for a friend who does have one, then make this at their house and eat it with them. Cake! Bringing people together. Though: the food processor thing means that this is ready to go in about ten minutes with a minimum of fuss. 
The cake is sweet, yet headily perfumed, yet still very straightforward and not requiring too much defensive explanation. The plum syrup in the icing really doesn’t add any extra flavour, but it does become a fantastically molten-fancy-lipstick colour which looks rather beauteous with the extra basil leaves strewn artlessly (haha, I arranged them SO carefully, with instagram in mind) over the top, their rich green even more glowingly vivid against the pink. Speaking of glowing vividly, Fire Walk With Me was equally hilarious, distressing, and terrifying, as though David Lynch had set out to make a parody David Lynch film. It did have a cameo by David Bowie, but – cruellest blow – the character James was in it heaps. James, you’re so dull. No wait, the cruellest blow of all – no Audrey Horne. 

plum and basil cake

a recipe by myself

150g sugar

1/2 cup (very loosely packed) basil leaves
150g butter, softened
2 eggs
150g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons milk
1 400g tin of plums
1/2 cup icing sugar

Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper. 

In a food processor, blend the sugar and basil leaves until the leaves are all dispersed and chopped up and the sugar is flecked with green. Throw in the butter and process again till the sugar is incorporated and the mixture is fluffy and light, then throw in the eggs, flour, and baking powder and process again to a thick batter. Pour in the milk and process again. Roughly slice the plums (or kind of hack them apart with a spoon, which is what I did) and add them to the mixture. Spatula all of this into the cake tin and bake for around 40 minutes. Truthfully: I lost track of time at this point and wasn’t watching the clock, so it may be closer to 50 minutes. Once cool, mix together the icing sugar with a tablespoon or three of the canned plum syrup and drizzle it over the cake. Scatter over basil leaves if you like. They’re more decorative than necessary for flavour, as the sugar provides all you need. So remove them before eating, if you like.

Tonight – adding somewhat to my general state of “whoa, um, okay” – Tim and I are flying up to Auckland for my cookbook launch party tomorrow. Want to come along? Email me! It will be MC’d by Rose Matafeo and I will be making a speech and there will be snacks and drinks and books for sale and really, none of that is concerning me so much as how I’m agonising over what to wear. Got to look fancy and Auckland-ready, but not like I’m trying too hard, but also spectacular. Which is an issue: trying too hard is one of my signature looks. I really am so, so very excited though – I will make sure there are plenty of photos and so on from the night to share with you all. 
Wish me luck! Just kidding, I make my own luck. 
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title via: Beastie Boys, Ch-check it Out. I love these guys so much. Not least because they’re always talking about food. 
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music lately:
David Dallas, Runnin’ – really feeling the lyrics and the beat and the chords and everything in this song. I mean like in a “I relate to this sentiment really hard” kind of way. 
Icona Pop, I Love It. I don’t care, I love it. Sometimes you just want to shout that really loud. 
Porcelain Raft, Drifting In and Out. Let’s get dreamy. Thanks to Amy for mentioning it in the first place. 
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Next time: better have slept. Will be reporting back from my launch party. Reporting on its massive, amazing success, I hope!  

we like lovin’ yeah, and the wine we share

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A week and a bit into the cookbook author life, and I’m still very, very much at the pinch-me stage. If you’re new to this blog, hello! Get ready to co-wallow in all my feelings and cake batter.

Margaret Atwood probably has absolutely no knowledge of this. But still! But still. But still!

As Tim will tell you (or “my partner Tim” as it rather hilariously refers to him in my cookbook every single time, a bit like how the Baby-sitters Club books would tell you about all sitters’ family histories in chapter two of every last book on the offchance you were picking one up for the first time and just had to know whose stepmom was whose) and in fact as I will tell you right now, and not for the first time, I am a cool mix of wildly insecure and wildly over-secure. So I veer between reading my cookbook and saying “Tim, I’m such an amazing writer, how do you cope with it?” and being numb of brain and in a crumply heap in bed and requiring constant bolstering just to lift my head up for reasons I can’t even quite work out. Or simply feeling like this will in fact all be like the bit in the Princess Bride where – spoiler – Princess Buttercup is presented to the people but then the old woman comes out yelling “Boooooooo” and saying she’s princess of nothing. Luckily nothing specifically like that has happened. Or even vaguely similar to that. Yet?

But seriously, seeing my name there with Margaret Atwood’s on a whiteboard (“above her!” said someone. “Near her whatsoever!” I replied) filled me with so many feelings that I hardly knew what to do with myself. On the one hand: of course. On the other hand: how did I manage to fool everyone into letting that happen?

