Category: Pudding and Dessert

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.

i woke up with the flour out

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A day off is one of the best things in the world. I’ve spent mine sleeping in just a little bit, mucking round on the internet in the afternoon sun, experimenting with cake recipes (cakesperimenting? No, that sounds gross) listening to Broadway records, and standing at the open fridge, purposefully grasping handfuls of jelly from the plate of it that we forgot to serve up at Tim’s party last week, and eating it. Fortunately for you, all I’m going to elaborate on is the cake. Wait, that’s a lie. I will elaborate on everything.

While mucking round on the internet…where I still am…I found this video of one of my fav food-people, Yotam Ottolenghi, talking about food, family and love. Who knew he was as louche and good-looking as his recipes? Not I.

I listened to the indefatigable original cast recording of Company today – being home by yourself is the best time to test whether or not you can keep up with Getting Married Today.

The jelly had one layer of strawberry and one layer of pineapple, and Tim made it. It’s his one specialty. To be fair, he’s not living in an environment that allows people other than me to have kitchen specialties. To be fair again, he’s really, really good at making jelly. That’s not even damning with faint praise, it’s pretty easy to get wrong. Sometimes the gelatine goes all chewy…you could pour boiling water on your foot instead of in the bowl…that sort of thing.

And…the cake. I’ve been wondering for a while now whether you could replace the ground almonds in a recipe with dessicated coconut – they’re both pretty similar as far as texture and properties go. Today was the day that I got to try it. I used this excellent Torta Caprese recipe (which was my birthday cake last year) but left out the chocolate, and instead of using melted butter, I went for a smooth measure of coconut cream. So this is gluten and dairy free now. While it’s nice to have gluten-free recipes around in case your friends (or more urgently, you yourself) can’t eat it, it’s also fun to play around with recipes – why commit only to flour when there are so many other ways a cake can be itself. 
Luckily, it being an experiment and all, it’s terrifically delicious. Not traditionally cakey exactly, but solid enough that you can slice it into wedges without it disintegrating. To give it a bit of shine, I made a glazey icing out of brown sugar, more coconut cream, and custard powder all boiled up together. The triple coconut punch of the ingredients wasn’t overpowering – although it’d take a whole lot of coconut for me to feel overpowered. Its mellow, cloudy sweetness and damp texture make this cake a joy to eat, with the soft glaze lusciously smooth in contrast and flutteringly caramel of flavour (not to mention so trendily mustard-coloured that you half expect a fashionista to bust through the window, steal, it wear it as a wondrous cape and then blog about it.)
Please excuse how the knife’s all streaked up from where I licked it, after cutting the slice of cake…
Pac-man cake! I should probably say something sensible about this cake now. Okay. It tastes amazing, and it’s so easy – just a bowl and a whisk is all you need. Desiccated coconut is a whole lot cheaper than ground almonds, and while they might not be interchangeable for all recipes, it worked well in this one.  It’s a squat little disc of a cake, about an inch high, like it’s been sat on. But, it’s saucy enough to be served up for pudding, while retaining enough cake persona to accompany a mug of milky tea (or black tea, if you want to keep with the dairy-free theme.) It helps to be a fan of coconut before you barge into this, but the finished result is so flourishingly delicious that it could charm you all the same.
Coconut Cake with Brown Sugar Coconut Cream Glaze 

Note: 1 regular tin of coconut cream should be enough for everything here plus a little leftover for whatever else you want to do with it. 

4 eggs
170g sugar
200g dessicated coconut
250 ml/1 cup coconut cream

Line the base of a 22cm springform caketin with baking paper and grease the sides. Set your oven to 180 C/350 F.

Whisk together the eggs, then add the sugar and whisk some more until the mixture has thickened and expanded a little. Fold in the coconut and the coconut cream, pour into the caketin and bake for 50 minutes to an hour. Cover with tinfoil towards the end if it gets too dark on top.
Brown Sugar Coconut Glaze

Boil together 1/2 cup cream, 3 tablespoons brown sugar, and 1 tablespoon custard powder, stirring the whole time. Let it bubble away for a minute or so till a rich mustardy-brown colour, then allow to cool a little before spooning over the cake.  
Speaking of things…that are…anyway, without further attempted segueing, here’s my new video tutorial, all about pastry. Specifically, short pastry and the gluten-free and vegan pastry that I used to make the roast vegetable tarts earlier this year. Hope you like it. This one’s a bit longer than the first one, because there’s two recipes, but on the upside, I didn’t have a massive sleep-inducing lunch before I started filming this time. 
If you do make the vegan/gluten free pastry that I outline in the video and are wondering what you can do with it, last night I made a Roast Onion Tart – I rolled the pastry out between two sheets of baking paper and then lifted it into a pie plate, pressing it down and patching up the raggedy edges. I baked it as is for 15 minutes at 200 C, then  once it was out, lowered the temperature to 180 C and in a tinfoil lined tray, roasted 4 red onions, peeled and halved, and a few fat cloves of garlic, all drizzled with some avocado oil. Once the pie shell was cooled I spread it with some baba ghanouj leftover from the party, but you could use hummus, or tahini, or any spread, or even just some white beans or chickpeas mashed with a fork. Once the onions were glossy and tender, I pressed on the garlic cloves to get all the soft garlic onto the baba ghanouj, then topped it with pieces of onion, then sprinkled over some walnuts (that a family friend had sent back down with us when we visited Mum and Dad – cheers Dianne!) and some thyme leaves. 

Tasty stuff, pretty cost-efficient, and while not the fastest meal in town, it’s not taxing to make.

Feel free to make requests for future content, fling handfuls of praise, question the many cuts (Either I got tongue tied, or I’d talk way too much, both of which require some severe editing) or express concern at my lack of mathematical agility. Not that I’m bothered by it.
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Title via: I am not actually much of an Arcade Fire fan at all, but luckily for this blog post, the one I track of theirs that I like is Neighbourhood #3 (Powerout). 
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Music lately:

At the recommendation of good lady and friend Jo, I’ve been listening to a lot of Mavis Staples today. As well as having a seriously cool name, Mavis Staples has the kind of soulful voice and sound befitting someone whose career spans more than 60 years.

