Category: Chocolate

Macaroon-age Daydream

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Apologies for the long gap between posts but I’m sure everyone else is just as busy as me if not wildly more so, what with the approaching Christmas and economy and global warming to worry about. Not helping is the fact that my computer has been monstrously slow of late. It took about five goes to upload my photos without the entire thing having a nervous breakdown, and you don’t even want to know how many frustrating minutes it took to even get to the point where I can type here. Using that same excuse, I apologise deeply if I haven’t been reading as many blogs as I should – I wish I could keep up with them all but my computer would require smelling salts and a cold compress. Now, seeing how this is the time of year that office parties and such become more prevalent, why not gaze upon this bowl of antioxidants as inspiration for what to do should you wish to engage in a little, um, oxidanting?

Above: You know that fruit that you get at markets sometimes that they sell for reeeally cheap because it needed to be eated ten minutes ago? Well I bought myself a bushel of the stuff on Sunday and using Nigella’s Antioxidant Fruit Salad from Nigella Christmas as a starting point, made myself an incredibly gorgeous breakfast. A slightly wilting mango was sliced into a bowl – the whole thing – followed by some strawberries, sliced and tumbled over, chopped mint from the garden and a handful of pomegranate seeds, lovingly harvested from a tupperware container in the freezer. Not pictured, but unbelievably essential, is a sprinkling of pistachio nuts, which gave the most fabulous contrast in textures and tastes, their waxy, almost chocolatey creaminess next to the zingy acidity of all that fruit. I added them at the last minute as an afterthought, but they completely made the salad.
Such are my mad domestic goddess skillz that I managed to whip up these chocolate macaroons while making the Christmas Dinner last week, obviously they aren’t the echt article from Pierre Hermes, you know, faint-makingly light, requires 19 egg whites, only 3 people worldwide know the recipe – these are rather unchic, stumpy little biscuits, but no less delicious.
I guess it’s fitting that such a quick and untaxing recipe comes from Nigella Express. I took them into the office the next day for a colleague’s birthday morning tea and they were, I’m immodestly proud to say, enormously popular. Of course, maybe people were just saying they like them because I was sitting right there. Who knows, they’re certainly easy enough to make so why not find out for yourself (although rigorous quality control in my kitchen proved that they were in fact fantastically good.)
Chocolate Macaroons
2 egg whites
200g ground almonds
30g cocoa powder
175g icing sugar
Heat oven to 200g C, and line a baking tray with paper or a silicone sheet. Mix the egg whites in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients till you have a sticky chocolatey mixture. As I said, this is very easy – no intrepid egg-white beating here. Roll the mixture into small balls and arrange on the baking tray. Bake for about 11 minutes although I took them straight out of the oven at about 8 or 9 minutes, that’s just because I get a bit nervous around biscuits – they always carry on cooking even when removed from the heat. They will be solidly chewy and densely chocolatey once cool, if you can wait that long, and are marvelous with coffee, ice cream, anything at all really.
On Monday, Tim and I went to the local Italian restaurant, Red Tomatoes, because with us both working full time and travelling round the place we’ve hardly seen each other. Red Tomatoes was recently on a New Zealand version of that Gordon Ramsey TV show where he goes into restaurants and swears a lot and then sorts out their problems. I’ve been to this place before a couple of times and it has definitely improved, in terms of decor, clarity of menu and staff attentiveness. The menu itself is not terribly adventurous, but this is not a bad thing, what is there is familiar and done well. The meals are still a little on the slow side, so don’t go there on an awkward first date. With Tim and I nattering away we barely noticed.
And the pizza is divine.

Thin, crisp, slightly chewy base…generous, piping hot toppings…lots of cheese…brilliant. Tim got the Meditteranean chicken and I got the Puttanesca and we swapped pieces as we went.

Can’t bond and connect emotionally, too busy eating own body weight in cheese.

As if cheese wasn’t exciting enough in its own right, the current economical crisis which had resulted in astronomically high prices for dairy means that eating cheese is now a hedonistic, decadently luxurious experience. They do say absense makes the heart grow fonder (and probably less clogged too, in this case.)
Next time: Who knows. Christmas is hot on my heels and I’ve barely done the dreaded but necessary shopping at all. I need a buffer month between November and December – who do you go to see about getting this sort of thing organised? And what could we call it – Lauratober?

Christmas Bells Are Ringing…

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So with all the feasting that ensued on the night of The Christmas Dinner, I entirely forgot to take a photo of the actual roast chickens. However, as the following photo essay demonstrates, there’s still plenty to see. I’m seriously exhausted, and it’s pretty late so I’m going to be dialogue-lite and let the pictures largely speak for themselves.

Above: I whipped up some pomegranate ice cream on Sunday morning, after I returned from the vege market. Literally – get it – Whipped? Cream? Okay, I told you I was tired, which is a perfectly legitimate excuse for dodgy puns.

Nigella keeps her pomegranates close and her cranberries closer. It’s a great thing that these berries are so expensive because she puts them in everything. Oh, I can’t be snide though because they really are rather Christmassy, the frozen ones looking like holly berries in thawing snow, and their fresh sourness can perk up otherwise heavy fare quite effectively.

Cornbread, Cranberry and Orange Stuffing (adapted from Feast)

This mixture is so delicious it almost didn’t make it into the chicken. Don’t for goodness sake be put off because you have to make cornbread first, it’s the easiest thing in the world and the recipe can be found here.

In a large pot, simmer 300g cranberries with the juice and zest of an orange. Add 125g butter slowly till it turns into a glossy, pinky-orange sauce, then crumble in the cornbread and stir to combine. When you’re ready to bake it, stir in 2 eggs and stuff your bird and roast, or spread it into a loaf tin and bake it at 180 for about 25 minutes.

Above: In front, Pear and Cranberry stuffing, and in the back, the cornbread stuffing. I may have made a bit extra so that they could stand in as another vegetarian dish. Inexplicably, I never liked stuffing as a child so you can see I am making up for lost time here.

I bought a brace of peppers at the market on Sunday morning and roasted them as soon as I got back. They seemed to just get silkier and more delicious as the day went on and were perfect served at room temperature, so the rich olive oil, clean fresh pomegranate, and salty caper flavours shone through vibrantly.

Chargrilled Peppers with Pomegranate (Nigella Christmas)

6 red and/or yellow peppers (although I got 7 to allow for muck-ups and nibbling-while-cooking)
Seeds from 2 pomegranates (although one is more than fine, Nigella)
2 T fresh pomegranate juice (just give the fruit a squeeze while seeding)
2 t lime or lemon juice
60ml extra virgin olive oil
15ml garlic olive oil
1/2 teaspoon Maldon sea salt
3 T drained capers


Set your oven to very, very hot – like 250 C. Cut the peppers in half, removing seeds and stalks, and place cut-side down on a baking tray. Roast in the oven till they blister – about 15 mins. Remove and carefully chuck them all into a bowl, quickly covering it with gladwrap till the peppers cool down considerably. From here it will be very easy to remove the skins – just pull them off. Tear the peppers into strips and place them in a serving bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Serve at room temperature. I made mine at about 11am and served it at 8pm, so it benefits from a bit of a sit. I just kept it covered and on the bench, although it won’t come to any harm in the fridge.