Speaking of such moments, the book launch party at Unity Books was completely wonderful, almost unbearably so – I wanted to claw back the time as it was racing past, just to make the whole thing not move so quickly. It felt almost sick, I was so happy, which is a strange way of putting it but it’s like all the emotions in me created a power surge that left me a bit light-headed. There was a great big crowd and so many lovely friends and cool people and Julie Clark of Floriditas launched it with a speech full of nice things about me. And then they announced my name and I stepped up to the mic and everyone cheered! Which is of course, fairly obvious at my own book launch, but wow, as Irene Cara sang: what a feeling. I am a cookbook author. A real one. And I can tell you one thing I’m certain and entirely secure of: I gave a terrific speech. Look, I just really love giving speeches.

A long line of people genuinely wanted their book signed, which was incomprehensibly exciting. Also, I was reminded of how changeable and hopeless my handwriting is. It’s…creative?

Being the heedless neophyte that I am, I forgot to organise any photos to be taken and didn’t get one single damn selfie the entire night. Despite my careful “I’m an auuuthorrr” outfit of dramatic black Kowtow sack dress and enormous witch hair. (Admittedly, my hair was in a very strange headspace – ha – that night, insisting on being fluffier than a Persian cat, but in the end I think it worked. Not sure why I’m compelled to point this out.) I also forgot to enlist Tim or anyone to video my speech for posterity/family/etc and feel a bit foolish about that. Now all I have are these stupid awesome memories. Unity Books did, however, take a few snaps on the night for their sweet write-up. Unity Books is one of my favourite places in Wellington, nay, the earth, and it was marvelous to be able to get all launched there.

So, the cookbook, huh? Last night I made my Chocolate Red Wine Cake from it, which – and maybe I am just saying this because it’s my own recipe from my own book, but I’m pretty sure it’s also the truth – is a simple, amazing, reliable chocolate cake that tastes brilliant. Comfortingly slabby in size, dense without being too rich, cocoa-dark without being dry, and the warm rush of red wine helps emphasise everything good about the chocolate without tasting too much of sediment or tannin.


Still getting used to the stove at our flat. But I also rather like the ominous, craggy slash that appeared in the top of this cake, most likely because the heat was up too high (it’s really hard to tell on the dials of this unfriendly oven.)

I probably said it best in the book itself, so while I usually rewrite all recipes in my own words, it would be a bit pointless to do it here, yes? So, in my own words:

red wine chocolate cake

recipe from my own cookbook, Hungry and Frozen.

Red wine and chocolate always make sense together, never more so in this sophisticated, yet very plain cake – tall, proud, gleaming with glossy ganache. The red wine is absolutely present, though not overpowering – its oaky darkness going beautifully with the bitterness of the chocolate and cocoa. You don’t have to use your best red here – the sugar and butter rounds out any rough, tannin-heavy aspects that might not be so pleasant by the glassful. Nevertheless, make sure it’s actually drinkable. It doesn’t have to be pinot noir, either – really, as long as it’s red, it should do the trick. 

200g dark chocolate
200g butter
1 cup pinot noir
70g good cocoa
250g sugar
3 eggs
250g flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

200g dark chocolate, chopped roughly
½ cup cream

Set your oven to 180 C, and line the base of a 23cm springform caketin.

Roughly chop the chocolate and butter and slowly melt them together with the red wine in a pan over a medium heat. It’ll look like an unholy mess but it will come together. Allow to cool slightly, then whisk in the rest of the ingredients.

Scrape this liquidy batter into the caketin and bake for an hour, but check after 45 minutes. Once it has cooled, pour the cream into a pan and heat till just below boiling point. Remove from the heat, and stir in the chocolate till it melts to form a thick ganache. Pour over the cake. 

Speaking of things that are better in the book, the photo of the cake in there is so much better than mine that it’s laughable. Not least because the cake in the book was photographed in natural light, whereas mine above was photographed at night in a dimly lit room because two of our bulbs have blown and both of them are annoyingly particular and require hunting round a shop inevitably called “Mr Light Bulb” while you wonder how a shop can survive solely dedicated to said light bulbs, then see the price on the ones you need to replace. Also my cookbook photographers (and friends) Kim and Jason are spectacular.

My friend Kim, who took many of the photos in the cookbook, did a gorgeous blog post of some of the photoshoot outtakes (which are themselves gorgeous, despite not making it into the book), in case you’re a little curious about this cookbook but unconvinced by this blog post alone (which would be…slightly worrying, truth be told.)