You can stream the whole Haunted Love album at undertheradar.co.nz – it’s very good, but if you need convincing or don’t have the time, try their very pretty current single San Domenico.
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Next time: Not totally sure yet – I have some food plans up my sleeve though (luckily not actual food up my sleeve, that wouldn’t be fun.)

whether drunk or sober, ice is getting colder

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When I was 12, I became pretty obsessed with a lady called Linda Goodman. All I could do was re-read her books over and over again, loitering by the 00 section of the local library in the hopes that there’s be something new (pre-Google, I wasn’t to know she’d died in 1995, thus making new book output unlikely.) Linda Goodman dealt in the subject of horoscopes, and I completely believed every word she said about my sign of Aries. Eventually I lost the level of interest in her writing but I’ve never been able to quit starsigns altogether – I’m always gravitating towards the newspaper to see what direction my day could take in spite of every negative prediction causing me to sternly tell myself it’s over.

Is it longing for guidance in this uncertain world? Is it actually the cosmic truth? Is it that I’m a bit self-absorbed and like to read things about myself and think, “oh, that’s so typically Aries of you, Laura!” Probably definitely the last one. Anyway, I bring this up because my horoscope today said “Your plans are more ambitious than you first realised, (cue Homer Simpson style “aaagh!” from me) though they are still very much within the realm of possibility. (“Phew!”)  You will need a lot of help. (“D’oh!”)

Of all the horoscopes to read when you’re planning on debuting your YouTube video tutorial on how to make homemade ice cream! So I decided to cautiously ignore it, except for the bit about the “realm of possibility.” I want to go to there!

I know, would I ever stop talking about ice cream? But two things prompted this into existence: the Ice Cream Guidelines list I made last time got me thinking that I could be even more demonstrative, and after having some delicious cider on Friday night I got to thinking that its sparkling, crisp apple flavour would be ideal in ice cream. And the reason I was drinking cider, was because I won some from Old Mout, just by tweeting them. And here I am talking about them! Ten points to their marketing team. And to me too, because it’s really delicious cider.

Let me defensively acknowledge some things first so you don’t have to: Yes, it’s distinctly amateurish, as I have but a phone to be filmed with. Yes, there are a lot of cuts and it’s a little quiet. Yes, I was in a post-lunch downwards spiral, but there was no other time to make the ice cream. Yes…I am pretty toothy. It’s from my mum’s side. On the other hand, it was really fun, and the pilot episode is always a bit shaky, right? (Unless you’re, like, Game of Thrones) Honestly, I really enjoyed this, and while it’s a little bit nervous-making putting yourself out there on YouTube, I’m already on here. If this blog is all the thoughts in my head, the videos are a bit like what you’d hear if you were sitting at my dining table with a cup of tea, or perhaps walking past me on the street, where I’m still very likely to be talking about custard.

Suggestions for the next one are welcome (although “Please! No more!” will be studiously ignored like a bad horoscope) but I must warn you, I’m already thinking about pastry: one batch traditional and buttery, one batch gluten free. What say you?

Cider Ice Cream

4 egg yolks
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups cream (plus – optional – an extra 1 cup cream)
1 cup apple cider (I used Old Mout’s Classic Apple. Use what you like – I also love Bulmer’s.)

Find a freezer-safe container of about 1 litre capacity. 

In a wide pan, carefully heat 1 1/2 cups cream. Don’t let it boil – turn it off once you start seeing steam rising off it. Meanwhile, whisk together the egg yolks and sugars till thickened and a little bit lighter in texture. Carefully pour a little hot cream into the yolks and sugar, stirring thoroughly, then pour in the rest.

Wipe out the pan and tip everything back into it. Stir continuously with a spatula over a very low heat, till it’s the texture of a good thickshake. Remove from the heat, continuing to stir – you now have custard. Once it has cooled a little, whisk in the cider, and scrape it all into the container. Freeze. 

If you like, once the ice cream is partially set, you can whisk up the extra cup of cream till thickened but not whipped and mix the two thoroughly together. This gives it a creamier texture, and of course, gives you more ice cream. But frozen custard on its own is all good.

As I said, I thought it up on Friday night and foolhardily tweeted about it, which, in my dubious code of honour, means that it had to happen. Luckily, it tastes spectacular – the apple flavour shines, with a mysterious hint of fermentation, which gives it a strangely sophisticated edge that you wouldn’t get from mere apples alone. Yet the cider flavour isn’t overwhelming either, with any threat of pub-carpet scent fades as the mixture freezes. I was a bit nervous that the aggressively bubbly structure of the cider would bubble right into the custard and break it up, but apart from a little fizzing, the two liquids settled into each other nicely.


Alcohol doesn’t freeze, so the cider content keeps this lusciously soft – I spooned the scoops of ice cream you see above straight from the freezer. It’s truly delicious stuff. 

While on the subject of shoddy video editing, my mission to turn Poppy the kitten into an internet sensation continues with her first video.

ALSO, I recently had an article published for the clearly excellent and discerning 3news.co.nz, called How To Hunt a Cookbook. If you’ve ever thought long and hard about how to get more second-hand cookbooks in your life, this might help you out some.
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Title via: Local wonder David Dallas and his bouncy, affable, and crocodile-snappy tune Till Tomorrow from The Rose Tint.
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Music lately:

Mariah Carey’s MTV Unplugged album is so brilliant, it caught me by surprise and I listen to her enough to forget that she really was, and still is, monumentally talented. Listen to her sing Make it Happen – when she cries “Grrrrouuuund-aahhh” towards the end I nearly cried from the amazingness of it all.

Neil Young, Don’t Let It Bring You Down – one of my favourite songs of his. Having been about six years since I lost my copy of his biography Shakey, I can’t remember how exactly he got into singing (what with that improbable voice) but I’m so glad he did.
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Next time: Possibly…a drink called Purple Jesus. Or the very sensible pea soup that I promised last time.

i dug right down to the bottom of my soul, to see how an ice cream felt

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I emerged from the weekend at home with my family looking like I’d got caught up in a knife fight. Luckily this wasn’t the case. It’s just that of the three things that bring Mum and Dad’s new kitten Poppy earthly joy, two of them are clawing and biting. The third is steadily ignoring the heavy disdain of the other cat Roger by chasing after him whenever possible.

So yeah, I’m pretty scraped up. I described Poppy on Twitter as being part Jessica Wakefield, part Bart Simpson, and part baby raptor, and I stand by it. Just when you think you need a tetanus shot and want to swear off small animals altogether, she’ll do something like this:

And then I forget what I was so mad about. The sting of her needle-claws fades away as I gaze into those inquisitive eyes.

It was hard to say goodbye to her, knowing I hardly ever get to go up home (you too, Mum and Dad) but on the other hand, there was Banana Pudding Ice Cream waiting in the freezer for me back in Wellington. The latest in a long, chilly line of ice cream recipes that I love, this takes a bit of work but is worth every single moment of your time, and rewards you tenfold with every spoonful.

