Category: Fruit

cause i bake the cake, then take the cake

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Show me a candle and I’ll try and burn both ends of it. In case that phrase and concept is not familiar to you, I feel I should explain that it is not because I’m of a generation that has only grown up with artificial light and therefore is all “what is this waxy tube and how’s it going to help me? Me, of the me-generation?” No, what I mean is that I’ll stay up late but also get up very early in order to do what I need to do. It helps that I’m somehow both a night owl and a morning person. At Tim’s and my old flat of three and half years – which we adored, by the way – this would mean sitting bolt upright in bed when my alarm went off, and slowly becoming slouchier as I typed away on my laptop in bed. No lights but that from the laptop itself and the slowly rising sun.
But here, in our new house, where it’s just us, I can quietly pad out of bed (inevitably locating the one piece of bubble wrap in the house by standing on it, which happened yesterday) fold myself up on one of our couches in a straight-backed manner, turn on the kitchen light, maybe even make myself a cup of tea. This morning there’s delicious rain on the roof. I can’t curb my candle-burning tendencies, but it sure is a lot nicer to do it here. Possibly a literal candle would be nice touch, even. My mum did in fact get me an oil burner as a housewarming gift (with two scented oils, “wellbeing” and “I’m worried about you get some sleep already” if I remember rightly) so it’s not out of the question. Strangely enough receiving that gift took me back to my attempted spell-casting youth. Where for a long time my favourite activity was hanging out at the 100-199 nonfiction section of the library, getting out particular books, and then lighting specifically coloured candles to heat patchouli and ylang ylang oil in the hopes that it would make something happen. (Patchouli and ylang ylang were the only two oils I could afford as an unemployed twelve year old, so basically everything I tried had to use them. As a result, all that really did happen was I was going around smelling like curtains from the seventies that had been stored in a camphor chest.)
Things keep happening to make this still-new place even more of a home. This week, our our new table – well, it’s new to us, but apparently very well loved by the family we bought it off, shadows of whom remain in the grain of the wood. A water stain here, a gouged-out dent from a truculent miscreant there, some glitter embedded in the varnish over in one corner, (which feels like a good sign). All these are things that might’ve happened with me around anyway, so, much as a brand new table would be delightful, it’s nice to have this lived-in one, and to not feel like I have to be nervous around it. Indeed, there’s enough I’m too nervous about already.  
 
A table like this needs a cake on it, I said, being the logical pragmatist that I am. In my mind. In my defense, Tim and four others were playing the boardgame of Game of Thrones on Sunday, and since that game chews through your energy at a surprising rate for a large piece of cardboard with several small plastic game tokens – at one point someone expressed their sincere wish for nerve-calming sedatives because the game was too much of a rollercoaster ride of thrills – providing some sustenance made sense. When it comes to Game of Thrones I’m simply a Watcher (the capital W makes it seem more sinister!) though I have also started reading them as well – much as I’m not sure I love the books, damned if I can put them down once I pick them up. The board game…not my thing. Maybe not enough Khaleesi being all amazing with dragons? On a screen? Who knows, but I’m happy to have a rock-solid cake-excuse (of course, there’s always the most rock-solid reason of all: I want cake.)

It’s high summer so plums are around in abundance and really cheap. If you’re somehow sick of just sitting there eating them while their sticky juice runs down your face in determined rivulets, this chocolate plum cake with sour cream icing is a good diversion – pretty exciting, but also calmingly straightforward to make. There is so little to it that you can have it in and out of the oven and ready to eat – if you leave it uniced – in about forty minutes. The sour cream icing was just something that I thought might be fun. It’s not quite the fluffy creation I envisaged but more of an alarmingly fast-moving icing that helpfully drips over the side of the cooled cake for you – still very, very delicious though.

Chocolate Plum Cake with Sour Cream Icing

I adapted the cake itself from this delightfully simple recipe I found. Otherwise: a recipe by me.

If you leave the icing off, this cake is dairy-free. If you ice it…with sour cream icing…it’s really not.

1/2 cup (125 ml) plain oil like rice bran or sunflower
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 ripe plums
4 tablespoons cocoa
1 cup flour

1 1/2 cups icing sugar
2 tablespoons sour cream (maybe a little more)

Set your oven to 160 C/320 F. Line the base of a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper. 

Mix together the oil, sugar, and eggs till quite thick. Dice the flesh of the plums into 1 or 2cm cubes (just guess) and stir them in. Finally, fold in the cocoa and flour, scrape it into the caketin and bake for 40 minutes (though check at 30 minutes – your oven may be gruntier than mine.) 

Serve now, or allow to cool completely and then ice. To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl – or it will be obstinately lumpy – then slowly stir in enough sour cream, two tablespoons should do, to make a thick yet quite runny icing. Tip most of it over the cooled cake, letting it run over the edges. Decorate with finely sliced dark chocolate if you’re a food blogger who worries that your drippy cake will look weird in photos but also thinks that the extra chocolate will taste nice. 

The juicy tartness of the plums with the dark backdrop of damp chocolate cake is really something in itself, but it’s made all the more lush by a blanket of sticky sour cream icing (seriously, look at that photo. This icing is going wherever gravity will take it.) Sour cream has enough buttery thickness and tang (so nearly wrote titular tang but that felt wrong, even for me) to see off the icing sugar’s aggressive sweetness, but to also complement the intensity of the plums and chocolate. It’s even better the next day, when the icing has had time to settle in and the cake absorbs some of the plum juice. You could make this with any stone fruit really, but rich plums and earthy cocoa together are specifically wondrous. 

Speaking of things that go well on our new table, and because I have exactly one minute to get ready for work and can’t think of another way to wrap this up: we finally, after living in Wellington since January 2006, spatula-d together enough Fly Buys points to cash them in on something. That something was a waffle iron. WORTH IT.
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Title via: Ummm, because I don’t swear on this blog I can’t actually repeat the title of the song that I’m quoting. But I can tell you it’s by Wu-Tang Clan and it’s reeeeeeally good. 
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Music lately:

Franz Ferdinand, Eleanor Put Your Boots On. Never stopped loving them.

Blind Willie McTell, Come Around To My House Mama. A song of face-fanningly casual sauciness, considering McTell recorded it in 1929. (I know they had bawdy songs and stuff back then, but still: it’s so casual!) 
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Next time: Probably another I Should Tell You interview. Good times!

isn’t it rich? are we a pear?

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I know, everyone’s on holiday and I said I wasn’t blogging till next year, but as Britney sang in her cover of the song My Prerogative, it’s my prerogative. Plus, cake! Cake.
 
 
 
The thing with traditions – they’re wonderful. They give you something to cling to in this strange, scary world, a sense of where you’ve been and where you might go – they give you stories to relay and build upon and argue over the precise order of; they give you something to pass on to other people. 
 
They’re also damn vexatious, because once you get sucked into a tradition it’s very difficult to break it. I have done roughly the same thing for Christmas every single year of my life, and as such the idea of being anywhere else during that time is un-contemplatable. (Admittedly: am not particularly good at compromising. Sure, Eartha Kitt romanticises it for me, but compromise does go some way to making other people happy.) As such, Tim and I have only spent one Christmas together in the past seven years…and that was when he came to my family’s place.
 
My family (in the very extended sense of the word) has been camping at this one particular beach every single year since I was born. I’m still pretty young, but that’s a lot of years. This year, for the first time, owing to a lack of money and time in equal measure, I’m not going along with them. I know I vocally dislike nature, but this place is magical and special and all we really do anyway is sit around and drink gin and play cards. Sigh.
 
And finally, the flat Christmas Dinner that I have had every year since 2006, when Tim and I moved in together, was not able to happen this year again due to a lack of time and funds – and also moving house on the 15th of December.
 
Damn you, traditions, getting me all emotionally attached to things and being so difficult to extricate myself from and making my heart hurt a bit! Is this what being a grown up is about? If so, then I stamp my feet petulantly in response. But also get on with it. Damn you too, grownuphoodity.
 
 
 
Before this gets all too, too hand-wringingly lachrymose, let us focus on a cake! Tim and I are spending New Years with a tangle of our best friends. I’m bringing novels of a worthy (Muriel Sparks) and trashy (Jilly Cooper) nature; plenty of whisky; languid-friendly dresses, and this cake.
 
I adapted it from a recipe that I found in the Meat Free Mondays book by Paul McCartney. I don’t eat a ton of meat as it is, let alone on Mondays, but there is many a brilliant and inspiring recipe for any day of the week to be found within its pages. This has ended up being really quite different to their recipe, but it’s what spurned on the idea, so a tip of the hat to them all the same. (PS: I would just like to say though, the caramel pear sauce was all my idea.) (I guess I’m not that grown-up yet.)
 
Pear and Almond Cake with Caramel Pear Sauce
 
PS: this needs a food processor to make it sorry – though if you don’t have one, I’d make sure the butter was quite soft, cream it with the sugar first, then the egg, then fold everything else in. So: still do-able, for sure.
 
