Category: Fruit

ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb

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When I was a kid I thought Robin Hood: Men In Tights was the last word in genius filmmaking. The very last. I rewatched it a few years ago and boo-urns, it really wasn’t that hilarious to me anymore. I guess when I was an impressionable youth, all it took was a few anachronisms and the merry men rapping their exposition and I was happy. I find it interesting what pop culture from my youth holds up to me – inexplicably Babysitters Club books yes, The Wedding Singer sadly no, despite how bodacious I thought Billy Idol was. Princess Bride, better with every watch, whereas time has not been kind to Aqua’s sound production. All 90s R’n’B without exception yes, Limp Bizkit…no. A thousand times nay. This is just me, what say you?  
I ask, because when eating a Cherry Ripe chocolate bar on the weekend (Americans: they’re like an Almond Joy with cherries instead of almonds) it became clear that it was unfairly undelicious. Weak chocolate. Nosebleed-inducing sweetness. Flavour more meh-ry than cherry. I was really, really hungry and I’d been lifting heavy things all afternoon so I ate the lot anyway. But I was sure they used to be nicer. Not that I had Scarface-level piles of cherry ripes around me as a kid. They’re only a relatively recent love of mine from the last decade or two. And yet. At first I thought it was my tastebuds evolving, and with all this “Mmm, tapenade and crackers” and “I love hummus!” and so on it had pushed out all the space available for enjoying the process of having your mouth waterblasted with sugar. But would a person who makes a pavlova and covers it in smarties say that? (I’m talking about myself, if you didn’t click that link.) I think not. So maybe it’s the fault chocolate bars? I do know a lot of people I’ve talked to are convinced Creme Eggs used to be better when they were kids. So.
Anyway I thought, to quote Jason Robert Brown: I can do better than that.

I had half a can of cherries in the fridge leftover from making Purple Jesus for Tim’s birthday last year. Coconut doesn’t cost much and I suspected condensed milk would be excellent glue to hold it all together. Finally I selected the kind of dark chocolate whose pure intensity of flavour and excellence of texture is matched only by its accessibility and reasonable price: Whittaker’s Dark Ghana. Bonus: sometimes if you’re lucky and the humidity is just so, this block of chocolate honestly sounds like a maraca when you snap it.
It worked. OH HOW IT WORKED! 
I’m not implying that if you do like Cherry Ripes we can’t hang out or anything, never! None of that. All I’m saying is: In my personal opinion I don’t like them anymore, and this is my attempt at recreating the Cherry Ripe so I do like it. So no need for hand-wringing.
Cherry-Coconut Chocolate Bars (Ah, c’mon, couldn’t use the registered brand name thingy, could I? I did consider Shmerry Shmipes, so feel free to use that.)

2 1/2 cups dessicated coconut
1 tin sweetened condensed milk
1 cup drained cherries from a jar
1 x 250g block very dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)

In a large pan, over a low heat, lightly toast the coconut until slightly nut-brown in parts. At this point, tip in the entire can of condensed milk and continue to stir, doing your best, over a low heat. Add the cherries – it will turn a ridiculous purple-grey, just go with it – and continue stirring till it forms a solid paste-like texture.

Remove from the heat, and tip the mixture onto a large sheet of baking paper on a bench, or onto a silicon baking sheet. Use the spatula to prod and spread and shape this forgiving mixture into a rough square, then use either a dough cutter or a knife and a fish slice to divide them into squares and shift them apart from each other.

Break the chocolate into pieces and place in a metal or china bowl that’s big enough to rest on top of a small pot of water. Bring said pot of water to the boil, which will gently melt the chocolate. Or you could microwave it, if you’ve got one. Use a teaspoon to transfer melted chocolate on top of each square of coconut, spreading it across and down the sides as per the above photo. Once they’re set, use the fish slice or a spatula or whatever to carefully flip them over, then using the remaining chocolate – which you might have to carefully re-melt, drizzle chocolate over (I use a kind of loose-wristed flinging movement which isn’t overly successful, to be honest.) If you feel like you’ve got enough chocolate you could just spread the chocolate over the bases so the coconut is entirely concealed. Store in a cool place.

All that writing makes it look like the most painfully complex recipe in history but I’m just trying to be elaborate with the instructions. This is honestly easy. There’s nothing fiddly involved, just a bit of time. 

Just a bit of stirring and spreading and slicing and melting and spreading and Jackson Pollock drizzling and verily you end up with a whole flipping jar full of delicious, chewy-sweet chocolate bars. Not too sweet, weirdly enough, despite the entire can of condensed milk (minus whatever stuck to the underside of the top of the can, which I carefully removed with my tongue). I think this comes from the toasting of the coconut, the relative sourness of the cherries, and the cocoa onslaught of the dark, dark chocolate. These morsels are best kept in the fridge, which means when you bite into them you get the full texture ruckus of cold, firm chocolate snapping into softly coarse coconut and pliant condensed milk. It’s truly splendid.
Seriously now. Try before you buy.
Nothing overly wacky to report from the weekend, as I was up in Auckland toiling away for work. Hence the post-toil cherry ripe bar which inspired all this. The time away toiling has rendered me completely useless which is why this blog post took forever to get to you. And even with all this time simmering away, it hasn’t necessarily improved. Did however have a “drawing club” at Kate and Jason’s house with what little time was left of my weekend, which was as gloriously old-timily fun as it sounds (or as awful as it sounds, depending on your opinion I guess). I got a rush of happiness from doing something I haven’t done since probably 1994 – just lying on the floor at a friend’s place drawing all afternoon. Finished the day with Jo and Laura (another one!) seeing out the first season of Veronica Mars. Leslie Knope has a hot contender for being my Favourite Fictional Hero Whose Fictionality Doesn’t Hinder Their Influence Upon Me…I can tell you.
Wait! Something a bit exciting: at our last book group, you know, the one with literary karaoke to three different versions of Wuthering Heights, I got a call from Australia’s edition of Vice magazine because they were wanting to talk to some people in Wellington about what they were up to of a weekend. Despite being genuinely excited about book club I wasn’t sure if the concept would translate particularly well, but lo: here I am in Vice! FYI, they asked me to send in a photo and I didn’t realise it’d be that big. Has my face always been that crooked? And ruddy-nosed? And, let’s face it, was my hair always that awesomely huge?
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Title via: Runaways, Cherry Bomb. I love the threatening way Cherie Curry spits out “HELLO” in the chorus. 
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Music lately:
Tim made me listen to this song by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, 99 and a Half Won’t Do. Now I’m trying to make you listen to it. It’s a beauty.
Who Are You, by Julien Dyne feat Ladi6 and Parks. Brill. Complicated and straightforward at the same time. I love the twinkly triangles and swirly piano notes. 
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Next time: I’m heading back up to Auckland this week for yet more toiling, but hopefully it won’t be quite so long before I bounce back this time round. 

heaven help my heart the day that i find suddenly i’ve run out of secrets…

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“And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house…” 
Shrewd readers will note that these photos haven’t been taken at my place. Less shrewd readers will note that these photos haven’t been taken at my place after I tell you that they haven’t. Hey, we can’t all be shrewd.
I made these Pineapple Secrets to take round to Kate, Jason, Kim and Brendan’s flat, which is Tim’s and my home away from home these days, to accompany a wild game of Settlers of Catan. For about 15 minutes it looked like I was going to out-strategise everyone and be queen of all I surveyed, but then I unsurprisingly slid back into last place. Fortunately there were Pineapple Secrets to sweeten the deal. I chanced upon them in by beloved Favourite Puddings of America cookbook, a book that keeps astounding me with its amazing recipe titles – like Perfect Divinity, don’t you just want to make that immediately? (It’s some kind of toffee-meringue confection, by the way.) Pineapple Secrets are part of your basic slice genus, being the kind which have half the mixture pressed into a tin, a filling spread across, and the rest of the mixture toppled over before baking the lot.   

That’s not baked beans in the yellow chequered bowl, by the way. Tim thought it was. It’s canned pineapple, simmered with a little cornflour and sugar.

Speaking of achingly cool things like playing Catan, on Friday night a party spontaneously formed at Tim’s and my place and – get you this – I managed to dupe everyone into listening to my Chess record, and if memory serves me correctly, it went down a treat. There is no better way to spend a Friday night than rapping to One Night In Bankok for a doubtless un-alarmed crowd, I promise you. I also remember Wuthering Heights being danced to, which feels hardly surprising – our capacity for that song has been tested but never met.

