Category: Cake

you’re bleeding syrup, amour

22 Comments
I really like this photo.

I did not specifically bake this cake with aesthetics in mind. I baked it because I thought Earl Grey tea and maple syrup would be a swoon-makingly good pair when in cake form. But I also had the secret hope that I’d be able to ice it all cool and it would look like an Internet Cake. Just wanted to impress you guys, is all. And maybe enjoy the rush that comes with a flood of one-off hits to my blog from people who will probably never read it again or even make the cake via Pinterest, as I am but human and not saint. 
It ended up being a bit more Glittery Nipple than anything else, but no-one ever said glittery nipples were a bad thing – I’m not sure anyone ever said glittery nipple three times in one sentence even. (It’s edible glitter by the way, in case you thought my aesthetics really had got the better of me.)
It’s a layer cake, even though I could only find one of my 20cm caketins, which meant I had to bake half the mixture, then put that cake on a rack, then bake the rest of the mixture in the same tin. It’s not the greatest hardship recorded, but it is a pain. The two cakes were all mountainous, so I had to level one off with a serrated knife. And finally a rogue air bubble appeared in one of them, and I kept getting thumbprints in the icing, but the cake itself just tastes so good, and I told myself that it would be reassuring to the public or something. I also told myself if I was constantly reassuring the public that I’m not all that good at stuff they might not trust me to do anything, like write a cookbook. And then I was like “nope! It’s reassuring!” in a strained voice. Besides, Radiohead were singing “try the best you can, the best you can is good enough” through my computer speakers so I took it as a sign. And it’s not like it looks terrible. You have to get quite close to see all the flaws, and if you’re that close to cake, you might as well be eating it. 

Hack icing job and air bubbles aside, it tastes super excellent. The pillowy buttercream, sweet but darkly so, the cake all tender and awash with fragrant flavour. The buttercream is unsurprisingly all you can taste initially when you plunge your teeth into the cake, but the Earl Grey makes itself known at the end, with a pinprick of orange from the bergamot, and the palest suggestion of tea’s clean bitterness.

I haven’t even addressed yet that maple syrup is hellish expensive. I probably only buy it once a year, and what can you do with such an ingredient but send it to the cupboard like you’re Henry the Eighth, too wracked with guilt over price to actually use it, until eventually you forget you have it or it goes past its best-by date and coagulates. My solution to stop turning delicious maple syrup into Tincture of Financial Self-Reproach, is to use small amounts of it in really good recipes where its flavour can shine. So: this cake. Also, I don’t even drink Earl Grey, I’m more of an English Breakfast person, or whatever plain tea is available, consumed black. Well, that was the case until I forgot to have breakfast the other day and so subsisted at work on black tea with spoonfuls of sugar in it till I could meet Tim for lunch. As a result…I think I prefer it sweetened now. It just tastes good. At least, this preference is hardly spurred on by remembrance of the good times I had with it.

Earl Grey tea and maple syrup both have what you could call a complexity of flavour and scent. Earl Grey is all rounded and fragrant with bergamot, while maple is smoky, almost savoury. They are a perfect pair. It’s a dick move, but if I didn’t have real maple syrup I’m not entirely sure I’d use fake – at least, unless I could find a brand that doesn’t put ‘synthetic bouquet’ at the top of its priorities when taste-testing it. Golden syrup is what I’d use itself as intensely flavoured as maple. But seriously, just ignore me and use maple flavoured syrup if you dig the taste and you have it and you want this cake. I don’t want to stand between a person and their hypothetical cake.

Earl Grey and Maple Syrup Cake

A recipe by myself.

Speaking of not a big deal, all you have to do is half-heartedly mix this cake and you’re done. Faint-makingly good though the buttercream is, the cake recipe itself is dairy-free, and if that’s what you’re after you could try baking it in a 22cm tin for about 40 minutes. 

300g flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch salt
175g brown sugar
3 eggs
250ml very strong earl grey tea
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1/2 cup (125ml) plain oil, like sunflower

Set your oven to 180 C, and line the base of two 20cm caketins with baking paper. Or, if you only have one, just do one, but bake two cakes in a row. This is what I did, and it’s annoying, but the price is right. Place the flour in a large bowl, then sift in the baking soda and baking powder (sifting is boring but I’m terrified of lumps of baking soda) and stir in the salt and the sugar. Tip in the cooled tea, the eggs, the maple syrup and the oil, and stir thoroughly till it forms a thick, smooth batter. Either divide between the two caketins and bake for about 35 minutes, or tip half into one of the caketins and bake for 25 minutes, then remove it and scrape in the remaining batter and bake for another 25 minutes. Once cooled, slice off the top if you need to, to make a more flat surface for icing, then…ice it.

Maple Syrup Buttercream

180g very soft butter
300g icing sugar
4 tablespoons maple syrup

This may or may not sound like large quantities of ingredients. This is because you need a lot of icing. So. Carefully beat the butter and icing sugar together (icing sugar is wont to fly everywhere) till light and very thick and fluffy. Tip in the maple syrup, and continue to beat to form a thick, gorgeously coloured icing. Spread a large dollop on top of one of the cakes, sit the other cake on top, then carefully spread the rest of the icing over the top and side of the cake. 

Edible glitter entirely optional. I almost covered it in hundreds and thousands, but thought a glint of silver against the pale, buff-coloured buttercream would look devastatingly sophisticated. I…should’ve known better. But I stand by my cake.

Speaking of standing by stuff, while we wait, fingers ever crossed for marriage equality laws to pass in New Zealand, Tim and I were thinking of having an engagement party. Strangely it was Tim gunning for it more than me, even though I love having parties. I was all “but can’t I just hide in bed and ignore everything, like how we’re going to get family all in one place and make sure everyone enjoys themselves and that we don’t get stressed out by people and vice versa.” We also realised, having pooled our life experience, that neither of us really knows what to do at one. The one engagement party I’ve been to was practically a wedding in itself – tears, speeches, large piles of presents, waiting forever to eat. And ones that I’ve seen on TV have been either debutante cotillion-esque, or (*spoiler alert but really*) Leslie and Ben’s awkward meeting of families on the so important Parks and Recreation. Thus, any advice and thoughts and experiences would be appreciated. Especially if it’s given in a friendly way, not in a “if you don’t do this exactly you will be naught but the Bride of Failure-stein.” I mean, I will ask my married friends what they did, I just thought this would get me more comments on my blog. I mean, would engage with my audience. I mean. Honestly: I just want to hear some opinions from people who have done it, is all, and I bet you have a good one.

Finally: here’s something I noticed recently that made me…smile.

At my christening: Before I even grew eyebrows I was furrowing them.
Family photo: I can almost physically feel myself overthinking in this one.

Earlier this year: a relaxed photo I quickly took after getting a fringe trim I was really happy with. 

I recently realised I had all three of these photos on my phone, and had a bit of an “oh, you!” moment at myself. I suspect many of you have been in this situation, where someone – okay, it has never not been an older man – has said something like “smile, love!” or “cheer up!” or the weirdly specific “it might never happen!” All of which seems relatively innocuous to most, but is also so very creepy and imposing, and maybe I want to not smile right now, and stop trying to control my body you YOU FOOTSOLDIER OF THE PATRIARCHY*.
* heard this from a cool friend recently, noted it down for inevitable future need of it. 
I concede that I look grumpy often, but without defensiveness or apology, because frankly there’s a lot to be grumpy at in this world. And this is just what my face does sometimes. For what it’s worth though, and in typically extreme fashion, I also had the most bared-teeth enormous smile as a child. Total strangers would approach me after ballet recitals to tell me, age eight or so, that I had such a wonderful, huge smile. (This really did happen. Nothing I say on this blog is fictional flourish.) So…yeah. To my original point: Those three photos together made me feel happy inside. 
So did, to bring it full circle, this cake. It’s utterly delicious and it’s easier to make than it looks and it’s fancy and it looks like a glittery nipple. What a coup!
_________________________________________________________________________
title via: Lana Del Rey’s Velvet Crowbar. I almost literally have to limit my listening of her music to very rare occasions because it makes me feel all weird and feelingsy inside. I know what you’re thinking: so brave of me to quote it here, then. 
_________________________________________________________________________
Music lately: 

PJ Harvey, Good Fortune. As freshly obsessed with this song as when I first heard it on the radio. 

