honey you are my shining star, don’t you go away

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Guess who has been sleeping through the night for the last couple of days? Actually, that question deserves an interrobang to imply the high stakes at, um, stake here: ME. I know. The universe even rewarded me with a really, really good dream about Pretty Little Liars (hello, obsessed, get in touch if you want to talk about it indepth) but then took that back with a dream about being ignored by friends, but the point is, both of these things were entirely fictional dreams, which took place in my head, while I was asleep. In case you haven’t caught up, or are wondering why I’m about to stage a medal ceremony to myself in honour of doing something that most people manage to get on with calmly and without ceremony…Insomnia. I have been in the thick of it for the last month, and it’s such an immense relief to get back to my usual six hours. I was starting to not feel like myself. It was scary.

In an entirely more delightful form of scary, Tim and I had a Hallowe’en party at our house on Saturday night. (I feel compelled to tell you that those are his old Goosebumps books in the above picture, not mine: strictly serialised fiction about Teen Girls Making Their Way In The World for me, thank you. I only read Goosebumps when I was at the reading-the-side-of-the-cereal-box stage of being desperate to consume words. Yep, glad we got that straight.) There was an excellent amount of candy, there was popcorn, and there were other foods that fell into the crispy/salty/crunchy/alcohol absorbing venn diagram, like chips and pretzels and these cheese stars that I made.

Despite being all, hello I’m a cookbook author, I tend to keep this kind of party food low-key. People need feeding, they’re not necessarily going to remember everything that was there unless it was awful, now’s not the time to be stuffing grape halves with tender figs and goat cheese. Lots of candy, lots of carbs. Make like, one thing from scratch so you look like a good person who cares. Me, I not only made these cheese stars, I also made hokey pokey. Because I’m an awesome person who really cares (yes, your level of greatness/compassion grows exponentially like that with each dish.)

Embiggening.

If anyone knows about party food, or in fact anything at all (I’d certainly like to hear her opinion on Pretty Little Liars) it’s Nigella Lawson. I knew I could trust her recipe for cheese stars to be calmly simple, and exactly the sort of thing that people want to eat while clutching a plastic cup of homebrew.

I’m going to say something very serious now: do not eat the dough. You might want to, and I understand that, I live this, but truly, the baked goods are a zillion times more delicious, and you’re going to be resentful of yourself for smiting a morsel of dough that could have become another star.

Cheese Stars

A recipe from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. They can of course be any shape, and I did intend to use all my cookie cutters on this pliant dough. But the thought of all those strange shapes mixed up displeased me, whereas a dish full of little golden stars was endlessly pleasing.

You really, absolutely need a food processor for this one. I’m sorry.

  • 200g grated cheese (Nigella says cheddar, I used the one on special)
  • 50g softish butter
  • 100g flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and put a sheet of baking paper on an oven tray.

Place all the ingredients in the food processor and blitz till they come together. This will take a while, and it will look like they’re just going to be fine little crumbs forever, but it will suddenly sieze up and spring together in more of a solid mass. Remove the dough, form into a thick, roughly disc-like shape, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate for fifteen minutes.

Roll it out to a couple of millimeters thick – I find it useful to do this with half the dough at a time – and cut into stars or however you like. The dough will get more and more easy to roll the more you do it, and can be re-rolled plenty. Bake the stars for around ten minutes. Carefully transfer to a rack of some kind – they’ll get crisper as they cool.

They taste like pastry, like the flakiest golden buttery shards of pastry from a croissants underbelly, like the spatters of cheese that bubble and go hard on the toasted sandwich maker and which are almost more delicious than the sandwich itself, and, after a few drinks, like the most rapturously sublime foodstuff in the world, basically. Thanks, Nigella.

I dressed as Myrtha, Queen of the Willis, from the ballet Giselle. Google her, she’s wonderful. But the short explanation is that she’s kind of a misandry ghost queen ballerina. Tim’s costume was split down the middle – a man in a suit on one half, a woman in a dress on the other. It was impressively committed. And spurred on a lot of impassioned conversations about how ridiculous it is that men don’t wear dresses and have makeup marketed to them and so on and so forth. It was a riotously fun party, and it was so great having the house full of excellent people laughing and dancing and mingling with varying levels of aplomb and swapping costumes and everything, really.

A couple of nights of actual sleep hasn’t made up for weeks and weeks of near-sleeplessness, but I’m starting to feel more and more like myself. And as I more or less think myself is amazing (self-doubt and self-importance make strange bedfellows) this is a good thing.

title via: supreme slow jam Shining Star, by The Manhattans.

music lately:

Terribly, terribly sad about Lou Reed now being the late Lou Reed. When I worked in a German bakery when I was 19, I used to play Venus In Furs over and over, very loudly. To the perhaps justifiable concern of my employers whenever they dropped in.