Still on the cooler-than-everyone* thing, on Saturday night we had book group at our place and attempted Literary Karaoke (where you look up songs on YouTube that reference books and then sing along!) Wuthering Heights got played again. Three separate versions. Told you we hadn’t reached capacity. (*When I say ‘cool’ I’m not being ironic*) (*I wasn’t being ironic there either.)

So while this cookbook can be heavy on recipes containing packaged cake mix or “marshmallow creme” whatever that is, when it’s good it’s brilliant, and these Pineapple Secrets are near-on spectacular. Even with all the cake mix I love the naive adventurousness of recipes from that 50s/60s era. Once I’d gotten over the adorable name (wait, that’s never going to happen) I appreciated how the ingredients were all in my cupboard or fridge at a time when both were feeling a little empty. This is just chance of course, but so delicious are the Pineapple Secrets that if you’ve got what it takes, I thoroughly advocate that you try making them yourself.

This slice is crumble-topping-esqe and sturdy, with a sweet, summery pineapple filling. While I love biscuits and cookies, the slice gets the jump on them any day with how easy it is to bring it into existence – no rolling out, or cutting, or cooking in batches. Not much of anything in fact, as this is not in any way a difficult recipe. Indeed what it lacks in difficulty it makes up for in deliciousness. Hooray!

Pineapple Secrets

Adapted slightly from America’s Favourite Puddings cookbook.

1 can crushed or sliced pineapple in juice
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons cornflour


2 cups flour
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
170g butter


Set the oven to 190 C/400 F. Simmer the pineapple and its juice, 1/4 cup brown sugar and cornflour together till thick and syrupy, stirring often. This shouldn’t take too long. Then, mix together the dry ingredients and rub in the cubed butter till thoroughly incorporated and resembling damp sand.


Take half the butter/flour mixture and tip into a greased, square baking tin. Wet the back of a spoon and use it to press down carefully on the mixture. Tip the pineapple and sauce over the top and spread across. Tip the rest of the flour mixture evenly over the top and use the back of the spoon again to very carefully smooth and press this down again. Bake for 30-40 minutes and allow to cool considerably before slicing.

It’s very simple but deceptively so – all that brown sugar bringing caramel intensity to the otherwise dull oats, the pineapple juicy and sweet and fragrant. I’m not sure how secret it is, since the title of the recipe completely gives it away, but it’s not unwelcome, even if you do see it coming. (Photo taken strategically to include their couch which I love. Alas, this is not my beautiful couch, although lucky for me I get to sit on it at least once a week usually.)
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Title via: Heaven Help My Heart from – how timely – the musical Chess. It’s a beautiful song, but when sung by Idina Menzel? Oh, the devastating. 
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Music Lately: 
Matthew Pickering: Your Beauty Transforms Every Space. Our friend Brendan was playing in a band with Pickering on Tuesday night at the ASB Gardens Magic series – all for free and featuring some very cool artists, like Ria Hall who was on before Pickering. It was all pretty lovely. Ria Hall’s I Am A Child is so stunning – would love to hear it a capella one day, her voice is just wild.

Audra McDonald: Summertime, from Porgy and Bess. Tim sent me this link the other day. It’s Audra McDonald, so you know it’s going to be special. And also it’s the Colbert Report, so you know it’s going to be…special.
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Next time: I’m away for the weekend so alas it’ll be a while before I can cook something again. Whatever that something is, depends on my exhaustion levels, which depends on a lot of things this weekend…anyone up for a recipe for heavily buttered toast?

banana by the bunch, a box of captain crunch would taste so good

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While there are large-scale diseases with varying degrees of manageability, on the day-to-day level the human body can still be pretty unfair to its inhabitant. I say this with full acknowledgement of my privilege – that is, I am sound enough of body. I mean your intentions going one way and your body going another.
But what’s got me thinking about this, is that it’s currently 5.30am. Not that shocking an hour really. But I’ve been absolutely, no-turning-back awake since 3.45am. Not for want of trying to sleep. My brain started getting stupid anyway. Like I’d be imagining rain on the roof and being all nice and calm, drifting away on a floating bed – suddenly my brain would insert into this lovely scene an enormous insect, a particular insect that terrifies the heck out of me and whose name I’m not even going to utter on this page. My brain did this about five times while I lay there in cold-then-hot discomfort, my normally reliable pillow becoming flat and concrete-like…when I checked my phone and over an hour had passed, I accepted there was not much I could do about it. So here I am.

Alas, this is quite typical. I’m not the best sleeper. Normally it manifests in my taking hours to fall asleep after turning off the light, but this time I had sleeplessness working its way to the middle from both ends of the night. As I sit here typing in the dark, Tim, the minxy hellion, is sleeping like he always does, deeply, unflappably, and with enviable briskness. Meanwhile I’ve been lying thinking “I’m going to be so fragile tomorrow. Does thinking I’m going to be fragile mean I’m going to be more fragile? Aagh, it’s that insect that I hate!”

Luckily I had the foresight yesterday to bake some banana bread, a warm pillowy slice of which I am confident will provide untold comfort.


Especially when that banana bread was spontaneously studded with the roughly chopped remainder of a vanilla-fluttery, buttery block of Whittaker’s white chocolate. (Please scuse the pink stains on my chopping board. Either everything is stained permanently or you never eat beetroot, there is no middle ground in life.)


Banana bread always seems like a rather lovely thing to me, perhaps because I associate it with the banana bread that shy, lonely Charlotte Johanssen brought over for her the Ramsey family in Babysitters Club #13: Hello Mallory, while the majority of Stoneybrook ignored the newcomers, quite racistly. While I didn’t exactly know what banana bread was at the time – we would’ve likely called it loaf cake in New Zealand – something about its compact, sliceable practicality all wrapped in tinfoil and carried over by Charlotte conveyed the sense of neighbourly friendliness better than any other food could’ve.

This is, kinda bafflingly, the FOURTH time I’ve blogged about Banana bread (Nigella’s beautiful recipe in 2008, and then in 2010 a vegan recipe and a highly recommendable Banana-lime Palm Sugar Loaf) and yet this new recipe still has its rightful place. Oh and I say ‘bafflingly’ because I can’t believe I’ve only just now brought up the Babysitters Club connection. Four banana bread recipes itself is not baffling. What’s this one bringing to the table though? It’s simple, it’s strewn with white chocolate, and it has the snuggly scent of cinnamon. It’s also gluten-free, if you want it to be.

Cinnamon White Chocolate Banana Cake

Adapted somewhatish from a recipe in Meat-free Mondays. That book just won’t quit!

125g soft butter
125g sugar (optional – half brown, half white sugar)
2 eggs
3 medium, ripe bananas (or 2 large)
50g roughly chopped white chocolate
170g rice flour, or plain flour 
50g cornflour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch salt

 Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and beat the butter and sugar together till creamy and light. Beat in the eggs, then fold in the bananas and white chocolate. Finally, sift in all the dry ingredients and fold them in gently. Tip the batter into a paper-lined loaf tin, and bake for about 1 1/4 hours.

Something about the magical properties of cornflour make this light, puffy, and with a crisp yet mouth-meltingly tender crust. There might be more to it than that, but I’m pretty sure it’s the cornflour. While I’ll stand up for white chocolate’s deliciousness any day, sometimes being paired with a spice only makes it more delightful, and this is verily the case with the cinnamon. Its warm mellow fragranced-ness against the shards of creamy sweetness is brilliant, and makes me want to pair white chocolate and cinnamon together again in other baking. And soon.


Um, yes, that is a glass bottle with a stripey straw in it. Guess what’s in the bottle? Iced coffee. Part of me is all “but it’s so pretty” and the other half is saying “Ugghh this is so blogger-y”. As always, to prove to myself that form over function could still provide a function, and I wasn’t just using props in my photos for the sake of it, I drank that coffee through the straw. It gave the already fruity, complex brew distinct notes of warm cardboard. But, as Leslie Knope said when she married off two male penguins to each other at the zoo: “I firmly believed it would be cute”.  I think I need to stop guilting myself out over this.

And look, here I am at 6.45am! A blog post under my belt, and the day’s hardly begun. I think I’d still take the sleep though. Fingers crossed for tonight. Which is feeling a long, long way away – oh, did I mention it’s Monday? Cruel, cold Monday? Thank goodness for banana bread, hey?

