Category: Chocolate

we are the custard pie appreciation consortium

18 Comments

Pie!

Blackberry Coconut Custard Chocolate Chunk Cookie Pie!
But before the pie, one thing. I’m not even sorry for lulling you into a false sense of pie-related security, that was in fact my aim.
After becoming besotted with Parks and Recreation and watching it fanatically with Tim, I couldn’t work out who the character of Ron Swanson reminded me of. And then, while looking through photos, it hit me: Rupert, our dead family cat.
I even uploaded this unfairly terrible photo of myself with Rupert so I could say: See? Look at the similar contempt in their eyes. Their comparable face shapes. Their pelts, both elegant and abundant. The resemblance doesn’t stop at the physical or the disposition, either. Like Ron, Rupert’s appetite was legendary. I’m pretty sure had we offered it to him, he wouldn’t have turned down The Swanson (that’s a turkey leg wrapped in bacon.)
Anyway, unsparing self-indulgence aside, here’s some pie that I invented…self-indulgently.
I’ve had this idea tucked away in my brain for a week or two, but only had the time and energy to test it out this morning. That idea was: what if I made a pie, but instead of using pastry, I used cookie dough? It’d be like there was a giant cookie on top! But it’d be a pie! You can see how I got so enthusiastic about this.
I mean, I really thought this was a good idea. Luckily for me, it actually worked out well, because I can’t predict what would’ve happened to my self-esteem/general demeanour if it had tasted awful or broken in half or something – I made such a huge mess of the kitchen in the process of making this and it was gratifying to have something delicious to justify it.
I guess you could employ near-on anything in the filling, but I wanted to use things I already had, which was frozen blackberries, dessicated coconut, and a little dark chocolate. The custard powder acts as a thickening agent, but importantly, along with the coconut, absorbs the bulk of the berry juice, thus preventing it seeping into the pastry and becoming soggy. This was my assumption, and it did exactly what I’d hoped. Apart from the sheer uncertainty of it all, and my chronic clumsiness meaning that there was a large and suspicious looking pile of baking powder on the floor, THIS PIE IS SO STRAIGHTFORWARD that I had to put that bit in capitals in case you were scrolling through this in a bit of a hurry and not really properly reading it, because (a) it’s a very important point and (b) people do that, we’re only human.
It’s not only straightforward, it turned out vegan, so feel free to feed this to near-on anyone you like (except Ron Swanson, who probably wouldn’t appreciate that there was no meat was involved.)
Blackberry Coconut Custard Chocolate Chunk Cookie Pie (it’s a good name, right?)
Cookie Dough Pastry
Follow this recipe, leaving out the spices, but adding in a teaspoon of cinnamon. Note: the texture of the dough when I made it this time round was much more traditionally cookie-like, but I honestly think I forgot half the flour when I made it last time. Depending on your ingredients the results may vary but it should be recognisably like cookie dough.
Roll out a decent handful of the dough and carefully lay it in a pie plate (as you can see from the photos, I put a sheet of baking paper in the pie plate.) Press it down, but don’t bother to trim the edges too much. Refrigerate.
Roughly chop about 70g dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana) and stir through the remaining dough. Roll out another decent handful of this dough into a rough circle.
Filling:
2 1/2 cups blackberries (or whichever frozen berries you like)
3 tablespoons custard powder
1 tablespoon golden syrup
2 generous teaspoons vanilla extract or paste
1 cup dessicated coconut
Mix everything except the coconut in a small pan, so that the berries are covered in the custard powder. Heat gently, stirring constantly. The berries will start to release their juice which will absorb the custard powder, slowly becoming brighter in colour. Slowly bring to the boil, by which stage it should be pretty liquid, then simmer for about three minutes, stirring the whole time. Stir in the coconut and allow it to cool a little.
Spread it all into the base of the pie and then top with the chocolate chunk layer. Pinch/fold the edges together.
Bake at 190 C/375 F for 15 or so minutes. Keep an eye out on it though. Like cookies, the dough will become more solid upon cooling.
This will make more cookie dough than what you’ll need for a pie, but whatever you don’t use, tip into a freezer bag and use in future as an instant crumble topping for fruit. Or if you’ve got the energy, roll it out and use it to make cookies.
So what does it taste like? All the nicer for sitting on this brazenly pretty plate shaped like a leaf, I can tell you. (It’s from Vanishing Point at 40 Abel Smith Street and their stuff is very reasonably priced, considering this is Wellington.)
As I said, the hypothesis paid off and both the base and top were crisp and chewy and, well, cookie-ish, without the slightest hint of disintegrating into a pastry swamp from the berry juices. The cookie recipe’s a good one, so it wasn’t surprising that it tasted delicious, but the small bursts of very dark, velvety chocolate against the more sweet, fragrant filling was very delightful. The whole thing was pretty brilliant actually – richly berried, softly gritty and crimson of filling, sturdy and intermittently chocolately of exterior.
As far as endorsement that’s not from me goes, Tim and I cheerfully fed this pie today to a cool crowd: Kate, Jason, Jo (thanks for the flowers Jo) Kim, and Brendan (who doesn’t have anything to link to.) They all seemed to really like it, and not just because I was standing right there with a serrated knife. Also, it was ostensibly given in exchange for more Parks and Recreation from Kate and Jason (that kind of rhymes!) so it’s all nicely circular. Tim and I watched an episode while having dinner tonight, it’s actually concerning how hyped up we were. Mind you, we do this over a lot of TV, at least we’re both like this. (Tim: “Mmm, both of us”.)
It has been a good weekend: Yesterday I had the fortuitous opportunity to have lunch at Kayu Manis with the esteemed Chef Wan and several other local food bloggers (find out more and see the photos here) and on Friday night I had another very fun food blogger occasion in the form of a Wellington on a Plate dinner at Fratelli. Last night Tim and I went to see @Peace at Chow, which was a sort of awkward location, but it was a cool night. Well, a cool morning. It started after 1am. Hence these stilted and expressionless sentences. I felt things! I had emotions! I just had two really late nights in a row and am feeling increasingly useless at placing words in a row effectively as this evening wears on.
Luckily, this being 2011, my thoughts on this pie, and all other good things, can be summed up with one simple gif.
___________________________________________
Title via: The Kinks’ excellent, if lengthily titled Village Green Preservation Society, which now always makes me think of the good fight fought by the people of Otaua back in 2008.
___________________________________________
Music lately:
Scritti Politti, The Sweetest Girl. Some songs that you initially don’t think you like whatsoever and then end up listening to them on repeat many times over in one sitting? This one. Is one.
Have linked to it before but Disfunktional by the aforementioned @Peace is such a good song. Last night it was sent out to anyone fighting with their other half. Such is the fervour inspired in people by @Peace and its members, there was huge cheering from the audience, until they were told not to cheer because it’s not something to be proud of. I guess you had to be there, but it was pretty funny. Probably because I was standing near one especially enthusiastic guy. Who cheered at that point.
____________________________________________
Next time: Made a simple dinner of rice and peas tonight from the Lee Brothers’ book – might put that one up next. Doesn’t sound very fun, but it tasted just perfect.

take back the cake, burn the shoes and boil the rice

14 Comments

While frantically making royal icing at 7.00am yesterday, sending clouds of icing sugar into both the air and my eyebrows with each rotation my whisk made around the bowl; spreading it over layers of cake and massaging sprinkles into a uniform layer across its still-wet surface, it was hard to imagine that soon there’d be events that would require more attention than the one at hand.

