lick an ice cream cone, crack a bone

July 26, 2016March 11, 20202 Comments

Supposing yesterday began when I woke up around 8am, I then went on to spend roughly fifteen or so further hours in bed. I rose briefly around noon to make myself some roasted vegetables, which did not have the galvanising effect on me that I’d hoped they would, because I then went back to bed until just after midnight when I had a sudden fit of activity: I got up, ate the remainder of this white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream and then made myself a small loaf of cornbread. Oh sure, I’m super tired at the moment, but it was more than just tiredness, it was like, One of Those Days. Apologies for referring to depressive times with a knowing wink, what else can ya do.

(Okay I have to confess here that I accidentally typed “knowing wank” instead of knowing wink which is ridiculous because the i and the a are not even remotely close to each other on the keyboard, it just happened and I can’t stop laughing at it.)

Anyway: there is nothing profound about the fact that I ate this ice cream after a day spent in bed willing myself to do anything, even to just binge watch TV shows, but being unable to maintain any kind of momentum; it was not even a particularly abnormal day, it was a day that anyone might have every now and then. But! If nothing else, the ice cream is exceptionally delicious and as I was eating it I was like “well this is nice,” and it being a nice moment was enough, just for now.

knowing wink

I’ve said it before, but ice cream is one of my very, very favourite foods and I love coming up with recipes for it. I mean, I argued successfully for an entire ice cream chapter in my cookbook. I love the stuff, and something in that cold, cold, creamy texture is the perfect vehicle for flavours to shine.

It sounds almost like I’m parodying myself to load an already loaded ice cream with literal butter but my reasons are sound, I promise. Butter, when browned over a high heat, becomes intensely rich and nutty and caramelly. When you put this with white chocolate – gently buttery, soft and vanilla-y – the effect is absolutely glorious. It’s like butterscotch, like white chocolate refracted through a prism, like freezing cold fudge, like plunging your hands into a pile of expensive folded robes made of the softest fabric at some kind of fancy department store. The pile of robes topples over. You slink away, unseen. You got away with it but you feel bad about the probably underpaid store attendant who has to tidy it up. You think about it still, eight years later. I don’t know where I’m going with this. The ice cream is delicious.

I’d like to emphasise that it is very, very simple to make, which is how I like my ice cream to be. You don’t need an ice cream maker! That’s what Big Ice Cream Maker wants you to think! I mean if you have one, that’s lovely, I just try to make a point of making recipes that require minimal equipment so that the maximum amount of people might consider trying them out. This ice cream requires three steps – browning the butter, melting the cream and chocolate together, and letting the cornflour thicken the cream mixture somewhat. Then you bung it in the freezer, don’t even worry about stirring it at this point, just wait for it to freeze and it’s all yours.

white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream

a recipe by myself

100g butter
three cups (750ml) cream
one tablespoon cornflour
200g genuinely nice white chocolate, eg Whittakers
3/4 cup sugar

First, your butter: melt it in a saucepan large enough to hold all the rest of the ingredients, since you might as well use as few pans as possible. Once it’s melted, keep it on the heat so it starts to bubble up and brown – once it’s at the point of having thick golden fluffy foam on top and being a rich golden brown underneath, remove it from the heat and transfer it to a small bowl to cool slightly.

Rinse out the pan and then over a low heat, melt the chocolate into the cream, stirring occasionally. Mix the cornflour with a couple of tablespoons of water – I just do this in the measuring cup I used for the cream – and tip it into the chocolate/cream mixture. Continue stirring over a low heat until it thickens a bit – you’ll feel it changing as you stir, going from being very thin liquid to a more saucy, thickshake type vibe. Remove it from the heat.

Stir in the sugar, and finally, spoon or pour in the butter, or more specifically, the dark golden brown middle layer of the butter – it will have separated into sediment on the bottom, super rich dark brown butter in the middle, and a golden salty layer on top. The middle stuff is what we want, but if other bits get in the mix it’s not the end of the world.

Freeze till solid – around 4-6 hours – and then it’s all yours for the eating.

The cornflour, without any effort on your behalf, thickens up the cream and turns it into a pseudo custard, and the texture when frozen is incredible – so, so smooth and satiny. But the burnt butter with the melted white chocolate! Seriously, I don’t know whether I’m more excited about the flavour or the texture in this one. Just trust me on it and try it for yourself. For what it’s worth, it tastes good no matter what kind of day you’re having.

Also! If you like the idea of ice cream then I have a ludicrous quantity of recipes for you, but you could consider: apple cinnamon ice cream; chocolate peanut butter ice cream; and grapefruit curd ripple ice cream.

Also I’m still laughing about “knowing wank”.

title from: The Dead Weather, Blue Blood Blues. This song is so crunchy, I love it.

music lately:

Brandy, Tamia, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Missing You. This was playing at the coffee shop I was at this morning and I got a sudden flashback to being ten years old and (rightly) getting suuuper emotional over this song.

Billie Myers, Tell Me. This song flew massively under the radar in 1999 or whenever it came out, but it’s so good and the chorus is so big, I love it.

next time: well that cornbread was amazing. I am very sure I’m going to make it again at some point.

frozen inside without your touch

July 4, 2016March 11, 20201 Comment

It’s so interesting to me how the body doesn’t remember pain. As any scientist will tell you, it’s super necessary for us to forget what hurting feels like, to ensure the human race can continue…to get tattoos. And also give birth. On a smaller scale, hunger works like that. When you are hungry, it’s all like “I could definitely eat an entire cheesecake and probably a large bowl of chowder; I also think that seventeen is a good quantity of whole grilled eggplants for one human to consume. God I want some Nando’s.”

And then when you’re feeling nauseous and the thought of food leaves you blank and numb, suddenly it’s like…why do humans eat? What possible joy is there to be derived from food? Do the words “food blog” seem really weird to you? So it’s like…you write about food? That seems confusing? And so it goes, round in circles. Don’t even get me started on that “wait why do humans drink?” feeling that I get when hungover. Aren’t humans funny!

scoop! there it is (so not sorry for this pun, but I would unrelatedly like to follow this up with a sincere apology for it

Anyway the point of all this high level impressive science talk is that I made this dark cocoa and olive oil sorbet simply because I was hungry for it. The ingredients seemed so rich and alive and I wanted to see how the flavours would work together. I’d been given a bottle of Seresin Estate olive oil, so aggressively green that the overture from Wicked would play in my head every time I looked at it; and had some organic cocoa that I was given by my godmother a while back, soft and dark like iron sand. I made it and ate it, and it was incredible. I photographed it, and it looked really pretty. And now that I’ve come to write about it, I’m, well, not feeling very good. But this is my opportunity to write, and I am not going to let a mere thing like the sight of food making me recoil suspiciously get in the way of this super important blog, especially since I only just relaunched it with this shiny new pretty look. You know that “mere flesh wound” bit from Monty Python? (If you don’t, just ask literally any baby boomer and they’ll enthusiastically recreate it for you.) That’s me with this blog.

