Category: Vegetarian

just like honey

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While in hindsight I did do quite a lot of baking as I was growing up, it wasn’t to the point where it was really obvious that I’d start blogging fervidly about food a few years later. Like, if ever questioned about food in my childhood you’re not going to hear me recount stories of instinctively rolling out pastry with an empty vermouth bottle found on the floor and studding it with halved plums from the orchard; or learning to handmake pasta while sitting on my great-great-grandmother’s floury knee. I think I’ve read too many interviews with chefs who had romantic-sounding upbringings. Ain’t nothing whimsical about 2-minute noodles and mass-produced “Kids Can Cook” books sponsored by 2-minute noodle companies, but…I seemed to have turned out okay.
There are a few recipes from my childhood which stick with me though, and which occasionally twinge both my heartstrings and tastebuds. Today’s recipe for Honeybuns is dairy free – as promised last week, in horrified reaction to $6 blocks of butter at the supermarket – and it’s one that Mum, and sometimes Mum and myself together, made a lot in my childhood. This isn’t simply nostalgia for its own hackneyed, rose-tinted-in-photoshop sake, these are in fact very very good. I had the urge to make them a while back and asked Mum to email me the recipe from the – if I remember rightly – pink scrapbook with big yellow flowers on it. I have this feeling that these were made so often that I was even nostalgic about them at like, aged 12, although that might be now-me trying to heap extra significance on these plain little cakes. (Which reminds me of that flawless film A Mighty Wind: “to do ‘then’ now would be retro, to do ‘then’ then was very nowtro”. I actually had an extremely vivid dream recently that Tim and I traveled to San Francisco and Fred Willard – who plays Mike LaFontaine in AMW – and Jake Gyllenhaal were shooting a movie on the street – some kind of comedy-Renaissance movie in fact – and I approached Fred and told him that I thought A Mighty Wind was a flawless film and in fact if I had to find a fault with it, it would be that it was too zealously edited and could’ve been longer. Jake was ignored until I asked him to take a photo of me and Fred. It was one of those dreams where you wake up thinking “YUSSS-ohhh wait.”)
Even if you don’t usually read through the recipe itself, I prod at you to sweep your eyes over this one – check out how fast and easy and ingredients-light it is. It’s one of those recipes you can make when you’re out of most cool ingredient-y things.
Honey Buns

I don’t know where the recipe itself is from originally…expect Mum will fill in the blanks in the comments.

125g honey
5 T oil (I use Rice Bran)
Good pinch salt
4 T water
125g wholewheat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 eggs

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. If your honey is particularly solid, gently microwave or heat on stove till it’s runny. Whisk in the oil, salt and water, then sift in the flour and baking soda together (I don’t usually sift, but a few bad experiences with baking soda make me sift when it’s included in a recipe) and whisk thoroughly till there aren’t any lumps. Finally, mix in the two eggs. It’ll be quite a liquidy mixture. Spoon into your chosen cases and bake for about 15-20 minutes. Cover with tinfoil if they get too brown. If you don’t have wholewheat flour, plain is fine.
I would recommend if you can, switching the water for orange juice – from a carton/bottle is fine, although if you’ve got enough actual oranges, squeeze away. Its acidy freshness points up the fragrant nature of the honey no end.
These are actually much, much nicer than their squat, monotone appearance suggests. They’re definitely plain to look at (hence the jazzy orange plate!) but the honey gives them surprising depth and a sticky, date-like sweetness kept in check by by the pinch of salt. They keep for quite a long time and even as its crumbs start to clench and become dry, a zap in the microwave and a spreading of butter (well, I can never keep it too far out of arm’s reach) livens them up again. But in honesty, I took a couple to work today and it was only laziness that stopped me going to the microwave and my block of butter, and they really were just perfect without. I don’t say this lightly or anything. And, back to the original issue, as these don’t even gasp out for butter, you could remain $6 richer for a little bit longer.
Tim and I went to Lower Hutt last night to see the Speakeasy Theatre production of RENT at the Little Theatre. Having now racked up four different versions of RENT nationwide, I can easily say it was one of the strongest-voiced, best acted and excellently directed ones I’ve seen. The sound system was a bit shoddy, which was a shame as some nice harmonies were lost, but it really deserves to be seen, so if you’re within cooee of Lower Hutt move fast because its last show is Saturday night. Tim wasn’t exactly euphoric at being there but did concede that the singing was fantastic.
I don’t find it surprising that the whole “Wellywood sign” thing has caught the awareness of so many. For what it’s worth, I think it’s a terrible idea. Putting aside the emphatically negative response from the public, the shuddery feeling that everyone else will think we did want it, the lack of relevance to NZ, the words “bucket list” being used as a reason, and the general marring of the landscape that it will bring…it just feels like an outrageous waste of money at a time like this. Or ever. I hope it doesn’t go ahead.
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Title via: The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Just Like Honey from Psychocandy. I really like this song, even though with those opening drums I always think it’s going to be the Ronettes, and then can’t help being slightly disappointed in spite of myself.
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Music lately:

Typing this word as many times as I have done just now, my thoughts turn to that another excellent song named after that excellent substance, Mariah Carey’s Honey from the album Butterfly.
Walk on By, a fantastic song from local band Diana Rozz. We’d seen them before but not for a long time – then caught their album release show at Happy on Saturday night and they were so much fun, so cool, so noisy…even the people on the door were hilarious.
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Next time: Mum sent me another childhood recipe upon my request the other day, but I might space out all that nostalgia-tripping with a Martin Bosley recipe for pork belly. Also: the Wellington leg of The Food Show is this weekend and I’m SO excited. Hopefully there’s cheap halloumi and generous soymilk samples like last year!

who is all ginger and jazz, who is as glamourous as?

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As I said on Twitter earlier this week, I both realise and acknowledge that if I’m serious about wanting to write a cookbook, I can’t just earnestly hope someone will say “hey, I’d like to offer you a book deal” while I’m walking down the street, like how some models are discovered. I’ve got to arm myself with a ton of recipes, and work hard on developing them. There’s no cookbook without recipes. Maybe when I’ve got a whole bunch written I could take a week’s annual leave and test them all, and you could all come round and sample them! A bit of a fantasy, sure, but a person can dream. Prepared-ly.
I didn’t invent lemonade scones, and I don’t know who did, but it’s a fairly well-known recipe – the premise being that you mix a can of lemonade, a bottle of cream and a whole lot of self-raising flour and it magically turns into scones when you bake it. I had a wave of the brain one day that gingerbeer instead of lemonade might make for awesomely flavoured scones. I’m not trying to winkle out of making any original thoughts here, but this is one of the most fun things about cooking – taking an existing recipe, adapting and evolving it out of necessity – not having the right ingredients – or inspiration, and just seeing what happens.
My idea was more or less successful. Really delicious, light-textured, golden scones. But not exactly the ginger wonderland I predicted. Turns out that the gingerbeer became completely muffled by the blanket of flour and diluted by the cream. There was, if you concentrated and ate with your eyes shut, a fluttery subtext of flavour, but…yeah.
I liked them so much though, that I tried them again, with a different gingerbeer brand and a handful of chopped crystallised ginger. The latter of which you could definitely taste in the finished product. We loved both versions, so feel free to try them yourself:
Gingerbeer Scones

300mls cream (I use Zoorganic)
330ml can ginger beer
4 cups self raising flour; OR 4 cups flour plus 2 teaspoons cream of tartar and 1 tsp baking soda
Optional: a handful of chopped crystallised ginger, a handful of chopped dates

Set oven to 200 C. Mix all in a bowl together, as briefly as you can. Pays to sift the flour first. Turn out onto a baking paper-lined tray, pat gently into a rectangle. Using a knife, or better yet, a dough-cutter, slice into 12, keeping them very close together – helps them rise. Bake for about 25 minutes. Best served warm from the oven, but they keep surprisingly well.
So, the first time I made these I used Phoenix Organic Ginger Beer and added a handful of dates. For my second batch I was recommended Pam’s ginger beer by Plum Kitchen, so I asked Tim to get some on his way home from work. He txts to ask if I was sure, because apparently “Bundaberg = best-a-berg!” I replied something along the lines of “Pam’s = insur-pams-able!” but he came home with Bundaberg anyway, because there wasn’t any Pam’s at the supermarket.
It’s not really fair to compare the two batches since the second had actual ginger in it, so my hypothesis notes are as follows:
1) It doesn’t really matter what brand you use. From Budget all the way up to the most artisinal and elegantly-labelled product.
2) If you’re not going to add crystallised ginger, these will still be really nice, but you might as well just use lemonade.
3) I’d like to think that a mix of gingerbeer and crystallised ginger mutually benefit and augment each other’s flavours, rather than all the flavour coming from the crystallised ginger. Because then my initial idea would still be kind of right. Please humour me by agreeing?
4) On the other hand, that kind of coddling will get me nowhere in the cut-throat world of cookbook publishery! Humour me not!
Either way, these are a slightly more charismatic take on your regular scone. Something in the bubbles of the fizzy drink and the oleaginous properties of the cream bestows on the scones a charming lightness and softness of texture. I will make them again. Also, while typing right now, I had this idea that instead of lemonade, you could use a bottle of dry cider, add a pinch of mustard powder and some grated cheese, and how good would that be? A bit like a Welsh rarebit, but in scone form! On the other hand, maybe scones have been plain for centuries for a reason…
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Title via: Barbra Streisand, she of muscular voice and enormous back catalogue, singing I’m The Greatest Star, a song about self-belief if ever there was one, from the excellent musical Funny Girl.
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Music lately:

Gloryday from See What I Wanna See. Felt appropriate, given the rapture-baiting mood. Not to mention, Idina Menzel is always appropriate listening.

