Category: Chocolate

we’re so much more than pointless fixtures, instagram pictures

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*lou reed voice* shiny shiny 

I’ve always been one to self-absorbedly imagine that I’m in a scene in a movie while doing otherwise mundane things like staring inscrutably out the window while on a train or sitting inscrutably on a park bench or getting a coffee by myself, inscrutably – I know I’m not the only one that does this! It’s like, this is the quiet bit in the indie movie where the camera stays fixed on me for an almost uncomfortably long time while I do something very normal but in an utterly enigmatic way. Right?

Anyway after spending the longest time of only listening to podcasts when getting to and from places, I’ve started listening to music through my headphones on my phone again (having got the Spotify app and an ad-free premium account) and wow, nothing enhances the “I’m a mysterious and important character in an indie film that you’ll guiltily download because you can’t stomach spending $25 on a ticket during festival season or waiting forever for it to have a limited-at-best release” feeling like walking down the road utterly immersed in your own personal soundtrack. Sauntering in the dark to Lazy Line Painter Jane by Belle and Sebastian – the lyrics are stupid but the beat and the melody are heavenly and the coda makes the mere act of walking seem like art; striding through the rain to Shazam by Spiderbait feeling like a complete brat as you jaywalk (in my defence the roads in Wellington are ridiculous and there’s nothing to do but jaywalk); drifting dreamily, almost floating, through the industrial end of town to Julee Cruise’s Rockin Back Inside My Heart. I know this is the most pretentious thing I’ve written in a long time and I sound like a teenager who has just discovered Morrissey (you should’ve seen me when I was a teenager who had just discovered Morrissey) but like, it’s just so, so, so long since I’ve done this and it’s such a small thing but it’s so amazing. That’s it, that’s the story: listening to music through headphones is nice, did you know?

*freddy mercury voice* hash! Aaa-aah, saviour of the universe!

Speaking of all the small things; I still haven’t replaced my lost SD card for my fancy digital camera, partly out of not wanting to spend excess money and partly out of a self-flagellating sense of punishment. As such my phone has graduated from being merely my best friend and confidante to my main camera. Which also makes it slightly harder to get a decent bundle of blog-worthy photos happening for any one dish I’ve made at any one time. In lieu of that, I’ve decided to do a wee round-up of some food I’ve made and quickly instagrammed lately – united they are greater than the sum of their parts, or something. All three of these things – peanut butter cookies; sausage and potato hash; and tomato and feta tart – are stupidly delicious and the recipes can be imparted to you super quickly, so…yeah. No harm done.

peanut butter cookies

one cup smooth peanut butter
one cup sugar
one egg
one teaspoon baking powder
dark chocolate

set your oven to 180 c/350 F. Mix all the ingredients together, roll the mixture into rather small balls (the smaller they are, the less likely they are to crumble) and place on a paper-lined baking tray. Press down slightly with the back of a spoon to flatten them juuuust a little. Bake for about ten minutes, then let them sit for ten minutes (important so they don’t crumble…again) before carefully transferring to a wire rack to cool. Melt the chocolate and spoon it over the top of the cooled cookies as you please. Makes many. 

If you’re a gluten-free person you will likely have encountered some version of this recipe already a million times but man it’s good – soft, chewy, salty-sweet cookies, the throat-coating peanut butter cut through with the crunch of bitter dark chocolate. I’d usually prefer milk chocolate here but using dark makes them dairy-free too – I made these to take into work one evening in a kind of a sustain-the-troops kind of move, and also because I thrive on presenting people with food that I’ve made whether they want it or not.

sausage and potato hash

four fresh pork sausages
two large floury potatoes
one onion, diced 
dried thyme
oil and butter
two eggs
HP sauce and/or ketchup/hot sauce/whatever other condiment your sodium-caked heart desires

It’s fairly uncool but if you microwave the sausages in a bowl of water for three minutes and then microwave the potatoes for three minutes (give both of them a stabbing with a fork first) then your life will be an awful lot easier. Otherwise consider simmering them in a pan of water for a bit first or just plough ahead and hope for the best. 

Heat plenty of olive oil or similar in a large pan. Gently fry the onion until softened and golden. Roughly chop the sausages and tip them into the pan, allow them to sizzle and brown. Then dice the potato fairly small, and add to the pan – try and get as much surface area touching the base of the pan as possible to encourage browning and crisping. Put a lid on the pan for about five minutes to allow the steam to cook the potato through, then remove the lid, turn up the heat, add a knob of butter and the thyme and allow everything to sizzle like whoa. Push everything to the side and crack the two eggs into the pan and allow them to fry till you’re quite satisfied. Remove from the heat; divide the sausage and potato mixture between two plates, top with the eggs, and apply as much sauce as you please. 

I made this for my wonderful girlfriend and myself on Sunday when we were both varying degrees of hungover and indecisive (okay, well she fried the eggs – I’m just not that great at eggs and she is) and it was the absolute perfect thing. Cheap, fast, fried, carb-loaded, slightly greasy, sustaining, nourishing, hot, covered in salt and sauce, and the ideal accompaniment to watching 21 Jump Street. From which we can learn two things: one, Dave Franco has ascended to being The Superior Franco, and two, Channing Tatum’s acting career is the greatest thing to happen to America this century.

tomato and feta tart 

one sheet ready-rolled puff pastry
half a tin of chopped tomatoes
one tablespoon cornmeal
about fifty or so grams of feta cheese
thyme leaves
a little oil, milk, melted butter or something for brushing the pastry with

Set your oven to 200 C/400 F and place some baking paper on a baking tray. Put the sheet of pastry on top and score a one-inch border around the edge – this is where you use the point of a knife to almost-but-not-quite cut through it, like you’re drawing a slightly smaller square inside of it. This is gonna make the edges puff up and make a fetching border once you bake it. Sprinkle the cornmeal over the middle of the pastry, drain the tomatoes well and spread them evenly across, then sprinkle/crumble the feta on top of the tomatoes. Brush the edges with melted butter or whatever if you like, and then bake for about 15-20 minutes until it’s golden, puffy and risen around the edges. Sprinkle with salt and strew with thyme leaves. Slice into bits and snarf the lot. 

Look, if you have some ready-rolled pastry in your fridge or freezer then you have the makings of a good time no matter how meagre the rest of your pantry supplies may be. You could literally just bake a piece of pastry and it would still be a charming snack. I mean, I wouldn’t be above such things. Tomatoes and feta are obvious pals so don’t even make me try to explain it to you, but there’s something fun about the tangy feta once it’s warmed through and how it contrasts with the relative sweetness of the tomatoes and the buttery, puffy pastry. This is another one that I threw together for my excellent gf and myself one Sunday and it’s the perfect lunch for two – cut it into four squares, have two each, put a little rocket or spinach on the side if you’re feeling outlandish, and deliciousness shall abound.

*no particular voice* this is a tomato and feta tart
As I alluded to before I’m trying so hard to spend as little money as possible right now, on account of how living paycheck to paycheck is no fun, but I also decided to ignore that rule and hoist myself off to a cafe to write this blog post over a coffee. Also it’s payday today! I doubt I’m gonna be able to afford to replace my SD card any time soon, so you’ll just have to get used to these phone-photos, but honestly instagram is so great that I’m not even too bothered (that said if you’re feeling like you’re too rich right now may I remind you that I have a paypal, pal) – somewhat unsurprisingly I love making my life look more dreamy and hazily lit than it really is. Just as I’m massively digging soundtracking my life like I’m the first person who discovered how to do this. Some might say it’s whimsical, some might say it’s insufferable and not even particularly interesting, but as long as they’re saying something I really don’t mind.
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title from: Queen Beyonce, with her drown-in-the-sexy song Rocket from her incredibly important self-titled album. Don’t listen to it unless you’re ready to fall over sideways. 
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music lately: 
Misterwives, Twisted Tongue. Uhhhh this is such a good pop song, I can’t even deal and I frankly refuse to deal. 
Beach House, A Walk In The Park. Another good one to make your way from A to B to. The perfect child of Billy Idol’s Eyes Without A Face and The Pixies’ Where Is My Mind (a perfect child that I never knew I needed, to be fair.) They’ve just been announced as coming to Laneway festival next year and I MUST GO. 
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next time: I mean technically it’s Spring, despite the weather being more appalling than it has been all winter, and I am determined to hunt down some asparagus. 

let’s go dip it low then you bring it up slow

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looky looky I got cookie 

Oh man, I started writing this blog post the other day and concluded that one of the good things about the past week or so is that I haven’t been sick for once, and then I woke up this morning feeling all woolly-headed and tender-eyeballed and sniffly and grubby and generally like a pile of dirt with a sad face drawn on it. This has been the sickliest winter, and I’m so unimpressed – can someone with a better sense of authority than I please tell my immune system that it’s grounded for the next month with no TV? Am crossing all fingers that it’s a shortlived burst of grime-lung as opposed to the return of the flu.