I have to admit, I’m looking forward to things returning to normal now. Lies. I want things to get less and less normal. And I was woefully insufferable the day after the launch party because I hate things being over and get bad post-thing comedown. The publicity for the cookbook has been a lot of fun (and if you feel like you’ve been left out from hearing my schtick then get in touch, I love publicity) and yesterday I got to appear on Radio New Zealand with the excellent Kathryn Ryan, which was a real trip. Of course, in a practical sense, radio does need nonstop content. But I love RNZ and it felt like I’d really hit the big time, being able to appear on there. If you want to listen to my interview, why, you can do that here!

Finally it inevitably behooves me to say the following: if you want to buy my book, and your local shop doesn’t stock it (and I would like to add: hurrah for supporting local bookshops) there are some options for you. Unity Books, the wondrous shop where I had my launch, can ship the book anywhere in New Zealand or worldwide if you ask them nicely. It’s also available at Fishpond and Mighty Ape, so: choices ahoy!
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Title via: Gomez, Whipping Piccadilly. As a commenter on songmeanings.com said…actually you should just read the whole comment, it’s a bit unintentionally hilarious. Which is better than being intentionally hilarious and failing at it. Oh, and I really like this song.
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Music lately:

David Dallas, Runnin‘. oh damn this song is good. Also it was fun to then listen to New World In My View by King Britt, which it samples, and then Sister Gertrude Morgan’s I Got The New World In My View, which that samples. Amazing beats, all.

Wu-Tang Clan, I Can’t Go To Sleep. The title speaks the truth.

The time has come, the walrus said, to lie on the floor and listen to Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise over and over and over again. Twin Peaks always gets me with its dreaminess.
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Next time: whatever it ends up being, one of these days I will make and photograph something during the day on the weekend so I don’t have to be so balefully apologetic about these badly-lit shots. 

where troubles melt like lemon drops

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The laptop that I’ve written this blog on for several years now is continuing to suffer from a very specific condition that occurs when someone kicks a bottle of beer on top of it. At first I was so happy and baffled that it wasn’t me that did it for once, clumsy hoyden that I am, that it didn’t occur to me how long I might be without this precious technology, and how wince-makingly expensive fixing it would be, and how many files were on it. (But: Tim and I just discussed for the eighteenth time how, even with all his contrition, it is a miracle it wasn’t me that kicked over the beer first.)

So: take a good look, because this instagram, grainy and overcast with the Rise filter, is the only record I have left of the lemon cake with white chocolate buttercream that I made last week. All the nice photos I snapped from various angles are stuck somewhere in a no-person’s-land on my stupid beer-sodden laptop.

Which is excellent timing, since my cookbook is out on the 23rd of this month and I’m just starting to do publicity and it’s like “hey everyone, come check out my blog with this one badly-lit photo that I took on my phone”. But also, this is essentially a lovely problem, since I wouldn’t be worrying about it if I didn’t have a cookbook to promote in the first place, and the whole situation is still somehow rosily tinted with relief that it wasn’t me for once doing the stupidly clumsy, ruinous thing.

Tim is terribly apologetic though, of course. It wasn’t even nice beer.

Without twee photos to pad this out, I might as well cut straight to the chase. This cake is delicious. Lemon and white chocolate are rather wonderful together, both delicate flavours in cake form, but with the airy tang of the former lifting the richness of the latter, and vice versa. Both the cake and the icing are very easy, and the cake itself is dairy-free if that’s of use. Make sure you zest the lemon before juicing it for the cake – the feathery strands of zest look so pretty on top of the cake and add pure lemon-oil zing to the buttercream. Pistachios are less necessary, but they look really lovely with their muted dusty green against the swelling white icing, for what it’s worth.

lemon cake with white chocolate buttercream

A recipe by myself, with thanks to a loaf recipe from the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders book.

1/2 cup plain oil (rice bran is nice and doesn’t taste heavily oily)
1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
3 eggs
200g sugar
pinch salt
250g flour
2 tsp baking powder

Set your oven to 180 C and line the base of a 22cm caketin with baking paper. You could probably make this easily in a 20cm tin as well, which would likely result in a smaller-but-taller cake.

Whisk together the oil, lemon juice, eggs and sugar till thick, then sift in the flour and baking powder and continue to stir briskly for another couple of minutes, until the mixture is thick and smooth and your upper arms are burning. Tip into the caketin and bake for about an hour, but check it around 45 minutes. It probably won’t rise very high. Allow to cool before icing.

75g soft butter
2 cups icing sugar, sifted if stupidly lumpy
100g white chocolate, decent stuff if you can

Beat the butter and icing sugar together- it will likely end up very thick and crumbly. This is okay. Melt the white chocolate and stir it in to the butter mixture, adding a little hot water if you need to, if it’s far too thick. Carefully spread across the top of the cooked cake once it’s cooled. Top with lemon zest and pistachios if you like.