Connie Converse, How Sad How Lovely. Connie Converse disappeared in 1974. She left behind a small body of work. Haunting seems to be a dully obvious word to use, but it’s hard not to listen to these tunes without that context over the top. This song lives up to its name, is all. 
_________________________________________________________________________
Next time: New I Should Tell You interview. Woop, there it is! 

cause i bake the cake, then take the cake

8 Comments
Show me a candle and I’ll try and burn both ends of it. In case that phrase and concept is not familiar to you, I feel I should explain that it is not because I’m of a generation that has only grown up with artificial light and therefore is all “what is this waxy tube and how’s it going to help me? Me, of the me-generation?” No, what I mean is that I’ll stay up late but also get up very early in order to do what I need to do. It helps that I’m somehow both a night owl and a morning person. At Tim’s and my old flat of three and half years – which we adored, by the way – this would mean sitting bolt upright in bed when my alarm went off, and slowly becoming slouchier as I typed away on my laptop in bed. No lights but that from the laptop itself and the slowly rising sun.
But here, in our new house, where it’s just us, I can quietly pad out of bed (inevitably locating the one piece of bubble wrap in the house by standing on it, which happened yesterday) fold myself up on one of our couches in a straight-backed manner, turn on the kitchen light, maybe even make myself a cup of tea. This morning there’s delicious rain on the roof. I can’t curb my candle-burning tendencies, but it sure is a lot nicer to do it here. Possibly a literal candle would be nice touch, even. My mum did in fact get me an oil burner as a housewarming gift (with two scented oils, “wellbeing” and “I’m worried about you get some sleep already” if I remember rightly) so it’s not out of the question. Strangely enough receiving that gift took me back to my attempted spell-casting youth. Where for a long time my favourite activity was hanging out at the 100-199 nonfiction section of the library, getting out particular books, and then lighting specifically coloured candles to heat patchouli and ylang ylang oil in the hopes that it would make something happen. (Patchouli and ylang ylang were the only two oils I could afford as an unemployed twelve year old, so basically everything I tried had to use them. As a result, all that really did happen was I was going around smelling like curtains from the seventies that had been stored in a camphor chest.)
Things keep happening to make this still-new place even more of a home. This week, our our new table – well, it’s new to us, but apparently very well loved by the family we bought it off, shadows of whom remain in the grain of the wood. A water stain here, a gouged-out dent from a truculent miscreant there, some glitter embedded in the varnish over in one corner, (which feels like a good sign). All these are things that might’ve happened with me around anyway, so, much as a brand new table would be delightful, it’s nice to have this lived-in one, and to not feel like I have to be nervous around it. Indeed, there’s enough I’m too nervous about already.  
 
A table like this needs a cake on it, I said, being the logical pragmatist that I am. In my mind. In my defense, Tim and four others were playing the boardgame of Game of Thrones on Sunday, and since that game chews through your energy at a surprising rate for a large piece of cardboard with several small plastic game tokens – at one point someone expressed their sincere wish for nerve-calming sedatives because the game was too much of a rollercoaster ride of thrills – providing some sustenance made sense. When it comes to Game of Thrones I’m simply a Watcher (the capital W makes it seem more sinister!) though I have also started reading them as well – much as I’m not sure I love the books, damned if I can put them down once I pick them up. The board game…not my thing. Maybe not enough Khaleesi being all amazing with dragons? On a screen? Who knows, but I’m happy to have a rock-solid cake-excuse (of course, there’s always the most rock-solid reason of all: I want cake.)

It’s high summer so plums are around in abundance and really cheap. If you’re somehow sick of just sitting there eating them while their sticky juice runs down your face in determined rivulets, this chocolate plum cake with sour cream icing is a good diversion – pretty exciting, but also calmingly straightforward to make. There is so little to it that you can have it in and out of the oven and ready to eat – if you leave it uniced – in about forty minutes. The sour cream icing was just something that I thought might be fun. It’s not quite the fluffy creation I envisaged but more of an alarmingly fast-moving icing that helpfully drips over the side of the cooled cake for you – still very, very delicious though.

Chocolate Plum Cake with Sour Cream Icing

I adapted the cake itself from this delightfully simple recipe I found. Otherwise: a recipe by me.

If you leave the icing off, this cake is dairy-free. If you ice it…with sour cream icing…it’s really not.

1/2 cup (125 ml) plain oil like rice bran or sunflower
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 ripe plums
4 tablespoons cocoa
1 cup flour

1 1/2 cups icing sugar
2 tablespoons sour cream (maybe a little more)

Set your oven to 160 C/320 F. Line the base of a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper. 

Mix together the oil, sugar, and eggs till quite thick. Dice the flesh of the plums into 1 or 2cm cubes (just guess) and stir them in. Finally, fold in the cocoa and flour, scrape it into the caketin and bake for 40 minutes (though check at 30 minutes – your oven may be gruntier than mine.) 

Serve now, or allow to cool completely and then ice. To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl – or it will be obstinately lumpy – then slowly stir in enough sour cream, two tablespoons should do, to make a thick yet quite runny icing. Tip most of it over the cooled cake, letting it run over the edges. Decorate with finely sliced dark chocolate if you’re a food blogger who worries that your drippy cake will look weird in photos but also thinks that the extra chocolate will taste nice. 

The juicy tartness of the plums with the dark backdrop of damp chocolate cake is really something in itself, but it’s made all the more lush by a blanket of sticky sour cream icing (seriously, look at that photo. This icing is going wherever gravity will take it.) Sour cream has enough buttery thickness and tang (so nearly wrote titular tang but that felt wrong, even for me) to see off the icing sugar’s aggressive sweetness, but to also complement the intensity of the plums and chocolate. It’s even better the next day, when the icing has had time to settle in and the cake absorbs some of the plum juice. You could make this with any stone fruit really, but rich plums and earthy cocoa together are specifically wondrous. 

Speaking of things that go well on our new table, and because I have exactly one minute to get ready for work and can’t think of another way to wrap this up: we finally, after living in Wellington since January 2006, spatula-d together enough Fly Buys points to cash them in on something. That something was a waffle iron. WORTH IT.
________________________________________________________________________________
Title via: Ummm, because I don’t swear on this blog I can’t actually repeat the title of the song that I’m quoting. But I can tell you it’s by Wu-Tang Clan and it’s reeeeeeally good. 
________________________________________________________________________________
Music lately:

Franz Ferdinand, Eleanor Put Your Boots On. Never stopped loving them.

Blind Willie McTell, Come Around To My House Mama. A song of face-fanningly casual sauciness, considering McTell recorded it in 1929. (I know they had bawdy songs and stuff back then, but still: it’s so casual!) 
________________________________________________________________________________
Next time: Probably another I Should Tell You interview. Good times!

isn’t it rich? are we a pear?

16 Comments
I know, everyone’s on holiday and I said I wasn’t blogging till next year, but as Britney sang in her cover of the song My Prerogative, it’s my prerogative. Plus, cake! Cake.
 
 
 
The thing with traditions – they’re wonderful. They give you something to cling to in this strange, scary world, a sense of where you’ve been and where you might go – they give you stories to relay and build upon and argue over the precise order of; they give you something to pass on to other people. 
 
They’re also damn vexatious, because once you get sucked into a tradition it’s very difficult to break it. I have done roughly the same thing for Christmas every single year of my life, and as such the idea of being anywhere else during that time is un-contemplatable. (Admittedly: am not particularly good at compromising. Sure, Eartha Kitt romanticises it for me, but compromise does go some way to making other people happy.) As such, Tim and I have only spent one Christmas together in the past seven years…and that was when he came to my family’s place.
 
My family (in the very extended sense of the word) has been camping at this one particular beach every single year since I was born. I’m still pretty young, but that’s a lot of years. This year, for the first time, owing to a lack of money and time in equal measure, I’m not going along with them. I know I vocally dislike nature, but this place is magical and special and all we really do anyway is sit around and drink gin and play cards. Sigh.
 
And finally, the flat Christmas Dinner that I have had every year since 2006, when Tim and I moved in together, was not able to happen this year again due to a lack of time and funds – and also moving house on the 15th of December.
 
Damn you, traditions, getting me all emotionally attached to things and being so difficult to extricate myself from and making my heart hurt a bit! Is this what being a grown up is about? If so, then I stamp my feet petulantly in response. But also get on with it. Damn you too, grownuphoodity.
 
 
 
Before this gets all too, too hand-wringingly lachrymose, let us focus on a cake! Tim and I are spending New Years with a tangle of our best friends. I’m bringing novels of a worthy (Muriel Sparks) and trashy (Jilly Cooper) nature; plenty of whisky; languid-friendly dresses, and this cake.
 
I adapted it from a recipe that I found in the Meat Free Mondays book by Paul McCartney. I don’t eat a ton of meat as it is, let alone on Mondays, but there is many a brilliant and inspiring recipe for any day of the week to be found within its pages. This has ended up being really quite different to their recipe, but it’s what spurned on the idea, so a tip of the hat to them all the same. (PS: I would just like to say though, the caramel pear sauce was all my idea.) (I guess I’m not that grown-up yet.)
 