Before I get into the recipe though…As I make a lot of ice cream, I thought it’d be nice to mentally spatula my brain for a list of ideas and helpful thoughts in the hopes of converting you all into the level of ice cream love that I have. And if you have any of your own to add, feel free to do so in the comments section.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People Who Make Ice Cream (these aren’t even habits, but I don’t like the word ‘tips’ and “Ice Cream Policy and Guidelines” sounded way harsh.)

1) You don’t need an ice cream maker. That’s just what ice cream maker manufacturers want you to think. It would be really cool to have one, but really, just freeze the stuff in a container, stir it occasionally, and you’ll be sweet as.

2) You do still need equipment. A food processor is essential if you want to make Instant Berry Coconut Ice Cream, otherwise all you need to find is: an average wide saucepan, a spatula, a whisk, and some good-sized tupperware or empty takeaway containers.

3) Don’t feel held back by what you can or can’t eat. From cream and butter (see below) to the cleanest of vegan ice creams, there are so many options. Coconut milk or cream is an amazingly versatile substitute for cream, both on its own and in custard-based recipes. Unless you’re adding a pre-prepared ingredient (like a particular chocolate bar) all ice cream should be gluten-free. Check out my recipe index if you’re not convinced, as somehow most of my ice cream recipes have ended up being vegan or dairy-free.

4) Imagine all the ice creams. Once you’ve got a good ‘base’ vanilla ice cream recipe, you can stir any number of cool things into it to make a spectacular pudding for yourself or a crowd. For example: chopped up dark chocolate and/or fudge; walnuts toasted in a little butter and brown sugar; whole raspberries; bashed up chocolate chip cookies; a whole bag of smarties/m’n’ms; it goes on. Your four options in order of most to least easy are: a couple of cans of coconut milk mixed with sugar (for a vegan base); about 500mls/2 cups cream whipped softly with 1/2 cup icing sugar; egg yolks and sugar beaten together with whipped cream then folded in; and finally a full-on homemade custard, which you’ll see in the recipe below. If your own mind is fleeced, be inspired by other people – searching “ice cream” on Tastespotting would be a good start.

5) Keep stirring. If you’re making a custard based ice cream, it may feel like the mixture is taking forever to thicken but the moment you leave it to check Twitter/etc it’ll overheat and you’ll have weird scrambled eggs on your hands. A spatula ensures that all the mixture gets lifted off the wide surface area of the pan and moved around. This also applies to rule 4. Keep stirring…stuff into your ice cream.

6) Accept the differences. The texture of homemade ice cream isn’t going to be exactly the same as the stuff in two litre tubs from the supermarket. The main difference is it’ll likely freeze harder, meaning you just have to let it soften a little on the bench for 15 minutes before you serve it. But you’ll be able to control exactly what goes into yours – no emulsifiers or stabilisers or soya lecithin (what even), it’s very likely to be cheaper than bought stuff, and you can get as creative as you like with the flavouring.

7) Don’t be scared. There’s a lot involved in homemade custard – from separating the eggs to heating the cream to carefully and slowly cooking the two together. However. As long as you keep stirring with your spatula and have a low heat, you will be just fine. Nigella Lawson recommends having a sink filled with ice cold water to sit the pan in quickly if you get nervous, I’ve never had to do that but it might give you peace of mind. I cannot overstate how clumsy I am, and not once in my entire life have I screwed up ice cream. Neither will you. And if you do, just step back a bit and try the more simple methods first.

And then try this. Bananas aren’t my first choice of fruit but this recipe capitalises on all that they have to offer – the quick-to-caramelise sweetness, the creamy texture, and the light, almost lemony flavour. It is SO good.

Banana Pudding Ice Cream


From The Lee Brothers Southern Cookbook.


2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup (tightly packed) brown or muscovado sugar
2 bananas, peeled and sliced
2 tablespoons dark rum (I used Gunpowder Rum)
2 large egg yolks
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups full fat milk
2 cups cream


(note: I also used 1 cup buttermilk and 2 1/2 cups cream, because that’s what I had. Was fine.)


In a pan over medium heat, melt the butter till it’s frothy, and stir in the brown sugar. This will become a delicious, bubbling caramel in a minute or so, and at this point, stir in the banana and cook till softened. Pour over the rum, allowing it to sizzle and bubble away for a minute or so. Remove from the heat, and spatula everything into a food processor bowl.


In a bowl, beat the egg yolks lightly then add the 1/3 cup sugar. Continue beating til mixture is thick and light. In the same saucepan you cooked the bananas in, gently heat up the milk. Don’t let it boil, but let it get good and hot.


Remove the pan from the heat and take half a cup of milk from it, pouring it into the food processor with the bananas and blending the lot till very smooth.


Pour the rest of the milk carefully over the egg yolks, whisking while you do so. Now spatula all this back into the pan that the milk was just in, and heat very, very gently over a low heat, stirring all the time. It will take a while, but it’ll thicken up into a light custard. At this point, take it off the heat (still stirring) and tip in the contents of the food processor, mixing it all together. Refrigerate till cool. And try not to eat it all at this point, rummy banana custard on its own is extremely delicious.


Finally: whisk the cream till it’s nice and thick, fold it into the banana custard, tip the lot into a container and freeze, stirring occasionally.

According to the Lee Brothers cookbook, banana pudding itself is a bit of a die-hard American thing, but for all that, it’s not necessarily particularly delicious. This ice cream is their take on it – for some reason I do love puddings that are variations on other puddings – and it’s luscious stuff. I really like that there aren’t huge quantities of everything, unlike other ice cream recipes which might ask you coolly for 9 egg yolks. The butter, brown sugar and rum elevate it above the ordinary, their dark caramel flavours not entirely muted by the freezing process. The result is a magnificently flavoured, velvet-textured, pale yellow ice cream. A very good idea would be to make a caramel sauce and add some of the rum in it, or even just do as we did and pile the ice cream into a glass and tip a capful of rum over the top. As you’ll see in a couple of the photos, I dusted it with cocoa – the bitter plain chocolatiness of which was an excellent match.

Here’s where I poured more rum over – the ice cream slowly and saucily melts into the alcohol. The spicy rum gives your mouth a hard-liquor kick which is then cooled by the ice cream. Meant to be.

As well as finally meeting the kitten over the weekend, Tim (who flew up to meet me) and I also caught up with heaps of my family and had a huge number of gifts pressed upon us – a jar of homemade lemon curd, a cake tin, socks, duck and hen eggs, bowls, and mugs. On Saturday night at my request Mum made corned beef, which she does with a level of amazingness I can only attempt to reach. I left feeling very happy and loved, and also nervous about the eggs, but miraculously they didn’t break on the journey back to Wellington.