Seriously, what can I do? Copy-paste that instagram photo again here? In the absence of photos, use your imagination to perceive that light, densely fluffy lemon-tinted cake spread thickly with buttery white chocolate icing is really excellent stuff, and worth your while for sure.

Other things you could look at instead of the photos of this cake, trapped in a stickily beer-tainted laptop:

Remember how I’m trying to read more books written by women? This wonderful story is another addition to that list, as is Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Don’t Tell Arthur by Nancy Mitford, and The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton.

 Trinkets.
 I finished my knitting project! I am very proud of myself. I tend to have lots of grandiose ideas that I throw myself into and then never finish, so there was some danger that this blanket would end up much the same. But look! I made a thing! (Don’t look too closely, or you will see a lot of dropped stitches and uneven knitting tension. This blanket is a bit of a Monet. )

And…introducing my cookbook, by way of this little ten second video!

Just to sensibly reiterate, my cookbook will be on the shelves of all nice bookstores on August 23, and I will be doing some giveaways in the leadup. I had my first interview for it today, which was partly thrilling, because I like talking about myself – in a way, every interview is like a therapy session – and partly terrifying, because what if I come across as a dick, or if I made no sense, or I got nervous and rose in upwards inflections at the end of every sentence? But overall, looking back, the person I was talking to was very nice and I felt like I represented myself well enough. There’s a lot of new land to navigate – I’ve been wanting this book to exist for so long, with so much of myself, that it’s strange to be right on the edge of it all. Trying to organise my schedule and a book launch that’s vaguely credible and pay all my bills and still work full time and also make sure that I’m not defined by this book entirely, that I don’t live or die by its success (considering I’m the kind of person who lives or dies by the most relatively trivial things, like are there rice bubbles left for my breakfast this morning, this is a bit of a challenge.) Hopefully you can bear with me through all of this…especially as it’s very exciting…

Till then, here’s a small, fun interview I did for mac+mae’s 100 days project.
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title via the song that always guarantees tears in my eyes, Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Judy Garland. I am totally a friend of Dorothy.
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music lately

Irene Cara, Fame. Gosh, my obsession with this soundtrack knows no bounds, and it might sound completely pride-goeth-before-a-fall but it felt like a good time to play the title track.

The Carter Family, Can the Circle Be Unbroken. Ye olde country to get you right in the ye olde heart.
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next time: Real photos! From my camera!  

everything i love is on the table, everything i love is out to sea

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Here are some things that happened over the weekend.
Tim and I drank a lot of coffee and started planning our wedding. We went to see Unknown Mortal Orchestra live at Bodega. They were amazing. A guy collapsed in front of me while we were there, which sent a shot of adrenaline to my heart like the “a shot of adrenaline to the heart” scene in Pulp Fiction, but by the time I ran to tell the bar staff his friend had taken him outside. I made burnt butter madeleines for friends Kate and Jason as a small token of my gratitude for giving us this beautiful formica table that they no longer needed. I’ve always loved formica, but it’s near-impossible to get hold of in Wellington, since every cafe and their mother seems to love it, too. 
And I spent three hours – three whole hours to the minute – huddled under the dining table, with Tim, and our friends Kim and Brendan, during a big earthquake, and through aftershock-after-aftershock. So, uh, yeah. The aftershocks continued throughout the night, when Tim and I (I dazedly, Tim pragmatically) gathered medication and a jacket and bottled water and then went to bed. I slept somewhere between midnight and 3.00am, and that was…it. There have been aftershocks all morning. The table that this laptop is sitting on wobbled just before, and it probably will again. Right now my legs and hands are shaking and my head is sort of spacey and my butt and heart are twitching in a syncopated motion and I sincerely can’t tell what is tiny aftershock and what is me. 
I’d like to acknowledge a ton of things: everything rattled fearsomely but nothing broke, we weren’t hurt, and Christchurch has dealt with this kind of thing x a million. Three hours is a long time to spend under a table, and admittedly we probably could’ve come out after an hour? Maybe even twenty minutes. But not only did it feel marginally safe under there, it was distracting. We had an instant world to focus our energies in. After the first big, terrifying quake finally subsided, we grabbed a bottle of whisky. Incidentally, the bottle Kim and Brendan gave us for an engagement present, and which we promised we’d drink with them sometime. This wasn’t what we’d pictured.
a whole new world.
Soon it acquired chips, pretzels, diet lift, dried fruit, knitting, the laptop that I’m typing this on, soothing music, cushions and blankets, and, as I joked weakly on Twitter, “a French Quarter”. While we were all varying degrees of scared, there was some bleak comedy happening under the table as well – like the shrieks of people excitedly playing Candy Crush on their phones jolting the rest of us, or when I elected to play Walk the Line instead of God’s Gonna Cut You Down (even if I don’t believe, Johnny Cash sounds like he means it), or our various Tetris-like attempts to fit comfortably under there. And just the fact that this was our house, and we had invited our friends there, gave me this unusual ability to channel general we-can-get-through-this Julie Andrews levels of brisk practicality. I mean, I was still kind of a mess, but honestly, relatively Andrews-esque. No one can brisk like her. After we’d dropped Kim and Brendan off at their house, I ended up having to ask Tim to pull over because I was having a small panic attack, I think my brain finally exhaled and stopped putting on a show. Later that night, after trying to lull myself into a false sense of security with Parks and Recreation, which is a surefire way to make myself feel like the world is a better place, I lay in bed absolutely awake, every particle of my body alert and unwilling to sleep. Tim, meanwhile, happy-go-lucky bastard that he is, was clearly half asleep already. And then he was all “we could just talk about stuff if you want, like the wedding” and so we did, even though I knew both of us were only trying to distract me. And it was so damn sweet I nearly cried. Oh no, wait, I did.
We’re both home today, partly because of my barely-slept NOPE in response to the world, but mostly legitimately – lots of CBD workers have been sent home or advised not to come in at all – trying to stay calm and ride out the aftershocks. My nerves are coming to pieces like the frayed end of a ribbon and everything feels very weird. A mix of “is this even that bad?” and “is this our life now? Waiting for earthquakes?” 
In the middle of all that, I found a madeleine that didn’t make it to the container for Kate and Jason, and ate it. Still good. 
Sweetly ruffled surface and palm-friendly shape aside,  these madeleines may look a little dryly unpromising from the outside. However each bite rewards your mouth with dense, buttery sponge, made rich with almonds and the purposeful, necessary burning of the butter. Madeleine tins aren’t the hardest thing to come by, or else I wouldn’t have one, but I’m sure you could try making this in cupcake liners and something delicious would still happen. These do take a bit of effort and musclework, but sheesh, your friends just gave you a whole table! 
burnt butter madeleines

