Category: Chocolate

flourless, we are flourless

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2011! What? How’d that happen already? Well, it’s here and the changing of another year has passed me by in a non-threatening blur of crosswords, novel-reading, and playing 500 with Mum and Dad at the beach. And being absent from the computer, which really wasn’t so bad at all. We’re back out to the beach tomorrow, using the very last of my leave, but Tim’s back to work tomorrow – he heroically came out to help us erect the tents and then cover them with tarps (couldn’t possibly buy a new tent or anything) which we managed to do without having a family meltdown, maybe some lasting buried tension but no meltdown. In the meantime I’m serving up a recipe that I made for Christmas night, which…seems like an extremely long time ago now. And a mighty fine Christmas it was too, I was lucky enough to get heaps of food-related things which I’m sure will all eventually appear here on the blog when I get back to Wellington.




So, apologies for the now outdated Christmas imagery in the background…should have thought more about this and posed the cake in front of a beachtowel or a picture of a dolphin or something to make it more generally summery.

Ever since I can remember we’ve spent Christmas evening with the family who grew up next door to my Mum’s family, and this year I was asked to bring along a pudding (suspect I would have taken it upon myself to bring one along whether it was asked for or not). The open brief of “bring pudding” is one of my favourites and for some reason, out of all the many many pudding recipes Nigella has (or anyone, but for me Christmas is Nigella’s time to shine more than usual) my heart set itself on her Christmas-Spiced Chocolate Cake. It’s a variation on her flourless chocolate cake, gussied up with the yuledtidish fragrance of cinnamon, cloves and orange.


It’s very easy to make and apart from all the eggs it’s pretty low-key, the quantities of chocolate, ground almonds and butter aren’t terrifying and all you need to do is some melting and mixing. You don’t even have to worry about it sinking – it’s practically supposed to. Altogether a non-stressful Christmas pudding option that wouldn’t be out of place any day of the year. As long as you don’t use the title. Not that I referred to it by its full title at any point. Can you imagine walking into a room and saying “here’s my…

Christmas-Spiced Chocolate Cake

From Nigella Christmas

150g dark chocolate, chopped (I used Whittakers Dark Ghana)
150g butter
6 eggs (at room temperature)
250g sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100g almonds
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Zest of 1 clementine/satsuma/just use an orange
4 teaspoons instant coffee (preferably espresso)

Topping:

Juice from the above citrus fruit
15g butter
1 tablespoon sugar
Pinch ground cinnamon
50g flaked almonds (they tend to come in 70g packets, you can use the lot here no worries).

Set your oven to 180 C/450 F, and butter and line a 23cm springform tin. That said, all I had at Mum and Dad’s was a 21cm tin that I’d brought up myself and it was all good.)

Break the eggs into a good sized bowl. In another bowl, gently melt together the chocolate and butter. Mum and Dad have a microwave so that’s what I did, but you can also put it in a metal bowl and sit it over a pan of simmering water…just melt the two together, it’s not complicated.)

While the chocolate is cooling, add the sugar and vanilla to the eggs and whip together till thick and pale and at least doubled in texture. This is easier with an electric beater but not impossible with a whisk. Gently fold in the rest of the ingredients, including the magically delicious chocolate-butter mixture. A big silicon spatula is best for this, and for transferring the mixture into the tin. Bake for about 35-45 minutes, and allow to col completely.

For the topping, simmer all the ingredients together till thick and syrupy and then topple them over the chocolate cake, which may well have dipped significantly in the centre.


This cake is seriously fantastic, chocolatey in an upfront way but without making you feel like you’re eating a damp, cocoa-scented piece of soap, as some flourless chocolate cakes can taste. The spices give it a real Christmassiness, showing that the sort of flavours which might show up in a fruitcake are equally fantastic against the slight grit of the ground almonds and the richness from the chocolate. The sticky, orange-syruped almonds on top make it look beautiful too – I just bunged them on and they somehow looked amazing, like shining golden tiles, so if you even put in the slightest bit of effort you’re guaranteed some gorgeousness.



This overachiever of a cake is also gluten-free and keeps for ages.

Hopefully everyone had a decent Christmas/New Years – I don’t really go in for resolutions, preferring to take each day as it comes but also to be receptive to as much positivity, creativity and safe fun as possible. Hope all that comes your way too.

Title via: Something about the panicky nature of Blackout from the fantastic Broadway musical In The Heights makes me feel slightly bad about appropriating their “powerless, we are powerless” line…not so bad that I haven’t done it.

Music lately:

I actually haven’t been listening to a whole lot of music this summer. I brought my ipod up but ignored it, preferring the sound of sea moving slowly across sand and tui calling to each other. Once I’m back in the city on Sunday and this holiday seems unbelievably far away I’m sure I’ll have music coming out my ears (and then going back in my ears again, of course.)

Next time: As I said I got a whole lot of food-stuffs for Christmas and it’s anyone’s guess what I’ll get into first. While part of me never wants to leave the beach, I do miss Wellington and am looking forward to reconnecting with my kitchen…

food beyond compare, food beyond belief…

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Another year goes past, another flat Christmas dinner is planned for and cooked and eaten and then reminisced about. Our first was in 2006, before I even had this blog, and when we’d just moved into our then-flat. The second one was the day after the David Beckham game, 2008’s was when I’d finished uni and started full-time work and Emma our then-flatmate was stranded in Thailand. She got back to NZ just fine, by the way, but still. Last year was our first Christmas dinner in our current flat and was also the day that I was on the cover of the Sunday Star-Times Sunday magazine (which meant a lot of “oh this? Oh I had no idea that was on the table there lookatmeeveryone“) This year was a pretty low-key happening, with just seven of us, but it was an amazingly happy day. Partly because of the awesome friends and whanau who were there, and partly because…my first ever Baked Alaska was not a disaster.