Other than my frustratingly delicate health, things have been thoroughly quite good of late: some working, some cooking, some hanging with friends and their beautiful dog while watching Buffy, a ludicrously late night out dancing, a day spent dozing in bed without – miraculously – getting angry at myself for not achieving anything with my time, and some whisky and movies and pizza and the batty latest season of America’s Next Top Model with my girlfriend. The only real thing making me frown (prior to feeling sick again) has been processing my feelings about the mid-season finale of Pretty Little Liars, (if you have feelings about that then friend: I am your girl to discuss it with), plus some unfairly painful cramps. Which were probably brought on by Pretty Little Liars, to be honest.

Importantly, there were also cookies! I made these about a week ago, simply because I felt this wiggly need to bake something. Overwhelmed by the internet when I went looking for inspiration (y’know, it’s all either triple backflip oreo stuffed red velvet bla bla bla cookies or raw high-protein dust cookies) I attempted to narrow down what it was I had in mind, which was: just something nice, okay? After some ineffectual writhing I eventually came up with this non-threateningly simple yet wonderful recipe, where they’re fairly plain but made with lots of brown sugar and dipped in milk chocolate. The where the end result is a little chewy, a little crunchy, and a little meltingly shortbread-like. And a lot smug-inducing.

zoomed in slightly: still good 

I took some to work to share because I am a literal earth-angel, and gave some to my girlfriend to say “yay it’s our six month anniversary but here is a low-key token of my affection or whatever it’s no biggie jk jk it’s really amazing I am the sincerest”; and ate the rest in bed by myself, and by all accounts, especially my own, they were utterly delicious. It’s always promising when the uncooked dough tastes so good that you consider retiring to your boudoir to eat the lot and pretend you can’t hear when people ask you where the cookies are that you said you’d make.

chocolate dipped brown sugar cookies

a recipe by myself

250g soft butter
one cup brown sugar
one egg
two cups flour
half a teaspoon baking powder

Set your oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4 and line a baking tray with baking paper. 

Okay so all you need to do is: mix stuff together, roll into balls, bake it until it’s cookies, but I am a talky lass and like to hold your hand through the process. What I’m saying is, the long recipe below might make it look like this is hellaciously complicated but it’s not, promise. 

Beat the butter and sugar together with a wooden spoon (or whatever! a rudimentary stick you found in the garden! A 30cm ruler! Don’t let me put you in a box) until it’s all light and creamy and fluffy and tastes incredibly delicious. Crack in the egg and continue to beat the mixture till it’s even lighter, then carefully fold in the flour and baking powder – at this point it’s very easy to fling stuff everywhere if you stir too vigorously. My dough looked a little dry and crumbly and like there was far too much flour but if you keep working it and clump it together with your hands it should form a pliant, stiff dough.

Refrigerate for half an hour- which is boring, yes, but this step helps the cookies to not spread too far when they bake. 

Roll the cookies into small balls, maybe around the size of an unshelled walnut, and flatten them slightly using the back of a teaspoon. Bake them for around 12-16 minutes until they’re lightly browned. I got a little distracted on the internet while they were baking and so some of mine are more browned than they oughta be, but they still tasted good. However, they will firm up and continue to cook a bit as they cool, so trust your instincts and remove them to a rack to cool when you feel they’re ready. Repeat this with the remaining dough.

Melt 250g milk chocolate in the microwave, or however you do it, and dip half of each cooled cookie into it. Sit them on a sheet of baking paper till they’re set, then they’re finally ready to be eaten. 

bite me 

These would be just lovely on their own but dipping them in chocolate makes them spectacular spectacular – milk chocolate is gently sweet with a creamy, slightly caramel vibe which works so well with these cookies. I know dark chocolate is considered to be the best kind but it’s honestly just not that fun to hoof into, all bitter and miserable and throat-coatingly cocoa-dark, and that kind of distraction is not what I want for these beauties. The way your teeth sink through the thin yet lightly crisp layer of chocolate into the crumbling, buttery cookie below generates a feeling that I can only explain by pointing you towards the hearts-for-eyes emoji.

So there you have it, these are easy to make, delicious at all stages, good to give away and perfect to eat in bed as your day’s food intake in its entirety. While not eating cookies or galumphing about complaining about how sick I am, I’m working hard on trying to get a million deadline-esque things done – including another crush cake for The Toast, more stuff for The Spinoff, and an interview with the babe Laura Lee for the I Should Tell You segment of this very blog. I’m drinking an aperol spritz as I write though and I can feel it helping me.
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title from: Rihanna’s still killer debut single Pon De Replay. Who could’ve known back in 2005 that Rihanna would become Rihanna? Well, we all should’ve, because this song is so good.  
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music lately:

Lana Del Rey, High By The Beach. I love this woman so much and am loving the unimpressed vibe her lyrics have taken in this dreamy new song of hers.

Men Without Hats, The Safety Dance. What care I that this song is literally the most dorky thing on earth? I love it so much, it’s so earnestly jaunty and happy and also strongly echoes my own feelings about dancing. It’s on the work playlist and it’s honestly quite dangerous: the first time I heard it I was so excited that I hurled a hot chocolate to the ground, making the title of the song a dark omen brought to fruition, really.
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Next time: Another I Should Tell You interview, wheeeeeeeee!

you could have my heart or we could share it like the last slice

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so delicious that Pony by Ginuwine starts to play non-diegetically when you take a bite

There’s a scene in the important film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, where Dewey Cox is starting his rapid trajectory towards being a famous rock’n’roll star. He tells his wife Edith, “I’m gonna miss some things, okay? I’m gonna miss some birthdays and some christenings. I’m gonna miss some births, period. It’s just unrealistic to expect that I’m gonna be here for every time you have a baby.” I’m currently relating heavily to this, apart from, tragically, the bit with the ascension to fame, because I’m week three into working roughly five thousand times more hours than I normally do. Luckily, I adore my job and doing so many hours does make payday fun, but all I’ve been doing is sleeping and working which doesn’t bode well for getting blog posts done, or indeed anything. In fact, I’ve been trying to write this very one here that you’re reading for about seven days now, but every time I went to write I would instead just stare into space and then wake up three hours later, gently spooning my laptop like it was some kind of ergonomically disappointing teddy bear.

Yet finally here I am! With a really wilfully stupid peanut butter chocolate caramel slice! It was in a brief moment of lucidity that I concocted it, taking a base made largely of peanut butter and actual butter, a centre made of condensed milk and more butter and a handful of roasted salted nuts, and a top of melted milk chocolate. Seriously, that’s really all there is to it. You pretty much know the recipe now.

hey baby, I think I wanna marry you

It sounds like it would be stupidly, almost uncomfortably sweet and rich, and while admittedly I have literal syrup running through my veins instead of blood and therefore my bar for the overly sweet is set quite high, I assert to you that it’s honestly very manageable to eat. In that you could easily manage to eat three quarters of it before you even realise the knife is in your hand and you’re standing at the fridge slicing off thick squares of it.