recipe from issue 148 of that favourite magazine of mine, Cuisine. I doubled this, and used a whole 70g packet of ground almonds, because I just did.

150g butter
75g sugar
2 eggs
30g ground almonds
75g flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Firstly, get your madeleine tin ready and set your oven to 180C/350F. In a small pot, melt the butter over a high heat, and then let it continue to bubble away scarily until it goes from a bright yellow frothy mixture to a darker, more burnished gold. Sit it in a sink of cold water, or tip into a cold bowl, so it quickly cools down. Whisk the eggs and sugar together for about five minutes, till pale and thick, then continue to whisk in the ground almonds. Sift in the flour and baking powder, alternating with pouring in the butter, and fold it all together gently. Let it sit for fifteen minutes, by which stage it should have thickened up quite a bit. Brush the madeleine tin with melted butter or a neutral oil (or some of the residual burned butter in the pan) and spoon small dollops of the mixture into the tin. Bake for ten minutes, then repeat with remaining mixture, allowing the cooked madeleines to cool on a rack as you go. 

Am fresh out of adjectives, to the point of narrow-eyedly using the Thesaurus app on this laptop for the word ‘good’. I can advise, therefore, that these are outstanding, sterling, and simply ace. Like many foodstuffs I like, these are a pleasing melange (that was the thesaurus too) of fancy and plain, soft and spongy and sweet and yet calmly straightforward of flavour – despite the burned butter’s richness that I mentioned, they really just taste like sublime (that adjective was mine!) cake.

And I’d like to just mention again that I love the table. Formica is a little nostalgic, a lot practical, and looks damn sweet in photos. 
Today, despite my nerves, brittle and fragile like a crisp meringue, I am enjoying just spending time with Tim and consuming more Orange is the New Black and knitting. It’s a bummer we’re here under these strange, nerve-wracking circumstances, but we might as well try to enjoy it while we’re here and be thankful for what we’ve got. It’s so odd going from being anxious about vague nothingness, to suddenly having that plus anxiety about potential reality, but on the other hand this affliction means I’m pretty much always fight-or-flight ready anyway? It’s not right, but it’s okay, as the great Whitney Houston once sang. I’m also super grateful for Twitter – the importance of that instant feeling of not being alone can’t be overstated. Stay safe everyone, pals, suspicious non-pals, the indifferent. And if someone works out how to, I don’t know, throw an earthquake in jail, I’d be open to listening. Especially if there’s a robust rehabilitation programme and preventative societal change involved. 
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title via: Don’t Swallow the Cap, from The National’s marvelously dour new album, Trouble Will Find Me.
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music lately:
UMO’s song So Good At Being In Trouble. Bliss. And what a title.

