she wore blue velvet

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Last week was big. I flew up home for the first time since Christmas (it’s easy to be wayward when time moves so ridiculously fast, I for one refuse to believe it’s any later than June. And certainly not October) and enjoyed wonderful, necessary quality time with family both immediate and extended, including the cats Roger and Poppy. Who were not entirely averse to my nuzzles.

This is Poppy. She looks like Roger, also a tabby. You can tell who is who though, because Roger’s always studiously trying to be left alone and Poppy’s always fixing to shred you like a confidential document.

I then met with friends on a sneaky weekend trip to Auckland, where we managed to halt the process of time somehow – unless it moves differently up there – and fit in a million different joyful activities, including magnificent brunch and endless coffee at Federal, hanging at Flash City, eating ice cream at The Dairy, drinking lunch beers at Tin Soldier, and trying on fancy beautiful dresses at Miss Crab. As well as that I met up for a coffee with rapper/poet Tourettes, which put the cool in “be cool” and that was all just Saturday, before we had a group snooze and pre-show beers and snacks and then saw WICKED. This was to be my third time seeing this musical, the first momentous occasion happening in London in 2011 and then again in New York City just a year ago. Having bawled so hard that I needed electrolyte replacement previously, I was prepared for more of the same, but managed to stay quite dry-faced for the most of it. Tears appeared, however, in I’m Not That Girl, (ughhh the poignancy) One Short Day (they’re just such good friends!) and verily rained down during For Good (just run away together!) It was an incredible production, the cast was amazing, and – we are a tiny country – it was kinda neat to have such a juggernaut, a real proper modern Broadway show, here in New Zealand at roughly the same scale it should be. And even though I know every beat and tick of this show off by heart, nothing ever prepares me for the said-heart-dissolving experience of the end of Defying Gravity. Okay, I think I cried in that one, too.

I hadn’t been to Auckland since November last year, which seems odd when I say it like that, but it’s just how it has happened. So it was exciting to rush around and take in all the things it has and to feel all bright-lights-big-city (I adore Wellington, but it is wee.) Through some well-earned serendipity and just enough planning we managed to get into almost everywhere we wanted (except Depot – but hey) without delay, there were always carparks and everything we ate, from the swankest brunch to the most rapidly cooling fries-stuffed cheeseburgers with wine and beer at the kitchen table, was so, so excellent.

Speaking of eating excellent things: I had this idea recently, that mixing blueberries with a lot of aggressive yet balanced savoury ingredients could produce something quite delicious. I was correct – blueberries, sitting around in olive oil, lime juice, vinegar, spices, chilli, are so compelling, so head-shakingly correct together, that I nearly ate the lot before I even worked out what they were supposed to be. I called them pickled blueberries, but was it enough to just make them and eat them? I didn’t think they’d work with chicken, steak and fruit is a derisive no, lamb – not quite, duck – too expensive, salmon – maybe? And then I had the idea to pair them with a chickpeas, their similar shape appealing to me, plus lots of creamy, rich, sharp feta, and to just build a salad from there. And it was the nicest thing ever.

But: don’t feel you have to have a montage of self-discovery to make these, I mean, they really would’ve been perfect simply eaten out of the bowl till they were gone, and I still think they’d be swell with salmon, so if you want to make them and just do that: cool. There are no wrong answers. (Unless you serve it with steak. That is wrong.)

Blueberries have a particular sweetness, different to the jamminess of strawberries or the particular sour tang of raspberries – it’s more subtly floral and muted. So, slightly unsettling though this recipe might sound, they actually work so well with all these strong flavours and textures, their blue juiciness bursting in your mouth with a rush of salt and sourness.

pickled blueberries

a recipe by myself. I wasn’t sure if these actually counted as being pickled or whether they were just marinated or even just “blueberries with stuff” and was I just unconsciously buying in to some overarching pickle trend and then I was like “well this is just what I’m doing.”

  • 1 cup frozen blueberries (or fresh, get you with your seasonal fruit)
  • 3 tablespoons olive oil, the best you can handle
  • 1 large red chilli, deseeded and sliced finely
  • 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
  • Juice and zest of one lime
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 2 teaspoons coriander seeds
  • a dash of cinnamon
  • As much salt as you please

If the berries are frozen, allow them to defrost in a bowl, otherwise simply mix together all the ingredients, taste to see if you think it needs more salt, sugar, oil or vinegar, then leave to sit for at least ten minutes at room temperature before eating. They last around a week in the fridge, although the texture of the oil goes a bit odd when it’s that cold it’s certainly still very, very, thrice very edible.

I then stirred about 1/2 a cup of the berries into a salad along with 1 drained can of chickpeas, a few handfuls of handful of baby spinach leaves, one finely sliced and overpriced capsicum, an entire damn packet of feta, roughly crumbled, plus some more olive oil and coriander seeds and a generous spoonful of fried shallots from a packet. It was a wondrous combination – crispness and crunch of the juicy, fresh kind and the fried, brittle kind; the sweet blueberries against the creamy salty feta and the bite of chili against everything, really.

Am still delighting in being a real cookbook author. In fact, I’m currently trying to organise an Auckland launch party for my cookbook, so get in touch if you want to give me a ton of premium champagne for free. If not: don’t bother (oh my gosh, kidding, I’ve had so much lovely feedback and correspondence from people about the cookbook and it’s the sweetest, kindest, heart-swellingest thing ever. Much sweeter than champagne.) Am still also not winning the gold medal for sleeping decently, in fact am somehow getting even worse at this sleeping regularly thing. But: getting there, slowly. One day at a time.


title via: Blue Velvet. Obsessed with Lana Del Rey’s cover of it.

music lately:

The never-not-astounding Lorde’s 400 Lux. Got a lot to not do.

Icona Pop’s Just Another Night. I love the way the singer’s voice breaks a tiny bit when she sings “it’s just another night, on the other side.”

Sky Ferreira, You’re Not The One. I love the enormous drums and spaciousness and general perfection of it all.

next time: after a week away, I kind of have no idea…

 

fancy plans and pants to match: soda jerk night at six barrel soda

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Yikes, so this happened ages ago, and because I am the worst kid in school I only just remembered it. So with an awkward flourish, welcome to another installment of Fancy Plans and Pants To Match, where I acknowledge that sometimes cool things happen to me, with the aim of doing it in a way that makes you not hate me as you read it. Vicarious thrills ahoy. This segment is named for a quote by Jimmy James, a character in the wonderful 90s sitcom NewsRadio. 
So here’s the thing: I got invited to Six Barrel Soda’s Visa Wellington on a Plate event, Soda Jerk Diner Night. Yes, the same Wellington on a Plate which finished back in August. 
The pitch: As if Six Barrel Soda wasn’t a fun enough place to spend your time, for several nights they transformed themselves into a classic American diner and served up four courses of comfort food, each with a drinks match. 
New Zealand needs more American biscuits. Biscuits > all of us.