Oddly enough it’s the caramel centre that keeps it in check – you blast the hell out of the condensed milk and butter in the microwave before spreading it across the base, and all that heat reduces it down and brings out the ocean-deep dark toffee flavours present in the sugars. Then the roasted nuts, crunchy as popcorn and covered in salt, add to this. Just in case it starts to sound all too sensible I then cover it in the plainest sweetest mellowest milk chocolate, but with good reason, because dark chocolate would be too punishingly intense and make it a chore to eat.

it isn’t too hard to see, we’re in heaven

Speaking of important movies and delicious things that make people flustered, my one other accomplishment of recent time is, last night I went to the movies and watched Magic Mike XXL with my girlfriend and her flatmates. But Laura! I said to myself. Aren’t you really like…gay? How could a movie about male strippers possibly hold your precious attention? My people, this movie is one of the best pieces of filmmaking I’ve ever encountered, one of the most joyful, kind-hearted, generous movies, and honestly, a rare film where women of all shapes and skin colours and faces have fun and are celebrated and support their friends and are in charge and are never, ever the joke, even though you keep thinking that’s where the movie’s gonna go. A film where men are emotional and express their love for each other without once adding “no homo”, but also a bisexual character is not seen as a curiosity to be analysed and picked apart. A film where guys listen to women and help them, not in a “you frail stupid woman let me do this better than you” kind of way, but a “I’d like to make things better so you can be happy because that’d be nice” kind of way. Just when you think it’s gonna zig, it zags. Honestly I’m getting emotional just trying to write about it.

Oh and if you’re into the sight of men and stuff, there’s…a lot of abdominal muscles being flung around. But truly, this movie is so very good, in the way that an old dog tied up on the street waiting patiently for their owner is good. Take your mother, take your 300 year old grandmother, take your husband, take your nine year old child, take everyone to see this movie! Put it this way: I came out of it saying that I’d actually love to read think-pieces on it, and normally my attitude towards think-pieces is that they should be thrown into the ocean. So. While I’ve been berating myself frowningly for not being outstanding in the field of achievement lately, getting this movie under my belt (hey-oh!) makes me feel like I’ve used my time very wisely.

just imagine another song from the Magic Mike XXL soundtrack here okay

Okay, one more thing about this movie before I get back to that other ridiculously sexy caramel confection: I love that there was more or less zero conflict. The characters were just happy and chill and overcame small hurdles and that was it! I have come to realise that I hate when movies, especially movies about an existing entity are like, what shall we do with these characters that the audience knows and loves – better make them fight and be isolated from each other until about ten minutes before the end. (For some reason A Goofy Movie is what sprang to mind here: hot take, A Goofy Movie was a bit disappointing.) Up with niceness! Okay that’s quite the end of my breathless and shrieking thoughts on Magic Mike XXL. On here at least.

peanut butter chocolate caramel nut slice

a recipe that I made by smashing several Nigella recipes together and adding bits of my own thoughts so yeah

200g smooth peanut butter
50g soft butter
half a cup brown sugar
one and a half cups icing sugar

one tin sweetened condensed milk
200g butter
two tablespoons golden syrup
half a cup (or so) salted roasted mixed nuts 

200g milk chocolate

Line a brownie tin – either a 23cm square one or a regular sized rectangular one – with a large piece of baking paper. Use a wooden spoon to beat the peanut butter and butter together, then carefully stir in the sugars (I say carefully, because icing sugar tends to fly everywhere in dusty white clouds at the slightest provocation) until you have a sandy, crumbly mixture. Press it into the base of the baking tin, using the back of a spoon (it helps if you dust it with icing sugar first) to flatten it out fairly evenly. Refrigerate while you get on with the filling.

To make the filling, melt the butter in a decent-sized china bowl (or something else microwave-proof) and then stir in the condensed milk and golden syrup. Microwave for five to seven minutes, stirring every minute or so – it will bubble up angrily but shouldn’t overflow, it’s better to stir it too much than to let it burn or overflow though – by which stage it should be thickened, and darkened into a rich, but still fairly light, golden colour. Let it sit for a bit to cool slightly, and then stir in the nuts. Pour this over the peanut butter base, using a spatula to get every last bit out and to smooth it out on top, then refrigerate till set and firm. 

Finally, microwave the chocolate in short bursts till it’s collapsing, and stir till it’s totally melted and smooth. Gently spread across the caramel layer, and allow to set either in the fridge or a cool place. 

Wait, I’ve achieved two other things lately: I zoomed to a party after one of my shifts and danced my face off with friends and had my sister-from-another-species vibe with Percy the corgi reconfirmed.
And, I dyed my hair purple. Well, more specifically, I stuck my hands in the pot of purple dye and kind of mussed up my hair (which was at the time a fading blue colour) in a haphazard manner just to see what would happen. It turned out pretty well, I think. In fact there’s probably also a metaphor for my life in there (or at least I’m self-centred enough to think that pretty much everything could be a metaphor for my life and indeed, that my life is fascinating enough to warrant multiple metaphors to represent it.) (I’m not sure if that made any sense but in my defense: oh man I’m tired.)
title from: Drake, Best I Ever Had, which is just…so Drake. “Sweat pants, hair tied, chillin’ with no make-up on/That’s when you’re the prettiest, I hope that you don’t take it wrong.”
music lately:
 
Carly Rae Jepsen, Run Away With Me. It’s like the best eighties song you don’t remember. 
 
Janet Jackson, No Sleep. It’s so dreamy. She’s back and she never even left.  
next time: I’m still working a ton more than usual but I’m gonna try so hard to cook for myself one time and blog about it before, I don’t know, the next financial year end rolls around. 

it’s a little secret, just the robinson’s affair

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got a secret, can you keep it, swear this one you’ll save

In a completely unsurprising turn of events, I fell asleep while writing this blog post and now have a very small window of opportunity – more like a mouse-hole of opportunity, or perhaps a fissure of opportunity – to get it done before I have to take off for work. In fact I have no real proof that I’m not still asleep right now, so please keep this in mind as you read on. What I’m saying is, I coolly absolve myself of any need to make any sense as I try to finish this thing without falling asleep again.

Speaking of cool absolution, I am so chill with being inspired by my own self, which is honestly kind of practical – I mean, I should theoretically like and use the recipes I’ve created. Last Sunday I was invited to my girlfriend’s flatmate’s fundraiser potluck for local charity Kaibosh, and with cheerful self-absorption I turned to my own cookbook to browse it for suitable recipes. The recipe for Secret Centre Mini Pavlovas caught my (probably half-asleep) eye, as it is both elegant and awesome yet easy and inexpensive to make.

gonna lock it in your pocket (I’m quoting the Pretty Little Liars theme song here btw)
I was absolutely correct about these chocolate stuffed meringues being easy to make, and for the filling I used Whittaker’s caramel chocolate, partly to be obnoxiously excessive and partly because I thought it would taste wonderful. 
However! Diligently I walked from my house to the potluck venue at In Good Company, and about halfway through the journey I came to a long set of concrete stairs. A set of concrete stairs that I once fell down. Aha, I thought, my old foe, we meet again. Luckily I’m going up, not down this time, hey? HEY? And then I fell up the stairs. 
While I was totally fine, with little more than a delicately bruised knee on top of doubtless another bruise that had only just barely healed – the container of meringues that I was carrying dropped and they got all banged up inside. They were still edible but the edges were all ragged and shattery and some of the tops were a bit crushed and essentially they weren’t particularly photogenic. So, I decided to forgo my own photos altogether and just use the ones that go with this recipe in my cookbook. I can’t remember whether it was Kim or Jason who took these, so a huge thank you to them both just to be safe. 

secret centre mini-pavlovas

a recipe by myself from my cookbook HungryandFrozen: The Cookbook. I just wrote out the instructions from memory rather than copy-pasting what was in the book, even though it’s all my own words (I don’t know why I did this) but either way the recipe is a lot simpler than the length of this recipe would make it seem – I just kind of overexplain stuff a bit. 

two egg whites
a pinch of salt
100g sugar
filling of your choice – in this case I used caramel-filled chocolate but dark chocolate is a good starting point

Set your oven to 150 C and line a baking tray with baking paper. 

Whisk the egg whites (or use an electric beater if you’re more sensible than me) with the pinch of salt till they’re white and a little fluffy and when you raise the whisk the fluffy egg white raises up with it and falls down slowly (this is known as “soft peak stage” but in case you needed an expanded explanation, there it is.) At this point slowly whisk in the sugar, initially about a teaspoon at a time, until the mixture becomes thicker and shiny and gorgeous. It should get to the point where it’s really very stiff, and if you raise the whisk up out of the bowl the mixture will be thick and dollopy instead of falling in ribbons off the whisk. God I hope these descriptions make sense! 

Place heaped spoonfuls of the thick, gleaming meringue onto the baking tray, leaving a little space in between to allow for expanding. Top each spoonful with a piece of chocolate, and then spoon over a little more meringue mixture, so that the chocolate is entirely encased in white. 