Title via: I feel like there should be like, an airhorn going off or a balloon drop every time I use a song from RENT (which this blog’s named for) in the title of a blog post too. If I keep making banana bread I’m going to run out of title options, but for now kindly revel in the unspeakably glorious joy that is Angel’s big number, Today 4 U, performed with alacrity by Wilson Jermaine Heredia. 
 
Music lately:

My capacity for being obsessed with songs is boundless. Boundless, I tell you. So the fact that I listened to Marina and the Diamonds’ Shampain almost literally a million times this week shouldn’t surprise you.

Monkees, Last Train to Clarksville. RIP Davy Jones, heartthrob.

Next time: whatever it is, let’s hope I’m telling you about it on more than three hours of sleep.

dance on the coral beaches, make a feast of the plums and peaches…

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When I was a kid I used to draw and draw and draw and draw. When you’d get your stationary at the start of the year I’d ask to get an extra “jotter pad” (those A4 notebooks with weak, brownish paper and inevitably a cartoon elephant on the front), one for actual schoolwork and one to draw in. At one point I managed to procure, somehow, one of those enormous notepads for offices that are nearly the size of a table which I hubristically and ostentatiously kept on my desk for drawing on when I was done with my schoolwork. (It gets worse. I also used to also keep a large stack of books on my desk for reading in between being taught stuff. Like, while the teacher was right there still teaching everyone things. OH the conceit! But admit it, it’s a good idea.) There was untold envy and reverence for my best friend at the time, who got her hands on one of those large, seemingly endless rolls of butcher’s paper. Basically my life revolved around obtaining surfaces to draw on. What did I draw? Well…ladies. Initially the Babysitters Club (both scenes from books and those imagined) then Spice Girls (I had a jotter pad expressly for drawing them) and fashion designs and characters from my stories. Like a woman called Stuyvesant who had blue hair and a black belt in karate.

So you could say I liked drawing and did it a lot. Somewhere down the line though, I lost the habit of drawing constantly. Fast forward many years to yesterday, when I casually picked up a pen to doodle away and I just couldn’t. Muscle memory means I can still remember bits of dances I learned over fifteen years ago, but drawing was just not working for me. It wasn’t like getting back on a bicycle in any sense of the word, since…I can’t ride a bike either. (I know. What kind of child of New Zealand am I? Frankly drawing the Babysitters Club was much more fun than cycling looked, which didn’t help with my motivation. Also I could not stay upright.) Has this ever happened to you? Something you were so invested in, which suddenly disappears on you?

Happily, some skills work in the right way, going from fearful to awesome. Like pie! As a food-interested youth, pie seemed so far out of my league that I practically had a Pretty in Pink relationship with it, the out-of-reach Blane to my uncool Andie. These days I’m more like Clare in the Breakfast Club to pie’s…anyway, my point is I’m now really calm about making pie, pastry and all. It is no big deal to me. Even with an florid title like Plum Chocolate Meringue Crumble Pie. Although it sounds like too much detail to take on board, it’s a remarkably cohesive disc of deliciousness, inspired by two things: the many kilos of plums Tim and I bought in Greytown with friends Kim and Brendan, and the beautiful Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts book that I scored in Featherston, which I showed you in my last post.

So instead of showing you the book again, I’ll show you where we got the plums from. See how excited I got with the Instagram filters!

Like we were purchasing plums in a Primal Scream music video!

This Favourite Recipes book I mention was published in the sixties and is full of more delight than I can possibly convey. So I’ll just list a couple of its dishes. Berlin Peach Punch. Miami Beach Birthday Cake. Lime Highbrow. Raspberry Razzle. I should like to make them all. (Especially the Berlin Peach Punch, anyone want to donate me some brandy?) It was, however, very light on plum recipes. So I used another recipe from the book and ended up changing it so much that it doesn’t bear a ton of resemblance to the original. But thanks all the same, Mrs Ivan Kessinger of Morgantown, who submitted the Cherry Crunch that I based the following on.

It’s not as difficult as it sounds – for one thing, there’s no pastry to deal with or filling to mix and heat. There is, admittedly, meringue, but as it’s covered with crumble you don’t have to put too much investment into how good it looks, plus two lonely egg whites’ll whip up before your arm muscles have even had a chance to get sore.

And it is stunningly, well-timed-thwack-to-the-back-of-the-knees-staggeringly delicious.

Plum Chocolate Meringue Crumble Pie


1 packet of plain, cheesecake-bottomish biscuits (I used Budget Vanilla Rounds)
125g butter, melted
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon flour
7 plums (or so)
100g good milk chocolate (I used Whittaker’s, which is mysteriously caramelly and wonderful)
1/2 cup almonds
2 egg whites
1/3 cup sugar + 1 tablespoon


Smash up the biscuits – either in a food processor or with a rolling pin. Mix in the melted butter and cinnamon and try, just try not to eat it all because you’ll need it! If you suspect you will eat lots, then add more biscuits and butter, of course.


Press 3/4 of it into the base of a paper-lined pie tin, to cover the base and about 1cm of the sides. Keep the other 1/4 for later…


Bake at 180 C for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn it down to 130 C, and throw in the almonds for a few minutes to roast, if you like – if you can’t be bothered, I understand. Either way, the oven needs to be 130 C. Sprinkle the tablespoon of flour and the extra tablespoon of sugar over the biscuit base, then slice up the plums and roughly chop the chocolate and layer them up on top of the flour and sugar. Try to layer the plums in such a way that they’re fairly smooth, so that you don’t have any trouble layering the meringue over.


In a clean metal bowl, whisk the egg whites till thickened and frothy, then slowly add the sugar while whisking continuously, till thick and shiny and bright white. Carefully spread this across the top of the plums in the pietin. Roughly chop the almonds and mix them into the remaining crumble, scatter this on top of the meringue. Bake the pie for 35 minutes. Allow to cool a little before eating. 

It’s honestly not as ridiculously sweet as it sounds. The salty butter and sharp, juicy plums keeps all that in check. You would not believe how brilliant sour plum juice and creamy milk chocolate is when it melts together. Not forgetting the soft solidness of the meringue relinquishing against the crunchy, almond-rich crumble top.

It’s genuflectingly delicious. Really the only problem is, as you can see, it’s not particularly solid. This could possibly be helped by refrigerating the heck out of it, but it’s wonderful at room temperature – all the flavours really shining – so just be prepared to carefully ease it out of the pie tin and eat the broken mess that lands on your plate with a spoon.

The reason I’ve been compelled to pick up a pen and put it to paper is that I’ve been home sick with a sudden sore throat, cough, attack of the phlegm, that kind of thing. As drawing wasn’t a goer – although I will keep trying – I’ve been occupying myself with Never Mind The Buzzcocks on YouTube. Later host Simon Amstell is adorable, and early host Mark Lamarr is so sharp and dry, so it’s win win really, and I’m reminded of late nights when I was living in England, watching it before bed with Hovis Extra-Thick Square Cut toast.
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Title: Warning: I’m going to use the word “obsessed” a lot now. I am obsessed with the song Meadowlark, which this lyric comes from. Liz Callaway’s version is tear-bringingly exquisite, honestly – if you click through please stick past the fairytale-ish opening lyrics, because it gets better, plus you’ll miss Callaway’s awesomely emphasised ‘r’ as she sings “larrrrk”. 
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Music lately:

I am also OBSESSED with the song Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise, from Twin Peaks – you do not want to know how many times I’ve listened to it this week, since first hearing it in an episode where it’s sung at the Roadhouse. I know the title is awful (I thought it was “right back” and I’d like to pretend it really is and everyone else has been wrong the whole time) but it’s so hypnotic that I don’t really mind.

Not obsessed with this song, but it is still quite good: St Vincent, Cruel. Delightful and delightfully catchy.
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Next time: I am still really compelled by the Meat-free Monday cookbook and will likely reproduce something from that, unless I get hold of some brandy and get to make the Berlin Peach Punch, of course. 

i don’t want a lot this christmas, there is just one thing i need…

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If there was some kind of chart for overachieving in the field of cake, right now I would be significantly off that chart. The needle on its spectrum gauge would be teetering nervously out of control. Why all this self-directed hyperbole? I made up a Christmas Cake recipe. And it turned out pretty delicious. And then – I went and iced it myself, too.