What happened: It really had been an unusual day. In the afternoon there was an earthquake large enough for both Tim’s and my workplace to tell us to go home, the kind of earthquake where no-one gets hurt but it’s big enough to make you cry in public. After we’d found each other and got home and sat there for a bit, the pub instantly seemed like the next logical step. Later on, aftershocks still happening regularly, Tim and I went to Six Barrel Soda where they were admirably sticking to their schedule and continuing with the scheduled diner night. Lucky for us, because the menu went like so:

Round 1:
Biscuits and Island Bay Sausage Gravy with a Mulberry Street, which is Aperol with house-made raspberry and lemon soda.
Round 2:
Mac’n’cheese, served with parmesan and bacon wafers and a Maria La Blanca, made with house chilli vodka, house celery tonic, celery, salt, pepper and hot sauce.
Round 3:
Little Pulled Pork Burger with a kola float, made with house-made Kola Nut soda and Gelissimo gelato.
Round 4:
Pie a la Mode, pumpkin pie with Gelissimo vanilla bean gelato and a filter coffee.

So what we’re talking about here is food that’s intensely comforting, like the meal equivalent of putting on an old jersey that’s recently emerged, cosy and soft, from the drier. But also food that’s beautifully, perfectly made, like an expensive jersey that you really shouldn’t put in the drier because it will shrink the fabric and ruin it.

mac and cheese, in a cute lil coffee cup. 

Maria la Blanca. Super delicious.

Pulled pork marinated in kola and lime. Could hardly process how good it was. 

The house-made tomato sauce was fantastic too, all sweet and smoky. 

The best bit: Every course was more excellent than the one before, but I particularly loved that they served us American biscuits, those scone-like delights which I firmly believe should be more popular here in New Zealand. And on a practical note, it really was lovely that they continued with the event despite the quakes, because there was no better place to be during nervewracking aftershocks than in the noisy, busy, familiar, wonderful Six Barrel Soda, eating the kind of food that pats your soul on its head reassuringly. Creamy mac and cheese with crisp, salty bacon and parmesan wafers. Rich, dark gravy to dip pieces of buttery, tender biscuit into. Saucy falling-to-pieces pork with crisp slaw. Sweetly spicy pumpkin pie. Their own sodas, hand made with seasonal ingredients. It was just a really brilliant evening. 

pie: not their first rodeo. I do enjoy implying that things might not be someone’s first rodeo. 

On a scale of 1 to Is This A Dream: Around a five. This isn’t a bad thing: recreating an American diner for the evening means it’s going to be relaxed and casual by necessity, but it was still a pleasingly fancy way to spend some time. The whole earthquake context plus the fact that we’d just been to the pub for three hours made it a little surreal, to be fair.

Would I do this for not-free? Indubitably. Six Barrel Soda is one of my very favourite places in Wellington, a home away from home, and it was only that this event sold out so quickly that I didn’t spend my own money to go along. They just have an excellent thing going – all convivial, and open, and instagrammable, and if you’re in the mood to not just take one person’s word for it, let me direct you to my friend Jason’s beauteous photos of the place. (He was also one of the photographers for my cookbook. Lucky me.)

Earnest thanks for making me feel fancy to: The nice kids at Six Barrel Soda Co, and the good sorts at Visa Wellington on a Plate. The cafe itself is upstairs on Eva Street – just look out for the sparkly-cool sign – and you can find their marvelous soda at lots of different places, so there’s a good chance you can have some vicarious thrills of your own. Thus making them not so vicarious, I guess.

what kind of girl is she? (are you gonna eat that pickle)

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I keep things honest on here. Panic attacks, bad habits, coming out, failed pastry, engagement announcements (not that I’ve had plural engagements, but it didn’t flow so well syntactically in the singular), tattoos, book deals (again, not plural but flows nicer in the plural, as would not explaining the flow of my sentence in the middle of my sentence.) Thus: if it has happened to me and is my story to tell, then there’s a high likelihood I won’t be able to stop myself telling you about it. But these past few of weeks – or even longer than that, really – some things that have been happening are a bit hard to describe, which is frustrating for a dictionary-nuzzling person as myself, because…I’ve just been feeling vaguely weird. Not every day, and not every minute, but enough, too much: bad brains, I call it. So many things in my life are so, so good, really, and yet my brain is not catching up with all of this. Bodies! They’re so confusing. Life! So odd. No-one prepares you for just the sheer difficult weirdness that is existence. For not being able to sleep, for losing your appetite, for being closely focussed on strange things, for suddenly hyperventilating in the middle of the supermarket after a really good day and then having to lie down for two hours once you get home. But what is easier to explain is how I’m trying to fix it, which is with doctors and medication and counseling and talking to Tim and to friends, many of whom know what it’s like anyway, and by trying to be a little kinder to myself. Being even just a little bit kind to yourself is a surprisingly easy thing to forget to do.

So, um, food blogging, yeah, alright! Actually for those of you who read this a lot, and read between the lines, all this probably will hardly be a surprise. But it’s still a thing that’s happening to me, and that is mine to tell, so here we are. Luckily, here are some other things that have happened:

It was Tim’s birthday on Wednesday. We both took that day and Thursday off work, and it was terrifically fun to just hang out and sleep in and read and watch things and drink coffee and eat brunch and just exist quietly but excitingly so. Except when we went to the Fishhead magazine third birthday party and existed loudly. On Thursday I made Tim his favourite food – lasagne – which, despite trying to bust out of its tin as you can see in the above photo, was amazing. Just straight up amazing.

On the day of Tim’s birthday we caught a bus into Newtown and went record shopping and had lunchtime beers, and bought this excellently cheap cabinet, all the better to see our trinkets with. There are now even more things in it, and yet curiously, no noticeable space has been made by moving things in there.

Aaaand, I got some new eyebrows, a shape and tint, something I’ve never done before. Felt like stronger brows might equal a stronger me, or something, plus the ones my face came with were so pale that they might as well have not existed.