The thing is, I do remember this sorbet tasting unbelievably good: pitch-dark chocolate flavour saved from throat-burning intensity by all the sugar, with the glossy olive oil adding the slightest suggestion of black pepper and some general lusciousness. If you use a more buttery, less grassy olive oil it will absolutely be delightful, but I like how this particular one brought out the almost meaty richness of the cocoa. In case all this talk of meat and grass and pepper sounds unhelpful, like, please know that this sorbet is honestly just massively good with enormous chocolatey flavour and a pleasingly yielding texture. The icy coldness of it all just makes the taste of chocolate even more delicious.

dark cocoa and olive oil sorbet

a recipe by myself.

one and a half cups of good dark cocoa
one cup of sugar
two and a half cups of boiling water
two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
a tiny pinch of sea salt

Either in a bowl, or in the container you plan to freeze it in – and you know I went for the latter – carefully mix the cocoa and sugar together so they form a sugary cocoa-y dust. Slowly pour in the olive oil and salt, and mix in a little. Add the water, a little at a time, stirring slowly till you have a thick, dark soupy liquid. I keep saying to do everything slowly because it’s really easy to fling clouds of cocoa everywhere or spill the lot, or at least it definitely is for me.

Stick it in the freezer, and give it a stir every hour or so – normally I wouldn’t make you stir it this often but this is just to keep the olive oil all fully incorporated. After a few hours it should be frozen fully and ready to spoon into waiting mouths.

Possibly more exciting than any aspect of the flavour that I can lay an alarming quantity of adjectives upon is: you can make it in the container that you’re going to freeze it in, thus avoiding the horror of washing one bowl. You’re using a lot of cocoa, but I do urge you to buy as good a quality one as you can muster – it doesn’t matter what brand, as long as the fat content is at least 20g per 100g of cocoa. At least. It’ll just be all palely not-quite-chocolatey without it. I just love ice cream so much and don’t want you to end up with frozen garbage! On the upside, water is free and sugar is really cheap and usually someone in your flat has a bag of it anyway. One other point about this sorbet: if you don’t get the chance to stir it every hour or so, the olive oil will obstinately separate from the water and freeze solid on its own: this is actually not the end of the world. It is, however, also science. Just break up the frozen oil by stirring it in – any remaining bits of it have the exact texture of nice chocolate and taste not unlike it too, so no harm done.

Leaving ice cream to the side for a minute: something in my life that I’ve been immensely proud of is being a contributor to The Toast website. (Noted readers include Hilary Clinton, I’ve just found out.) The Toast closed its doors this week, which left a particular emptiness in my heart and/or soul – it was always such a warm, safe place where I could go for an absolute escape; to find myself in the incredible specificities of the writing or to learn a ton of new stuff. It was a kind and clever and beautiful website and I’m bummed that it’s done but I’m so happy that I got to be a part of it with my Crush Cake series. I don’t know where I’m going to take the series next – maybe I’ll pitch it to someone else, maybe I’ll just let it be, but either way I feel like you should definitely read my two favourites: the profiterole mountain I made for Lucy Liu, and the giant bagel that I made for Sandy Cohen.

don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened

I know it’s the middle of winter here in New Zealand and tucking into food that you’ve wilfully frozen seems counterproductive but let me remind you of one of life’s greatest pleasures: sitting on the floor in your underwear with the heater blasting artificial warmth your way as you merrily eat vast amounts of ice cream. The very minute I feel like not-nauseous again – and I hope I did an okay job of convincing you to make this sorbet in spite of my present lack of enthusiasm – this is what I’m going to do. I hope it’s soon.

If you liked the look of this you may also want to suss out my recipes for lemon poppyseed ice cream, quince sorbet, lychee and cucumber sorbet, and this cocoa sorbet recipe I blogged about in 2010 which inspired today’s recipe.

title from: Evanescense, Bring Me To Life. Do not come into my blog and imply that this song does not hold up. Also don’t not try to analyse whether all the double negatives I’ve used just now render my point meaningless.

music lately:

Beyonce, Sorry. You can really just count on Beyonce, can’t you? This is from her brilliant and important visual album Lemonade and if you haven’t watched it yet I strenuously insist that you make time for it; it’ll improve your life, no biggie.

The 1996 song Jellyhead by Crush was already fairly forgotten as far as 90s nostalgia goes but even more injurious, you could only find an amazingly cheap-sounding house remix on YouTube. Today I discovered this terrible quality version of the original song, and it’s honestly one of the best pop songs of all time and even though it sounds like it was recorded through a sock I’m so happy to hear the original again finally! (As in, for the first time since 1997-ish.)

next time: I found this broth recipe that looks super cool, and as broth normally makes me all like “ah yes, lightly salted water” the fact that I’m interested in this recipe is surely indicative at all of its potential.

pile on many more layers, and i’ll be joining you there

April 21, 2016March 11, 2020Leave a comment

three chocolate cakes sandwiched together with cream cheese icing and crushed up creme eggs and you can’t see it but there’s also an implied *painting nails emoji*

Well, Mars may be in retrograde and my April tarot card may be the tarot card equivalent of a heavy resigned sigh, but: ya girl is out here being thirty finally. (She says, quite thirty-ish-ly.) It seems only right that the first blog post I do after my birthday is for a birthday cake, yeah? Not my own, but instead one I made for my pal-and-colleague’s girlfriend’s 21st, because that’s a thing I do sometimes. Such a momentous occasion and an honour of a task calls for something a little no-holds-barred, and with the simple brief of “Cadbury Creme Egg” I set to work on what turned out to be this three layer masterpiece. Being the dingus I am, I stupidly only took a few cursory snaps of it on my phone rather than sitting it down and lovingly photographing it with my proper camera, but I was so pleased with the results – like, look at that thing! It’s beautiful! – that I decided to blog about it anyway, hasty photos and all. Who knows when you, yourself, might need to make a three layer creme egg cake!

champagne for my real friends

As for my birthday, I won’t sugar-coat it for you: it was wonderful! It started when the clock ticked over to midnight the night before because I was still working; however all the hugs and frolics made it fun and I liked that I got to catch my birthday in the act, right as it started, without wasting a drop of it. As someone who wastes a lot of time fretting about wasting time, that was nice. The day proper had a professional hair wash and straighten like I am a fancy rich woman who just does that, real champagne, delicious brunch, the receiving of exciting gifts like tequila and a gilded bowl and Lana del Rey vinyl and a rather gobsmackingly beautiful record player; rewatching Once More With Feeling; a phone call home where tales of my birth and incredulity at the passage of time since then were recounted, and then lashings of wine and platters and selfies with beauties at the place where everybody knows your name (yeah, that’s right, I went back to work to hang out on my birthday, that’s how much I like the place.)

a bad but maybe useful photo of the three layers waiting to be iced

So, the cake! Oddly enough it was incredibly un-stressful to make – I made it in my mornings between doing wall-to-wall shifts at work and was still generally very serene the entire time. The mixture generously makes three moist, rich cakes with near-perfect tops for stacking and icing (I sliced a bit off one to make it super evenly flat, and this is how I know it tastes extremely good.) The icing of it is also very straightforward, and in fact the hardest thing about it is getting your hands on some creme eggs. I was going to ice the whole lot like a more traditional cake but decided to leave the sides nakedly exposed with the icing tightly spread into every gap a la momofuku – it’s actually much easier, and that way you can see the cakes themselves in a “you’re damn right this cake is three layers tall” kind of way and it’s all rakishly messy yet neat at the same time.

I could’ve gone for a more hardcore filling but decided that the tang of the cream cheese would gently counteract the bone-dissolving sweetness of the fondant inside the eggs while still showcasing them. Honestly, the more novelty involved the more serious and thoughtful you have to be. This cake is so majestic and tall and the creme eggs look so cute all halved and nestled in together that you really don’t have to worry about any further decoration but there’s also nothing stopping you – my one concession was to quickly melt a caramac bar and pour it onto the top layer to echo the look of the eggs’ filling, but it’s not that necessary.