1 x 70g packet ground almonds
150g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
150g sugar
170g butter, cubed
1 egg
1 can of pears
 
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon golden syrup
2 teaspoons cornflour
30g butter
 
Set your oven to 160 C/320 F and line a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper.
 
Tip the ground almonds, flour, and baking powder into your food processor bowl and process for a bit to mix them together. Then add the sugar and butter and process thoroughly till it forms a thick dough. Tip in the egg and blitz briefly to mix it in. Spread this thick, luscious mixture into your caketin – it won’t be very high – and then drain your can of pears, reserving the liquid (important!) and arrange them, cut-side-up on top of the batter. 
 
Bake for about an hour, or till the cake feels springy and firm in the centre. 
 
Meanwhile, in a small pot or pan, mix the brown sugar, golden syrup and cornflour to an unlikely paste. Slowly mix in the reserved pear juice from the can, and then continue stirring it over a low heat. Allow it to simmer but not quite boil till it all becomes quite syrupy and thick and dark. When it reaches this stage, remove it from the heat and stir in the butter. 
 
Note: You have a choice when the cake is cooked – either do as I did, and leave it in its tin, spike several times with a skewer, pour over the hot caramel pear sauce and then allow it to cool completely. OR – unclip the cake from the tin, slice up, and serve the caramel pear sauce on the side to be poured over in quantities of each slice-eater’s choosing. 
 
 
So uh, even though I made this for other people to eat, I had to judiciously remove a small sliver and eat it, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to blog about it. Or I could, but the most conclusive thing I’d be able to say about it is that it’s very instagrammable. 
 
Luckily for us all, I heroically ate said sliver of cake. And it’s rather wondrous. The caramel sauce absorbs into its surface, making it a sticky confection of a thing, and the pear juice really does make itself known, flavourwise – giving the sauce a floral fragrance which elevates it above mere sugariness (though I do love mere sugariness too, to be fair.) The cake itself is dense and buttery and the almonds give it a slightly nubbly texture which echoes that of the pears. It’s damn good stuff.
 

Due to obstinate fog in Wellington canceling my flight and delaying my departure by 24 hours, my time up home was sadly briefer than I thought it’d be. But all the same it was a lovely time, seeing my family again and spending Christmas day with them. Everyone loved the gifts I got them and I loved the trinkets I received.

Cleaning out one of the cupboards stuffed with my old schoolbooks and things was surprisingly diverting. I was reminded how utterly, utterly righteous I was as a child. Seriously, almost all of my schoolbooks are filled with firmly written opinions like “why must we do maths? Why aren’t Spice Girls more integrated into the curriculum? UGH SPORTS WHY”.

I relayed this to Tim, who astutely pointed out that I could’ve believably expressed that same opinion yesterday.

 
I also adored hanging out with the cats. Or at least attempting to. Roger was largely disinterested, but at least sat still long enough that I could situate myself very close to him and pretend like we were friends. Poppy, ever the baby raptor, decided she hated me and tried to shred my face off every time we approached. I did manage to pick her up for a quick minute though, and even caught the brief affair on camera. Me, thrilled to the bone, Poppy, at least displaying only ennui, instead of her claws. A Christmas Miracle! 
 

Title via: Yes, I elect to end the year on a truly atrocious pun. And I’ll probably start next year with one too, as is my wont. I was always a bit terrified of the song Send In The Clowns from A Little Night Music when I was young, because frankly clowns are scary as hell. But after listening to it properly, I came to realise it’s one of Sondheim’s most quietly devastating tunes, and I rather love it. Especially when Dame Judi Dench absolutely kills it.

Music lately:

The Smiths, How Soon Is Now? We saw Morrissey in concert the night before we moved house. I know he can be horrible, but his music just turns my insides to melted butter and I love his voice and it was just amazing times a billion. It doesn’t excuse any of his horribleness, but I was glad we had the opportunity to see him. Before the show, we each picked three songs we really hoped he’d sing – cutely, or maybe grossly, we both picked the same three – and he did! He sang all three. This was one of them – a song from his erstwhile band which is so good I hardly ever listen to it, because it makes me feel all queasy inside. Not the best recommendation, but if you’ve never heard it before…just try.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation. Since being lent speakers by some friends, Tim and I have been ploughing through all the vinyl we bought over in America. This album of the same name is so utterly great, and I love this song, and Richard Hell is impossibly dreamy. Which maybe helps make the song sound better, who knows?

Next time: This really is the last post I’m doing for 2012 – have a joyous relaxed happiness-filled time, and I’ll see you on the other side. 

extraordinary, just like a strawberry

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There is no way to talk about needing to distract yourself while two of your closest friends are out of the country for a significant amount of time to sound like a dork (at best), so all I’ll say is that Tim and I are moving house in two weeks and it is significantly distracting. I love our current flat of three and a half years in a way that I never thought a person could love the place they live – having had a succession of terrible, dark flats (crumbly, cold and damp like milk seeping into passionless wheaten breakfast cereal) overlorded by landlords ranging from the faintly bizarre to the terrifying. Here we have real sunshine, the kind that actually gets through the windows and blankets you in warmth rather than sodding off to hang out with your rich neighbours while your room is shrouded in darkness. We don’t have dampness, we don’t have mice, and so on and so forth. In the darkness and with mice my only friends was how I of course started this blog, and pretty much the best thing about living in horrible flats is that you get to spin ever-larger tales of their ill-repute later in life. If Tim and I, aged 19, had shacked up together in a mansion, well. Actually that would’ve been really awesome. I care not for the value of whatever lesson living in said horrible flat taught me: I’d take the mansion any day. 
Much as I hate things coming to an end, sometimes moving on feels right, and we’ve found a new place that we adore. It’ll be just us (nothing to do with us being engaged, we just like that notion) it’s enormous – plenty of dancing room – it has more storage room than we’ve ever known, and it has a dishwasher! I’m already pretty slovenly but I look forward to spiraling further downwards into a state of blissful sloth after welcoming this appliance into our lives. 
Packing has been strangely fun: I spent several hours doing it on Saturday while Tim was off playing the game of Game of Thrones. (I love the tv show, I devour the books, I can’t abide the endless and endlessly complicated game and was happy to be left alone, in case you’re thinking of getting righteous on my behalf.) On my travels through the dark corners of our wardrobe I discovered many a long-forgotten thing.
A faxed copy of my casually sexist birth certificate. My mum’s occupation and the question of their surnames being different were apparently not of interest in the mid eighties. (Faxed to me during high school so I could take part in a first year university philosophy paper, what an overachiever that baby turned out to be!) 

We have some fairly embarrassing DVDs in our collection, but also some really, really good books.

I wasn’t sure whether to admonish myself or be delighted at the sheer decadence of it all, either way I forgot that we had a bottle of champagne in the cupboard. Who even gets champagne at all, and then goes and forgets about it? Us sybaritic lotophagi, that’s who. (And who even says sybaritic lotophagi? This dick.)
I made this ice cream cake a couple of weeks ago now for a potluck dinner which was also something of a farewell for the two aforementioned now-traveling friends. The recipe comes from this glorious American book from the sixties that I own called “Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts (including party beverages)” (punctuation my own addition.) I love old-timey desserts, and American ones tend to have this particular heedless, uninhibited nature which I particularly adore, and have discussed at length when I made a plum meringue crumble pie from this same book earlier this year.

This recipe is as much about texture as it is flavour – crunchy biscuit crumbs puncturing and encasing the creamy, cold ice cream, itself studded with sorbet-like frozen slices of strawberry. It is pure summer, in spoonable form. In that you can serve it with a spoon, but I took that to a new level by lying on the couch and verily spooning the roasting dish that I made this recipe in, while feeding myself spoonfuls of what ice cream remained in said dish. Seriously though: this would be perfect for a southern hemisphere Christmas pudding – what with strawberries being in season and all – but if you’re up there in the northern hemisphere I recommend this insistently all the same, since you could easily use frozen berries and serve it alongside another pudding of a hotter nature. Just make it, okay? It’s brilliant.

Strawberry Ice Cream Cake 

From Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts – recipe submitted by Mrs Elaine Cruikshank, Montrose, Iowa. 

I know the method looks weird, since every recipe with separated egg whites goes on about how it needs to be whisked in a sterile environment and it WILL fail on you and so on and so forth. And here we are throwing a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and whisking them all devil-may-care. What can I say, it just works! So go with it. Also: the recipe called for 1/2 cup chopped nuts in the biscuit stage but I left them out for someone at the party who had an allergy, you can of course feel free to put them back in.

1 cup flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
125g melted butter
2 egg whites
1 cup sugar
2c sliced fresh strawberries (or use defrosted frozen, as I suggested)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup cream
More sliced strawberries for decoration

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Stir together the flour, sugar and butter till it forms a soft, stiff dough. Press it evenly onto a paper-lined baking tray, so that it looks like a giant cookie and bake for 20 minutes. You could in fact stop right here and enjoy your giant cookie. I might well do this myself one day. But what you want to do is let it cool, then crumble with your fingers, and sprinkle 2/3 of the crumbs evenly into the base of a medium sized brownie tin/medium sized roasting tin – or you could use a cake tin, even, it really doesn’t matter. 