And – I guess you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here – I made some tiny fried pickles! Tiny, tiny deep-fried pickles in puffy, light batter. Like popcorn chicken, but with pickles, and minus the magically delicious herbs and spices (these are really good, but they’re no popcorn chicken. Really, what could be? I’m sorry. I should’ve chosen a better analogy.) They’re really easy to make, and for all that deep-frying stuff is a little intimidating in theory, you only need an inch or so of oil in a wide pan, not whole vats of the stuff. And these pickles cook up really, really quick. Drain them, throw them in some smoked paprika and a little more salt because hurrah for sodium, and that’s it.

tiny fried pickles
A recipe by myself. Dairy-free!
1 jar pickles
1 egg
1/2 cup soda water/sparkling water/whatever you call it in your neighbourhood
1 cup flour
pinch salt
pinch sugar
plain oil for frying
Drain the jar of pickles and slice into rounds. Don’t even think about measuring them, but roughly a centimetre wide is a good size to aim for. On the other hand, I’m horrendously fussy and discarded all the ends like some kind of wastrel. Sit the slices on a couple of paper towels. This helps absorb some of the pickle-vinegar, which will help the batter stick and stop it spluttering like whoa in the hot oil.
Then, mix the egg and soda water together, then add the salt, sugar, and – slowly – the flour, and stir to a thick batter. Doing it in this order stops it getting lumpy.
Heat up about 1.5 inches of plain oil in a wide pan. It has to be properly hot, so try dropping a little batter in it to test once you think it’s ready, and it should bubble up and you know, fry.
Now, it’s possible there’s a better/more logical way of doing this, but this worked for me: tip all the slices of pickle into the bowl of batter. Take a large spoonful of the pickle-y batter, and with a smaller spoon, push slices off into the hot oil. Some batter may fall into the oil too. This is cool. The lil pickles should take a minute or two to get brown and puffy, if they need it use a pair of tongs to carefully turn them over in the oil, then remove them – still using the tongs – to another plate lined with paper towels and spoon some more slices in. Finally, dust the fried, puffy pickles with smoked paprika and more salt and serve immediately.

 

Salty, sharp slices encased in batter that’s crisply browned on the outside while fluffy and light on the inside, the sweet smokiness of the paprika and the doughy batter tempering the vinegar bite of the pickles. They’re really, really good.

Back on the cookbook front, since that still exists and is still the most improbably wonderful thing: I found out today that my book is currently at 6th place on the Independent Booksellers List! Cool, hey? I’m currently trying to plan an Auckland launch party for it (despite having no money, no time, and no brain space) because that seems like…fun! Oh and I have literally had people come up to me and say that they are fans, which is one of the top ten excellent feelings in the world. Yeah excellent feelings! They don’t make the weird ones disappear, but they do help balance them out some.
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title via: What Kind of Girl is She from the important musical [title of show]. This particular song isn’t on youtube, but uh, Die, Vampire, Die from the same musical is, and it’s pretty perfect.
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Music lately:

The National, the Thanksgiving Song. They did a cover of a song that Lynn Belcher from the wondrous Bob’s Burgers sings. It’s odd and sinister and not even as good as the cartoon original, but I admire their commitment.

Miley Cyrus, Wrecking Ball. Yeah. This song is so, so good.

Frank Ocean, Super Rich Kids. Dreaminess.
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Next time: I did this cool thing with blueberries and chili and lime and stuff and I have no idea what it is, but it’s addictively good. If I work out what it is…salsa? I might blog about it. 

we’d roll and fall in the green

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Today has been a bit of a dick, between one thing and another. I took a sleeping pill last night in the hopes that I’d force myself into actually sleeping. It worked, but then I was like a forlorn jellyfish the rest of the day, somnambulant and dopey and fractious and essentially undoing all the good work I had done by having a good night’s sleep. And I currently feel queasy, although I can’t tell if it’s because of the dinner I just made or something else. 
But, as Dave from Happy Endings would say, let’s back up. (PS: Max and Jane are my favourites. Also Brad and Alex. And Penny. Just in case you thought Dave was my favourite.)
Yesterday was pretty wonderful. I woke up just before 6am, lightly hungover from a gathering the night before for dear friend Kate’s birthday. This early start was for a skype date with Ange, erstwhile flatmate and forever friend, who now lives in London. Also because I can’t help waking up hilariously early on the weekend. It all started because Ange and I were emotionally snapchatting about our feelings about Top of the Lake and wanted to discuss them in a less rudimentary fashion, and ended with a “huh, we should probably Skype more often since it’s really convenient and stuff.”
We had brunch with Kate and Jason, which included an excellently bitter Campari and grapefruit juice. This turned into coffee where we ran into other friends, which turned into record shopping, which turned into ice cream sundaes with fixings leftover from the party the night before, which turned into beers at the pub around the corner. We saw a cute dog, we parted ways, and Tim and I went home to play candy crush and knit (respectively) and watch West Wing. And all I really felt like was eating greens, so I made us this.
Just greens on greens on greens, with some butter and lime juice and sesame seeds to make it more of a meal and less of a pile of stuff that happens to be technically edible. I am a firm believer in just eating what you feel like eating at any given moment, without guiltily focussing on whatever the properties of the food are (admittedly it was only roughly last year that I reached this calm conclusion) and so if I feel like eating a dinner composed largely of bits of plant, then that’s what I do. Of course, I could take a hell of a lot better care of myself on a day-to-day basis (my lunch today was basically just coffee and fruit burst lollies, which was down to apathy and stuff rather than actually wanting it) but it’s nice when what you feel like, and what you have, and what you’re able to make, are all the same thing. In this case, I happened to have a few vegetable-y bits and pieces getting wearily limp in the fridge, and they all benefited from this stirfry-steam-cover-in-butter method. 

greens with sesame lime butter

A recipe by myself. This mix of greens is a good one, but use what you have – beans, courgettes, etc – in the quantities of your choosing. 

broccoli, about half a head thereof
bok choi or pak choi, a bunch
a large handful of baby spinach leaves, or larger spinach leaves, chopped
2 teaspoons sesame oil
25g butter
1 teaspoon kecap manis or soy sauce
1 lime
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1/3 cup cashew nuts

Wash the broccoli and bok choi leaves. Heat up a teaspoon of the sesame oil in a large pan, then throw in the broccoli and bok choi and stir around for a little bit to coat in the oil, then tip in 1/4 cup water and put a lid on the pan, so the water can bubble up and quickly steam everything. Once the water is evaporated, or thereabouts, and the vegetables have softened a little but are still bright green, remove the lid and stir in the spinach. Then remove all of that to a serving dish. Finally, melt the butter in the same pan, stir in the kecap manis, juice and zest of the lime, sesame seeds and cashew nuts. Allow to bubble away until the sesame seeds have browned slightly, then remove from the heat and tip onto the vegetables. Either stir through or take it to the dining table and make everyone wait while you photograph it, because you’re a highly strung food blogger.

Broccoli is already a little nutty and sweet, so adding sesame oil and sweet kecap manis only but embiggens everything good about it already. Astringent pak choi and fast-wilting, metallic spinach are helped by the rich butter and crunchy seeds and cashews, and the lime simply brightens everything up with its citrus intensity. It’s very simple and plain, but not to the point of nondescript, where you forget that you’ve eaten immediately after you put your fork down. Nope, this is delicious stuff. And a terrific end to my Sunday.