Demi Lovato, Give Your Heart A Break. I love her so much and this song is perfection. So.

Next time: something that doesn’t need a food processor, I promise.

 

we’re up all night to get lucky

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It seems very unfair to have both insomnia and writer’s block, not that I like the phrase writer’s block because it seems so self-fulfilling, but these are the words that rolled around my head like a marble on a wooden floor this entire night (not like the regular marbles that we used to play with in school, or even the double-sized ones we called bonkers, but the rare prize known as the grandaddy, triple the size of a normal marble and like holding a planet in your own hand. Until you inevitably lost them all. I have no idea what the point of playing marbles was when you could spend all your time gazing deeply into them – needless to say I was much better at looking at them than playing with them competitively. Man, I guess I have a lot of feelings about marbles.) I paused only to have a brief but elaborate dream about being unable to go to sleep, which was, I don’t know, a little bit on the nose even for my brain. 
But: I have a doctor’s appointment today (which will basically be me pleading “make me slee-hee-heeeeeep”) so hopefully that will start to take care of it. It being a complete state of somnambulance, of being unable to sleep more than two or three hours a night, of being unable to keep my eyelids from flying open and staying that way. Uncool! Sleeping should be one of those things you don’t have to try too hard at, like being funny and paying attention to letters from the IRD.  

Also a bit unfair: I’m not sure that today’s recipe is as good/irrefutably perfection as it could be, but I also think I know how to make it better, so I’m sharing it with you anyway. Every time I went to sweepingly refuse to write about it, I had to admit that it did taste really, really good. I’m talking about cinnamon date rolls, by the way.

But first, I’m talking about my Auckland cookbook launch last week. Wow. 
hard twee.
MC Rose Matafeo and I. She was super amazing. Also this is her instagram. Hope that’s okay, Rose. Rose?

 I choo-choo-choose you.
It was such a fun, incredible night. My mum, dad, and little brother were able to be there, outlandishly stunning Sacha McNeil from Nightline came along; I invited Anna Coddington (who I’ve interviewed on this blog before) and she brought Anika Moa and I was like “HI ANIKA MOA THIS IS SO IMPORTANT”; I got to see so many friends and meet so many gorgeously terrific and terrifically gorgeous new people that I’ve previously only talked to online, like Amanda, Lani and Jilly, I got given a corsage (!!) and there were so many nice people and they were all so nice to me and it ruled. Seriously, do yourself a favour and have a cookbook launch party. 
Feverish and fervent thanks to Delaney Mes who helped in a million different ways to get the party happening, to Unity Books who supplied copies of my book and a friendly person to sell them on the night, to the people at the beauteous Bread and Butter Letter boutique for being charming and kind and having such a fun place for my party, and to fizzy sherbet lollies and pretzels for helping get me through the night. So many nights, in fact.
And, if you want, you can watch MC Rose’s delightful intro and my own speech, which, like all public speaking, I ADORED. If you were at the Wellington launch party, yeah, I recycled most of my jokes. I’m not good at letting go. 

So finally, these cinnamon date rolls that I’m quite, but not intensely enthused about. Here’s the deal. They are easy. Amazingly delicious. And other such adjectives. But…don’t do what I did and use regular flour. It’s tiresome, but if you specifically buy hi-grade/bread flour, these buns will have the extra gluten they deserve to become puffier and lighter and easier to knead and even more wonderful than they already are. So – if you only have regular flour, they’re pretty much great, but go on. Learn from my stumbles. Since there are so many and all.

What I’ve done here is take two rectangles of dough and roll them, sushi-ly, around chopped dates, butter, cinnamon, and a gritty sprinkling of brown sugar. They’re then scored, garlic-bread-style, and baked so they have a kind of pull-apart quality, while leaving the sticky, caramelly filling thoroughly cocooned in soft dough so it doesn’t burn. Cinnamon is such a warm, comforting scent and for what it’s worth, these will make your house smell incredible. Kneading the dough isn’t so hard, it’s just some patient, rather satisfying pushing and flattening, and the yeast comes in sachets so you don’t have to worry about getting scientific with it. Just throw it in to the flour and go. There isn’t actually that much sugar sprinkled into these, but what’s there melts into the butter and creates sticky, syrupy toffee wonderfulness. That will burn your DNA off if you eat them straight from the oven, so try to let them cool a little.

cinnamon date rolls


A recipe by myself

500g plain flour
50g sugar
1 sachet instant dried yeast
1 teaspoon salt
50g melted butter
3 tablespoons greek yoghurt
1 cup milk
1/2 cup dates
2 tablespoons brown sugar
50g butter, extra, cubed
Cinnamon

Place the flour, sugar, yeast and salt in a large bowl. Tip in the butter, yoghurt, and milk, and mix to make a rough, sticky dough. Knead repeatedly by pushing the dough with the palm of your hand and back into a ball repeatedly, until it forms a solidly cohesive-enough lump, which springs back quickly when you prod it. Cover with gladwrap and allow to rise in a warmish (or at least, not freezing, it doesn’t actually have to be that warm) place for an hour or so, then get back in the kitchen with it. Push it down again with your fist and divide it into two even pieces. 