The involtini is another one that tastes best when it’s not piping hot. This turned out to be an amazing combination of flavours and textures, so much more than just a token vegetarian dish. There was hardly any left afterwards but what was there made for a luxe lunch the next day, microwaved for a bit and served with salad and leftover roast veges.

Above: The marvelously summery Sangria (and yes, we used those tacky plastic ice cube things…well, they’re practical! And this was hardly a classy joint to begin with.)

Poinsettia, a mix of cranberry juice, cointreau, and sparkling white wine (1 litre, 125 mls, and 750mls respectively) is an enchanting combination that completely owns Buck’s Fizz in terms of festive drinkability. Tip of the cap to Nigella, for all that she half-heartedly protests that she’s not much of a drinker, she can certainly navigate her way round a liquor cabinet.

The table! We managed to fit eight of us around it, not entirely comfortably though…

Above: The roasted pepper salad and boiled new potatoes with mint from our herb patch. Notice the gorgeous yellow bowl which was a Christmas present from the parents last year, and the beautiful Christmas crackers which were really way too classy for us. They contained real presents, like pens, corkscrews and measuring tapes. Nifty or what? True to form, as well as forgetting to photograph the chicken, I forgot to bring the parsnips out of the oven at all until after we finished the main course. They instead became a refreshing palate cleanser between meals, something to consider for your next dinner party perhaps…After dinner we played charming parlour games (well, we played Scattergories, is there a more satisfying game for bookish, wordy BA students to tackle?)

Drama! Tim is the only one in our flat capable of turning jelly out of a mould. He may be the only person in the world who can do it…perhaps we can never know.

The white chocolate almond cake was utterly gorgeous, although the problem with cakes that have white chocolate in them is that you quite often can’t actually taste the white chocolate as much as you’d like (who am I kidding, as much as I’d like.) So I upped the ante by drizzling over a melted milky bar, Jackson Pollock-styles (hey, I got an A in an essay about him in first year, I feel sufficiently qualified to pay homage to him via the medium of baked goods.) This is a fantastic cake for entertaining as you can make it in advance and it keeps beautifully, but looks rather impressive as far as puddings go. I’m not sure if it was supposed to rise much – or whether it has something to do with our oven – but the cake rose hugely then sunk, leaving a crevice that I filled with chopped pistachios (it was going to be silver cachous but they were $5.50 for a small cannister at New World – um, no thanks – and besides, the still-festive pistachios are actually pleasant to eat.)

Above: The official pudding table: the white chocolate almond cake, the “tortova”, pomegranate ice cream, red and green jelly, and strawberries, also virtuously purchased from the market. The chocolate torte turned out to be marvelous, somehow crisp and chewy at the same time and punctuated by welcome chunks of dark, dark chocolate.
It was altogether a fantastic meal shared with fantastic people, although it was such a shame that Emma couldn’t be there. She was however present in our minds and hopefully gets back to New Zealand asap safe and sound!
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In other news: I’m reading To Kill A Mockingbird. Tim found an old copy somewhere while dropping some stuff off at the Salvation Army, and I do love old books, (not those horrible shiny reissues with conceptual cover art) so he grabbed it for me. It was one of those that I knew I should have a look at one day, but the curmudgeon in me has this thing where the more a book is recommended to me, the more I stubbornly refuse to read it. I don’t know why, perhaps hype annoys me, but that’s certainly the reason I’ve never read The Kite Runner. Anyway, To Kill A Mockingbird is really very good, (she says condescendingly – didn’t it win the Pulitzer or somesuch?) I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve also recently read Nigella Lawson’s unofficial biography, forwarded to me by the ever-thoughtful Linda. It is a cracking read, I think I devoured it in a day or two on my lunchbreaks at work but…it’s really not very well written. It quotes her cookbooks as though they were interviews – as though I don’t know them all word for word anyway – but it’s worth it for the luscious pictures of Nigella. What a beauty. I must say, it’s not a good book for the self esteem, as it constantly reiterates how goddess-like and creamy and striking she is and it can leave the reader feeling somewhat homely. I definitely recommend it for a bit of light reading though. Okay, this suddenly turned into Laura’s book corner, so I’d better get going…
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Next time: I attempt chocolate macaroons (the quick, chewy kind, not the faint-making Hermes kind) and make Ed Victor’s Turkey Hash with the scant leftover roasted chicken from the Christmas dinner.

Under Pressure

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A brief progress report on my last-minute preparations for the Christmas Dinner – which is tomorrow! – with no proper recipes yet because I don’t have time to type them out. Why? Tim and I are on our way to a seventies party. He’s dressing up as David Bowie, and after much pondering I’m going to be glam-rocking it up myself. I say pondering because it was surprisingly difficult to figure out what to dress up as (after Tim beat me to being Bowie that is). I mean, if I go as Charlie’s Angels-era Farrah, I look like Laura in trousers. If I go as Debbie Harry, I look like Laura in a dress. It goes on. I’d probably make a convincing Stevie Nicks, but I’m not a Fleetwood Mac fan and I have this feeling that you should be somehow committed to what you’re dressing up as. Stevie Nicks certainly seemed to be.

Anyway, that’s not what you came here for – you came for the close-up photos of foodstuffs! But before I get into that, we’ve had some slightly unsettling news that Emma – the gluten-free flatmate – is stuck in Bankok due to the shootings at the airport that you have probably heard about in the news. She’s on holiday there and was supposed to come back a few days ago – and then she was supposed to come back today – and now she’s not going to be back till next Wednesday. We’re all a bit nonplussed, and it’s not going to be the same without her, but the point is that she is completely safe where she is and that the show goes on.

Have I mentioned this before? You could get rapidly and dangerously inebriated if you played a little game called “Have a drink every time Nigella mentions the word ‘pomegranate’ in her latest book.” Pomegranate farmers the world over must fall on their knees and weep gratefully for Nigella because without her, the market would crumble. I know I myself, at her insistence, bought two of the oft-mentioned fruit from last week, and bashed out the seeds to freeze for later use. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the shiny, ruby-like seeds first because they really are every bit as pretty as Nigella says. Tomorrow they will be sprinkled, with capers, onto roasted capsicum following a recipe from the aforementioned Nigella Christmas.

Today I made the involtini from Nigella Bites, and it is now stashed in the fridge ready for baking tomorrow afternoon. Although it’s quite an involved recipe – frying the eggplant slices, making the filling, rolling them up, saucing everything – it’s nothing too difficult. I adapted the recipe somewhat, only in the name of laziness – instead of making a simmered tomato sauce for these eggplant parcels, I just upended a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes over them. I’m sure Nigella would approve.