And then today happened and undid all the good work of yesterday. But I have high hopes for tomorrow, even if Tuesdays are often the worst. If nothing else, there is more knitting (my current project: a black hooded cape) and reading (have finished NW by Zadie Smith, am halfway through Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, am upping my weights at the gym so I can pick up The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton) and more Orphan Black to watch, and I have a list of recommendations of other sleeping pills that won’t make me feel like a baffled sock the next day.

PS…I still have a cookbook! It’s still strange and exciting and amazing and a lot to take on! If you like, you can listen to a very fun interview I did with Charlotte Ryan at Kiwi FM, where I got to pick some songs as well. I started off making a consciously careful, everything-rests-on-this list of tunes to play, but luckily ended up going with whatever I felt like at the time. What were the songs? You’ll have to listen to the interview! Or just ask me, I’m a total pushover.
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Title via: Wuthering Heights, a very important song by Kate Bush. If I had a dollar for every high kick I’ve done to this song, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a good night’s sleep for work tomorrow, that’s for sure.
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Music lately: 

Dear Time’s Waste, These Words Stick Me To You. Dreamy.

ASAP Rocky, Problems. Effective, and effectively stuck in my brain.

Had the house to myself for most of Saturday, so naturally played some crowd-unpleasing Broadway and danced out my feelings, or at least some of them. Did some particularly bold pirouettes and leaps to Age of Aquarius from Hair and Heaven Help My Heart from Chess. (musicals with an arbitrary noun for a name, huh?)
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Next time: Whatever I feel like, evidently. 

we like lovin’ yeah, and the wine we share

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A week and a bit into the cookbook author life, and I’m still very, very much at the pinch-me stage. If you’re new to this blog, hello! Get ready to co-wallow in all my feelings and cake batter.

Margaret Atwood probably has absolutely no knowledge of this. But still! But still. But still!

As Tim will tell you (or “my partner Tim” as it rather hilariously refers to him in my cookbook every single time, a bit like how the Baby-sitters Club books would tell you about all sitters’ family histories in chapter two of every last book on the offchance you were picking one up for the first time and just had to know whose stepmom was whose) and in fact as I will tell you right now, and not for the first time, I am a cool mix of wildly insecure and wildly over-secure. So I veer between reading my cookbook and saying “Tim, I’m such an amazing writer, how do you cope with it?” and being numb of brain and in a crumply heap in bed and requiring constant bolstering just to lift my head up for reasons I can’t even quite work out. Or simply feeling like this will in fact all be like the bit in the Princess Bride where – spoiler – Princess Buttercup is presented to the people but then the old woman comes out yelling “Boooooooo” and saying she’s princess of nothing. Luckily nothing specifically like that has happened. Or even vaguely similar to that. Yet?

But seriously, seeing my name there with Margaret Atwood’s on a whiteboard (“above her!” said someone. “Near her whatsoever!” I replied) filled me with so many feelings that I hardly knew what to do with myself. On the one hand: of course. On the other hand: how did I manage to fool everyone into letting that happen?

Speaking of such moments, the book launch party at Unity Books was completely wonderful, almost unbearably so – I wanted to claw back the time as it was racing past, just to make the whole thing not move so quickly. It felt almost sick, I was so happy, which is a strange way of putting it but it’s like all the emotions in me created a power surge that left me a bit light-headed. There was a great big crowd and so many lovely friends and cool people and Julie Clark of Floriditas launched it with a speech full of nice things about me. And then they announced my name and I stepped up to the mic and everyone cheered! Which is of course, fairly obvious at my own book launch, but wow, as Irene Cara sang: what a feeling. I am a cookbook author. A real one. And I can tell you one thing I’m certain and entirely secure of: I gave a terrific speech. Look, I just really love giving speeches.

A long line of people genuinely wanted their book signed, which was incomprehensibly exciting. Also, I was reminded of how changeable and hopeless my handwriting is. It’s…creative?

Being the heedless neophyte that I am, I forgot to organise any photos to be taken and didn’t get one single damn selfie the entire night. Despite my careful “I’m an auuuthorrr” outfit of dramatic black Kowtow sack dress and enormous witch hair. (Admittedly, my hair was in a very strange headspace – ha – that night, insisting on being fluffier than a Persian cat, but in the end I think it worked. Not sure why I’m compelled to point this out.) I also forgot to enlist Tim or anyone to video my speech for posterity/family/etc and feel a bit foolish about that. Now all I have are these stupid awesome memories. Unity Books did, however, take a few snaps on the night for their sweet write-up. Unity Books is one of my favourite places in Wellington, nay, the earth, and it was marvelous to be able to get all launched there.

So, the cookbook, huh? Last night I made my Chocolate Red Wine Cake from it, which – and maybe I am just saying this because it’s my own recipe from my own book, but I’m pretty sure it’s also the truth – is a simple, amazing, reliable chocolate cake that tastes brilliant. Comfortingly slabby in size, dense without being too rich, cocoa-dark without being dry, and the warm rush of red wine helps emphasise everything good about the chocolate without tasting too much of sediment or tannin.


Still getting used to the stove at our flat. But I also rather like the ominous, craggy slash that appeared in the top of this cake, most likely because the heat was up too high (it’s really hard to tell on the dials of this unfriendly oven.)

I probably said it best in the book itself, so while I usually rewrite all recipes in my own words, it would be a bit pointless to do it here, yes? So, in my own words:

red wine chocolate cake

recipe from my own cookbook, Hungry and Frozen.

Red wine and chocolate always make sense together, never more so in this sophisticated, yet very plain cake – tall, proud, gleaming with glossy ganache. The red wine is absolutely present, though not overpowering – its oaky darkness going beautifully with the bitterness of the chocolate and cocoa. You don’t have to use your best red here – the sugar and butter rounds out any rough, tannin-heavy aspects that might not be so pleasant by the glassful. Nevertheless, make sure it’s actually drinkable. It doesn’t have to be pinot noir, either – really, as long as it’s red, it should do the trick. 

200g dark chocolate
200g butter
1 cup pinot noir
70g good cocoa
250g sugar
3 eggs
250g flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

200g dark chocolate, chopped roughly
½ cup cream

Set your oven to 180 C, and line the base of a 23cm springform caketin.

Roughly chop the chocolate and butter and slowly melt them together with the red wine in a pan over a medium heat. It’ll look like an unholy mess but it will come together. Allow to cool slightly, then whisk in the rest of the ingredients.