Pear and Almond Cake with Caramel Pear Sauce
 
PS: this needs a food processor to make it sorry – though if you don’t have one, I’d make sure the butter was quite soft, cream it with the sugar first, then the egg, then fold everything else in. So: still do-able, for sure.
 
1 x 70g packet ground almonds
150g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
150g sugar
170g butter, cubed
1 egg
1 can of pears
 
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon golden syrup
2 teaspoons cornflour
30g butter
 
Set your oven to 160 C/320 F and line a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper.
 
Tip the ground almonds, flour, and baking powder into your food processor bowl and process for a bit to mix them together. Then add the sugar and butter and process thoroughly till it forms a thick dough. Tip in the egg and blitz briefly to mix it in. Spread this thick, luscious mixture into your caketin – it won’t be very high – and then drain your can of pears, reserving the liquid (important!) and arrange them, cut-side-up on top of the batter. 
 
Bake for about an hour, or till the cake feels springy and firm in the centre. 
 
Meanwhile, in a small pot or pan, mix the brown sugar, golden syrup and cornflour to an unlikely paste. Slowly mix in the reserved pear juice from the can, and then continue stirring it over a low heat. Allow it to simmer but not quite boil till it all becomes quite syrupy and thick and dark. When it reaches this stage, remove it from the heat and stir in the butter. 
 
Note: You have a choice when the cake is cooked – either do as I did, and leave it in its tin, spike several times with a skewer, pour over the hot caramel pear sauce and then allow it to cool completely. OR – unclip the cake from the tin, slice up, and serve the caramel pear sauce on the side to be poured over in quantities of each slice-eater’s choosing. 
 
 
So uh, even though I made this for other people to eat, I had to judiciously remove a small sliver and eat it, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to blog about it. Or I could, but the most conclusive thing I’d be able to say about it is that it’s very instagrammable. 
 
Luckily for us all, I heroically ate said sliver of cake. And it’s rather wondrous. The caramel sauce absorbs into its surface, making it a sticky confection of a thing, and the pear juice really does make itself known, flavourwise – giving the sauce a floral fragrance which elevates it above mere sugariness (though I do love mere sugariness too, to be fair.) The cake itself is dense and buttery and the almonds give it a slightly nubbly texture which echoes that of the pears. It’s damn good stuff.
 

Due to obstinate fog in Wellington canceling my flight and delaying my departure by 24 hours, my time up home was sadly briefer than I thought it’d be. But all the same it was a lovely time, seeing my family again and spending Christmas day with them. Everyone loved the gifts I got them and I loved the trinkets I received.

Cleaning out one of the cupboards stuffed with my old schoolbooks and things was surprisingly diverting. I was reminded how utterly, utterly righteous I was as a child. Seriously, almost all of my schoolbooks are filled with firmly written opinions like “why must we do maths? Why aren’t Spice Girls more integrated into the curriculum? UGH SPORTS WHY”.

I relayed this to Tim, who astutely pointed out that I could’ve believably expressed that same opinion yesterday.

 
I also adored hanging out with the cats. Or at least attempting to. Roger was largely disinterested, but at least sat still long enough that I could situate myself very close to him and pretend like we were friends. Poppy, ever the baby raptor, decided she hated me and tried to shred my face off every time we approached. I did manage to pick her up for a quick minute though, and even caught the brief affair on camera. Me, thrilled to the bone, Poppy, at least displaying only ennui, instead of her claws. A Christmas Miracle! 
 

Title via: Yes, I elect to end the year on a truly atrocious pun. And I’ll probably start next year with one too, as is my wont. I was always a bit terrified of the song Send In The Clowns from A Little Night Music when I was young, because frankly clowns are scary as hell. But after listening to it properly, I came to realise it’s one of Sondheim’s most quietly devastating tunes, and I rather love it. Especially when Dame Judi Dench absolutely kills it.

Music lately:

The Smiths, How Soon Is Now? We saw Morrissey in concert the night before we moved house. I know he can be horrible, but his music just turns my insides to melted butter and I love his voice and it was just amazing times a billion. It doesn’t excuse any of his horribleness, but I was glad we had the opportunity to see him. Before the show, we each picked three songs we really hoped he’d sing – cutely, or maybe grossly, we both picked the same three – and he did! He sang all three. This was one of them – a song from his erstwhile band which is so good I hardly ever listen to it, because it makes me feel all queasy inside. Not the best recommendation, but if you’ve never heard it before…just try.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation. Since being lent speakers by some friends, Tim and I have been ploughing through all the vinyl we bought over in America. This album of the same name is so utterly great, and I love this song, and Richard Hell is impossibly dreamy. Which maybe helps make the song sound better, who knows?

Next time: This really is the last post I’m doing for 2012 – have a joyous relaxed happiness-filled time, and I’ll see you on the other side. 

every task you undertake, becomes a piece of cake

8 Comments

It was The Spice Girls who first said in their seminal text Wannabe, “now here’s the story from A to Z, you wanna get with me you gotta listen carefully”. And so it follows that if you wanna get with this cake you too should closely heed this recommendation. I guess what I’m saying is, this cake isn’t complicated but there’s plenty going on and so you might want to take the following hints into account. And the subtext: I really like quoting the Spice Girls on this blog.

– I can’t think of a better way of extracting the juice from the mandarins than peeling the fruit, holding it in your fist and then clenching thoroughly over a receptacle of some kind. It’s visceral, it’s effective, it neatly does away with including another kitchen implement that you have to wash.
– You can of course use oranges, lemons, grapefruit, limes, any other citrus that I’ve shamefully failed to name here instead of mandarins.
– The texture of your yoghurt will affect how much icing sugar you need. If it’s the more liquidy stuff, more icing sugar. If it’s the fabulously whipped-cream thick variety, perhaps less is needed.
– With this in mind, go slowly with adding more yoghurt to the icing or it might all just slide right off the cake and make you nearly cry frustrated tears when you put it on the cake. How do I know? I just do.
– Only arrange the plums just before you serve this. Or they will fall off. They just will. Perhaps it’s their passive-aggressive way of reminding us that they’re not in season, and therefore they’re not going to cooperate with no upstart food blogger.
– This cake is really delicious and not as scary as I’m making it sound.

Mandarin Cake With Yoghurt Icing and Plums

Cake adapted from a recipe in the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders by Lynn Bedford Hall. Icing and stuff all my idea though, for what it’s worth.

125ml mandarin juice (this depends on your mandarins, but maybe seven altogether?)
125ml plain oil, like rice bran or grapeseed
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
175 sugar
250g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch salt

6 plums
3 tablespoons sugar
1 extra mandarin

3 tablespoons plain unsweetened yoghurt
150g icing sugar, plus more if necessary

Set your oven to 170 C and line a 21cm springform tin with baking paper.

Whisk all the cake ingredients together (that’s from mandarin juice to the pinch of salt inclusive, by the way) for a few minutes till it forms a thick, pale golden batter. Tip this into the caketin and bake for an hour, though check after 45 minutes. Ovens can be tricksy.

Meanwhile, slice the plums into wedges and place them in a bowl. Sprinkle over the sugar and squeeze over the juice of the mandarin. Leave to sit at least for as long as the cake needs to cook, but overnight is even better.

Once the cake has cooled, whisk together the yoghurt and icing sugar till thick. Add more of either ingredient if necessary. Icing can be tricksy, too. Spread this thickly across the top of the cake, and place the plum slices on top.

Juicy plums, oddly-yet-pleasingly tangy icing, soft-crumbed and sweetly citrussy cake. Worth every Spice Girls quote it took to get to this point (and if you’re not weary of Spice Girls quoting, ignore that sentence and instead read this one: Yay, Spice Girls!)

As I said, plums aren’t in season, but they were only $6 a kilo and you can hardly get anything for $6 these days. If I sound a little defensive it’s only because I recently had the good fortune to meet Nadia Lim, winner of 2011 Masterchef, and she is VERY big on seasonal eating. Which is highly admirable. Sorry to let you down, Nadia, but if it’s any consolation, mandarins are in season right now so hard. And these ones couldn’t be fresher or more local, as they’re from Tim’s grandparents’ tree in Wairoa.