I’ve made this Involtini from Nigella Bites for the last three Christmas Dinners and it’s one of the best Christmassy vegetarian recipes I’ve ever found. Basically it is spoonfuls of herbed, nutty cooked bulghur wheat rolled up into parcels with long thin slices of fried eggplant, which are then tucked in to a casserole dish, covered with tomato puree and baked. It’s incredibly good and can be done ages in advance, and while Nigella’s original recipe contains lots of feta, it’s easy enough to make this dairy-free or completely vegan as I did. Pistachios are even prettier than feta anyway…
This year I had the idea that I could cook the eggplant slices quickly in a toasted sandwich press brushed with a little oil. It totally worked! Didn’t look as sexy as Nigella’s glistening griddle-striped slices, but since it’s all getting covered in tomato sauce anyway, I didn’t really care, and it saved me from sweating over a hot oily pan.
The roast chicken was the only thing in the whole damn day that had dairy products in it, and that’s because Ange, our very good friend and ex-flatmate, is vegetarian as well as dairy-free. I poured cream all over the chickens before roasting them, inspired by a recipe of Ruth Pretty’s I read in the 2005 Nov/Dec issue of Cuisine magazine. It felt like an amazingly extreme thing to be doing, plus it made the birds tender, golden and crisp. Notice in the background the boiled potatoes and roasted capsicums…I don’t have the energy to photograph and talk about them individually: just know that they were there too and they tasted great. I didn’t plan for gravy but quickly boiled up the roasting pan juices (there was heaps, was a shame to waste it) with a little flour and, without any white wine to hand, threw in some sake instead. It smelled amazing and tasted just fine too.
(Sorry to keep putting you on the spot Ange) For the first time my favourite stuffing (Cornbread and Cranberry from Nigella’s Feast) was dairy-free, made with rice bran oil (what, you thought margarine? Pffft) and soymilk. Even though I really love the bit where you crumble the already buttery cornbread into a pan of melted butter and cranberries, it was still delicious, and in fact the soymilk made it almost spookily puffy and light-textured. Except I ended up baking it for too long so instead of a soft, moist stuffing it was more like a large savoury biscuit. Eh, still tasted good.
The cranberry sauce! I have to co-sign with Nidge on this one, it really is as redder-than-red as she insists. I didn’t even up the saturation in this photo.
Anyway all that was cool, but The Baked Alaska. Oh my gosh. I always like to use this day as an excuse to try out a challenging new pudding but this one had an element of stage fright to it. (In case you’re wondering, 2006 was Nigella’s Rhubarb and Mascarpone Trifle, 2007 was her Rugelach, 2008 I made her White Chocolate Almond Torte, and last year I did her Chocolate Pavlova.) The cake and ice cream I made in advance but the last bit – whipping up meringue, spreading it over them and blasting it in the oven right before serving had humungous potential for wrongness.
I used a recipe from the Floridita’s cookbook for the base and invented my own coconut-blackberry ripple ice cream for the next layer, partly because I had some blackberries in the freezer already. I know it seems unfair to recommend making your own ice cream when it’s only going to be covered in meringue. But the good thing about it is that without the preservatives and who knows what else that goes into a lot of commercial ice cream it’s way more solid and therefore a bit more forgiving when you shunt it under a blazing oven. I’d argue that it’s much more fun to make your own but that’s just me. I like making ice cream.
The ice cream was made by whisking together 4 egg yolks (the egg whites I put in a plastic container and refrigerated to use, plus two more, for the meringue) and about 150g sugar. I then heated a can of coconut milk without letting it boil, and quickly whisked it into the egg yolk mixture. All of that got returned to the pan and gently heated, while constantly whisking, till it thickened like custard. I stirred in a can of coconut cream and then began to freeze it in a shallow dish (the same one I baked the cake in actually). Then I defrosted about 150g blackberries (you could use any berry really) mashed them with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and the juice of a lemon, and drizzled it into the still-softish ice cream.
Tim took this photo and also put the ice cream and cake on top of each other on the tray while I whisked up the meringue topping. For which I’m seriously grateful, because it only occured to me halfway through making the meringue that I still had to do all that.
I made sure to follow my Nana’s advice to make sure the meringue completely covered the cake and ice cream – it provides a thick blanket of protection which allows the ice cream to survive under the heat, but if it’s not uniformly covered, the ice cream can seep out and then you’ve got a small crisis on your hands. I also followed some last-minute tweeted advice from Martin Bosley about warming up the sugar first before its beaten into the egg whites. It’s not every day that this kind of interaction comes my way so I thought I might as well try it – sat the sugar in a shallow metal bowl in the oven while it was heating up, enough to make the crystals warm but not enough to melt them into syrup. Cannot deny that my meringue whisked up in minutes with more volume and shine than a shampoo commercial.
But it worked, it worked! I felt a rush of happiness and pride just looking at it. Baked Alaska are generally supposed to resemble mountains, mine was admittedly more of a plateau, like a Baked Cape Town Table Top Mountain.
Look at the jelly in the background somehow managing to steal the show with its ruby-glow.
So on top of looking spectacular – like a pudding from a Dr Seuss book, or a Graeme Base book, or let’s face it, a Barbie film adaptation of a classic fairytale – it tasted wonderful too. It’s like having three puddings at once, all compressed into a handy cube. The radicalness of hot meringue against still-frozen ice cream. The sweetness of the topping and the creamy berry-sharp coconut ice cream against the dark cocoa-y cake. Stunning. I may have high-fived myself.
Finally: Cakeballs! So satisfying to say, make and eat. They came about because when I made the cake for the Baked Alaska and tried to turn it out of its tin onto a tray it…broke. Not so much that it couldn’t be more or less patched up, but it did leave me with a significant pile of cake crumbs. I could have eaten the lot in despair, but then I remembered Nigella’s recipe in her Christmas book for “Christmas Puddini Bonbons” aka…cakeballs. Mine were pretty simple – the cake crumbs mixed with about 125g melted chocolate and 2 tablespoons golden syrup before being rolled into balls and drizzled with more dark chocolate. What gave them that superfunk-Christmas look and transformed them from “hastily covered-up mistake” to “incredible bonbons that I will fight you for” was the judicious sprinkling of edible glitter. I’ve walked past the cupcake lady at the City Market nearly every Sunday asking how much her edible glitter is. Finally I decided that it wasn’t even expensive at all especially considering it lasts forever, and bought a small vial of it. Ohhhh how I love it. Had to hold myself back from glittering up the roast chickens.
Tim and I have been living off the leftovers ever since, which I love. We’re going up to my place for Christmas this time next week so we’re trying not to buy too much new food…just using up what’s there. I tell you, there’s nothing like standing at the kitchen bench, wordlessly eating leftover jelly off a plate to bring you closer together. (I grabbed two spoons from the draw, and then was like “Well I’ve got my spoons” like I was going to have one in each hand. Yeah, I gave him one of the spoons. But I think he believed me…I think I believed me for a second.)
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Title via: Les Miserables, Master of the House. Last night Tim and I saw the live recording of the 25th Anniversary Les Mis concert at Embassy Theatre. It was amazing – Norm Lewis (he of the faint-making voice), Lea Salonga, Ramin Karimloo, erm…Nick Jonas (he wasn’t awful per se, anyone would look useless next to Ramin). Matt Lucas of Little Britain was Thenardier, who knew the man could sing so well! I know Les Mis isn’t the height of pop culture awesomeness, especially in this post-Boyle, post-Glee time, but whatever, the music is still incredible, totally unashamed about the tears that appeared during Salonga’s I Dreamed A Dream and Lewis’ Stars.
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Music lately:
I’ve been listening to A Very Little Christmas heaps – it was put together by a whole bunch of local musicians, has some excellent seasonal tunes both original and familiar, and you can download it free, what!
Sideline, a new track from David Dallas with Che Fu. Woohoo! Is all I have to say. Because I’ve spent three days trying to write this blog and my sentence-forming ability is dissolving like sugar in a hot oven…
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Next time: Proper recipes…vegetables…

one night in bangkok makes a hard man crumble

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Crumble has got to be some of the the best kind of food in existence, among the comforting-est of all the comfort food. In Nigella Express, there is this very cool idea where you make up some crumble topping in advance and freeze it so if you ever want pudding, but the thought of actually having to cook makes you weepy, you’re still good to go. I mean, there’s a bit of initial effort that goes into it. But that’s the good thing about Nigella – there’s options. Whether you’re in the mood for a seven layer trifle where you make your own sponge and custard by hand, or something more or less instant but not so instant that you’re sitting on the couch ejecting a can of whipped cream into your mouth, she’s got you covered.