These recipe instructions are long as hell, I grant you, but it’s honestly more or less chill. I just like to reeeeally explain stuff. As I point out in the recipe, I only had two caketins so baked two layers at once followed by a third, and it all worked out. Also, this would be easier with a cake mixer probably but I used a mere wooden spoon and honestly didn’t even do that great a job of creaming the butter and sugar and it STILL worked out fine so – let’s all just breathe.

triple layer creme egg cake

I made the actual cake itself by following the recipe from this site pretty well to the letter; all the random measurements are a bit of a faff but the cake same out perfect so I’m happily and trustingly passing it on to you. I deviated and made my own icing, if you wanted to take this cake in a whole other direction you could use whatever filling and icing you like. It’s a very good starting point.

cake:

one and a half cups good cocoa powder
one and a half cups boiling water
one tablespoon instant espresso powder (or plain instant coffee if it’s all you can find)
three quarters of a cup of sour cream
one tablespoon vanilla extract
375g soft butter
two and a half cups sugar
three large eggs
one and three-quarter cups plain flour
one and a quarter teaspoons baking soda
a pinch of salt

Take three 20cm springform caketins and line the bases with baking paper. Grease the sides with butter and sprinkle a little cocoa over them, shaking the tins about till they’re fairly evenly covered with a cocoa dusting. Set your oven to 180 C/350 F.

In a medium-sized bowl, mix together the cocoa, coffee powder, water, and sour cream till smooth. In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar together till creamy. Beat in the eggs one at a time till thoroughly incorporated, then add about a third of the flour and baking soda (you’re gonna want to sift them if you’re going to all this trouble, the last thing you need is baking soda lumps) along with the cocoa mixture in alternating quantities, mixing till it’s a suddenly-enormous dark, smooth chocolatey batter.

Divide the batter evenly between the three cake tins, smoothing down the tops. Place them all in the oven and bake for thirty or so minutes, rotating their positions on the oven shelves halfway through to ensure even baking. If you only have two pans, then just bake two cakes using 2/3 of the cake mixture, then while they’re cooling, put the remaining third of the batter in one of the used cake tins and bake that after. This is what I did and it was totally fine.

Allow the cakes to cool completely.

Icing:

100g soft butter
500g cream cheese (this sounds like a lot but it’s just two of those Philadelphia packets) at room temperature
two cups icing sugar, but have more just in case
five or so creme eggs (perhaps grab a few extra in case anything goes wrong.)

Make sure both the butter and the cream cheese are soft, and your icing sugar isn’t lumpy, and then just mix the hell out of all three ingredients till you have a ton of icing.

Assembly:

Slice the peaked tops off any of the cakes if they’ve risen too much, so that they’re all more or less flat. Place one cake on your chosen serving plate, and place a good dollop of icing in the centre. Spread it out fairly evenly using the side of a knife. Unwrap one creme egg, roughly chop it, and sprinkle/drop the whole lot evenly on top of the icing. Then place another cake layer carefully on top.

Don’t worry if there are massive gaps between the layers, we’ll take care of that later. Repeat this process with the next layer of cake and another egg.

Finally, put the top layer of cake on and spoon most of the remaining icing on top. You want a decently thick, even layer on here. Now, using the side of the knife, smear remaining icing into any gaps along the sides, running the knife’s side around the sides of the cake to press it all in and to create a messy yet smooth look. Does that make sense? You kind of want the cake to look like it has just fallen out of a cylinder. Halve three creme eggs and arrange them, cut side up, on top of the cake. I melted a caramac bar and drizzled it into the centre just to add to the creme egg look, but it’s not essential. You now have a damn creme egg cake.

So I ate a bit of cake off-cuttage and a lot of icing and loved it all, but in order to strike real faith in your hearts about this recipe, let me quote the actual recipient of the cake, the birthday lady herself: “Argh it was amazing! With all of the layers and all of the creaminess and chocolate and just the fact that a cream egg could be transformed into a cake. Super awesome and delicious”.

I had a lot of fun making this cake and it was such a nice opportunity; and should you ever be called upon to make a fancy big cake I definitely recommend this one. If creme eggs are emphatically not your jam, I think this would be amazing with roughly chopped caramel-filled chocolate covering it with the caramel dripping everywhere; or with smashed up oreos, or with milk chocolate melted and drizzled all over the top, you see what I mean? For an enormous time-consuming cake made to a very specific brief it’s really quite versatile.

what a cute 30 year old.

Finally: fun birthday fact! It turns out that if you say “Happy Birthday” to me I’ll immediately say it back to you without thinking. I’m not sure if it’s cute or weird or both (the Laura Vincent Story) but it’s what my brain has decided is a fantastic reaction and I can’t break it. Not that I – or indeed, you – have to worry about it for another year. Happy birthday!

title from: Pink Floyd, Shine On You Crazy Diamond. I may not be inspired by Pink Floyd to write poetry anymore as I was in my teens – for which we can all be relieved – but this song still goes off. Very slowly. And what an imperative in that title!

music lately:

Something To Sing About, from Once More With Feeling. As I said, on my birthday I rewatched this, the musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon can be ever so Joss Whedony but I’ll never deny the incredible cleverness that went into writing this episode. All the songs are brilliant and Something To Sing About is 100% NOT the best place to start if you don’t know the story because of the massive spoilers and lack of context but it’s still my favourite and you should watch it anyway. Buffy’s eyes! The discordant wobble when she sings “heaven!” Spike’s half smile when he sings back at her! The time signature changes! I died.

By My Side, Godspell. I busted out my copy of the original broadway cast recording of the musical Godspell on vinyl and while it hilariously does not hold up, the music is still endearing and By My Side is still one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

Penguins and Polarbears, by Millencollen. Couldn’t say why, but I truly adore pop-punk singers when they sound completely congested, which Millencollen delivers upon handsomely. If the lead singer makes you want to swallow an antihistamine for your own safety, then chances are I’m all over it. (There’s a point during the Green Day Bullet in a Bible concert performance of Brain Stew where I’m pretty sure lead singer Billie Joe is literally just dribbling incomprehensively and I love it.)

next time: I think I mentioned last time that I made homemade matcha mayonaise but I also made this awesome granola stuff. Either way: deliciousness awaits you.

for the want of the price of tea and a slice

March 14, 2016October 25, 20228 Comments

Things I’ve said at work lately:

– here, have this salted chocolate cashew butter slice that I made. It’s dairy free and gluten free!

– uhh I have to go to the bathroom because my satin jumpsuit is actually on backwards and I’ve only just noticed

– hey, I know we’re kind of busy but I have a rather singular situation, the centre bit of my bra is hanging on by a fragile, tautly pulled thread and if I shake one more cocktail it will very likely break and bust open, and since I’m wearing a cropped top there is very little room for error here. Is it okay if I run home and change my bra? I can be back really soon- oh, you were just coming to tell me I could sign out? So there was actually no need for me to tell you any of this?

As well as wearing clothing quite uselessly, I also like to occasionally bring in treats to work to boost both morale and blood sugar. In this case I’d been toying with an idea, batting it about like a cat with a small felt mouse on a string, about some kind of nut butter slice covered in chocolate. What I made was fine, with a soft, fudgy texture in the base followed by the snappish crunch of cold dark chocolate, but it wasn’t quite there. As soon as I sprinkled some salt on top the flavours sprang to life and it all made sense and tasted properly delicious as opposed to giving the illusion of tasting delicious. So don’t leave that bit out, even if it seems either excessively sodium-ish or small enough to forget about.