How did I meet her? My dear friend Jo and I were both invited to her Wellington On A Plate Masterclass by Pead PR. You can read Jo’s thoughts on the event here. As well as being a great friend, Jo is also good to hang with at a party. She’s all “Oh hey there Mayor Celia Wade-Brown, let’s hug and talk about our lives and this is my friend Laura”. And she stayed with me right to the end (the champagne helped the time fly by, admittedly) while I waited to meet Nadia and talk with her. Nadia herself should be commended for her massive patience in taking the time to talk to me after having talked to roughly a million other people beforehand. I admit I never actually saw Masterchef – we don’t have a TV, and while I love cooking shows I honestly find the hugely competitive ones a little stressful to watch. All that running around and plating up and being edited to look like a mean person! So while I’d heard Nadia Lim’s name around, and had read a few interviews with her and such, I didn’t have much of a feel for what she was like as a person or a cook. Well, she seems awesome. She’s enthusiastic about food, which I love, she’s confident and fun, she’s highly knowledgeable, and she made three different salmon entrees (using Regal King salmon) and a dessert in her half hour masterclass. All of which I wanted to try recreating myself as soon as possible. You know sometimes when a recipe is so simple and practical and delicious that you think “why haven’t I been making this all the time?” That’s how I felt about her salmon recipes.

And as I said, I got to have a chat with her and she graciously answered the three questions I threw down.
_____________________________________________________________________

HungryandFrozen x Nadia Lim

Me, Laura Vincent: You’ve just had a cookbook published. What’s something people should know about the process? 

Nadia Lim: Mine was a seasonal cookbook, so if you shoot in winter…I had to use imported stuff which I hated, because I’m a huge fan of eating seasonally and locally, it was a huge dilemma. There are things I had to leave out…and some things I just couldn’t use at all, like I couldn’t put feijoas in. That was a challenge.

Me: I hear that. I am struggling to find strawberries for my photos. Luckily butter’s always in season… I think it’s awesome that you’re young – 26 – and you’ve got a cookbook, you won this TV show, you’re out there getting yours. In an industry generally presided over by older males, what do you think a younger perspective brings?

Nadia: I’ve always stayed pretty true to my food philosophy. When I was twelve I came up with my philosophy of ‘eating from the ground, the sea and the sky, not the factory. But when you’re younger, you’re more more willing to learn new things. Sometimes people are a little stuck in their ways, their techniques, how they do things, but I’m very adaptable and I like to learn from lots of different people, I’m really open to it. And I also think the young generation has a real responsibility, now we’re going back to more, you know, finding out about your ingredients. Whether they’re ethical, sustainable, healthy, what their environmental impact is. That’s really important.

Me: Say someone gave you a million dollars and you could travel anywhere in the world to eat their food-

Nadia [immediately]: Turkey. Yes. I love Middle Eastern flavours. I haven’t been to the Middle East yet but I use a lot of their ingredients in my cooking. I love things like pomegranates, dukkah, labne…Turkish cuisine often – well, you know the flavour wheel, of whether your tastes are more tart/sour dominant or sweet, or salty…I’m quite sour orientated, and a lot of their food is quite tart, like their cheeses, and pomegranate molasses.

Me: And sumac?
Nadia: Yeah! They use so many things that I love in that type of cuisine, and it’s quite healthy, lots of grains and vegetables and freshly made food.

Me: I have spent one afternoon in Turkey – I didn’t eat anything, I had one glass of apple tea. 

Nadia: Apple tea is so good!

Me: Yes! Based on that I can definitely recommend the place. And thanks heaps for your time.

Nadia: Thank you!
_____________________________________________________________________

Thanks again Nadia Lim, now established as my second-favourite Nadia, right after Ms Comaneci.

In a world where there is so much to be outraged at, like awful pizza companies being awful, I’d like to also throw some light on some things making me happy lately. Whittaker’s sent me a wealth of their wonderful chocolate to assist my recipe testing, for which I’d like to individually hug every single Whittaker’s employee. Tim and I found out we’re going to be able to go behind the scenes at Third Man Records and will get to talk to co-founder Ben Swank when we’re in Nashville in October. We went to a Whisky Breakfast for Wellington on a Plate at Arthur’s cafe – our friend Kim has some glorious photos here on her blog. I got to meet Nadia Lim (okay, you already know that from just ten seconds ago, but I’m not above recycling nice news.) I finally finished and uploaded episode 3 of my podcast, The HungryandFrozen #soimportant Podcast. You can listen on iTunes or on the website. If you like.

And finally, this excellent cat video made me laugh.
_____________________________________________________________________
Title via: Was *this* close to quoting the ‘jaded mandarin’ line from Jesus Christ Superstar, which I thought for a long time was Judas calling Jesus a mandarin as in the fruit. But instead: MARY POPPINS with A Spoonful of Sugar. She is so important. 
_____________________________________________________________________
Music lately:

Willy Moon, I Wanna Be Your Man. He is one smooth babe.

Placebo, Slave to the Wage. Forgot how much I love them.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Down By The Riverside. She is the coolest.
_____________________________________________________________________

Next time: I’m as shocked as anyone, but it’s nearly spring! I’m hoping there’ll be some new fruit and vegetables coming in soon…I love winter so much but I’m ready for more fruit and for asparagus!

PS: I totally forgot to upload the photos first time I published this. Fail! But lots of people reminded me right away. Hooray for the people!

how lucky can you get?

22 Comments

I intended on publishing this on Thursday or Friday, but a ton of other things got in the way, and then Tim and I have spent the last 24 hours driving many, many, many and then some miles to visit his grandparents, having realised we hadn’t done it in a while and it was an important thing to do. I’m all good with family outweighing this blog, just as I’m cool with this blog outweighing my need to sleep and generally function. Let’s go, on with the show.

You know what I love? What really makes me want to hug myself but also not want to draw attention to it for fear of breaking the spell and then it’ll all be over? Spontaneous good times. I just wish I could schedule them into my life more often. Like, “You there! Closest friends of mine! Nothing’s happening this Saturday, so let’s all pretend like we’re going to do other things separately but actually we all secretly understand that we’ll meet at someone’s house at 9pm and then drink lots of whisky and stay up all night talking about our lives and feelings!” Obviously life doesn’t actually work like that, but I think if we all tried to maintain this pretense, it could be quite, quite rewarding.

I say this because last Saturday, after a five-hour photoshoot for The Cookbook, we had a couple of people round for a game of Game of Thrones. (Yes, it’s a boardgame; no, it’s not just a group of us dressing up and talking all ye olde and calling everything we drink Summerwine or Good Brown Ale; yes I would probably be up for that too though; no there is no alternative to calling the board game ‘Game of Game of Thrones’.) That photoshoot was particularly exhausting – sounds ridiculous, but it takes it out of a person – we were all super low in energy when it was done, and I figured it was going to be a very quiet night. Smash cut to 11:00pm when I tweeted “Everyone in the world is at our house and no-one is allowed to leave until they’ve drank all our alcohol and eaten all our food” (because if I like you, that’s the kind of host I am.) There was a dance party in the kitchen. There was the Game of Thrones TV theme song sung while Brendan played it on the accordion (which is the most magnificent thing to hear – not us singing along with it so much, but the accordion itself – so imposing!). There was, well, pretty much everything the tweet implied.

It was so fun, and I had no idea it was going to happen. So let’s all plan for more spontaneous times, okay everyone?

But what about this chocolate cake already? It’s from Lucky Peach magazine, ‘a quarterly journal of food and writing’, exploring food with a kind of irreverence and fearlessness and coolness that hasn’t quite been done before, which in this everything-has-been-quite-done-before world is impressive. Like: David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, writes about his father’s love of sodium in this latest issue. By way of shorthand illustration of its coolth. (Also: coolth is a word. Cool huh!)

It’s not pretty, it’s occasionally kinda ugly, but the design is compelling and fun and the writing is generally super brilliant. It’s expensive but it’s only out four times a year and it’ll probably take me a quarter of a year just to read this issue. And it has this cake from pastry chef/musician Brooks Headley. It appealed to me – a plain, but excellent-sounding chocolate cake is what everyone needs up their sleeve (figuratively) and in their mouths (literally). The recipe is all in cups, being American, and in the magazine it was three times bigger than this – all I needed was one cake so I scaled it back. Forty-five minutes later when I finally figured out the mathematics of it all, I can attest that it is a fantastic recipe.

Chocolate Olive-Oil Cake, by Brooks Headley, from Issue 4 of Lucky Peach

Life is strange. I buy really expensive cocoa which actually tastes like chocolate, and used that here, but I couldn’t bring myself to use a full 2/3 cup of also-pricey olive oil, so I went for 1/3 cup olive oil and 1/3 cup plain cooking oil. You do what you like.

  • 1/2 cup cocoa
  • 2/3 cup water
  • 1 1/3 cups flour
  • 1 1/3 cups sugar
  • 1/2 t baking soda
  • 1 t salt
  • 2/3 cup buttermilk (I used unsweetened natural yoghurt)
  • 2/3 cup olive oil
  • 1 egg

Set your oven to 170 C and line a 20 or 21cm cake tin with baking paper.