In a bowl, combine the egg whites, sugar, sliced strawberries and lemon juice. Whisk the heck out of this for as long as you can, but around 5-10 minutes. Despite the doubtfulness of it all, it will thicken and aerate and the whisking action will break down the strawberry slices, tinting the mixture a rather glorious pale pink. 

Whip the cream and fold it into the strawberry mixture, then scrape the lot over the top of the biscuit crumbs. Decorate with slices of strawberries if you like, and sprinkle over the remaining 1/3 of the crumbs. Freeze till solid. 

I already adore ice cream with inordinate fervency, but here with early strawberries, delicious with their early-season optimism, it’s more glorious than ever. And this is so, so easy and straightforward. 
Speaking of optimism, how goes my job-prowl? Not bad. I mean, I’m still unemployed, and feeling its pinch pretty keenly (moving house is SO EXPENSIVE) but my interview on Friday earned me a follow-up coffee this morning! Which is very exciting. Especially since I was quite, quite convinced I’d blown the interview itself. I have another interview on Wednesday, and I still am yet to hear back from another interview that I felt went well, so we’ll see. We’ll see. Even if my perception of how Friday’s interview went was way off, I promise you I’m perceiving this ice cream correctly: it’s damn incredible. I love it. Make it. Spoon with it, even – you’re not alone. 

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Title via: Ini Kamoze, Here Comes The Hotstepper. This song has aged so well. In my opinion. And my opinion is correct.
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Music lately: 

Rekindled my long-ago interest in Lisa Loeb. By way of playing Do You Sleep around 2938102938 times in a row one afternoon. You know how music can swiftly take you back to a particular time and place? Listening to this song now just reminds me of the time that I last listened to this song, because I have listened to it so much lately. Try it!

Tegan and Sara, Closer. It’s like, here are your feelings, neatly packaged in jaunty song form!

Barton Hollow, by the Civil Wars. I’d heard of this band before but really got into them when they were recently covered on this TV show I’m obsessed with, called Nashville. (Especially fun since Tim and I were just IN Nashville and so it’s all, “I recognise that landmark in this establishing shot!”) This country-ish, harmony-rich song is delicious.
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Next time: Lack of incoming funds + moving house has meant I’ve been making meals strictly based on what’s in our cupboards, fridge and freezer. So: hopefully something even bordering on coherent for you. 

i’ll drink to that, and one for mahler!

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Back when I first left my job and strode purposefully into the warm, sugary waters of cookbook-writing (before immediately getting sick for three weeks) I had it in my head that I’d be able to blog more than ever. Well, ha! I certainly learned a thing or two since then. Like I wouldn’t really have the time, at all. So, sorry to leave it so long between blog posts. Basically, if I am awake I am working on the cookbook. It leaves very little time for blogging. But as this blog is so deeply important to me, it does not behoove me to neglect it. So here I am, and I will attempt to keep this relatively snappish (a) so I can get onto preparing for today’s cookbook photoshoot and (b) because there is only so much one can say about a smoothie. 
It has been one heck of a week. If my last blog post indicated that it was crunch time and time was crunchy, well, time has since become ever more textured. Barbed. Studded. Clawed. Gritty. It’s grit time. Hopefully all this grit will bring forth a pearl of a cookbook though.
At book group the other day (which escalated with delightful predictability to into-the-night discussions on feminism, politics, and HBO television) I had an amazing Ottolenghi salad that the host, my longtime friend Ange had made. I then realised how long it had been since I’d cooked anything that wasn’t something being tested for the cookbook. Much as I’ll miss the montage that is my life currently, I am definitely looking forward to opening up someone else’s cookbook and making their recipes.
But I am still fair sparkling with excitement, every particle of me alive and tense with the knowledge that I am going to be a published author, that my ideas have actually taken me somewhere. Luckily the universe reminds me often enough of this, so that when I’m all grumpypants and don’t want to look at food, the amazing ridiculousness of this all sets in again, I remember that any problems I have are AMAZING PROBLEMS TO HAVE and I find energy to keep going. I mean, I physically cannot bring myself to complain about any of the more stressful elements of this whole process (please ignore any times I actually complained about it) because it’s all so…incredible.

Yesterday, pale with the knowledge that I’d hardly eaten anything vitamin-rich lately, I made myself a smoothie for breakfast. It was perfect – eye-wideningly zingy, not troublingly filling, and gloriously pink. Who am I to tell you how to make a smoothie? It’s just blended up stuff. When I was a child and my grandma gave me her old blender, which had a three-cup capacity and all the grunt of an electric toothbrush, my favourite thing to do was blend up a can of peaches in its syrup and drink that like the fancy lady I thought I was. What I’m saying is: smoothies, they’re not long division, but they are delicious. Here’s an idea for you.

Raspberry, Pear and Basil Smoothie

The secret ingredient is a sneaky, sour teaspoon of apple tea powder. Which in itself is a perfect snack. If you don’t have any, this is still more than fine of course. Consider a tiny pinch of citric acid instead, if you like.

1 heaped cup frozen raspberries
2 pears
1 lemon
1 tablespoon apple tea powder
A few basil leaves

Tip the raspberries into a blender (pausing to ostentatiously instagram them first, if you’re anything like me.) Peel the pears and roughly chop them, and add them to the blender too. Eat the peel to assuage any wastefulness-guilt. Squeeze the juice from the lemon into the cup measure, then top up with water. Pour this into the blender, add the apple tea powder and the basil leaves, then process thoroughly till smooth. 

I say use frozen raspberries, because who has heaps of fresh raspberries kicking around to be diluted into smoothies? Do you? Who are you, Marie Antoinette? You could use any berry you like – frozen strawberries are rather pleasing as their seeds aren’t so obvious between the teeth. On the other hand, the seeds kind of make you feel like you’ve got something to do as your teeth grind them down, so there is a case for both sides. The pears give a similar kind of bodily smoothness to the drink that bananas might, also their mild, fragrant juiciness is a good backdrop for the more boldly acerbic berries. Basil’s smokiness provides a little depth and warmth. And the finished smoothie is a really pretty colour. Really, really pretty. Let us not overlook its aesthetic value for the sake of pretending we’re overlooking its aesthetic value.

Last time I blogged I was urging anyone local to come along to the rally for Marriage Equality. Well, I went, with all my friends, and it was the most intense, happy, emotional day. I wore my big gold dress as it was the most celebratory thing I owned and also because it made me think of Edie Beale’s ‘Revolutionary Costume For Today‘ from Grey Gardens. (“The full-length velvet glove hides the fist”.) We marched together, all the way to parliament in the hot sun, to hear speeches from many different sides of the story, from the most recent of accepters to those who had been working longer than I’ve been alive to fight for equality, for people to just be who they are. It was incredibly moving. Later that evening, over lots of ice cream (I needed to test a ton of ice cream recipes, so I did just that, and then invited people round to eat it all) we huddled round a livestream of Parliament TV to watch, with lip-biting nervousness and then heart-soaring joy, as Louisa Wall’s bill was voted to go ahead to a select committee by a surprisingly generous majority. This isn’t the final hurdle – there are still so many steps to be taken for the bill to become law – but still, it was such an exciting, wonderful achievement. Watching it all unfold with people dear to me was even better. I’m really not expressing myself here, but it was all…just…so important.

If my paragraph hasn’t moved you in the slightest, perhaps this video of Mitt Romney being incredibly disrespectful will show just one reason I feel so strongly about this issue – I’ve watched this video three times and my eyes well up each time by the end.

Another exciting thing that has happened, on a much smaller scale – and yet no less large-scale in its way – I received an email from Julie Clark of Floriditas cafe, saying their bakery always has plenty of ingredients and she’d read about some of my recipe testing mishaps and she’d like to help me out. How kind, thought I, perhaps she has a spare bag of sugar for me! The next day she emails again to say she’s just down the road and has something for me.

That something was 20 blocks of butter and 60 eggs. I’d never even met Julie, and to receive so much kindness from a stranger near-on floored me. She didn’t know it at the time, but Floriditas was where Tim and I went for a celebratory dinner on the night I found out my book deal was confirmed, and also we often buy their loaves of bread to add to the snacks table at photoshoots for everyone to eat. So…synergy? Anyway, damn, sometimes these moments come out of nowhere and all you can do is say thank you. All my recipe testing since then has been monumentally less stressful, since, if something doesn’t work out quite right, there is still another remaining tonne of butter for me to use. Thank you, Julie!

Next time I blog, we may well have wrapped up the photography process and I’ll be very nearly finished the manuscript. The team – Kim and Jason the photographers, Tim the handsome project manager and Kate the stylist, are continuing to do such a brilliant job and putting so much energy into this and I am SO so excited for you all (I mean, no pressure, if you don’t want to buy the book that’s totally up to you) to see their amazing work.