However life, in the way it does to everyone every day, presented me with a whole lot of other things to take in.
Yesterday I found out that Nancy Wake had died, aged 98. I grew up with the proud knowledge that I was related to her down the line, but also with a more general respect for all that she’d achieved. I won’t pass wikipedia content off as my own here, instead I definitely recommend reading a summary of her life during WWII here. Where it says she was descended from Pourewa and Charles Cossell – those are my same ancestors, just a few generations back, of course.
A significant day in my life was when I met Nancy Wake in London in 2005 – sort of by chance, although you don’t just run into someone in the Royal Star and Garter Home for the ex-Service Community. It was very lucky that I was able to go in and visit her, as I was told at reception that they have a no-visitors policy unless Wake herself had cleared it first. However, my sincere story (from New Zealand, related, happy to leave if it doesn’t suit, just thought since this was my one chance, etc) randomly got the thumbs up and suddenly I was wearing a visitor’s sticker and being escorted down a hallway to her room. I hardly remember what happened to be honest, apart from small details – she was wearing red lipstick and red nailpolish, there was a handwritten Christmas card from Prince Charles and his sons pinned to the wall, and I’d (a little naively) brought her a gift of homemade fudge, to which she said sharply “I can’t eat any of that stuff.” Tim was there too – it was right when we first started ‘going out’ or whatever, he loitered outside but with her permission snapped a photo of the two of us together. Nancy Wake was a hugely inspirational person (quoted as saying “I’ve never been afraid in my life”, something that seems to have failed to reach my share of our DNA, as has her bicycling ability) and I was very sad to hear of her death. But, I also feel lucky to have had moment, though a slightly surreal moment, with her.
I’ve also been reading heaps of accounts of the rioting in London via Twitter and news websites. Hope everyone I know over there – and the list does grow the more I think about it – is doing okay and staying safe. Actually I just hope everyone is staying safe and that it somehow stops really soon. Scary, sad times.
It’s almost like my body or soul, whichever is responsible for this kind of carry-on, instinctively knew I’d need cake at some point. I made this on Sunday, not for any particular reason but just because it felt like something I needed to do, in my heart. Maybe not so much for my heart, some might say, but I tend to believe my body’s food-related instincts are always accurate. Firstly, I knew I wanted to make a big cake, secondly, I had a vision of a cake entirely covered in hundreds and thousands – this turned out to be way too difficult and so I compromised with just a rainbow-dotted top – and thirdly, I wanted the juicy acerbic squish of blackberries, which I already had in my freezer, against the buttery richness of vanilla and white chocolate.
Sometimes cakes and such will spring into my mind, fully-formed like this – in which case if I’ve got the means I just go with it. I’m glad I did, because this isn’t so much a cake as an accomplishment, the sort of thing you want to put on your CV. (Actually, this cake should go on your CV, the one I’ve made here one only looks complicated.)
White Chocolate Layer Cake with Blackberries and Hundreds and Thousands

Adapted liberally from a basic cake recipe of Nigella Lawson’s that appears in some form in nearly all her books.

Cake:
225g soft, soft butter
225g sugar
4 eggs
200g plain flour
25g cornflour (or just 225g plain flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons vanilla extract/paste
100g good white chocolate (I used Whittakers) chopped roughly

Filling:
Jam
Lots of blackberries (frozen is fine, but thaw them in a sieve over a bowl – they have SO much juice in them)
Royal icing:
2 egg whites
Icing sugar
vanilla extract/paste
Hundreds and Thousands (about a small container full, depending on your capacity)
  • Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and grease and line a 21 or 20cm springform caketin, or two if you have them.
  • Your two options for the cake are: Blitz the butter and sugar in the food processor, then the eggs, then everything else, scrape half the mixture into each of the cake tins and bake for 25-30 mins.
  • Or, do as I did, and beat the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon, then beat in the eggs, then fold in everything else and proceed as above. If you only have one tin (like me), just cook them one at a time, and when the first one’s done, carefully remove it from the tin and leave it aside to cool, while you put more baking paper into the tin and scrape the rest of the batter into it and bake.
  • Once the two layers are cooled, put one onto a plate and spread the top thinly with the jam of your choice. Then, arrange the blackberries over the top of the jam, and top with the second layer of cake. Quantities are a little hazy here, but I didn’t have nearly enough and had to top it up with some nearby scooped out tamarillo flesh, because the blackberries studded thinly across the cake looked ridiculous. Prepare more than you think you’ll need, you can always eat the leftovers.
  • To make your icing, whisk the egg whites a little then slowly stir in icing sugar. This is an instinctive recipe, sorry, I don’t have measurements, but probably 2 cups or so. When you’ve stirred in enough icing sugar that the mixture is thick and white, whisk it hard for a couple of minutes and add more icing sugar if it’s too soft and runny. It needs to be thick and spreadable. Stir in your vanilla.
  • Spread the icing carefully across the top and sides of the cake, and tip over as many 100s and 1000s as you like.
  • Serve with heaps of pride.
This cake recipe is reliable and easy, although admittedly my layers didn’t rise very high, I think this is because the wooden spoon I used to make them didn’t beat as much air in as a cake mixer would. No matter. It’s tender and buttery and good on its own; when paired with sharp berries, thick sweet icing steeped in vanilla, welcome lumps of white chocolate and the rainbow crunch of hundreds and thousands, not to mention more cake, it’s pretty damn flabbergasting.
Luckily for you, there are many, many options if the stars don’t align for you ingredients-wise.
Here’s a few of them! (Tell us, Susan!)
  • If you don’t have the energy/cake tins, just halve the recipe and possibly leave out the chocolate, for a small vanilla sponge cake.
  • Royal icing is practical, but also a little dull – hence why I vanilla-d it up to round off its sweetness. You could always use something else – buttercream or ganache, for example.
  • Fill with different fruits – whatever frozen berries are on special, canned pears, etc.
  • Pains me to say it, but the sprinkles are not essential. Or you could use different ones!
  • Use dark or milk chocolate instead of white
  • Add cocoa to the batter
  • And so on. Use your instincts, have fun. Add nuts, leave ’em out. Use fruit to join the layers, or more icing, or have no layers at all. Cake!
Be warned: sprinkles only need the barest encouragement to bounce all over the place and off your slice of cake and onto the floor.
I would finally like to send a quick “Hey!” and “Cheers” to Curd Nerd who snaffled me into the Beervana on Saturday, where I had a very fun time tasting tasty beers hither and thither, and sitting in on presentations by local prizewinning brewers and the redoubtable Martin Bosley.
________________________________________________________
Title via: Getting Married Today, from a musical that I just can’t get sick of, not that I’m trying, Stephen Sondheim’s Company. I once had a dream that I was performing this song most adequately in a local theatre production, if someone would like to make this happen in real life, that would be grand. I recommend first, original Broadway cast member Beth Howland; then 2006 revival cast member Heather Laws’ admirable version, and finally the always wonderful Alice Ripley performing it with her usual commitment in Washington in 2002.
________________________________________________________
Music lately:
New music from Tourettes is always good news to me.
The Go! Team, Ladyflash. This song is so cheery that some of it’s gotta rub off if you listen to it enough.
(Reach Out) I’ll Be There, The Four Tops. There is so much good stuff in this song that it’s only right to listen to it while thinking about the above cake. It’s so upbeat it’s almost on its way to being melancholic again, with all those minor keys and stuff (I really have no technical knowledge of what makes music sound the way it does…evidently.)
_________________________________________________________
Next time: something a little more erring on the side of sensible. But not too sensible. It probably won’t be very sensible at all, let’s face it.

the french are glad to die for love, they delight in fighting duels

12 Comments

Having Chocolate French Toast Sandwiches for dinner may sound a little subversive (as far as these things go), but really it’s exactly the same as having scrambled eggs on toast followed by a chocolate bar. Mind you, I was never shocked by the idea of deep-fried Mars Bars. In fact, I loved and welcomed them when I was travelling through Scotland. There’s nothing quite like eating one the morning after a big night out. I’m not saying they make you feel better. If anything, the consumption of one just sharpens any lingering liver-related remorse. For a few moments though all is good, as you eat the salty, crisp, oily battered Mars Bar, with warm chocolate melting onto your fingers.