Bake for thirty minutes, although check them at around 20 – 25 minutes in, just in case your oven is more grunty than mine. They should be a delicate pale brown colour on top and appear firm. Allow them to cool in the oven with the door slightly ajar, and then carefully remove them from the paper, peeling it away from their fragile bases, and then all you have to worry about is eating them.

never not dazzled by fairy lights

While my falling asleep constantly or falling up stairs or generally being involved in some kind of falling is barely news, these secret centre mini pavlovas are, at least, notably spectacular. Crisp, dissolving meringue gives way to a burst of chocolate that you wouldn’t otherwise know what there unless someone forewarned you. While it’s sweetness upon sweetness, something in the mix of textures keeps it fresh – whether the chocolate is still warm and gushes into your mouth or cooled and firmed and crunchy under the brittle meringue. The potluck dinner was so fun and fortunately no-one minded the mini-pavlovas being a little smashed up, and there was a ton of delicious food and lovely people and a very decent amount of money was raised for Kaibosh, an outcome sweeter than a meringue secretly stuffed with chocolate.

Am about to fall asleep again but before I spatula my tired self out of bed to get ready to go, I wish to impart two more pieces of crucial information to you:

Kate and Jason (the stylist and aforementioned co-photographer for my cookbook, but also like, wonderful people in their own right aside from their relation to my cookbook) GOT A BEAUTIFUL DOG and I got to hang out with him today. He’s blindingly white and fluffy like a freshly laundered towel and so friendly and silly and I’m quite in love.

 this is Ghost, also a good name for me because I am dead after looking at his face

Secondly, I had another Crush Cake story published in The Toast! The Toast is probably the very best website on the internet, if I was pushed to choose one, and little makes me prouder than being able to contribute to their spectacularly high quality accumulation of writing.

This is a crush cake dedicated to Drake. If you’re not intrigued and inspired to immediately find out exactly what this is all about, then…I mean I can’t blame you, but that’s kind of a bummer. 

bonus! dog! so! blessed!
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title from: Mrs Robinson, that cheerfully weird song by Simon and Garfunkel. I love the punchy yet thoughtful guitar chords. And also the lyrics which sound like they were written by a committee passing notes to each other. 
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music lately:

Ummm so the video for Beyonce and Nicki Minaj’s song Feeling Myself is still only available via subscription to Tidal but this 30 second teaser alone is giving me more life than literally anything else right now. Watch it and feel yourself become a better human. 

King Kunta, Kendrick Lamar. Yeah, still can’t stop listening to this on repeat eh.  
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next time: I made ice cream so amazingly nice that I literally ate nearly a litre of it in one sitting. Maybe you’ll be able to make it soon too. 

let’s just make this part go faster

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mugging for the camera
Comfort food can take many forms. For me it’s usually something that gives you the masticatory impression of gently sliding into a warm bath, like a slowly-stirred risotto or a bowl of soft, butter-saturated polenta or an enormous pile of mashed potato, but sometimes comfort food is more about the act itself than whatever form the food ends up taking. Sometimes it can simply be like, it’s 2am and I just finished work and it’s too windy to stand up straight and you’re sad and I’m sad and I bought you this bag of crisps from a 24/7 dairy because the line at BK was too long and also I didn’t know what else to do but this $3 gesture represents a lot more than merely just crunchy sodium goods…y’know? 
But sometimes comfort food is very obvious and straightforward, in this case: a chocolate peanut butter cake that you make in a mug (the most comforting vessel!) microwaved briefly so that quite instantly you can reward yourself for existing with a piping hot, warm, rich cake. Just for you. I’d never made a mug cake before but I’d sure heard of them: in my completely unresearched experience mug cakes started off as the sort of thing that an enthusiastic relative would email you accompanied by sparkly gifs of puppies and a phrase along the lines of “This is the most dangerous cake in the world…..Because now chocolate cake IS OnLy five minutes away!” A few rotations of the earth and the very simple recipe is now a staple of pinterest and has morphed into such things as “choc chip cookie in a mug” (why would a cookie be in a mug though) and “red velvet layer cake in a mug” (this does not sound comforting or fast tbh.) However you come to it, and whatever your opinion on microwaves, there’s something thoroughly charming about going from point A – you standing there with no cake – to point B – you eating a small cake from a mug – within about five minutes. And so, in the mood for sugar and immediacy, I recently made my first mug cake. 
 stay inside, drink more coffee, make cake really suddenly

I made this recipe up based on ingredients I already had in my possession, basically just whatever dusts and pastes I could find that might together form a half-decent cake. A little cocoa, a little coconut sugar (included for its extraordinarily deep caramel flavour, but just use brown sugar or plain sugar if you like) a little peanut butter for those this-is-a-fun-cake vibes…and after a long 90 seconds it transformed into a soft, meltingly chocolately, utterly delicious brownie-type thing, which I poured cream all over and ate in a chocolate-scented haze of beatific calm. All of which could be yours really, really quickly if you make yourself this.

chocolate peanut butter mug cake

a recipe by myself

two tablespoons butter (around thirty grams)
one tablespoon coconut sugar or brown sugar
two tablespoons cocoa powder
two tablespoons peanut butter
quarter of a cup milk
a pinch of baking powder
a couple of squares of chocolate, roughly chopped

Place the butter in the mug that you’re using and soften it in the microwave. Stir in all the ingredients – a teaspoon with a long handle or a narrow whisk is good for this – and add a little extra milk if it seems toooo stiff. It should come to about halfway up the mug. I microwaved it for a minute on high, then another thirty seconds, by which stage it was firm enough on the surface for me to decide it was ready to eat. 

Plunge a spoon into the cake, pour cream or milk into it, and eat all by yourself. 

It doesn’t rise very much, mind you, but I was astounded at how filling it was, so what it lacks in height it makes up for in cellular density I guess? Also for the work of minutes that you can count on one hand it’s a pretty tidy result. In fact pretty tidy is underselling it: it’s really, completely, wonderfully delicious.

This blog post is also going to be fast and mug-sized, but to distract you (and indeed, myself) from this I will leave you with Wednesday the silly beautiful tiny dingus of a cat being a literal loaf.

loaf cat (the demonic glow is coming from my heater/the camera on my phone not being able to deal with said glow)

Wait, one more thing! If anyone out there could please recommend a rad web designer that would be excellent. I’m thinking about refreshing this old blog here since it currently looks thoroughly ancient and un-cute. I don’t know anything about anything so am hoping to go by personal recommendations for people who do good work like this, and am also hoping that my blog can undergo some kind of movie makeover transformation to the effect of a stunning brunette removing her glasses and undoing her ponytail and suddenly everyone gasps and notices how bodacious she is. 

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title from: mate, it has been a while since I’ve quoted RENT on here. This song that I quote today, I Should Tell You, is so fragmented and tentative and nervous and beautiful. Jonathan Larson could really, really write. 
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 music lately:

I don’t know why Anna Kendrick’s voice in the Don’t You Forget About Me bit of the final number in Pitch Perfect makes me feel emotional, but there you have it. (I saw Pitch Perfect 2 last night, there is wonderful singing and Anna Kendrick is great and it’s so weirdly racist and many other bad things! That’s my review.) 

Shazam, by Spiderbait, from one of my favourite music genres, “bratty”.
Lorde, Royals. I hadn’t listened to this song in forever and ever and wow it is still such a tune.  
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 next time: roast chicken in a mug! I’m kidding.  

if green pears you like, if old chairs you like, if back stairs you like, if love affairs you like

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Poire Belle Helene – pretty Helen pear – man, everything sounds so much better in French, but then do the French sit around being like man everything sounds so romantic in English? I, uh, I doubt it. 

