Category: Cookies, Biscuits and Slices

don’t feel so alone, got the radio on

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

Radiokaka (Radio Cake)

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

I guess there is a decent segue to be found in that this cake could be described as “a bit wicked” and then I could talk about Wicked the musical but as I really hate using “wicked” to describe food (worse still: “wickedly indulgent”) and I can’t think of a segue that doesn’t irritate me, I’ll just say – Wicked was incredible. You think you know something every which way to Sunday and then…seeing it live, I felt like that moment in the Wizard of Oz movie where Dorothy steps out from her black-and-white house into the world of Technicolour. Everything was heightened, more impressive, both funnier and sadder, given more meaning. By the end of the first act, when the crucial Defying Gravity scene happens, I was shaking, and I didn’t even realise it. Another thing I didn’t realise was that in Tim’s and my travel blog it might’ve sounded like I didn’t like it that much. What I was trying to articulate was, that a lot of people don’t like musical theatre, but if you were one of these people there was still a lot to enjoy in the scenery and production values alone. I honestly didn’t think it would impact me that much – there are many better-written musicals out there and there’s music that affects me much more on a day-to-day basis than Wicked’s score. But in person it delivers so hard that all I could think, once it was over, was that I needed another hit. Which means traveling to Australia…or even better, New York…maybe the next trip?
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Title via: the kind of adorable Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers with Roadrunner, one of my favourite songs ever. Something about it – simple, repetitive, conversational – I can just listen on repeat over and over again and not get weary of it.
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Music lately: sadly the branch of Real Groovy – across the road from where Tim and I live – is closing down at the end of this month. It’s a place that I’ve spent heaps of time (and money) ever since we moved here in 2006. I’ll miss it. They seem to be largely fleeced of most decent stock but I managed to pick up some Liza Minelli and Judy Garland on vinyl, plus some other bits and pieces. Liza Minelli’s title track from Liza With a Z shows some serious work ethic in terms of actually delivering the song at all…it’s so fast she’s practically rapping.

Chico, by The Concretes. Tim’s mum and sister came down from Palmerston North yesterday and this song was playing at the place we went out to get pizza at. I hadn’t heard it in so long, and even though I normally like my songs to have a bit more, erm, concreteness to them, but with a bit of distance I was struck by how pretty it was – the twinkly bells and dreamy-woozy vocals make it feel like you’re drifting off to sleep, which is very occasionally what I like in a song.
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Next time: In the name of good value, we bought 2kg of yoghurt the other day so you can most definitely expect some yoghurty recipes soon, including a really delicious cake recipe. Plus some more slow-dripped travel stories.

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

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

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


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


Chocolate Jam Bars

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

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

Shopping Cart from Parallel Dance Ensemble (who include our recent interview subject Coco Solid). Saw the new video for it today, too tired to harness the power of description right now, but love this track all over. Another new video bringing our ears and eyes much joy is Ladi6’s gorgeous track Like Water. Truly: get her albums, they’re amazing. (told you too tired for descriptions right now)
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Next time: Hahahaha. I don’t know but as soon as I do know, you’ll be next in line to find out.

tengo de mango, tengo de parcha…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chocolate Coconut Condensed Milk Brownies

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

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

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

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

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

Mango Sauce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

 

i look like a woman but i cut like a buffalo

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I kinda love it when celebrities that I already like turn out to be really into their food, I guess because it makes them more relatable to me – why else do we want to find out about what they do in their spare time? Little did I know that Alicia Silverstone of important film Clueless is now a website-wielding vegan, letting recipes and tips and stories fall for whoever wants to catch them. The recipe on her site The Kind Life which caught my eyes wasn’t actually from her, but a site member. However, Silverstone herself is evidently no slump in the kitchen. Her recipes are not only extremely legit and delicious looking, some also appear hastily flash-photographed in a kind of charming, regular-people way.

I’d been looking for a decent cut-out cookie recipe since I got some seriously awesome tiny cutters from my godfamily for Christmas, including a tiny star, a tiny ace of spades, and a tiny teardrop. I actually got my little brother some excellent cookie cutters for that same Christmas – now he can make ninjabread men. I also got him Street Chant’s album Means. I’m a good sis. So Julian, if you’re reading this…then keep reading.