Never Can Say Goodbye, Gloria Gaynor. Isn’t this song just amazing?
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Next time: I went to the supermarket the other day and it was $6 for a block of butter! Is this real life? (translation: it’ll probably be dairy-free recipes for a while now.)

o souperman

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This soup actually cured my cold. Either that or my cold was on its way out and the bold quantities of garlic, ginger, and chilli in this soup merely opened the door for it, put its hand in the small of its back (the soup’s hand, the cold’s back…I think) and kindly but firmly steered it outwards.

Soup isn’t always the most exciting thing to have for dinner – it’s generally never fried, crispy, crunchy, chocolate dipped, or any of those things that can be so, so good about eating. However this recipe is courtesy of Yotam Ottolenghi, whose way with food is always exciting. That said, you’ve got to make sure you really read the ingredient list, simple as it looks, and don’t miss anything out. Each thing, from the sticks of celery to the bay leaves play their important part, allowing the soup to neatly dodge the whole “wait, what? This is just bits of herbs floating in warm water” vibe.
Unfortunately I can’t avoid my “awful low-lighting and also prosaic soup composition photos” vibe. First comes the better control of photography on a Winter’s night, then comes the better composition. I promise you I’m reading…well, looking for, my camera’s instruction manual.
Garlic Soup

From Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty

Serves 4

4 shallots (or an onion) finely sliced
3 celery sticks, finely chopped
40g butter (optional – just use the oil if you like)
2 T olive oil
25 garlic cloves, finely sliced (yes, peeled and sliced, sorry)
2 tsp finely chopped fresh ginger root
1 tsp finely chopped thyme leaves
200ml white wine
generous pinch saffron threads (optional…because I accidentally left it out)
4 bay leaves
1 litre good-quality vegetable stock
1/2 tsp sea salt
Parsely, coriander and Greek yoghurt and harissa to serve.

Fry your shallots or onions and celery in the butter and oil till soft and translucent – keep an eye on them, don’t let them turn brown. Add the garlic and continue to cook over a low heat, then stir in the ginger and thyme, followed by the wine which will bubble up and reduce down a bit. Then add the saffron, bay leaves, salt and stock and simmer for about 10 minutes.

Note: I acknowledge peeling and slicing all that garlic is a big pain, but it’s worth it in terms of flavour. Maybe a buddy you can enlist, in exchange for feeding them soup?
Ottolenghi says to blitz with a hand blender or in a food processor but I didn’t have the energy for that – all the lifting and the assembling and the cleaning on a cold dark night…and it seemed just fine as it was.
As I said, every ingredient is important – the wine against the hot pan, evaporating into concentrated savoury goodness, the vigorous burst of ginger heat, the softened, traditional flavours of the onion and celery. The heavy spoonful of yoghurt isn’t exactly essential but I would definitely not leave out the green garnishy things on top – coriander’s fresh taste goes well with the rest of the soup, but it also makes it look a bit more presentable. If you don’t have harissa (I did) you’ve got a number of options – stir in some sambal oelek, chopped red chilies, or replace the olive oil with chili oil. Or, of course, ignore the chili altogether.
I realise I’ve spent nearly this whole thing saying how not-fun soup is, but this stuff is truly gorgeous (not-not-fun?), a broth of flavours unfurling like flannel sheets grabbed straight from the dryer – warming, comforting, lightly textured.
Work took me down to Christchurch on Saturday, and I was fortunately able to have a quick catch up with Mika of the mighty fine Millie Mirepoix blog who coincidentally was also down from Wellington. The chilling rubble of half-formed houses and the constant road-blocking cordons, the cracks in the road and the buildings that you had to look at twice to register that they were leaning on an angle or sunken in the middle made me feel a bit queasy and sad inside and it would’ve been easy to get stuck focussing on that. Not that it shouldn’t be focussed on (it should! But in a “now what” kind of way, maybe? Not really my place to say) but what I mean is, it was really good to see a friendly face amongst it all, and to contribute in a small way to the local economy by getting coffee and a really, really good Cherry Ripe Slice at Beat Street Cafe and another fantastic coffee from Black Betty’s. If you’re heading to Christchurch I totally recommend these places – they’re open, they’re friendly and they’re serving up seriously good food.
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Title via: Laurie Anderson’s intriguing, staccato yet tranquil O Superman. Admittedly I don’t know a lot of her stuff (only really this and Language Is A Virus), and it can be, to someone attuned to songs being a bit verse-chorus-verse-chorus and so on, a bit challenging, but I do like it a lot, and not just because Idina Menzel cites Anderson as someone she studied for her character of Maureen in RENT (I heard Anderson first, so!)
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Music lately:
Lena Horne – who died just over a year ago now – and her beautiful version of I Got Rhythm from the Lovely and Alive record.
Joy Division, Love Will Tear Us Apart. Heard it this morning for the first time in ages on the radio. It’s a bit obvious, but it’s always good. (Speaking for the original only, not cover versions…)
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Next time: My invention of gingerbeer scones possibly hasn’t been thought of before because they weren’t as wildly gingery as I thought they’d be…but they were still delicious, and I took photos of them anyway.