This recipe isn’t just novelty or excessiveness for its own sake. Whoever invented it knew exactly what they were doing. It’s respectable, and awesomely so. When I first made this it was for dinner on Wednesday night. I love having breakfast for dinner, and, as noted when I made pancakes for dinner, there’s a Pippi Longstocking-ish thrill to be had about eating what you want when you want. Plus it seems kinda shortsighted to restrict so many good, fast and simple food ideas to the early morning. I made them again for lunch today, which is when I discovered a further point in their favour – they still taste brilliant after sitting round for a several minutes while I photograph them.
Chocolate – French Toast – together – it speaks for itself, really. Except I’m not going to let it, because this wouldn’t be much of a food blog if all I did was post pictures of things with a caption saying the title of the recipe and “Ya-huh?” or “See?” afterwards.
So: The sensory experience of biting into crisp-edged, egg-soft bread and the contrast between its buttery exterior, puffy interior and the tongue-coatingly cocoa-y dark chocolate holding it together, is pretty outstanding. Both in terms of both texture and – surprise – taste.
While I could eat white chocolate all day, every day, I think the darker stuff works best here, because while it’s rich, it’s not too sweet. Any more going on and your veins might not be able to cope from the spike in blood sugar.
If you want to galvanise this basic recipe and make it more debonairly savoury, you could do as I did and slice up some ripe pear and feta cheese and use that inside the sandwich instead. Because juicy pear and soft, creamy, salty cheese nestled in a cocoon of the aforementioned eggy, buttery bread is almost enough to steal its chocolatey counterpart’s glory.
Despite the namechecking of the French, it seems right that I found a recipe of such unrestrainedness in an American magazine. This magazine, called Fine Cooking, is one of the better ones out there – in fact when one of Tim’s co-workers gave him some issues of it to give to me I was surprised at how much I liked them. I’m very particular about food magazines and wasn’t expecting to find an American one, with their differences in measurements and common ingredients and so on, to be so readily fantastic. But the recipes are gorgeous with a good mix of easy and aspirational; the layout is appealing and the writing is genuine and knowledgeable. Which sounds like a pretty simple formula – but several magazines seem to miss one or two of those elements. While I don’t think you can actually find Fine Cooking in shops here in New Zealand, they have a very cool website where you can easily look up recipes. Such as this one here for Chocolate French Toast Sandwiches. Which surely and specifically demonstrates that they know what they’re on about.
Seriously, this recipe is probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to me all week. Well, that and the fact that Tim and I have booked tickets to go up home and visit my family (including NEW KITTEN) for a weekend in September. And the fact that I won tickets to the Chocolate Festival next month thanks to the lovely Andrea of So D’lish. Actually…that happened last week…we’re so unexhilarating lately, but I do like it that way most of the time.
Chocolate French Toast Sandwiches

Slightly adapted from this recipe in Fine Cooking.

Four thick slices of white sandwich bread
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
A pinch of salt
40g dark chocolate (I used Whittakers Dark Ghana)
Butter

– Cut the slices of bread in half diagonally, so that you have eight triangles.
– Roughly chop the chocolate.
– Lightly whisk the eggs, then add the milk and the salt and mix again.
– Heat a little butter – as much as you like really, I used about a tablespoon – in a wide saucepan. Quickly dip four of the bread triangles into the egg-milk mixture and fry on both sides in the butter till golden brown.
– Lay two triangles each onto two plates, and divide the chocolate over the top.
– Repeat the dipping and frying with the remaining four triangles of bread, and then put them on top of the pieces on the plate, to complete the sandwiches. The heat of the top and bottom pieces will slowly melt the chocolate.

For a Pear and Feta variation, slice up a pear and some feta, as much as you like, and use that to fill the sandwiches instead.
_________________________________________________________
Title via: Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend, that evergreen song from Marilyn Monroe’s film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (Look, I managed not to use the word iconic! Oh, wait…)
_________________________________________________________
Music lately:

Laura Nyro. I’d heard of her before, but never actually heard her; oh my gosh. Been On A Train is strong stuff. Her voice is amazing. And, I had no idea she wrote the gorgeous Wedding Bell Blues.
Chess – for a musical about a game where the players are almost entirely sedentary, the music itself is – thankfully – extremely dramatic and exciting. While Nobody’s Side is the big power number for the ladies, I found myself on a bit of a Heaven Help My Heart rampage on Youtube today. Predictably, Idina Menzel’s version is my clear favourite, but Broadway original Judy Kuhn’s clear voice and emotional presence also makes for a beautiful rendition. Also Julia Murney’s is routinely amazing. Um, that’s all for now.
__________________________________________________________

Next time: Not sure. Possibly something from Ottolenghi again, I just can’t quit that cookbook of his.

as if to say he doesn’t like chocolate, he’s born a liar

13 Comments

Self Portrait With Chocolate Fudge Pie.
I have many many people that I look up to in this world. For example: Susan Blackwell. She is extremely funny and clever, she has a very cool job and she’s aspirational – despite (I’m sorry Susan Blackwell, if you’re reading this – and if you are, hiii!) not having the most bankable voice, she starred in the Tony-nominated musical [title of show]. As herself. I love that she has created basically the only role I could ever hope to play in a musical (apart from maybe the girl from A Chorus Line who can’t sing), for having one of the few songs that I can absentmindedly sing along to without stopping mid-note and saying “oh forget it” which is what happened when I was singing (yes, lustily) along to Aquarius from the musical Hair the other day. These days, among other things, she has her own joyful online show where she interviews Broadway stars in an array of locations. It’s called Side By Side By Susan Blackwell. I basically would like to model my life upon her career trajectory. Except with the addition of authoring an extremely excellent cookbook. Perhaps if my (still hypothetical) cookbook becomes exceptionally popular, I’ll just be able to command that someone puts on a local production of [title of show] and casts me as Susan. That’s quite the “if” though…
Anyway, the point of all this is that in one of her recent segments of SBSBSB, she interviews stage and screen actor Billy Crudup, and, in the process, they make his grandma’s recipe, Chocolate Fudge Pie. I was captivated by this; its name, its provenance, its promise of chocolate, fudge, and pie in one handy substance…and vowed to make it pronto.
Obligatory pouring-of-mixture into receptacle shot, which I can never quite get right.
I adapted this very American recipe into metric (hello, cups of butter, what?) but the only thing I had trouble with was the original request for “six squares of bittersweet chocolate”. Figuring that because “this America, man,” these squares are probably fairly large. Even taking into account that I’m halving the recipe presented on the show, 70g of chocolate felt about right. Enough for plenty of flavour plus a little bit of mixture-tasting.
Billy Crudup’s Grandma’s Chocolate Fudge Pie
With thanks to Billy Crudup, Billy Crudup’s Grandma, Susan Blackwell, and whoever hired Billy Crudup on Broadway so that he’d be a legitimate interview subject for Susan Blackwell thus creating the opportunity for him to share this recipe in a place that I was likely to find it.
70g dark, dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)
180g butter
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup plain flour
pinch of salt

Set your oven to 160 C/325 F. Grease a 20-22cm pie plate (like the one in my picture. You could also use one of those throwaway tinfoil tins that are very, very cheap at the supermarket) I also cut a circle of baking paper for the base, because I’m nervous like that.