The hardest thing you’ll have to do is heat the water and cocoa together. So to do that: in a decent-sized pot or pan, since you might as well mix everything else into it, stir the cocoa and the water together and heat gently – continuing to stir so it doesn’t burn – until it just starts to bubble. Remove from the heat and allow to cool down some – I filled the sink with an inch of cold water and whisked the cocoa and water to move this process along – then whisk in the remaining ingredients. Pour into your cake tin and bake for around 30 minutes.

Brooks states that this recipe is “foolproof”. I am wary of this description. Getting your learner driver license is foolproof, they told me. Well this fool just failed, I replied, tearfully. It goes on. But this cake really is very straightforward. And importantly: delicious. Don’t be scared of the olive oil, it has its own nutty, buttery flavours that are perfect for chocolate and it makes for a long-lasting cake with a light crumb. I made this to augment the contents of the ‘snack table’ during some photoshoots this week and the final slice, eaten for breakfast yesterday before driving up to Tim’s grandparents’ place, was every bit as good as the first.

So thanks, Lucky Peach. Long may you be excellent.

Title via: How Lucky Can You Get, the Kander and Ebb song from Funny Lady, the sequel to Funny Girl. I love Barbra, but Julia Murney interprets it deliciously. As she does with everything.

Music Lately:

Frank Ocean, Bad Religion. OBSESSED.

It’s not music, but I have been watching this video lots and crying nearly every time, which is what I tend to do with music anyway. Nadia Comaneci in 1976, getting – spoiler alert – a perfect 10 for her floor routine. I used to be so (here comes that word again) obsessed with her as a kid, and youtube has helped me remember just why.

Next time: Whatever it is, I’ll blog about it sooner this time, promise!

 

raspberry beret, i think i love her

20 Comments
There are so many things I’m no good at. I’ll be the first to tell you. But no false modesty about one thing: I can speed read. When I was a kid with no income (I lived in the country! There was no such thing as a paper run) my skills would be particularly useful – if we ever went to town, I could absorb a Babysitters Club book in around 15 minutes in the bookshop, thus saving my family a cool $5.95 each time. 

Further to this, it seems everyone I know has been reading the Hunger Games books recently. This week Tim and I planned to meet up with a group of friends for a BYO dinner on Friday night, after all of them had seen the Hunger Games movie. On Wednesday night Tim started reading the book itself out of curiosity and finished it the next day. On Thursday I realised I was going to be the only person at the dinner table on Friday night who wouldn’t have read it or seen the movie. So I thought to myself: Can I read it by the time we get to the movie? Could I what.

I finished it in less than three hours, that very night. Including checking Twitter constantly, and making dinner (which was toast, but still. Dinner.) While the book itself is easy enough to gallop through, I clearly still have the speedreading magic. At lunch on Friday it took little more than some significant eye contact for Tim and I to know exactly what the other person was thinking: we should book tickets to see the movie with everyone else that night. After the movie I nearly floated out of the cinema and analysed it so hard I almost lost my voice. Roughly 24 hours previous I was opening the book for the first time, knowing nothing about it other than the lead character was called Katniss and it was really, really popular. The only thing faster than my reading, was the material I was reading’s ability to win me over. It won me over so fast it deserves an ironically slow clap from a crowded room.

However, back when I made this Coconut Raspberry Loaf on Wednesday to eat during an afternoon with my friend Kate, I was none the wiser. I strode purposefully up to her house in Mt Vic with the cake only partially cooked, because I was already late and it was taking forever to cook and I was starting to feel like I was in one of those dreams where you’re trying so hard to get to your destination but things keep slowing you down and you never actually make it. Irrationally, I grabbed the wobbly loaf cake from the oven, wrapped the tin in several teatowels, put it in a bag and left (of course the wind dropped and the humidity rose at this point, directly in relation to the gradient of hill I was climbing) and continued baking it for a further 15 minutes at Kate’s. Still turned out fine, which bodes well for your baking it in uninterrupted circumstances.

My entire motivation in these photographs was getting the cool couch in the background.

Raspberry Coconut Loaf with Raspberry Icing

Adapted liberally from a recipe in the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders Book. 

150g butter, melted
250g sugar
2 eggs
250g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup dessicated coconut
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup frozen raspberries
1/2 a cup extra raspberries
1 – 2 cups icing sugar

Set your oven to 180 C, find a loaf tin and line it with baking paper. My way of doing this is to just get a large rectangle of baking paper, squash it down into the inner corners, and then throw in the batter to hold it down. Your finished loaf cake will have some inconsistent lumps and bumps but don’t we all?

Whisk together the melted butter and sugar to combine, and then beat in the eggs till the mixture is a little lighter in colour. Sift in the flour and baking powder, tip in the coconut and milk, and stir vigorously – you may need to move to a wooden spoon or spatula if it’s too much for the whisk. Finally fold in the raspberries, tip the mixture into the tin, and bake for about an hour and a half, although start checking it for done-ness at about an hour – give the top a prod and if it’s wobbly, it’s not done yet.

For the icing, simmer the raspberries in a tablespoon or two of water till soft, then push through a sieve to remove the seeds – I know, horrible job – then stir in icing sugar to the juice that remains below till you have a smooth electric pink icing. Thickly spread across the somewhat cooled cake. 

Not one drop of food colouring went into that icing. Who knew raspberries with their natural muted-garnet hue, had it in them to deliver electro spilled-nailpolish pink like this? Not I. I was expecting a kind of dull, uncooked steak colour at best, not this bodacious fuchsia, the stuff of $2 Shop lipgloss.

Coconut’s mild sweetness and the sharp juiciness of raspberries work beautifully together. While you could leave the icing off if you’re in a hurry or don’t have enough raspberries, the fast-dissolving nature of the icing sugar and retained sourness from the fruit adds marvelously to the overall deliciousness, more than your usual, potentially oversweet icing might. This cake is easy to make, slices beautifully, and the coconut and fruit makes sure it’ll be okay the next day too. Frozen raspberries are cruelly costly,  but I wanted them for a few different reasons and so stuck to my guns. But you could use the cheaper blackberries or boysenberries happily here. Or even just leave them out altogether and you’ve got yourself a rather choice plain coconut loaf recipe.

Basically it’s amazing, plus it easily stands up to a cross-town dash in the middle of the cooking process.

And the cake batter tastes brilliant. Bada bing.

Tim and I spent last night at the Wellington Zoo – with most of the people that we went to see the Hunger Games movie with. Yes. They run sleepovers during the warmer months, and usually schoolkids are their main market, but about 28 adults instead were there last night. Getting up close to the animals without any of the usual crowds? So cool. Sleeping on the floor, separated only from its unyielding flatness by a couple of thin sleeping mats? Do-able as. Discovering the Mighty Boosh-esque lizard lounge for various reptiles, decorated with records by Julio Iglesias? Delightful. Realising there was a pelican, one of the things I fear most in this world, living on Monkey Island where we gathered for 20 minutes to feed its simian inhabitants? Blood-chilling. Apart from that ugliness though (and thanks to everyone who helped by saying “it’s gone! Oh wait it’s back” while I hid my face in Tim’s shoulder) it was a fantatically awesome time.

Especially when this sunbear stood on her hind legs and waved to us.

So gorgeous. Partially because we’d all just seen it, and partially because of the heightened silliness you feel when a little underslept and in an unfamiliar place, but there was a lot of raised eyebrows-ing and “this is SO Hunger Games” and so on. What, I enjoy wallowing in the obsession of pop culture, okay? Also, does anyone else get young Catherine O’Hara vibes from Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Katniss in the film? That is not-given-lightly high praise, by the way.
_______________________________________________________________________
Title via: Raspberry Beret, that jaunty classic by the jaunty Prince.
_______________________________________________________________________
Music lately: 


Althea and Donna, Uptown Top Ranking. So very good, I was led to this track by a way inferior but admittedly clever sampling of it in a mainstream track. So, really, thank you inferior but admittedly clever mainstream track. 


Bic Runga, Tiny Little Piece of My Heart. As beauteous as she ever was at this sort of thing.


Bernadette Peters, Being Alive. Never not obsessed with this song! Or her.
_______________________________________________________________________
Next time: I have a couple of quinces that I need some, uh, quincepiration for (sorry…not!) but I also am very set on turning Whittakers‘ new peanut butter chocolate into ice cream. First, to get my hands on some…

banana by the bunch, a box of captain crunch would taste so good

24 Comments
While there are large-scale diseases with varying degrees of manageability, on the day-to-day level the human body can still be pretty unfair to its inhabitant. I say this with full acknowledgement of my privilege – that is, I am sound enough of body. I mean your intentions going one way and your body going another.
But what’s got me thinking about this, is that it’s currently 5.30am. Not that shocking an hour really. But I’ve been absolutely, no-turning-back awake since 3.45am. Not for want of trying to sleep. My brain started getting stupid anyway. Like I’d be imagining rain on the roof and being all nice and calm, drifting away on a floating bed – suddenly my brain would insert into this lovely scene an enormous insect, a particular insect that terrifies the heck out of me and whose name I’m not even going to utter on this page. My brain did this about five times while I lay there in cold-then-hot discomfort, my normally reliable pillow becoming flat and concrete-like…when I checked my phone and over an hour had passed, I accepted there was not much I could do about it. So here I am.