i want to be the girl with the most cake

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I’m sure if someone made a perfume based on the feijoas, it’d sell heaps. Right? But then I’d happily wear perfume that smelled like bread baking, if only such a necessary thing existed. So far the only way I can scope that you could recreate that incredible scent is to tie a fresh-baked loaf to your head (or to any bit of you, really) and that’s not a particularly practical option (no matter which bit of yourself you tie it to).

When Mum came down to Wellington last weekend, she brought with her a large box of feijoas, from my Nana’s tree. (Thanks Nana!) At first it was enough just to let them be. Feijoas, like avocados, are objectionably expensive here in the capital, and so just having the option of grabbing one, slicing its thick green skin open and winkling out the contents with a teaspoon to be swallowed happily, was a pleasingly luxuriant act.


But being myself, I was looking for something to bake them into. Two people I work with helped me out, one by emailing me a recipe she thought I might like (thanks Alex!) and one by supplying a first-come-first-served bag of Granny Smith apples from his tree in Gisborne (cheers Tane!) which the intriguing recipe for cake required. From the East Coast, Waiuku and the desk across the office, many people have made it possible for this cake to exist.
So, it’s a good thing it tastes extremely amazing.


The apples sort of dissolve into the mixture, while small chunks of hot, sugary crystalised ginger and grainy feijoa flesh give it texture and intense fruitiness. The sticky, buttery, chewy coconutty topping works better than any icing could (that said, I’m imagining a cream cheese icing with extra chopped crystallised ginger on top…)


Feijoa, Apple and Ginger Cake

Recipe from this site.

1 cup feijoa pulp
1 cup finely chopped apple (depending on size this may be one or two apples)
1/4 cup chopped crystallised ginger
1 tsp baking soda
125 mls (1/2 cup) boiling water
125g soft butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 cups flour

Topping:

50g melted butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground ginger
2 tablespoons milk
1 cup thread coconut (or dessicated, if it’s what you’ve got)

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Butter and paper a 20-22cm springform caketin.

Combine the feijoa, apple, ginger, baking soda and boiling water in a bowl, and set aside while you make the cake batter.

In a good sized bowl, cream the butter and sugar till fluffy, then beat in the egg, and stir in the flour. The mixture will be quite thick at this point – almost like scone dough. Fear not! Fold in the fruit mixture, stirring well, then tip this now significantly liquid-er mixture into your prepared caketin.

Bake for 40 minutes or until golden and not wobbling in the centre. Meanwhile, combine your topping ingredients and spread carefully over the cooked cake, returning to the oven for about 8-10 minutes till the coconut is golden.


I suspect it would be very difficult to overcook this cake, which adds to its appeal, and everything going on – the coconut topping, the ginger – are a fitting showcase for this seasonal and gorgeous fruit. However, I reckon you could very easily substitute the same amount of mashed banana when feijoa is out of season or unavailable (like if you live overseas). Or soft, ripe pears…or a drained can of apricots…so much potential for deliciousness.
Thanks for all the kindness on my last post in regards to Rupert the ex-cat. I guess it won’t properly sink in till I next go home.
I’m sure Rupert would be entirely indifferent if he could know that he is remembered extremely solemnly round here…
Me: *wistful face*
Tim: Are you imagining a montage of the good times you and Rupert had together?
Me: Actually…..yes.
Tim: I’m sorry.
Me: (singing quietly) thankyou for the music, the songs we’re singing, thanks for all the joy– (at this point a straight face could no longer be maintained, extreme laughter ensued.)
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Title via: the excellent Doll Parts by Hole. I love the contrast between the gentle strumming and pretty harmonies against the sad lyrics.
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Music lately:
Happy Birthday, by Altered Images. Maybe it has been done already, but the light, twinkly intro would be really good sampled in something. I think so, anyway.

(Version) For The Love Of It by Salmonella Dub, back in their Tiki-fronted days. A really, really good song. Something about the methodical rhythm and drawn-out chorus…I was happily reminded of it while reading this article from the archives on DubDotDash.
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Next time: Don’t know! Should possibly do something veering away from the puddingy side of things, just for a bit of contrast or something…

keep your culture

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While we were overseas, I read a sad tweet from Andrea of the So D’Lish blog, that the price of dairy in New Zealand was going up again. As a habitual consumer of butter, it hurts to be handing over around $5 a block. Don’t even get me started on the price of milk. Yeowch. Not understanding the outs and ins of economy, I’m sure there’s a reason why it all continues to be so expensive, but it feels unfair and it kinda sucks.