Carefully – either in the microwave, in a double-boiler contraption (rest one heatproof bowl over a small pan of simmering water, not letting the water touch the bottom of the bowl) or just in a pan over a low heat, melt the butter and chocolate together. Set aside. Whisk the living daylights out of the eggs and sugar, pour in the chocolatey butter, the flour (good to sift it to prevent lumps) and the salt.

Bake for around 45 minutes until no longer super wobbly in the middle. I found 45 minutes perfect for me but you may want to check it at 35, in case your oven is a bit enthusiastic.
This pie rules. Like brownies, but somehow superior, because here in every single slice there is an ideal and just plain nice ratio of cakey exterior to melting, squidgy centre. It’s not off-puttingly rich, and the relatively scanty quantity of chocolate somehow flourishes while baking to create a result of astonishing chocolatey depth. It’d be completely fantastic with some ice cream on the side, slowly liquefying into its pliant, satiny centre – but is still practical and cake-resembling enough for me to take a clingfilm-wrapped slice to work in my handbag for lunch.
My attempt at prettying up this brown spongey savannah with icing sugar was patchy to middlingly successful, at best.
I’m not just saying this because the recipe came to me via someone that I think is really, really really cool (I’m talking about Susan Blackwell, not Billy Crudup by the way, hence the ‘via’) but this recipe is amazing and will most definitely become a regular fixture on my circuit. Speshly because it gives me a legitimate excuse to bore people about [title of show], as my knife hovers with maddening endlessness over the pie and they wait for me to serve them a slice. “It’s about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical!”
By the way, I did three really clumsy things on the day of making this Chocolate Fudge Pie. Firstly, I dropped my phone into a bowl of salad. Secondly, I dropped and smashed my Kilner jar, at least half full of homemade quince brandy (oh, the swearing and endless vacuuming that ensued) and finally, I dropped a full, open, king-sized box of weetbix (not actual weetbix, but those “weeta-brix” knockoff type ones) down the back of the pantry. Yet I managed to make this entire pie, chocolatey and eggy and rich, in a white shirt, without getting one particle of it on myself. At this point, I was really expecting to get covered in mixture, somehow it didn’t happen. I’m not sure what my message is here, apart from: enjoy life/your nice alcohol/applicable consumable item now, rather than saving it for an appropriate occasion, because you never know when it might slip out of your hands and smash to pieces. On carpet. Even as the jar of brandy fell I remember thinking “wheeee-ew, it’s landing on carpet, it’ll bounc-ohhhh no.”
_________________________________________________________
Title via: Bloc Party’s Helicopter. I really like these guys, although it’s hard to know if my view of them is softened because they really remind me of living in the UK in 2005. Although I spose any music can be affected by the circumstances that you hear it in, I’m pretty sure this is still a good song with or without my contexty lens over it.
_________________________________________________________

Music lately:

Probably said it before, but while the movie adaptation of the musical Hair is pretty awful, they got one thing right in the casting of Cheryl Barnes to sing the song Easy To Be Hard; it’s so beautiful. Even then, I hate that the camera cuts away from her so much.

@Peace, a new creation from Homebrew’s Tom Scott and Nothing To Nobody’s Lui Tuiasau. You can stream it, or you can buy it – and in a cool but bold move from its makers – pay what you like for it, right here. It’s all excellent, with silky as production from Benny Tones, and if you’re not sure, the title track is a good place to start (although so is the opening song, “this goes out to all walks, living in this village that we call Aucks”)
__________________________________________________________

Next time: Completing the completely coincidental trifecta (pie-fecta?) of blog posts about pies, and entirely inspired by Twin Peaks, which Tim and I have been obsessively watching lately: Cherry Pie.

at sideshow stalls, they throw the balls at coconut fur

14 Comments

Winter has got me, and not in an epic, sweepingly-caped Game of Thrones kinda way (although, phew, look at that show’s very casual body count) but in the more unremarkable, throat infection kind of way. While I’ve been coughing at intervals during the daytime, I’m starting to wonder if there’s some chemical or hormone that’s released just as you’re about to drift off to sleep (perhaps to dream about being cast as Amy in Company, as my brain somewhat plausibly presented me with recently) which reacts with whatever’s happening in your throat. Because it’s at night when I cough the most. My brain is woozy and dozy, but my throat and lungs are wide awake and on fire.

 

 

So I’ve generously applied a tea made from chopped, carroty-fresh tumeric root and fibrous chunks of fresh ginger. I’ve drunk a lot of water, sipped Gees Linctus, eaten leafy green vegetables, and dissolved so many lozenges on my tongue that my teeth’ll probably corrode before the season is out…and also had some whiskey. Fingers crossed this elixir mix gets the better of my immune system soon.

In the meantime, here are the promised Coconut Macaroons – luckily, as in previous winters, I haven’t got a blocked nose and therefore no sense of taste. Those winters are no fun at all. I’d take a cough and no energy over that any day. I’d never tried these Coconut Macaroons before, despite owning How To Be A Domestic Goddess since 2006. But one of the many manifest joys of Nigella Lawson is that with her massive quantity of recipes, there’s always deliciousness anew to discover and love.

This is how much coconut they use…On the other hand, only two egg whites! These macaroons are less sophisticated than their French macaron counterparts, but they’re significantly less terrifying to make, too.

Coconut Macaroons

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

  • 2 egg whites
  • 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
  • 100g sugar
  • pinch of salt
  • 250g shredded/fancy shred/long thread coconut (if all you have/can find is dessicated, I’m sure it’s fine, but Nigella does make a bit of a point of saying that shredded is better – am just the messenger)
  • 30g ground almonds
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or coconut essence

Set your oven to 170 C/340 F and line a baking tray with baking paper. In a non-plastic bowl, whisk the eggs till just frothy, then add the cream of tarter and whisk some more till you get soft peaks forming.

At this point, carry on whisking – fun! – while gradually adding the sugar a teaspoon at a time. It should eventually be thick and shiny, by the time all the sugar’s used up.

Now plunder all this gorgeous meringue-y hard work by tipping in the coconut, salt, extract and ground almonds, and fold together till you have a sticky mixture. I’ll tell you now: this mixture tastes amaaaazing.

Take a quarter cup measure, and scoop out cups-ful, dumping them down onto the tray. You should get between 8 and 12 out of this mixture. Bake for around 20 minutes, or until lightly golden. If you like, once they’re cool, drizzle them or swirl their bases in melted dark chocolate (around 150-200g should do this lot)

I love them. They’re satisfyingly large, pleasingly occupying both biscuit and cake territory, chewy with the fresh, summery taste of coconut and the bounty bar-echoing delight of their optional chocolate coating. They’re just seriously delicious.

Title via: the very lovely David Bowie’s earlyish song Karma Man, from the album London Boy.

Music lately:

With the lack of sleep that recurrent coughing brings, I’ve not been drawn towards anything with a heavy beat or a heavy meaning to process lately. Which is why Patsy Cline and the serenely beautiful Ali and Toumani album, for example, have been played a lot.

Next time: I found this amazing roast vegetable tart recipe, vegan and gluten free and delicious and everything. Hopefully will be blogging with a non-inflamed throat next time, too.

 

clean clear crisp, we got a love like this water

12 Comments

I don’t want to come across all “Oh hi old friend, haven’t seen you in so long, oh wait I’ll just put my shiny new iPhone on the table there for everyone to see while opening up the FriendPal app, which I paid $3 for, it takes a photo of the person in front of you so you can talk to them while looking at a picture of them on your phone” etc. But I really, really love the FoodGawker app, which is where I found this recipe for Chocolate Mousse. While all the food that I blog about here makes me happy, sometimes I find an exciting recipe that just fills my thoughts constantly, because I’m so curious about it. A recipe that makes people’s voices slower, plane trips delayed, busses late and traffic more congested because they’re all standing between me and my kitchen.