The filling, by the way, is a nubbly mix of bulghur wheat (although I substituted quinoa), feta cheese, pistachios, garlic, cinnamon and oregano. It’s bound with an egg, but I daresay without that it would make a lovely salad.

Above: Speaking of things Nigella would approve of, once it has the sauce poured over and is sprinkled with more feta and pistachios, the colours of this dish are entirely appropriate to Christmas. Doesn’t it look pretty?

Above: And of course, there’s pudding. I didn’t end up taking many photos of the making process of these because both puddings involve stressful beating of egg whites (I know, I am my own worst enemy) and I didn’t want to mess around taking photos and risk the whole lot going disastrously wrong. So all we have as proof of the White Chocolate Almond Torte – well, so far – is this picture of partially melted white chocolate. Due to my well-documented love of white chocolate it will come as no surprise that I had great difficulty refraining from burying my face in this bowl.

There’s chocolate in the other pudding – the Other Torte infact – although someone did suggest “tortova” which I think is rather sweet. This is one that you need to prep in advance for, because there’s a lot of chopped things involved – dark chocolate, walnuts, biscuits (luckily gluten-free biscuits crumble like, well, gluten-free biscuits) and dried apricots. All these are folded into a glossy meringue made from four egg whites, spread carefully into a lined 23cm caketin and baked at 180 C for about half an hour, then left to cool in the oven. I haven’t actually tasted it yet obviously so I can’t vouch for its deliciousness but it certainly smelled marvelous as it crisped up.


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I did snag a quick photo of the mix though – the things I do for you! Meringue can be a fickle beast to deal with and I certainly didn’t want to tempt fate by setting up several shots here. It waits for no one and needs to get into the oven without delay.

Next time you hear from me, the Christmas Dinner for 2008 will be over and – *faints* – it will be December already. With any luck there will also be amusing photos of Tim and I dressed up as glam rock scallywags. Actually, the nature of his multicoloured spandex jumpsuit ensures that all photos will be amusing.

Pineapple Express

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A very, very swift post from me – I know my exam is tomorrow, but Tim and I have studied ourselves into a brick wall and can nay do more. We’ve been watching some audio commentaries on The Mighty Boosh DVD (yes, we are earnest commentary-watching folk) and giving our brains a well-needed airing before everything we’ve crammed in there floats lightly out our ears.

Saturday’s weather was beyond awful – gale force winds and pelting rain. Sunday, however, in typical Wellington fashion, was the complete opposite – an unutterably beautiful day. I purchased a pineapple at the vege market for a dollar and imagined I would sprinkle it with chopped mint and fresh ginger and serve it for a sparklingly healthy dinner. Then Tim said “or we could dip it in chocolate?” Brilliant. I was sold.

In fact I went one better, and used a recipe of the blessed Nigella Lawson’s from her gorgeous book Forever Summer .

Caramelised Pineapple with Hot Chocolate Sauce
1 ripe pineapple
demarara sugar (Nigella specifies 250g)
200g dark chocolate
125ml Malibu
125ml cream

Preheat the grill to very hot (or the barbeque!) Slice the skin off the pineapple then chop it into wedges. If you like, thread them onto soaked wooden bamboo skewers or just leave them plain like I did. Lay the pineapple on a layer of tinfoil and sprinkle with the sugar. Pop under the grill till caramelised and deep golden in colour. For the sauce, simply melt the chocolate and stir in the Malibu and cream. Pour into a bowl for people to dip the pineapple in. I resolutely sprinkled the pineapple with mint though and it added its pleasant, reliably perky flavour to the whole thing.

You should probably know that we lowly (soon-to-be-ex) students don’t carry anything as highfalutin’ as actual Malibu. Instead I used a harsh splash of this Malibu doppelganger stuff of Katie’s called – charmingly – “Wipeout.” The look of Malibu in the same white bottle, minus the smooth rumminess.

Above: Cool mirror effect on the shiny dipping sauce. It’s probably the aluminium in the Wipeout liquor that makes the chocolate so reflecty.

We ate dinner (a quick feast of steamed red potatoes, proper beef sausages, roasted capsicum and carrot sticks) outside because it was so glorious, and at 7.30pm we were still able to be comfortably al fresco with our pineapple. It is a wonderful pudding – the taste of scorched fructose and smooth, smooth chocolate mingling very pleasantly with each other, people leaning over each other sociably to access the fruit and sauce – heck, I’d go for two pineapples next time.

I haven’t mentioned this so far because I’ve been so busy promoting the Otaua video (and in case you’re wondering, the case is going on hiatus for three weeks so no proper conclusion yet) but if you like, clickety click HERE to witness a rather amazing thing. You may remember that I went on a plugging spree for the late Broadway musical [title of show]. Well it’s over now, but some spry fans organised – and just let me try to explain this properly – a music video to ‘9 Peoples’ Favourite Things’, one of the songs from [title of show], using fans of the show holding up pictures of the lyrics. As in, one word per person. If all this makes no sense, watch the video anyway because Tim and I are both in it! Yayyy! Participation from miles afar! But actually, don’t even try to look out for us because we zoom by in a flash and your retinae will chaff with the strain of it all. But there’s still something for everyone. For Broadway fans, there’s Jonathan Groff *swoons*, Patti LuPone, Shoshana Bean, Amy Spanger, Seth Rudetsky, Betty Buckley and Cheyenne Jackson *swoons again* amongst others. For the average punter, have fun trying to spot America Ferrera, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, TR Knight from Grey’s Anatomy and for those who like to dip your toe on either side of the fence, check out the spunky Bebe “Lillith” Neuwirth. Follow the link in the grey box for stills and names, and you’ll actually get to see me.

See, there was no need to flinch, I didn’t even try and make you watch the Otaua video again. But if you’re on youtube anyway with nothing else to do…As it is we are on a rollicking 1900 views, which is flipping amazing. Hopefully in three weeks we can make the change we want. In fantastic news, Otaua and the video itself were on the TV1 national news show here in New Zealand, they gave us a good two minutes and showed lots of clips of Otaua looking clean and lovely and untainted by oil plants. Hilariously though, they showed a clip of the mayor of Franklin, Mark Ball, and said that it was my dad. Not sure what the mayor thinks of this…

Speaking of change, in a day or two I’m guessing things are going to go absolutely nuts in America. Even a bare plot summary of my beloved RENT which this blog is named for should indicate that I’m pretty left leaning. (Hint: lesbians ahoy!) I couldn’t be more hopeful that Barack Obama gets in as president, and that Sarah Palin fades quietly into obscurity (I know, I know, I’m not American, but let’s put it this way, I’ve heard many, many women say that she in no way speaks for them by virtue of her gender). It’s times like these that I get a particular song stuck in my head…’Louder Than Words’,a stunning ditty from one of Jonathan Larson’s earlier works, Tick, Tick…Boom! If the words look a little cheesy on paper, click here for a somewhat poor quality vid of the final Broadway cast singing it to get the full effect.
Why should we
Blaze a trail
When the well worn path
Seems safe and so inviting?