Scrape this liquidy batter into the caketin and bake for an hour, but check after 45 minutes. Once it has cooled, pour the cream into a pan and heat till just below boiling point. Remove from the heat, and stir in the chocolate till it melts to form a thick ganache. Pour over the cake. 

Speaking of things that are better in the book, the photo of the cake in there is so much better than mine that it’s laughable. Not least because the cake in the book was photographed in natural light, whereas mine above was photographed at night in a dimly lit room because two of our bulbs have blown and both of them are annoyingly particular and require hunting round a shop inevitably called “Mr Light Bulb” while you wonder how a shop can survive solely dedicated to said light bulbs, then see the price on the ones you need to replace. Also my cookbook photographers (and friends) Kim and Jason are spectacular.

My friend Kim, who took many of the photos in the cookbook, did a gorgeous blog post of some of the photoshoot outtakes (which are themselves gorgeous, despite not making it into the book), in case you’re a little curious about this cookbook but unconvinced by this blog post alone (which would be…slightly worrying, truth be told.)

I have to admit, I’m looking forward to things returning to normal now. Lies. I want things to get less and less normal. And I was woefully insufferable the day after the launch party because I hate things being over and get bad post-thing comedown. The publicity for the cookbook has been a lot of fun (and if you feel like you’ve been left out from hearing my schtick then get in touch, I love publicity) and yesterday I got to appear on Radio New Zealand with the excellent Kathryn Ryan, which was a real trip. Of course, in a practical sense, radio does need nonstop content. But I love RNZ and it felt like I’d really hit the big time, being able to appear on there. If you want to listen to my interview, why, you can do that here!

Finally it inevitably behooves me to say the following: if you want to buy my book, and your local shop doesn’t stock it (and I would like to add: hurrah for supporting local bookshops) there are some options for you. Unity Books, the wondrous shop where I had my launch, can ship the book anywhere in New Zealand or worldwide if you ask them nicely. It’s also available at Fishpond and Mighty Ape, so: choices ahoy!
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Title via: Gomez, Whipping Piccadilly. As a commenter on songmeanings.com said…actually you should just read the whole comment, it’s a bit unintentionally hilarious. Which is better than being intentionally hilarious and failing at it. Oh, and I really like this song.
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Music lately:

David Dallas, Runnin‘. oh damn this song is good. Also it was fun to then listen to New World In My View by King Britt, which it samples, and then Sister Gertrude Morgan’s I Got The New World In My View, which that samples. Amazing beats, all.

Wu-Tang Clan, I Can’t Go To Sleep. The title speaks the truth.

The time has come, the walrus said, to lie on the floor and listen to Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise over and over and over again. Twin Peaks always gets me with its dreaminess.
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Next time: whatever it ends up being, one of these days I will make and photograph something during the day on the weekend so I don’t have to be so balefully apologetic about these badly-lit shots. 

unlimited, my future is unlimited

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This is a strange and pretty wonderful day, but it’s also just another day.

I mean: my cookbook is released today! I spent all of last night in a flux (not a flux capacitator, I wish, 80s Michael J Fox on whom I still crush, call me!) of feelings, from the obvious excited to the also obvious terribly nervous, but generally settling on a strange blank overwhelmed kind of place. I’m very hard on myself, and I’ve wanted this so much, for so long, with every bit of energy I have, and it’s finally happening. But then it’s also just another day and I have to go to work and deal with invoices and stuff and so does everyone else. 

Okay, I just deleted an enormously introspective paragraph which included phrases like “running so hard” and “knowing myself” and which not only would’ve put off anyone from reading any further, it also got dangerously close to inadvertently quoting word for word the theme song from Party of Five. So. I will try this again. Forgive me, it’s just…I’ve never had a cookbook before, I’m still working out what it’s like and what you do and so on.

I’ve never had a cookbook before. Until today. Huh. It is a big deal. So, I raise a glass to myself.

A nervous toast, but still.

When I wasn’t taking self-deprecating Instagram selfies last night, I was also making chocolate mousse. Not the powdered mousse from a packet, foodstuff of my childhood, which you whip up with milk to produce a small quantity of dusty-textured, faintly chocolate-flavoured slurry. The mousse here requires some effort and logistics, which I enjoy – much as emphatically basic recipes are wonderful, I also like to make things that involve lots of steps, on account of I really enjoy cooking and tinkering round in the kitchen. So I don’t apologise for this recipe being slightly fiddly, as that’s what chocolate mousse requires. 

I do apologise for the fact that a lightbulb blew and so the only place with any decent light at all was this table, and even then the photos are a bit hopeless. If this insults your eyes so, you could always, um, buy my cookbook which is full of incredibly beautiful photos shot by my friends Kim Laurenson and Jason Aldous, styled by my friend Kate McLeod. That’s right I’m high-fiving myself for that smoothly unclunky segue into self-promotion. And that’s right I’m shaking my head baffledly at self-promotion of self-promotion within a blog all about myself in the first place. What a world we live in! Especially now that the world contains my cookbook. Gotcha again.

 

I kinda made this mousse recipe up, but it doesn’t deviate from any classic interpretation of this French confection. There’s whisked up egg yolks, there’s melted chocolate, there’s cream. I didn’t add the egg whites, as I don’t like the presence of tooooo much raw egg, and I prefer the flavour of cream. I added brown sugar to give a little caramelly darkness to the chocolate, but it honestly didn’t change the flavour outrageously, so you could just use plain white sugar. But whatever you do, it’s important to keep the following in mind:

  • Have all your ingredients ready, so that none of them are sitting around for too long.
  • If you can access free range eggs, they are a lot better here than the other kind – the yolks tend to whip up thickly and easily incorporate the other ingredients, and that spooky raw egg flavour disappears quickly.
  • There will be one point – before you add the cream – where it will all look very unlikely and you might find yourself thinking things like “omg this mousse has failed and no-one will buy my cookbook and here is a slide-show of everything I have ever done wrong in my life”. BUT. Once you add the cream, a little at first and then the whole lot of it, the mixture will mousse-ify and thicken and turn into something completely, soothingly recognisable.

Most important of all, is that it tastes incredibly wonderful. The cocoa bitterness of the dark chocolate is dispersed through all that cream, each making the other more delicious.

Silky, satiny, velvety, it is in fact like every cool fabric there is available. Fortunately not one part of it is wooly, though. There is a slight hint of sugar-grit in it, which I don’t mind, as this simply reminds me that this is very homemade – also there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well attempt to embrace it. If you leave it overnight in the fridge however, the sugar dissolves entirely and it all gets even more traditionally mousse-ish and puffy in texture (I just scooted to the fridge to verify this by eating some.) Either way, it’s chocolate delivered to you in a glossy, aerated mass. It’s so good.

chocolate mousse

a recipe by myself. Makes enough for two generous serves, plus some leftover for breakfast the next day. Or: three generous serves. Or: etc.