That said, I can’t help being suspicious of crumble recipes, and will often think “that’s not nearly enough butter!” as I read the list of ingredients. I definitely trust Nigella Lawson, the woman who taught me that 250g butter in one cake is just fine, but even so when I saw that her recipe was for four servings, it took effort to stick to the 50g she stipulated. Worrying, maybe, but true. No one wants wafer-thin crumble coverage.
Turns out 50g was all good, and there was no need to get so hand-wringingly righteous over it. That said, when you divide 50 between 4 that’s only like…less than 1 tablespoon of butter per person. That’s practically nothing. But go with it, you somehow end up with just the amount of crumble you need. Nigella calls this “Jumbleberry Crumble”, which is just an olde English term for “whatever berries you have”. I had the end of a packet of frozen blackberries, plus some cranberries leftover from last Christmas. While I held back from exaggerating the topping quantities, I did add some dark chocolate chunks to the fruit. It felt right, but then adding chocolate to things usually does…right?
Jumbleberry Crumble

From Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express

For the Crumble Topping:
50g butter
100g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons brown sugar

Rub the butter into the flour and baking powder, till it resembles coarse crumbs (with some inevitable floury dustiness). Stir in the sugar, and then tip into a freezer bag till needed.

Assembly:
Set your oven to 220 C. Get some ovenproof ramekins, fill with frozen berries (and a few dark chocolate chunks if you like), sprinkle over 1 teaspoon cornflour, two teaspoons sugar, and a couple of tablespoons (roughly 50-75g) frozen crumble topping. Bake for 15-20mins depending on the size of the ramekin – 125g ones for the lesser time, but 250-300ml ones will take a little longer.
I made these fairly late at night with both low lighting and low camera battery, not giving me a lot of room to move as far as getting quality photos. Next time?
These were delicious – the chocolate melting into the sharp juices released by the frozen berries as they stewed in the oven, creating a thick, rich sauce for the fruit. The crumble topping was highly satisfying despite my earlier nervousness – biscuity, sweet and gratifyingly crisp in places. Plus, because there’s only the two of us, I’ve got some crumble mix in a sandwich bag in the freezer, just waiting to be sprinkled over fruit on another cold evening. For all that I talked about Spring and skipping along in the mild sunshine with armfuls of asparagus bushels in my last post, the weather in Wellington is so variable (and it varies heavily towards the murkier, chillier end of the scale more often than not. This is a pain, but there is an upside when it means you’re more likely to be in the mood to eat crumble.)
Title via: One Night In Bangkok from the musical Chess. Confession: I actually thought that my title was the lyrics but it turns out it’s actually “makes a hard man humble”. Whatever. I love this song – the strange, theatre-plus-rapping that became a chart hit despite having perhaps seriously Top 40-unfriendly lyrics and concept. Adam Pascal’s take is pretty fabulous, from the 2008 concert with Idina Menzel and The Wire’s Clarke Peters, but is cruelly unavailable on Youtube. You’ll just have to buy the DVD…Nevertheless Murray Head’s original has its dubious charms also. I did a jazz dance to this many, many years ago, I can still remember bits of it to this day.
 
Music lately:
The Little Things by TrinityRoots. We saw them on Sunday night at the Opera House on their ‘reunion’ tour. They seemed so comfortable with each other – spinning a tune out for ten minutes and then with a collective nod seamlessly bringing it back down to earth. All three of them are wonderful to watch – Warren Maxwell looking calm and spiritual, Riki Gooch’s boyish face belying his monster talent on the drums and Rio Hemopo providing welcome bass in both guitar and voice. They were supported by Isaac Aesili, who is hugely talented in his own right, and Ria Hall, who I’d met before when she emceed the Smokefree Pacifica Beats, and has an absolutely stunning voice. It was a beautiful night.
What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye, from the album of the same name. Tim got some Marvin Gaye on vinyl and this song is just up there with the very best of all music, like crumble is among the best of all foods.
Next time: As I said last time, I have some options, so it all depends on what I feel like…by the way, I’ve tinkered round and added the option of a Facebook ‘like’ button just below, in case you’re all “I don’t like change!” I don’t even really like Facebook so am a bit unsure about actively letting it invade my blog but wanted to give this ‘like’ thing a whirl. Considering how rubbish the photos are this week it possibly isn’t the best place to start and will probably put any new readers off, but anyway, if you don’t know, now you know…

she likes her hair to be real orange

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I made Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake yesterday and I gotta say, I absolutely love it, for all that I was never massively sold on Jaffas as a kid. Not that we ate lollies all the time, or that I would have turned Jaffas down given the chance. But when the rare money I came across coincided with a trip into town I would tend towards a dollar mixture, or those sherbety fizzy lollies, or, eventually, showing my Spice Girls influnce, chupa chups. What I bought most of all though was Grape Hubba Bubba bubble gum, fifty cents a packet if I remember right. I loved that stuff. The combination of fleeting, fake-grape flavour (a million years removed from the wasp-guarded vine that grew – then withered away – on our wire fence) plus the bonus time-passing activity of blowing bubbles was pretty heady. Especially since casually snapping gum and consuming grape-flavoured things seemed very American, which was pleasing since I was so obsessed with Baby Sitters Club books. Erm, anyway Jaffas were never that high on my list. Although I’ve since realised that they’re probably not the best example of the two flavours anyway, I doubt that any actual oranges or decent chocolate suffered in their making…

Reading through Nigella Lawson’s new book Kitchen, which continues to make me want to cook everything from its pages, her Chocolate Orange Loaf called out to me (not literally…though give it time). Plain, dark-brown, oblong, it’s nothing fancy to look at, and in fact I was almost about to make her Blondies which has cool stuff like chocolate chunks and condensed milk in it. But then fate, or maybe something way less dramatic, like me just making a different decision, intervened. And I’m not even that fussed because I’ll probably make the blondies too before the weekend is out. Either way I’m glad I went the way of the chocolate-orange combination, forgoing my Jaffa-indifference, because the result was pretty stunning.

 

Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake

From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen

  • 150g soft butter
  • 2 x 15ml tablespoons golden syrup
  • 175g dark brown or muscovado sugar
  • 150g flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 25g best-quality cocoa (I tend to buy Equagold, nothing else seems to taste as good
  • 2 eggs
  • zest of 2 oranges and the juice of one

Set your oven to 170 C/340 F and butter and line a loaf tin (or hunt down a silicon one). Beat the butter, golden syrup and sugar together. This is the hardest part, really – it tastes so good. Nigella asks you to alternate the dry ingredients with the eggs but I didn’t have the energy and I’d somehow already made a ridiculous mess so I just beat in the eggs – which makes the mixture much lighter and aerated – then folded in the dry ingredients with a metal spoon (more control than a fling-y spatula), followed by the orange zest and juice. Don’t fear if it looks a little curdled at any stage. Pour into the tin and bake for around 45 minutes.

I was worried that I’d overcooked mine – it looked a little ‘solid’ round the edges. I considered doing my usual cake-rescue method of making up a syrup to pour over, but after curiously slicing off a sliver, it turned out the loaf was just fine. Better than just fine, even.

The orange flavour isn’t overpowering, more fragrantly suggested than in-your-face, but what’s there is completely delicious. The citrus and the caramelly golden syrup seem to pick up something good in the dark, dark cocoa, giving the cake an almost gingerbread intensity of flavour even though it’s very light-textured. It’s seriously good with a cup of tea and I reckon it would be amazing spread with cream cheese but unfortunately I didn’t have any in the fridge to test this theory.

I’m not sure how long this would last for but it seems to be one of those Bernadette Peters-style cakes which just keeps getting better and better as the days go by.

Title via: The Flaming Lips’ sweet tune She Don’t Use Jelly from Transmissions From The Satellite Heart. Which cavalierly rhymes “store” with “orange”. Whatcha gonna do?