How, as we travel
Can we see the dismay
And keep from fighting?

Cages or wings
Which do you prefer? Ask the birds
Fear or love, baby
Don’t say the answer
Actions speak louder than words!

What does it take
To wake up a generation?
How can you make someone
Take off and fly?

If we don’t wake up
And shake up the nation
We’ll leave the dust
Of the world wondering why

Why do we stay with lovers
Who we know, down deep
Just aren’t right?
Why would we rather
Put ourselves through hell
Than sleep alone at night?

Why do we follow leaders who never lead?
Why does it take catastrophe to start a revolution
If we’re so free? Tell me why – someone tell me why
So many people bleed

Cages or wings
Which do you prefer? Ask the birds
Fear or love, baby
Don’t say the answer
Actions speak louder than words!

Still Hungry and Frozen

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I was highly excited anticipating the one-year-anniversary of my blog. I invisaged all manner of things – maybe some kicky new features, or a photo essay dedicated to the cat, or some kind of conceptual baking, or maybe a video, something new and fun to try and make our relationship last beyond the honeymoon, “hey this blog is mildly diverting” stage and into full-on commitment. But then I had to hand in a 3000 word essay, and if that were not enough we exceeded our 20gb internet limitation…by a lot. We lack the technology to make a cooking video happen and I was not feeling telegenic in the slightest. So, a few days late, I apologetically offer you this post, like a bunch of wilted flowers and slightly melted chocolates purchased at the last minute from a petrol station.

But really – it is exciting to me that this blog has existed for a whole year. I remember having the epiphany to make one, I don’t remember when, it was just an idea that made so much sense to me. I’d read blogs and thought “I’d like to do that,” and I read other blogs and thought, hubristically, “well I can definitely do better than that.” Little did I realise that my badly lit photos taken on auto were not going to cut it with fickle blog readers. I rather naively assumed that my terrible photography would be seen as charming and positively daring, but actually it was just…terrible. And as I learned new skills (helloooo macro function) I gained more readers. But I’d like to think it’s the content and recipes as well as the photography that makes people stick around, especially because my photos still have a long way to go. Indeed if you have a little time on your hands and you’re up for a laugh, why not peruse my very early archives? I truly thought that all I had to do was put my opinion out there and the adulation would pour in. I love my blog wholeheartedly and with complete bias though, it has been a haven, a diary, a self-indulgent soapbox, a recipe file, and a record of my life for the past, swift-moving year. I look forward to seeing how long it lasts.

I went to the vegetable market on Sunday and gamely trudged back up the hill with my spoils, (sweating like a donkey all the while, as is the nature of Wellington hills) but it wasn’t till I got my breath back and stopped perspiring that I realised how utterly gorgeous the vegetables were. They made me want to don a voluminous cape and floppy beret and paint them in a still life. Fellow food-bloggers, tell me I’m not the only one who thinks food is really preeettyyy.

I mean these would not look out of place in some medieval, suckling pig feast. I’ve honestly never purchased shallots before (don’t faint, but I’ve always used onions instead when a recipe asked for it, well I am a student) which is probably why I’m so embarrassingly enthusiastic, but they were cheap and rather beautiful so I grabbed a bunch.

Oh asparagus how I love you. Especially when it’s two fat, healthy bunches for $3, that can last for four separate dinners. I used the shallots and asparagus in an intriguingly delicious recipe from Simon Rimmer’s excellent, inspiring cookbook The Accidental Vegetarian. It was so monumentally good that I considered making the whole thing again the next night, or perhaps eating the whole lot on my own and pretending it never existed. I’ve altered the recipe a bit as Rimmer’s version was more coconut-happy than I go in for. It’s a little fiddly but not difficult, and makes the kitchen smell completely fabulous.

Rendang Shallot and Asparagus Curry

50g butter
75g brown sugar (yes, it does sound like a lot and yes, I used less for the two of us)
20 banana shallots
400g asparagus
400ml tin coconut milk
3 T toasted dessicated coconut
Coriander to serve

Melt the butter in a pan, add the sugar and when it starts to dissolve throw in the shallots, peeled but left whole. Turn down the heat and cook slowly for at least 20 minutes, (he recommends 45 but they were more than fine with less). Blanch the asparagus and refresh in cold water. I sliced them into two-inch lengths.

Curry Paste:

1 onion, roughly chopped
2 garlic cloves
1 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled
3 red chillies, or however much you desire
1 tsp ground coriander
1 T tamarind paste (or substitute lemon juice)
1 t tumeric
1 t curry powder
1 stalk of lemon grass (which I left out because I didn’t have any)
pinch of salt

Whizz the lot together in a food processor, or chop and mix everything well like I did using my mezzaluna. This results in a chunkier but no less flavoursome paste. Heat a little oil in a pan and gently fry the paste, carefully, and stir in the coconut milk, letting it bubble away and thicken slightly. Add the now magically caramelly shallots and the blanched asparagus, letting it simmer for about ten minutes. Finish by stirring through the toasted coconut and chopped coriander. If you like, add a handful of frozen peas to beef it up (as it were) quite easily. This should serve four-six.

The combination of flavours were so perfect – zingy, spicy, earthy, fresh, sweet. I truly could have eaten this whole thing surruptitiously by myself. And shallots – oh my! Rich, mild, gently oniony, what have I been missing out on all this time!

My blog’s one year of existence coincided rather bittersweetly with the closing of [title of show], one of the most exciting new shows on Broadway…I, of course, make this statement without having seen it at all, such is the nature of being a theatre fan from New Zealand. Rice Krispie treats are referred to in one of the songs, and I’ve had a distinct hankering for them ever since hearing it for the first time. Nigella has a version made with melted marshmallows which indeed sounds delightful, but I opted for an old Edmonds recipe for what we in New Zealand call Rice Bubble Cake, using honey and butter to bind the cereal together in sugary squares.

Rice Bubble Cake

125g butter (incidentally, one year ago a block of butter was $2.70 from the corner shop, now it’s $5)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon each of honey and golden syrup

Melt the butter and sugars together till gently bubbly. Once it has bubbled away for a little while, remove from the heat and carefully stir in 4-5 cups rice bubbles. Spread this into a waiting square tin, and allow to cool. The butter-sugar mix will be very hot, so don’t go sticking your face into it or anything.

Rice bubble cake makes me reminisce twofold; I remember making this with mum as a child, wanting to eat the buttery sugary mixture so bad and not thinking it would be enough to cover all those rice bubbles. It also reminds me of my gap year in a boarding school in England, where the kitchen would serve up cakes of some sort for afternoon tea with soothing regularity. One of the mainstays of afternoon tea was rice bubble cake, sometimes it was sublime and sometimes it was crumbly and oily and weird. We never knew what happened behind the scenes to make it so, and frankly I don’t want to know. But for those of you who’ve never tried this before, I know it looks a little odd, but just try and stop at one piece. Or three. Crunchy, texturally delightful, caramelly, buttery – it’s great stuff.