 
 
 
Foodgawker is a site with page after page of thumbnails of stunning food photography, each photo linking to the recipe it depicts on the blog it came from. You’ve got to self-submit, and you’ve got to be good. Possibly related: they’ve consistently rejected all my submissions over the last year or so. But still I return, using it like Google for recipes. Their iPhone app condenses all this into a format that fits on your phone, and it’s a grand way to fill in spare time – although it helps to have some free Wi-Fi, I bet all those high-res pictures chew through the megabytes.
 
The reason this recipe caught my attention, while browsing through the app in an airport recently, was its ingredients. Or lack of.
 
 
 
 
Chocolate, water, juice, honey. (The honey was a total pain to scrape off the baking paper, by the way, and I didn’t even achieve visually what I was hoping for! Hopefully I learn from this.)
 
You get chocolate mousse out of hardly anything at all. I wish I’d known about this recipe a few years ago as a student – a little chocolate, turn on the tap, and you’ve got pudding. No eggs, no cream, no nothing. It’s amazing. As the German man on Tim’s and my train to Warsaw said when he found out we were from New Zealand: “Oh my gosh, that is further away than I could ever have imagined!” As they say in [title of show], “For anyone who’s ever dreamed, it’s time to believe in dreaming again….It’s time. Dream. Believe.” (Oh come on, it more or less applies to awesome chocolate mousse. Also: [title of show]!)
 
 
Water Chocolate Mousse
 
With a huge thanks to the Mess In The Kitchen blog where I found this recipe. I’ve adapted it slightly.
 
100g dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)
1/4 cup juice (any flavour, I used more of that strawberry juice)
1/3 cup water
2 teaspoons honey
 
Bring the liquids and the honey to the boil in a pan, then remove from the heat and tip into a bowl. Break up the chocolate and add it to the bowl, stirring till the heat of the liquid melts it and you’ve got a shiny chocolate puddle.
 
Refrigerate for 10 minutes or so. Just before you take it out, fill your sink with a couple of centimeters of cold water, and add a handful of ice cubes.
 
Sit the bowl of chocolate in the water, and whisk. Whisk and whisk and whisk and eventually it will aerate, turning paler and thickened and – pa-dah – into chocolate mousse. If you end up with what looks like overbeaten whipped cream, just whisk in a little hot water till you get the consistency you want. Divide amongst two smallish bowls/glasses and serve.
 
Serves 2
 
 
Most recipes involving chocolate will stress that you can’t let any water get into it or it’ll seize up and turn all gross. So, it was with slight consternation that I mixed the two together. Through some miracle of science, the melted chocolate, rapidly cooling with every flick of your whisk, absorbs the liquid and becomes a soft, velvety pillowy pile of mousse, with the clean, unsullying water making the dark cocoa flavour so definite it’s like every single one of your tastebuds is wearing 3D glasses.
 
 
 
 
In terms of excitement-causing, second only to the astonishing minimalism of the ingredients is this recipe’s versatility. With no eggs or dairy or gluten, this could also serve as icing on a cake, the filling in a pie shell, or as a base for whatever flavour you want to push upon it – use orange juice, add vanilla or peppermint extract or cinnamon. If you don’t have juice or honey, I think you could use water for the entire liquid content, and just use two teaspoons of sugar.
 
 
 
 
And for interest’s sake, I tried it with white chocolate instead of dark. Apart from the sort of muddy colour (from the strawberry juice) and a softer-set texture, it worked amazingly well and now calls me, siren like, from the fridge.
 
 
 
Title via: Ladi6’s high-achieving single Like Water from her beautiful album The Liberation of…
 
 
 
Music lately:
 
Kiss From a Rose, Seal. OMG this song is good. Although it’s really hard to blog when you’re singing along to it. It requires all your concentration.
 
HAIR. While I appreciate that I’ve mentioned it a million times, it’s only because it’s really, really good. And I’m obsessed anew thanks to the arrival from America of the Actors Fund of America Benefit recording and the vinyl record of the 2009 revival cast. “All the clouds are cumuloft, walking in spaaaace”
 
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, How Can You Love Me. As commenter Pete20Pedro on Youtube says, “what a jam!” And their album came with a free tshirt, one of those nice ones with really soft fabric, even.
 
 
Next time: Nigella’s recipe for coconut macaroons…unless anything dinner-y overtakes my interest before then. That’s if I’m not asleep in every spare moment. Had another weekend away for work – fortunately, didn’t hit my head again, but I did have a weird sleepless night in my motel, which I’m still catching up on now.

how long has this been going on…?

12 Comments

If there was a defining recipe of my childhood, the above cake would be second only to microwaved Marmite and cheese sandwiches. Which is where you take many bread slices, butter them, spread them with Marmite, pull several slices of cheese from the block with the wire cutter, layer them all up in a stack on a plate (probably plastic and not microwave safe) and then nuke until the cheese is bubbling violently. Allow to cool slightly, then eat. Alternatives include tomato sauce and cheese (like a low-rent Margherita pizza…kind of) and, uh, golden syrup and butter. In fairness, this was in the days where I was dancing in every spare minute, and there wasn’t a lot of time or access to fancy snack foods. It’s no wonder I gravitated instinctively towards the improvisational and energy-dense. Plus I love melted cheese.

What I baked the most in my childhood though, for family members’ birthdays, for Calf Club (a kind of elaborate rural pet day, FYI) competitions and simply for my own entertainment, was this cake recipe which came with a glass bowl Mum bought in the 80s – one of those round, slightly opaque baking dishes with high, ridged sides. I suspect it became my go-to cake because it was very simple and didn’t involve any expensive ingredients and therefore wouldn’t be too stressful to my parents that I was making it so often. I didn’t realise it at the time when I was a kid, but it’s completely vegan – using water, vinegar, baking soda and oil in place of the richness and raising abilities in butter and eggs. These ingredients mean that it’s a fairly spartan-tasting cake, which I also didn’t really realise at the time, since I didn’t have much to compare it to. In hindsight, I feel a bit sorry for everyone in my family who had to choke down slices of it every time I insisted on baking it, but at least I was always generous with the icing.

After all this you might wonder why I even emailed Mum for the recipe. Partly curiosity about how whether I’d still like it, and partly in recollection of its dairy-free-ness, which makes it pretty attractive to me right now in these times of brutally expensive butter. Mum did say “wouldn’t you rather just turn off the heater and eat butter instead?” to which I respond…I’m sorry…that I want to have my cake and eat it too. I have made a few additions to the recipe though, so that you’re not stuck consuming the same firm, pale brown disc of cake I grew up on.

My Childhood Chocolate Cake, Improved Significantly

The title needs work, but at least the recipe doesn’t anymore.

  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 3 tablespoons cocoa, good dark stuff like Equagold if you can get it.
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/3 cup plain oil such as rice bran
  • A pinch of salt
  • 2 tablespoons malt vinegar or balsamic vinegar
  • 3/4 cup fruit juice of some kind, watered down a bit if you like (like, 1/2 cup juice, 1/4 cup water)
  • Optional but excellent: 100g very dark chocolate (I use Whittakers) roughly chopped.

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

Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder and baking soda into a bowl and stir in 1/2 cup white sugar and 1/4 cup brown or muscovado sugar (or just 3/4 cup white sugar)

Using the back of a spoon, make a well in the centre (like, a bit of a hollow/valley in the flour-cocoa mixture that you can pour liquid into. I used to spend ages on this bit, smoothing the mixture into precarious sand-dunes. Mind you I used to think those hideous framed sand-oil-water things were really cool) and pour in the oil, salt, vinegar, and fruit juice.