Because I am heedlessly whimsical and waggishly adorable, when the notion strikes me to make a classic French dessert for my lunch in its entirety, I indulge that whim. Hard. Some might describe that as not providing one’s body with enough necessary nutrients or a lot of work for a small result or even simply annoying, but I’ve said the magic word – whimsical – and as such am exonerated from all such opinions. For what it’s worth though, later that day I was later horribly ill and had to go home from work but I refuse to blame this poached pear in chocolate sauce. I don’t actually know what I’m blaming – it was all very mysterious and came out of nowhere, but I’ve eaten both pears and chocolate since and been utterly fine, so who knows. I hate going home sick from work – firstly when you’re a bartender you have to try and find someone to cover you at the last minute, secondly you miss out on hours, thirdly there’s this sense I have with hospo instilled from my ballet days where like, you can be coughing up blood and yet the show must go on – but maaaaan I was sick. Fortunately I have a marvelous girlfriend who was able to immediately administer panadol and cold flannels and such, but wow it was horrible. Um, anyway, this recipe is really delicious and you should definitely make it without fear of incapacitation. Definitely.

There’s this scene in the musical Company where the lead character, Robert, is recounting a story to a woman that he’s trying to sleep with, about another woman whom he tried to sleep with – in this story they had just met and were thoroughly into each other and rented a motel for the night, she then suggested that he go buy champagne, he drove to the nearest shop and bought all the champagne he could carry, sped back to the motel and – he says devastatingly – I could not find it. He then drove around for three hours looking for the motel before leaving. This was me, but with a block of Lindt dark chocolate that my mum had sent me. I was like, this would be perfect for the Poire Belle Helene whim that I’ve been taken with, and then I could not find it. I then ransacked my bedroom for twenty minutes. I don’t know how a person loses a block of chocolate in their room but I’m sure I’ll find it somewhere ridiculous when I least expect it, like in my sock drawer or on my head or melted and dripping down the mirror. I wanted some damn Poire Belle Helene though, so scooted to the corner dairy and bought some milk chocolate to use instead. A fascinating story, I know!

Honestly poached pears have never appealed to me that much as a dessert – if I wanted a damp fruit I could just open a can of them, thank you, don’t insult me with this pretense of a pudding – but cover them in chocolate sauce and suddenly I get it. Poire Belle Helene was a dessert invented by that clever man Escoffier in the late 1800s in honour of an opera (that was what people did for fun back then, I guess, and I’m all for it) and it’s a fetching combination – fragrant, sweet pear with creamy, rich chocolate sauce, the gritty yet yielding fruit against the silky, warm chocolate. It’s blatantly a good idea for lunch. My recipe here is for one person (hence the flighty name) but the quantities are easy enough to increase.

poire belle helene seulement pour vous  (poire belle helene for you only) 

a recipe by myself. Serves one.

one firm pear
four tablespoons sugar
two cups of water
a tablespoon or so of riesling or sweet white wine, if you have it
one teaspoon vanilla extract 

75g milk chocolate
half a cup of cream
a tablespoon of butter
a pinch of salt

Peel the pear, leaving the stalk intact. If it’s a bit wobbly and won’t sit upright, cut a small slice out of the base so it’s steady, otherwise leave as is. Put the sugar, water, riesling and vanilla in a small pot and lower the pear into it – it probably won’t be submerged but this is okay. Bring the pan to the boil and then lower to a simmer, turning the pear over occasionally so that all sides spend time submerged by the hot syrup. Stick a skewer into the pear after about ten minutes, and if it’s soft and yielding then you’re good to go. Remove it from the syrup and place in the bowl that you’re going to serve it in.

In a small pan, heat the cream till the surface is wobbly and it seems like it’s just about to bubble. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate, and allow it to sit for a minute – the heat of the cream will melt the chocolate instantly. Stir briskly till all the chocolate is melted and you have a smooth, shiny sauce. Stir in the butter and the salt and then pour lavishly over the pear. Drink the rest of the sauce or save it for something else, up to you. 

aggressively autumnal

Obviously this makes a fairly gorgeous pudding to be had at the usual time of after dinner, but honestly, in the middle of the day, eaten contemplatively and reverently at the kitchen table while wearing stretchy pants and a large, soft hoodie and wooly socks…it was sublime. Milk chocolate brings a different vibe than 80% cocoa dark chocolate but I’m such a fan of its friendly, vaguely caramelly flavour. Whatever chocolate you use, try to make sure it’s good, that is, that it’s actually going to impart some kind of chocolate flavour at all, you know? The pears can be any old trash but the quality of the chocolate is really going to make or break this thing. That said, I used the fakest, cheapest vanilla essence in the syrup because it’s all I had, and I manage to sleep at night (that’s not true, I’m a terrible sleeper, but it’s not from synthetic vanilla guilt at least!)

chomp

So the most exciting news in my life right now is that my flat now has A CAT. It’s actually so hard for me to type this because just the knowledge that there is a cat in my presence makes me want to do triumphant forward rolls around the room for a good solid forty minutes. Oh sure, you say, cats are nice, but do you have any idea how fervently my heart has been yearning for one? I mean, if you read this blog you should have a decent idea since I go on about it quite a lot, but if not, just imagine the ferocious intensity of a thousand perturbed alligators: that’s me. And now, a cat! Just as I was at the pinnacle of my I-have-no-cat feelings, the universe threw me a bone in the form of my flatmate, who was a last-minute replacement cat sitter for a friend going overseas for work for several months. Isn’t that wonderful? 
caaaaaaaaaaaat faaaaace
business cat has key performance indicators to think about and doesn’t have time for you right now, Bob

Her name is Wednesday and she has a tiny crooked tail and a curious disposition and she’s just the happiest little nubbin ever. And so am I. 
In the wider scheme of things there is a lot of terribleness out there right now (well, there always is, but right now it’s bubbling closer to the surface) and while I have nothing to say that would change or help, I would just like to draw your attention to the following two things while I’m here: if you’re able to contribute to the people of Nepal following the horrifying earthquake that hit them, this FB post has some very useful information. If you are able to contribute to the people of Baltimore in the wake of ongoing police brutality, a wonderful woman I follow on Twitter is doing great, highly transparent work gathering essential supplies for people and can be supported via her Indiegogo account here. That is all. 
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title from: the gloriously sassy title song from the glorious musical Anything Goes. Okay so you should absolutely listen to the stridently excellent Patti LuPone sing it on the 1988 Broadway cast recording and then I urge you to watch Sutton Foster breezily belt it out and then tap dance effortlessly at the 2011 Tony Awards, and then speaking of things called Tony, I really truly adore Lady Gaga and Tony Bennet’s take on it. Finally Melanie C’s version is so gorgeous. Listen to them all or get outta here, quite frankly. It’s just one of the best show tunes there is and Cole Porter, who wrote it, is an actual genius. 
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music lately:
DVS’s brand new mixtape DVTV is SO VERY good, as is he. 
Janelle Monae, Yoga. “Get off my areola” is honestly the best line of 2015.
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next time: anything goes! (loooool)

and my friends i’ve returned to wish you a happy christmas

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Have yourself a very little blog post: this one. It’s Christmas Eve and for the first time in my life I’m not at home, I’m in fact all alone in Wellington. Well, this is not entirely true: there is also Ariel the cat, who I’m simultaneously looking after in the absence of her owners and also trying with zero chill whatsoever to befriend. The reason I’m here and not up home is because I have work tomorrow (another first) and while it’s not ideal to not be seeing my family, it is at least interesting seeing what this completely different experience is like.

I baked some cookies over the last couple of days, mostly just so I could feel like it’s Christmas, since baking is What I Do at this time of year, and partly because I wanted something to pad out a work Secret Santa gift. These cranberry and white chocolate cookies of Nigella’s are completely serviceable items for this time of year should you feel pressed to churn out some baked goods yourself, they are sturdy and durable and last for ages, they are delicious yet comfortingly unchallenging to eat; they are very easy to make; and the uncooked dough tastes brilliant. Dried cranberries, like sour little jewels, pair magnificently with sweet, buttery white chocolate, and the red and white has a kind of christmassy holly-and-snow vibe going on which is pleasing. If you want you could add pistachio nuts to really go all out on the colour theme, but going nut-less is way cheaper.

white chocolate cranberry cookies

adapted barely from a recipe by Nigella Lawson. A lot of white chocolate chips and buttons out there taste of absolutely nothing, just a vague waxy textural sensation, so try to get something that tastes like…something. Otherwise take a bar or two of white chocolate and chop it up.