Alas, this is quite typical. I’m not the best sleeper. Normally it manifests in my taking hours to fall asleep after turning off the light, but this time I had sleeplessness working its way to the middle from both ends of the night. As I sit here typing in the dark, Tim, the minxy hellion, is sleeping like he always does, deeply, unflappably, and with enviable briskness. Meanwhile I’ve been lying thinking “I’m going to be so fragile tomorrow. Does thinking I’m going to be fragile mean I’m going to be more fragile? Aagh, it’s that insect that I hate!”

Luckily I had the foresight yesterday to bake some banana bread, a warm pillowy slice of which I am confident will provide untold comfort.


Especially when that banana bread was spontaneously studded with the roughly chopped remainder of a vanilla-fluttery, buttery block of Whittaker’s white chocolate. (Please scuse the pink stains on my chopping board. Either everything is stained permanently or you never eat beetroot, there is no middle ground in life.)


Banana bread always seems like a rather lovely thing to me, perhaps because I associate it with the banana bread that shy, lonely Charlotte Johanssen brought over for her the Ramsey family in Babysitters Club #13: Hello Mallory, while the majority of Stoneybrook ignored the newcomers, quite racistly. While I didn’t exactly know what banana bread was at the time – we would’ve likely called it loaf cake in New Zealand – something about its compact, sliceable practicality all wrapped in tinfoil and carried over by Charlotte conveyed the sense of neighbourly friendliness better than any other food could’ve.

This is, kinda bafflingly, the FOURTH time I’ve blogged about Banana bread (Nigella’s beautiful recipe in 2008, and then in 2010 a vegan recipe and a highly recommendable Banana-lime Palm Sugar Loaf) and yet this new recipe still has its rightful place. Oh and I say ‘bafflingly’ because I can’t believe I’ve only just now brought up the Babysitters Club connection. Four banana bread recipes itself is not baffling. What’s this one bringing to the table though? It’s simple, it’s strewn with white chocolate, and it has the snuggly scent of cinnamon. It’s also gluten-free, if you want it to be.

Cinnamon White Chocolate Banana Cake

Adapted somewhatish from a recipe in Meat-free Mondays. That book just won’t quit!

125g soft butter
125g sugar (optional – half brown, half white sugar)
2 eggs
3 medium, ripe bananas (or 2 large)
50g roughly chopped white chocolate
170g rice flour, or plain flour 
50g cornflour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch salt

 Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and beat the butter and sugar together till creamy and light. Beat in the eggs, then fold in the bananas and white chocolate. Finally, sift in all the dry ingredients and fold them in gently. Tip the batter into a paper-lined loaf tin, and bake for about 1 1/4 hours.

Something about the magical properties of cornflour make this light, puffy, and with a crisp yet mouth-meltingly tender crust. There might be more to it than that, but I’m pretty sure it’s the cornflour. While I’ll stand up for white chocolate’s deliciousness any day, sometimes being paired with a spice only makes it more delightful, and this is verily the case with the cinnamon. Its warm mellow fragranced-ness against the shards of creamy sweetness is brilliant, and makes me want to pair white chocolate and cinnamon together again in other baking. And soon.


Um, yes, that is a glass bottle with a stripey straw in it. Guess what’s in the bottle? Iced coffee. Part of me is all “but it’s so pretty” and the other half is saying “Ugghh this is so blogger-y”. As always, to prove to myself that form over function could still provide a function, and I wasn’t just using props in my photos for the sake of it, I drank that coffee through the straw. It gave the already fruity, complex brew distinct notes of warm cardboard. But, as Leslie Knope said when she married off two male penguins to each other at the zoo: “I firmly believed it would be cute”.  I think I need to stop guilting myself out over this.

And look, here I am at 6.45am! A blog post under my belt, and the day’s hardly begun. I think I’d still take the sleep though. Fingers crossed for tonight. Which is feeling a long, long way away – oh, did I mention it’s Monday? Cruel, cold Monday? Thank goodness for banana bread, hey?

Title via: I feel like there should be like, an airhorn going off or a balloon drop every time I use a song from RENT (which this blog’s named for) in the title of a blog post too. If I keep making banana bread I’m going to run out of title options, but for now kindly revel in the unspeakably glorious joy that is Angel’s big number, Today 4 U, performed with alacrity by Wilson Jermaine Heredia. 
 
Music lately:

My capacity for being obsessed with songs is boundless. Boundless, I tell you. So the fact that I listened to Marina and the Diamonds’ Shampain almost literally a million times this week shouldn’t surprise you.

Monkees, Last Train to Clarksville. RIP Davy Jones, heartthrob.

Next time: whatever it is, let’s hope I’m telling you about it on more than three hours of sleep.

"and altogether quite impossible to describe…." "blonde".

12 Comments
First: you have till the eighth to vote for HungryandFrozen/me in the Concrete Playground blogger awards! Please and thank you, with as much sincerity as words on a screen can convey. (Edit: please note the competition is now totally closed. Did not win. Am writing a new blog post though!)
I wonder what it’s like having a significant effect upon people? From afar, not even realising any responsibility, Nigella Lawson influences me constantly. Having thrown the word “girlcrush” around with friends a lot recently, I realised for me the line between “celebrity crush” and “general celebrity obsession” is a fine one, and can mean anything from “I want to kiss you on the mouth, sooner the better” to “Oh how I want to hang out with you and learn from you and develop injokes and hilarious photos of us having fun times together”. Tim tends to occupy the crushy segment of my brain the most, but in lieu of hanging out – or anything! – with Nigella, you could do worse than bake like her. (What Would Nigella Do?) I started off with a sandwich bag filled with cream cheese icing leftover from another cake, which I’d stashed in the freezer, La Lawson-styles – and it works really well as long as it’s airtight – and thought I’d capitalise on my pretend organised-ness by actually using it up. This motivation transformed itself into an idea: white chocolate brownies, the sweetness roughened up a little by a hint of bitter coffee, then resweetened in the form of cream cheese icing.

Being fairly confident these days with inventing recipes, I ploughed ahead and made them happen. Okay, there’s not actually any dark chocolate in them, so they’re more blondies than brownies. And then, my sneaky secret ingredient of one small teaspoon ground coffee – which I pictured ever so subtly rounding out the white chocolate – somehow tinted the whole mixture a deep, sludgy brown. After tasting the mixture liberally, the coffee flavour was highly apparent. Okay, cool, so they’re mocha blondies now or something. Nervous about overbaking them into boring, cakey submission, I took them out of the oven after a conservative 20 minutes, allowed them to cool, then proudly cross-hatched them with said cream cheese icing.
All was well, my Blondies complete and another new recipe successfully created. And then I tried to slice into them. I know brownies and their blonde pals are supposed to be squishy but this was liquidy and entirely raw batter, hidden under a thin veneer of properly cooked stuff. And all that icing. After some deliberation (ie, me going like this) I just threw them in the oven, icing and all. 
Blondies II. We’ve lost the pretty blinding white icing, but in fact I felt triumphant – that it was meant to be, even! – because baking means the icing isn’t nearly as viciously sugary. And then I looked closer. The damn thing still wasn’t cooked properly. It was still too gooey to slice properly. Generations to come will speak in hushed tones of the batter they could not bake!
By this stage, with a savage case of the sugar-sweats not helped by the cruelly increasing humidity, I recklessly threw it back in the oven, not so much hoping for the best as much as crossing my fingers that this wasn’t a shameful waste of ingredients, time, and brain cells.
And then they came right. Finally.
How little did I know, when taking this photo of Whittaker’s White Chocolate, how much stress this recipe would cause. 

At the time, my only issue was “are close-up photos of the whisk dripping with batter a little overdone? Do I even care, because I personally find them awesome?” Simple, naive times.

“Can it be that it was all so simple then?”
I give you the recipe, but cautiously. I know I could just call them Mocha Blondies but I prefer the lipsmacking Nigella-ness of “Coffee-tinted” (see: influence) and as the coffee ended up overstepping the white chocolate element it feels necessary to properly warn you. 

White Chocolate Brownies With Cream Cheese Icing
Which turned into Coffee-tinted Blondies with Cream Cheese Icing
Which turned into The Blondies That Could Not Be Baked: Witness The Incredibleness!
Which finally settled into Coffee-tinted Blondies With Baked Cream Cheese Icing.