Using a spatula, stir everything together thoroughly, transfer to the prepared tin, and bake for around 40 minutes. Once cool you can ice, or it’s just as fine plain.

Mum concedes that it wasn’t the nicest cake but it was good for kids because they just want to eat the icing anyway, and it was very easy to put together, so “it never felt like a waste of time baking it.” In case you’re wondering where the changes were made, I upped the cocoa, and added brown sugar and chopped chocolate. These helped make it a little darker and richer. Then, I changed the liquid content from plain water to juice – the reason I say you can use any juice is that the flavour itself doesn’t seem to be overly strident once the cake is cooked, instead adding an overall extra layer of sweetness and distracting from the slightly fizzy vinegar aftertaste which could sometimes otherwise linger.

In short, and the reason you might want to make it at all, it’s a really delicious cake now, instead of being a cake that was okay for kids in the early 90s who didn’t know any better and who were mostly interested in the icing on top anyway. It has an unambiguous chocolate flavour with a pleasingly un-dry texture – almost bordering on brownie-like with the brown sugar and lumps of dark chocolate. It’s really good.

So good I made it twice this week, and tested it out on friends of ours on Friday night. So I can now tell you it also goes well with red wine.

In fact the consumption of this cake was just the beginning of what has been a fantastic weekend. On Saturday night Tim and I met up with another friend of ours at Foxglove to see the mighty pairing of David Dallas and PNC, down in Wellington on account of Dallas’ new album The Rose Tint, which you can download for free, what? Whoever did the sound last night deserves a gift basket of seasonal fruits or something because not only could we hear every single word – always fun at a hip hop gig – it also wasn’t so loud that I left with ringing ears and a bleeding nose, or vice versa. Very fun night. Continuing with the theme of mighty pairings, Tim and I were invited out to lunch by Kate of Lovelorn Unicorn and her husband Jason, we went to this place in Miramar called The Larder and it was all just highly delicious. Wish all weekends could be like this – don’t think I’d get bored of it in a hurry. (Can’t completely speak for Tim though, considering The Warriors and the All Whites both lost their games.)

Title via: Ella Fitzgerald. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any footage of her singing How Long Has This Been Going On but a voice like hers can stand tall in audio form alone.

Music lately:

I was listening to some Be Your Own Pet for the first time in about three years, (I think?) I’ve never met one other person that thought their music was good, but their songs still capture my ears after all this time. Fire Department, for one.

Paul Robeson, Going Home, from his Carnegie Hall concert in 1958. I don’t know why it is, but all his stuff on vinyl is always in the “we’ll pay you to take this” bin at record shops. Which works out nicely for me.

Next time: Kate and Jason were talking about Nigella Lawson’s recipe for snickerdoodles today from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and I realised I’ve only made them once, and that was in 2006, and that they were so good and I can’t believe I’ve never revisited them. That time might be now. But on the other hand, I recently won a copy of the lovely Flip Grater’s cookbook and it’s full of recipes that I want to try repeatedly. So, it’ll likely be one of those options.

 

don’t feel so alone, got the radio on

6 Comments
So, the Royal Wedding on Friday night. I seriously didn’t think I’d be watching it, I really wasn’t more than passingly interested, and even then only so far as it was a big thing happening in my lifetime, as opposed to being all “Wedding!! Fairytale princess!!!!” Tim and I went out to dinner with good friends that night, and when I got home there seemed to be only moments between casually but curiously turning on the TV “just to see the dress”…and me sitting in bed, mug of tea in hand, crocheted blanket and hot water bottle on lap, tweeting complete strangers about Princess Bride references and Victoria Beckham’s choice of hair extension and having txt conversations with Mum that went like “awww” and “:D”.


Anyway, earlier that day I inadvertently ended up making something not a million years removed from Prince William’s choice of wedding cake. Inadvertently, despite having read about his choice of cake already and, despite-er still, having read a recipe referencing it at the Kitchen Maid blog. I’m not trying to cash in on the wedding, I promise. Because the reason I wanted to make this recipe, is the following story.

I was on Wikipedia one time, and I was clicking on links and clicking and clicking and clicking as you do, and somehow I found myself reading about Radiokaka or Radio Cake, a type of Swedish confection “launched with the advantage that it can be eaten without a sound, without nibbling, which was an advantage when you listened to the radio with headphones…” That this doubly advantageous cake was thusly promoted to children appealed to me massively. I like the pragmatic approach; the radio needs to be listened to and cake needs to be eaten, here there is minimal imposition on either act.

Fact: a charming piece of information like this is the difference between me looking at a recipe and thinking “yeah, nah, boring” and me thinking “I need this in my life without delay”.

To find the recipe, I had to translate a whole bunch of Swedish sites, and it became pretty clear that butter, Copha or coconut oil were the emollients of choice. I know butter’s expensive these days but it’s cheaper than coconut oil, and to me feels less creepy than Copha. That said I grew up ingesting Kremelta in various party-foods (and Mum’s seasonal treat “White Christmas”) so go for your life if that’s what you’d prefer. For me: butter. On that note, it’s probably best to just look at the ingredients, take it in, and then move on. There’s no getting around them. And if it’s good enough for generations of radio-listening, silently nibbling youthful Swedes, it’s more than good enough for me. And there’s really nothing here that you wouldn’t find in a cake.

I normally don’t even go down the biscuit aisle at the supermarket, in fact if Tim so much as glances sideways at them I’ll inevitably roar “you want biscuits? I’ll MAKE YOU BISCUITS” but in a friendly, couplesy in-joke kind of way, well I hope. However we saw some plain ones going cheap a while back and I grabbed a couple of packs in case of future cheesecake. Their presence in my cupboard seemed to make it all the more obvious that I should make this recipe.


The recipe itself I cobbled together from various translated sources, it seems there’s not a heck of a lot of variation but I’m happy to be proven wrong. In a nod to the coconut oil, I added some threads of coconut to the chocolatey, biscuity layers. I think if I was making this again I might stir in a couple of spoonsful of good cocoa too, just to give a bit more of a dark edge to the chocolate. The recipe below might look really long and complicated but it’s truly not – a bit of mixing and layering, is all – I just wanted to talk you through it, and through any potential hurdles.

Radiokaka (Radio Cake)

200g dark, dark chocolate. I use Whittakers Dark Ghana.
200g butter
2 cups icing sugar (loosely heaped, not tightly packed or anything).
2 eggs
1/2 cup coconut, either dessicated or thread
1 packet plain biscuits, like superwines. If you’re in the US, pop culture would suggest…Graham Crackers?

Take a loaf tin, and line with either baking paper or plastic wrap.

Break chocolate into pieces and gently melt it with the butter over a low heat. Or if you like, get a small pot of water simmering away and then sit your pot with the chocolate and butter in it over that. As soon as it all starts to collapse, you can probably take it off the heat and leave it before stirring together, as the general heat will continue to melt everything.

Meanwhile, thoroughly whisk together the eggs and icing sugar until thick and very pale. Carefully pour in the chocolate mixture, continuing to whisk briskly (so that it doesn’t sieze with the heat. Pour some into the base of your prepared loaf tin – enough to cover it properly, a few milimetres – making sure it goes right to the corners. Set this aside to cool and slightly solidify.


Once this has happened, carefully place a layer of biscuits on top of the chocolate. I realised halfway through that the biscuits weren’t the right shape and I needed to carefully slice them in half. A bit of crumble-age isn’t a big deal, it’s just getting covered with chocolate anyway. Sprinkle with coconut (toast it if you like first) and then carefully spoon over some more chocolate. The chocolate may have set a bit by this point and will need some handling. Spread it evenly over with the back of a spoon – be rough, don’t worry about the coconut staying put. Layer up biscuits and chocolate again, making sure you leave enough chocolate to cover the top. Refrigerate for at least an hour.