Thanks heaps to Jason who helped me with the html stuff on this blog. Explaining html difficulties is like explaining dreams, in that they’re both boring to other people and it’s really hard to properly convey the fear and drama. But I assure you, whether or not you find it interesting, he’s the reason that you’re seeing a new font here.
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Title via: One of my favourite musicals, A Chorus Line, and its charmingly conversational and surprisingly twisty song Nothing. I don’t really like the movie (it cut the important Music and The Mirror??) but it luckily doesn’t mess with this song in any way.
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Music lately:

While endlessly gazing at Poppy I realised she was almost identical to the kitten in David Dallas’ very cool new video for Take A Picture (ka-chiiiik! Can’t help it.) The eye colour is a little different, but apart from that…totally twins.

The Real McCoy, Come and Get Your Love. I know the whole omgilovethe90s! thing has lost all impact, but this is unquestionably (in my mind) one of the best songs of the last 20 years.
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Next time: Could be this delicious baked oatmeal recipe I found, or maybe this pea soup recipe which is basically just peas and water. It’s not only extremely financially friendly, it’s also surprisingly fantastic to eat, too.

we are the custard pie appreciation consortium

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Pie!

Blackberry Coconut Custard Chocolate Chunk Cookie Pie!
But before the pie, one thing. I’m not even sorry for lulling you into a false sense of pie-related security, that was in fact my aim.
After becoming besotted with Parks and Recreation and watching it fanatically with Tim, I couldn’t work out who the character of Ron Swanson reminded me of. And then, while looking through photos, it hit me: Rupert, our dead family cat.
I even uploaded this unfairly terrible photo of myself with Rupert so I could say: See? Look at the similar contempt in their eyes. Their comparable face shapes. Their pelts, both elegant and abundant. The resemblance doesn’t stop at the physical or the disposition, either. Like Ron, Rupert’s appetite was legendary. I’m pretty sure had we offered it to him, he wouldn’t have turned down The Swanson (that’s a turkey leg wrapped in bacon.)
Anyway, unsparing self-indulgence aside, here’s some pie that I invented…self-indulgently.
I’ve had this idea tucked away in my brain for a week or two, but only had the time and energy to test it out this morning. That idea was: what if I made a pie, but instead of using pastry, I used cookie dough? It’d be like there was a giant cookie on top! But it’d be a pie! You can see how I got so enthusiastic about this.
I mean, I really thought this was a good idea. Luckily for me, it actually worked out well, because I can’t predict what would’ve happened to my self-esteem/general demeanour if it had tasted awful or broken in half or something – I made such a huge mess of the kitchen in the process of making this and it was gratifying to have something delicious to justify it.
I guess you could employ near-on anything in the filling, but I wanted to use things I already had, which was frozen blackberries, dessicated coconut, and a little dark chocolate. The custard powder acts as a thickening agent, but importantly, along with the coconut, absorbs the bulk of the berry juice, thus preventing it seeping into the pastry and becoming soggy. This was my assumption, and it did exactly what I’d hoped. Apart from the sheer uncertainty of it all, and my chronic clumsiness meaning that there was a large and suspicious looking pile of baking powder on the floor, THIS PIE IS SO STRAIGHTFORWARD that I had to put that bit in capitals in case you were scrolling through this in a bit of a hurry and not really properly reading it, because (a) it’s a very important point and (b) people do that, we’re only human.
It’s not only straightforward, it turned out vegan, so feel free to feed this to near-on anyone you like (except Ron Swanson, who probably wouldn’t appreciate that there was no meat was involved.)
Blackberry Coconut Custard Chocolate Chunk Cookie Pie (it’s a good name, right?)
Cookie Dough Pastry
Follow this recipe, leaving out the spices, but adding in a teaspoon of cinnamon. Note: the texture of the dough when I made it this time round was much more traditionally cookie-like, but I honestly think I forgot half the flour when I made it last time. Depending on your ingredients the results may vary but it should be recognisably like cookie dough.
Roll out a decent handful of the dough and carefully lay it in a pie plate (as you can see from the photos, I put a sheet of baking paper in the pie plate.) Press it down, but don’t bother to trim the edges too much. Refrigerate.
Roughly chop about 70g dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana) and stir through the remaining dough. Roll out another decent handful of this dough into a rough circle.
Filling:
2 1/2 cups blackberries (or whichever frozen berries you like)
3 tablespoons custard powder
1 tablespoon golden syrup
2 generous teaspoons vanilla extract or paste
1 cup dessicated coconut
Mix everything except the coconut in a small pan, so that the berries are covered in the custard powder. Heat gently, stirring constantly. The berries will start to release their juice which will absorb the custard powder, slowly becoming brighter in colour. Slowly bring to the boil, by which stage it should be pretty liquid, then simmer for about three minutes, stirring the whole time. Stir in the coconut and allow it to cool a little.
Spread it all into the base of the pie and then top with the chocolate chunk layer. Pinch/fold the edges together.
Bake at 190 C/375 F for 15 or so minutes. Keep an eye out on it though. Like cookies, the dough will become more solid upon cooling.
This will make more cookie dough than what you’ll need for a pie, but whatever you don’t use, tip into a freezer bag and use in future as an instant crumble topping for fruit. Or if you’ve got the energy, roll it out and use it to make cookies.
So what does it taste like? All the nicer for sitting on this brazenly pretty plate shaped like a leaf, I can tell you. (It’s from Vanishing Point at 40 Abel Smith Street and their stuff is very reasonably priced, considering this is Wellington.)
As I said, the hypothesis paid off and both the base and top were crisp and chewy and, well, cookie-ish, without the slightest hint of disintegrating into a pastry swamp from the berry juices. The cookie recipe’s a good one, so it wasn’t surprising that it tasted delicious, but the small bursts of very dark, velvety chocolate against the more sweet, fragrant filling was very delightful. The whole thing was pretty brilliant actually – richly berried, softly gritty and crimson of filling, sturdy and intermittently chocolately of exterior.
As far as endorsement that’s not from me goes, Tim and I cheerfully fed this pie today to a cool crowd: Kate, Jason, Jo (thanks for the flowers Jo) Kim, and Brendan (who doesn’t have anything to link to.) They all seemed to really like it, and not just because I was standing right there with a serrated knife. Also, it was ostensibly given in exchange for more Parks and Recreation from Kate and Jason (that kind of rhymes!) so it’s all nicely circular. Tim and I watched an episode while having dinner tonight, it’s actually concerning how hyped up we were. Mind you, we do this over a lot of TV, at least we’re both like this. (Tim: “Mmm, both of us”.)
It has been a good weekend: Yesterday I had the fortuitous opportunity to have lunch at Kayu Manis with the esteemed Chef Wan and several other local food bloggers (find out more and see the photos here) and on Friday night I had another very fun food blogger occasion in the form of a Wellington on a Plate dinner at Fratelli. Last night Tim and I went to see @Peace at Chow, which was a sort of awkward location, but it was a cool night. Well, a cool morning. It started after 1am. Hence these stilted and expressionless sentences. I felt things! I had emotions! I just had two really late nights in a row and am feeling increasingly useless at placing words in a row effectively as this evening wears on.
Luckily, this being 2011, my thoughts on this pie, and all other good things, can be summed up with one simple gif.
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Title via: The Kinks’ excellent, if lengthily titled Village Green Preservation Society, which now always makes me think of the good fight fought by the people of Otaua back in 2008.
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Music lately:
Scritti Politti, The Sweetest Girl. Some songs that you initially don’t think you like whatsoever and then end up listening to them on repeat many times over in one sitting? This one. Is one.
Have linked to it before but Disfunktional by the aforementioned @Peace is such a good song. Last night it was sent out to anyone fighting with their other half. Such is the fervour inspired in people by @Peace and its members, there was huge cheering from the audience, until they were told not to cheer because it’s not something to be proud of. I guess you had to be there, but it was pretty funny. Probably because I was standing near one especially enthusiastic guy. Who cheered at that point.
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Next time: Made a simple dinner of rice and peas tonight from the Lee Brothers’ book – might put that one up next. Doesn’t sound very fun, but it tasted just perfect.