125g soft butter
half a cup sugar
half a cup brown sugar
one egg
half a cup oats
one cup flour
half a teaspoon baking powder
half a teaspoon salt
a slosh of vanilla extract
half a cup dried cranberries
half a cup white chocolate chips or buttons

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

Using a wooden spoon or similar, beat the butter and the sugars together in a large bowl till thick, creamy and light. And delicious. Beat in the egg, then fold in the remaining ingredients. Refrigerate the mixture for about 10-15 minutes. 

Take tablespoons of the cookie dough and place on the baking tray, an inch or so apart. Flatten slightly with the back of a fork and then bake for fifteen minutes, although check after ten minutes – they should be a significant, but not overly dark, golden colour. They’ll be really soft at this point but they’ll firm up on cooling, so carefully transfer them to a rack or plate of some kind and carry on cooking the rest of the dough. 

Makes 24 or so cookies, depending on the size you make and also how much cookie dough you eat. It’s really good cookie dough. 

Bonus recipe: Ginger Beer Shandy (or just Ginger Beer if you don’t like the word shandy for some reason.) Take ginger beer, take beer beer, make sure they’re both ice cold and pour half and half into a glass. Drink with utter joy! Any kind of lager or pale ale is good here, and even though I like the idea of the circularity of using ginger beer with the beer, it’s actually even nicer with dry ginger ale. This is also a Nigella recipe, from Forever Summer. Thanks, Nigella! You are the reason for the season. The season being “the concept of love and also the endlessness of time itself.” 

If tomorrow is indeed Christmas for you (well, for many it’s just another day) and you’re kicking back with like, Buck’s Fizz and a laughably enormous feast and so on, maybe think a nice thought for those in hospo and other roles who are going to work as you recline and open gifts. I’m not even going to try and front like my job is as arduous as being in an emergency ward or being a taxi driver or whatever, but like, if you’re working and not in bed then you’re working and not in bed, you know? Whatever happens when the clock ticks over to the 25th, I hope it’s a truly swell day for you, but also that every single other day that follows is also excellent (getting into the same territory here as when I used to as a child make wishes with increasingly nervous caveats, like, I wish for a thousand dollars but it can’t fall from the sky onto my head and squash me.) Basically I want things to always be nice forever, that’s not so much to ask this Christmas, huh?

Finally, in case you missed it and feel like cooking up some last-minute trouble for yourself, my previous blog post was a list of recipes I’ve written up here which would make excellent edible gifts. These cookies are now a post-script to said list.


title from: Sufjan Stevens, Sister Winter. When he’s not doing his usual material, this guy specialises in Christmas music that is aggressively plaintive and gently devastating, which is sometimes just what your ears need to hear. 

music lately:

Christmas Bells, from the original Broadway cast recording of RENT. I mean. This song is somehow ridiculous and ridiculously touching at the same time, and has to be one of the very few songs about Christmas that can claim to contain relationship exposition, drug deals, heavily layered syncopation, parodies of existing Christmas songs, and a reference to Steuben glass. It’s wondrous.

Robyn, With Every Heartbeat. This song just slays me, is all.

Taylor Swift, Out of the Woods. This is so dreamy and urgent and Roxette-ish and so perfect and I can’t stop listening.

Next time: it might be 2015, but it might not, because I am sure I won’t let one last opportunity for pre-new-year maudlin introspection pass me by! 

i still love you, girl from mars

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crunch time
 
Well. Gosh. I hung out with friends on Saturday night and as we watched the election results unfold we all started to feel increasingly bleak and baffled and like getting very drunk. As I said in my last post, pre-election, everyone’s politics are personal and you’re entitled to them, but it should come as no surprise whatsoever that I’m not so much “left-leaning” as “riding through your town on a sustainably farmed unicorn brandishing a rainbow flag and leaving a fearsome trail of blood from my liberal bleeding heart”. And so, the results were not what I was hoping for and voting for. But here we are, and all that can be done is that we try to support the vulnerable and the needy and the children and so on and make the best of things, yeah? Which is what we should all be doing no matter who is in power, and ultimately what I’d hope anyone in power would be aiming for in some form. Also, said friends had adopted a cat that day and other friends brought their pet corgi along to the party so there was much comforting snuggling and patting to be had.

I made this Mars Bar Cornflake Slice to bring along, thinking rightly that something sticky-sweet and deliciously immature would be ideal on such an intense night. It is adapted from a recipe in my queen Nigella Lawson’s book Feast, and you’re actually supposed to spoon the mixture into little cupcake papers. I thought I had tons of them but could only find like, seven, so panicked and threw it all into a flan dish and hoped for the best. And joyfully, it’s so damn excellent in slice form. I was worried it might be a little plain – I considered putting caramelised peanuts on it, or drizzling over melted dark chocolate – but it was stupidly perfect as is.


If you haven’t had a Mars bar in a while (and why not, when their ad insists that a Mars a day helps you work, rest AND play, all things I could use some help with) they are a layer of soft squishy chocolate nougat, with a layer of caramel sauce, all covered in chocolate. The breakfasty-comforting taste of cornflakes – slightly malty, slightly nutty – along with all that caramel and sugar is wonderful. It’s crunchy, it’s chewy, it involves melting chocolate bars with butter, and it’s so, so easy. I liked it so much that I made another trayful this morning just to have them around (and it allowed me to feel like a good flatmate and leave a note on the fridge telling everyone else to help themselves to it.)

mars bar cornflake slice

Adapted from a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s important book Feast

three 75g Mars Bars (or similar weight made up of whatever size bars you can find)
70g butter 
four cups of cornflakes
a pinch of sea salt (optional)

Break the mars bars into pieces and melt together slowly over a low heat with the butter. The nougat filling will take the longest to break down and probably won’t incorporate entirely, so don’t worry if the mixture isn’t completely smooth. Stir in the cornflakes and spatula the lot into a baking paper lined baking dish. Use the spatula to flatten it out evenly, sprinkle over a little salt if you like, then refrigerate till solid – around half an hour. Cut into thick slices with a large knife. 

You can use whatever kind of baking tray you like, but I used a round metal flan dish. I think I chose it subconsciously because I have this thing where if I’m cutting up a slice from a round dish it feels like all the rounded-edged pieces are mere offcuts and I get to eat them all. Even though I’m going to eat it all anyway? Gotta get your thrills somehow, I suppose.

 
I enjoyed being up home, trying to get the cats to bond with me, talking about knitting with nanna, making dinner for Dad and a birthday cake for Mum and generally having swell family times. Roger, pictured above, has been with the family since 2007 and my weekend at home was pretty much the first time he’s ever shown an interest in me. I am a pushover who will gladly accept this.
I have been selling heaps of my cookbooks which is exciting – let me remind you that if you want to buy a copy, going directly through me is your only chance while my stocks last. If reading my words isn’t enough for you, and how could it possibly be, you can also listen to this super cool interview I did with Harry Evans for his radio show Common Ground. We discussed libraries and halloumi and the election and the writing process and social media and I got to pick two songs to play and it was just really, really fun and lovely. You can either listen on iTunes or on Harry’s site. Yay interviews!

title from: 90s cuties Ash and their song Girl From Mars. 

music lately: 

Underworld, Rez. Listening to this song honestly makes me feel like I’m a flower petal adrift on late summer evening breeze. Literally.

Street Chant, Salad Daze. It’s so so dark and shadowy and hypnotic and good.

Charli XCX, How Can I. Sad pop sad pop, whatcha gonna do when it comes for you.

Buzzcocks, Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t). Oh, this song!
 
Next time: I was given a ton of grapefruit from someone’s tree which is pretty exciting, therefore maybe it will be something grapefruitly?

fancy plans and pants to match: nautilus estate wines, part two

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Bread and Butter Chicken

Well hello there, and welcome to another installment of Fancy Plans and Pants to Match, where I overexplain somewhat apologetically about how sometimes I get cool free stuff because I’m an amazing blogger and cookbook author, and try to write about said free stuff in a way that makes me seem charming and only minimally insufferable. The name of this segment comes from a quote by Jimmy James, a character in the brilliant 90s sitcom NewsRadio.

This is part two of a series of recipes I created for Nautilus Estate wines. Last time I wrote about lemonade pancakes with strawberry sauce and pasta with chorizo and feta and chilli butter, and this time I’ve got more deliciousness for you. I hate to repeat text I’ve already written verbatim but I’m gonna power through the pain anyway, because…everything I said last time is still relevant and I’m not going to try and think of a synonym for every single word I wrote when the original will do fine. But consider yourself warned that (just) the following two paragraphs appeared when I previously wrote about this stuff.