To serve, turn out and slice fairly thinly – about 1/2 to one inch gives you plenty.


Considering its ingredients it’s pretty astonishing that the Radiokaka doesn’t taste aggressively sweet. What it is, is rich. Rich rich rich. It’s a good richness though, and the silky dark chocolate flavour, broken up by the almost-crunch of the softening biscuits and the relatively neutral coconut is a pretty extraordinary combination. It’s a wonder the Swedish kids could concentrate on their frequencies at all. It keeps well (you can even freeze it), slices like a dream and is fancy enough to serve up at a dinner party but could also be served up for kids to demolish happily.


It’s one week since Tim and I got back from our trip overseas and as I guessed, it’s feeling more like a zillion years ago. However small things like making chocolatey Swedish recipes, flicking through the Musicals section of the vinyl selections at Slow Boat Records and watching the dogs being walked on the waterfront makes me glad to be back in Wellington, and just glad in general.

I guess there is a decent segue to be found in that this cake could be described as “a bit wicked” and then I could talk about Wicked the musical but as I really hate using “wicked” to describe food (worse still: “wickedly indulgent”) and I can’t think of a segue that doesn’t irritate me, I’ll just say – Wicked was incredible. You think you know something every which way to Sunday and then…seeing it live, I felt like that moment in the Wizard of Oz movie where Dorothy steps out from her black-and-white house into the world of Technicolour. Everything was heightened, more impressive, both funnier and sadder, given more meaning. By the end of the first act, when the crucial Defying Gravity scene happens, I was shaking, and I didn’t even realise it. Another thing I didn’t realise was that in Tim’s and my travel blog it might’ve sounded like I didn’t like it that much. What I was trying to articulate was, that a lot of people don’t like musical theatre, but if you were one of these people there was still a lot to enjoy in the scenery and production values alone. I honestly didn’t think it would impact me that much – there are many better-written musicals out there and there’s music that affects me much more on a day-to-day basis than Wicked’s score. But in person it delivers so hard that all I could think, once it was over, was that I needed another hit. Which means traveling to Australia…or even better, New York…maybe the next trip?
_____________________________________________________________________

Title via: the kind of adorable Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers with Roadrunner, one of my favourite songs ever. Something about it – simple, repetitive, conversational – I can just listen on repeat over and over again and not get weary of it.
_____________________________________________________________________

Music lately: sadly the branch of Real Groovy – across the road from where Tim and I live – is closing down at the end of this month. It’s a place that I’ve spent heaps of time (and money) ever since we moved here in 2006. I’ll miss it. They seem to be largely fleeced of most decent stock but I managed to pick up some Liza Minelli and Judy Garland on vinyl, plus some other bits and pieces. Liza Minelli’s title track from Liza With a Z shows some serious work ethic in terms of actually delivering the song at all…it’s so fast she’s practically rapping.

Chico, by The Concretes. Tim’s mum and sister came down from Palmerston North yesterday and this song was playing at the place we went out to get pizza at. I hadn’t heard it in so long, and even though I normally like my songs to have a bit more, erm, concreteness to them, but with a bit of distance I was struck by how pretty it was – the twinkly bells and dreamy-woozy vocals make it feel like you’re drifting off to sleep, which is very occasionally what I like in a song.
_______________________________________________________________________

Next time: In the name of good value, we bought 2kg of yoghurt the other day so you can most definitely expect some yoghurty recipes soon, including a really delicious cake recipe. Plus some more slow-dripped travel stories.

so let’s find a bar, so dark we forget who we are

10 Comments

I’m tired as, partly from bad sleep and partly from the mental faculty resources required to organise yourself out of the country but here’s a quick blog post before we go…

So: by the time today’s over, Tim and I will be on our way to London. I realise people travel, or don’t travel, every single day and we’re not revolutionary or anything, but having saved and waited for ages, it’s quite the test of our comprehension skills to deal with the fact that it’s actually happening very soon. Not counting the time I got lost in the Christchurch airport last year, neither of us has been in an international airport since 2005. Our retinas are parched from being so wide-eyed, we’re clench-toothed from smiling. We’re ticking off so many to-do lists that…umm…anyway this is a big deal for us.
I’d like to say, massively sincerely but awkwardly, that I really hope all of you readers don’t completely forget this place in the four weeks that we’re away and then never read this blog ever again. I probably won’t get to update this often or at all, baking not being so practical while travelling, but who knows. I’m absolutely going to pick it all up and start blogging hard as soon as I get back in four weeks. In the meantime, I guess there’s the archives – my photography no-skills from 2007 are always good for a laugh.
For what it’s worth, Tim and I started a little travel blog so that instead of sending out mass emails we can just update it when we get the chance. We’re not going to be fervently overdocumenting every passing minute of our trip, but we’ll aim to add to it fairly often. It’s called Tim and Laura’s Adventure and we made it late at night this week. Now that I look at it again the layout’s pretty hideous but you know, feel free to read it, and I can tell you this: we won’t use “London Calling” as the title of a post. I’ll also be mildly active on Twitter, although all online stuff is at the mercy of wi-fi – luckily they’re pretty on to it with that in the northern hemisphere.


I had a day off on Monday and did a little baking, partly to use up some bits and pieces, partly to take something to take to work to help them cope with my month-long absence (that’s how I imagined it at least), and partly because I just love to bake so much and knew it’d be a while before it would happen again.
I tutu-d round with a recipe I found at grouprecipes.com and came up with the following. It’s easier than biscuits, tastes wonderful and also used up the rest of this jam that I made a while back. You can mess around with the ingredients depending on what’s in your cupboard – the type of nuts, coconut, oats and chocolate and the flavour of jam are all interchangeable with other types.


Chocolate Jam Bars

2 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup brown sugar
200g butter, softened slightly
1 cup thread coconut or 1/2 cup dessicated coconut
1 cup almonds or other nuts, chopped roughly
1 1/2 cups whole or rolled oats
1/2 jam (or more) (I used this stuff)
100g dark chocolate, chopped roughly into chunks (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)
Set your oven to 180 C/370 F, and line a large tin (the recipe recommends 13 x 9 inches, mine was bigger and it worked fine) with baking paper. In a bowl, mix together the flour, brown sugar and baking powder. Using your fingers, rub in the butter, till their are no large chunks left and the whole lot has a sandy texture. Stir in the oats, coconut, and almonds. Tip 3/4 of this mixture into the tin, and press it down flat with your hands, then smooth it with the back of a wet spoon.