Music lately:

I’ve been on a bit of a Sondheim kick, although it’s more like a Rockettes kickline than a solitary burst of commitment…I’ve been listening to so many interpretations of his music on youtube lately that linking to just one is a bit misleading but feel free to enjoy the late Eartha Kitt’s I’m Still Here from Follies.

Yesterday we bought Aloe Blacc’s new album Good Things, and the title doesn’t lie. It is a bit gloomy towards women but if that’s the experiences he had prior to writing these songs, well I guess fair enough, and it’s nicely balanced by the lump-in-throat inducing Mama Hold My Hand. The bouncy, catchy I Need A Dollar would be his best-known track but I love his slow-paced, sultry cover of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, which isn’t actually even on the album. Go find Good Things, it’s very easy to like.

Next time: I have so much Nigella going on right now that I’m probably going to have to hold up before I end up reproducing her entire book here on this blog. I’ve also made and loved her Apple Cinnamon muffins and crustless pizza and so they’ll no doubt end up on here soon.

 

better yet oatmeal cookies, y’all just rookies to me

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Oatmeal cookies, and the Chocolate Chip Cookies that they overlap with on the Venn Diagram of Cookie Genres (it might exist…) are nothing new, and there are roughly a million recipes out there for them, but still, even if you didn’t grow up with tins full of baking, there’s something old-fashionedly comforting about biting into a half-crisp, half-chewy biscuit, buttery and caramelly and a little nutty with rolled oats, maybe with some chunks of dark chocolate to luxe things up deliciously. They’re fast to make and relatively inexpensive and keep for as long as you can hold out from eating them.

They also, a lot of the time, involve creaming butter and sugar together. We don’t have a microwave and the butter conditioner in the fridge just sits there stubbornly making the butter colder, so anything with softened butter either requires wrapping it up in tinfoil and sitting it near the heater, on the coffee maker, whichever’s on, or back when we had our PC, on top of the hard drive. Or leaving the butter out overnight and hoping the kitchen is be warm enough to soften it into cream-able submission. Which means there’s generally a bit of a distance between myself and oatmeal cookies. Or at least there was, until I saw this recipe that I’m going to share with you…

I found this recipe on a blog called The Hungry Engineer. It awesomely uses oil which I could then take the liberty of switching with melted butter. Not that I have anything against oil. I just want butter in my life and I figure that they’re similar enough to not get fussed over. That said, if you stick to the original recipe, you’ve got yourself a mighty good dairy-free cookie. And I’ve got something that I don’t have to enter into a MacGyver-style assault to be able to actually make it.

And yes, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the melted-butter based Anzac biscuits, but I didn’t want to go adulterating them with chocolate and brown sugar and stuff. Leave well alone I reckon, and this recipe below is a more than worthy solution.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies

With thanks to The Hungry Engineer blog

  • 150g butter, melted and cooled slightly, OR 3/4 cup plain oil (like Rice Bran)
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup flour
  • 1 cup rolled oats
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 cup – or as much as you like – dark chocolate, roughly chopped into chunks (I use Whittakers)

Set your oven to 180 C/375 F, and get out a couple of trays and line them with baking paper. Whisk together the butter (or oil) with the sugars and egg. Mix in the flour, baking powder, oats and chocolate. Scoop out spoonfuls of this (magically delicious) mixture and drop them onto the trays. You don’t really need to flatten them out – the heat of the oven takes care of that. Bake them for 9-12 minutes, swapping the trays halfway through if you like.

Let them cool a little before eating, because burning hot chocolate on the tongue is no fun at all.

These cookies are so good, for the reasons outlined earlier (as well as the obvious – it’s a chocolate chunk cookie, title speaks for itself, right?) The timer buzzer on our oven decided to join our butter conditioner and refuse to work, so these cookies were overcooked by about five minutes – this is the difference between chewy and crisp. They’re still really good, but next time I make them I’m going to be paying more attention, as I lean towards a chewy preference.

It’s a man with a cookie for a head!

FYI, that’s a jumper of mine under that gleefully ugly plate, and it occurs to me now that hopefully I don’t find any crumbs down my sleeves because that’s one of my least favourite things. And yeah, I do get crumbs somehow stuck in my sleeves enough to know I don’t like it (cookie crumbs hang around like sand once they get in your clothes, trust me.)

Yesterday Tim and I went to the extremely awesome Bookfair, put on by the Downtown Community Ministry who do heaps of good work in providing support to those in Wellington who need it. The Bookfair happens every year and it is so exciting. If you like books. Which I do. Tim and I scored some amazing finds this year. Like an ancient edition of Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game, the adorable 1952 edition of This Thing Called Ballet (“makes a plea for balletosanity as against balletomania” according to Daily Sketch), and a 1953 edition of Maori Grammar and Conversation, written with the Hon. Sir Apirana Ngata. Sure I can learn phrases and grammar from it, but as a slice of New Zealand history – for better or for worse – it’s a fascinating read. I also got a juicy stack of Cuisine magazines and am slowly filling the gaps in my collection from the past ten years. Feels so good.

Title via: De La Soul with Redman, Oooh, from their album Art Official Intelligence. I loved this song right away when I first heard it ten years ago – its mellow melody, awesome beat, and more-ish chorus.  

Music lately:

Leonard Cohen’s So Long, Marianne from Songs of Leonard Cohen. It’s relatively lengthy at six verses, and also relatively upbeat as far as Cohen songs go. But by the time you get to the “I see you’ve gone and changed your name again” line, you start to feel all desolate because the song’s nearly over. Devastating from the lapping strum to quiet finish.

Sleepy Man, sung by the amazing Idina Menzel in 1990, when she would have been around 19. It’s a side we don’t often see from her vocals, and while the lyrics to this song from The Robber Bridegroom are pretty painful I do love it, so it was a total treat to find the link to this performance – especially as she was from well before she was on Broadway.

Next time: On the one hand, I’ve got all these Cuisine magazines to plough through and be inspired by, on the other hand it could be time to crack out that quince brandy I’ve had chilling in the cupboard…

in cyberland we only drink diet coke

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When I tweeted on the Twitter recently that I was making Chocolate Coca Cola Cake, there was a massive flurry of like, two or three people tweeting back at me that they wanted the recipe. Never one to offend my constitchency, I obediently bring you…Chocolate Coca Cola Cake. Check out all those curvaceous C’s lined up like that. Nigella, you alliterative minx.

I’ve already told the story of how this was the first recipe I made from How To Be A Domestic Goddess in 2006, but the tl:dr version is that Tim bought it for me, even though we didn’t have any expensive-book-money kicking round, to cheer me up after some clothes I was pretty invested in got stolen off our washing line. What a nice fulla he is.
This recipe is fantastic – very reassuringly cake-like, nothing fancy here, but also like no other chocolate cake you’ve ever tasted. Yeah, the Coca-Cola might be a bit of an awkward-sounding ingredient, but it works I promise you. The flavour isn’t strident, but gives a slight lick of damp cinnamony fizziness. It’s easy as to make too – just melt and beat thoroughly till smooth. When I was a kid we never really had fizzy drink around (except on my birthdays when Mum made ice cream sodas) and I never buy it or drink it now but – there’s something SO good about the taste of a cold Coca-Cola. Which is exactly what Coca-Cola would like me to think, but there it is.
Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake

From Nigella Lawson’s amazing, amazing, How To Be A Domestic Goddess

200g plain flour
250g sugar (brown sugar is good)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 large egg
125 mls buttermilk (or 125 mls half yoghurt half millk)
125g butter
2 T cocoa powder
175mls Coca-Cola

Preheat oven to 180 C/375 F and put in a baking sheet/biscuit tray to heat up. Butter and paper-line a 22-23cm springform tin.