This is so easy to make – truly, the hardest bit is getting the various nut butters and coconut oil out of their jars without flinging them everywhere. Indeed: if you end up getting slightly more than half a cup of each ingredient it’s completely fine. I know I probably did.

salted chocolate cashew butter slice

a recipe by myself

half a cup cashew butter
half a cup peanut butter
half a cup coconut oil, melted
half a cup LSA mix, or ground almonds
quarter of a cup icing sugar
one tablespoon honey or maple syrup
150g dark chocolate
sea salt

Mix the nut butters and oil together till smooth, then tip in the sugar, honey, and LSA and stir again. Pour it into a brownie tin lined with baking paper, and freeze till firm. Gently melt the dark chocolate and remaining coconut oil together, and pour over the base. Freeze again. Once you’re pretty confident that it’s completely solid, sprinkle with plenty of sea salt and slice up however you like.

(Regarding that bra situation: I juuuust made it home before I heard this muffled popping noise indicating the valiant thread had finally snapped. I was sad to see it go, I called it my “power bra” because I got it in New York and it basically positioned you in such a way so you could break a glass ceiling with your own buoyant cleavage. I was like…I’ve defeated my power bra. Am I too powerful? Do I have to eat the bra now, like that scene with the Khaleesi in Game of Thrones?)

As well as giving you an energy boost and being full of shiny-making ingredients, this has a gorgeously buttery, mellow flavour with a pleasingly dense bite to it. Texture is everything here but you can totally play with flavour too – you’re welcome to use entirely cashew butter in the mix, but I decided to cut it with the much cheaper peanut butter so as to not make this ridiculously extravagant. You could, however, use almond butter or all peanut butter or add cinnamon to the base or whatever you like, really. If avoiding dairy isn’t a daily task for you, then you could definitely use white or milk chocolate on this instead – and I do adore both – but the bitter plainness of the dark chocolate against the creamy, nutty base is genuinely pleasing.

We ended up being extremely busy on the night that I brought in my container of this in to work, so I left it in the freezer and when I opened up the bar the next day it was entirely gone: I am taking this as positive feedback. I myself couldn’t stop eating the stuff that I’d left in the freezer at my apartment, so for what it’s worth my own personal feedback is highly positive.

All I’ve really been doing is working lately and I’m so tired that all I can talk about is how tired I am like it’s my one personality trait (as opposed to in high summer, when my one personality trait is that I’m sweatily overheated.) But I managed to make this delicious stuff, and I somehow overthrew my own Power Bra, so I guess I’m doing alright.

title from: Us and Them by Pink Floyd – I used to be incredibly obsessed with them, then dropped off a bit, and now am back to gently sincere fondness.

music lately:

Billy Bragg and Wilco, Walt Whitman’s Niece. I used to listen to this song all the time, it has this rollicking, shambling quality that I love and the call-and-answer bit is charming.

Roots Manuva, Witness Dub. This song is on the work playlist and no matter how exhausted I am it brings me back up every single time. It is a TUNE.

next time: I’ve been mucking around with this roasted broccoli turmeric coconut thing recipe which may appear here.

i got my batches and cookies

February 24, 2016March 11, 20204 Comments

As a kid I actually really wanted to be a fashion designer, and would fill up scrapbooks with drawings of clothes that I wished would exist. For example, one outfit that I invented when I was about 9, that I would totally wear now, is a hooded white velvet minidress with a long zip up the front and hot pink feathers around the edge of the hood. Honestly, like, someone please make me that immediately for a casual daytime look. Somehow fashion design morphed into recipe design, but I still love clothes so, so, so much, and approach them much the same way in which I do food – with my mind on texture and bringing together slightly strange elements with more recognisable and familiar things. Not much makes me happier than fossicking through op shops and vintage shops, allowing time to dissolve like a sachet of colourfree raspberry flavoured Raro juice in a jug of water as I try on garment after garment and imagine how I can incorporate them into my daily costumes.

However! I can talk myself out of buying clothes, no matter how much I need them, like, my shoes will be held together with superglue and have the holes in the soles buffered with beer coasters and I will still be all “uhhhh I probably shouldn’t spend money on these new, excellent value, durable, good-looking replacement shoes, I will just hobble around in these travesties for another year.” When it comes to food though, I go into a damn trance. Just two days ago I went in to the supermarket to get cocoa and buckwheat flour and walked out of the supermarket with a jar of raw organic probiotic sauerkraut (which is, thankfully, SO delicious.) I absentmindedly meandered into Commonsense Organics the other day and came out with seven whole turmeric roots.

they pair well with a rose wine from the local dairy and one’s bed

I’m kind of not really going anywhere with this – it’s just that the reason I was going to buy cocoa and buckwheat flour was because I was going to make the cookies that you see here, and it got me thinking about myself because that’s all I think about, apparently.

These cookies though! I was recently given a copy of Simply Nigella, the new cookbook by my idol Nigella Lawson. I want to make pretty much everything in it but this recipe caught my eye with the inarguable motivating factor of, if I make them then I will have cookies. It also seemed like a nice thing to be able to tell my newish roommate that there are cookies on the bench and they can help themselves to as many as they want – I just like being that person!

The buckwheat flour in these cookies makes them gluten-free, which might be pleasing news to some of you, and also gives it a rather fascinating smoky tone echoed in the rich cocoa and almost throat-burningly dark chocolate. They’re all cakey and melting and punctuated with chunks of chocolate. They look like lumps of coal and are altogether highly compelling wee things; you could make them with regular flour which would make them taste more normal but I like the oddly addictive husky flavour the buckwheat gives. I am lacking in measuring scales and so had to estimate the quantities in cup measures; thus I have written out here the recipe I made since this is the one that worked for me. I accidentally got white sugar instead of the brown sugar requested in her recipe, because my reading comprehension is useless – I’m very sure they’d be even nicer with it though.

smoky triple chocolate buckwheat cookies

from Simply Nigella, altered slightly to accommodate for things like cup measures and the fact that a block of chocolate here is 250g and I couldn’t be bothered buying an extra 20g chocolate to make up her specified quantities.

125g melted dark chocolate
125g dark chocolate, roughly chopped (or the same amount of buttons/chips etc)
60g soft butter
half a cup sugar
two fridge-cold eggs
one cup buckwheat flour
quarter of a cup of cocoa
half a teaspoon baking soda
a good pinch of sea salt

set your oven to 180C/350F and line a baking tray with paper (or in my case, realise you have no baking paper so just hope for the best.)

Beat the butter and sugar together with a wooden spoon or whatever, until it’s quite light and fluffy. Briskly beat in the melted chocolate – make sure you let it sit for a minute or two so it’s not boiling hot before you tip it in – and then beat in the eggs quickly. It will look far too liquid at this point but stir in the flour, cocoa, baking soda and finally the remaining chocolate bits and it will suddenly turn into a thick cookie dough.

Take heaped spoonfuls of the dough and drop them onto the baking tray – Nigella suggests leaving 6cm space between them but they don’t spread that much – and bake for 8-10 minutes. Remove them from the oven and leave them to sit on the tray for five minutes before carefully transferring them to a plate or rack, then repeat with the remaining dough, which you should put in the fridge while you’re waiting for each batch to cook.

These are so good! I’ve had one in my mouth pretty much the entire time that I’ve been typing this (that is, I’ve eaten several in quick succession, it wasn’t just one cookie) and couldn’t be happier about it. For once I got as many cookies out of the batch as the recipe promised, as the raw dough is honestly not thaaaaat nice – however the grainy density of the buckwheat becomes entirely delicious once it’s all cooked. They’re even better the next day, somehow even more melting and more chocolatey.