2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 tablespoons brown sugar
150g dark chocolate
250ml cream

It’s very useful to have more than one person working on this. You don’t want tooooo much time to pass between each step. That said, I mean, mine was delicious, and I had such time passing.

In a medium sized bowl, whisk the egg yolks for a minute, then add the sugar and continue to whisk until it thickens and aerates into a thick, moussy, pale caramel-coloured substance. Melt the chocolate gently, and stir a little at a time into the egg yolk mix. Make sure you stir it thoroughly, so that any residual heat from the chocolate doesn’t cook the eggs. It will likely thicken into a scarily stiff paste at this point, but the cream will sort it out. Finally, whisk the cream till thickened but not whipped – sort of your ‘good quality thickshake’ type texture – and stir it thoroughly into the chocolate mixture. Add a little cream at first to slacken the chocolate mixture, then add the rest and whisk hard. Divide between your receptacles and allow to sit in the refrigerator for fifteen minutes before eating. 

The thing is, I saw these cups on sale at Supreme Coffee and my first thought was “oh wow I love pink and grey they would look adorable filled with chocolate mousse.” Usually whenever I make something with aesthetics first in mind – that is, will it look cool on the blog? – the recipe obstinately never works out, and I learn a lesson about the importance of friendship or something. But this time the mousse did work out, I suppose partially because wanting chocolate mousse is not simply an aesthetic thing. Chocolate mousse is seriously amazing and delicious. Phew, though.

So now what?

I sit and wait and see what happens, I guess. My cookbook, Hungry and Frozen, is in shops from today and all I can say is that I hope people like it as much as I do. Also that people don’t go on an introspective mental trip through the journey it took them to get there like I do every time I look at the book. You…don’t want that.

One more thing: oh wow, last week was ridiculous. Specifically the time when I dropped my precious, precious cellphone down an eighth-storey lift shaft to its doom, and also on Friday when (with a new and devastatingly expensive cellphone in hand) I experienced a very large earthquake at work. Almost worse than the quake itself was walking down the seventeen flights of stairs at work to get to the ground to try and meet Tim, who’d been evacuated from his work. From the tenth floor down, it was pitch black. Had to use every particle of my body to try and stop myself having a panic attack. Luckily, while the quake was really big, no-one was hurt, and I managed to find Tim fairly quickly. Our solution was to go meet friends at the pub. My body’s solution is to insist it’s feeling earthquakes every five minutes. Sigh. At least I had my phone on me. Am I a bad person for hoping there’s no earthquakes this week to distract from my cookbook? For what it’s worth, I never want any earthquakes to happen ever, so there’s that.

While my book is released today, on Tuesday night is the LAUNCH PARTY. Because I’m a real author! If you happen to be in Wellington that day consider yourself super welcome to come along. (Click the link to see the invite.) (Click here to see it too, just in case.)

Cookbook day! I have a cookbook! Remember when I got the call to say that Penguin were definitely going to publish it? How far I’ve come. I am so, so tired. Hope you like the book. Time for me to eat some chocolate mousse and get ready for work. Because it’s just another day. But it’s also THE day.
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title via: Idina Menzel singing The Wizard and I in the musical Wicked. Sigh, swoon, all the exhalations and faints.
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music lately:

Cat Power, Satisfaction. A foxy, laconic cover of the Rolling Stones song.

The Last Goodbye, The Kills. I keep telling Tim this will be our first dance at our wedding. He’s not quite convinced. 

Marvin Gaye, How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You). Isn’t it, though? Isn’t it?
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Next time: I’ll probably still be talking about this cookbook. Wouldn’t you?

fancy plans and pants to match: degustation at hippopotamus

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Welcome to another installment of Fancy Plans and Pants To Match, where I acknowledge that I occasionally get invited to really cool things, but try to be self-deprecating enough that you won’t hate me for it, with the overall aim of sharing some fun stuff I’ve done that you yourself might like to try. I named this segment for a quote from the perspicacious and cool Jimmy James from the excellent but largely overlooked 90s sitcom NewsRadio.

So, here’s the thing: I was invited to Hippopotamus‘s Visa Wellington on a Plate event, France vs Wellington in a Glass.

The pitch: A six-course degustation, each course matched with a French and a New Zealand wine. Not a competition as such, but more a good opportunity to compare and contrast two proud wine regions within the context of super excellent food from Hippopotamus’ resident chef Laurent Loudeac.

 What happened: The menu went like so:

I know. There’s not enough self-deprecation in the world to make up for how amazing that all sounds. Each course and its wines was introduced by the respective representatives of each side of the world – Rick Lindsay from Eurovintage for New Zealand, and Jean Christophe Poizat of Maison Vauron for France.

Scampi! The fancy crustacean! 

Beef on beef on beef. So much bovine excellence.

The best bits: I attended this same dinner last year and while it was amazing, this year’s menu felt like it had stepped up even more. The first course was wonderful – the lightest, cleanest salmon, both slivered and cubed to maximise on its excellent texture. Attention to texture was a huge part of the evening – crunchy buttery pastry around soft, shredded pork with a tender scallop; meltingly fibrous steak with gelatinous, soft beef shin; firmly seared fish with cloud-like mash and floaty foam. Everything was just wondrously good. I know hardly anything about wine, but I do trust my tastebuds enough to confidently say that everything I drank was exquisite (and got more and more so as the night went on, funny that.) The fun thing about tasting wine in this manner – or in fact any situation where you’re tasting a range of something – is going with your instincts and working out exactly what it is you are tasting and what you prefer and so on and so forth. And you’re drinking wine, so that’s fun. I loved the two that were served with the third course – a 2008 Seresin Marama Sauvignon Blanc from the Wairau Valley, and a 2010 Henri Bourgeois Sancerre Cuvee d’Antan, from the Loire Valley. Both had a distinct touch of passionfruit about them, but the French was sweeter, while the New Zealand one was a little spicier and muskier. Both were brilliant with the course itself, especially working with the sweet mildness of the scampi and the mustard creaminess of the wasabi mash. Meanwhile, the wine I drank with the fourth course (2008 Ata Rangi McCrone Vineyard Pinot Noir from Martinborough, and a 2007 Bertrand Maume Gevrey Chambertin from Burgundy) was more savoury, clean, a little spicy and quite richly liquor-y on the French side, with the New Zealand wine giving hints of fruitcake and berries. Fun! I got to sit at the table with Lindsay and Poizat, both charming, and it was very enjoyable hearing their insider knowledge (hot tip: wine is delicious) up close and personal.