Frank Sinatra, New York, New York. Rat Pack = soothing to me.

This isn’t music, but Tim and I listen to Bob Ducca’s list of ailments at least weekly, and did again on purpose last night. Makes me helpless with laughter every time.
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Next time: Um. No more quakes, please. Seriously.

people from the city having lunch in the park I believe that it’s called al fresco

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I had a day off today, on account of some time off in lieu I built up a while back at work. Strangely enough, I still found myself swatting away that creeping bleak Sunday evening feeling yesterday, even though I knew Monday was entirely mine. However it really was a lovely quiet little weekend. I baked, and Tim and I had burritos and grilled corn and Bloody Marias for brunch (the difference between a Mary and a Maria is vodka and tequila, to which I found myself asking aloud which was more of a brunch liquor, and tequila won because we felt like it, even though vodka had more of a morning feel to it. Yeah.) We also watched a lot of House of Cards and spent much time unpacking our swirling feelings around Top of the Lake and a few minutes unpacking Star Trek 2. I went to an exhibition launch at the City Art Gallery on Friday night and drank a lot of wine and all of a sudden it was Monday morning and all of today stretched out before me.

It all stretched out before me, because I slept in for seven minutes. On my day off. My body is annoying. And then, also annoying, I spent a lot of the morning curled up on the floor sniffling, on account of our landlord rebuffing Tim and I not once, but twice, in our request for a pet cat. Whether or not you’ve noticed that I talk about cats quite a lot, or have one tattooed on me, or have three paintings of cats on my wall, or whatever, the fact is I want a cat with every molecule of my being. It physically hurts my heart. And we just can’t have one, despite there being nothing in our tenant information about not having pets, or indeed, any reason whatsoever from our landlord, despite my very persuasive email. And apparently my yelling “I’m gonna take this to City Hall!” will have no effect, well, according to Tim. I really don’t want this to be the end of the road for Tim and Laura Having A Cat, but also I acknowledge that I’m not Leslie Knope and this isn’t a comical episode of Parks and Recreation where plotlines will be wrapped up neatly after some toiling. But I also feel like I can’t simply stop trying. Is there some kind of tribunal for if your landlord makes you cry because they just say no to a cat, without saying why?

But as I said, I did do some baking, as a means to a very specific end: work snacks. A few different factors – money, time, disorganisation, listlessness, money again – mean that my lunches for work are generally terrible. In that I’ve recently been having instant noodles for lunch, and that’s a distinct step up nutritionally and delicious-wise from what I used to eat. It’s a bit stupid but it’s the way it is: I can make myself elaborate (or at least decent) dinners or pretty weekend brunches or huge cakes, but I struggle to put any effort into lunch for work. Maybe because it’s hard to throw lots of time and money into something you’re going to wolf down under fluorescent lights, maybe because it’s hard to make something that is filling and that you look forward to and that you won’t get utterly sick of after five days (instant noodles, looking at you.) Maybe it’s just because I’ve only recently started to think about it, and it’s easy to fall into habits that require the least from your brain.

I do go through occasional bursts of inspiration, but I’m going to try to be more consistent now, so that I have the energy throughout the day to not fall asleep, and so that lunch isn’t something I dread yet long for because I’m so hungry but also know that it’s just dried noodles in a polystyrene cup. (They actually are pretty delicious as a snack, by the way, but they’re not that filling and day after day of them is not cool.)

Kinda typically, I completely screwed up one of my ventures, the granola bar. We might call them muesli bars in New Zealand, but that to me recalls memories of primary school morning tea, grimly dry, mealy, oaten briquettes which came in boxes of six or eight and occasionally had a mean sprinkling of chocolate chips on top or some vague apricot flavour. And also, oddly, a listening comprehension test from the same time where the narrator pronounced the word “muesli” as “mooooslie” and it was very distracting. Granola bars sounds a little more freewheeling and chewy and American and cool.

I made this recipe for Date Orange and Almond Granola Bars from The Moveable Feasts, a food blog I love – the author Amy just seems like someone I’d get on with in real life, and she is beautifully descriptive about food but in a relaxed way…I don’t know, a lot of food blogs these days have a really strange energetic style that I not only don’t enjoy reading, but also it blurs them all into one. This one though: it’s good. And this recipe seemed exactly what I was after to take to work – something sustaining and easy to make, and yet still snacky and sweet and enjoyable.

I then somehow added three times the required amount of oats. I don’t know how or why, just my usual heedlessness I suppose – it wasn’t till the next day that I worked it out – but it basically turned into granola, really really good granola, so all is not lost. Just diverted. I now have a container to take with me to work for eating by the handful, the spoonful, or the milky bowlful, depending on my needs.