Roll them out into rectangles about fifteen centimetres wide and 25 centimetres long – although really, so long as they’re similarly sized rectangles it doesn’t matter about measurements. You may need to let the dough sit for ten minutes to allow it to relax a bit before rolling it further. Roughly chop the dates, and sprinkle them, along with the brown sugar, plenty of cinnamon, and the and cubed remaining butter, over the two rectangles. Roll them up from one of the long sides so you have two long tubular tubes of dough. 

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and sit the two dough rolls in a baking dish lined with baking paper, as I’ve done in these pictures. Using a serrated knife, make some decent slashes across the top of each roll of dough, which will allow you to be able to pull the whole thing apart into segments easier once it’s coked. Allow to sit for a further fifteen minutes while the oven warms up – this stage is called proving, I guess because you have to prove your commitment to breadmaking by waiting again – and finally bake for around 40 minutes. 

Homemade bready things don’t last like ones from a packet, but you and I both know (now that I’ve told you) that pulled apart pieces of this come back to life easily in the microwave.
Oh, okay, I guess I didn’t have writer’s block after all.

One more from the launch party –
Here I am signing a book for someone. Clearly my years and years of ballet training have reaped dividends, as far as my impeccable sitting posture goes.
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title via: the assuredly ubiquitous Daft Punk song with the splendidly handsome Pharrell, Get Lucky. You’ll probably like it.
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Music lately: 

Bastille, Laura Palmer. I do like a good Twin Peaks reference. And a good song. This, luckily, is both.

Tim and I hosted a dear friend’s birthday party on Saturday night. We danced till three am. In the morning. I particularly enjoyed flinging myself recklessly to Marina and the Diamonds’ heart-searing song Shampain.
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Next time: Sleep. If I have to stay awake and think about all the ways that I should be sleeping in order to make it happen. Also: a recipe that I believe in to some exaggerated percentage, like 799% or 100% or something.

like lorne green you know i get paid, like caprese and with the basil

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“I’m so tired! This sucks! I should’ve got up at 3am when I had the chance and used that time to blog!” – a thing I just said, at 6.52am. With more imprecation. From which you could deduce that while I’m very dedicated to this blog, my brain is not always that dedicated to my being a human. Yes, my sleeping has become worse than ever, leaving me oddly nostalgic for the time when I was merely a terrible sleeper. Yes, I’m going to go see a doctor about it. Yes: I will talk about cake soon. 
This weekend was the ideal mixture of ridiculous and spontaneous yet cosy and involving a lot of sitting down in my own house. There were spontaneous beers and a launch party and a photoshoot for a local magazine, but there was also a lot of Bob’s Burgers and pizza, a trip to Holland Road to buy more yarn for exciting new knitting projects, and a Sunday evening watching Fire Walk With Me  with some babefriends. 
I needed some basil for the magazine photoshoot. They always come sheathed in plastic at the supermarket, so when I unwrapped it, it turned out I’d scored the most abundantly leafy plant. Basil in everything! Summer is coming! That, plus the fact that I wanted to bake something for the friends coming to watch the movie, but also knew we had dubiously meagre ingredients in the pantry, led to some creativity: A tin of black doris plums plus some sugar with an explosion of basil leaves in it might be the perfect early Spring cake. The wintry stewed plums, handily seasonal all year round in their can, plus the musky, smoky hint of summery basil – the faint spicy pepperiness of the leaves providing warmth while also heralding the warmer weather to come. Or something. I told you I haven’t had much sleep. I stand by the use of “heralding” in regards to a cake. 
I’m really sorry that this cake uses a food processor – if you can work out a way to get the basil all up on the sugar efficiently without one then by all means, do it, and then mix the rest of the ingredients by hand. In my defense, I do have a lot of recipes that don’t require a food processor. And you could always hunt around for a friend who does have one, then make this at their house and eat it with them. Cake! Bringing people together. Though: the food processor thing means that this is ready to go in about ten minutes with a minimum of fuss. 
The cake is sweet, yet headily perfumed, yet still very straightforward and not requiring too much defensive explanation. The plum syrup in the icing really doesn’t add any extra flavour, but it does become a fantastically molten-fancy-lipstick colour which looks rather beauteous with the extra basil leaves strewn artlessly (haha, I arranged them SO carefully, with instagram in mind) over the top, their rich green even more glowingly vivid against the pink. Speaking of glowing vividly, Fire Walk With Me was equally hilarious, distressing, and terrifying, as though David Lynch had set out to make a parody David Lynch film. It did have a cameo by David Bowie, but – cruellest blow – the character James was in it heaps. James, you’re so dull. No wait, the cruellest blow of all – no Audrey Horne. 