Till then, I’ll be carving that butter sculpture of myself that I’ve always dreamed of.
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Title via: I’ve used this before but it’s so utterly plunder-able that I don’t care. And if you haven’t listened to it yet, please do yourself a favour and click here for the shivers-inducingly magnificent Elaine Stritch singing  Ladies Who Lunch from Sondheim’s Company.
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Music lately:

Thanks to a tip-off from Martyn Pepperell I’ve been streaming Alice Cohen’s album Pink Stream – so twinkly! And if there’s one thing I enjoy in music, it’s twinkliness. 

TLC, Creep. Always.

Liza Minnelli and Pet Shop Boys, Losing My Mind. I didn’t think Sondheim’s fragile, terribly sad original could be improved upon by dramatic eighties drums and synths, but…it can! And how! 
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Next time: I’ll be twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. Not sure what that will bring, foodwise – Marmite on toast?

you got it allison. you got it raw!

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It is crunch time. The time is crunchy. There is less than a month till my manuscript is due, and just over a month till Tim and I go to America for a holiday. We’ve been having three photoshoots a week, we’re surrounded by cakes, and it was only as I, with primal instinct, rapidly transferred handfuls of fresh clean spinach leaves by the handful into my mouth while Celine Dion’s Power of Love played in my head, that I realised I haven’t eaten a lot of vegetables lately. I’d like to add that I’m not saying this in a “now I need to go for a jog to work it off!” kind of way. Just that my nutrition has been at the mercy of whatever it is I happen to be preparing for photoshoots on a given day. And: I feel great!

I couldn’t be happier. It’s like being in a montage! Here are some fleeting scenes that have been part of it all lately:

– Did I mention Tim and I are surrounded by cake. At first it was a novelty, and then I felt horrible that it was no longer a novelty, so I’ve been trying hard to make myself feel like it is, by constantly saying “look at all this cake! What a novelty! What is life?”
– I was on the way to the supermarket today to pick up some ingredients, checked the mail on the way, only to find a letter from Mum to find a much needed, much appreciated supermarket voucher.
– I had to make a pavlova at 11pm on Friday while feeling a little queasy. Said pavlova inevitably failed, when I went to check on it the next morning. A  snap decision was made to make another one again, an hour before a photoshoot. It mercifully worked.
– Did I mention I was making said pavlovas with nought but a whisk and a bowl (and ingredients too of course, smarty-pants.) Have been pretty much unable to use my right arm ever since. It’s weird, because I make cakes and whip cream and so on with a whisk all the time. I think the franticness must’ve made my muscles extra tensile.
– I have been paying what feels like obscene amounts of money for out-of-season fruit and vegetables. Since winter is here the only thing actually in season is one sole, limp, rapidly browning parsnip. And it is $7.
-Breaking: a hangover from a ridiculously enormous party is not conducive to wanting to test lots of recipes. And yet still I cooked.
– The kindness of friends continues to bring joy. Jo lent me her mother’s wonderful pottery. Willow lent me some glorious tablecloths. Martha of Wanda Harland gave our plate collection an early boost by loaning us some beautiful stuff. Jason (one of the photographers) bought pretty much the most stunning dessert spoons I’ve ever beheld. And it goes on.
– Since I have been making so, so, sososososososososo much food for photoshoots and general recipe testing, it has been persistently difficult to find time and energy and – importantly – general hunger to make food that I can blog about. There’s just no chance to be hungry. Don’t get me wrong. As far as problems go, this one is pretty wonderful, what with it being because I’m writing a cookbook and all. But still!

This is why these marinated tamarillos are perfect. Sharp, sweet, aromatic, spiced. Small slices with a cracker and some cheese makes for a snack of thrillingly punchy flavour and relief-inducing smallness. Frankly I really just love eating them with a spoon.

Recently I was able to attend a demonstration from Megan at little bird organics. It was a supercool experience, as she took us through making several courses of food – all raw. Their ethos is about food tasting and also making you feel amazing, and this recipe from the evening in particular caught the attention of my tastebuds. Clearly I am not a raw vegan, or even vegetarian, but I enjoy being inspired by people who love food, and being exposed to new ideas. Which is exactly what happened. Thanks so much Megan for allowing me to share this recipe here. Because it is freaking delicious.

Marinated Tamarillos.


With huge thanks again to little bird organics for the recipe, that I have adapted ever-so-slightly. 

8-10 tamarillos
1/4 cup maple syrup or agave nectar
250ml (1 cup) red wine
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves
Salt

Slice the tops off the tamarillos and using a sharp knife, slice off the skin. Then slice the newly naked tamarillos lengthwise, or however you please, really. Place them in a bowl. Pour over the syrup and the wine, spear with the cinnamon stick and the cloves, and grind over plenty of salt. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. I don’t have a dehydrator, but the recipe recommends putting them in it if you do. 

There will be a lot of syrup – I just drained it off. I held on to it because I have a feeling it’ll be fantastic topped up with gin and soda.

Something in the salty, wine-deep intensity of these is quite compulsive. I love them. It may look like you’re making tons, but you’ll get through it all easily, I promise. Best of all, tamarillos are actually in season here and reasonably priced. But once they’re gone, I think I’ll try making these with sliced pears, and then next Autumn, perhaps I’ll make it with feijoas. Inbetween times, I predict this would also be a wonderful marinade for sliced plums…all I’m saying is, there are options for you outside the realm of the tamarillo. But it’s a very, very good start.

I saved the best montage scene for last. This afternoon I had to make a [redacted] pudding for tonight’s photoshoot. It felt like it was going to be highly straightforward. Well. I screwed it up royally. It did not cook right at all. So I panic-ate it. I just…ate it all, in a kind of fugue state. It felt oddly logical, so I went with it, because that way it would be gone and the ingredients wouldn’t be wasted and so on and so forth.

My second attempt at making the pudding failed also. Freaking out about wasting ingredients, about wasting precious time, about this stupid, sodding, straightforward pudding just refusing to work, I may have panic-eaten a goodly proportion of the second one, too. Luckily I came to and binned the rest of it, before my insides corroded. A few prickly, selfish tears were shed, I had some rescue remedy, and looked up pictures of Tom Hardy holding a dog. And, weary but sufficiently emboldened, I made a third go of that pudding. I could feel – perhaps a little irrationally – the ingredients not quite coming together the way I intended them to, but shunted it hatefully into the oven all the same. As soon as I could ascertain that it was not entirely successful, but at least relief-inducingly good-enough…I lay down on the ground and drank some vodka.

Lucky for me I have such a brilliant team in Kate, Jason and Kim. They’ve been able to make even the most doubtful dishes look so beauteous, it makes me feel this might all come together and…work. As Jessi says to Kristy in the Baby-sitters Club movie, “Kristy, this brilliant idea might actually be brilliant!” (I’m not sure whether the actor is not so great at her job, or the line is so bad that she couldn’t do anything with it, either way it’s kinda terrible – yet so applicable.)

In the face of all this exciting, tiring, wonderful, stressful, emotional, sugar-soaked, um, stuff, sometimes there is only one response:

A large Campari. If you can’t be fancy, you might as well fancy yourself as fancy.

PS: If you’re in Wellington and feeling able and up for it, there’s a Celebration Rally for Marriage Equality on Wednesday 29 August at noon in Civic Square. This is so important! I’m not sure that I’m going to have time to make a sign or anything, but I’m definitely going to be there. If you’re interested, click the link for details.

Title via: Normally I quote songs but this is a line from a movie – a musical comedy, in fact, but the point is, it is Cry-baby. An over-the-top, hilarious, sweet, wonderfully bizarre movie from John Waters starring a young Johnny Depp who overacts deliciously when saying such quotable lines as the title for this blog post. Also: there is Wanda Woodward. Find it, fast. 

Music lately:

Over at Lani Says I got wise to the ways of Jessie Ware. Her song Wildest Moments is LUSH.

Safety Dance, Men Without Hats. Make of this what you will. I can’t help loving this ridiculousness. And if your friends don’t dance then they really are no friends of mine.

Never not obsessed with the musical Hair. Here’s Flesh Failures/Let The Sun Shine In from the original Broadway cast.

Next time: Next time, I’ll be ever closer to the manuscript due date. And therefore you can look forward to me making even LESS sense than I did in this post. Good times, good times.

every task you undertake, becomes a piece of cake

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It was The Spice Girls who first said in their seminal text Wannabe, “now here’s the story from A to Z, you wanna get with me you gotta listen carefully”. And so it follows that if you wanna get with this cake you too should closely heed this recommendation. I guess what I’m saying is, this cake isn’t complicated but there’s plenty going on and so you might want to take the following hints into account. And the subtext: I really like quoting the Spice Girls on this blog.