To paraphrase [tos], let my blog be the Rice Krispie Treat?
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Overheard in our kitchen: (in the throes of discussing what we’d do if we won the $30 million lotto this weekend)

Me: I could fund my own cookbook and get it done next year. Then I could create my own stage show around it, where I bake stuff and tell hilarious anecdotes and feed the audience and…maybe sing and dance…
Paul: You mean like an infomercial?
Me: NO! Like a proper stage show! But with baking, which I’d give to the audience! And it can promote my book but also be a fantastic piece of theatre in its own right!
Tim: So…it’ll be an infomercial.
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Well, I do have plenty of hilarious food-related anecdotes (particularly involving grapefruit and Jersey Caramels as friends and family will know from the many times they have been told). But that’s the thing about imagining what you’d do if you won the lottery, especially if you have a particularly vivid imagination like me – your mind bounces from concept to concept and then you get overexcited and your heart starts to thump wildly with the very fullness of your own potential excellence and then you remember that you haven’t won $30 million at all.

As I said earlier in this post, I handed in a 3000 word essay – well it was my final essay for uni. I have an exam on the 4th but my lectures, assignments, etc, are over for good. Luckily I’ve finished on a relative high, getting A’s on two essays (on the social influence of Idina Menzel and the subordination of female Beat poets respectively) and loving all my papers. I started this blog while still in the middle of uni, now that I’ve come to the end of that time it’s a little sad, but also exciting to think what might be in store for me next. Hopefully you, the reader will stick around with me – I’d flatter myself that this is kind of a fun read – and not just come here if Tastespotting tells you to.

In the words of Rent: “How do you measure a year in the life…how about love?”

In the words of the always inspiring Nigella Lawson: “I have made the most of being a food obsessive. For good or bad, it’s my life, it’s me and I don’t see anything changing.”

And appropriately, in the words of [title of show]: “I’d rather be nine peoples’ favourite thing than a hundred peoples’ ninth favourite thing.”
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So true. Quality over quantity any day. And ah, maybe next year I’ll do something more exciting to mark the occasion.

Spring Awakening

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Momentous times: Next week will be my very last week ever of university classes. On the 13th, it shall be my one year blogoversary. On the 23rd, Tim and I have been ‘going steady’ (or whatever other mildly nauseating term you want to apply to it) for three years. Stick around, folks because where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

We do need comfort food though. Despite the fact that it has officially been Spring for a whole month now, the weather is still regularly chilly (punctuated by brief, teasing bursts of sunshine) and so my northern hemisphere readers may well get the same kick out of this food as I did down here in New Zealand.

I have oft sung the praises of NZ food magazine Cuisine, which I believe is the classiest one on the market. Elegant yet functional, inspiring but attainable. Also kind of expensive for the average student, which I why I source out back copies at second hand book stores. I found this interesting sounding meatball recipe in the September 2004 edition, and I know, meatballs are meatballs are meatballs but this is utterly fabulous – warming, softly spicy, saucy and comforting. Here is my adapted version, although I’ll cite the original proportions of ingredients. As I have a well-stocked spice collection and mince is always in my freezer, this was a very cheap meal. Not to mention that I got a sizeable bag of gorgeous wee new potatoes from the vege market for a cool dollar…

Oven Baked Meatballs and Potatoes

Don’t be put off by the list of ingredients, this is so easy and mercifully doesn’t use as many pots and pans as you might think. Also, the original recipe specified a jar of artichoke hearts as an ingredient, if you have some, be my guest.

Serves 6

800g minced pork (although I used beef, lamb would be fab too)
1 onion, finely diced
2 t ground cumin or whole seeds
2 t ground coriander
a pinch sweet smoked paprika if you’re lucky enough to own some
1 cup finely sliced, washed spinach leaves
a handful of chopped coriander leaves
1 egg, beaten
2 T plain flour, plus extra
6 or 7 waxy new potatoes…as many as you fancy really, chopped into smallish chunks.
2 T tomato puree
1 litre chicken or beef stock

Heat oven to 190 C. Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan, then add the onion and spices, stirring till the onions are soft and becoming fragrant. Add the spinach, cooking briefly till it wilts. Tip all this into a bowl with the mince, egg, and coriander. Squeeze it all together with your hands, roll the mixture into meatballs, and toss them in the flour. Using the same pan that you fried the onions in, brown the meatballs in batches, transferring them to a shallow oven dish as you go. In that same pan, cook the potatoes gently for about ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Add a spoonful of flour and let it absorb all the residual pan juices, then add the tomato puree and stock, bringing to a robust simmer. Carefully pour this over the meatballs, cover with foil (I admit I forgot to though) and cook for at least half an hour.

With spring comes asparagus, that wonderful vegetable that I’ve been waiting for since, well, since last October. A stroke of luck led me to find a generous bundle of it for a staggeringly cheap $1 at the vege market last week, and so we were able to have roast asparagus – one of my favourite things – twice with dinner this week. If you have not yet experienced the joys of this then amigo, read on and learn.

This is something I picked up from Nigella Lawson’s marvellousmarvellousmarvellous How To Eat, but it’s barely even a recipe. Heat your oven to 200 C, and place your asparagus spears on a foil-lined oven tray. Roll them in a little olive oil, then bake for 25 or so minutes till slightly crispened. If you have asparagus of the tough, stringier variety, you may need to trim an inch or so off the bottom. Serve sprinkled with a little good salt. This is near on perfect, but imagine rolling the spears in basil pesto before roasting would appeal also…

And of course, when the weather is cold I crave some kind of pudding. Also when the weather is fine. Either way, we haven’t had a proper pudding in a while and after dinner on Thursday I didn’t quiiiite feel ready to finish eating for the night. I played with the Chocolate Pear Pudding from Nigella Express, I’ve made it before but it’s quite adaptable. Here it takes the form of Chocolate Banana Surprise Pudding, (the surprise being the unexpected square of chocolate that is nestled within the batter!) It is beyond simple to whip up. What I did was cream 150g soft butter with 125g brown sugar. I added an egg, 1 overripe banana, 125g flour, 25g cocoa and 1 t baking powder. You may need to add a little milk if the mixture is too stiff. This went into three 250ml ramekins – although I’m sure you could play with proportions – and I pushed a couple of squares of dark chocolate under the batter of each. These were baked for 25 minutes at 200 C. The tops are cakey and delicious while a spoon, plunged into the heart of the pudding reveals stickily saucy chocolately depths. Perfect with a spoonful of Banana, Pear and Dark Chocolate Sorbet melting into it…

Last week I was fortunate enough to embark on my first business trip. I was taken up to Auckland because Smokefree, who I work with, were one of the sponsors of the Juice TV music awards, and there was a swag of signage that needed to be erected. I got to stay in a lovely hotel, meet some fantastic people, and attend the event. Here are some things I learned…

-Wellington is a nicer city than Auckland. Hands down.