200g butter
300g white chocolate (I use Whittakers…the best white chocolate around, I reckon) 
3 eggs
150g brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground coffee beans
1/2 teaspoon cocoa
Decent grind of salt
200g flour

Carefully melt 100g of the white chocolate together with the butter. Allow it to cool a little – otherwise the eggs’ll scramble upon impact – then beat in the sugar and the eggs. Stir in the cocoa and coffee then fold in everything else. Tip into a paper-lined baking tray, then bake for about 30 – 40 minutes. If it still feels wobbly on top, bake for another 10 to 15.

Optional: beat together softened cream cheese and icing sugar, then spoon into a small plastic sandwich bag, snip a small hole in the corner, then use it to pipe out the icing on top of the brownies. You could then bake it again for ten minutes, or not, depending on your sweetness capacity and how cooked your blondies are…

This one’s for you, Nigella!

Speaking of inspirational women, I went to my first ever Roller Derby game on Saturday, with Tim, Kim and Brendan. It was so fun – the speed and the skill and the community feel and the amazing clothes. About halfway through our seats felt wobbly, but I barely noticed since we were on the stands and not overly stable. As soon as this had registered in my mind, an enormous clattering noise appeared and the building shook. Earthquake. It went on long enough that I ducked down so I was covered by the chair in front of me, and for bits of debris for fall from the ceiling. Then suddenly it was over and I was so thankful – while essentially it wasn’t much of anything, I think you still react in the same way that you would if it was going to be a bigger quake, and the comedown from that adrenalin rush is still significant. It was large enough – 5.7 in Picton! – that mentally I started into dignity-free survival mode. And then it was over. After the game, seeking emotional refuge, we all descended upon our friend Jo and watched TV and ate dumplings and drank cider and the whole thing was unbelievably comforting.

But what do the blondies taste like, finally? Distinctly white chocolatey, with a melt-on-the-tongue texture and a smooth coffee flavour – even the slightest threat of bitterness is seen off by the rich, sweet batter. The cream cheese icing, once baked, doesn’t have the same soft sharpness as the regular stuff, but on the other hand it’s not nearly as sweet. Although these took three goes in the oven and multiple direction changes, they’re so delicious and I’m still calling them a success.

Finally, a further reminder, yes, twice in one blog, that you can feel free to vote for this blog if you feel strongly enough about it, in the Concrete Playground blogger awards. You have until Thursday. Am optimistically picturing the kind of last-minute triumph that you might have seen in Sister Act II, Remember The Titans, and/or A Mighty Wind. Involving a montage scene where the votes climb and there’s emotional, swelling music and my face looking like this. Underneath all that optimism is also some resignation that I might be the only one that feels this way about my blog. But if nothing else, that’s a good lesson to have learned. Maybe.
_____________________________________________________
Title via: The highly-tense-in-all-the-right-ways song What Is This Feeling from the magical musical Wicked. Somehow this musical, however ridiculous, affects me emotionally now as much as it did four years ago. 
_____________________________________________________
Music lately: 
Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate’s masterpiece album. Can listen to this constantly and never get sick of it. So beautiful.
King Kapisi’s new track Can’t Stop Won’t Stop – awesome tune, awesome video. Love Rapley’s singing over the chorus. 
Barbra Streisand. I thought Jenna Maroney’s Jingle Bells was intense and unhinged, but Barbra’s – a non-parody, even – wins the prize. 
______________________________________________________
Next time:

i don’t want a lot this christmas, there is just one thing i need…

24 Comments

If there was some kind of chart for overachieving in the field of cake, right now I would be significantly off that chart. The needle on its spectrum gauge would be teetering nervously out of control. Why all this self-directed hyperbole? I made up a Christmas Cake recipe. And it turned out pretty delicious. And then – I went and iced it myself, too.

Aye, it’s only November, but not only is Christmas Cake the sort of thing you can make way ahead of time, like the overexcited person you may well be, it’s also good to be prepared. As that angry lion in the Lion King sang. And anyway, it’s the kind of cake you can make while it feels like you’re disorganisedly letting everything slide – it’s that easy. Even the icing is manageable. I know it’s divisive – I’m not personally the biggest fan of it, especially because marzipan costs about $12 for a small cube and so you have to use almond-flavoured icing, for which not one single almond suffered in the making of. But it’s a fun challenge and you get to have this dazzlingly gorgeous cake to admire, eat, or pick up and reflect the sun off, to annoy the neighbours.

[Edit: awards voting now closed, ages and ages ago] You know what else is a thing? (Just watch me segue!) I got nominated in the Concrete Playground Bloggers Awards – “The Search For NZ’s Best Online Writers – under the Food Blogger category. Now that is a title I’d like to call my own. And thanks so much to whoever nominated me – too much. So kind. Yes, I’m up against some blogs you’ll likely recognise, but let’s talk about me here, okay? I feel like a bit of a veteran of the vote-driven competition, having been lucky enough to land myself in quite a few over the last year or so, but not lucky enough to actually win any. This is really cool, and I’d love to win it but I don’t want to burn my brain up too much over it, because losing’s no fun, on the other hand, I want to definitely put myself out there because I believe in this blog – or I wouldn’t be up at midnight writing on it – on the other hand…

Pro: COOL TO BE NOMINATED
Con: Faking being stoic if do not win
Pro: Voting for people in competitions a now-normal part of life.
Con: Feel nervous asking people to vote for me…again
Pro: I really am one of the best online writers in NZ about food.
Con: In my mind…
Pro: You only have to vote once during the whole thing, not daily! Hey-ohh.
Con: Voting’s done through Facebook, so if you don’t have one…you get to dodge this whole hornet’s nest. So this con is really a sneaky pro for some of you.
Pro: COOL TO BE NOMINATED, FUN EXPERIENCE, CHILL OUT LAURA. One can still be the best food blogger in their own mind…for what it’s worth…

What I’m clumsily and bad-attitudinally trying to say is; though I’ve failed you all before, it would be really cool if you could vote for HungryandFrozen, but only of course if in your heart it’s actually the one you want to vote for. I would appreciate it with an embarrassing/refreshing lack of irony. Because seriously, NZ’s Best Online Writer? I want that! So if you do: vote here. (Please, thanks, and cake for all. Also you have to scroll round till you find my blog and click the “Like” which means, yes, you need Facebook.)

And I realise there are far more crucial voting situations going on right now. Am not going to talk about my opinion in that area, although it shouldn’t be hard to guess. But if you are in New Zealand please exercise your right to vote this Saturday. Your voice counts and you have the responsibility – think about everyone who you could affect with this and choose wisely.

Back to the Christmas Cake. Fa la la la la. I’m looking forward to December this year actually – Tim and I have been stocking up on old-timey Christmas records (so cheap! I love that I always want the vinyl no-one else wants) and I’ve got plans underway for the best, more hard-out flat Christmas Dinner ever. I don’t want for much this Christmas, and our very short trip up home last weekend where I got to hang out with Nana and see so many people made me feel highly anticipational for some whanau time over lots of food.

I’d been reading through a lot of old, old cookbooks and Nigella’s books and all sorts of cookbooks, and my braincells were tickled by all the variations on Christmas Cake. I was really keen to try adding my own to the squillions of recipes already out there – a kind of mash-up of all the things that sounded fun about other Christmas Cake recipes. So I included a whole can of condensed milk, because having that on the ingredients list pleases me. I soaked the fruit in ginger beer and rum – Gunpowder’s – spicy and intense – because how cool does that sound? (Are you starting to see a pattern emerging here? I’d see an ingredient, think “funnn” and that would be that.) I used dried pears which sounds extravagant, but it’s more stupidity on my part, I bought them once on the supposed insistence of Nigella Lawson, ended up too fearfully nervous of how much they cost to make anything with them, and now they’re nothing like the plump, full-of-potential specimens they started as. However, after a bathe in some rummy ginger fizz, they’re perfect for a fruit cake. You could use apricots, dried apples, or anything within that realm of wrinkly fruit, really.

I followed a decoration idea of the aforementioned Nigella’s because the gleaming white-on-white look appealed to me, and I also liked the lack of fuss involved in haphazardly piling up star shapes on each other. And then topped it with edible glitter because it cost about $9 for the tiny tub and I’m trying to insist it’s highly relevant to many things that I bake and cook on a daily basis and I’m becoming increasingly drawn to glittery things these days, like a magpie.

The real question is: did it taste okay after all that? Can you really just go making up a Christmas Cake? Bit of a concern, considering how much fruit and nice liquor and time and effort and so on went into it. Luckily – BRILLIANT. Like, deck the halls with boughs of deliciousness.