Aye, it’s only November, but not only is Christmas Cake the sort of thing you can make way ahead of time, like the overexcited person you may well be, it’s also good to be prepared. As that angry lion in the Lion King sang. And anyway, it’s the kind of cake you can make while it feels like you’re disorganisedly letting everything slide – it’s that easy. Even the icing is manageable. I know it’s divisive – I’m not personally the biggest fan of it, especially because marzipan costs about $12 for a small cube and so you have to use almond-flavoured icing, for which not one single almond suffered in the making of. But it’s a fun challenge and you get to have this dazzlingly gorgeous cake to admire, eat, or pick up and reflect the sun off, to annoy the neighbours.

[Edit: awards voting now closed, ages and ages ago] You know what else is a thing? (Just watch me segue!) I got nominated in the Concrete Playground Bloggers Awards – “The Search For NZ’s Best Online Writers – under the Food Blogger category. Now that is a title I’d like to call my own. And thanks so much to whoever nominated me – too much. So kind. Yes, I’m up against some blogs you’ll likely recognise, but let’s talk about me here, okay? I feel like a bit of a veteran of the vote-driven competition, having been lucky enough to land myself in quite a few over the last year or so, but not lucky enough to actually win any. This is really cool, and I’d love to win it but I don’t want to burn my brain up too much over it, because losing’s no fun, on the other hand, I want to definitely put myself out there because I believe in this blog – or I wouldn’t be up at midnight writing on it – on the other hand…

Pro: COOL TO BE NOMINATED
Con: Faking being stoic if do not win
Pro: Voting for people in competitions a now-normal part of life.
Con: Feel nervous asking people to vote for me…again
Pro: I really am one of the best online writers in NZ about food.
Con: In my mind…
Pro: You only have to vote once during the whole thing, not daily! Hey-ohh.
Con: Voting’s done through Facebook, so if you don’t have one…you get to dodge this whole hornet’s nest. So this con is really a sneaky pro for some of you.
Pro: COOL TO BE NOMINATED, FUN EXPERIENCE, CHILL OUT LAURA. One can still be the best food blogger in their own mind…for what it’s worth…

What I’m clumsily and bad-attitudinally trying to say is; though I’ve failed you all before, it would be really cool if you could vote for HungryandFrozen, but only of course if in your heart it’s actually the one you want to vote for. I would appreciate it with an embarrassing/refreshing lack of irony. Because seriously, NZ’s Best Online Writer? I want that! So if you do: vote here. (Please, thanks, and cake for all. Also you have to scroll round till you find my blog and click the “Like” which means, yes, you need Facebook.)

And I realise there are far more crucial voting situations going on right now. Am not going to talk about my opinion in that area, although it shouldn’t be hard to guess. But if you are in New Zealand please exercise your right to vote this Saturday. Your voice counts and you have the responsibility – think about everyone who you could affect with this and choose wisely.

Back to the Christmas Cake. Fa la la la la. I’m looking forward to December this year actually – Tim and I have been stocking up on old-timey Christmas records (so cheap! I love that I always want the vinyl no-one else wants) and I’ve got plans underway for the best, more hard-out flat Christmas Dinner ever. I don’t want for much this Christmas, and our very short trip up home last weekend where I got to hang out with Nana and see so many people made me feel highly anticipational for some whanau time over lots of food.

I’d been reading through a lot of old, old cookbooks and Nigella’s books and all sorts of cookbooks, and my braincells were tickled by all the variations on Christmas Cake. I was really keen to try adding my own to the squillions of recipes already out there – a kind of mash-up of all the things that sounded fun about other Christmas Cake recipes. So I included a whole can of condensed milk, because having that on the ingredients list pleases me. I soaked the fruit in ginger beer and rum – Gunpowder’s – spicy and intense – because how cool does that sound? (Are you starting to see a pattern emerging here? I’d see an ingredient, think “funnn” and that would be that.) I used dried pears which sounds extravagant, but it’s more stupidity on my part, I bought them once on the supposed insistence of Nigella Lawson, ended up too fearfully nervous of how much they cost to make anything with them, and now they’re nothing like the plump, full-of-potential specimens they started as. However, after a bathe in some rummy ginger fizz, they’re perfect for a fruit cake. You could use apricots, dried apples, or anything within that realm of wrinkly fruit, really.

I followed a decoration idea of the aforementioned Nigella’s because the gleaming white-on-white look appealed to me, and I also liked the lack of fuss involved in haphazardly piling up star shapes on each other. And then topped it with edible glitter because it cost about $9 for the tiny tub and I’m trying to insist it’s highly relevant to many things that I bake and cook on a daily basis and I’m becoming increasingly drawn to glittery things these days, like a magpie.

The real question is: did it taste okay after all that? Can you really just go making up a Christmas Cake? Bit of a concern, considering how much fruit and nice liquor and time and effort and so on went into it. Luckily – BRILLIANT. Like, deck the halls with boughs of deliciousness.

It’s a tall, but surprisingly light cake, as far as this kind of thing goes, with a distinct caramel-toffee vibe from the condensed milk. Strangely the ginger wasn’t as prominent as I thought it’d be, but the dark rum definitely makes itself felt. The dried pears give a fudgy, grainy sweetness, and the sultanas are, well, they fulfill their role of being a sultana (is anyone passionate about the sultana?) All the little things – the cocoa, the cinnamon, the orange oil – mesh together to form this mysteriously tis-the-seasonal flavour. All up: It worked!

Dunno how the pencil got in there. It’s…artistic?

The HungryandFrozen Christmas Cake

  • 1 and 1/2 cups (375ml) ginger beer
  • 1/2 cup (125ml) dark, rum (I used Gunpowder)
  • 700g sultanas
  • 300g dried pears or dried apricots or dried apples etc – or a mix.
  • 300g butter
  • 100g brown sugar
  • 1 can sweetened condensed milk
  • 1 tablespoon cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin (I like to think it gives it ‘something’)
  • 1 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1 teaspoon Boyajian orange oil (optional – could try replacing with the zest of an orange)
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 tablespoon cocoa
  • 2 eggs
  • 300g flour
  • More rum (or whichever liquor you’re using.)

Soak your fruit overnight (at least) in the liquids. I’d say there was 1/2 a cup of liquid left when I made my cake so if you’re nervous, drain out that much and discard/drink the rest.

Take a 22-23cm caketin, line the base with a double layer of paper and then, as best you can, line the sides with a double baking paper which extends about ten cm above the edge. Pulling out a long piece of the paper, folding it in half, making it into a loop and then shoving it into the caketin and hoping for the best tends to work for me.

Melt the butter, sugar, condensed milk and spices together gently. Remove from the heat, stir in the fruit and its liquid and the baking soda. It might fizz up a bit at this point. Beat in the eggs then carefully sift and stir in the flour, making sure there’s no lumps. Tip into your prepared tin, and bake at 140 C for around 2 1/2 hours. Pierce it at various intervals with either a cake tester or a piece of dried spaghetti and tip over a capful or three of rum.

Title via: Queen of my ear canals, Mariah Carey, with the immortal All I Want For Christmas Is You. Will we ever see another modern Christmas song that’s as good as this? Doubties.

Music lately:

Reach Out (I’ll Be There) – The Four Tops. I probably mention this song once a month, but I think for a song like this it’s okay. Frankly. And I love the “RAH!” at the start of each verse.

Idina Menzel, Heart On My Sleeve. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for me, at least indulge me by watching this entire video from start to finish – it’s slow but so beautiful and never fails to make my tear ducts spring into action.

Next time: Probably hounding you respectfully for votes again, but also aiming for some cool recipes you’ll want to try immediately.

cooler than ice cream and warmer than the sun…

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Mmmhmm. Another ice cream. What can I say. When the vision appears, there’s nothing you can do but meet it head on, climb on top of it, and skilfully fly it round like a hovercraft till you can alight upon the grassy knoll of recipe-confidence.

Let that extended metaphor be a red flag that warns you not only of my 3am bedtime last night, but also of increased potential for further extended metaphors. Anyway this ice cream leapt to mind fully-formed, no need for contemplative hovering: Cranberry Curd and White Chocolate Ripple Ice Cream.