-The people that work at Juice TV are awesome, friendly and welcoming.

-The NZ musicians present at the event seemed to think they were somehow above it all. I’m looking at you, Mr young blonde whippersnapper, late of Zed and now playing guitar with The Feelers. Hardly a career trajectory, so why are you so lacklustre on stage? Look alive! Furthermore, many of them chose to hang languidly outside the performance room hobnobbing with each other rather than actively support the bands on stage. I mean really. You’re not Mick Jagger.

-Boh Runga, younger sister of NZ wonderkind Bic Runga, is really, really pretty in person.

-Just because you are impossibly leggy and have doe-eyes does not mean you make a good TV presenter. It does still make you impossibly leggy though, to which I say *sigh*. Would I take good legs over a personality though? Well, perhaps not.

You may be pleased or disappointed to know that my night finished quite early, not with me snorting cocaine off a dolphin, but with a cup of tea and a good night’s sleep. It was an interesting time though, and great fun, and I may be repeating the experience again come mid-November for the SouthernAmp festival…

Speaking of music, once more shall I plug dad’s protest video on youtube because, well, it’s still important to me. If you’ve watched it already, if you’re curious, if you pretended that you watched it last time but didn’t actually, help out our cause and please, see it by clicking here. If you have a youtube account, any comments of support would be wonderful! We are currently on 879 views which is flipping AMAZING for a video from the tiny tininess that is Otaua. While I’m plugging things I might as well give you the link again to this amazingly hilarious [title of show] video. Once again, if you are lucky enough to live in New York city, go see this sparklingly brilliant musical before it sadly closes. If you are like me and don’t live in NYC, then watch the video because it’s ridiculously funny. Even Tim laughed, which, given his weary suspicion of most of the Broadway shows I’m into, is quite the endorsement.

Next time: I make my own ravioli.

Don’t Think Ice, It’s Alright

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I understand the prevailing trend these days is to profess adoration for dark chocolate, the higher in cocoa mass and the more intensely bitter the better, preferably savoured by candlelight with a perfectly aged red wine. Me, I could take it or leave it. I love it for cooking – rarely use anything else – but in terms of eating, I am the fiendiest fiend for white chocolate. I know, it’s not even “real” chocolate, and it’s nothing but sugar, and doesn’t even have any cocoa mass by which to measure its superiority against other chocolates…but I LOVE it. If I know there’s some in the house I can barely concentrate, and find myself blindly standing by the cupboard, stolidly chewing away at whatever’s left of my white chocolate resources. Whereas dark chocolate – well, it’s pretty telling that I have four blocks of the stuff sitting in my wardrobe (because (a) I stock up if it’s on sale and (b) we don’t have a lot of cupboard space in the kitchen), and haven’t touched the stuff.

But I’m only human. I see chocolate, unwrapped and vulnerable in front of me and I gotta take a bite. This particular stuff – Donovan’s 80% cocoa dark chocolate, has its own cromulent gratification, in spite of not being my first choice. Smooth, sharp, with an uncannily refreshing, rather than rich finish, it was the perfect thing to embiggen my otherwise low-rent sorbet…

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I got the idea for this from a Jill Dupleix recipe for “ice cream” made of only two ingredients – bananas and raspberries. Berries being expensive, I thought I could make another version using canned pears. I poshed it up by adding some shards of the aforementioned dark chocolate and changing the name…

Banana, Pear, and Bitter Dark Chocolate Sorbet (see, doesn’t sound like something out of a can at all when you put it like that)

3 very ripe, large bananas
1 large or 2 regular sized cans of pears, well drained
45g dark chocolate, chopped roughly

Ideally you should do this in a food processor. But I was feeling lazy…or ecologically minded if you will…and used a fork. Mash the bananas and pears together till they are uniformly smooth. Fold in the chocolate. Freeze, stirring occasionally. This makes about 750mls…I think. If you want more, all you have to do is add more bananas or another can of pears. It could probably do with a blast in the food processor after a certain amount of freezing, but once again, I was being serenely carbon neutral with my fork. I’m sure it would be far superior made in the food processor, but it really depends on whether you want to serve it to people or just eat it by yourself.

It’s so healthy you could practically have it for breakfast. Even with the chocolate because you know, antioxidants! If you want to serve it to polite company though you need to leave it on the bench for a while to soften. Because it has no added fat it freezes rock solid and you will get fissures in your teeth trying to eat it. I think I got elbow fissures trying to scrape up a spoonful for this photo. But when I left it out of the fridge (for ages actually, I’d forgotten about it but our kitchen is so arctic that it hadn’t melted in the slightest) to soften, I was pleasantly greeted by a delicious flavour combination. The delicate flavour of the pears, the texture of the bananas, the occasional surprise of dark chocolate made for an excellent mouthful. Better yet it cost me diddly squat to make. Supermarkets will sell overripe bananas for a song, canned pears are always cheap, and okay, chocolate is expensive but if you can get it on special it’s not too bad. Which is why, when Tim and I trekked to Pak’n’Save to do our groceries and I saw 250g blocks of chocolate for $2 compared to the usual $6, I stocked up.
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When I was up home last weekend, my mother – ever the teacher – gently brought my attention to some misplaced apostrophes in my blog. As I want to be a sub-editor one day…and consider myself pretty au fait with grammatical concepts…I apologise sincerely. By the time I’ve written and edited these posts and grappled with the screen freezing up and photos uploading I tend to miss a few things. I’ll think twice next time I sneer at someone else’s poor punctuation. And indeed, feel free to tell me if there is an apostrophe out of place somewhere causing you offense.
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Next time: I attempt to make Peanut Butter and Chocolate Popcorn from the Hot Garlic blog. With not a little trepidation I must admit, as I wasn’t born with American tastebuds but the way everyone raved over it…and I do love my popcorn maker…well, my curiosity was piqued.
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Your daily kitty cuteness update:
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He’s still doing it.

Strange Brew

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So, (she says casually), I made mascarpone. There’s something about creating one’s own dairy product that is monumentally pleasing, and makes me feel like a one-woman, fully functional, to-scale fromagerie. I’ve made creme fraiche before and mascarpone isn’t too far removed in terms of method. I heated a litre of cream, till small bubbles appeared round the edge, then stirred in just under 1/2 a teaspoon of cream of tartar, and let it bubble away merrily for about 5 minutes. I then allowed it to cool, and lined a sieve with a couple of coffee filters that Tim had mysteriously acquired for me from Starbucks. This bit is a little cumbersome but not complicated: Sit the lined sieve over a bowl, then pour the cream mixture carefully into the sieve, and leave overnight in the fridge to slowly drain. Or, if your abode is as cold as my flat, you can leave it on the bench.

Seriously, our kitchen is so cold that the olive oil on the shelf by the window has solidified in its bottle. Which is what happens if you put it in the fridge.

Et voila! Mascarpone!

Above: The mound of mascarpone, with the strainer, coffee filters, and drained liquid.