With that in mind, please don’t throw things at me when I say that Tim and I recently bought a 2 litre bucket of yoghurt (Americans, that’s just over 2 quarts which seems…strangely straightforward as far as conversions go, but I’m not arguing with Google.) It started out that we just wanted “some yoghurt”, and then it did work out so much cheaper per capita of yoghurt to go for the enormous tub, and it was organic yoghurt on top of that, and the final thing that un-narrowed Tim’s eyes and convinced him that it was a sensible thing to do was when I said “It’ll go so quickly, I can make all those recipes with yoghurt in them!”
And then – this happens every time – I couldn’t find one stupid recipe to make. A bit like those nights when you roll from left to right in bed on a suddenly uncomfortable pillow under irritatingly grippy sheets, any recipe I did manage to find with yoghurt in it suddenly seemed completely uninspiring, and unused cookbooks piled up around me.
And then I decided to strike out on my own, with the help of that longtime hero of mine, Nigella Lawson. I adapted a recipe of hers from the important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess, ending up with a huge cake that you can add heaps of different flavourings to – I went for a sexy splash of Boyajian Lime Oil, which is outrageously expensive here in NZ but pretty reasonable in the UK where I bought it. I do not for one second insist that this is the only method of flavouring your cake. Some citrus zest and juice or some bottled flavourant will also do awesome things. The finished cake is so deliciously good that you don’t even need to make icing if you’re not feeling up to it. And to make up for the expense of using yoghurt, I used oil in the recipe instead of melted butter.
This cake was a bit of an experiment and it worked – light, puffy, golden, gifted with staying power – we took the last bits for lunch today, five days after it was baked, and it was still as good as day one. It can feed a bit of a crowd, too, making a satisfyingly large and easily sliceable slab.
Yoghurt Cake
Adapted from Nigella’s Baby Bundt recipe in How To Be A Domestic Goddess.
250ml (1 cup) natural yoghurt
175ml (3/4 cup) plain oil, I use rice bran
4 eggs
300g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch salt
250g sugar

Optional:
Zest and juice of 1 lemon, lime or orange
1 teaspoon Boyajian lemon, lime, or orange oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract or coconut essence

Preheat your oven to 170 C/340 F and line a brownie tin or similar, good-sized rectangular dish with baking paper.

Whisk together the yoghurt, oil, eggs, salt (don’t leave it out! It helps the flavour) and any flavourings you desire. Fold in the flour, sugar and soda and stir vigorously. It will be a very pale mixture.

Pour into the cake tin, and bake – 40 minutes to an hour should do it, depending on your oven.
Ice as you wish or leave plain.


Delicious.
The yoghurt isn’t exactly a flavour in its own right but works excellently to deliver any citrussy stuff you might add to the batter. However it did occur to me just now, as I type, that you could use some kind of fruit-flavoured yoghurt in this. Think of it as a bit of a blank palate cake, ready for wherever the meeting point is between your inspiration and what’s in your cupboard – you could probably even change tack completely and add a few spoonfuls of cocoa to the mixture to see what happens. In case you’re wondering, the yoghurt itself is from Clearwater’s and is completely delicious, light and sharp but surprisingly creamy.
I just know that the moment my index finger gathers, silicon-spatula-like, the final drip of yoghurt from the base of the two litre pail, I’ll suddenly remember a billion different amazing recipes for yoghurt. Not that this yoghurt situation is a problem or anything, barely a challenge in fact. (I hope you all assume this anyway, but sometimes it feels necessary to reiterate that I’m aware there’s a world beyond my fridge). On that note, what a week, right? Seemed as though I found out everything on Twitter – from sitting round seeing exactly what it was Obama had to say, to discovering there had been a tornado on Auckland’s North Shore. By the way, if any of you were in Albany at the time, I hope you’re doing okay. Strange times. Finding out that the price of butter increased, of course, isn’t quite a “where were you when” moment but either way, thumbs up to the good people on Twitter for keeping me informed.
And the yoghurt levels have slowly dropped – for breakfast, for marinating chicken, and also in this really cool recipe for bread rolls which I tried out over the weekend and am not only going to be repeating as much as I can, but also blogging about soon.
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Title via: Three Houses Down, with this awesome song from their album Breakout…in yoghurt as in life, eh?
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Music lately:
Richard Hell, Another World – unfortunately not on Youtube (another one of those things that’s not actually a problem in relation to other problems, but don’t you hate it when you search for something on Youtube and a drop-down menu pops up with exactly what you were looking for, and then the video itself isn’t even there? Does that happen to anyone else?) but it is what I’m listening to. From Blank Generation, one of my favourite albums.
Broadway’s Norm Lewis (who I met in London, did you know??) singing All The Things You Are with Audra McDonald – if I was a block of butter (which, sometimes, I practically almost am) I’d have completely melted off the bench by the time this song finishes.
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Next time: When the weather’s freezing and the butter’s expensive, I turn to cheap, warming fare like porridge. Especially when I can soak sultanas in brandy and have them with it.