The recipe I found was from Madeline Tuthill and because it’s vegan, as per Silverstone’s ethos, you don’t have to stress about the fact that butter is now upwards of $5 a block (whyyyyyy) or anything like that. All the ingredients are of the comfortingly within-reach variety – some oil, some flour, some syrup – and all you have to do is mix and roll. (“Rolling with the homies“…oh Brittany Murphy. So amazing in Clueless.) The dough is pliant and stands up to many a re-roll, lifting easily from its cut-out indentations to leave behind your shapes. However, I had to add more flour because it was initially too soft to cut properly – this could be due to anything, ingredients, height above sea level, the weather – so if you’re making these, pay attention to your dough and see if you need to add more flour or if it’s all good as is. And though it asks for wholemeal flour, you could just use all plain. I did, with some quinoa flakes added because they were sitting round, looking awkwardly unused.

Gingerbread Cut-Out Cookies

Adapted from a recipe of Madeline Tuthill’s, from The Kind Life.

  • 1 and 1/2 cups wholemeal flour
  • 1 and 1/2 cups regular flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon each cinnamon and nutmeg
  • 2 teaspoons ground ginger
  • 1 cup golden syrup, maple syrup, or honey, or agave nectar, or cough syrup (kidding!) or a mix of whatever you’ve got.
  • 1/2 cup oil, I use rice bran oil because it doesn’t taste too oily.

Set your oven to 190 C/375 F and lay some baking paper on an oven tray.

Mix together all the dry ingredients, making sure the baking soda and baking powder are well incorporated. Make a well in the centre, pour in the syrup and oil and whisk together before mixing the lot together. Or you could whisk the wet ingredients separately, but this saves on dishes.

If it looks too soft and sticky to roll and cut out, then add a little more flour. I had to, so you might too. Grab a chunk and roll it out, I used two bits of greaseproof paper and rolled it between them, because that saves washing the bench and the rolling pin. If you don’t have a rolling pin, a bottle of wine or something similar shaped will do just fine.

Cut out however you like – if you don’t have any cookie cutters, just use a glass with the rim dipped in flour, or just cut them into squares with a knife. Lay the shapes onto the tray and reroll the scraps, before grabbing another chunk of dough and repeating. Once the tray’s full, bake for 10 minutes only – then carefully transfer to a wire rack to cool, and continue like this till you run out of dough.

Makes plenty – depends on how big your cutters are.

I love how these cookies turned out – a little chewy from the syrup but still crisp and biscuity. I used golden syrup because I have a massive tin of it, and it makes an ideal carrier for spicy flavours with its caramelly depth and darkness. All that syrup means these keep for ages as well, to be eaten by the contemplative handful as and when you desire.

I did consider icing them but their small surface area would’ve made it a complete mission. However bigger cookies lend themselves to all kind of sugary artistic notions. Especially if you’re making this with kids (or, not to be narrow-minded, yourself) – make faces or swirls or squiggles or Jackson Pollock drips with different colours, sandwich ’em together, stick lollies to them, whatever makes you happy. Plain, they were still perfect – the gingery intensity of flavour was all the embellishment these tiny shapes needed.

Title via: Dead Weather’s I Cut Like A Buffalo from their album Horehound. It’s a total pity that buffalo mozzarella is so expensive, because there are heaps of good songs with the word buffalo in their title for me to exploit. Shuffle off to Buffalo, Buffalo Gals, Buffalo by the Phoenix Foundation, Buffalo Soldier, Buffalo Stance…what’s the deal?

Music lately:

Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s Winter In America, bluesy and beautiful. Love the of-the-timely H20gate Blues.

PJ Harvey’s new, extremely magnificent song The Words That Maketh Murder. New PJ Harvey!!

Next time: I’ve reconnected with my Aunt Daisy cookbook and it feels like every page throws up something I really, really want to make. So you can expect something from her next time for sure.

 

swallow my pride, oh yeah

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The nice thing about Mum’s (circa 1971) copy of the “De Luxe Edition” of Edmonds Cookbook that she sent me as a birthday present back in April is…that while there are great recipes and all, just reading through it can be pretty fun in its own right. Beautiful and useful as many of the newer cookbooks celebrating old-time New Zealand cooking are, I like the unromantic straightforwardness of the original text itself.