Dot teaspoonfuls of jam fairly evenly on top of the base and then scatter the choppped chocolate over the top of that. Finally, evenly distribute the remaining flour mixture over the top of the chocolate and jam and bake for around 30 minutes.
I loved this recipe – it’s undemanding to put together, it makes a generous amount, and the texture is stunning. The crunch of the nuts, the roughness of the oats against the soft bite of the coconut, the sticky jam against the softly solid chocolate chunks. Total stunner.
Is it weird that I’m already thinking about things I’m going to bake/cook when I get back? Like recreating the banana panikeke that I had at Polyfest, like hummingbird cake, like the Bolognese Risotto from Nigella’s Kitchen book… Even if it’s weird I guess it’s not surprising, considering how I think about tomorrow night’s dinner while cooking tonight’s one and anticipate which second piece of cake I’m going to choose while eating my first piece. However, there’s so much to enjoy over the next four weeks, maybe this is my brain’s way of coping with it all – ignore the onslaught of mental stimulation by thinking about soothing cakes. Fingers crossed I can get heaps of awesome food over the border on the way home. New Zealand doesn’t have a reputation for merciless airport biosecurity does it? Oh wait…
PS: I might be typing all lacklustre-ly but it’s just the tiredness talking. Trust me, I’m grinning hard. CAN’T WAIT.
__________________________________________

Title via: The song Out Tonight from RENT, the musical that gave this blog its name. Please: Original Broadway Cast (Daphne Rubin Vega) and movie adaptation version (Rosario Dawson). (Chocolate Jam bars…let’s find a bar…see?)
__________________________________________
Music lately:

Shopping Cart from Parallel Dance Ensemble (who include our recent interview subject Coco Solid). Saw the new video for it today, too tired to harness the power of description right now, but love this track all over. Another new video bringing our ears and eyes much joy is Ladi6’s gorgeous track Like Water. Truly: get her albums, they’re amazing. (told you too tired for descriptions right now)
______________________________________

Next time: Hahahaha. I don’t know but as soon as I do know, you’ll be next in line to find out.

tengo de mango, tengo de parcha…

12 Comments

Only ten sleeps till Tim and I go on our massive adventure overseas. And there’s so much to do. Like pack. And suss out the best method of casually running into Angela Lansbury in London so I can tell her she’s one of my heroes. And I’m going away for three days for work on Thursday.

Hence, the mood here is distinctly…squirrelly. Between all that, and keeping an eye on the regrettably escalating disasters both local and international, we haven’t been to bed before midnight once over the last three weeks. I don’t know if that’s gasp-worthy or not compared to your own patterns, but 11-ish used to be the zenith of my awakeness on a regular day. Seems a harder to settle down and relax for its own sake now.

However, I had a day off today, slept in, did some yoga, and fully intended to make this Mango Chutney. Unfortunately, in my absence last weekend the two mangoes had achieved a state of maturity not wanted for that recipe.

So…I thought about sensible ways of using up these heavily ripe mangoes. Because of our trip, it has been on my mind that I need to use up anything perishable. I had a can of condensed milk in the cupboard which took from our work’s emergency survival boxes (because it had reached its best-by date, like, I was allowed to take it). Despite the fact that so many other options would’ve been easier – including just straight eating them – I found myself deciding, trancelike, that the most judicious, pragmatic option would be to use the mangoes in a sauce to go with a chocolate cake using this *clearly dangerous* condensed milk.

See? Makes sense, right? I also kinda love the seventies vibes of the orange sauce against the chocolatey background.

Nigella Lawson has a recipe for chocolate cake which uses condensed milk in it, really easy stuff – one of those melt, mix, bake jobs. I adapted this a little to better serve the coconut-chocolate craving I had, and to make it more of a brownie than a cake. The mango sauce is my own creation and as long as you’ve got a food processor, it’s completely simple. Of course, the mango sauce can easily exist without the brownies and vice-versa, but they do taste blissful together, and I barely had to convince myself that they both needed to be made. And further to this, since I already find baking a calming, endorphin-inducing activity, if you feel this way too it can only have a restorative effect on your nerves…

Some things to keep in mind – with all that condensed milk I wanted to counteract it with some good, heartily dark cocoa and chocolate. The initial melted mixture is unspeakably delicious, but you can kinda feel your teeth wearing away like rocks on the shore with sweetness if you sneak a spoonful, so the higher the cocoa solids the better. The mango sauce tastes really good if it’s freezing cold. And the spoonful of Shott Passionfruit syrup isn’t essential but if you’ve got some, you may well be as flabberghasted as I am about how distinctly passionfruit-esque it tastes. I bought it at the City Market a while back after tasting some – it’s so delicious. Don’t feel like this recipe is pointless if you don’t have any – it’s all about the mangoes, and the syrup just encourages its wild fruitiness. Vanilla extract, while different, would provide a similar and delicious function.

Something about the presence of condensed milk made me want to include it in the title, you do as you please but this is what I’ll be calling them.

Chocolate Coconut Condensed Milk Brownies

Adapted from a recipe of Nigella Lawson’s from How To Eat

  • 100g butter
  • 200g sugar
  • 100g dark chocolate (I use Whittaker’s Dark Ghana 72%)
  • 30g cocoa
  • 1 tin condensed milk
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 2 eggs
  • 200g flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 2 cups long thread coconut OR 1 1/2 cups dessicated coconut

Set your oven to 180 C/370 F. Line a square or rectangle small roasting tin – the sort you’d make brownies in – with baking paper.

In a large pan, melt together the butter, sugar, water, chocolate and condensed milk. Sift in the flour, cocoa and baking powder, mixing carefully. Mix in the coconut and eggs. Tip into the tin, bake for about 30-40 minutes.

This mango sauce is drinkably gorgeous, light, perfumed, zingy and bright orange. You could use it on ‘most anything – pancakes, ice cream, porridge…

Mango Sauce

A recipe by myself. Makes about 1/2 cup sauce. Use more mangoes if you want more.

  • 2 Mangoes, fridge-cold
  • 1 tablespoon Schott passionfruit syrup OR 1 teaspoon good vanilla extract
  • 1 teaspoon custard powder mixed with a tablespoon water

-Chop as much of the mango fruit off the stone as you can. Place in a food processor with the syrup and blend thoroughly till it’s looking good and liquidised. Tip in the custard powder-water and blend again. Scrape into a jug/container, set aside till you need it.

I never really know what to do with sauces to make them look good – the spoonful that I draped over these brownies looked hopelessly drippy. So when in doubt: distract with a relevant garnish. In food as in life.

So what do they taste like? Separately, both recipes shine – the slippery, fragrant, island-paradise taste of mangoes, elusive and slightly peachy and barely tampered with in this sauce. The condensed milk gives the brownies a melting texture punctuated by the strands of coconut, like fibres in a coir mat (Wait! No! That doesn’t sound nice at all!) and the combination of dark chocolate and cocoa gives a broad spectrum of chocolate flavour. Together though, far out they’re good – the cool, fruity sauce cutting through the sweet, throat-filling brownie, the fragrant mango and coconut cosying up together in an extremely delicious manner.

And I’m pretty sure they’ll disappear in a hot minute. So no need to worry about baking lurking round limply while we’re overseas. Speaking of limpness, I nearly fainted from bunchy nerves after booking Tim and I into Ottolenghi’s Islington restaurant for a ‘birthday season’ dinner on the 18th of April (the day after my birthday). So you know, my actual birthday was booked out, over a month in advance. Yotam Ottolenghi is such an exciting, inspirational food-creator – a recent addition to my heroes of cooking, a mighty team that includes Nigella Lawson, Aunt Daisy and Ray McVinnie. To actually eat in one of his restaurants is seriously thrilling. Just…imagine someone whose work you think is really, really awesome. Then imagine you get to experience it. It’s like that.

Title via: I was totally going to quote M.I.A but her line felt more suited to the mango pickle that I never ended up making. If this process is of any interest to you; anyway instead today I quote Piragua, the song about shaved ice from Broadway musical In The Heights, from the pen of the gorgeous and formidably talented Lin-Manuel Miranda – special guest at the inagural White House Poetry Jam, for starters…

Music lately:

Cole Porter’s Anything Goes from the musical of the same title. Thought on its breezy, timeless moxie today while watching a clip of the also formidable star Sutton Foster tap-dancing the heck out of it in rehearsals – seriously, watch this video. I kinda wish songs still had unnecessary preambles and lengthy dance breaks.

Dum Dum Girls, He Gets Me High: makes me want to dance round like this.

Next time: Well, I’ve still got those quinces to use. Anyone got any suggestions, preferably something that doesn’t involve too much sugar?