Cranberries are pretty synonymous with Christmas food, and if they’re not for you they will be after reading books by Nigella Lawson. But I’m a fan any time of year, despite their kinda maligned image. They’re not as give-it-to-you-on-a-plate sweetly juicy as strawberries, not as popular as raspberries, not as purple as boysenberries and their medicinal purposes aren’t as dinner-table-conversational as blueberries. In fact cranberries are like the grapefruit of the berry world: sour, prone to bitterness, with connotations of…groin. Luckily Nigella Lawson’s here, with her recipes for cranberry sauce and cranberry stuffing and all kinds of good Christmassy things, to save the cranberry’s image.

I’ve gone one further, and taken one of her more interesting recipes – Cranberry Curd – and turned it into an ice cream, where swirls of frozen whipped cream whirl around slashes of crimson. A beautiful vortex, like holly berries on snow…that have been prodded at and moved around with a stick…the harshness of the berries muted with sugar, eggs, and butter; the plain cream embiggened by the gorgeous colour and the still-remaining hint of sourness, as well as the frozen, buttery crunch of white chocolate (Whittakers – my favourite and what I almost always use. Just enter the name into the search bar for proof…) While you can make this any old time, the colours and the frozen nature of it and the fact that I’m making it in mid-November means it’s ideal for a yuletide pudding. Especially since December is summertime in New Zealand. Although if I had a glazed ham for every December 25th that was either coldly rainy or airlessly humid…

The method looks really long and complicated but there’s nothing to get uncomfortably nervous about – apart from a particularly brutal sieving segment, the cranberry curd is delightfully untemperamental – and then you just half-heartedly whisk some cream, mix them together, admire the swirly prettiness like it’s your 6th form art board and you’re impervious to criticism, then let the freezer do its thing. My advice is to go slowly and calmly at all stages. I was on some kind of clumsiness roll and ended up doing many stupid things, like flinging cranberry curd everywhere and getting cream in my hair and wailing about curd on my tshirt before realising there was a slowly descending splodge of cream that had been there for even longer. Oh, and accidentally dropping all the remaining cranberries out of the sieve into the carefully strained mixture below. And dropping cream on the floor. It was like that scene with McNulty and Bunk in Season 1 of The Wire but with “WHY AM I SO CLUMSY” instead of one specific expletive used as my only dialogue. Mercifully it all ended up okay. More than.

Keeping in with the theme of Christmas usefulness, you could always double the cranberry curd ingredients, jar them up and give them away as gifts. It’s exactly like lemon curd but with cranberries, doesn’t it make you just want to invent a whole lot of different curds now? Banana coconut curd, raspberry curd, kiwi-strawberry curd…

Cranberry Curd White Chocolate Ripple Ice Cream

  • 500ml/2 cups cream
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 100g or so white chocolate, roughly chopped (I used Whittakers)

Cranberry Curd:

  • 250g cranberries (straight from the freezer’s all good)
  • 100ml water
  • 200g sugar
  • 100g butter
  • 3 eggs

Bring the cranberries and the water to the boil in a small pan till the berries are softened and have released their juices. Now comes the one horrible job. You have to try push all this through a sieve into a bowl. There’s a technique – go slowly, keep pressing down and stirring with a spatula and then scraping the underside of the sieve with that spatula. You should end up with around 1/3 cup cranberry matter and a permanently clogged sieve.

From here it’s simple though. To the strained, velvety pink liquid add the butter and sugar and gently melt over a low heat, then beat the eggs and sieve them into the pan while stirring (ordinarily a pain but you’ve already got a dirty sieve, so?) continue to stir over a low heat until it has thickened a lot. Don’t let it overheat and curdle after all that trouble – if you suspect shenanigans, just remove it from the heat and keep stirring. Allow to cool. Stir in a few daring drops of red food colouring if you like – this particular time I did.

Meanwhile, whisk the cream and three tablespoons of sugar till it has thickened and has increased in body mass but isn’t at the point where you’d call it whipped. Fold in the shards of white chocolate, and spatula all this into a freezer-proof container. Tupperware lunchboxes like the one I’ve used here are perfect. [Note: I forgot to mention that the sugar goes here and have finally updated it, apologies to anyone who had to work this out for themselves.]

Ripple technique: I worked this out on the fly, as the spoonful of curd hovered questioningly over the container of whipped cream. Firstly, spoon the curd into the container of whipped cream in three rough horizontal lines (across the width, like a bumblebee) then take the handle of a spoon or a skewer or something, and make lines up and down across the length of the container, through the stripes. From here, carefully swirl all this around till you’re happy. Just remember you can’t un-swirl, so go slowly and carefully.

Freeze.

All these surrounding ingredients really truly mellow out the cranberry, leaving it velvety and intriguingly sweet and berryish without any of that mouth puckering, tooth-coarsening quality that you might expect. The stripe method of swirling means everyone’s guaranteed a decent portion of sherbety cranberry ripple to dissolve, and white chocolate is so delicious that I almost don’t want to demean it by explaining why it’s there, but its rich sweetness works perfectly with the ingredients and lends an alluring crunch to all that smoothness. I’m proud of myself for this one.

So I’m super tired because it has been a big weekend of activity, from a raucous book group on Friday night followed by a catch up with a friend at Havana, Saturday’s plans for mini-golf were dashed upon the raindrops, but we all went to Denny’s and ate a whole lot of food (including a proper coke float) and followed it up with a Whisky Appreciation Evening that carried on long after the night had turned into the next morning. That’s what weekends are for, but now my brain’s feeling a little frantically underslept – if nothing else I can lean on this container of ice cream, cool my fevered brow, and spoon it into my mouth while I’m at it with but a minimum of effort. Just like the ice cream itself. I feel like it’s not too early to start thinking about Christmas-related things, but if you do, then maybe come back and re-read this post in three weeks so you can absorb it more comfortably?

Title via: Eurythmics, Who’s That Girl – so our Whisky last night was Scottish, but I didn’t realise babein’ Annie Lennox was too. This song doesn’t encroach on Thorn In My Side’s Favourite Eurythmics Song territory, but it’s still damn good.

Music lately:

Mos Def, Rock’n’Roll. I absolutely love Jack White, truly, but I was a little surprised he didn’t get mentioned in this song.

Underworld, Rez. So twinkly and light and gratifyingly endless.

Next time: I started making progress on a Christmas Cake today. Would’ve actually made it but was far, far too sleepy. More fool me…

your shoulders are frozen, cold as the night

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It’s been a long time, shouldn’t have left you, without another ice cream recipe. Although this isn’t ice cream at all but its tangy cousin, Frozen Yoghurt. I did that thing where I dream up a cool ice cream flavour, but then I went and forgot it and tried to retrace my steps mentally to work out exactly what it was that I thought was so good – a bit like that Sweet Valley Twins book where Jessica accidentally made those amazing cookies then pretended that it wasn’t an accident and she had to recreate them for the TV show Lifestyles of the French and Famous and they stay up all night trying to work out what the flavour was and then they retrace their steps and get the flavour just in time and also the make up artist makes it look like they had a great night’s sleep. And Jessica does not acknowledge that serendipity played a part in her success. Just. Like. That. Fun fact: I didn’t Google any of this, I just knew it. 
Lucky for me, while trying to work out what it was that entranced me in the first place I managed to come up with something else entirely: Applemint and Fresh Tumeric Frozen Yoghurt. Yep, the very same tumeric that you normally put in curries, and yep, Applemint is just the words Apple and Mint squished together because it pleases me. Also pleasing is this combination of flavourants – crisp apple, cool mint and the golden presence of tumeric. Whatever the original idea was, this one wins – for one thing, it actually exists, unlike the other idea which continued to fade further and hazily-er out of reach the harder I searched for it. 

I’m not fussy about all things in life but I am about yoghurt. Clearwater’s Organic is the kind that I used for this recipe – it’s heavy and rich and topped with cream and you can buy it in a two litre bucket which I find truly exciting. Otherwise I’d look out for Collective Dairy or Zany Zeus, two other NZ brands that are outstanding in the field of excellent yoghurt. If you want to make this vegan, you could replace the yoghurt with a couple of cans of coconut milk and even call it Froconut if you like. Coconut milk makes awesome ice cream, so no need for fear here.