I like how it informs you that Edmonds is manufacturer of such time-saving, of-the-era items as “Instant Chopped Onions”, “Start” (what even is that?) and “Pronto Instant Beef Tea” (with that kind of title, I can hardly fathom its speed of assembly.) How it coolly gives a recipe for “Grated Nut Cakes” when neither the act of grating nor presence of nuts are involved in the method.


On page 37 is a recipe called Walnut Pride and even though reading through it didn’t reveal anything fist-raisingly representative of being proud, I felt instantly and strongly drawn to making it. Probably so that if people came over and went to the cake tin to look inside (and they do) and asked what it was, I could say “Walnut Pride. Want some?”

Really, it’s just your average cakey slice, with some nuts thrown in. As it was, I used Brazil nuts because they were cheaper than walnuts, as a bonus Brazil nuts have a prouder sound to them than walnuts…right? There’s nothing outrageous about this recipe but it’s tasty, and easy to make, and non-threateningly good-looking, and as far as baking goes, sometimes there’s not much more you could ask for.



If anyone does actually know where the name came from, feel free to share. Without being overly simplistic, according to Wikipedia the first gay pride events in New Zealand were in the 1970s, so maybe this cake is what people ate to give them energy and to share amongst friends while marching..?

Brazil Nut Pride

Adapted from The Edmonds Cookbook.

120g butter
250g brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1/3 cup milk

250g plain flour
1 moderate teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup Brazil nuts (or, of course, the original walnuts)
1/2 cup sultanas

Set your oven to 180 C/370 F, and line a baking tin – not too big, not too small – with baking paper. Cream butter and sugar, then add the vanilla. Beat in the egg, then alternatively mix in the milk with the dry ingredients. Stir in the Brazil nuts and fruit. Bake for 40 minutes, then ice with lemon icing when cool and cut into squares. I mixed up some lemon juice with icing sugar till it was a thick enough to drizzle off a spoon onto the cake, but feel free to smear it with lemon butter icing as the recipe suggests.


It tastes just fine – not faint-makingly delicious, but good and cakey, a bit flutteringly caramelly from the brown sugar, with the occasional creamy nutty crunch from the Brazil nuts lodged throughout. And in case you’re wondering what a “moderate teaspoon of baking powder” is, well so am I. My interpretation involved casually swiping a spoon into the box of baking powder while squinting with my head tilted to the side, then tapping the spoon slightly to remove any excess. You…you do what feels right.

I was home from work sick today with what I’ve called the proto-flu – my throat was all constricted and I felt shivery and very sensitive to the touch last night, but after a good sleep and lots of tea and water, I’m back to just having a sore throat again. So I’m basically fine. The fact that I felt like three bits of marmite and cheese on toast for lunch was a good indication. If I don’t want to eat, it usually means I’m sick. Sometimes when I get really crook, I end up sadly telling Tim, usually from the foetal position, “I guess I’ll just have to stop the food blog, I can’t even imagine why I wanted to talk about food in the first place”. As soon as it passes I start thinking about cheesecake and fried chicken and spaghetti that sort of thing again.

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Title via: To those of you who thought I might quote U2’s (Pride) In The Name Of Love…pshh. They’re all very talented people. I just don’t like their music enough to use a lyric as a post title. Now, the Ramones – I love their song Swallow My Pride, especially the way the chorus lurches surprisingly-but-pleasantly upwards. And it is they who bring us today’s title.
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Music lately:

Tim put on some Smiths this evening, haven’t listened to them in aaaaages. A favourite of mine is Shoplifters of the World Unite from Louder Than Bombs. The beginning always catches me off-guard with its directness, and Morrissey sounds typically wonderful.

Today I watched the 1993 film of Gypsy, one of the greatest musicals ever written, starring the awesome Bette Midler as Madame Rose. Also awesome was Mad Men‘s Elizabeth Moss in a small role as Baby Louise, and Tony Award winner Christine Ebersole playing burlesque stripper Dressy Tessy Tura. This movie is criminally under-represented on youtube, but check out Midler’s brassy and sassy Everything’s Coming Up Roses. I can’t even imagine how extremely amazing the recent Broadway production (with Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti, Boyd Gaines and Leigh-Ann Larkin) must have been.