In a large pan, gently heat the Coca-Cola, cocoa and butter together till the butter melts. In another bowl sift together the dry ingredients and pour in the buttery cola. Whisk in the yoghurt and egg, mixing everything really well. Pour into the tin and bake for 40 minutes or until cooked through.
Nigella has a recipe for icing that goes with it but it makes a way huge amount. What I did was mix together 1/3 cup Coca-cola, 2 tablespoons cocoa, and enough icing sugar to make a smooth, pourable icing. Even so this made way too much and it flowed over the plate and pooled all over the benchtop. It took so long to clean it up.
I made this cake to eat with the band Alex The Kid during Tim’s and my interview with them for our blog 100s and 1000s. It was a fun afternoon, and as soon as they left I grabbed my photo and took a couple of snaps. But I waited till they were done. You don’t want to hinder people’s ability to eat this stuff.
So good.
Check out, if you will, out the sweet coasters Tim and I made! Neither of us tend to go in for crafty cute stuff but something about this project we found in the latest issue – finding old coasters, cutting up pages of old books, glueing them together and spraying with fix-y stuff – appealed. To be honest Tim ended up doing most of it but I spotted the book about the galaxy, and the end result is pretty sassy, hey?
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Title via: The incomparable (I think my heart beats faster just thinking about her) Idina Menzel who originated the role of Maureen in RENT on Broadway in 1996 and reprised it nearly ten years later in the film version of RENT. The audience’s first sight of her is when she does her fairly astonishing ‘performance art’ piece, Over The Moon, which the title of this post quotes. I kindly but firmly direct you to consult both the original Broadway and film version.
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Music lately:

Voom, King Kong – apparently this song only came out in 2006 but you hear it and get this feeling like you swear you were listening to it when you were 12. (Depending on where ’12’ was for you). This song (like Ash’s Burn Baby Burn) is made of so many hooks that a more cautious band might have made a whole album from the material crammed into King Kong’s 3-ish minutes. It is fantastic stuff. We managed to see them on Saturday night at Mighty Mighty, so much fun although we missed half their set (including Beth, sniffle) because we were at another gig at Bodega, for Amnesty, where we saw the outstandingly awesome local band Nudge who, for a three-piece, churned out the kind of sound that you’d expect from twelve people.

Dead Prez, Hip Hop…love the beat, the chant-along chorus, and how they tip their hat to Trenchtown Rock. I was working at Big Day Out when they came to New Zealand this year but managed to catch the tail end of their set on my shaved ice break. Even from where I was at the back of the field with a tired brain, a mouthful of syrup, and minutes to go before they left the stage, they were pretty electrifying.

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Next time: 99% sure it will involve tofu.

don’t dream it’s pavlova

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The New Zealand ‘identity’ has many characteristics to capitalise upon for advertising campaigns – how minimalistic we are as a people, how we generally don’t go into excessive details or facial expressions or go in for fancy things. I found myself thinking about this when I was given the opportunity to submit this blog post as part of a promotion for mega-cook and food hero Rick Stein’s impending visit to Aotearoa. The “ultimate New Zealand dish” was my brief, which is not something I feel authoritative enough to pinpoint down. But a pavlova immediately leapt to mind, and infuriatingly, so did all those ads.

On the one hand, it’s kind of amusing that we have this famous pudding which has appeared in recipe books and graced tables for years and years, but which is seriously a bit of a mission to make. Oh, us kiwis, being all casual about this complicated dessert! On the other hand I was annoyed with myself for buying into it all by having an advertising-fuelled self-deprecating chuckle. On the other hand, it made me wonder whether we are even all that relaxed and simple or whether it’s something advertising has constructed. On the other hand, marketing is hard, trying to get information to people in the spaces between the information they’re actually trying to absorb is a mission and a half, and I can’t help but salute any that winkle their way into everyday vernacular.

On the other hand, pavlova. Let’s not overthink it, eh?

Pavlova – made from egg whites, sugar, and a lot of air – isn’t overly straightforward, but if you’re careful and patient, it’s really no big deal. But importantly, it always looks like a big deal. Pavlova is one of those dishes over which arguments are dribbled back and forth between New Zealand and Australia about who thought it up originally. Fortunately the pavlova is unlikely to engage in the kind of reputation-smearing scandalous activity that prompts a flurry of “Australia can have him” responses from the public. While I’d like to think it’s ours, because I love ballet so much and it was named after the great ballerina Anna Pavlova, whose ethereal white tutu it supposedly represented, I’m not overly fussed. If Australia really does have claim to the first pav, so be it – I’m more charmed with the idea of dishes being created in honour of people at all. Maybe one day there will be a “Heavily Buttered Toast with Marmite and Melted Cheese, Microwaved a la Laura” in the same way that you get Peach Melba and stuff like that.

With all this in mind, I’ve adapted a Nigella Lawson recipe for my take on pavlova. Yes, Nigella Lawson the British non-New Zealander. If you want a plain pavlova recipe I’m sure you couldn’t do better than anything in the Edmonds cookbook or any other reliable local cookbook. My take on Nigella’s version of our usual, marshmallow-white creation is a darker, and (dare I say it in the same breath as the wholesome Edmonds cookbook) altogether sexier pavlova. Aren’t we always asking people, wide-eyed and hopeful, about what they think about New Zealand? Isn’t it a compliment to us that the mighty Nigella has so many pavlova recipes? Yes, our usual pavlova is covered in a thick layer of whipped cream and maybe a few slices of kiwifruit or spoonfuls of passionfruit seeds. These are both incredibly good options and my version – Chocolate, Tamarillo, and Pistachio Pavlova with Coconut Cream – is just another option, rather than any kind of attempt to kick the original white pav.

Chocolate, Tamarillo and Pistachio Pavlova with Coconut Cream

Based on the Chocolate Raspberry Pavlova (also excellent!) from Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer.
6 egg whites
300g caster sugar
50g good cocoa (I use Fair Trade or Equagold)
1 tsp balsamic or red wine vinegar

6 tamarillos
2 tablespoons brown sugar
150g dark chocolate (I used Whittakers – made in Wellington!)
100g shelled pistachios
1 can coconut cream

Set oven to 180 C. Whip up the egg whites till satiny peaks form, then continue to beat them while adding the sugar a tiny bit at a time. Maybe get a buddy to help with this bit. Once the sugar is all added the mixture should be thick, shiny and stiff. Sift in the cocoa and sprinkle over the vinegar, folding in carefully. Spread mixture into a 23cm circle on a baking paper lined tray. Immediately turn down oven to 150 C and leave for about an hour. Once done, turn oven off and leave pav to cool completely.

While the pav is baking, scoop out the seeds and flesh of the tamarillo, tip into a small bowl and sprinkle over the brown sugar, allowing it to dissolve. Swipe a sharp knife through the flesh if the seeds aren’t loose enough – you want a loose, chunky mixture as opposed to large, separate pieces. I hope that makes sense. Melt the dark chocolate and drizzle spoonfuls generously, Jackson Pollock-styles across the pav. You don’t have to use the whole lot, but don’t let me hold you back. Spoon the tamarillo seeds, flesh and juice evenly over the top and finally sprinkle thickly with pistachios. Serve in wedges with a spoonful of coconut cream on the side.