All I’ve done lately is work so I have little to report but coincidentally I’m feeling moderately financially chill for the first time in living memory (I have the memory of a goldfish though, but also goldfish are incredibly intelligent and their three-second memory is a total myth so…ha! Okay, I got a bit lost here.) I don’t know how I’m doing so okay as my rent is more expensive than it has ever been but I’m trying really hard at budgeting and freelance hustling and so on; I’ve always identified heavily with grubby uselessness-monger Nick Miller from the TV show New Girl, but as the latest season unfolds it’s nice to see we are growing together.

“they said avocado is extra and I said shh, I know it’s extra. but I want it.” Nick is I and I are Nick.

title from: the siiiiick Lizzo song Batches and Cookies featuring Sophia Eris. Such queens.

music lately:

DZ Deathrays, Blood on My Leather. I spontaneously went to see these guys at Bodega a couple of years ago and they were sooooo good. I love their bratty sound.

Rihanna feat Drake, Work. She released a double video for this and they’re both so dreamy and gorgeous. This song just gets better with every listen: praise Rih.

Stereo Total, I Love You, Ono it starts off disguised as an irritating song but suddenly the more you listen the more it gets stupidly endearing.

next time: maybe something more from Simply Nigella, this book is a stunnerrrrrr.

you were rubbing both my hands, chewing on a candy bar

February 3, 2016March 11, 20208 Comments

mutiny on the bounty

I, like Homer Simpson, am the highly suggestible type. If you need someone to rob a bank with you, just ask me: not because I am particularly stealthy (although I can do the splits with ease which I imagine would be useful for getting around laser light security) or inclined towards a sexy danger crime life, but simply because I’ll probably be like “ummm yeah why not, I haven’t got much on tonight” without even thinking about it too deeply. Indeed, the other day when my friend Jen was all, “My kingdom for a bounty bar!” I was all, “you know what? My kingdom, also, for a bounty bar!” And then I thought it would be way more fun to go to great effort to make my own, rather than just walking 200 metres to the dairy to retrieve one in a matter of moments. Jen is also currently crashing at mine, which means I was able to get both of us bounty bars while neatly using only one kingdom as bait. Or…something.

okay sure I could’ve tried to have been neater about this but the chocolate could’ve tried too

These are, charmingly, entirely vegan and really pretty cheap to make, although I confess I am a milk chocolate-adoring heathen and so used that to coat them, but all you have to do to keep them vegan is use a dark chocolate like Whittakers which has no milk solids in it. I found this recipe online and basically didn’t change a thing; but it’s worth keeping in mind that chocolate-dipping stuff uses sooooo much chocolate.

It might seem like far too much trouble to go to for a mere chocolate bar dupe, but there is a significant motivating factor: these taste so, so, so incredible. The coconut is all damp and squishy (there’s no better way to describe it sorry) and the feeling of the firm crunch of chocolate giving way to it all is straight up heavenly. I truly don’t want to be one of those people who are all “it’s practically health food!” because that kind of talk makes my teeth feel like I’ve just bitten into tinfoil, however, as these are blessed with twelve hundred different types of coconut by-product, you take one bite and you can practically feel your hair getting shinier.

homemade bounty bars

from a recipe on healthyeah.co.nz (which is a v cool site!)

one cup full-fat coconut cream (I like Fia Fia which has the texture of whipped cream and the highest percentage of actual coconut that I could find, according to the ingredients list)
three cups dessicated coconut
two heaped tablespoons coconut oil
pinch sea salt
two tablespoons golden syrup or maple syrup
two 250g blocks of dark chocolate (or chocolate of your choice!)

Put the coconut cream, coconut oil, and golden syrup into a small pan and heat gently, just till the oil is melted fully. Stir in the salt and coconut and remove from the heat. Spatula into a baking-paper lined brownie tin (y’know, one of those regular sized rectangular baking tins) and refrigerate the mixture till it’s firm. Then slice into even rectangles or squares and freeze (or if your freezer is tiny like mine and won’t fit a damn thing in it, just put it back in the fridge and hope for the best.)

Once you’re quite convinced that the mixture is as solid as it’s gonna get, gently melt the chocolate in a small pan, and carefully dip each coconut block into it, coating it on all sides, before resting it on a fresh sheet of baking paper to harden. Unfortunately the best way I can think of to do this is to literally sit each slice of coconut stuff in the chocolate and spoon more chocolate over the top, but you do you. Transfer the slices to the fridge once they’re all coated. It’s probably easier to melt the chocolate in two separate batches, just to prevent it burning while it melts.

So very worth the effort. Honestly, can not emphasise hard enough how good the bit is when you bite through the hard chocolate into the soft coconut.

Literally nothing of significance has happened in my life since my last blog post since all I’ve been doing is apartment-hunting and taking the distressing heat of summer very personally. I mean, I do love summer! I do not, however, love being all “why is someone pouring water down the back of my neck how rude oh my god it is my own sweat, how vulgar and embarrassing…better tweet about it.” But seriously, it’s so, so hot. Sweaty is my one personality trait. Wait, there’s a back-up personality trait: joy at having eaten a good 75% of this bounty of fake bounty bars that I made, while gaining mountains of praise for the mere 25% that other people managed to get their hands on.

title from: Blood Bank by high-pitched gentle-mongerers Bon Iver.

music lately:

Eliot Sumner, After Dark. Am 100000% in love with Sumner (fun fact: child of Sting and Trudi Styler!) and their music.

CHVRCHES, Lies. It’s so fizzy and atmospheric and the beat is addictive and I’m soooo bummed that I couldn’t go see them at Laneway on Monday.

next time: let’s all keep our fingers crossed that it’s some kind of cleaning-out-the-pantry type activity on account of I’ve finally found an apartment and need to, like, clean out my pantry.

now she’s eating chocolate to induce sleep, in a chemical world it’s very, very, very cheap

January 25, 2016March 11, 20201 Comment

It seems completely unfair that so many property leases come to an end in January/February in New Zealand. It’s the middle of summer, and we should all be in the throes of some popsicle-fuelled montage of laughing on the beach, ruefully standing in front of an electric fan, prancing about under sprinkler systems on the front lawn, punting an endless cavalcade of volleyballs into the top-right corner of the camera frame, and, I don’t know, resting icy-cold cans of beer against our foreheads as the sun slowly goes down, letting the condensation run down the side of our faces and drip onto our jorts.

Instead, thousands of us are staggering about in the humidity going from flat viewing to flat viewing to compete for underwhelming rooms against the forty-five other people at the viewing and wasting the best hours of our lives refreshing the flatmates wanted/for rent pages online. It is so stressful! And then if I even manage to find somewhere to live, I have to pack up all my belongings which is a deadly combination of boring and tiring; then there’s the matter of funneling every last dollar you’ve ever breathed on into the bond for your next flat, then you either have to get charged for moving companies or you have to literally break every bone in your body moving yourself, and then you have to unpack, but also you have to do all the other things you would normally be doing in this time while doing all that, like going to work and brushing your teeth.

Hoofing a large quantity of white chocolate gingerbread brownies is not going to help with this in the long-term, but it does offer a brief and delicious respite. I recommend it whether or not you’re apartment-hunting, but for those of us in that boat, I really recommend it.

Let the record state that I think white chocolate is easily the superior chocolate, followed by milk chocolate, then dark chocolate. White chocolate tastes of vanilla seeds, of pure creamery butter, of having a lucid dream that you’re into the air and sinking down upon a thick, fluffy cloud which supports your entire body weight for an uninterrupted meta-nap. Dark chocolate tastes of obligation and charcoal being rubbed against your two front teeth. It’s fantastic to bake with! I just don’t want to eat the stuff en masse.