– I can’t think of a better way of extracting the juice from the mandarins than peeling the fruit, holding it in your fist and then clenching thoroughly over a receptacle of some kind. It’s visceral, it’s effective, it neatly does away with including another kitchen implement that you have to wash.
– You can of course use oranges, lemons, grapefruit, limes, any other citrus that I’ve shamefully failed to name here instead of mandarins.
– The texture of your yoghurt will affect how much icing sugar you need. If it’s the more liquidy stuff, more icing sugar. If it’s the fabulously whipped-cream thick variety, perhaps less is needed.
– With this in mind, go slowly with adding more yoghurt to the icing or it might all just slide right off the cake and make you nearly cry frustrated tears when you put it on the cake. How do I know? I just do.
– Only arrange the plums just before you serve this. Or they will fall off. They just will. Perhaps it’s their passive-aggressive way of reminding us that they’re not in season, and therefore they’re not going to cooperate with no upstart food blogger.
– This cake is really delicious and not as scary as I’m making it sound.

Mandarin Cake With Yoghurt Icing and Plums

Cake adapted from a recipe in the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders by Lynn Bedford Hall. Icing and stuff all my idea though, for what it’s worth.

125ml mandarin juice (this depends on your mandarins, but maybe seven altogether?)
125ml plain oil, like rice bran or grapeseed
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
175 sugar
250g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch salt

6 plums
3 tablespoons sugar
1 extra mandarin

3 tablespoons plain unsweetened yoghurt
150g icing sugar, plus more if necessary

Set your oven to 170 C and line a 21cm springform tin with baking paper.

Whisk all the cake ingredients together (that’s from mandarin juice to the pinch of salt inclusive, by the way) for a few minutes till it forms a thick, pale golden batter. Tip this into the caketin and bake for an hour, though check after 45 minutes. Ovens can be tricksy.

Meanwhile, slice the plums into wedges and place them in a bowl. Sprinkle over the sugar and squeeze over the juice of the mandarin. Leave to sit at least for as long as the cake needs to cook, but overnight is even better.

Once the cake has cooled, whisk together the yoghurt and icing sugar till thick. Add more of either ingredient if necessary. Icing can be tricksy, too. Spread this thickly across the top of the cake, and place the plum slices on top.

Juicy plums, oddly-yet-pleasingly tangy icing, soft-crumbed and sweetly citrussy cake. Worth every Spice Girls quote it took to get to this point (and if you’re not weary of Spice Girls quoting, ignore that sentence and instead read this one: Yay, Spice Girls!)

As I said, plums aren’t in season, but they were only $6 a kilo and you can hardly get anything for $6 these days. If I sound a little defensive it’s only because I recently had the good fortune to meet Nadia Lim, winner of 2011 Masterchef, and she is VERY big on seasonal eating. Which is highly admirable. Sorry to let you down, Nadia, but if it’s any consolation, mandarins are in season right now so hard. And these ones couldn’t be fresher or more local, as they’re from Tim’s grandparents’ tree in Wairoa.

How did I meet her? My dear friend Jo and I were both invited to her Wellington On A Plate Masterclass by Pead PR. You can read Jo’s thoughts on the event here. As well as being a great friend, Jo is also good to hang with at a party. She’s all “Oh hey there Mayor Celia Wade-Brown, let’s hug and talk about our lives and this is my friend Laura”. And she stayed with me right to the end (the champagne helped the time fly by, admittedly) while I waited to meet Nadia and talk with her. Nadia herself should be commended for her massive patience in taking the time to talk to me after having talked to roughly a million other people beforehand. I admit I never actually saw Masterchef – we don’t have a TV, and while I love cooking shows I honestly find the hugely competitive ones a little stressful to watch. All that running around and plating up and being edited to look like a mean person! So while I’d heard Nadia Lim’s name around, and had read a few interviews with her and such, I didn’t have much of a feel for what she was like as a person or a cook. Well, she seems awesome. She’s enthusiastic about food, which I love, she’s confident and fun, she’s highly knowledgeable, and she made three different salmon entrees (using Regal King salmon) and a dessert in her half hour masterclass. All of which I wanted to try recreating myself as soon as possible. You know sometimes when a recipe is so simple and practical and delicious that you think “why haven’t I been making this all the time?” That’s how I felt about her salmon recipes.

And as I said, I got to have a chat with her and she graciously answered the three questions I threw down.
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HungryandFrozen x Nadia Lim

Me, Laura Vincent: You’ve just had a cookbook published. What’s something people should know about the process? 

Nadia Lim: Mine was a seasonal cookbook, so if you shoot in winter…I had to use imported stuff which I hated, because I’m a huge fan of eating seasonally and locally, it was a huge dilemma. There are things I had to leave out…and some things I just couldn’t use at all, like I couldn’t put feijoas in. That was a challenge.

Me: I hear that. I am struggling to find strawberries for my photos. Luckily butter’s always in season… I think it’s awesome that you’re young – 26 – and you’ve got a cookbook, you won this TV show, you’re out there getting yours. In an industry generally presided over by older males, what do you think a younger perspective brings?

Nadia: I’ve always stayed pretty true to my food philosophy. When I was twelve I came up with my philosophy of ‘eating from the ground, the sea and the sky, not the factory. But when you’re younger, you’re more more willing to learn new things. Sometimes people are a little stuck in their ways, their techniques, how they do things, but I’m very adaptable and I like to learn from lots of different people, I’m really open to it. And I also think the young generation has a real responsibility, now we’re going back to more, you know, finding out about your ingredients. Whether they’re ethical, sustainable, healthy, what their environmental impact is. That’s really important.

Me: Say someone gave you a million dollars and you could travel anywhere in the world to eat their food-

Nadia [immediately]: Turkey. Yes. I love Middle Eastern flavours. I haven’t been to the Middle East yet but I use a lot of their ingredients in my cooking. I love things like pomegranates, dukkah, labne…Turkish cuisine often – well, you know the flavour wheel, of whether your tastes are more tart/sour dominant or sweet, or salty…I’m quite sour orientated, and a lot of their food is quite tart, like their cheeses, and pomegranate molasses.

Me: And sumac?
Nadia: Yeah! They use so many things that I love in that type of cuisine, and it’s quite healthy, lots of grains and vegetables and freshly made food.

Me: I have spent one afternoon in Turkey – I didn’t eat anything, I had one glass of apple tea. 

Nadia: Apple tea is so good!

Me: Yes! Based on that I can definitely recommend the place. And thanks heaps for your time.

Nadia: Thank you!
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Thanks again Nadia Lim, now established as my second-favourite Nadia, right after Ms Comaneci.

In a world where there is so much to be outraged at, like awful pizza companies being awful, I’d like to also throw some light on some things making me happy lately. Whittaker’s sent me a wealth of their wonderful chocolate to assist my recipe testing, for which I’d like to individually hug every single Whittaker’s employee. Tim and I found out we’re going to be able to go behind the scenes at Third Man Records and will get to talk to co-founder Ben Swank when we’re in Nashville in October. We went to a Whisky Breakfast for Wellington on a Plate at Arthur’s cafe – our friend Kim has some glorious photos here on her blog. I got to meet Nadia Lim (okay, you already know that from just ten seconds ago, but I’m not above recycling nice news.) I finally finished and uploaded episode 3 of my podcast, The HungryandFrozen #soimportant Podcast. You can listen on iTunes or on the website. If you like.

And finally, this excellent cat video made me laugh.
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Title via: Was *this* close to quoting the ‘jaded mandarin’ line from Jesus Christ Superstar, which I thought for a long time was Judas calling Jesus a mandarin as in the fruit. But instead: MARY POPPINS with A Spoonful of Sugar. She is so important. 
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Music lately:

Willy Moon, I Wanna Be Your Man. He is one smooth babe.

Placebo, Slave to the Wage. Forgot how much I love them.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Down By The Riverside. She is the coolest.
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Next time: I’m as shocked as anyone, but it’s nearly spring! I’m hoping there’ll be some new fruit and vegetables coming in soon…I love winter so much but I’m ready for more fruit and for asparagus!

PS: I totally forgot to upload the photos first time I published this. Fail! But lots of people reminded me right away. Hooray for the people!

he’s a hero, a lover, a quince, she’s not there

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I have come to recognise that while I’m pretty brainy (maths/science aside, but what have either of those disciplines ever, ever done for humanity?) said brain will sometimes mix things up entirely for me, usually the more confident I am that what I’m saying or doing or thinking is correct. For example, I got How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson back in 2006 and it only just, just this week clicked into place how great her Food Processor Danish Pastry recipe is. Normally with recipes like this you need to slowly massage cold butter into the yeasted dough while rolling it out over and folding it over and over again. Nigella’s blasts the butter into the dough right at the start, so it’s already there come the rolling-out stage. This whole time I’ve been all, “oooh, I’m using a food processor to briefly cut in the butter, la de da” (in a Homer Simpson voice) not realising she was removing a ton of effort from an otherwise intimidating recipe. Oh Nigella, moon of my life.

Another example, because I don’t think I explained the singular drama of pastry comprehension very well: I recently with vociferous disdain described someone as a “typical 99 percenter.” I was well into my spiel before I realised, prompted by puzzled looks of those around me, that “wait! I meant 1 percent! I was dissing the 1 percent! You know that!” Way to go, brain, constantly making me backtrack when I could be making pie.