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Next time: The brisket!

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

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

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

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

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

Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies

With thanks to The Hungry Engineer blog

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

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

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

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

It’s a man with a cookie for a head!

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

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

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

we’ll start with the seed of an idea

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Truth be told, I love my food blog best of all. But I’m always inspired by other bloggers out there. There are so many great writers, like-minded souls, and awesome recipes to be found. My favourite discoveries are recipes where the overall result doesn’t involve 12 layers of sponge or a tray of eggs or whatever, just something that’s recognisable, but with a sassy combination of flavours to make you think I must make this immediately and I’m so happy the internet exists so I could find this and not even have to pay for it, even. Like this Spiced Sesame Slice from the very cool Wayfaring Chocolate blog. It’s basically a cake. But then there’s sesame seeds in it. And on it. Plus ginger and cinnamon. I don’t know about you, but that sort of old-fashioned-plus-sexy-modern combination is pretty alluring. Then again, I get all hepped up over things that other people sneer at (like the music of Jesus Christ Superstar.) I may not be the best yardstick to measure “exciting stuff” by but trust me – this cake is damn good.



(If you’re wondering what the foliage in the background is, on the left is harakeke and on the right is our boutique saffron plantation. If you weren’t wondering at all, I just like calling two bulbs a boutique plantation.)



Spiced Sesame Slice 


Recipe from Wayfaring Chocolate…cheers Hannah!

50g sesame seeds
125g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
2 eggs
140g brown sugar
125g butter, melted

Set your oven to 180 C/375 F and line a rectangular or square cake tin, don’t worry about the size – just one of those usual-sized caketin things, you know? Even if you’ve got nonstick or silicone it would pay to butter it because this stuff sticks quite a bit. Not sure why.

First of all, toast the sesame seeds till they’re good and brown and smelling popcorn-y in a pan. Set aside. Don’t taste them, you’ll burn your tongue. Like me.

Whisk the eggs and sugar till thick and creamy and increased in volume. Pour in the melted butter, and then fold in the dry ingredients and half the sesame seeds. Turn it into the cake tin and sprinkle over the rest of the sesame seeds. Bake for 20 mins until firm-but-springy to the touch. Let it cool for a bit before slicing up.



So delicious. It’s really light-textured, and the buttery nuttiness and the warm spiciness is seriously good. It was so easy to just keep slicing off bits…tidying up edges…eating the broken bit…ah, you know how it goes. We go through bottles of sesame oil – its rich, dark nutty flavour is amazing, and the seeds work really well in a sweeter setting. I didn’t have any allspice (does anyone ever have allspice?) so in a move that I hope Hannah of Wayfaring Chocolate would be proud of (she eats stuff like chilli-studded chocolate and kangaroo meat very casually) I used Ras-el-Hanout spice mix instead. But you could just leave it out, or even add more cinnamon and ginger.



And it’s really, really good with a cup of tea.
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Title via: Untitled Opening Song from [title of show], the musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical. This show is pretty special to me, even though I obviously never got to see it on the Broadway, and I won’t go on about it (although you know I could easily go on about it) but I will say this: don’t anyone let a New Zealand production get made (and I seriously believe it could work) without me playing Susan. I just want to so bad, and I think that’s a good enough reason to make it happen.
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Music lately:

Apart from the sweet writing skills and chocolate-a-plenty and recipes, the other thing I like about Hannah’s blog is that it always makes me think of the song Poor Wayfaring Stranger. We used to sing it in choir at school, which is when I really started to dig its melancholy, old-timey, Americana sound. This version by Dusty Springfield is particularly choice.

Gypsy Eyes from Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland…we just love us some Hendrix. Gypsy Eyes is a very cool song…I like the way he pronounces all the vowels on ‘re-a-lize that I’ve been hypnotised’.