So with these brownies I took my beloved white chocolate and decided to pair it with ground ginger and brown sugar to create a kind of caramelly, gingerbready vibe. And the warm spiciness of the ginger against the gentle sweetness of the white chocolate is, I’m not gonna sugar coat it for you, an amazing combination. Like, just when you think the sugar is going to blowtorch your teeth into nothingness, the ginger comes in and lifts everything up, and just when it threatens to burn your throat with its intensity the white chocolate and cakiness softens everything.

On top of that these are really, really easy to make. Which, when you’re feeling all fragile, is worth taking into consideration.

white chocolate gingerbread brownies

a recipe by myself

200g butter, melted
one cup brown sugar – press down to make sure it’s firmly packed in
two eggs
100g white chocolate, roughly chopped (or more! I just ate over half the 250g block that I bought for making these and so was like “i guess this small remaining quantity is what’s going in the recipe”)
one tablespoon ground ginger
one cup plain flour
one teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line your usual brownie/medium-sized rectangular tin with baking paper.

Mix the melted butter and sugar together, and – making sure the mixture isn’t at all hot at this point – beat in the eggs. Fold in the remaining ingredients, and spatula the lot into the baking tin.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until it’s firm and golden on top but still appears to have some below-the-surface squish. Allow it to cool a little and then slice it up.

I was so delighted by these that after making a batch and leaving it for my flatmates (after inhaling like five pieces at once) I made a second batch to take to work for fun snack times, and even though I overcooked it slightly it was still really, really, really good. White chocolate and ginger, I ship them heartily.

Speaking of really, really, really good, the other thing this week distracting me from the horrors of abode-seeking is that, and it’s really hard to not gasp until I faint while I type this, I made and wrote about a Crush Cake for Peter Gallagher’s O.C character Sandy Cohen on The Toast, and Peter Gallagher himself read it and tweeted me to say thanks! I realised that is actually an incredibly obscure and vague run-on sentence, so let me distill it down to: I adore this celebrity, I wrote about this celebrity, and then this celebrity actually read what I wrote and thanked me for it. WHAT!

Isn’t that just THE MOST, to say THE LEAST? But even if Peter Gallagher hadn’t blessed me with his bestowal of gratitude, I would still have been perfectly content, because writing for The Toast is a majorly excellent achievement for me in itself and I feel like the story I wrote about Peter Gallagher/Sandy Cohen is the best one I’ve done yet.

But also: aaaaaaah!

And also-also: for those of you also schlepping about trying to find somewhere to live instead of living your truth this summer, kia kaha but…please don’t take the room I want.
____________________________________________________
title from: Blur, Chemical World, from their 93 album Modern Life is Rubbish. Damon Albarn is frolicking about in a field in the video and there is a bunny present and just like, get out of here Damon Albarn. And take your beautiful face with you.
____________________________________________________
music lately:

DNCE, Cake By The Ocean. Who knew that a former Jonas Brother singing the aggressively jaunty chorus refrain of “Cake! By! The! Ocean!” would skewer my heart like this? I seriously can’t stop listening to this song and even though I’m not sure if it’s even that good I can’t possibly bring myself to care. (Oh wait, it’s definitely amazing.)

Lisa Stansfield, All Around The World. Such a damn classic and one of the very best bridges in songwriting history.
____________________________________________________
next time: I finally, finally bought another SD card for my lovely camera so can start using it for food photography again instead of using my phone. Knowing my luck I’ve probably completely forgotten how to use it, but I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself.

i see christmas lights reflect in your eyes

December 16, 2015March 11, 2020Leave a comment

chocolate candy cane bark the herald angels sing

It’s less than ten days to Christmas and it’s times like these that one’s thoughts turn to…how it’s less than ten days till Christmas. There has been so much going on in my life and also in the lives of others that are plaited into mine and as such it has been a bit hard to blog with my usual aggression; or at least that’s what I assume it is that’s slowing me down? – every time I’ve sat down with my laptop and been all “hello old friend, we meet again, let’s tango” I’ve instead got really lethargic and rapidly blacked out with tiredness and woken up an hour later drooling lavishly into my own cleavage. Oh sure, it’s funny the first like, seven times! But now it’s nearly literal Christmas and I still haven’t got this blog post out. However, you are reading this, which I suspect means I have finally done it.

So anyway, every year with charming self-absorption I present you with a list of recipes I’ve blogged about over the years which would also make excellent Christmas presents. And it’s that time of that time of year again! Oh sure, material goods are an unmitigated delight, but unless you’re surrounded by brats I am supremely confident that there is an impressive number of people in your life who want nothing more than to be presented with something completely delicious that they can tuck into with impunity, rather than, say, a small cow figurine or an earnestly hideous vase which they then have to pretend to feel joy about when in fact it is an insult to their carefully curated personal aesthetic.

cornbread cookie squares with maple buttercream: aka found footage of heaven

Honestly though, say it with eat-y stuff. Whether or not Christmas is a thing that affects you or that you pay attention to, there’s no harm in having a delicious arsenal of ideas for things you can make for people at any old time to express your gratitude and selflessness. This is just a time of year where gift-giving is impressed upon us as being really important. And so, here I am to help. Okay, yes, the rise of the dawn of the planet of the Buzzfeed has rendered this entirely superfluous but what my list has that buzzfeed doesn’t is…me! So much me! It has actually been fairly unusual compiling all these old blog posts and reading through the million different people I have been, but the recipes still absolutely hold up (as does the writing, obviously) and there’s not one thing in this list that I wouldn’t love to be presented with, before presenting it directly into my own mouth.

So here goes: the hungryandfrozen edible gift idea round-up.

Category One: Things in Jars.

We are no longer quite at Peak Mason Jar, and thank goodness tbh, but: jars will never die. Jars are gonna save you this Christmas.

orange confit (This is basically just slices of orange in syrup, but is surprisingly applicable to a variety of cake surfaces. And it’s so pretty. And so cheap.) (vg, gf)

cranberry sauce (this is stupidly easy and you should make it to go with your main meal anyway) (vg, gf)

bacon jam (Best made at the last minute, because it needs refrigerating) (gf)

cashew butter (vg, gf) (just don’t drop your wooden spoon into the food processor)

red chilli nahm jim (gf)

cranberry (or any-berry) curd (it involves a lot of effort but it’s so pretty. Just like me.) (gf)

rhubarb-fig jam (gf)

salted caramel sauce (gf, has a vegan variant) (Salted caramel is kind of the cockroach of food trends, in that it could still be popular in a post-apocalyptic landscape where we all eat dust that has been milled into varying levels of granularity. Salted caramel in a jar is a double whammy.)

apple cinnamon granola (vg)

strawberry jam granola (vg)

Marinated Tamarillos (vg, gf)

taco pickles (vg, gf)

pickled blueberries (vg, gf)

peach balsamic barbecue sauce (vg, gf)

berry chia seed jam (vg, gf)

berry chia seed jam: this is my jam

Peach Balsamic Barbecue Sauce: give a fusspot a pot of fussy stuff.

chocolate dipped brown sugar cookies: oooh

Category Two: Baked Goods.

Make your house smell glorious, eat some cake batter, wrap the baked things you haven’t eaten in rustic-looking brown paper and tie it all up with string, then toast to your own productivity and excellence.