Serves 6 or so.
Something I should probably point out is that I completely forgot to turn on the oven before making this, so the beaten egg whites sat around for a considerable amount of time before getting any kind of blast of heat. This, plus the fact that I made this using a whisk instead of any kind of electric equipment, may explain the overwhelming flatness of the finished product. Still, 6 egg whites were not going to be used in vain, and with a certain pioneering spirit (and very sore upper arms from whisking the egg whites) I carried on. I’d sent a txt to our good friend and ex-flatmate Ange, saying that for reasons too complex to explain in 160 characters I had to make a pav and would she like to help us eat it? Luckily she did, or I might have eaten the whole enormous flat mess while curled up on the floor – what pavlova? I never made a pavlova!

I really did this whole thing on the fly – running round Moore Wilson’s and looking at what was in season without a clear picture of what I wanted the end result to be apart from “damn amazing”. For a few dire moments it looked like the pavlova would have to be topped with mashed swede or something until Tim pointed out the tamarillos, dark red and rounded fruit encasing sharp, juicy flesh and seeds. My mind began to move remarkably fast, and I mentally paired the fruit with dark Whittakers chocolate and maybe some kind of nut for interest’s sake. Pistachios, green and gorgeous, presented themselves once I got to the baking goods shelf and all of a sudden it started to make sense.

This pavlova replaces the dairy of our robust industry for a large spoonful of coconut cream. It’s a nod to our place in the Pacific and also makes it accessible to those who can’t actually eat dairy. Between the hastily assembled concept, forgetting to turn the oven on, the fact that the kitchen and myself were starting to be covered in chocolate, and the visitors turning up to eat it, I was starting to get a bit nervous about how it would actually taste after all that.

Friends – fellow New Zealanders – it was flipping excellent. What the pavlova lacked in, shall we say, body, it made up for in fudgy cocoa-y depth, with that familiarly crisp surface which dissolved alluringly on the tongue. The tamarillos were juicily sharp and fragrant, contrasting with the dark, rich cocoa taste of the melted Whittakers chocolate, the soft, buttery pistachios, and the mellow coconut cream seeping into each slice. We ate slice after slice (once I’d taken an excessively long time photographing it, of course) and then my flatmate and his friends came home and they had some too. Then Ange’s boyfriend came over and ate some. It was a big pavlova but its lifespan was barely hours.

Is this New Zealand’s ultimate dish? Oh, who could say. Put it next to a roast lamb or a fresh crayfish and it might seem far too fussy and “not us” and downright excessive. It is, however, an example of what you can do with one of our best dishes. It’s a new take on a gorgeous original. Yes, we may be told repeatedly that we are short on emotion and expression but don’t let this hold you back from enjoying something magically delicious, Aotearoa.

For more info on Rick Stein’s New Zealand tour, give this site a look.

Two very cool things happened this week. One: I met Ray McVinnie. RAY MCVINNIE! Some know him as a judge on NZ Masterchef but I’ve been reading his Quick Smart column in Cuisine magazine hard for years and years now. Yes, he’s more of a niche celebrity than a complete household name but he’s easily my favourite NZ foodwriter and every single one of his columns is a diamond. If you don’t know who he is, try to think of your favourite local celebrity who seems accessible enough in status but also roughly the awesomest in their chosen field, and imagine you got to meet them. McVinnie was at the recent Visa Wellington on a Plate launch that I was lucky enough to attend and along with two other Wellington food bloggers at the event, I just kind of prodded him on the shoulder, and said “hello, I’m Laura, I’m a food blogger, I’m a really big fan of your writing.” We all introduced ourselves and even got a brief conversation out of him – “Keep writing about food,” he said (oh how I will!) and also he said something about food being the glue that holds society together, I can’t remember specifically what it was but I remember agreeing with it. No lie, I grinned all the way home (sorry to any passers-by), got in the door and did a high-kick of happiness. By the way, the Visa Wellington on a Plate sounds well exciting, all those set lunch menus at all the fancy restaurants is making me happy just thinking about it. For more info check out their website!

Then on Saturday, I had a seriously cool lunch at Duke Carvell’s with a whole bunch of Wellington-based food bloggers, including the aforementioned ladies of Gusty Gourmet who I met Ray McVinnie with. (Ray McVinnie! Okay I’ll stop talking about it now.) Everyone was super lovely, and just plain super, really, and it was fun learning about peoples’ stories and what made them start writing, and who the person is behind the blog name. It was a good feeling, being amongst other people who love food and love writing about it, and who all live in Wellington. Blogger solidarity!
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Title via: Crowded House…maybe I should feel slightly apologetic about this one, oh sure it’s a sharp-inward-drawing-of-breath-through-clenched-teeth-edly bad pun, but the way those opening chords teeter as if being plucked on the strings of a fully functioning heart instead of a guitar…I’m really not sorry at all.
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Music lately:

New Edition’s Something About You, from their 1996 reunion album Home Again. Those moves! It has been years and years since I’ve heard this song but I saw a tweet on Twitter mentioning 90s music and instantly thought of this. I used to love it and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m not really keeping an ear to the R’n’B ground these days but it feels like they don’t make ’em like this anymore. (Poetically, fishpond.co.nz offers this album on cassette, before informing you that it’s “currently unavailable”…no kidding.)

Meadowlark, a song from the musical The Baker’s Wife, sung by Liz Callaway. I’m a bit obsessed with Liz Callaway at the moment, I’ve enjoyed her singing for a while but recently it’s hit me just how intensely amazing she is. In a joyful coincidence, one of the songs she’s most famous for is something I’m also obsessed with right now. I’ll be trying to articulate this better on 100s and 1000s soon…
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Next time: It has been real pie-making weather out there lately…I have pie on the brain. When it’s this cold all I really want to do is read Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and then cook everything from it.

now let me welcome everybody to the wild wild west

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So, the novelty of a Monday at home is less novelty-ish when I’m coughing like a beast. Typing is a nice distraction from my chapped throat, but I’d sooner just get better. I’ve been downing tea made from lemon and ginger slices, crunching on vitamin C and echinacea, and sippin’ on gees linctus and juice. I’d had plenty of gees linctus when I was younger, but it turns out these days you have to state your intentions and hand over photo ID to get it, and it no longer comes in a pretty flask with a fancy label, but instead a tiny prescription bottle with one of those child-proof lids that are really difficult to remove.

I also have a whole mess of lozenges which are pretty good for noise control when I start coughing heaps. They were definitely useful at Tim’s graduation on Thursday. There were about forty thousand people (well, it felt like at least that many) getting graduated that night and I’m pretty sure not one of them wanted some lady spluttering during their moment of glory. In case you’re wondering, Tim was graduating with Honours in Media Studies which makes him super-qualified to do all sort of interesting things that no-one out there seems to need people to do right now, but fingers crossed that market opens up soon…Either way I’m pretty proud.
Tim’s family came down to be there for the graduation as well and his mum gifted us some bananas. There’s nothing I like more than a little unpremeditated push towards baking. Muffins felt a too obvious, but I couldn’t be bothered with anything too high-concept either. What a quandary. Then I remembered this eye-catchingly named recipe that I found while hopping from blog to blog like a frog on a lily-pad. It’s called Ponderosa Cake. According to the friendly person whose blog I found it on, the cake is named after some regional pine trees. Secretly I hope it was so named because someone wanted to immortalise their passion for Bonanza in baked form.
Ponderosa Cake
Recipe inspired by a recipe found on Chocolate & Chakra. I say inspired because I completely mucked things up as I went along – didn’t have enough butter, added 2 eggs by mistake instead of one, forgot the yoghurt till it was about to go in the oven – so the end result was almost a completely different cake…
100g soft butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2-3 large, ripe bananas, mashed
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda
1/2 cup plain yoghurt or sour cream