The whole entire Distant Relatives album, from the one-two punch of Nas and Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley… amazing. Purposeful beats, powerful messages, impassioned delivery, but you only have to listen to first track As We Enter for five seconds to know it’s special stuff. I like the titular togetherness of the lyrics as they go back and forth – “My man’ll speak patois, and I can speak rap star…”
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Next time: Butter is so expensive! Hey! Wha’happen? If anyone could make this all go away and get it down nearer to $2 a block I’d be most obliged. Till then, we’re probably looking at some dairy-free times up ahead.

go and part the seas in malibu

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Yikes last week went fast. I most definitely meant to blog sooner but one thing leads to another and all of a sudden it’s a dark Sunday afternoon and I’m pretty convinced it’s time to go to bed but it’s really only just past lunchtime. That’s how you maintain a blog, people! That said, if the week went as quickly for everyone else, then no harm done – we’re all on the same page.

Nothing like rifling through the sepia-d pages of the Edmond’s Cookbook of Mum’s that she gave me to make things feel a little more slow and relaxed. I’ve already made a bunch of crazy marshmallows from this book, but today I felt like something with more practical application to our lives. Not that marshmallows are an unreasonable possession. They have their reasons.


Am I trying to recreate a Frankie magazine photoshoot or what. Except theirs happen on beautiful fabrics and paper and stuff, and mine is on a cheap and grubby teatowel.

I’ve always been a fan of coconut but recently I’ve been really embracing the stuff – I love that it’s so intensely rich and delicious and creamy and fragrant but also very cheap. That said it feels like forever since I’ve had an actual coconut, drank the water from it and bit into the chewy, juicy white flesh (so long ago that I can remember doing it but not where or when or anything…maybe I just dreamed this bit.)

Apparently New Zealanders have loved coconut for generations, although in its most mainstream form it’s really the least appealing – I’m not talking fragrant curries or moist puddings eaten with mangoes or whatever here, I mean the dry, dessicated white flakes that cling to the edges of lamingtons or lolly cake (usually falling off and getting all over everything inbetween being on the plate and getting in your mouth). Nevertheless, as an ingredient dessicated coconut is definitely practical and still gives that definite, beachy flavour, and was recognised as such by several interesting recipes in this pretty old (sorry Mum) Edmonds Cookbook.

Coconut Kisses

These biscuity biscuits are supposed to be stuck together with butter icing…While I’m seriously the last person that would act as a gatekeeper between butter icing and the rest of the world, I liked the idea of having twice as many biscuits around if I left them alone.

110g butter

2 tablespoons hot water
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup flour
3/4 cup coconut
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder (you could do as the good book tells you to and use Edmonds)
Note: I added 1/2 a teaspoon Boyajian orange oil, partly for flavour and partly because it was really expensive and I like to pretend like it’s a useful ingredient to have around, I mean it is and all, but, you know.
Melt butter and hot water together (I sat the bowl on top of a small pot of simmering water), mix in the rest of the ingredients. Roll into balls, put on a baking tray and flatten a little (I forgot!) Bake 15 minutes at 180 C/375 F. You can, of course, stick pairs together with butter icing.

Notice the lovely cake stand, given to me for my birthday by my godmother and family!

They don’t look overly exciting but these coconut kisses are in fact mighty delicious – crisp on the outside but meltingly shortbready within. They’d be perfect dunked in a cup of tea as long as you didn’t drop them – they’re pretty small – and they have echoes of several coconut-flavoured biscuits out there on the market except of course they’re way nicer, and much cheaper to make than buy. You could also try using oil instead of the melted butter – I’m sure it would work, and if so: vegan!

Because one kind of coconut flavoured baked good is just not enough, I also gave the Coconut Cakes a crack. They’re really just small, coconut-enhanced scones, and in fact after eating one, what I really wanted to do was spread them with raspberry jam and sandwich them together with whipped cream.

Coconut Cakes


110g flour
45g butter
30g sugar
60g coconut
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
1 teacup milk (I used just under 3/4 cup)

Sift flour, rub in butter, stir in the rest of the dry ingredients. Mix to a stiffish dough with the milk. Edmonds says “place in rocky shapes” on your baking tray, I just dropped rough dessertspoons-ful onto the tray and hoped for the best. Bake 15 minutes at 180 C/375 F.

These are so good – really quick to mix up and incredibly tender and light, not a biscuit and not a cake. The coconut makes them flavourous and textural (yeah they’re words!) and they smell amazing while they’re baking. I think you could definitely get away with buttering these before eating (not that I’m the best yardstick to measure healthy buttering behaviour against) or serve with cream and jam as I mentioned earlier, but they’re great just as they are – soft and delicious.