Also first of all, my Christmas Cake is amazing. It just is: deal with my lack of coyness. Even if you decide at the last minute to make it on Christmas Day itself, it will still taste so great.

christmas-spiced chocolate cake (Also a good xmas-day pudding) (gf)
chocolate orange loaf cake
vegan chocolate cake (It’s good! It’s easy!) (vg)
chocolate chunk oatmeal cookies
cheese stars (make twelve times the amount you think you need because these are addictive and also great to serve as blotting paper for the inevitable copious liquor that happens this time of year)
coconut macaroons (gf)
chocolate macaroons (gf)
gingerbread cut-out cookies (vg)
coconut condensed milk brownies
salted caramel slice (hello again Salted Caramel! Your persistence is as admirable as your deliciousness!)
fancy tea cookies
chocolate olive oil cake
cinnamon bars
coffee caramel slice
everyday chocolate brownies
cornbread cookie squares with maple buttercream
cranberry white chocolate cookies
peanut butter cookies
secret centre mini-pavlovas
avocado chocolate brownies (gf, df)
bobby dazzler cake
chocolate-dipped brown sugar cookies

Also, if you click on the link to the Orange Confit above, you’ll see a recipe for the easiest, fastest fruitcake loaf. It makes an excellent present, for the sort of person who’d like to receive fruitcake. And it’s dairy free.

secret centre mini-pavlovas

peanut butter chocolate caramel nut caramel chocolate peanut butter slice caramel

Category Three: Novelty!

This is mostly either homemade recreations of things you can buy from the corner dairy for fifty cents, or sticky-sweet things where you melt one ready-made thing into another. It’s frankly the best category and you know it.

moonshine biffs (like homemade Milk Bottles!) (gf)
raw vegan chocolate cookie dough truffles (vg, gf)
lolly cake
peppermint schnapps (vg, gf) (this is some harsh moonshine but also SO FUN. Weirdly, more fun the more you drink of it?)
candy cane chocolate bark (No effort, vegan – well, I think candy canes are vegan – gluten free, amazingly delicious, just store it carefully so it doesn’t melt)
white chocolate coco pops slice
homemade cherry ripe
mars bar cornflake slice
chocolate cookie dough pretzel things
brown sugar malteaser cardamom fudge
peanut butter chocolate caramel nut slice

Delightful Bonus Category: Stuff to bring!

A brief list of things you could consider making and taking to the next seasonal party in which there are heavy implications that you need to bring a plate and that it should be something amazing that people will actually enjoy.

Whether or not this list is helpful, I’m honestly just so glad that I got this damn blog post done finally so I really am beyond caring. (Kidding, I care ever so much, like, in a completely uncool lacking-in-chill kind of way.) I’m working as much as I physically can over Christmas and new years, and will be spending the day with work family eating and drinking and eating and drinking and so on in that fashion. I can’t wait, and while it would be lovely to be going up home to my family, spending my one spare day with people I adore and cooking a ton of nice food for them is something I am super looking forward to. However! Were money something I felt irritatingly mellow about, my Christmas list would look a little like the following:

– a new leather bomber jacket (my current one is falling to pieces 100% literally)

– timberland boots (2003 called, and I’m ignoring it because I don’t care if they’re outdated)

– Marc Jacobs Lola perfume (am never not cursing myself for using up all my supplies last year by calling it “baller deodorant” when I could’ve just used nivea roll-on)

– a watch: either something very heavily masculine or something plasticky and stupid looking

– a set of pots and pans, preferably the kind that looks stupidly good in photos; I currently have very little in the way of anything

– a handbag: my last one basically dissolved into the air within less than a month and I’ve since been lugging my earthly possessions about in a grubby tote

– a candle that smells like cinnamon

– several bottles of fancy liquor so I can finally start my liquor cabinet: some nice gin, some sweet and dry vermouth, some fernet (it rhymes with cliche!), a campari and a bourbon…y’know, no biggie.

– A record player – nothing fancy, just something that I can literally play all my records on.

Whatever it is you want for Christmas, especially if it’s world peace, I hope you get it. I’m definitely going to be blogging again before Christmas and that all sounded a bit final, but nevertheless: get what you want! Get it! Go on, now!

_____________________________________________________________

title from: 2005’s plaintive Athlete song, Wires. It’s plaintive but it’s still got legs, I reckon.

_____________________________________________________________

music lately:

Mariah Carey, Oh Holy Night, from her Merry Christmas II You album. That’s right, she has other Christmas songs, and this one is classic Mimi. She sounds so good.

The Wombats, Greek Tragedy. Pop! So poppy!

Idina Menzel’s Christmas album. She is my idol, and I am a completist.

Also: my dreamy summer playlist on spotify. Look, I could either list every song here or I could just link you directly to the playlist, but either way it’s very very good and feels like sunshine on your shoulders.

_____________________________________________________________

next time: no sleep allowed! I made some roasted asparagus with burned butter hollandaise which was amazing, however I also haven’t made ice cream in ages and am feeling the need.

i want blood, guts and chocolate cake

November 18, 2015March 11, 20203 Comments

It’s really something huh, how you can simultaneously absorb constantly unfurling news of how monumentally disastrous and rubbish the world is right now, and yet have your own relatively small, inconsequential issues selfishly jostle for position at the forefront of things you have to try and process…yeah? Author Roxane Gay said “I have never considered compassion a finite resource” and important singer Lana Del Rey once tweeted “um, I like it tha best when you’re nice to me” and I think they’re both good thoughts to keep in mind. No one needs my hot take on world events, especially not on a damn food blog, but man, stuff is happening so hard, right? And it’s just going to keep happening and keep happening and keep happening and all we can do is try to be human beings and be compassionate. And nice. In our own small ways and to our own capacities. That’s all I’ve got.

In what I’d like to emphasise is unrelated news, It feels like utterly forever since I’ve updated this blog. I also suspect I’m the only one exuding major stress over it, so I’ll just get to talking about what it is I’ve finally got around to cooking and deeming blog-worthy. And that thing is: avocado brownies. I’m not usually prone to faffing around with replacing the butter content of anything (indeed, I usually replace the existing butter specified in a recipe with even more butter) but I’m also easily seduced by a novelty ingredient. Moreover, I wanted to make something nice to take to work for a very lovely manager’s final shift, and this requires accommodating some gluten and dairy-related issues. A bit of excavation online brought this recipe for avocado-based chocolate brownies to the surface, and as I’ve had an abundance of said fruits lately anyway, all signs pointed to yes.

These whole process is reassuringly normal; the avocado is mixed in with the sugar and eggs at the start and it all looks and tastes very much like regular brownie batter (not as good, but on the other hand it does stop me eating my usual half to three quarters of the uncooked batter followed by some sustained writhing on the floor in sugar-related agony.) They get better and better the longer they’re left in the fridge, becoming more dense and richly fudge-ish with almost swampy levels of dark chocolatey depth. Like, believe me, these brownies are real and stand their ground and are delicious at a level bordering on magical. Make ’em out of curiosity, whether or not the gluten/dairy-free thing applies to you, because they’re just that good.

avocado chocolate brownies

recipe pretty well unchanged from this recipe on Sprouted Fig

two large, perfectly ripe avocados
one cup of brown sugar
two eggs
one cup of cocoa
150g dark chocolate
half a teaspoon baking soda
one tablespoon water

Set your oven to 170 C/350 F. Scoop the avocado flesh into a bowl, and use a whisk to whip it till it’s all smooth. Add the eggs and the sugar and continue to whisk briskly, then carefully whisk in the cocoa – cocoa tends to fly everywhere in clouds at the slightest agitation, hence why you need to slow down for this bit. Chop the chocolate roughly but finely, so that it’s all rubbly and in shards, and fold it into the batter. Finally, mix the baking soda and water together in a small measuring cup or similar, and vigorously stir it into the chocolate mixture. Spatula the lot into a paper-lined brownie pan, and bake for about 25 minutes – as soon as it’s firm on top it’s ready to be taken out. Refrigerate the brownie for at least an hour but really the longer the better – it just gets more dense and fudgy the longer it sits. Slice it into smallish squares and fling at your face.