125g good chocolate, chopped roughly
1 -2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 cup brown sugar
Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line a square or rectangular cake tin with baking paper. Cream the butter and sugar together till fluffy, then beat in the eggs. Add the bananas, then fold in the flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Finally mix in the yoghurt, plus half the chopped chocolate and cinnamon. Spread it into the cake tin, then sprinkle over the rest of the chocolate and cinnamon, plus the brown sugar. Bake for 25-30 minutes.
I’d rather have a thousand coughs than a blocked nose and lose my sense of taste, because Ponderosa Cake is incredibly good. It’s very light and tender and keeps well. The blast of heat in the oven caramelises the spiced, sugary chocolate topping slightly, providing depth of flavour and a pleasing gritty crunch to the moist, banana-y base. Happily, it used some of the treats I picked up at the recent food show – like The Collective yoghurt and Whittakers chocolate. Despite the fact that I somehow managed to get things wrong every step of the way, this is really a very straightforward cake. It’s ideal for those times where you want something a little out of the ordinary but not so far out of the ordinary that you’re up at 6am measuring the temperature and viscosity of sugar syrups.
I’m not sure if Hoss and Little Joe ever bonded over banana cake, but it’s a nice thought, right? I understand when my mum and her brothers and sisters were growing up, Bonanza was appointment viewing on TV… You know you want to hear that theme song again!
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Title via: 2Pac featuring Dr Dre, California Love. I know, it’s one state over from the Ponderosa. There couldn’t be a more obvious song that springs to mind for the sadly late Tupac Shakur, but no matter how often it’s thrashed it’s still a goodie, and one of those songs I knew all the words to (except for an embarrassingly long time I thought it was “city of corn chips” instead of “Compton”, what can I say, there was no Google back then.)
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Music lately:

The Music and the Mirror from A Chorus Line. This song is actually mostly dancing but the singing that’s there is so gorgeous – the line “I’ll do you proud” slays me a bit. It’s a song about a woman who needs a job, so she’s auditioning for the chorus even though she is good enough to be a star. Well, it seems a bit more dramatic when set to music anyway, and the original Donna McKechnie is pretty incomparable but there’s plenty of fun to be found on youtube of that amazing dance in the red skirt. If you’ve only seen the film version of A Chorus Line, they cut this song – criminal!
The Ali and Toumani album, a recently-released collaboration between the late Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate. It’s…an absolute beauty.
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Next time: well, hopefully I my immune system and I become friends again. I’m down in Christchurch on Friday for Chartfest then Dunedin on Saturday for Smokefreerockquest so I can’t afford to be this germtastic.

to fruits, to no absolutes

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I had a wonderful weekend at home, but I feel a bit talked out on the subject of RENT. All the way up to Auckland in the car my family and Tim politely listened while I talked about it anticipationally, and all the way through dinner afterwards and on the drive home I was generously tolerated during my frame-by-frame debrief of the entire production. But – oh my gosh thank goodness I imagine that I hear you say – I’m not entirely out of steam. For the sake of all involved though, and because I’m probably the only person who cares what I think about this particular production, I’ll keep my review to the following thoughts: (I have more thoughts though! So many more!)

  • I was very, very happy to be given the opportunity to see the songs I love so much performed live, and the Auckland Music Theatre did a great job.
  • The vocal sound was a bit restrained which didn’t do them any favours, because in RENT if you miss one throwaway line, well there goes an entire subplot.
  • The choreography for Out Tonight wasn’t overly satisfying, and I was a little disappointed Mimi wasn’t wearing blue tights, but this seems typical of all local productions I’ve seen.
  • Some of the songs – including the difficult Contact (“Mum, there’s this giant, metaphorical…sex scene”) in which Cameron Clayton as Angel just stunned and La Vie Boheme were staged and choreographed absolutely brilliantly.
  • I didn’t like what they did with Over The Moon – while it was clever to have it more dynamic with the cast-as-audience it lost the actual audience participation. And the cowbell.
  • While the cast was overall brilliant, and it’s not fair to compare them to the original Broadway stars, occasionally a singer’s range didn’t stack up to what you expected to hear.
  • I really liked Kristian Lavercombe as Mark, he brought this narrow-hipped Buddy Holly feel to the role and led the show well.
  • The much-publicised Annie Crummer (let’s face it, there are no real main characters but if there were, Joanne wouldn’t be one) looked stunning and sounded great but her distinct vocals coupled with the slightly quiet mic made most of her lines hard to hear. If you didn’t know them off by heart already that is.
  • Go see it if you can – it’s running till May the 7th and frankly, I’d go back again if I could. We saw the Saturday matinee and I would have happily stuck around and seen the night show. I don’t say that lightly.
Oh yeah… and it was fun hearing the name of my blog in the title song.
We’re so countrified that we spent five traffic light cycles taking a photo of me in front of the Civic theatre on Queen Street. I guess since our community is now shunted into the Waikato we can officially qualify as tourists in Auckland supercity. Imagine if I ever made it to New York – but then there are probably thousands of people who take photos of the “look at me standing by this distinctive structure” variety over there.
I was also home for Anzac Day and after watching the amazing and moving coverage on Maori TV (I could have done with someone a little drier in delivery than Judy Bailey, that said, I wish I had her legs), we went to the local wreath-laying ceremony, catching up with plenty of whanau in the process. A large bag of feijoas was pressed upon us by old family friends and I managed to carefully transport them back on the plane to Wellington. Feijoas are a fairly localised fruit, I think they mostly pop up in NZ and Australian cooking but not necessarily many other places in the world. I would describe them as being similar to passionfruit in fragrance, a little like a strawberry mixed with pineapple in flavour and not unlike guava in texture. They’re basically the greatest thing on earth.
Unfortunately their relative rarity and short season (they’re one of the best things about the colder autumn days) means that recipes are few and far between. So I decided to improvise, and made Feijoa Coconut Brownies. If you aren’t within reaching distance of a feijoa I’d substitute equal weight of banana or applesauce.
Improvised on the spot though these may be, they tasted like they’d been prophesied about to come and save the world by some holy sage a thousand years ago. I’m trying to say they were really good.
Feijoa Coconut Brownies

200g butter
100g good dark chocolate
150-200g feijoa flesh (just cut them in half, scoop out the flesh with a teaspoon and mash with a fork. The weight here refers to the flesh only, not the whole fruit)
100g sugar
3 eggs
2 tablespoons good cocoa (like the Fairtrade stuff Mum gave me! Yay!)
50g thread coconut (or dessicated, the longer thread stuff gives good texture)
200g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
100g good dark chocolate, chopped (optional)