It’s a tall, but surprisingly light cake, as far as this kind of thing goes, with a distinct caramel-toffee vibe from the condensed milk. Strangely the ginger wasn’t as prominent as I thought it’d be, but the dark rum definitely makes itself felt. The dried pears give a fudgy, grainy sweetness, and the sultanas are, well, they fulfill their role of being a sultana (is anyone passionate about the sultana?) All the little things – the cocoa, the cinnamon, the orange oil – mesh together to form this mysteriously tis-the-seasonal flavour. All up: It worked!

Dunno how the pencil got in there. It’s…artistic?

The HungryandFrozen Christmas Cake

  • 1 and 1/2 cups (375ml) ginger beer
  • 1/2 cup (125ml) dark, rum (I used Gunpowder)
  • 700g sultanas
  • 300g dried pears or dried apricots or dried apples etc – or a mix.
  • 300g butter
  • 100g brown sugar
  • 1 can sweetened condensed milk
  • 1 tablespoon cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin (I like to think it gives it ‘something’)
  • 1 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1 teaspoon Boyajian orange oil (optional – could try replacing with the zest of an orange)
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 tablespoon cocoa
  • 2 eggs
  • 300g flour
  • More rum (or whichever liquor you’re using.)

Soak your fruit overnight (at least) in the liquids. I’d say there was 1/2 a cup of liquid left when I made my cake so if you’re nervous, drain out that much and discard/drink the rest.

Take a 22-23cm caketin, line the base with a double layer of paper and then, as best you can, line the sides with a double baking paper which extends about ten cm above the edge. Pulling out a long piece of the paper, folding it in half, making it into a loop and then shoving it into the caketin and hoping for the best tends to work for me.

Melt the butter, sugar, condensed milk and spices together gently. Remove from the heat, stir in the fruit and its liquid and the baking soda. It might fizz up a bit at this point. Beat in the eggs then carefully sift and stir in the flour, making sure there’s no lumps. Tip into your prepared tin, and bake at 140 C for around 2 1/2 hours. Pierce it at various intervals with either a cake tester or a piece of dried spaghetti and tip over a capful or three of rum.

Title via: Queen of my ear canals, Mariah Carey, with the immortal All I Want For Christmas Is You. Will we ever see another modern Christmas song that’s as good as this? Doubties.

Music lately:

Reach Out (I’ll Be There) – The Four Tops. I probably mention this song once a month, but I think for a song like this it’s okay. Frankly. And I love the “RAH!” at the start of each verse.

Idina Menzel, Heart On My Sleeve. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for me, at least indulge me by watching this entire video from start to finish – it’s slow but so beautiful and never fails to make my tear ducts spring into action.

Next time: Probably hounding you respectfully for votes again, but also aiming for some cool recipes you’ll want to try immediately.

i need to be dazzling, i want to be rainbow high

21 Comments

For all that I occasionally struggle to count to ten accurately (specifically, I lose count of things really quickly. I can count to ten. I can!) my brain does put itself to good use coming up with ideas. I was in the middle of implementing one pavlova idea that I’d thought up when my brain sidestepped and reached into a previously unused pocket and presented me with yet another cool idea for pavlova.

This is the first idea. I got to thinking that we humans cover pavlova with various fruits – and that’s all. There’s good reason for this – pavlova is tongue-dissolvingly sweet, and fruit provides contrast of both texture and relatively lower sugar content. But when thinking about things that aren’t fruit, I hypothesised that a pavlova covered in smarties (or m’n’ms or pebbles or whatever, but let’s stick with smarties while we’re here) would be dazzling to look at and delicious to eat – imagining crunch of candy-covered chocolate against marshmallowy, yielding pavlova. Thick cream in the middle to sandwich it all together. And all those rainbow colours against an off-white pavlova base.

My hypothesis may have been shaky and my mathematics half-hearted, but truly:

Pavlova:

+ all of this:

 
= oh my goshness unbelievable gasp flavoursome excellence jazzy rainbow candy wow (and also this whole time you were performing a gleeful can can without even realising it.)

 

It actually tasted exactly like I imagined it would. Nice one, brain o’ mine! Now, don’t be fooled: this is sweet. But the crunchiness somehow counteracts the solid sugar hit. Apparently a glass of milk alongside is good. This is a highly decent fall-back pavlova recipe too, with only four egg whites and a straightforward, as far as these things go, method. The end result was almost weightless, large, and had a crisp, melt-in-mouth exterior encasing a soft interior.

 
 
Smartie Pavlova 
 
(or whatever you call the lollies) (and really, name it what you like, I’m not watching at your window like Kathy in Wuthering Heights to see what you call it. I can, however, be persuaded to dance like Kate Bush’s interpretation of her!)
 
Pavlova recipe itself from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat.
 
4 egg whites
250g sugar (caster sugar if you can)
2 teaspoons cornflour
1 teaspoon vinegar – I used cider vinegar
 
300ml bottle of fresh cream 
2 tablespoons brown sugar
Between 300g and 500g smarties/m’n’ms/pebbles/equivalent. I picked out all the brown and white ones and ate them because I wanted bright colours only. 
 
Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. In a very clean non-plastic bowl, either whisk or beat with a mixer machine thing the egg whites till very frothy and quite stiff. In every other recipe in the world that I’ve seen, you’re supposed to add the sugar a tiny little bit at a time, but Nigella reckons to just add this quantity a third at a time. I nervously went with the incremental approach, but anyway, it’s going to get very, very thick and stunningly glossy. As you get on you can add the sugar in larger quantities. 
 
Spread it on a paper-lined baking tray to a circle of around 22cm across, smoothing out the top as well as you can, then put in the oven and carefully shut the door. Immediately reduce the heat to 150 C/300 F and bake for between an hour, and an hour and a quarter. Allow to cool.
 
Whisk the cream and brown sugar until stiff and spreadable, but not so stiff that it’s getting granular and threatening to turn into butter. Spread it thickly across the top of your cooled pav, and then carefully topple over the smarties. Half of them will probably fall off, but just scoop them up and use them to fill in the gaps. Admire.
 
 
This pavlova was carefully ferried by myself to be sliced into by friends while watching the important modern drama Gossip Girl. As you can see in the above photo the colouring on the candy shells of the smarties bleeds out a little on the cream – this is no real biggie but if you’re planning on trying this, decorate it at the last minute. The actual pavlova itself should last for a good long time in an airtight container, but everything else, assemble as late in the piece as you can to keep it at its twinklingly polychromatic best. Don’t be afraid of how ridiculous this may seem to you: it’s delicious and it makes sense when you gaze upon it and when you bite into it.
 
A few days after the last remaining slice of that pavlova disappeared, I met with the same group of friends at the same house, for a Halloween party. Neither Tim nor I had ever been to one before so we went all out, like Cady Heron in Mean Girls. None of this “I’m a mouse, duh!” here. I fulfilled a long-held desire to dress up as Elphaba/Wicked Witch of the West from Wicked (didn’t have time or a willing photographer to let me recreate every promotional photo since 2003, but maybe next Halloween) and it was so fun. That’s green eyeshadow all over my face, not facepaint – a little advice from me to you – and the hottest, itchiest, prone-to-moultingest $2 shop wig ever. 
 

Yeah, I downloaded Instagram. I wasn’t glowing fuzzily like that in real life. It’s just so prevalent that I start to wonder if the events I’m snapping really happened if they don’t feature blown-out lighting or a rosy glow. And it makes my grainy phone photos look like they’re supposed to be that way. And it was such a good night, culminating in some feverish dancing to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights (I told you I could be persuaded) and some very specific and still-memorised dance moves to the Spice Girls’ important song Wannabe. 

 
 
Title via: Rainbow High from the musical Evita, which is such a gloriously stompy song and is best showcased by a much younger and giggly but still terrifyingly talented Patti LuPone, the original star on Broadway, performing it at Les Mouches nightclub.
 
 
Music lately:
 
Well, Spice Girls/Wannabe and Kate Bush/Wuthering Heights…of course.
 
Also the new video for David Dallas’ awesome song Start Looking Round is as good as you’d expect it to be, considering his recent output. Even with no kittens in it like the last one had. 
 
 
Next time: On Saturday morning Tim and I met up with Jo and also Kim in Petone and we kept running into each other and they gave me – well, Tim and I – parfait glasses! And now I want to make ice cream to put in the glasses. Because they are beautiful and I love them (the glasses AND the ladies.)
 
Oh yeah and the idea-within-an-idea for pavlova was, okay, imagine if instead of putting whipped cream on pavlovas, there was cream cheese icing instead? Maybe with caramel sauce on top or strawberries or who knows. Or imagine little tiny meringues sandwiched together with cream cheese. I just need a reason to try this, is all, so if someone has a need for an experimental pavlova in their life…