Please notice the beautiful parfait glasses, unexpectedly given to me on a trip to Petone by magnificent ladies Jo and Kim. Having these parfait glasses did motivate me to make some more ice cream to put in them, but that’s not saying much really because I could look at a shrub, a sofa cushion, a small badger, and still suddenly want to make ice cream.

Applemint and Fresh Tumeric Frozen Yoghurt

Note – if you don’t have access to fresh tumeric, leave it out and add in a teaspoon of ground ginger instead. If you don’t have palm sugar, use plain brown sugar or any sugar at all, to be honest. And finally, if you don’t have a food processor, just grate up the apple, and finely chop everything else and stir it in. This is just my lazy way.

2 1/2 cups lovely thick plain yoghurt
3 tablespoons palm sugar, roughly chopped
1 Granny Smith apple, roughly chopped (skin on)
About 1 centimetre segment of fresh tumeric, peeled and roughly chopped.
1/4 cup mint leaves – or as much as you like really – washed.


Blitz the apple, sugar and tumeric with a couple of tablespoons of the yoghurt in a food processor, until everything has become tiny and the green skin of the apple is as small as confetti. Add in the mint and the rest of the yoghurt, process for another ten or so seconds to mix everything in, then scrape into a 1-litre container and freeze, stirring occasionally.


Allow to sit out of the freezer for 20 minutes before serving so it’s not rock-solid.

To be straight up with you, this will be a lot more luscious if you blast it in the food processor halfway through the freezing process. I couldn’t be bothered, and this achieved me a frozen yoghurt full of ice crystals, which I soldiered through and ate anyway. It’s still delicious, but keep this in mind. The delicate and fragrant yet juicy apple is perfect with mint’s almost-spicy freshness, and the tumeric isn’t overtly present but hints at flavours of carrot, ginger and lemon, and it sounds quite cool in the title so don’t go leaving it out if you don’t have to. It’s all very light and refreshing but with plenty of flavour.
To remain straight up with you: frozen yoghurt doesn’t necessarily make the most effective ice cream soda. Its icy texture doesn’t really amalgamate in with the fizzy drink, instead busting into large particles floating round. It all looks unbelievably undrinkable, but it’s all good, as long as you don’t look too closely. I thought this flavour would be cool with ginger beer and I was so very correct – just avert your eyes and drink up. And yes, occasionally I succumb to pretty things and these stripy straws were one such instance of that. Just to convince myself that they weren’t just bought out of  aesthetic aimlessness, I made myself drink the entire glassful through them.

Sometimes pretty > useful.

Speaking of, we had a big clean-out of our closet and found heaps of things that hadn’t seen the light of day since we moved in two and a half years ago – including my old pointe shoes. And because instead of tidying, I tend to just wear as much of the clutter as possible…I tried them on.

That on the far left is a bloodstain, in case you’re wondering. This pair is actually one of my cleanest – Grischkos, still with the same ribbons I would’ve sewn on and burnt the edges of so they didn’t fray. While there came a point where it was very clear I wasn’t going to be a professional of any kind, nothing gave me as much happiness as dancing – I guess not till cooking came along. Best believe I’ve been prancing round in these more than once since, in fact attempting a pirouette ill-advisedly on our wooden kitchen floor this very evening. Put a stop to that quick though, no need to add more blood stains to these shoes!
Can’t believe I forgot to mention this but amongst all the hubbub of last week maybe it’s not surprising. A couple of weeks ago Tim and I attended the excellent launch of Fast Fresh Tasty, a new, local food app filled with seasonal and beautiful recipes. It’s best described over at the Wellingtonista – but if you’re into food apps and have a smartphone I definitely recommend it. 
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Title via: The Arctic Monkeys’ exciting 2005 debut, I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor. I wrote a probably terrible essay in uni on how The Internet was changing the music industry because these guys had a fanbase on Myspace or something. It all makes me feel very old and very young at the same time.
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Music lately:
The opening of The Crystals’ Da Doo Ron Ron has got to be one of the best there is, with those blaring horns and galloping handclaps. We used to sing this song in primary school, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as the original itself. 
Heavy D and The Boyz, We Got Our Own Thing. RIP, Heavy D.
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Next time: No kidding, I thought up another ice cream recipe idea almost immediately, but I might put that on hold and serve you up an awesome Christmas Cake recipe – you can’t ignore that it’s rapidly approaching, and Christmas Cakes need plenty of planning ahead!

how do you measure, measure a year?

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…or four years, even. HungryandFrozen, this very blog that you are granting the power of your eyeballs to, is now four years old! How significant! To me! There’s no “it’s our birthday but you get the presents” happening here because I only just remembered a few days ago, and I’m not going to write anything profound that also sums up my whole life up until this point – but kindly let me indulge in some hazy-eyed pridefulness (I warn you, I’m writing this very late at night, so I may run into lengthy hyperbole even more so than usual.) HungryandFrozen has grown and changed and thankfully improved with me through the years, and become an important, central part of my life. Which might be a weird thing to say about a website, but consider that it has allowed me…

– to document my life
– to channel the millions of ideas flying in my head into something so said head doesn’t fall off from the pressure build-up
– to help the village I grew up in
– to get free accommodation with strangers in Oxford (thanks again, Kate!)
– to make some of the best new friends ever (the kind you feel instantly able to tell all your secrets to and in turn never whisper theirs to anyone)
– to be on the cover of a magazine in all my resolutely unphotogenic glory
– to get a radio interview
– to be nominated for (but not win, sniffle) cool awards
– to attempt to become a kind of Ruth Reichl-esque double act with Tim while reviewing cafes for a national paper
– to learn from others’ writing and photography
– to be certain that I’d be kindred spirits with certain other faraway food bloggers
– and to force my dreams upon you all in the hopes that if I say them enough and work hard enough they’ve just got to come true eventually.

And to create many a recklessly long and indulgently unedited sentence. It took me a while for the format to settle into this happy little rut with strict, unchanging elements: long-form, title quoting/mangling a song I like (or occasionally an exceptional TV/movie quote), recipe included, but never just a recipe, always with life and thoughts thrown round it like a cape – and it’s not one I plan on straying from.

Let me tell you a story: Tim and I first moved to Wellington in early 2006 and we had very little money (or things – for about three months our bed was two single mattresses pushed together on the floor, with all the softness and back support of a weet-bix.) Tim forwent his insulin (kidding! I’m kidding so hard I can’t even get to the end of the sentence before I interrupt to reassure you it’s not true) so I could buy Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. I loved cooking so much and she had a way of presenting every meal, no matter how simple, as if it was something exciting for you to be doing for yourself. Like that’s how you deserved to eat. Again, with the no-money thing, if I ever cooked a recipe from her book it felt like I should photograph it, because it was such a big exciting deal, every dinner an occasion. I guess that’s where the whole documentation of what I eat vibe came about. Not a great story, but…it’s true. And now, here’s a cake.

This cake has nothing to do with my blog being four years old, it’s just a coincidence. It’s also a Hummingbird Cake, from the American South, where the food is good. 

I didn’t bother shifting the mess in the background of this photo, because I was lazy, but it was symbolic of the mess this cake itself caused – while stirring up the cream cheese icing I moved my spoon a little too sharply through the mixture and ended up shifting a dust-cloud of icing sugar all over myself. I was wearing a wooly jumper at the time and the icing sugar gleefully burrowed into its fibres. But still I caked on.

How this came about was that Tim brought home some uneaten bananas from his work. I could’ve turned them into modest muffins or banana bread, but uninspired by those this time round I turned instead to Hummingbird cake. What is this? Imagine banana cake…but with pineapple in it too, studded with pecans, double-layered and thickly painted with cream cheese icing. It’s like a really well-accessorised banana cake (the pecans would so be the earrings) (okay, on a roll here, the icing on top would be the cape, the icing in the middle a belt, and the pineapples…stick on diamantes? Sparkly hairpins?)

It’s the sort of thing I’d be tempted to tinker further with, in the name of improvement – adding coconut, mangoes, rum, grated carrots, white chocolate, maple syrup, that kind of thing. But believe me when I say it’s beautiful as is – anything else added would be delicious, but I wanted to try it in its purest form first. That said, I did spread some lemon curd between the layers. So, I guess I didn’t quite listen to own lofty advice. That alone was the extent of my tinkering, I swear. 