Beauteous pudding.
On a scale of 1 to Is This A Dream: This is edging towards a 9. Six courses, twelve wines, it’s very much pinch-one’s-self territory. Hippopotamus is a completely stunning restaurant, and every last detail was very near-perfect. In fact, as I have very little experience of perfection, maybe it just was perfect? Either way: wow. 
Would I do this for not-free? If I was feeling flush and it was a special occasion. I would also be hastily trying to invent a special occasion to have an excuse to do it. Look, Hippopotamus is not a cheap place to have a night out, but it’s also pretty incredible and if you’re going to spend your hard-earned dollars on a swanky time, it’s most definitely worth your consideration. (Although for all I know you are reading this and saying “but I’m really rich! I don’t like, get this way of thinking.” While lighting the candles on a birthday cake with hundred dollar bills. And it’s not even your birthday, you just bought yourself a huge cake for fun.)
Earnest thanks for making me feel fancy to: Hippopotamus restaurant, Museum Hotel, L3 90 Cable Street, 04 802 0935.

everybody loves a winner, so nobody loved me

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Thanks heaps to everyone who took part in my cookbook giveaways. I wish I could give cookbooks to all of you, but that probably wouldn’t be very good business practice (have also been known to say “Tim is so lovely it’s a pity EVERYONE can’t marry him” so make of this what you will.) If nothing else, all the super-nice comments on my Instagram and on this blog have been endlessly good for my soul and ego and smile occurrence. Especially in this very strange week where I dropped my precious cellphone down an eighth storey lift shaft, and also got sent home from work after a very big, scary earthquake.

And the winners are: Alice and Georgia Rose! Please send your details to laura@hungryandfrozen.com and I’ll send you a copy of the book right away.

For the rest of you, it’s less than a week till my cookbook is out! Fathom THAT!

Also for the rest of you, here are some guinea pigs I saw in a pet shop a couple of weeks ago. Couldn’t leave you with nothing.

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title via: The achingly perfect Maybe This Time. By Liza. 

next time: Fancy plans and pants to match at a Hippopotamus degustation!

take my hand, we’re off to never never land

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Okay, let’s all check ourselves before we wreck ourselves: my cookbook is officially out next week, for real, in the flesh, etc. On 23 August. And at the end of this blog post there is a giveaway competition thing you can enter to win one of two copies for yourself! (COMPETITION CLOSED) But if you don’t read this entire blog post first – and it’s as long and self-indulgent as ever! – I will know and my ghost will hang around you and sigh heavily and say “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed”. And yeah, in this scenario I have a ghost while still being alive, it’s not entirely improbable, right? At the least, I’d read the heck out of a young adult lit book which had that plot.

The ‘after’ photo – above – of the plum hand pie is so much better than the ‘before’ photo of said hand pie and its little pie pals below, taken the previous evening. On account of I will possibly never work out how to take decent photos at night-time, illuminated only by an environmentally friendly lightbulb, which casts a gloomy yellow haze over everything within a metre of it and makes you squint like you’ve never squinted before, but does save ten percent power or something. Now that I’m done both damning myself and faintly praising myself, the important thing is: these hand pies are delicious and very easy and cute, and probably about to be really ‘in’, too. For what that’s worth. (Now that I’ve said it, hand pies will probably be widely denounced as embarrassingly tacky, which to be honest will probably make me love them even more.)
I made these to be eaten at a spontaneous-ish gathering of friends to watch a movie on our projector on Saturday night (Wet Hot American Summer, if you’re wondering, because as I always say, nothing bad can happen when Wet Hot American Summer is on.) It was a very fun evening, just really relaxed and lovely and silly and hilarious and low-key, the sort of fun you wish you could schedule in on a bi-daily basis, while knowing it’s best to just wait and let it happen accidentally.

 

Above: the morning after. Tim went to swoop in on the lone, remaining pie for a pre-breakfast snack, till I squawked “stop! The light is really great right now and I can salvage the terrible photos I took last night!” Oh, and that’s right, individual bowls for every snack and a commemorative teaspoon for the candy. Sure, we’re really messy, but we also have bizarrely specific high standards, you know?

So when I say hand pies I simply refer to what we might normally call pastries or turnovers or mini-pies. But ‘hand pies’ are deeply intertwined in the the cuisine of the American south, and I cannot resist a little culinary Americana. Or any Americana. As befits a kid who grew up in New Zealand but was obsessed with the Baby-sitters Club books and ensemble movies like Now and Then. Not that hand pies are mentioned in either of those, but let’s not get lost in semantics. My version is not strictly traditional, but what it is, is really very easy and fast and non-stressful. And delicious. I appreciate that there’s a bit of a cost at the outset in buying ready-rolled sheets of pastry, but sometimes it’s just as much looking after yourself to buy something pre-made as it is to make it from scratch.

Seriously, very little actual work gets you these fantastically good, gently spiced pockets of plummy sweetness. The the lemony warmth of the cardamom, the tear-jerkingly comforting scent of cinnamon and the toffee flavour of the brown sugar lends the tart juiciness of the plums some welcome richness. The fruit softens up but doesn’t collapse, and any juice is absorbed into the cornflour to give the filling a little heft. And they’re hand-sized! Who cares if they’re on-trend, as long as they’re on your hand and fast approaching your mouth.

plum, cinnamon and cardamom hand pies

a recipe by myself

2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon cornflour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 sheets ready-rolled puff pastry (all-butter if possible, but I know only three supermarkets in the fanciest bits of New Zealand actually sell that, so just deal with the weird fake margarine stuff this time round – you can’t even taste it if you don’t think about it.)
2 plums

Set your oven to 200 C/ 400F and line an oven tray with baking paper.

Mix the brown sugar, cornflour, cinnamon and cardamom together in a small bowl.

Finely dice the two plums, discarding the stones, obviously.

Slice the pastry sheets into nine equal-ish squares, by making three slices downwards and three across. Maths! Finally useful. Spoon half a teaspoon – at most – of the sugar-spice mix into the middle of each square. Spoon a small teaspoon of diced plum over the top of that, then fold the pastry in half, pinching at the edges to form a snugly-filled triangle. Repeat with the remaining squares. You might have some plum or spice-dust leftover. Arrange the triangles on the baking tray (it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out how the triangles could all fit on there evenly, I guess maths is useful, sort of) and bake for about 20 minutes. They’ll be piping hot at first, so let them cool a tiny bit.

Hand pies! Get some.

So, now you want to know how to win a copy of my cookbook, yes? I was going to interweave references to The Monster at the End of This Book throughout the blog post, but am too tired and so will cut straight to the point: I have two copies to give away. This competition is open to people in New Zealand only. Sorry, international admirers! However, I’m also giving away a copy on Instagram which anyone in the world can enter, so if you’re international and want in, follow me on there. (username: hungryandfrozen.) For everyone else…

here’s what you have to do. 