I liked these so much that I immediately made another batch for my flatmates, although I concede that this was partly if not mostly motivated by the fact that I never actually got any photos of the original brownies that I took to work. And this blog’s needs are important!

Honestly not much else exciting has happened to me lately; I dyed my hair a darker shade of red, I hooned through the excellent TV series Master of None (and I recommend it so hard), I finally tidied my room up after being a stressfully messy slattern for, well, my entire life, and during so I inexplicably found my notecards from a speech I gave in primary school in 1997 about the Spice Girls.

“practically every girl’s fantasy”

That’s…all I’ve got. Stay nice if you can.
__________________________________________________________
title from: that magical woman Marina and the Diamonds and her song Teen Idle.
__________________________________________________________
music lately:

Uffie, Hot Chick so bratty! So 2006!

Robbie Williams, Freedom so good! So 1996! I don’t even care!

Misterwives, Hurricane. Perfect pop perfection.
__________________________________________________________
next time: I promise I will neither take this damn long to update! I will make a thing more than once a week!

and sugar, we’re going down swinging

October 23, 2015December 13, 20237 Comments

In this, the year of grace 2015, mere non-plural months away from turning thirty, ya girl played beer pong for the first time in her life on a Sunday evening and also finally completed watching The OC in its entirety, finishing the last ever episode by literally crying into a bagel at 3.40am on a Wednesday night. I also finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer last week and may have listened to Say Anything’s 2004 album Is A Real Boy around seven times in one day, so all in all I’m partying like it’s the early-to-mid-to-late 2000s. It may be that pop culture is getting the better of me though: yesterday I walked away from the self-checkout counter at the supermarket without paying (immediately turning around and going “oh my god I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to it’s just that I was listening to Spike’s song from Once More With Feeling, the musical episode of Buffy, and got all flustered, you must get this all the time, right, here I’m paying right now”) and then later that evening while rewatching Pretty Little Liars I was so flaily at a particularly potent moment that I accidentally kicked myself really hard.

But though I’m about ready to throw my heart in a ravine if, say, Sandy Cohen so much as dares to enter my thoughts (he’s just so good) I have also been taking rather excellent care of myself; ramping up my vegetable intake and removing my makeup before I go to bed and remembering that I love yoga, especially the kind on youtube where you essentially just lie down and sway gently and someone tells you that you’re a good person. And then yesterday I made fudge, which I’m not going to pretend is like, nutritious, but I’m also not going to pretend that I, like, care. I’m more into adding extra good things to my life than subtracting anything that other people might consider “bad” (and here please picture me elaborately doing air quotes with a disdainful look upon my face) because basically I want to have my cake and eat it too in literally every sense of the word.

I found a particularly simple yet wonderful sounding brown sugar fudge recipe in this amazing American cake and pudding cookbook of mine; and then tinkered with it some, as is my wont. I have been thinking lots about cardamom lately and liked the idea of adding some to the fudge, but that seemed a bit worthy and earnest; I then thought about texture and crunch and considered adding some kind of candy to the recipe, but that seemed a bit basic and obvious. Then I was like, why not both? The combination of ready-made packet candy and sophisticated, nuanced spice pleased me and I was also quite sure that the flavours would be complementary enough to make my resolute commitment to a silly idea worth it.

I am so smug about how correct I was: sweet fancy Moses this fudge is good. First of all can we just take a moment to hold our palms to the sky reverently and just consider how amazing the texture of fudge is? It’s firm yet yielding, like a really pert butt; it’s somehow buttery and soft yet has the slightest hint of grit from the boiled sugar, it melts on impact in your mouth, it’s magical, when you add in the intermittent crunch from the malteasers it’s actual sorcery, in fact I have to draw this moment to a close before I flail so hard that I kick myself again. So yeah, the texture is great, but the flavours here are rather perfect too – the warm gingery elements of the cardamom nuzzle into the throat-burningly dark caramelly flavours of the brown sugar and give it depth beyond mere sweetness. The spikes of crunch provided by the malteasers on the other hand stop it being all too intense, and the chocolate coating unsurprisingly goes well with everything.

brown sugar, cardamom and malteaser fudge

one cup brown sugar
one cup white sugar
one cup milk
25g butter
a pinch of salt
a pinch of ground cardamom
one packet of malteasers

Place the sugars and milk into a good sized saucepan, and bring to the boil. Allow it to continue boiling, stirring occasionally and watching carefully so it doesn’t bubble over, until it reaches what is known as the soft-ball stage – what you want to do is get a bowl of cold water, and periodically take small spoonfuls of the boiling sugar and lower them slowly into the cold water. Initially it should just dissipate and dissolve into the water (and you may want to change the water occasionally if it gets too sugary) but once you can lower a spoonful of sugary stuff into the water and it solidifies into a soft, pliant kinda substance, you know you’re ready. I hope that makes sense. This should take about ten minutes.

At this point, remove it from the heat and sit the pan in a sink partly filled with cold water – this is optional but helps, obviously, to cool it down faster – and stir in the butter, the salt, and the cardamom. Stir vigorously until it is thick and seems to have lost most of its glossiness. I use a whisk for this, as I figure the aeration helps cool it and thicken it faster, but any old spoon will do the trick. At this point, stir in half the malteasers – some of them will melt a bit, which is totally ideal – and transfer the fudge onto a buttered tray/dish. Use the back of a spoon to gently push it out into an even square, then tip the remaining malteasers over the top and push them into the fudge a little to ballast them. Allow it to cool in the fridge for a bit and then slice into irregular squares. I say irregular because you have no option, the malteasers make it a bit hard to get straight lines.

I think I’ve definitely hit this home by now, but wow this is so good. Even if you’re wary of playing with sugar and/or fire, if you follow the instructions that I give in the recipe to gauge when the fudge is ready, you can’t go wrong. Because even if you do go wrong you can still do ever so many things – pour the ineffectual fudge onto ice cream, stir it into softened ice cream, just eat an ice cream and throw the fudge at the wall – either way, there’s enough serendipity to go around.

PS: if you’re wondering, I was honestly pretty good at beer pong and it was a taut and thrilling game for all involved. However I think I generally prefer to drink my drinks in a more straightforward way rather than having to leap through elaborate hoops to get to them.

title from: here I am keeping it real, real era-specific that is, with one of my favourite Fall Out Boy songs.

music lately:

Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes. I have listened to precisely zero Tori Amos in my life but wanted to take a chance on her so picked this song at random, and mercy me it’s beautiful. So, so beautiful. Except now I’m stuck being unable to choose a follow-up because what if it’s not as good as this one, and she has so many songs! Love to overthink!

Say Anything, the Is A Real Boy/Was A Real Boy album. Frankly: listening to it seven times is actually not enough for me.

next time: I am about to come into possession of a treasure far higher in worth than rubies: avocados. So, expect avocados.

Hungry and Frozen

possibly the best food blog in the world, since 2007

Category: Chocolate

lick an ice cream cone, crack a bone

frozen inside without your touch

pile on many more layers, and i’ll be joining you there

for the want of the price of tea and a slice

i got my batches and cookies

you were rubbing both my hands, chewing on a candy bar

now she’s eating chocolate to induce sleep, in a chemical world it’s very, very, very cheap

i see christmas lights reflect in your eyes

i want blood, guts and chocolate cake

and sugar, we’re going down swinging