While it might look terrifyingly well-stacked, for one thing there were some recipes calling for triple layers, and for another thing, as with many recipes that I present here, there are options. As this makes two hefty cakes which you then sit on top of each other, you could always just halve the mixture and still be having a good time. The cream cheese icing is a little non-negotiable, but leave it off and the recipe’s suddenly dairy-free. Pecans, again, give it that proper southern vibe, but they are expensive – I believe their cheaper friend, the walnut, would be a more than delicious substitute.

Hummingbird Cake

Recipe via this one I found at The Enquirer – thanks, Enquirer!

3 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup oil (I use rice bran)
2 cups mashed ripe bananas (about 4 bananas)
1 can crushed pineapple
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda 
1 teaspoon salt

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and take two 22cm caketins and line them with baking paper. If you’re halving this, the three eggs are going to be an issue…My guess would be to use two eggs.

Whisk together the eggs, oil and sugar till frothy, then mix in the fruits and the cinnamon. Sift in the dry ingredients, fold together, then divide evenly between the two tins. Smooth out the surface with a spoon. Bake for about an hour until done – two cakes in the oven dilutes the heat a bit, I had to bake one of the layers for at least another half hour.

Icing: 

2 x 250 containers cream cheese
Icing sugar

This is going to make WAY more than you need, but I suspect that just one container of cream cheese wouldn’t be quite enough. I’m happy to be proven wrong though. Make sure your cream cheese is at room temperature – that’s important, it’s like trying to stir a brick otherwise – and whisk it up till smooth. Stir it icing sugar, probably around 250g but just keep going till it’s very thick and doesn’t look like it’s going to slide off the cake at the first chance. 

Sit one of the cakes on a plate, and spread it thickly with cream cheese icing, leaving about an inch border free to allow for spreading. Sit the second cake on top, and thickly spread this with the icing too. Most cakes you see online have the sides iced too, but I suspected, probably correctly, that my icing would just fall off. You could always follow the recipe I linked through to, which uses butter in the icing and is therefore more likely to be secure. 
The swiftest of glances at the ingredients list will mean it’s no surprise how luscious and gorgeous this cake is, but let me tell you anyway. Rich-textured with all that banana, gratifyingly enormous, with the summery, juicy flavour of pineapple, the smoky, soft crunch of the pecans, and the sticky, sharp cream cheese icing glueing it all together. It’s gloriously un-sensible and yet it’s not too much more effort than a regular banana cake, and what little effort you do have to put in is rewarded with some outrageous amounts of deliciousness.
Speaking of un-sensible, I made a new tutorial video! 

This one’s all about making bread, so if this intrigues you in the very slightest and you’ve got a spare ten minutes, kindly hit that play button.
Hard to believe it’s already mid-October. It’s also hard to believe the horrible, terrible situation in Tauranga with the Rena oil spill – I’m not going to say anything about it in case I say too much, but it makes me feel sick, sad and angry. 
So what next? I love this blog and I’m in no way ready to retire and receive my cut-glass bowl or gold watch. I guess I’ll keep working on my list, keep trying to discover recipes, keep writing and climbing that mountain (totally metaphorical, I’d never climb an actual mountain…never again) and just generally do things that involve the word “keep”. Thanks so much, from the bottom of my butter-clogged heart, to everyone who was there from the start (that’s you, Mum and Nanna) to everyone who’s stuck around, and basically to everyone who’s ever given me their time. Because, while the love of food and writing about it is strong, the knowledge that there are people out there reading this every time something new crops up is what really keeps me coming back here. 
THANK YOU. 
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Title via: Since this blog started with the musical RENT it might as well have a mid-point reflection with RENT too. This song is so, so very beautiful and I recommend aggressively that you watch both the original Broadway cast version and the movie version featuring many of the original Broadway cast. As a shrewd youtube commenter said, “Whoever disliked this cant Measure”.
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Music lately:
I honestly nearly cried when I listened to Tina Turner singing River Deep Mountain High recently, I think I was a bit underslept, to be fair, but the combination of the incredible, soaring melody and her wobbly, emotional voice hit me like a pie to the face. An emotional pie.

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Next time: Not nearly as much emotion, for one thing. I’ve got ideas, but I don’t have anything actual, so we will see.


Also: editing this to submit it to Sweet New Zealand – monthly blogging event created by Alessandra Zecchini, and this month hosted by lovely Sue of Couscous and Consciousness. Late, but not so late…that it’s too late.

that’s all you take, for a cup of cold coffee and a piece of cake

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Fun to have up your sleeve: a super delicious cake recipe which can be easily made to look disproportionately spectacular in relation to the effort that went into it.

Not so fun to have up your sleeve: actual cake. Crumbly enough to make your elbows itch and move round everywhere as you try and shake it out, sticky enough to really winkle itself permanently into the fibres of the fabric.

Consider how many times a day that you blink your eyes. That’s probably how often I think about cake. Well, if I’m being realistic, that’s probably how often I’m thinking about all food, as opposed to cake specifically. While you’re blinking, I’m blinking and thinking about food…ing. In this case, I found some lipstick-pink rhubarb sticks at the vege market last week and had a vision of simmering them up and having them dripping out from the layers of a cake. I had a whole lot of sour cream leftover from another recipe, and so I mentally inserted that into the layers with the rhubarb. And then I thought, what if it was a bundt cake? How cool would that look? All diagonal and undulating and with a veneer of intimidation?
Pretty cool, yes indeed. Could almost walk away right now and let the cake speak for itself. Except that would be an ineffectual blog post, and also the cake would probably say, in a spongy voice “errr, look over there at that…pikelet. Way more appealing than my regal, creamy body.” And then the cake would quietly shuffle off to a hiding place. 
My grand visions don’t work out the way I hope they will (this goes for dinners, clothing, and judging when it’s the right time to say “that’s what she said”) so it’s most definitely enpleasening and good for the soul when it does. But if you need some convincing as to why you should try making this full-on cake, consider the following:
1) It looks awesomely ridiculous and ridiculously awesome.
2) It’s way easier to make than its outward appearance would suggest.
3) Without the filling, the cake is both vegan and delicious.

While you’re considering that, you could maybe consider considering another cake worth your consideration: Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Guinness Cake, which was the subject of my most recent cooking tutorial video on YouTube.

All the cakes! The Guinness cake was the reason I bought all that sour cream, by the way. Not that it needs a lot, but subconsciously I would’ve reached for the bigger amount at the supermarket so that I could have leftovers to use in another baking caper. I’ve got another video about bread on the make, but I’m waiting for this one to climb in views before I upload it (also it needs some severe editing, would you believe I could talk about bread for A WHOLE HOUR and I was aiming for a six-minute clip.)

Back to this cake: the only bit where you really have to tap into your concentration faculties is when slicing it into layers, but even that’s simple enough: just use your sharpest knife, go slowly, stop often to make sure it’s staying even, then slide some baking paper underneath the layer you’re slicing and lift it off. Onto the next one.

Despite sandwiching this together with sour cream wrought from the milk of the nation’s finest cows, my eye was caught by this vegan recipe, which harnesses the awesome power of coconut milk and not much else and turns it into a cake most delicious. The website that I found it on is fairly confusing but the recipe itself is sound as a pound.
Coconut Lemon Rhubarb Brown Sugar Sour Cream Layer Bundt 

Working on that title. But if I left something out…recipe adapted from this site here.

1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup oil (I use rice bran, it’s nice and tasteless-tasting)
1 x 400ml (or 14oz) can of coconut milk
1/4 cup lemon juice (or substitute with the citrus of your choosing)
Zest of the lemons you juiced
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups shredded coconut (disclosure: totally forgot to add this)


Set your oven to 180 C/350 F, and thoroughly grease a bundt tin.


Whisk together the sugar, oil, coconut milk, lemon juice and zest. Sift together the dry ingredients – super important that you don’t have any lumps here or the whole cake will taste like baking soda. Whisk the flour in till you’ve got a thick batter, scrape it into the cake tin and bake for around an hour.

‘Fraid I didn’t actually weigh out the amount necessary but it was two decent-sized bunches of rhubarb, trimmed and chopped into short sticks, brought to a slow simmer in a pan with about 1/2 a cup of sugar (seriously, I’m sorry I chose this moment to be all instinctive and not record amounts.) Cook away, stirring often, till the fruit has mostly collapsed and softened. Allow to cool. Mix together 1 cup of sour cream (I used delicious Tatua stuff) together with 3 tablespoons of brown sugar. Cut the cake into two or three slices as per my instructions up there, then carefully spoon sour cream onto the bottom layer – less than you’d think and not all the way to the edge, as the weight of the next two layers pushes it out – and then spoon over some rhubarb. Carefully lift the next layer of cake and slide it off the baking paper and on top of the bottom layer. Repeat, finish with the top layer, dust with icing sugar if you like.