1: Leave a comment on this post telling me a recipe from this blog that you like the look of. It can be from like, last week, I’m not going to give extra points for people who go deep into my archives, but who knows, you might like what you see once you start looking.
2: Be a person from New Zealand.
3: Wait till 10am Sunday morning (sorry for those with short attention spans, myself included) which is when I’ll do a post on here letting people know who won.
4: See if you’re one of the two people who got drawn at random! And either console yourself by baking hand pies, or rejoice in your winning by baking hand pies. And emailing me your address.

May the odds be ever in your favour!

title via: my guitar heroes Metallica with their joyfully sinister song Enter Sandman.

Music lately:

Joan Osborne, Right Hand Man. This song is so excellent and saucy and great. And, um, also has the word ‘hand’ in it, but this is entirely coincidental.

Lillias White, Don’t Rain On My Parade. Brilliant song, oh-damn-that’s-so-true lyrics, and Lillias White’s smashing voice. There are a million different renditions of this song from Funny Girl, and at least a hundred of them, this included, are my favourite.

Next time: I don’t even know, especially as I’m going to be out of the house most nights this week, but we’ll see, we’ll see. Maybe even one of the recipes from my own book. If nothing else the words “my cookbook” will probably appear a lot, accompanied by a palpable air of smugness.

where troubles melt like lemon drops

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The laptop that I’ve written this blog on for several years now is continuing to suffer from a very specific condition that occurs when someone kicks a bottle of beer on top of it. At first I was so happy and baffled that it wasn’t me that did it for once, clumsy hoyden that I am, that it didn’t occur to me how long I might be without this precious technology, and how wince-makingly expensive fixing it would be, and how many files were on it. (But: Tim and I just discussed for the eighteenth time how, even with all his contrition, it is a miracle it wasn’t me that kicked over the beer first.)

So: take a good look, because this instagram, grainy and overcast with the Rise filter, is the only record I have left of the lemon cake with white chocolate buttercream that I made last week. All the nice photos I snapped from various angles are stuck somewhere in a no-person’s-land on my stupid beer-sodden laptop.

Which is excellent timing, since my cookbook is out on the 23rd of this month and I’m just starting to do publicity and it’s like “hey everyone, come check out my blog with this one badly-lit photo that I took on my phone”. But also, this is essentially a lovely problem, since I wouldn’t be worrying about it if I didn’t have a cookbook to promote in the first place, and the whole situation is still somehow rosily tinted with relief that it wasn’t me for once doing the stupidly clumsy, ruinous thing.

Tim is terribly apologetic though, of course. It wasn’t even nice beer.

Without twee photos to pad this out, I might as well cut straight to the chase. This cake is delicious. Lemon and white chocolate are rather wonderful together, both delicate flavours in cake form, but with the airy tang of the former lifting the richness of the latter, and vice versa. Both the cake and the icing are very easy, and the cake itself is dairy-free if that’s of use. Make sure you zest the lemon before juicing it for the cake – the feathery strands of zest look so pretty on top of the cake and add pure lemon-oil zing to the buttercream. Pistachios are less necessary, but they look really lovely with their muted dusty green against the swelling white icing, for what it’s worth.

lemon cake with white chocolate buttercream

A recipe by myself, with thanks to a loaf recipe from the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders book.

1/2 cup plain oil (rice bran is nice and doesn’t taste heavily oily)
1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
3 eggs
200g sugar
pinch salt
250g flour
2 tsp baking powder

Set your oven to 180 C and line the base of a 22cm caketin with baking paper. You could probably make this easily in a 20cm tin as well, which would likely result in a smaller-but-taller cake.

Whisk together the oil, lemon juice, eggs and sugar till thick, then sift in the flour and baking powder and continue to stir briskly for another couple of minutes, until the mixture is thick and smooth and your upper arms are burning. Tip into the caketin and bake for about an hour, but check it around 45 minutes. It probably won’t rise very high. Allow to cool before icing.

75g soft butter
2 cups icing sugar, sifted if stupidly lumpy
100g white chocolate, decent stuff if you can

Beat the butter and icing sugar together- it will likely end up very thick and crumbly. This is okay. Melt the white chocolate and stir it in to the butter mixture, adding a little hot water if you need to, if it’s far too thick. Carefully spread across the top of the cooked cake once it’s cooled. Top with lemon zest and pistachios if you like.

Seriously, what can I do? Copy-paste that instagram photo again here? In the absence of photos, use your imagination to perceive that light, densely fluffy lemon-tinted cake spread thickly with buttery white chocolate icing is really excellent stuff, and worth your while for sure.

Other things you could look at instead of the photos of this cake, trapped in a stickily beer-tainted laptop:

Remember how I’m trying to read more books written by women? This wonderful story is another addition to that list, as is Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Don’t Tell Arthur by Nancy Mitford, and The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton.

 Trinkets.
 I finished my knitting project! I am very proud of myself. I tend to have lots of grandiose ideas that I throw myself into and then never finish, so there was some danger that this blanket would end up much the same. But look! I made a thing! (Don’t look too closely, or you will see a lot of dropped stitches and uneven knitting tension. This blanket is a bit of a Monet. )

And…introducing my cookbook, by way of this little ten second video!

Just to sensibly reiterate, my cookbook will be on the shelves of all nice bookstores on August 23, and I will be doing some giveaways in the leadup. I had my first interview for it today, which was partly thrilling, because I like talking about myself – in a way, every interview is like a therapy session – and partly terrifying, because what if I come across as a dick, or if I made no sense, or I got nervous and rose in upwards inflections at the end of every sentence? But overall, looking back, the person I was talking to was very nice and I felt like I represented myself well enough. There’s a lot of new land to navigate – I’ve been wanting this book to exist for so long, with so much of myself, that it’s strange to be right on the edge of it all. Trying to organise my schedule and a book launch that’s vaguely credible and pay all my bills and still work full time and also make sure that I’m not defined by this book entirely, that I don’t live or die by its success (considering I’m the kind of person who lives or dies by the most relatively trivial things, like are there rice bubbles left for my breakfast this morning, this is a bit of a challenge.) Hopefully you can bear with me through all of this…especially as it’s very exciting…

Till then, here’s a small, fun interview I did for mac+mae’s 100 days project.
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title via the song that always guarantees tears in my eyes, Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Judy Garland. I am totally a friend of Dorothy.
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music lately

Irene Cara, Fame. Gosh, my obsession with this soundtrack knows no bounds, and it might sound completely pride-goeth-before-a-fall but it felt like a good time to play the title track.

The Carter Family, Can the Circle Be Unbroken. Ye olde country to get you right in the ye olde heart.
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next time: Real photos! From my camera!