So here’s the thing: Nautilus Estate got in touch with me and asked if I’d like to develop some recipes for them to go with their fancy fancy wines. Oh my gosh yes, said I. I love wine, I love thinking up recipes, I love receiving a butt-tonne of wine in the mail, and honestly it’s just nice to be thought of as someone who could do this, right? And then a whole lot of stuff happened in my life. Finally though, I got around to actually completing my original task. So thanks Nautilus, not only for the wine itself, but for your infinite patience and your “hey it’s cool we can wait the wine will probably be kind of useful right now anyway” attitude.

The pitch: Nautilus Vintage Rose 2011 and Cuvee Marlborough NV Brut. Both fizzy and fizzing with deliciousness. All I have to do is come up with some recipes to complement what they’ve already got going on. Important note: I cannot format a swishy little accent on the ‘e’ in rose/cuvee for some reason so when you read it please pronounce it “rose-ayyyyy” and “coo-vayyyy” in your head

fancy pudding with a fancy wine for a fancy lady who needs a synonym for fancy

What happened: somehow these recipes to match the wines came to me pretty immediately and fully-formed, perhaps because that’s something I am very good at doing (in the interest of being a self-deprecating New Zealander I feel like I should match this boastfulness with one of my failings: I can’t ride a bicycle. Self-deprecation, the wine matching of personal self-esteem!) The rose’s delicate but definite berry sweetness could handle something rich and buttery, and I liked the idea of pairing such an elegant drink with something so hearty and cosy. Not that I wouldn’t serve this bread and butter chicken to people I was trying to impress – it’s still at that level, but also really very easy and plain and comforting. Chicken, butter, bread: all as wondrous as it sounds, and ideal with a sparklingly ripe-flavoured wine like the rose.

butter is really delicious: I’m highly qualified to tell you this

bread and butter chicken

a recipe by myself
recommended wine pairing: Nautilus Estate Vintage Rose 2011

four chicken thighs, skin on, organic and free range if possible because I don’t like to be prescriptive but oh damn they taste so much better
100g butter
three thick slices stale white bread, eg white sourdough, those Vienna loaves, that kinda thing 
½ cup walnuts
fresh thyme leaves, around a tablespoon.

Set oven to 200 C, and place the chicken thighs snugly in a roasting dish. Cube the butter and scatter evenly on top of the chicken thighs. Put the dish in the oven and leave for around 40 minutes. 

Meanwhile, tear the bread into very small pieces, allowing some of it to crumble into breadcrumb dust and some of the pieces to be more crouton-esque. Basically just rip it up and whatever you do will be correct. Either roughly chop the walnuts and tip them in, or just break them up in your hands – they don’t need to be too small. Stir in the thyme leaves. 

Remove the chicken from the oven – it should be very crisp and golden and the juice should run clear when you puncture the thicker end of the thigh with a skewer. Scatter the breadcrumb-walnut mixture evenly over the top, and spoon over plenty of the buttery pan juices (there will be plenty!) so they can absorb it all. Some of the breadcrumbs will stay on top of the chicken, some will fall down into the spaces between the thighs, but it will all taste incredible. Return to the oven for around ten minutes or until the breadcrumbs look crisp and golden. 

I’d serve it with lemon wedges and a salad that has lots of peppery rocket leaves and flat leaf parsley in it, but to be honest I just ate one of the thighs with my bare hands straight from the oven with a glass of wine and it was quite perfect. 

I thought the more crisp, full flavour of the cuvee could happily lift the bittersweet and majorly-sweet grapefruit and white chocolate curds. On that note, I thought making a lemon curd thing but with white chocolate instead would be super fun, and oh, how right I was. I use a particular technique that perhaps in time they’ll call HungryandFrozen’s Unclassic Method, where I just throw all the ingredients in at once and stir over a low heat till the butter melts and it somehow comes together. The white chocolate curd has a rich vanilla-custard flavour and the grapefruit curd has a gentle sharpness, which, with the thick, tart yoghurt, is all so good you’ll want to say “OH SHUT UP” to no one in particular after having a mouthful because you don’t know what to do with yourself. As well as tasting excellent, the texture of the cool, bubbly brut goes well with the thick, saucy sweetness of this pudding.

grapefruit curd, white chocolate curd, greek yoghurt

a recipe by myself. Serves two – four, depending on the size of your serving glasses, I recommend going on the smaller side all the same and eating the remaining ones yourself at another happy time if you’ve only got two people to feed.
recommended wine pairing: Nautilus Estate Cuvee Marlborough NV Brut

two grapefruit
four eggs
three quarters of a cup of sugar
150g butter
100g white chocolate chopped as fine as you can be bothered to
several tablespoons of thick, plain Greek yoghurt

In a smallish pan, mix two eggs and half a cup of the sugar. Squeeze in the grapefruit juice and stir again. Dice half the butter into small cubes and tip them into the pan. Over a very low heat, patiently, stir this mixture constantly till the butter melts and it all thickens. Once it has all come together and is looking thick and saucy, but not necessarily too thick – better safe than sorry – remove from the heat and stick the pan into a sink which has a couple of inches of cold water in it, stirring constantly to lower the heat of the pan’s contents. Spatula this into a bowl and refrigerate while you get on with the white chocolate: whisk together the remaining two eggs and the remaining quarter cup of sugar, then add the cubed butter and chopped white chocolate. Again, over a very low heat, stir it constantly till the butter and chocolate have just melted and it becomes thick and smooth. Stick this pan in a sink of cold water too, just to make sure it doesn’t carry on cooking in the hot pan. Transfer this into a bowl and also refrigerate – ideally for at least an hour, but you can make the two curds a whole day ahead. 

Layer up generous spoonfuls of the grapefruit and white chocolate curd and Greek yoghurt in small serving bowls (125ml or so but larger is fine) and serve. Some mint leaves or chopped pistachios might be nice here, but there’s plenty going on already. 

silkier than a silkworm in fetching silk stockings descending gently to the earth from a silk parachute

bread and butter chicken: still delicious, don’t forget

from a scale of 1 to the entire verse of Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads: As with last time, still a solid eight – this is so much nicer than the wine I usually drink, and it was sincerely thrilling having so much of it, with my only task ahead something I already adore: developing recipes.

would I do this for not-free? again, as with last time, I mean, I’m not just going to give people content for nothing – wait, I write a food blog – oh you know what I mean – but I would definitely buy this wine off the shelf now if it was on special or I was feeling, oh I don’t know, employed. It tastes excellent and the people behind it are blatantly pretty cool, so go forth and seek it, I say.

earnest thanks for making me feel fancy to: …Nautilus Estate! You rule.

finally, some slightly unrelated blog admin: my rent is not your problem, but I can so feel in my bones that there’s at least one eccentric millionaire who reads this blog and is fond of me in a monetary way. What I’m saying is, hi, this is a periodic reminder that you can totally donate to hungryandfrozen.com to help me continue to exist and to remain on the fringes of that fancy life. But also I shall not be fussed if you don’t. I’m kind of just trying to trick super rich people into Robin Hooding themselves to me. But also trying to pay rent and buy food and such. Anyway: consider it, if you like!

leave me with some kind of proof it’s not a dream

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I’m not a particularly good sleeper, but I am very, very good at dreaming. Sometimes too good – waking up and realising oh, Lea Seydoux definitely didn’t txt me, oh, I don’t actually get to go to a private dress rehearsal of Wicked, oh, I didn’t find masses of two dollar coins in the grass and clawingly scoop them up into my handbag, oh, I wasn’t in an episode of Bob’s Burgers where we hung out with people who hadn’t quiiiiite realised their 1960s heyday was over and drove a Kombi van to go shooting paint at trees in rapidly changing layers of colour. (Am not too fussed about that last one not being true: experiencing it in my mind once was quite enough.)

Anyway, dreams are generally only of interest to the person whose subconscious they materialise from, but in this case I woke up and was like, woohoo! I’m a sugary prophet! Because I dreamed I was making a cake without checking if I had all the necessary ingredients (so far, so realistic) and upon realising I was out of cocoa, I used chocolate milk instead. I didn’t get so far as baking it, but the dream-mixture definitely tasted good.