Whether or not you see all that as a lot of effort or not, this is delicious either way and encompassing all kinds of delicious flavours and textures: the double sour-sweet of the softly fibrous rhubarb melting into the cool, satiny sour cream. Squidgily creamy, sweet with coconut and pure sugar, sharply spiked with rhubarb and lemon, pink and golden like a decent sunrise, and tall as a house the size of a cake.
On Saturday I fed the cake to our top-notch friend Jo (well, she fed herself, but I passed the cake to her on a plate) and to myself before we went for a flounce round Petone, being fed truffled brie at Cultured, buying fizzy Limca drink, coriander seeds, mustard, and other food trinkets, browsing the treasures at Wanda Harland, and checking out the goods at the A La Mode relaunch, before driving back to the city to weigh up the whys and why-nots of buying whipped cream flavoured vodka (verdict: I want to try and make my own instead, but how??) All of which makes it sound like I’m some kind of obnoxiously frolicky blogger who runs around in a haze of pink-tinged high-contrast photos, but it’s all in the framing. Am mostly grumpy nervous and opportunistic, as opposed to the kind of carefree imagery this might’ve served up. Also: truffled brie is incredible stuff. Just enough of too much of a good thing, you know?
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Title via: Cat Stevens, proving his use to my blog once again. Matthew and Son is my very, very favourite song of his and I think I talk about this amazing video of him singing it at least once a week but if you haven’t watched it…do.
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Music lately:

Somehow a lot of time has gone by since I last had a proper wallow in some Julia Murney singing excellence. And then I realised, it’s because she’s just so, so good that if I watch too much it mucks with my brain and I get all miserable that I’ll never get to see her live and so on and so forth. Long story short, her rendition of Nobody’s Side from Chess is spectacular.

Soul II Soul, Back to Life. (“back tooo reality…”)
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Next time: I still have this chilli sauce recipe that I want to make, however I also had this pear sorbet idea which I haven’t had time to execute, but maybe if I train my body and mind to thrive on a quarter of the sleep I get currently.

sit down you’re rocking the oat

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You could say that I was wronged by authority-driven physical education at an early age. Or, that I seriously hated gym, sports, and PE and it all hated me. These days, while I appreciate that a lot of people love and enjoy sports, I don’t feel like I owe it anything.

But, it can’t be denied that the Rugby World Cup is happening in New Zealand right now. It’s going to be hard to avoid. Last night instead of watching the game (Tim did though) I had a charming evening with excellent host Jo Hubris, Sebastian the cat (also a good host; he sat on me) two Chileans and lots of wine.  Here’s some things that could fill the rest of my time while it continues:

– Locate season two of Twin Peaks.
– Bake a Hummingbird Cake (had a really nice one at this cafe in Auckland called Fridge on Monday)
– Attempt bacon ice cream.
– Work more on making the cookbook that I want to write more likely to happen
– Sort out the minutes upon minutes of video footage of Poppy the kitten on my phone.
– Ummm….that’s it really. But this suggestion compilation by Laura McQuillan is a good start, as is The Wellingtonista’s list-a. Plus, Twin Peaks is very consuming. And ostensibly I could use up quite a lot of time thinking up things to use up the time.

To the food! While I love to eat, so much (that also works without the comma) unfortunately my breakfast habits can be a bit shocking. Eating breakfast is one of the best things you can do for yourself, and whenever I miss it, I always end up feeling all light-headed and empty. Like Ron Swanson, I have a lot of time for the foods of this eating genre, as so many of the best things to eat are associated with it: bacon, waffles, pancakes, yoghurt, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, French toast, hash browns…oats.

You can tell just by looking at oats, mealy and dust-like, that they’re going to be cheap and good for you. However, unless you put in some effort, they don’t always taste fun. There’s a fine line between luscious porridge and wallpaper paste, so if you’re looking for a new weapon to add to your artillery of breakfast wholesomeness, then I present to you: Baked Oatmeal. It might not sound that fun, more like regular porridge that just takes way longer, but picturing a cross between fruit crumble, cake, and flapjack might make the argument to try it more powerful.

So yes, there are swifter breakfasts out there. And if there’s a puritan nature within you that you’re trying to keep hidden, it might rise to the surface after reading about the cream and eggs in this. But firstly, they help keep it luscious and tender and puffy and cakey, preventing your breakfast from resembling warmed woodchips mixed with drywall scrapings. Secondly, they make it taste so good. And that’s all the argument I need.

Baked Oatmeal


I found this recipe on a blog called Macheesmo. I’ve adapted it a tiny bit.


1 can apricot halves OR 1 ripe apricot/peach/nectarine (etc) halved.
1 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup cream
1/2 cup milk (I used buttermilk)
1 large egg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 cup chopped dried fruit – eg dates – or seeds – eg pumpkin (optional)
Pinch salt
Brown sugar for sprinkling
Butter for buttering the dishes.


Mix together everything except the apricots, brown sugar and butter. Leave it for at least 25 minutes, so the oats can absorb some liquid, but if you leave it overnight in the fridge it’ll be even better. 


Set your oven to 180 C/350 F.


Thoroughly butter two ramekins (if you don’t, the oats will be as superglue to their surfaces) and divide the oat mixture between them. Press an apricot half into each dish (and if you like, you can push one below the surface and then put another on top, like I did) sprinkle with brown sugar, and bake for 20-25 minutes. It’ll be really hot at first – sit the ramekins on plates or in bowls and be careful not to touch them!


Serves 2.

This is delicious (well obviously, or I wouldn’t be blogging about it) but in a simple, calming way – the cream-swollen grains becoming richly nutty and yielding to the spoon, the brown sugar on top bubblingly caramelised, the already soft fruit dissolving juicily in your mouth. The oven-time gives a slightly cake-esque solidness to the surface and the egg helps keep it from being challengingly dry. It’s worth putting in some effort the night before, or just getting up earlier than usual, with this as your reward.

Tim and I ran into our much-loved friend Dr Scotty on Thursday night, who has been around since the bad old days of this blog (by which I mean…when this blog started, it was pretty bad. Not that there were elaborate scandals happening, alas) and I said I’d mention him here, there’s mutual benefits though, as he used to leave the nicest comments, and I’m hoping to entice him back to my comments box (not a euphemism.)

On Tuesday night Tim and I went to the launch of the NZ on Screen shipping containers on the waterfront. I think they’ve got one in Auckland too, and there’s going to be a travelling roadshow round the South Island. If you see it, I completely recommend that you take a look inside – it’s dedicated to all things onscreen in New Zealand, past, present and future, and the level of detail and technology involved is stupendous. And there’s this thing where you can green-screenly insert yourself into a famous movie or TV show – so we now have a photo of Tim looking appropriately nervous at Bruno Lawrence during the railway track scene of Smash Palace.

(I feel I should disclose that in 2003 I had a big crush on Doug Howlett and so became very interested in the world cup coverage that year. I think I ended up with three separate copies of that issue of Metro magazine with him and Joe Rokocoko on the cover, sent to me by caring family members. The crush has since cooled down and he’s not in the All Blacks anymore so between that and my aggressive disinterest in watching sport, I don’t have much reason to pursue the games this time round.)
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Title via: Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat from the musical Guys and Dolls. The movie is cool (Marlon Brando, phwoar to the phwoar) and that version is probably the one you’ll have seen if you know this song. However the recent Broadway revival’s version has Mary Testa in it and therefore is also very much worth your time.
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Music lately:

On Wednesday night Tim and I got to go along to see Detroit’s Elzhi, who could both take on Nas’ Illmatic and a capella verses with ease, style, and respect for the original text. And, bless him, it was all over by midnight so I was able to get up the next morning without too much pain. Check out One Love and move around from there.

This morning Radio Active played Garageland’s song Fingerpops which I can’t have heard for at least ten years. Not Empty is my favourite but this is still special stuff.
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Next time: while drinking Old Mout cider last night I thought it’d also make a cool (haaa!) ice cream flavour. So that’s what I’m going to do.