like a dream I’m flowing with no stopping, sweeter than a cherry pie with ready whip topping

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Telling people you love a particular TV show can be a bit like telling them about a dream you had last night. They think, Great. I’m really pleased that I’m hearing about something fictitious which happened while you were entirely sedentary. With my weekend, I sculpted the concept “love” out of clay*, bought an adorable classic car, went to three different concerts, and took a mini-break to the seaside with my many, many friends. I do find it hard not to talk plenty to whoever’ll listen about TV shows that I love. In case you’re wondering, it’s all the obvious ones – Mad Men (I want a pencil skirt!) Game of Thrones (I want a dragon!) The Wire (I want Stringer Bell!) But recently Ange, our ex-flatmate but current friend, gave Tim and I something we’d been after for a long time – the TV-est TV show of all: Twin Peaks. A show that gave water coolers a dual reason for existence. A show that has basically one piece of music for 97% of its entire score. A show that straddles horror and hilarity. A show with a feature-length pilot episode that was sold off to Europe as a stand-alone movie.

 
 
And a show – this is where I’m hoping it’ll start to make sense – a show that talks about pie a lot. Also doughnuts, but the cherry pie is a big damn deal to Kyle McLachlan’s character Dale Cooper, and I swear nearly every time he mentions it, he uses some kind of reference to death. As one of my old uni tutors would say, while slapping a copy of In Cold Blood in time to each syllable, it’s all in the text. To illustrate the dramatic-ness of how we feel about it, last Saturday night Tim and I had planned to go out and do Saturday night things. We thought we’d casually watch a bit of TV till the point of the evening where it feels acceptably late enough to leave the house. At 1.30am, five episodes into Twin Peaks, we realised we weren’t going to be leaving the house that night at all. And I realised the time had come, after Dale Cooper’s boundless and influential enthusiasm, for me to make a cherry pie.
 
 
Above: If Dale Cooper was here, he’d zoom in on this picture of cherries and see my reflection in them. (+10 points for referencing something from the show while referencing something from the show!)
 
 
Lucky for me, I had a jar of morello cherries that my nana had given me as a present a while back sitting in the cupboard. If you’re not blessed with such a cool and shrewd nan as I, the jars seem to be fairly easy to get hold of and not very expensive – plus their syrupy habitat means you can turn this out any time of year. While cherry pie is as American as apple pie (or pecan pie, or blueberry pie – what a lucky country!) I somewhat predictably turned to Nigella Lawson and a recipe from her seminal text How To Eat. While you can make pastry completely by hand, and I’ve done it, it’s definitely a squillion times easier with a food processor. Either way, the significant upside is that this recipe doesn’t need blind baking – you just roll it out, line the pie plate, fill it up, put a pastry lid on it and bake.
 
 
This pie is a joy, both in the making and the eating. Rolling out the pastry and carefully arranging the light-catching cherries. The scent of them jammily cooking away, and of butter and flour coming together as one to form rich, crisp pastry in the oven. The feeling of grabbing it out of the oven with teatowel-shielded hands, setting it down on the bench and vaingloriously roaring “I MADE PIE”.
 
And how. The pastry is biscuity and buttery and miraculously not prone to soggy-ness (unlike the endearing but mysteriously Deputy Sheriff Andy Brennan in Twin Peaks who cries constantly.) The filling is an appealing mix of tart and sugary. And due to the minimal ingredients, the peerless, fragrantly sweet cherry flavour is allowed to shine.
 
 
Above: Dale Cooper really liked black coffee. And that’s actual coffee in there, which I drank after taking this photo. Not just an empty-cup-as-prop. I keep it real for this blog, even while engaging in flights of baking-fantasy as inspired by an ancient television show.
 
 
Dale Cooper: “They’ve got a cherry pie there that’ll kill you!”
 
*Just when you thought I couldn’t get any cooler, I should probably own up that this is a reference to Ashley Wyeth, a character from Baby Sitters Club #12, Claudia and the New Girl. That is all.
 
 
Cherry Pie
 
Recipe from How To Eat, by Nigella Lawson
 
Pastry:
 
240g self-raising flour (or, plain plus a heaped teaspoon baking powder)
120g cold diced butter
2 egg yolks
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch salt
2 tablespoons water
 
Filling:
 
1 jar – around 700g – of morello cherries in syrup
30g melted butter
90g sugar
1 heaped tablespoon plain flour
1 tablespoon of juice from the jar of drained cherries
 
Set your oven to 200 C/400 F, and put in a baking tray to heat up while this is happening. This helps to properly cook the bottom of the pastry shell.
 
Put your butter and flour into the freezer for a few minutes, before briefly whizzing in a food processor to the point where there are no large pieces of butter and it looks like damp sand.
Mix the liquid pastry ingredients together and add to the food processor, briefly processing again till it comes together in larger clumps, and if you pinch together some of the crumbs they stick together. Tip out this crumbly mixture, push it together into a large lump, and refrigerate for about 20 minutes.
 