This recipe for Quince Tarte Tatin is a significant undertaking, so I’m letting you know well in advance that you’ll need to let yourself know well in advance that you want to make it. This is the kind of thing that ought to come with some kind of apologetic medical pamphlet covered in cartoonish diagrams. The pastry alone takes two days, the quinces at least two hours. However most of that time is waiting (apart from a brief but sweatily red-faced pastry-rolling session) and not all foodstuffs can appear to us immediately. If you want to make a pie with bought pastry and ingredients with swiftlier-to-disintegrate cell structure than quinces, that is completely fine. This is not the only pie in the world.

There’s three parts to this recipe: firstly the pastry, which is care of a Nigella Lawson recipe, then dealing with the quinces, for which I adapted a Floriditas recipe, and finally slapping it all together, where I went back to Nigella and followed her timings for an apple tarte tatin recipe.

This is most definitely not the required 50x50cm square, yet still it turned into pastry. So, hopefully that’s kind of encouraging to everyone. And it goes without saying that this is one of the most blissfully delicious kinds of uncooked pastry dough under the sun.

One nice thing about all the effort that goes into the pastry is that you only need half of it to make the tart, so I’ve frozen the other half for undoubtedly smug future use.

Processor Danish Pastry

From Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess – and if you don’t have a food processor then cube the butter and roughly rub it into the dry ingredients at the start with your thumb and fingertips, making sure there’s still visible bits of butter, and then proceed as per the recipe. I’m sure that would work out fine.

  • 350g bread flour
  • 250g butter, cold and sliced thinly synapse
  • Pinch salt
  • 25g sugar
  • 1 sachet instant dried yeast
  • 1 egg
  • 125ml (1/2 cup) room temperature milk
  • 60ml lukewarm water

Blend together the butter, flour, salt, sugar and yeast briefly till the butter is fairly well dispersed through in small pieces. Mix together the egg, water and milk in a bowl and tip in the floury buttery mixture. Stir together quickly, then cover and refrigerate overnight. This recipe takes time.

The next day, let it come to room temperature and roll it out to 50cm x 50cm, or the best you can manage. I undershot the mark ridiculously, but also my arms nearly fell off from the exertion and in the end I was proud of my wobbly 35cm shape. If it’s sticky – and mine was, immensely so – just continue to sprinkle over flour. Fold it in three, like a business letter or something, then roll it out again as best you can to the same shape. This got a bit painful but it’s necessary – all these folds are creating air pockets which will make the pastry deliciously puffy and layered as it bakes. Based on the results, I’d say attempt to roll it out as far as you can, but if you can only manage a weird shape like me, you’ll probably still be fine. Repeat this once more and just as you’re about to collapse, divide the pastry in half and either refrigerate for another hour before using once it’s returned back to room temperature, or wrap and freeze for another time. Just like that!

Not that quinces are a burden, as far as burdens – or anything – goes, it’s just that every year I get all “Hooray! Quinces! So fragrant! Sniff them! Seasonal eating, it’s quite the thing to do! Have YOU ever sniffed a quince?” and then realise I don’t have all that many recipes for them and I’m not entirely sure how to get the most out of their short autumnal tenure. I was lucky this year that Tim’s grandmother on his dad’s side gave us a bunch of quinces from Taihape, and also that in a comment on my previous blog post, Sophie recommended quince tarte tatin for using up quinces.

Quinces are rock-hard, can’t be eaten raw, take forever to cook and generally reward you by turning an odd pinkish brown colour. Maybe if they weren’t so irreverently rare we wouldn’t be so excited by them? I don’t know. But I love them, with their rich flavour of rose petals and lemon and pears and apples. Cooking them in the oven for a long time under a low heat slowly busts through their solidity and makes them as soft as canned peaches. Which would be a fine substitute, if you want a faster pie. I adapted this recipe from one in my Morning Noon and Night cookbook from the beautiful Floriditas cafe, basically by making it really lazy. The original recipe isn’t even that difficult or anything, I’m just a corner-cutter from way back.

Oven-poached Quinces

Adapted from Morning, Noon and Night, the Floriditas cookbook.

  • Quinces (about 2kg)
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 litre water
  • 1 cinnamon stick
  • Squeeze of lemon juice
  • 1 tablespoon honey

Tip everything except the quinces into a large roasting dish and mix to combine. Then, rub away any fluff clinging to the surface of the quinces then chop them up, leaving the skin on. In half is fine although mine were in all sorts of irregular shapes because they were a bit blemished. I cut off the knobby bit at the top, but leave the seeds in. Sit the quince pieces in the roasting dish, and then cover with a sheet of baking paper under a sheet of tinfoil. You can scrunch the tinfoil over the edges of the roasting dish to hold the paper in place. Place in the oven and leave for about 2 hours. They won’t look overly promising but should be extremely tender and smelling wondrous. They’re done when a fork or skewer plunges easily into the fruit’s flesh.

Finally, to bring the two separate elements together in pie unity:

First catch your pie dish. Lots of people end up with those straight-sided fluted ceramic pie dishes, it’s not quite as good but it’ll do the trick. There is actually such thing as a tarte tatin dish, but I don’t even know what they look like so I’ll just give you instructions for what I used which was this metal plate with sloped sides which I got for a dollar at a garage sale in Paraparaumu.

Quince Tarte Tatin

1/2 measure pastry from above recipe
Poached quinces from above recipe

Set your oven to 200 C/400 F and put a baking tray to heat up at the same time. Place the fruit snugly in the dish and dot with about 25g chopped up butter and scatter with a tablespoon of sugar. Place in the oven to heat up a little while you roll out half of the pastry (freeze or refrigerate the rest of the pastry for another use). Remove the pie dish from the oven, drape the pastry on top of the fruit, tucking it in carefully round the sides, then bake on top of the baking tray for 20-30 minutes. It’ll be puffy golden brown on top. Remove from the oven, slide a knife round the sides and place a large plate over the pie dish. Carefully flip it over so that the pie drops onto the plate, revealing a crown of fruit. If some sticks to the pie dish, just pick it up and push it back into place.

Also: feel free to use a different fruit to quinces here. Something like apples or pears might require a little softening in a pan with some butter and sugar first, but anything from a can should be good to go.

The sheer deliciousness of this pie is augmented by relief that all that effort didn’t go to waste. I think so, anyway: honeyed, soft fruit and palpably excellent pastry, buttery and puffy and echoing all the good things about croissants.

You can serve it with syrup from poaching the quinces or just photograph it in a pretty bottle you bought then save it for mixing with vodka and lemonade. Up to you! We took it round to our dear friend Jo’s to eat while watching Veronica Mars (so important) with another dear Laura, who had brought some blue cheese. Someone suggested a slice of the blue cheese on the slice of the pie. It was pretty incredible.

You might think I throw round terms like ‘dear friend’ flippantly but seriously, look at the beauteous cake Jo, Kate and Kim made for me on my two-weeks-after-the-fact birthday party! Tim and I took the rest of the pie round to their place and that’s where it got finished. Which is really all good…because we’ve still got a significant volume of four-layer surprise birthday cake to get through.

Title via: Superboy and the Invisible Girl from the Broadway Musical Next to Normal, with the gorgeous and gorgeously talented Jennifer Damiano and Aaron Tveit. The actual line is ‘a lover a prince’, and even though I know that’s what it is I can never stop myself from saying ‘a lover of Prince’ whenever I’m singing along.

Music lately:

Am listening to the excellent new Homebrew album while I type. You can’t go wrong by listening to Listen to Us again, or ever.

212, Azealia Banks. Took a while, but: obsessed.

Next time: I have a lot of tofu in the fridge. And if there’s one thing I know about tofu, it’s that it doesn’t get better with age…

 

like a week that’s only mondays, only ice creams never sundaes

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Look, when you’ve been 26 as long as I have, which is about 48 hours now, you learn some things, okay? Like…I may get older, but it looks like I’ll never grow out of being deeply clumsy (spilled lemonade all over a Settlers of Catan game.) Or being forgetful (I forgot something, I forget what.) Or being unable to follow a list of tasks I set myself. (Probably don’t need to provide an example for that one.) Or overthinking things. (I really overthought some things.) Yes, all of that in 48 hours.

Me on my birthday, in some of my favourite clothes. (Apparently I turned 26 in 1991.)

It wouldn’t be much of a celebration without ice cream, that foodstuff that I have so much love for.

As well as my birthday happening (and being absolutely over now, so I should really probably let it go already) another joyous time is upon us: feijoa season. There are those who say it’s like a reward for the cold weather but I’m the weirdo who actually loves the snappy chill of autumn and winter – slow-cooked stews; hearty warming soups; soft cosy woolly jumpers and socks; wrapping yourself in blankets; watching entire seasons of important TV shows; scarves; old-timey puddings; rain on the roof; the unbeatable unity of complaining about bad weather with strangers or those you struggle to make small talk with any other time of year. And there’s feijoas.