Dreams can come true, ya know. But when I first tried making a cake like the one in my dream, it failed completely – brickishly solid, without having the good grace to turn into a giant cookie, dry and sandy, a miserable waste of ingredients, to be honest. (And then I was like: hey, could make cake pops with this in the future! Not wasteful after all! And then I neglectfully left it on the bench for a week before guiltily binning it.)

Not one to be deterred by my dreams not coming true immediately, I decided to try again and to be a bit more thoughtful – I had a look around at cake recipes that had a larger proportion of liquid in them, I added some baking soda, and so on. And it worked! As if a chocolate milk cake wasn’t cute enough on its own I decided that adding a milk chocolate ganache on top would both amplify the flavour and more importantly, make the cake’s name reeeeally adorable.

chocolate milk milk chocolate cake

recipe by myself

 170g soft butter
one cup sugar
two eggs
one and a half cups flour
half a teaspoon baking soda
one teaspoon baking powder
three quarters of a cup of chocolate milk

 150g milk chocolate
quarter of a cup of cream

 Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Line a 21cm springform caketin with baking paper and grease the sides. This is a simple cake –  beat the butter and sugar together in a large bowl till all creamy and delicious, beat in the eggs, sift in the flour and baking soda/baking powder (if you’re not going to be bothered sifting, which I totally get by the way, at least make sure there are no baking soda lumps. They will taste disgusting.) Mix altogether, stir in the chocolate milk, spatula it all into the caketin and bake for around 40 minutes, or until the top feels firm and springy. 

 Allow the cake to cool. Break the chocolate into squares and gently melt it together with the cream, stirring plenty so it doesn’t catch and burn. Tip the lot onto the cake, spread it around with the flat side of a knife, and festoon with sprinkles or in whichever manner you find pleasing-est. I used rainbow sugar that I bought in San Francisco. 

Dreamy as this cake undeniably is, I’d have to describe the actual chocolate flavour as…aggressively mild. It’s like the slightest, barest hint of cocoa warmth against the comfortingly plain, buttery cake. It’s really good though, and seriously, potential cuteness is a good reason to do something, okay? But if you don’t have chocolate milk in your fridge or the energy to obtain some, regular milk is fine, especially with the soft sweet flavour of the cream-rich milk chocolate ganache tying it all together. It’s delicious. Oh, I really did make a good cake. 

Is it worse to never have a particular dream come true, or to have it come true and then thoroughly un-materialise itself? As I’ve said before, I’m more of a do-it-then-worry-about-regretting-it type than a don’t-do-it-and-wonder-forevermore type, but. Look. Okay. May was a difficult month for a ton of reasons, some within my control and some of them dizzyingly, confusingly, out of my control. This one thing though, I really can’t tell whether or not I could’ve changed it: once the last copy of my cookbook is sold from the last bookstore…it will be out of print. And my publishers, Penguin, won’t be publishing another one with me.

I’m not telling you this to garner sympathy (note, I love attention but hate pity, there is a difference – pity is mortifying, attention is wonderful) and I’m not telling you so I can vent unprofessionally about Penguin, because that would be really stupid of me, and I’m so grateful for the start they gave me. I’m just telling you because I really can’t hide much and it’s my nature to be all “hello there perfect stranger, let me tell you about my childhood triumphs, tragedies, and grass-related rashes” and because my cookbook sprang from this food blog, it would feel fake and strange to be carrying on writing to you as if nothing had happened. This is a big deal. This cookbook has been my life, years before Penguin even approached me to write it. I just knew it had to happen.

Whenever anything else was getting me down, I had this cookbook to comfort me: I’m a real published author, like Nigella Lawson and Ann M Martin and Virginia Woolf, my words can be bought, my recipes are on paper in peoples’ homes, becoming part of their lives, my name is on a cover page, I’m real. And so when I received this news, I felt like an utter, embarrassed failure. Like the fabled Emperor upon having his lack of New Clothes pointed out. Like maybe if my book had sold better, if I’d done more, if I’d quit my job sooner, if I’d not been so honest on here, if I’d been in Auckland, if I’d been richer with more resources, if I’d been better…then things might be different.

So uh, luckily for you all I held off from writing this blog post while I was entrenched in that particular swamp of miserable self-pity (I’m the only one allowed to pity me, thank you very much.)

This is where I’m at now: still really very unhappy, which I think is quite understandable, yeah? But pragmatic. Dignified. I’m not actually a failure. A major publishing house approached me, I wrote a book, a team of wonderful talented friends helped give it life, it was published, I can still go into bookstores and find myself immortalised alongside authors who have had a massive impact on my life (okay, alongside Nigella) and it’s still a really, really brilliant book. I mean, it has references to Homer Simpson and Ron Swanson and The Big Chill, but also to classic French sauce techniques and traditional hand-made ice cream and what I imagined to be Americana. It has a chapter of recipes you can make when you might be kinda tipsy. It has halloumi cheesecake and apple crumble for breakfast and a cake with sachet juice powder in it and a vegan chocolate cake that I’ve been making since I was about eight years old. It’s so excellent and I’m still so proud of it and of myself. It was not an overnight success (okay, some might say it was not at all a success, but some can go stand on a piece of Lego) and I will not be an overnight success, but I’m gonna get there.

At times like this I like to think of one of my idols, Broadway star Idina Menzel. She got a record deal off the back of her being in the cult-hit/actual-hit Broadway show RENT. She made the most amazing, confessional stream-of-consciousness overproduced album, the record company didn’t know what to do with her, and after a vaguely successful lead single, they dropped her. Now she’s got a Tony award for being Elphaba in Wicked, she’s the voice of a lead character in Frozen, one of the most successful Disney movies yet, and she’s performing in Radio City Hall in New York this month. Original copies of her debut album now sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. And look at another idol of mine, TV character Leslie Knope. In the face of adversity, budget cuts, uncooperative gatekeepers and incompetency, she Did A Lot Of Stuff (I’m getting tired here and don’t want this blog post to go on forever, so just watch Parks and Recreation, okay? Start from season 2.)

Also – I mean – at least I had my dream come true at all, for a little bit. It’s not like everyone who did buy my book has to throw it in the bin by law now. The recipes are still great. And to be fair, this is ultimately something that just affects me. It’s not like I have a failed charity or…other failed good thing. It’s just one person’s cookbook. You don’t even need to care that this has happened to me. It’s one of those “You are Lisa Simpson” moments and there will be other publishers and other opportunities and other huge, spectacular things. I’m so unsure and yet so sure of that at the same time.

My ambition to be a Lorde-Kanye-One-Direction level famous cookbook author has not wavered in the slightest, in fact it still hasn’t occurred to me that I might have any other path in life. (There’s an upside to studiously ignoring logic! Strident self-belief!) But if nothing else, it’s good to know I can still make small, chocolate cake-sized dreams come true, all by myself.

And I am now what you might call “professionally single”. Which is my spin doctor way of saying “deeply unemployed and set adrift upon a cruel river of uncertainty”. But yeah, I am still full of words and ideas and recipes and ice cold brilliance and if anyone important is reading this and wants to make something of it, you know who to call. (Call me. Just in case you’re so important that you’ve forgotten how to pick up on subtle hints.)
And uh, speaking of framing things so they suit you, I guess I could call my book a cult hit now? An underground sensation? A huge, important point on my timeline, but not the last one. With that in mind, there’s no better time to rush into shops or online to buy this book, if you haven’t already. It’s so good, and nothing will ever change that.
PS: a terrific radiant humble thing that happened to me lately is that I had writing published on The Toast! Which I correctly believe is one of the very best websites on the whole internet. 
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title from: Paramore, The Only Exception. I love song, with its mix of learned doubt yet unwavering hope. 
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music lately: 
Ida Maria, Oh My God. Her voice is all husky and aggressive and gorgeous and so is this song. 
Spice Girls, Too Much. Viva forever! 
Frank Ocean, Bad Religion. His Channel Orange album remains perfect and this song remains burningly, achingly, hurts-to-listen-to-it good. 
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next time: hopefully some really cool news or even slightly cool news. Or just news that is neutral but not sad and involving a long drawn-out blog post about my many feelings regarding it. Also: I made halloumi and hash brown burgers AND jam so it will likely be a recipe for one of those cool things.