The New Zealand International Film Festival has rolled into town again, replete with cinematic plenty. On Friday night we saw The Illusionist at the prompting of our former-flatmate-current-friend Ange – it was directed by Sylvain Chomet, who also did Triplets of Belleville. It was beautiful, so beautiful but utterly sad and desolate as well. I definitely recommend it all the same, and don’t feel that subtitled films aren’t for you because in fact there is almost no dialogue whatsoever in this film. Just beauty! I also recommend that afterwards you go somewhere warm and drink French red wine and eat homemade chocolate macaroons, it definitely worked out well for us.
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Title via: okay, all this coconut talk made me think of a certain coconut liqueur, and like all good songs named after an object or a person or something, the very thought of it had me humming Hole’s wonderful 1998 song Malibu and now here we are. Of course, I’ve already outlined my enjoyment of Courtney Love previously here…
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Music lately:
I Heart Nigella by Wellington band Mammal Airlines. Tim and myself interviewed them recently for our website 100s and 1000s (please excuse the insultingly bad quality of the video, we’re getting there, we are…) and the three of them were awesomely nice and fun to talk to. But perhaps most awesomely nice of all is the fact that they have a song called I Heart Nigella, and what’s more, it’s really good. They’ve made both their EPs available for free download, so take advantage of that generosity, hey?
This Song Has No Title from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I know Elton John has an electric boot planted firmly in the middle of the road these days but I have no fear in saying I love this album. The reason it’s on my mind though is because Tim put it on the stereo and managed to trick me into thinking we were listening to War of the Worlds, which I really hate. I was getting pretty aggravated until album opener Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding dropped speed and changed tempo and all of a sudden I realised we were actually listening to Elton John. Now we sound like incredibly unexciting people, but it’s a true story and you heard it here first.
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Next time: I made ceviche for the first time and it was so good! Not so good was my pronunciation. Even though Nigella was all “it’s Mexican!” I’ve been pronouncing it all French-like, “se-veesh”…

to fruits, to no absolutes

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

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

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

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

open sesame

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I’m blogging on a full stomach. Food is so strange. I really, really want it, visualise creating it, feeding people, feeding myself, that sort of thing. But if I have slightly too much, suddenly even just thinking about food feels like an awkward way to pass the time. I start to question how a person could ever possibly want to eat anything but cool, bland lettuce. I never force myself to blog, but on the other hand I’ve started this and want to get it done so…hopefully it doesn’t read like I’m averting my eyes while typing.

My aimless flicking through recipe books recently while shopping stopped being aimless once my eyes settled upon a recipe for shortbread made with tahini, in Jewish Cooking, Jewish Cooks by Ramona Koval. The book was pricey but my curiosity was prodded, and, figuring it was absolutely the same as hitting up Google, without taking the chance that this recipe hadn’t been documented online, I hastily scrawled the instructions on my arm. Luckily I found a pen in my purse, my only other option being a black eyeliner. Much as I like the idea of turning my body into a walking cookbook, googling would have been easier – trying to transcribe the scribbled, condensed and sideways version of the recipe from my arm to paper was not a fast task. The things we do for our craft, hey?

Tahini is seriously cool – a thick, rich, throat-binding paste of ground sesame seeds. Like peanut butter it’ll stick to the roof of your mouth and refuse to let go so be careful about wading in and eating it by the spoonful. With that in mind this recipe might sound pretty Schafer-tastic, like the sort of grainy snack the characters of Hair would eat to give them energy to sing about their hair. Wrong. This recipe contains a lot of butter. Watch out. I’ve never used tahini in anything sweet before but making these inspired me to get into all kinds of experimentation, I’m thinking toasted sesame ice cream…

The shortbread is stunningly good stuff and on the back of its excellence I may well end up buying this cookbook. I love that you press it into a tin and slice it up later. So, there’s none of that biscuit-fatigue where you’ve eaten way too much mixture and want to lie down on the floor and sleep it off but you still have to keep rolling and cutting circles of dough and waiting for the tray of cookies in the oven to finish baking so you can swap it with the next batch. Nope, none of that at all. Refreshing.