So if you want to make the granola bars, just follow the link, and if you want to make this into granola bar granola…just triple the quantity of oats. On purpose.

Fortunately the other thing I made worked out just fine. I really like Fine Cooking magazine and figured I’d find something on its website that my brain could happily latch on to. Well, there was a little heedlessness involved here, too – this is supposed to be a recipe for Ginger Bars, but halfway through making it I realised I had no ground ginger. No harm done: I like cinnamon even better.

These have all the squish and sweetness of brownies, but with the pure rush of comforting warmth that cinnamon brings. They take about five minutes to make and get better each day. They just taste ridiculously good.

Cinnamon Bars

Adapted from a recipe from Fine Cooking magazine.

  • 180g soft butter
  • 4 tablespoons golden syrup
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 1 1/3 cups sugar
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • Pinch of salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line a brownie tin with baking paper.

Cream the butter, sugar, honey, golden syrup, cinnamon and salt together till light, airy, and pale. (Also: you should totally eat some at this point, it’s amazing.) Beat in the eggs, then stir in the flour and baking soda. Tip the lot into the brownie tin, sprinkle over a little more cinnamon if you like, and bake for about 25 minutes. It should still be a little tender in the middle, not entirely wobbly and liquidy, but not too firm either.

Cute plate, yeah?

So, now that I am armed with two snacks, one of which can double as a lunch, I’m feeling a little better about the week ahead. Cat-related tears aside (which resurfaced this evening) (which I should really call having-no-cat-related tears.)

PS: I wrote something about Tim’s and my trip to Nashville for a national newspaper here, and it ended up online, if you want to read it. We loved Nashville so much, I could’ve written triple what I did here.

title via: Lily Allen’s LDN. Sunny and grey at the same time. Oh why oh why would I want to be anywhere else?

music lately:

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, As Long as the Grass Shall Grow. Just really simple and beautiful.

Solange, Stillness Is The Move. This woman cannot make a musical misstep as far as my ears are concerned. I love this airy cover of the Dirty Projectors’ song.

Next time: I made some oven-baked risotto and it was as awesomely zero-effort as it was excellent-tasting.

 

i got a new rose, i got her good

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Guess who cooked something in the middle of the day and took advantage of the natural light to photograph it in.

 

You’d think I’d never seen natural light before. Could not stop photographing this cake. I really could take or leave sunshine most of the time anyway (which is lucky, since I live in Wellington) but it does help a cake look swell.

 

I am enamoured. I took so many photos that I could write this entire blog post in these stilted, sassy little sentences with images interspersed rather than my usual three-abreast enormous paragraphs. (I don’t know, I notice these things.) But will I? Ha! Folly!

Am currently riding the wobbly bicycle of two consecutive nights of appalling sleep. I had to stop – I counted – twelve times while typing the small paragraph directly above to yawn. For a while there it felt like I was back on the sleep wagon, but for the last month or so I’ve been reliably having horrifying visions just as I shut my eyes. I won’t even go into them here because I don’t want to freak you out too much (although, hmmm, a tamer one was a skull with two flailing arms reaching through the eye sockets) but there’s nothing like a chilling vision to make you suddenly very awake. I’ve also been waking up very early on weekends. Sigh. I’d happily be nocturnal if I didn’t have to also be administratively functional in an office during the day. But here I am. On a less alarming note…or is it…when I have managed to sleep, I have been having so many dreams about instagramming things. A majestic whale, swimming near the crystalline shore; a dazzlingly pink cherry tree in full bloom; a sunset as richly orange as a roasted apricot. What an age we live in! What an age I live in, in my head!

Back to the cake. On Sunday I wanted to bake something to be able to take along with me to augment my appalling work lunches (that’s a whole other story, but the condensed version is: for someone who likes food I’m not very good at feeding myself sometimes!) and I had a feeling we’d be seeing some friends later on in the day. “I’m going to make a goddamn marble cake” I announced with steely purposefulness, like some hardened cop in a buddy-movie having a moment of clarity. About deciding to make a marble cake. It was reading through old cookbook that I found in a bookfair once that reminded me of this confection: basic buttery sponge cake, divided into as many bowls as you like, each flavoured with a different tincture of some kind, and then dolloped back together to make a thrillingly dappled baked good. Back in my day, before I’d ever heard of the word “ombre” (and for shame, I read the dictionary for fun as a kid) marble cake was pretty high impact.