These edible jewels are well known in New Zealand but if you’re not from round these parts: imagine an egg-shaped, rough-skinned green fruit which you cut in half to scoop the insides out with a teaspoon – like a passionfruit. The texture is like that of canned pears and the flavour is intoxicatingly elusive. Like pear and old-fashioned grape and maybe a hint of elderflower or strawberry? It’s fizzingly tart yet fragrantly sweet. It’s so beautiful.

And it works brilliantly in ice cream, as I found out this week. As always with my recipes, you don’t need an ice cream maker to do this. In fact this is one of my simplest ice cream methods yet. Only a couple of ingredients, a bit of a blast in the food processor, and you’re done. Yet my reasons for making it this way are highly purposeful. Feijoas have a slightly gritty texture and I didn’t want to add to that with granulated sugar. Condensed milk smooths it all out and gives the ice cream itself a fantastic texture. To that I added lime juice to point up the feijoa’s own flavour, in the way you’d add salt to a tomato. To counteract all the sweetness of the condensed milk, and to reflect the tartness of the fruit, I used thick, creamy Greek yoghurt. And that’s it.

Feijoa Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

15 or so ripe feijoas
1 tin condensed milk
2 tablespoons lime juice
250ml/1 cup thick plain Greek yoghurt

Halve the feijoas and scoop out the flesh, tipping it all into the bowl of a food processor. Blend it thoroughly with the condensed milk and lime juice till well pureed. Then add the yoghurt and continue to blend till it is, uh, blended. Scrape into a freezer-proof container and put it in the freezer. Don’t worry about stirring it as it freezes, just let it do its thing. Allow to soften out of the fridge for about ten minutes before you serve it.

Notes:

– If you don’t have a food processor, don’t feel like you can’t make this. Either use one of those stick blenders for soup or a just fork and some extra effort to mash up the fruit – the texture will be a bit different but it’s all good.
– I know it asks for a lot of feijoas, but who goes looking for feijoa recipes to just use up one or two? This is for my people with plastic bags heaving with fruit from their aunty/kindly neighbour/roadside stall!
-I try not to be fussy about ingredients but I am about the yoghurt here – if you use anything other than thick Greek yoghurt the texture will be compromised significantly and it just won’t taste as good. If you can’t find that yoghurt I’d use the same amount of regular cream instead.

I think this is made even more delicious because of how little effort you have to put into it. The tiny burst of lime brightens and emboldens the fragrant feijoa flavour and the condensed milk gives it this incredible texture, interrupted by the ever-so-slight grit of the feijoa seeds. The only thing is that it has a slightly weird colour – beige-ish, I’d say? But the flavour is so shiningly, adamantly feijoa-esque that you can either overlook it or dump a ton of food colouring in there to suit yourself.

Just know: it’s wildly delicious. If you can’t access feijoas for whatever reason, I’d substitute two tins of drained canned pears. In fact I might try that myself as well, because it sounds so good in its own right.

Tim and I went to The Ambeli for my birthday, which is this swanky award-winning restaurant that I’ve been longing to go to. I don’t mean to sound like a naive rube, but the prices – admittedly more the wine than the food – were fairly faint-making and I sat there in my seat suddenly feeling like I didn’t belong there at all. However, emboldened by a few things (“Birthday!” “We haven’t gone to dinner in forever!” “it IS legal to charge this much!” “Be cool!”) I settled down and we ended up having a completely splendid time. If you’re rich or at least feeling that way, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Every element of the food was intensely exquisite, so that you wanted to eat it very slowly and taste every ingredient in every mouthful and then write an essay on your feelings about it. The wait staff were astute, lively and knowledgeable. The wine made us super talkative, you know, where you’re nodding along heartily because everything is so important and meaningful (I’d like to think we can be that without the wine.) We left with the sadness that a birthday comes but once a year, and also happily full and tipsy and analysing the food like it was some kind of intelligent movie we’d just been to see.

The next morning I had ice cream for breakfast. And it was good.

Title via: Without Love, featuring a young – well, younger – Aaron Tveit, from the musical Hairspray. The local musical theatre company is going to be putting on a production of it later this year, I am so very excited.

Music via:

Lianne Las Halvas, Forget. I love the scratchy strumming that loops round it and the equally looping chorus – it’s kind of understated and wacky at the same time. And Lianne has amazing clothes. So.

SWV, Co-Sign. New SWV! Which I couldn’t find on YouTube for ages because I kept searching for SVW by mistake. It’s never easy to capture prior magic, especially from a land as long ago as the 90s, but I like what they’ve done here.

Next time: I still haven’t made anything from my Little and Friday cookbook – for shame! Need to change this soon, since I love baking and it is full of baking and all.

i’ve got caviar for breakfast, champagne every night

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I was never excited by breakfast as a kid. Breakfast meant having to go to school, inevitably sitting round all day with wet shoes because there was this puddle right by the steps to my first classroom which never dried up, not even in the middle of summer (as far as my dramatic memory goes, anyway.) Later at boarding school, it meant not knowing where to sit, day after day of dry loveless cereals dampened with milk and choked down or eyeing up masses of pale, bulky margarine to be spread over pale, barely warmed toast. But: I appreciate that I’ve been lucky that whatever the financial situation was around me, not one single day has gone by that I haven’t been assured breakfast. Even when Tim and I were first living together there was always bread for toast (a diabetic needs their carbs! And hey, thank goodness Tim isn’t kept alive by like, caviar or truffle oil. Just simple, cheap carbs.)

There’s good memories of breakfast too. Dad suggesting and then making canned corn on toast on a Saturday morning. Nana guiding me from the white sugar to over to the more thrillingly caramelly brown sugar to pour over my porridge when I was staying with her. And now I love it – going out for brunch with Tim (well, we have to as cafe reviewers, so bully for us) or slouching round together in the kitchen in the early hours with a cup of tea or coffee pretending for a while we don’t actually have to leave the house and earn money. With this in mind, if you’ve got some time handy, nothing makes breakfast nicer than – of course – actually having something good to eat. Granola is an elegant solution. Robust and filling, but importantly delicious – depending on what you put in it – and the recipe’s flexible. And best of all, once you’ve made it, you’ve got breakfast in five seconds, and all you have to wash up is a bowl and a spoon. No dishes at all if you just curl up with the jar and eat it by the handful till you’re ready to carry on with your day.

I’d been meaning to make granola literally forever. Okay, just a month or two, but whatever, sometimes I find it fun to use words that make people huffy about correct usage. I don’t mean harmful words that you say while also yelling “PC gone mad! PC gone mad!” as if it’s some kind of shield that lets you be an awful person…I just mean acting the fool. Also contributing to this might be the Parks and Recreation character Chris Traegar who reminded me how satisfyingly useless the word “literally” is.

That said, this might not literally be granola. It’s more muesli with granola aspirations. But aren’t we all? Allegories aside, what I mean is: it’s a little more free-flowing and not quite as tooth-challengingly clumpy as proper granola, but on the other hand it’s nicer and cheaper than the stuff at the supermarket. If your cupboard is bare you’ll need to spend a bit of money to get the ingredients, but fortunately most of them are fairly cheap and this batch will last you for ages.

This one has a one-two punch of grated apple and apple juice to impart crisp juicy flavour, cinnamon to make you feel warm and safe inside with every mouthful, and cashew butter for a bit of much-needed lusciousness. Ugh, I know, who has cashew butter? Well, I do – a Christmas present from my brother – and I wanted to use it in something specific. If you’re given to making your own granola maybe it’s not so difficult a pantry item after all, but if you don’t have it within reach, you could use tahini of course, or even peanut butter, which will affect the flavour a little but only in a “made on a production line that also processes peanuts” kind of way, I presume. Or just leave it out!

Apple Cinnamon Granola

This makes HEAPS. Initially I just had to leave it in the roasting dish until I’d eaten some, because we didn’t have a container big enough for it. Even now, several meals down, it’s divided between two big containers.

  • 3 cups rolled oats
  • 2 cups wholegrain or “whole” oats
  • 1 cup quinoa flakes
  • 1 cup linseeds
  • 1 cup sunflower seeds
  • 1 1/2 cups dessicated coconut
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 2 large apples, grated (including skin)
  • 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon (to taste)
  • Pinch salt
  • 2 heaped tablespoons cashew butter
  • 2 heaped tablespoons golden syrup
  • 1/2 cup apple juice

Set your oven to 100 C. Line your biggest roasting dish with a big sheet of baking paper. Mix together all the ingredients from rolled oats to salt directly in the mixing bowl itself, then place in the oven, stopping to stir about every ten minutes or so, for thirty to forty minutes.

Then, just when you think you’ve got away with not having to do any dishes, mix together the cashew butter, golden syrup, and apple juice till relatively smooth, and drizzle it over the roasting dish of oats. Don’t worry about covering it all – just mix it through. This is going to create some cluster action. Return to the oven for ten minutes, then turn the oven off and leave it in there to cool. If this isn’t an option – flatmate wants to roast a chicken or something – then just carrying on baking for another ten minutes after stirring it again.