Then, divide into two discs, roll out both, and use one to line a fairly shallow 20cm pie plate.
 
Filling: Drain the cherries of their juices. Mix the butter, sugar, flour and reserved tablespoon of cherry juice to make a pinkish paste and spread this across the inside of the pastry lining the pastry place. Dot the cherries evenly across the pie plate until it’s covered, then drape the other disc of pastry across the top, trimming the edges and crimping them if you’re good at that (I’m not!)
 
Make a few small slices in the top with a knife to allow steam to escape, and then place on the hot baking tray in the oven. After 15 minutes, cover loosely with tin foil and reduce the temperature to 180 C. Bake for another 18 minutes. Allow to cool a bit before eating – it’ll collapse if you try to slice it too soon.
 
Title via: The Beastie Boys, Whatcha Want – very likely my favourite song of theirs after Remote Control, and fortuitously referencing cherry pie. Not that ready whip topping was involved in the making of this, but it wouldn’t be out of context if you’ve got some handy…
 
 
Music lately:
 
I know she has so many hits that even ten years ago it required a double CD package to release a compilation of them all – but some of Mariah Carey’s early album tracks are absolutely glorious in their own right, too. Like And You Don’t Remember from her second album Emotions which could’ve easily been a single alongside the rest of the outrageously good ones from that album.
 
From Slow Boat Records today I snapped up the 1987 revival cast recording of Anything Goes on vinyl. Patti LuPone was in sublime form (and wears very cool blue and white tap shoes) and gets so many good songs it’s hard to know where to start. But of course the title track is as good a place as any.
 
Falling, aka the Twin Peaks theme. Someone kindly made a montage of of images of waterfalls for you while you listen to it on youtube.
 
 
Next time: Not pie. Probably something from my Ottolenghi cookbook, since I flicked through it this morning and thought “oh, that’s right! I want to cook every single recipe in this!” Also: my parents adopted a kitten. There might be photos, accompanied by captions deeply imbued with longing.

as if to say he doesn’t like chocolate, he’s born a liar

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Self Portrait With Chocolate Fudge Pie.
I have many many people that I look up to in this world. For example: Susan Blackwell. She is extremely funny and clever, she has a very cool job and she’s aspirational – despite (I’m sorry Susan Blackwell, if you’re reading this – and if you are, hiii!) not having the most bankable voice, she starred in the Tony-nominated musical [title of show]. As herself. I love that she has created basically the only role I could ever hope to play in a musical (apart from maybe the girl from A Chorus Line who can’t sing), for having one of the few songs that I can absentmindedly sing along to without stopping mid-note and saying “oh forget it” which is what happened when I was singing (yes, lustily) along to Aquarius from the musical Hair the other day. These days, among other things, she has her own joyful online show where she interviews Broadway stars in an array of locations. It’s called Side By Side By Susan Blackwell. I basically would like to model my life upon her career trajectory. Except with the addition of authoring an extremely excellent cookbook. Perhaps if my (still hypothetical) cookbook becomes exceptionally popular, I’ll just be able to command that someone puts on a local production of [title of show] and casts me as Susan. That’s quite the “if” though…
Anyway, the point of all this is that in one of her recent segments of SBSBSB, she interviews stage and screen actor Billy Crudup, and, in the process, they make his grandma’s recipe, Chocolate Fudge Pie. I was captivated by this; its name, its provenance, its promise of chocolate, fudge, and pie in one handy substance…and vowed to make it pronto.
Obligatory pouring-of-mixture into receptacle shot, which I can never quite get right.
I adapted this very American recipe into metric (hello, cups of butter, what?) but the only thing I had trouble with was the original request for “six squares of bittersweet chocolate”. Figuring that because “this America, man,” these squares are probably fairly large. Even taking into account that I’m halving the recipe presented on the show, 70g of chocolate felt about right. Enough for plenty of flavour plus a little bit of mixture-tasting.
Billy Crudup’s Grandma’s Chocolate Fudge Pie
With thanks to Billy Crudup, Billy Crudup’s Grandma, Susan Blackwell, and whoever hired Billy Crudup on Broadway so that he’d be a legitimate interview subject for Susan Blackwell thus creating the opportunity for him to share this recipe in a place that I was likely to find it.
70g dark, dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)
180g butter
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup plain flour
pinch of salt

Set your oven to 160 C/325 F. Grease a 20-22cm pie plate (like the one in my picture. You could also use one of those throwaway tinfoil tins that are very, very cheap at the supermarket) I also cut a circle of baking paper for the base, because I’m nervous like that.

Carefully – either in the microwave, in a double-boiler contraption (rest one heatproof bowl over a small pan of simmering water, not letting the water touch the bottom of the bowl) or just in a pan over a low heat, melt the butter and chocolate together. Set aside. Whisk the living daylights out of the eggs and sugar, pour in the chocolatey butter, the flour (good to sift it to prevent lumps) and the salt.

Bake for around 45 minutes until no longer super wobbly in the middle. I found 45 minutes perfect for me but you may want to check it at 35, in case your oven is a bit enthusiastic.
This pie rules. Like brownies, but somehow superior, because here in every single slice there is an ideal and just plain nice ratio of cakey exterior to melting, squidgy centre. It’s not off-puttingly rich, and the relatively scanty quantity of chocolate somehow flourishes while baking to create a result of astonishing chocolatey depth. It’d be completely fantastic with some ice cream on the side, slowly liquefying into its pliant, satiny centre – but is still practical and cake-resembling enough for me to take a clingfilm-wrapped slice to work in my handbag for lunch.
My attempt at prettying up this brown spongey savannah with icing sugar was patchy to middlingly successful, at best.
I’m not just saying this because the recipe came to me via someone that I think is really, really really cool (I’m talking about Susan Blackwell, not Billy Crudup by the way, hence the ‘via’) but this recipe is amazing and will most definitely become a regular fixture on my circuit. Speshly because it gives me a legitimate excuse to bore people about [title of show], as my knife hovers with maddening endlessness over the pie and they wait for me to serve them a slice. “It’s about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical!”
By the way, I did three really clumsy things on the day of making this Chocolate Fudge Pie. Firstly, I dropped my phone into a bowl of salad. Secondly, I dropped and smashed my Kilner jar, at least half full of homemade quince brandy (oh, the swearing and endless vacuuming that ensued) and finally, I dropped a full, open, king-sized box of weetbix (not actual weetbix, but those “weeta-brix” knockoff type ones) down the back of the pantry. Yet I managed to make this entire pie, chocolatey and eggy and rich, in a white shirt, without getting one particle of it on myself. At this point, I was really expecting to get covered in mixture, somehow it didn’t happen. I’m not sure what my message is here, apart from: enjoy life/your nice alcohol/applicable consumable item now, rather than saving it for an appropriate occasion, because you never know when it might slip out of your hands and smash to pieces. On carpet. Even as the jar of brandy fell I remember thinking “wheeee-ew, it’s landing on carpet, it’ll bounc-ohhhh no.”
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Title via: Bloc Party’s Helicopter. I really like these guys, although it’s hard to know if my view of them is softened because they really remind me of living in the UK in 2005. Although I spose any music can be affected by the circumstances that you hear it in, I’m pretty sure this is still a good song with or without my contexty lens over it.
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Music lately:

Probably said it before, but while the movie adaptation of the musical Hair is pretty awful, they got one thing right in the casting of Cheryl Barnes to sing the song Easy To Be Hard; it’s so beautiful. Even then, I hate that the camera cuts away from her so much.

@Peace, a new creation from Homebrew’s Tom Scott and Nothing To Nobody’s Lui Tuiasau. You can stream it, or you can buy it – and in a cool but bold move from its makers – pay what you like for it, right here. It’s all excellent, with silky as production from Benny Tones, and if you’re not sure, the title track is a good place to start (although so is the opening song, “this goes out to all walks, living in this village that we call Aucks”)
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Next time: Completing the completely coincidental trifecta (pie-fecta?) of blog posts about pies, and entirely inspired by Twin Peaks, which Tim and I have been obsessively watching lately: Cherry Pie.

clean clear crisp, we got a love like this water

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I don’t want to come across all “Oh hi old friend, haven’t seen you in so long, oh wait I’ll just put my shiny new iPhone on the table there for everyone to see while opening up the FriendPal app, which I paid $3 for, it takes a photo of the person in front of you so you can talk to them while looking at a picture of them on your phone” etc. But I really, really love the FoodGawker app, which is where I found this recipe for Chocolate Mousse. While all the food that I blog about here makes me happy, sometimes I find an exciting recipe that just fills my thoughts constantly, because I’m so curious about it. A recipe that makes people’s voices slower, plane trips delayed, busses late and traffic more congested because they’re all standing between me and my kitchen.

 
 
 
Foodgawker is a site with page after page of thumbnails of stunning food photography, each photo linking to the recipe it depicts on the blog it came from. You’ve got to self-submit, and you’ve got to be good. Possibly related: they’ve consistently rejected all my submissions over the last year or so. But still I return, using it like Google for recipes. Their iPhone app condenses all this into a format that fits on your phone, and it’s a grand way to fill in spare time – although it helps to have some free Wi-Fi, I bet all those high-res pictures chew through the megabytes.
 
The reason this recipe caught my attention, while browsing through the app in an airport recently, was its ingredients. Or lack of.
 
 
 
 
Chocolate, water, juice, honey. (The honey was a total pain to scrape off the baking paper, by the way, and I didn’t even achieve visually what I was hoping for! Hopefully I learn from this.)
 
You get chocolate mousse out of hardly anything at all. I wish I’d known about this recipe a few years ago as a student – a little chocolate, turn on the tap, and you’ve got pudding. No eggs, no cream, no nothing. It’s amazing. As the German man on Tim’s and my train to Warsaw said when he found out we were from New Zealand: “Oh my gosh, that is further away than I could ever have imagined!” As they say in [title of show], “For anyone who’s ever dreamed, it’s time to believe in dreaming again….It’s time. Dream. Believe.” (Oh come on, it more or less applies to awesome chocolate mousse. Also: [title of show]!)
 
 
Water Chocolate Mousse
 
With a huge thanks to the Mess In The Kitchen blog where I found this recipe. I’ve adapted it slightly.
 
100g dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)
1/4 cup juice (any flavour, I used more of that strawberry juice)
1/3 cup water
2 teaspoons honey
 
Bring the liquids and the honey to the boil in a pan, then remove from the heat and tip into a bowl. Break up the chocolate and add it to the bowl, stirring till the heat of the liquid melts it and you’ve got a shiny chocolate puddle.
 
Refrigerate for 10 minutes or so. Just before you take it out, fill your sink with a couple of centimeters of cold water, and add a handful of ice cubes.
 
Sit the bowl of chocolate in the water, and whisk. Whisk and whisk and whisk and eventually it will aerate, turning paler and thickened and – pa-dah – into chocolate mousse. If you end up with what looks like overbeaten whipped cream, just whisk in a little hot water till you get the consistency you want. Divide amongst two smallish bowls/glasses and serve.
 
Serves 2
 
 
Most recipes involving chocolate will stress that you can’t let any water get into it or it’ll seize up and turn all gross. So, it was with slight consternation that I mixed the two together. Through some miracle of science, the melted chocolate, rapidly cooling with every flick of your whisk, absorbs the liquid and becomes a soft, velvety pillowy pile of mousse, with the clean, unsullying water making the dark cocoa flavour so definite it’s like every single one of your tastebuds is wearing 3D glasses.
 
 
 
 
In terms of excitement-causing, second only to the astonishing minimalism of the ingredients is this recipe’s versatility. With no eggs or dairy or gluten, this could also serve as icing on a cake, the filling in a pie shell, or as a base for whatever flavour you want to push upon it – use orange juice, add vanilla or peppermint extract or cinnamon. If you don’t have juice or honey, I think you could use water for the entire liquid content, and just use two teaspoons of sugar.
 
 
 
 
And for interest’s sake, I tried it with white chocolate instead of dark. Apart from the sort of muddy colour (from the strawberry juice) and a softer-set texture, it worked amazingly well and now calls me, siren like, from the fridge.
 
 
 
Title via: Ladi6’s high-achieving single Like Water from her beautiful album The Liberation of…
 
 
 
Music lately:
 
Kiss From a Rose, Seal. OMG this song is good. Although it’s really hard to blog when you’re singing along to it. It requires all your concentration.
 
HAIR. While I appreciate that I’ve mentioned it a million times, it’s only because it’s really, really good. And I’m obsessed anew thanks to the arrival from America of the Actors Fund of America Benefit recording and the vinyl record of the 2009 revival cast. “All the clouds are cumuloft, walking in spaaaace”
 
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, How Can You Love Me. As commenter Pete20Pedro on Youtube says, “what a jam!” And their album came with a free tshirt, one of those nice ones with really soft fabric, even.
 