don’t feel so alone, got the radio on

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

Radiokaka (Radio Cake)

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Chocolate Jam Bars

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

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

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

tengo de mango, tengo de parcha…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chocolate Coconut Condensed Milk Brownies

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

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

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

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

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

Mango Sauce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

 

i’ve got strength and endurance, so i count my blessings

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So. After Tuesday’s horrific earthquake in Christchurch, from which the sad news continues to eclipse any good, I couldn’t consider much of anything, let alone blogging. Which is fine.

Tim and I and my whole family are so lucky. Removed physically from the horror, although not emotionally. My cousin and his partner down in Christchurch were fine, despite being in the city centre at the time, and we were able to hear this news pretty quickly. Any other friends and family we had down there have been accounted for. But the number of fatalities climb with sorrowful speed. We had two people staying in our lounge last night, friends of our flatmate’s who were in Christchurch when it happened. Their stories were a further reminder to be thankful for what I’ve got.
Thankful or not (and it’s not proper gratitude, how can you be truly thankful that something awful happened to someone else and not you?) I’ve been changed by this earthquake. Wellington, where I live, is supposed to be earthquake central, not Christchurch. I used to be such a daydreamer, floating down the street in my own world. Now I dart from block to block, each shop front a potential missile that I pass like a small victory. I take my phone everywhere. I feel nervous when Tim and I go our separate ways for work in the morning. I lie awake, mentally assessing what might fall on me in the night, the useless-in-an-earthquake concrete walls staring back at me, every twitch of my muscles or distant slamming door feeling like the opening bars of an earthquake’s crescendo. One good thing about staying up so late to listen to the news and refresh Twitter is that my eyes shut that much faster when I do get to bed.
Worth pointing out here that this specific fear of earthquakes and feeling like every creak of a building is nature getting angry isn’t anything new. It’s been this way ever since a well-intentioned but excessively heavy school assignment on disasters when I was about 10. Just now it’s a lot more…near.
As with when I was 10, I try to comfort myself with the thought that my grandma Zelda, who died when she was about 75 (would’ve been so much longer if emphysema hadn’t set in) once told me that she’d never once been in an earthquake. She might’ve been lying to an overly nervous kid (that said, she did live in Tuakau, not known for its tremors.) But then and still now, I tell myself like a mantra that if Grandma could be that age and never be in an earthquake, then maybe I could be that person too. Then there’s practical things to help soothe the mind too: we refreshed our bottled water supply, located a torch, that kind of thing.
Of course there’s food. On Tuesday night I came home and made us a risotto with extra butter and frozen peas, remembering Nigella’s philosophy of the mindless stirring being good for the soul. It wasn’t half bad, just focussing on that wooden spoon spiralling through the slowly expanding grains of rice. We ate it out of bowls on the couch and listened to Radio New Zealand till well after midnight.
With some renewed sense of purpose, I baked some stuff for the bring-and-buy sale happening at Grow From Here up the road. In a sort-of humorous twist, the friends from Christchurch who I mentioned earlier were asleep on our lounge floor while I was trying to quietly, quietly ice a cake and wrap up cookies without waking them. At Grow From Here we met up with another local food blogger, Mika of Millie Mirepoix. I’d made Chocolate Guinness Cake, gluten-free peanut butter cookies, and a couple of fruit tea loaves. Mika had made lemon-iced gingerbread (as in the dense sticky cake, not the biscuit), lemon shortbread, and mini cinnamon-raisin-walnut pinwheels. Other people had bought clothes, shoes, a stack of (mostly amusement-causing, MOR-tastic) vinyl thanks to Real Groovy, homemade candles, jigsaws, even a TV. I’m glad Tim and I were there – it felt extremely self-helpful to do something positive for others. There were so many nice people that came and bought things, often giving extremely generous donations, and it was so cool to hang with Mika and with Kaye who is one of the people who runs Grow From Here. FYI if you’re near Wellington and longing for some plant-life, totally go see Kaye at Grow From Here, she’s lovely and full of good advice and their range of fruit and vegetable plants is amazing. Massive respect to them for getting this organised.
With our powers combined, about $200 was raised by the afternoon. All going to Christchurch. I went back and visited again this afternoon and at that point $700 had been raised. Kaye said that about five minutes after Tim, myself and Mika left, someone turned up asking if they could volunteer. For all the the universe gets it really twisted sometimes, it also provides. I’m going to be dropping some more baking off tomorrow morning and while I can’t hang around, please come to the top of Cuba Street if you can – just a donation of any kind and you can take what you like. And there’s plenty of deliciousness for the taking.
Before Tuesday, this blog post was going to be a salute to vegetables, but not only do I not have the energy to talk about them in detail, I have even less energy to write recipes out. But in the interest of not being entirely lazy and self-pitying…
…if you roast a halved eggplant, a few good halved tomatoes, and a halved red onion and some garlic cloves with some salt and olive oil, then simmer them (as is) with stock or water, then peel the garlic cloves and puree everything (carefully…maybe fish out the vegetables and puree them then pour them back into the stock in the pan) with some chilli then you’ll have yourself a delicious, thick and darkly savoury soup. Vegan too. I got this recipe from the latest issue of Cuisine magazine.