I love how the mascarpone took on the folds and curves of the filters and sieve so it resembles a plump, billowy pillow.

As I said in my last post, I planned on making tiramisu this weekend. I realise this Italian specialty is fairly unexciting and run-of-the-mill these days, but – gasp – I’ve never tasted it in my life. Let alone made one in my own kitchen. I used a recipe from Cuisine.co.nz but just realised there was a perfectly serviceable one in my Claudia Roden “Food of Italy” book. The two recipes are very similar though, and it would seem that the greatest discrepancy between any of the various recipes I’ve seen for this occurs in the number of eggs used. The Cuisine recipe only used three eggs, which was a nice, small, non-frightening amount.

Above: Making the zabaglione, rich with Marsala wine.

I am, if nothing else, forever indebted to Nigella for introducing me to the heavenly liquor that is Marsala, and I was very pleased to see that the Cuisine recipe called for it. The whole process of making tiramisu isn’t terribly difficult, and I did the whole thing in about an hour. The fiddliest thing is the zabaglione part, which involves all sorts of things that I tend to avoid – separating eggs, fitting a bowl over a pan of simmering water (don’t let the base of the bowl touch the water or a kitten dies!) and endless whisking. Despite the pain, it is pleasing to watch the eggy, sugary mixture come together. Into this, I folded the mascarpone, and whisked-till-stiff eggwhites (another thing I dislike – recipes that use lots of bowls. Such is life though.)

Above: Freshly brewed coffee, made capably by Tim, plus the Savoiardi biscuits and the Marsala (I added a splash to the coffee as well. It belongs in everything.)

Slightly untraditionally, I put a layer of grated chocolate in each layer, basically because I had some bitter dark chocolate that needed using up. I also ended up – aided by some judicious spatula work – with three layers of biscuits, which used up exactly one packet, in a regular sized loaf tin.

Above: The biscuits soaked up the coffee very quickly – a deft hand is required. I usually err on the side of undeft, but it’s not difficult or anything. The only thing I found taxing was trying not to get crumbs of the biscuits caught up in the cream mixture.

Then of course, the moment of truth – the eating. Not that I flatter myself that my own personal tiramisu is the definitive article, the ur-pudding, but I followed the recipe and everything went to plan, so I’m guessing what I created is more or less what it should have been. And it was delicious. The texture is just…mad. Damp biscuits which crunch hollowly against the most voluptuous, rich cream…oh yum. More please.

The snap of the darkest dark chocolate against the cream is, I think, my favourite part. Oh, and the coffee was perfect – of course!


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Yesterday afternoon Tim, Paul and I went to see the Wellington Phoenix play some Melbourne team. We got trounced resoundedly, and to add insult to injury it utterly, without reservation, bucketed with rain on the walk home. I was glad that I’d had the foresight to bake a casserole earlier in the day – using a recipe from my delightful Supercooks Supersavers Cookbook from 1980 – and it was basically the nicest thing in the world to come home to. I had the crock pot ticking away overnight making vegetable soup into which I biffed a lamb shank, it smells heavenly and we are going to have it for dinner tonight along with the leftover casserole (made very cheaply with gravy beef)…much as I absolutely cannot wait for summer to arrive, I do love winter comfort food wholeheartedly.

After eating our delicious casserole last night, Tim and I managed to stay up till 1.30am to watch the closing ceremony of the Olympics. I guess it’s really saying something if, comparitively at least – it seemed fairly low-key. The reason we persisted in staying bleary-eyedly awake is because Jimmy Page of Led Zep was supposed to be playing, little did we know it was going to be alongside British songstress Leona Lewis, she of the particularly awful song “Bleeding Love.” We could not, however, deny that she has an excellent voice…nor that Page seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself as she gyrated beside him. The whole London bit seemed altogether bizarre – here’s a bus! And a celebration of our awful weather! And a child descended of multiple ethnicities! And now the bus is turning into a…hey, there’s David Beckham!

I’ll definitely miss the Olympics, it’s astounding to think of all that buildup just for two short weeks. The New Zealand team certainly were amazing, I will not, however, at all miss the pitiful New Zealand reporting/commentating team. Finally, and speaking of rock music, my title refers to the 1967 Cream song, but you know, brew…coffee…cream…tiramisu…a little forced, I know, but it made me chuckle.

These Things Take Time

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(Yes, that is The Smiths I’m quoting in the title. ) Finally! A new post. It has been a long time coming. Uni is keeping me good and stressed, and I have a presentation and a 2500 word essay to pull out of the air this week…

Above: Bla, bla, chocolate shmocolate. Yes, I made another chocolate cake, this time the Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cake from Nigella’s marvelous Feast for Emma’s 22nd birthday; the cake was amazing, the photos weren’t, but I rather liked this swirly shot.

I’m sick of seeing sweet things on this blog, and I’m sure you must be too, but bear with me – I’d hate to lose a reader for want of a sausage. (heh!) Because I’m temporarily relying on our old digital camera which is really…not very good (I know, artist – tools – do not blame) and our actual camera is still unavoidably detained, the only way I can take blog-worthy photos is if there is natural light. Considering our flat gets about 14 minutes of natural light per day in winter, and that it has been raining non-stop for the last month or two…well. It doesn’t make for snap-happiness. Plus, it’s always dark by the time I start cooking dinner. During the day is when I bake. So that’s what you get to see. It’s a pity, because if I say so myself, I’ve been making some pretty nifty dinners lately – pumpkin and black bean curry, corn chowder, bobotie, raw salad with hot and sour dressing and sesame noodles, mushroom risotto…but for you: more sweet things.

There were some blackened, rock-hard bananas that had been in the freezer forever. Because our freezer space is limited at best, and because they were just sitting there balefully, annoying me, I decided to turn said bananas into some muffins. Sounds dull, sounds obvious, but once you bite into one – fresh from the oven, with the warm tickle of cinnamon present in your throat and the flavour of honey flooding your tastebuds – it makes me wonder why I don’t encase this fruit in lumps of quickly-stirred batter more often. They’re squishy, they’re sweet, they take five minutes to make, and they freeze well. This particular recipe of Nigella’s is quite apt for the current economic downturn – minimal butter and sugar, no eggs…

Banana Muffins (from Nigella’s equally warm and cinnamon scented How To Be A Domestic Goddess, my love for this book is intense!)

30g melted butter
60mls (1/4 cup) honey (I sometimes use half honey, half golden syrup)
3 large, very ripe bananas
150g flour
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
Good dash cinnamon

Heat oven to 190 C. Mash the bananas, add the butter, honey and cinnamon. Carefully fold in the dry ingredients. If it looks tooooo dry add a couple of tablespoons of milk. The main point is not to overmix them. Spoon evenly into a 12-bun muffin tin lined with paper cases (or use a nifty silicone one like I did) and bake for 20-25 minutes. Leave in the tin for five minutes before removing. Eat.

Not revolutionary…but delicious.