The apple flavour is surprisingly subtle after all that, but the harmonious pairing with cinnamon brings it out further than it would be on its own. This has crunch and warmth and sweetness and is generally a beautiful way to start the day. Or have it for dinner. And use what you can find – add sesame seeds or pumpkin seeds if you have them, use demerara or white sugar, leave out the quinoa and add wheatgerm, whatever. It won’t fail. It’ll give you sunshine on a cloudy day.

We had a charming weekend away in Greytown, which I won’t tell you much about since I’m going to be writing about it for the newspaper, but for now – just look at this kokako. All I knew about these glossy birds was gleaned from educational videos in school, where the main take-home message was: they are monumentally endangered. So to actually be able to see one at Pukaha Mt Bruce was pretty wonderful. We’re gazing at this rare, precious bird quietly and respectfully through the mesh fence that protected it from the outside world, taking in the moment. Then it starts flirting with Tim. Yes. Tim got openly hit on by an endangered native bird. It shadowed him as he walked the perimeter of the enclosure, continually jumping up to cling onto the mesh by Tim’s face and squawk at him plaintively. I was ignored entirely apart from this brief moment of eye contact between us in the photo above. Recognising a rival? Can’t blame the kokako, really.

Oh yeah, and if you’ve got it, enjoy the Easter break! May I non-coyly recommend these Hot Cross Buns if you’re in the market for making them this year?

Title via: Aretha Franklin’s Evil Gal Blues, a cautionary tale where she not only belts it out, but also accompanies herself on piano. Formidable.

Music lately:

Under by Watercolours. Warming and chilling at the same time. Beautiful.

Sherie Rene Scott, the Broadway star who is on my list of “people who have made me cry even though they’re only on a grainy YouTube video”. One of my favourites is of her singing I Miss The Mountains in a very early workshop of what would become the musical Next To Normal. Maybe quite specifically because of her vibrato on “mountains” at 1:54 and the way she says “meeeeeeh-iss” at 2:25.

I’ve also been listening to a TON of podcasts (yeah, those things, I know, I only just got into Google Reader this year too) lately, if anyone has any they can recommend me then please go right ahead.

Next time: I am right in the middle of making pulled pork for the first time, and if it tastes even one tenth as good as it smells, I’ll be one happy person. And therefore more likely to blog about it. 

raspberry beret, i think i love her

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There are so many things I’m no good at. I’ll be the first to tell you. But no false modesty about one thing: I can speed read. When I was a kid with no income (I lived in the country! There was no such thing as a paper run) my skills would be particularly useful – if we ever went to town, I could absorb a Babysitters Club book in around 15 minutes in the bookshop, thus saving my family a cool $5.95 each time. 

Further to this, it seems everyone I know has been reading the Hunger Games books recently. This week Tim and I planned to meet up with a group of friends for a BYO dinner on Friday night, after all of them had seen the Hunger Games movie. On Wednesday night Tim started reading the book itself out of curiosity and finished it the next day. On Thursday I realised I was going to be the only person at the dinner table on Friday night who wouldn’t have read it or seen the movie. So I thought to myself: Can I read it by the time we get to the movie? Could I what.

I finished it in less than three hours, that very night. Including checking Twitter constantly, and making dinner (which was toast, but still. Dinner.) While the book itself is easy enough to gallop through, I clearly still have the speedreading magic. At lunch on Friday it took little more than some significant eye contact for Tim and I to know exactly what the other person was thinking: we should book tickets to see the movie with everyone else that night. After the movie I nearly floated out of the cinema and analysed it so hard I almost lost my voice. Roughly 24 hours previous I was opening the book for the first time, knowing nothing about it other than the lead character was called Katniss and it was really, really popular. The only thing faster than my reading, was the material I was reading’s ability to win me over. It won me over so fast it deserves an ironically slow clap from a crowded room.

However, back when I made this Coconut Raspberry Loaf on Wednesday to eat during an afternoon with my friend Kate, I was none the wiser. I strode purposefully up to her house in Mt Vic with the cake only partially cooked, because I was already late and it was taking forever to cook and I was starting to feel like I was in one of those dreams where you’re trying so hard to get to your destination but things keep slowing you down and you never actually make it. Irrationally, I grabbed the wobbly loaf cake from the oven, wrapped the tin in several teatowels, put it in a bag and left (of course the wind dropped and the humidity rose at this point, directly in relation to the gradient of hill I was climbing) and continued baking it for a further 15 minutes at Kate’s. Still turned out fine, which bodes well for your baking it in uninterrupted circumstances.

My entire motivation in these photographs was getting the cool couch in the background.

Raspberry Coconut Loaf with Raspberry Icing

Adapted liberally from a recipe in the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders Book. 

150g butter, melted
250g sugar
2 eggs
250g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup dessicated coconut
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup frozen raspberries
1/2 a cup extra raspberries
1 – 2 cups icing sugar

Set your oven to 180 C, find a loaf tin and line it with baking paper. My way of doing this is to just get a large rectangle of baking paper, squash it down into the inner corners, and then throw in the batter to hold it down. Your finished loaf cake will have some inconsistent lumps and bumps but don’t we all?

Whisk together the melted butter and sugar to combine, and then beat in the eggs till the mixture is a little lighter in colour. Sift in the flour and baking powder, tip in the coconut and milk, and stir vigorously – you may need to move to a wooden spoon or spatula if it’s too much for the whisk. Finally fold in the raspberries, tip the mixture into the tin, and bake for about an hour and a half, although start checking it for done-ness at about an hour – give the top a prod and if it’s wobbly, it’s not done yet.

For the icing, simmer the raspberries in a tablespoon or two of water till soft, then push through a sieve to remove the seeds – I know, horrible job – then stir in icing sugar to the juice that remains below till you have a smooth electric pink icing. Thickly spread across the somewhat cooled cake. 

Not one drop of food colouring went into that icing. Who knew raspberries with their natural muted-garnet hue, had it in them to deliver electro spilled-nailpolish pink like this? Not I. I was expecting a kind of dull, uncooked steak colour at best, not this bodacious fuchsia, the stuff of $2 Shop lipgloss.

Coconut’s mild sweetness and the sharp juiciness of raspberries work beautifully together. While you could leave the icing off if you’re in a hurry or don’t have enough raspberries, the fast-dissolving nature of the icing sugar and retained sourness from the fruit adds marvelously to the overall deliciousness, more than your usual, potentially oversweet icing might. This cake is easy to make, slices beautifully, and the coconut and fruit makes sure it’ll be okay the next day too. Frozen raspberries are cruelly costly,  but I wanted them for a few different reasons and so stuck to my guns. But you could use the cheaper blackberries or boysenberries happily here. Or even just leave them out altogether and you’ve got yourself a rather choice plain coconut loaf recipe.

Basically it’s amazing, plus it easily stands up to a cross-town dash in the middle of the cooking process.

And the cake batter tastes brilliant. Bada bing.

Tim and I spent last night at the Wellington Zoo – with most of the people that we went to see the Hunger Games movie with. Yes. They run sleepovers during the warmer months, and usually schoolkids are their main market, but about 28 adults instead were there last night. Getting up close to the animals without any of the usual crowds? So cool. Sleeping on the floor, separated only from its unyielding flatness by a couple of thin sleeping mats? Do-able as. Discovering the Mighty Boosh-esque lizard lounge for various reptiles, decorated with records by Julio Iglesias? Delightful. Realising there was a pelican, one of the things I fear most in this world, living on Monkey Island where we gathered for 20 minutes to feed its simian inhabitants? Blood-chilling. Apart from that ugliness though (and thanks to everyone who helped by saying “it’s gone! Oh wait it’s back” while I hid my face in Tim’s shoulder) it was a fantatically awesome time.

Especially when this sunbear stood on her hind legs and waved to us.

So gorgeous. Partially because we’d all just seen it, and partially because of the heightened silliness you feel when a little underslept and in an unfamiliar place, but there was a lot of raised eyebrows-ing and “this is SO Hunger Games” and so on. What, I enjoy wallowing in the obsession of pop culture, okay? Also, does anyone else get young Catherine O’Hara vibes from Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Katniss in the film? That is not-given-lightly high praise, by the way.
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Title via: Raspberry Beret, that jaunty classic by the jaunty Prince.
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Music lately: 


Althea and Donna, Uptown Top Ranking. So very good, I was led to this track by a way inferior but admittedly clever sampling of it in a mainstream track. So, really, thank you inferior but admittedly clever mainstream track. 


Bic Runga, Tiny Little Piece of My Heart. As beauteous as she ever was at this sort of thing.


Bernadette Peters, Being Alive. Never not obsessed with this song! Or her.
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Next time: I have a couple of quinces that I need some, uh, quincepiration for (sorry…not!) but I also am very set on turning Whittakers‘ new peanut butter chocolate into ice cream. First, to get my hands on some…