And if you slice a cucumber into sticks, mix it with some sliced red onion (sit the onion in water for a while to make it less tongue-harsh) mint leaves, finely chopped roast peanuts and some crisply fried garlic, and then pour over a dressing of white vinegar, fish sauce, a little sugar and sliced red chilli (I just used a spoon of sambal oelek as that’s what I had) then you have Vatcharin Bhumichtr’s gorgeously contradictorial Yoam Droksok, a Cambodian salad which heats and cools on impact and is strangely addictive.

So the baking has helped some. We went to see friends in Ngaio for book group on Wedneday night and played with/coveted deeply their kitten and ate their mini lemon meringue pies and laughed so much, which also helped. Every time I pause from any activity though, my mind goes immediately to Christchurch. Which I guess is just fine. It’s not over for them just because a little time has passed. It’s probably never going to be ‘over’ in fact, just…different.
I’m sure you’ve seen this information in a million other places but in the interest of being part of the solution:
  • Red Cross seems to be one of the most reputable ways to donate. Anything helps, but if you haven’t got anything to give, then maybe pass the link on through your networks.
  • If you’re on Vodafone (in New Zealand) you can txt Quake to 333 or 555 which will send $3 or $5 respectively to the Red Cross. Telecom users txt 4419 – a simple way of doing the above option.
  • MusicHype has an enormous ‘mixtape’ where you can download roughly a metric ton of music for a donation which goes to Red Cross. Very cool idea, and it’s also awesome that they got it set up so quickly. Artists include Salmonella Dub, Mel Parsons, King Kapisi, 1995, DJ Sticky Fingas and literally quite a few more. Click here for more info.

Finally: as a blogger it has been so heart-swellingingly good to know that all the Christchurch people whose blogs I read and who I follow on Twitter are more or less okay.

Stay safe.
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Title via: Nas and Damian Marley’s Count Your Blessings from Distant Relatives. It feels like ages ago since anything, let alone when I saw them live earlier this month, but their lyrics feel as important now as they did then.
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Music lately:

Well…I’ve spent a good long time listening to what I consider Mariah Carey’s Early 90s Trifecta of Emphatic Reliability: Anytime You Need A Friend, I’ll Be There, and Hero. In times of high stress comes both comfort food and comfort listening. And all those songs with the simple theme of “I’ll be there”, just listen to these songs enough and you do get some sense that yeah, you can get through this. Temporary it may be, but it does help. It might help more if you have songs of some kind of equivalence to this. Maybe listening to Mariah Carey really, really wouldn’t help some of you right now.
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Next time: Each day as it comes so… Who knows. Promise I’ll write the recipes out proper though.

rise up, rise in the morning

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Aunt Daisy’s Favourite Cookery Book might appear fairly unpromising at first – a narrow, yellowing fliptop book with no pictures apart from the occasional persuasively worded ad. But it’s an absolute diamond, a paragon of everything you’d hope a cookbook from 1956 to be. Zillions of recipes, roughly 140 of which are for jam, and several of which come with the word “Mock” before or “(Good)” afterwards. It’s funny, there’s this idealisation of your grandma’s era as being so natural and the way to be, but in this book there’s plenty of urging you to set things in gelatine and to add synthetic flavourings to your food. There’s one chapter on vegetables, half of which is devoted to salads made of egg, cheese and potato, while baking and puddings are luxuriated in across several lengthy chapters. It’s fun.

It’s hard to tell if the hilarity is intentional or just of the time. I suspect the latter. It’s partly because of Aunt Daisy’s blunt delivery (“bake in the usual way”) partly because of the things we don’t tend to eat these days – salads set in gelatine, boiled offal as recuperation food for the unfortunate convalescent, and partly her delicious titles – “Matrimony Jam” made of marrow and gooseberries, pudding “(from a man)” and “Lady Windemere Salad”.