 
Next time: Nigella’s recipe for coconut macaroons…unless anything dinner-y overtakes my interest before then. That’s if I’m not asleep in every spare moment. Had another weekend away for work – fortunately, didn’t hit my head again, but I did have a weird sleepless night in my motel, which I’m still catching up on now.

red enough it could burn you…

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I was away in Auckland for work over the weekend, but very happily, I got to fit a night at home with the family in around it. During my 18-hour stint at home I somehow managed to catch up with huge amounts of family, both extended and immediate. Well, the family minus one cat (Rupert, who died in May). Roger, the remaining feline, seemed to enjoy the extra attention but didn’t go so far as to actually sit on my lap for an extended time period or sleep on my bed that night.
While packing up on Sunday in my Auckland motel to head to the airport, I bent down to check if I’d left anything under the bed (I always do this, even if I hardly bring anything with me – I once found twenty cents!) and on the way down my right temple connected hard and swift with the wooden back of a desk chair. It hurt so bad, and I wailed really loudly. And then kind of laughed at the fact that there was no-one to hear me saying “owwww”, which…actually sounds fairly sinister now on paper. Anyway, if this blog is completely non-inspiring to read, blame it on my sore, impacted head.
The new Cuisine magazine arrived in our mailbox the day before I left to go up to Auckland, giving me just enough time to read it, but not enough time to cook any of its content. I did daydream about one particular recipe while away, which I then made pretty well immediately after returning home to Wellington. Rote Grutz, or its supercool translation Red Grits (I find it hard not to spell it Gritz) is a German recipe that Ray McVinnie, one of my very, very favourite local food writers, discovered while researching food in Berlin. I’m not even going to pretend to *cough* when I say: “Luckyyyy”.
It doesn’t look like there’s much to this recipe, and it’s true, but the ingredients come together to form something that’s a gorgeous merging of jam and custard. The ‘grits’ part of the name come from the berries’ seeds, at least that’s my guess. They’re certainly gritty. The cornflour and juice cooks together and becomes satiny and light (apart from that one lump of unstirred cornflour stirring in my glass), stunningly red, not too sweet. In fact, the sour-sugary aspect makes it compelling eating. I even sneaked back to the fridge in a bit of a trance while it was cooling to eat some more spoonfuls, then accidentally dropped a steak right into the bowl of berries. Luckily the steak was wrapped and on a tray and I removed it fast.
I didn’t have the exact ingredients that Ray McVinnie specified, but I’d like to think what I had worked just as well. There’s something nice about the red-on-red of the juices but I’m sure you could use orange or apple juice if that’s what’s most accessible to you.
Rote Grutze/Red Grits

From the June/July 2011 issue of Cuisine magazine.

250mls cranberry juice
150g sugar
800g frozen raspberries
50g cornflour mixed with 4 tablespoons water

Or, my appropriation based on what was in the fridge and the amount of people it was feeding:

125ml (1/2 cup) strawberry juice (I know! I bought it at the food show, the brand is NJoy but I can’t find anything about them online. Anyway, this seemed like a practical use for it.)
75g sugar
400g frozen cranberries and blackberries
25g cornflour mixed with 2 tablespoons water

Bring the sugar and juice to a boil in a saucepan. Add the berries, bring to the boil again and carefully stir in the cornflour mixture, stirring really well so you don’t end up with lumps of cornflour. Remove from the heat, cool, then pour into glasses. Out of mine I got enough for the two glasses you saw plus a couple of tablespoons left over to be saved for making future breakfasts more exciting.


The Red Grits are pretty to look at, dark as garnets and just as light-catching. While they’d taste gorgeous with a cascade of fresh cream plunging into their red depths, they were satisfactorily delicious as is. As well as served in glasses, I imagine these saucy berries could be spooned over ice cream, tucked under a crumble topping, or used to fill a pie shell.


And extremely easy to make. Tim and I never actually saw these on a menu in Berlin, but it does feel nice to be eating something Germanic, so that our holiday doesn’t feel quite so far away in the past.
Last week I had the extremely cool opportunity to go to the launch of Visa Wellington on a Plate. Which I’m really excited about. Particularly the set menus which allows me to briefly feel like a Lady Who Lunches. At last year’s launch I met Mika of Millie Mirepoix for the first time, and also the magnificent Ray McVinnie himself. He wasn’t there this year, but I re-met Delaney of Heartbreak Pie and Rosa of Mrs Cake, and met for the first time Joanna from Wellingtonista, etc. We ploughed through beautiful nibbles, ended up at Cuckoo round the corner for wine (I will pay you back Delaney and Rosa) and then Tim appeared and he and I ended up having a wild dinner at Foxglove with Jo and her friend Heather. It all happened really spontaneously which is a word that I don’t usually use to describe activities that I participate in. It was so fun, and several bonus points to the staff at Foxglove who dealt with our increasing raucousness. But as well as making real-life friends of people that also seem cool online, Wellington on a Plate has plenty to offer people who just want to eat stuff: check em out.
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Title via: Linda Clifford, Red Light, from the Fame soundtrack. I love this song so much. It’s also an amazing moment in the film itself – obviously Leroy is a total babe and it’s supposed to be humourous but I always felt so sad for Shirley Mulholland. When she says “who wants to go to a…school and learn to dance anyway” a bit of my heart chips off (this is why I can’t watch this film too often) because I know how she feels.
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Music lately:

Arctic Monkeys, Don’t Sit Down Because I’ve Moved Your Chair. Some of the music I was really wild about six years ago really hasn’t aged too well, or successive output has downright deteriorated. So it’s nice to see the Arctic Monkeys continuing to be awesome.

Patrick Wolf, The Magic Position. I had a bad headache today from the aforementioned head-hitting moment and so was feeling a bit grim. This song came on my ipod and, with its carousel-ride sound and Bolero-baiting violins, it was about halfway through before I realised I was happily swaying my head side to side like Stevie Wonder.
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Next time: I’ve been tutu-ing with the idea of making a Facebook page for this blog. On the one hand…it might be a good way for people to latch ever further onto this blog. A lot of people like Facebook. On the other hand, I don’t really like Facebook (it’s true! You have to scrape me away from Twitter with a silicon spatula but I can’t spend more than a minute on Facebook) and I wouldn’t know what to say on there, and research would suggest that you actually have to have an engaging Facebook page to keep people around. On a further, auxiliary hand, what if I built a Facebook page and nobody turned up? Any thoughts’d be appreciated.

don’t feel so alone, got the radio on

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

Radiokaka (Radio Cake)

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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