 

This one appealed to me particularly with its swirling of rosewater and dark chocolate-tinted cakes. Being fairly susceptible to romantic notions, eating something scented with roses feels gratifyingly sybaritic. Of course, rose isn’t for everyone – it’s a very particular flavour, delicate and sweet, but pour in too much and your cake will taste like shower gel. Here it subtly perfumes its half of the batter, contrasting the darker, plainer chocolate with a slightly floral, almost lemony burst of flavour. For a while I was a little sad I didn’t have any red food colouring to make the rose half of the batter pink, but decided it could be representing white roses. I also expressed some disappointment at no longer having that bunch of dead roses from while ago, which could’ve been in a vase in the background behind my rose cake. But then Tim said “mmm, synergy” and I didn’t feel so bad. In case you don’t work at an office of some kind, sometimes particular words or phrases get ruined through their overuse in work-related documents and communications. Don’t even get me started on “deliverables”. No wait – that word ruins itself. Enough of that ugliness though: this cake is very easy to make, it tastes like a dream, and looks pretty jazzy, especially if you do the old dusting-of-icing-sugar trick. If you’re really not sold on the concept of eating a cake that tastes like flowers, or indeed, if you just don’t have access to rosewater right now – I’d use a generous splash of vanilla instead, or anything you want, really. Peppermint extract could be fun, or you could make one half chocolate and one half orange.

Chocolate Rose Marble Cake

Adapted from The Chocolate Lovers Cookbook, one of a million bearing that title, but this one was published in 1985 and is by someone called Audrey Ellis. Thanks, Audrey! Ring tins are a little nervewracking because you can’t really line them with baking paper, but this cake slid out easily. Also: what they lack in that department, they make up for in being stupidly easy to cut nice even slices out of. I don’t know why, and I’m not sure I even care. It just happens.

1 tablespoon cocoa
2 tablespoons boiling water (this is a ridiculous quantity to boil, make yourself a cup of tea while you’re at it.)
250g soft butter
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
250g flour
4 teaspoons baking powder (sounds like a lot, yes? But go with it.)
1 tablespoon rosewater or 2 teaspoons rose flavoured essence

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Grease a ring caketin with butter, then shake a little flour round in it, getting rid of any excess by tapping at the base over the sink. In a small bowl, mix together the cocoa and boiling water (this helps intensify the cocoa flavour). Beat the butter and sugar together till light and fluffy, then beat in the eggs, followed by the flour and baking powder.  

Spoon roughly half the batter into another bowl. Into one bowl, mix the cocoa-water mix, and into the other bowl, the rosewater. Thoroughly mix each, then drop alternating spoonfuls around inside the ring tin, I mean, it’s not going to be perfectly checkerboard-like by any means, this is just a guide. As you can see, I just went for…whatever. Quickly swirl a knife once around the ring through the cake batter-  you don’t want to overswirl, or you’ll lose the pattern as they merge together while baking – and smooth out the top a little with the back of a spoon. Bake for about 45 minutes, or until springy on top. Leave in the tin for five minutes, then carefully turn out onto a plate. Dust with icing sugar.

Friends did indeed come round for coffee that afternoon. In a bid to prove I hadn’t just put the tablecloth out to make my photos look good on my blog, I left it there all day – in fact, it’s still there now, but I think the reasoning has progressed from justification to laziness. It was an excellent afternoon: we listened to records, made idle plans, caught up on happenings, ate a lot of cake. Idyllic stuff. Just the kind of thing I want to be doing with my Sunday.

 

Speaking of idyllic: I’m going to learn to knit! Snuglife! I can’t wait. That is, if I can bear to bust into this oddly adorable, leporine ball of yarn. Yeah, I really need a pet. Maybe I could knit myself one. Maybe I could knit myself a life and then dream about instagramming it. That’s if I ever fall asleep again! This is far too bleak a note to be ending this post on, let’s look at cake again.

 

Phew. Going to try to knit a beret-ish hat, in case you’re wondering. Winter still hasn’t quite started officially yet – that’s the first of June – but it’s certainly cold enough to try and make my life as plushly cosy as possible. In hindsight, knitting myself a life and then dreaming about it does have a rakishly Michel Gondry air to it, so who knows? Maybe everything’s working out the way it’s supposed to.

PS: tomorrow it’s one whole year since I found out for sure my cookbook was getting published. Feelings!

Title via: The Damned, New Rose. I love the start – “Is she really going out with him?” and those heartbeat-fast drums. 

Music lately:

La Vie En Rose, Edith Piaf. When one’s thoughts turn to roses…this song is just too pretty and yearning, damn that beautiful French language and her amazingly guttural vibrato! C’est lui pour moi, moi pour lui? Quelle swoon.

Bloodletter, by Delaney Davidson and Marlon Williams. From Sad But True, their record that we just keep turning over and over and over and over.

Next time: I’m gonna sleep on it (fingers crossed.)