My dad’s mother Zelda died in 2002 and I ended up with her Aunt Daisy cookbook in the above photo, as well as a notebook of handwritten recipes and clippings. As far as I know she wasn’t much of a cook (I remember Dad looking doubtfully through the notebook saying “well she never made that“) and to be honest the only food-related memories I have from staying with her are 2-minute noodles and marmite on toasted North’s wheatmeal bread – one of the most hole-prone and flavourless slices around, although I always thought of her when I saw it and was sad when they gussied up their branding recently. Mini kit-kats, and orange juice mixed with lemonade was a very special treat. I really did love 2-minute noodles and Marmite on toast, so these are good memories, by the way.

The fact that she may not have used this Aunt Daisy book doesn’t bother me, the fact that I actually have it is enough. And I’d like to think that since she held onto it at all, for all those years, it must have had some value to her. Over Christmas Mum had the book beautifully rebound for me by this woman in Waiuku and in its new, hardcover, less fragile incarnation I’ve been moved to not just read through it in wonder, but actually cook something from it for the first time in ages.

As soon as I discovered the following recipe I knew that it and I were meant to be in each other’s lives. Because it’s a recipe for bread with condensed milk in it, and that kind of idea and the concept that I could bake it is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It distills into a paragraph everything that was good about the time it was written. I’d been thinking about that soft, sweet bakery bread recently thanks to this conversation, and I wondered if this ingredient would kinda replicate that – it didn’t – but it was still wildly good stuff. And easy as to make – stir, rise, stir-knead-rise, shape, rise, bake. Apart from the kneading – because of the hefty amount of dough the mixture will seem all shaggy and reluctant at first, but it does eventually come together.

White Bread (or “condensed milk bread” as I’ve been referring to it as)

Adapted from Aunt Daisy’s Favourite Cookery Book, 1956 edition

  • 4 dessertspoons sweetened condensed milk
  • 2 1/2 cups lukewarm water
  • 1 sachet dried yeast
  • 7 cups high grade/bread flour
  • salt

Mix together the condensed milk, water and yeast till a little frothy, then stir in 1 cup of the flour and leave, covered, for 15 minutes till somewhat puffy and bubbly.

Stir in the remaining 6 cups flour and a generous amount of salt – Aunt Daisy reckons a dessertspoon – and knead till springy and supple.

Cover and leave to rise for 3/4 of an hour.

At this point, Aunt Daisy says to roll it out to around an inch thick, quarter it squares, then shape and place two pieces each into two loaf tins. I found this slightly confusing, but figured she knew what she was doing, so rolled each piece up and tucked them in pairs into two loaf tins.

Set your oven to 220 C/440 F and leave the loaves for about 15 minutes to become puffy and further risen. I brushed them with melted butter at this point. Bake at this temperature for around 8 minutes and then lower it to 180 to bake them for 45 minutes.

You end up with two brown, somewhat gloriously buttock-like swelling loaves of soft white bread, which are – for all that there are those saucy dessertspoons of sticky-sweet condensed milk – barely sugary. In fact this recipe is pretty austere, with no quantities of milk, no butter, no oil, none of the usual things I’m used to massaging into dough. It has a tense, tight texture which makes it perfect for slicing into adorably small sandwiches and toasts up beautifully, with the slight, fluttery caramel taste of the condensed milk just making itself known. I actually reckon you could comfortably double or even triple the amount of condensed milk in this – but for now I’m extremely happy with these loaves as they are.

I love making bread so much. I realise it comes across as a total mission and it kinda is, but if you’ve never made bread before and you’re curious as to what the fuss is about then this isn’t a bad place to start. I took some slices to work today for lunch, toasted them and spread em with butter and Marmite – still one of my favourite things to eat.

Question + Preamble: Tim and I are stepping up the pace on the glacial path to our trip overseas in March/April and have booked a few important things…we still have a ton more things to book but we wanted some advice: who here has travelled overseas and bought vinyl? What’s the best way to pack it so that you don’t get to your local airport, pick up your bags and discover that your precious records have been smashed into jigsaw puzzle pieces stored in an attractive sleeve?

Title via: The extremely excellent Idina Menzel and her song Rise Up, she’s never actually recorded it but for a while it was an integral part of her live shows and eventually came to have the title it does. Dedicated to her sister, for a few years there was one version which she updated around 2008 to include a punchy chorus. Of course I recommend you listen to both the emotion-soaked original, and the slicker, but still beautiful recent rewrite.

Music lately:

Tim and I went to see the play Diamond Dogs at Bats tonight – apart from the fact that we totally recommend it because it’s fantastic, it also does a decent job of getting Bowie in your head. While I’m not sure it’s really his finest moment, Modern Love is easily one of our favourite Bowie songs and the recurrent nature of its chorus allows it to all the more easily be stuck in your mind.

By the Throat from the (late) Eyedea and Abilities. Amazingly good.

Next time: Possibly Brian O’Brian’s Bran Biscuits, from the same book, if I’m up for it…I have so many things to blog about, just no time to do it in so it depends what I feel like on the day I guess.