Halvah Shortbread

Adapted from Ramona Koval’s Jewish Cooking, Jewish Cooks

  • 170g soft butter
  • 1/2 cup tahini
  • 2 1/4 cups brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup ground almonds
  • 2 cups flour

Set oven to 180 C. Either – whizz the butter, sugar and tahini together in the food processor, pulsing in the rest of the ingredients till combined. Or – cream butter, tahini and sugar together with a wooden spoon till well incorporated, then beat in the almonds and flour till smooth. Press into a baking dish – I used a round silicon flan dish – and bake for about 15 minutes till golden on top. Allow to cool, then slice into pieces.

Makes as many as you like – about 20 decent sized slices, or, you know, 400 wafer-thin shavings…

This shortbread is incredible – thick, golden slabs of buttery biscuit softened but deepened by the intense and complex nuttiness of the tahini. It’s literally one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten in a long time. I want to eat the whole trayful. Well, I wanted to eat the whole trayful but now – as previously mentioned – I am too full for such dreams. It is worth buying a jar of tahini just to make these – don’t think it will loiter sadly at the back of the fridge like a kid whose parents forgot to pick them up from school – I go through about a jar a month. Drizzle it over Meditteranean style food, spread it across flatbread when you do make kebabs or wraps, thicken up homemade hummus, or make this satay sauce.

On Saturday night Tim and I found ourselves at Watusi for Auckland-based rapper David Dallas. Based on the fact that Watusi is tiny and the Facebook event page had well over 350 confirmed guests, we thought we’d better err on the side of early. We were at the back for opener Percieve, and when the Homebrew crew came on it clicked that we had seen them before in Auckland. They could, judging by the lyric chanting, dancing, and basic sheer elation from most of the males around me, have probably filled the venue in their own right. Props to Homebrew Crew for this, considering how many times they reminded us about their underground nature. Maybe they hadn’t reckoned on how Wellington thrives on unearthing the underground.

We got hustled to the front by an enthusiastic friend for David Dallas’ set, which was not a bad place to be, if a little confronting. His explanation for Big Time – wanting to do something big but not knowing what made me prod Tim on the shoulder and say “me too!” It was a pretty bare set-up – just Dallas plus backing tracks – but it still sounded good, the mellower songs given more punch when blasted through speakers. The music spanned from older Frontline stuff, touching acapella material, (where being close enough to hear the voice before it hits the mic is pretty nice), singles from Something Awesome, and a throwback to his verse on Scribe’s rather famous Not Many. The last time I’d seen this song live was at the 2004 Pasifika Festival so it was a pleasant blast from the past. This guy was nominated for the inaugural Taite Music Prize and was just overseas performing at SXSW so to see him perform in such a laughably tiny setting was definitely…um, sorry, how else am I supposed to wind this up…something awesome.

Title coming atcha via: Kool and The Gang – according to Wikipedia Open Sesame was described by critics as their “least funky” album. I don’t know what level of funk said critics were dealing with but I mean…I liked it.

Music lately:

Ms Dynamite’s Wile Out, a track I swear plays every time I flick on the radio. It was only tonight that I managed to hear the announcer mention who sang it, nice to see Ms Dynamite back in such fine form. A straightforwardly excellent tune, to me Wile Out wouldn’t have been out of place in late 2004-2005 which makes it comfort listening in a way – that was the time I went over to work in England and really, all music sounded pretty exciting in that context.

I Need A Dollar by Aloe Blacc, which is what seems to get played on the radio if the above isn’t on rotation. It’s being used as the theme to a new HBO show called How To Make It In America, which I don’t have an overwhelming interest in seeing just yet, (is it just me or does their theme sequence attempt to do what The Wire’s did?) but this trudging melody is certainly engaging, like a modern Brother Can You Spare A Dime – not that this song hasn’t ever been relevant itself.

Next time: Today Tim and I bought a new camera, a DSLR – the piece of equipment I, until very recently, never really thought I’d own. Our current camera has done noble service, seeing me through many situations and undoubtedly improving the look of this blog but a quick look at, say, the girdlebuster pie post should indicate why a new camera isn’t a bad idea. I’m really looking forward to getting to know this gorgeous new creature that we own, and getting to grips with such interesting features as manual focussing. What this means for you is (hopefully) cooler photos on here, since lo-fi food photography is never going to win anyone any friends!