Set oven to 180 C/350 F. Melt the chocolate and butter together gently, either in the microwave or in a bowl over a pot of simmering water. Stir to combine. Tip in the rest of the ingredients apart from the flour and baking powder, and mix thoroughly. Fold in the flour, baking powder and chopped chocolate if using, and spread the mixture into a baking paper lined 20x30cm-ish tin. Bake for 20-25 minutes (no less – this is a supermoist mixture, it can handle the slightly longer oven time). Allow to cool a bit, then slice into bars.
Notice my new favourite toy – a cakestand from my godmother and family. I love how clean and elegant it is – makes me feel very Scandinavian. Or at least what I think being Scandinavian might feel like. (Other characteristics: writing excellent electro-pop and sprinkling dill on everything)
These brownies were, and I don’t care that I’m saying so myself because look at them, gorgeous. The feijoa gave an acidy kick to the chocolate’s embroidered velvet pants, while the softly textured coconut buffered against the feijoa’s grittiness and provided a delicate richness of its own. They are super moist, cocoa-y and dense. They’re damn good brownies.
I had one for breakfast this morning and it felt good.
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Title coming your way via: surprise! RENT! I’m confident that feijoas aren’t the kind of fruits that Mark sings about in La Vie Boheme…and yet feijoas are undeniably one of the fruitier brothers in existence, so it all kind of works out.
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Music lately:
Just one more – Santa Fe from RENT. I don’t have a favourite, but this mellow beauty still thrills with every listen despite not being one of the huge showstoppers. I was a bit let down by the staging/arrangement of this song in the production we saw, but funnily enough Mum thought it was going to be the end of Act I, like Act II would be all about this group of bohemians and their attempt to start a restaurant out west. Looking back to when I first heard this song, I have to admit I didn’t quiiiiite pick up on the hypothetical nature right away either.
The amazing M.I.A’s new Suicide-sampling song Born Free. Watch the video if you dare (if you can find it) it’s definitely…an eye-widener.
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Next time: I’ve been given so many cool food-related things for my birthday (cake tins, maple syrup, limoncello, etc) that I’m going to have fun working out how to use them all, hopefully managing to incorporate my new cakestand in the process…

a girl has to celebrate what passes by

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I had a seriously nice 24th birthday on Saturday – my aunty visited with my very awesome young cousin (I recognise my own ardent admiration for Nigella Lawson reflected in his deep commitment to various superheroes), Dr Scotty dropped by with jaw-droppingly real champagne, Himalayan pink salt and vanilla pods, (I love how Scotty comes to our house and quotes my blog back to me, if that’s wrong I don’t want to be right) and I got more txt messages than I usually get in a whole month.

Tim was all, “I could make you a birthday cake if you want” and I was like, “the cuss you will! Don’t do me out of an opportunity to bake!” but what I made wasn’t a birthday cake, just a cake that happened to be hanging round on my birthday. Like a girl that’s just a friend, not a girlfriend…you know.


I know it seems like I say this about every cake here, and let’s be honest, I do know a lot of awesome cakes, but this cake was truly incredibly delicious. I say “was”, not “is”, because 24 hours after it was first sliced into, only a slender wedge remains.

I found this recipe for Torta Caprese on a blog called A Forkful of Spaghetti a while back, and my birthday seemed like as good a time as any to try it out. It’s one of those Italian cakes which manages to be terrifyingly elegant and artlessly down-home at the same time, but delicious either way you see it.

Sophie Grigson’s Torta Caprese


200g butter, melted and cooled a little (do this before you get anything else ready to give it time to cool down)
200g dark chocolate, in pieces
4 large eggs
170g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g ground almonds

Line the base of a 24cm cake tin (although I used 22cm just fine) with baking paper and grease the sides. Preheat oven to 180 C/350 F.

Either blitz the chocolate pieces in the food processor or chop them roughly with a large knife till you have a rubbly pile of chocolate shards and dust.

In a large bowl, whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture has expanded a little. Mix in the chocolate, ground almonds, and tepid melted butter until evenly combined. Spatula the mixture into your caketin.


Bake for 50-60 mins, until the cake is just firm to the touch. If it gets too dark towards the end, cover with tinfoil. I found it was quite perfect after 50 minutes. Leave it to cool in the tin, then turn it out and dust with icing sugar if you like.


I love how no-nonsense the method is – no separating of eggs, no whisking till your arms ache, just a bit of chopping and mixing but you end up with this incredibly good-looking cake as a result. It’s solid but light and amazingly buttery. Some of the chocolate melts into the cake as it cooks and the rest remain whole, as darkly rich chunks that contrast with the soft grittiness of the almonds. It’s amazing, and a bit like a really, really sophisticated chocolate chip cookie. And it’s gluten free for those of you who swing that way.


Yesterday after our visitors left Tim and I went to engage in Independent Record Store Day. By the time we left the house most of the shenanigans were over but we still enjoyed perusing the wares at Real Groovy. I was pretty rapturous to find the original Broadway Cast recordings of A Chorus Line and Hair, as well as the Original West End cast recording of Chess (ie the one everyone knows) on vinyl for an enchantingly cheap price. Mercifully the guy behind the counter didn’t ask us about what kind of turntable we have, because at this stage the answer would be “a hypothetical one”. Hoping to change that to an actual one in the near future. We browsed at Slow Boat Records but didn’t find anything in particular to commit to. There’s also the enticing Samurai Store on Willis Street but by that stage, probably desperate for more cake, we were starting to flag and headed back home.

That night we went to see the Wellington Musical Theatre production of Miss Saigon. It’s a cleverly staged production with a very talented cast, I recommend it if you’re in the capital. I’d never seen Miss Saigon before and only had a basic understanding of the story. The music isn’t necessarily super-catchy, and sometimes it feels like it could do with a couple more high-energy numbers, but on the whole I really loved it and there were plenty of those moments where your heart jumps around the place. It made me realise how few musicals I’ve seen in the last couple of years, for all that I go on about them, and it really made me want to see more. Unfortunately, that involves overseas travel…I swear I see well-known New Zealanders sent across the world all the time in the name of travel writing for various publications, if anyone out there wants to pay for me (and Tim!) to do the same, don’t hold back…

Before the show we had some curly fries at Sweet Mother’s Kitchen, that stalwart of Courtney Place, and afterwards we went to Matterhorn for some late night snacks (I don’t know why, but I feel really cool ordering food late at night). The place was full of people who had a “oh, it’s so great to be back at Matterhorn, I’m such a regular here” look about them but I think we acquitted ourselves okay, ordering a bunch of tapas and a couple of drinks without any awkwardness. It’s a very expensive place, but the food is perfectly executed, the service excellent and the setting rather gorgeous…maybe I’ll go back for dinner for my next birthday.

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Title via: The Miller’s Son from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, currently revived on Broadway with the supremely wonderful Angela Lansbury. This song is a stunner, all womanly and bolshy, and musically complex. One of my favourite versions is performed by Sara Ramirez, most people know her as Callie from Grey’s Anatomy, but hi there, the lady has a Tony Award too and can sing her face off.
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Music lately:

It’s not a tradition or anything, and it’s a completely obvious thing to do, but two songs in particular always get bandied about if one of us is aging another year…

Birthday by The Sugarcubes, ie the rock band that Bjork used to be in. It’s most famous in English but the original Icelandic sounds so beautiful. And really it doesn’t matter what language it’s in when the chorus is as wordlessly spectacular as this. I have to admit, after hearing Defying Gravity for the first time I thought “ooh, I’d love to hear Idina Menzel sing Birthday“. Maybe that’s what Stephen Schwartz was listening to when he wrote the ending?

Happy Birthday by Altered Images from their EP of the same name. It’s sweeter than birthday cake icing but I love the way it flits along noncommittally before launching into those guitars….

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Next time: I’ve been given so many exciting food-related birthday presents, including…a bottle of real maple syrup from my step-grandmother, two loaf tins from ex-flatmate Ange, a beauty of a cake stand from my godmother and family, a recipe collection from the Ashburton Fuchsia Society from Nana, and more fruit puffs from Mum…for starters. So you’ll be seeing these things all used and blogged about in the near future, no doubt.