Because it seemed as though on this particular day we were going to get more than our 14 minutes of natural light, I decided to really go nuts (yes, this is my version of living it up) and make cupcakes. Wait, it gets better – Pina Colada Cupcakes.

Nigella’s cupcake recipe has served me well. In each of her 6 cookbooks (all of which I own – ker-ching!) she includes one or other form of cupcake, and between the simplicity of the recipe itself and the amount of times I’ve reproduced it I hardly ever actually consult the text. Not everyone is as vigilant as I though. This variation on Nigella’s ur-recipe runs thusly – take 125g each of butter and sugar, cream thoroughly, add either a drained can of crushed pineapple in juice or about 200g chopped real pineapple, then two eggs, 125g flour, 2 t baking powder…a teaspoon of Malibu if you like, and a splash of milk if the batter needs it…divide between 12 cupcake cases, bake at 180 for 15 minutes. I iced with a slapdash buttercream (you know, butter, icing sugar, bit of water) to which I added a pinprick of Boyajian orange oil…finally I strewed some coconut over the fragrant cupcakes to complete the Pina Colada effect.

Even though I didn’t soften the butter enough and so it sort of affected the baking process, the finished cakelets tasted fabulous. There’s something about coconut and pineapple, they’re such a classic combination. Which is why I’ve appropriated it here and then tried to take all the credit for something really quite unimaginative…

I realise it’s bordering on churlish to complain about my rapidly diminishing time and then talk about a film that I watched, but I couldn’t spend the whole weekend doing schoolwork. Anyway, Enchanted – you know, that self-reflexive Disney film – has come out on DVD and I rented it from the video hut down the road. I ended up watching it alone because Tim’s a hater, but it was actually really very good. I laughed out loud more than I expected. And it has Idina Menzel in it! She doesn’t even sing, she just acts, which is pretty cool. It’s a small but relatively pivotal role, and they could have gotten, oh I don’t know, Demi Moore or Rachel Griffiths or…I don’t know, even Hillary Swank to play the role, it’s not like they didn’t have the budget for it. Anyway, Idina is very cool in the role, she looks gorgeous and it’s nice that she didn’t get the “bad stepmother” story arc. James Marsden, as the uber-prince Edward, is hilarious. He manages to wring every drop of physical humour out of his role, and I love how he exaggerates the trad Disney prince. Susan Sarandon, for someone so awesome, is surprisingly…meh…Patrick Dempsey does a decent straight man, and Amy Adams is really likeable. I’d seen pictures of her and she didn’t look like she had a lot of spark, but she lights up on screen. Timothy Spall is as nifty as ever.

Speaking of movies, okay, so I often catch the cable car into Lambton Quay for work. On the swipe-card turnstiles there are these signs saying “No Entry for Small Children.” Every time I see those signs, I think to myself, “Gee, I should buy No Country for Old Men for Tim. It’s violent, Oscar winning and Coen-penned – he’ll love it!” And then I think happily about Javier Bardem for a spell. And then I soberly nay-say myself, refusing to be jettisoned into capitalism by a suggestive sign. Don’t fall into their trap, I think with caution. This can go back and forth. And it happens every time I go to work. I’ve tried to catch myself in the act, but those signs get me every time. You know what I’m talking about, right? (*small voice* just me?)

Aint No Sunshine

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Another day, another chocolate cake. Seriously, I’ve eaten more chocolate cake in the last month than I normally do in a year. It has continued to rain steadily in Wellington – indeed, over the whole country – and there was even a sizeable slip not far from where my flat is. But on Saturday morning I felt the oddest sensation. I woke up with the sun streaming through the windows. I didn’t know what to do with myself at the sight of blue sky. I felt like a babushka from Old Rumania, shucking off my winter cloak to prepare for the feasting of Springtide. Well, it wasn’t so much “sunny” as “not raining” but Tim and I took the opportunity to zoom into town to do some jobs and that afternoon, while there was still more blue than grey in the sky, I made a cake.

I had some cream cheese leftover from the cheesecake I made for Tearaway magazine, and although it would have been entirely more economical to use it in some pasta sauce or something, I decided to build a chocolate cake around it. And no, I didn’t use it in the icing, which is more conventional, but in the actual cake mix. The recipe comes from the bountiful Nigella’s Feast, a cookbook which keeps on giving. No matter how much batter I shmeer on it, its pages never get stuck together. No matter how many times I read it, I always find something new I want to make now. In this case, the Tropical Chocolate Cake, which hosts an intriguing mix of pineapple, chocolate and coconut flavours.

I decided to modify Nigella’s method somewhat. She makes an enticing two-layer cake sandwiched and slathered with a coconut meringue frosting. She says, a little snippily, to “lose the Bounty connection” if the idea of meringue palls somewhat, but I decided against it because I just couldn’t be bothered. Instead I made one bigger, bungalow-type cake smothered in a coconut custard buttercream. Still sounds good, right? In fact that’s all I’m-a talk about today, uncharacteristically. Because this cake is the only thing I’ve managed to get decent photos of.

Above: This isn’t exactly photographically sound, but then the food-processor shots don’t really have to be, do they? In fact they don’t even offer anything at all; they are what my media studies lecturer would call a “kernel,” that is, a sort of light, C-plot segment that doesn’t move the narrative forward but offers light relief from the main thrust of the action. Consider yourself schooled!

Tropical Chocolate Cake, adapted slightly from Feast

1x400g can pineapple pieces in juice
75g cream cheese
200g butter, pretty soft
200g flour
100g sugar
100g brown sugar
40g cocoa
2 eggs
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
2 T malibu or juice from the can of pineapple

Set the oven to 180 C (360 F) and line a 23cm Springform. First you want to whizz up the pineapple and cream cheese. Then add the rest of the ingredients, scraping occasionally with a spatula. Pour this alluringly delicious mix into the caketin, bake for roughly 40 minutes, maybe more. And uhm, that’s it. Simple, no?

I iced it with a mixture of 40g butter, 1 T custard powder, enough icing sugar to turn it into a cohesive substance, 1 t coconut essence, and a tablespoon each of milk and water. And then I thought I might as well dust it with chocolate sprinkles that I found in the cupboard. They were a year or two past their best before date, but how bad can sprinkles get?

It is moist, fragrant, delicious, and a genius combination of flavours. Very summery too, with elements of Pina Colada and Hawaiian Tropic Sunscreen. This hardly a bad thing; I say this as someone who can happily pass several minutes’ time sitting there inhaling the scent of a bottle of SPF 40+ (truly, it’s gooood.) As soon as I finished taking the photos of the cake it started raining again and hasn’t really stopped (it’s now Monday.)

Since the little tacker was so popular last time, and because Tim managed to catch this doozy of a picture, I thought we could be graced by the presence of *cough*Oscar the non-existent kitty*cough*.

I love that flagrant disdain he has for the laws of, you know, breathing.


Next time: well, the bread photos weren’t so crash-hot, hence their lack of presence here. Who knows?