plum and basil cake

a recipe by myself

150g sugar

1/2 cup (very loosely packed) basil leaves
150g butter, softened
2 eggs
150g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons milk
1 400g tin of plums
1/2 cup icing sugar

Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper. 

In a food processor, blend the sugar and basil leaves until the leaves are all dispersed and chopped up and the sugar is flecked with green. Throw in the butter and process again till the sugar is incorporated and the mixture is fluffy and light, then throw in the eggs, flour, and baking powder and process again to a thick batter. Pour in the milk and process again. Roughly slice the plums (or kind of hack them apart with a spoon, which is what I did) and add them to the mixture. Spatula all of this into the cake tin and bake for around 40 minutes. Truthfully: I lost track of time at this point and wasn’t watching the clock, so it may be closer to 50 minutes. Once cool, mix together the icing sugar with a tablespoon or three of the canned plum syrup and drizzle it over the cake. Scatter over basil leaves if you like. They’re more decorative than necessary for flavour, as the sugar provides all you need. So remove them before eating, if you like.

Tonight – adding somewhat to my general state of “whoa, um, okay” – Tim and I are flying up to Auckland for my cookbook launch party tomorrow. Want to come along? Email me! It will be MC’d by Rose Matafeo and I will be making a speech and there will be snacks and drinks and books for sale and really, none of that is concerning me so much as how I’m agonising over what to wear. Got to look fancy and Auckland-ready, but not like I’m trying too hard, but also spectacular. Which is an issue: trying too hard is one of my signature looks. I really am so, so very excited though – I will make sure there are plenty of photos and so on from the night to share with you all. 
Wish me luck! Just kidding, I make my own luck. 
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title via: Beastie Boys, Ch-check it Out. I love these guys so much. Not least because they’re always talking about food. 
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music lately:
David Dallas, Runnin’ – really feeling the lyrics and the beat and the chords and everything in this song. I mean like in a “I relate to this sentiment really hard” kind of way. 
Icona Pop, I Love It. I don’t care, I love it. Sometimes you just want to shout that really loud. 
Porcelain Raft, Drifting In and Out. Let’s get dreamy. Thanks to Amy for mentioning it in the first place. 
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Next time: better have slept. Will be reporting back from my launch party. Reporting on its massive, amazing success, I hope!  

oops!…i did it again

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apple butterscotch chip muffins
Initially, I was concerned that I’d been so busy I might not have time to cook anything I could even blog about. All you need is one party here and one catch up there and one overtired unhungry evening and a weekend and…suddenly you realise you’ve eaten naught but candy love hearts and coffee for three days. Or at least, I realise that. 
And then my concern changed into the shape of fear that this recipe would be off-putting, because it has the irritatingly specific butterscotch chips in it. But I figured you could joyfully replace them with white chocolate. 
And then, the biggest concern of the three – I realised, deflating like a sad balloon all the while – I’d already blogged this recipe back in 2010. 
As Homer Simpson once said: It’s like something out of that twilighty show about that zone.
Also more specifically: d’oh! 
Also less specifically: mmm, sacrelicious. 
I just really love Homer Simpson quotes, and relate to him quite a lot. (Him and Lisa.) 
To add to this increasing whirlpool of misadventure was that I then didn’t sleep the entire night – well, I slept for fifteen minutes, around 7am the next morning, but that’s all. Truly. At 3.30am I started writing this blog post obstinately anyway, in the face of all that doubtfulness. It seemed better than the alternative – staring at the walls in the dark. Sure, I’m feeling reproachful of myself for not being able to produce one single thing to blog about, but doubly sure I also have no time or brainspace, and c’mon, I gave you halloumi fries last week. Doesn’t that allow me some beatific laurel-resting till around the year 2017?

So, uh, admittedly the recipe hasn’t changed, but for the butterscotch chips instead of almonds. Said butterscotch chips were purchased from Martha’s Backyard, this amazing American foodstuff and stuff-stuff supply store in Auckland, where I also bought liquid smoke, three large boxes of nerds, and a bunch of fake plastic roses, all in black. For Hallowe’en, or whatever occasion seems fitting sooner. The butterscotch chips are fun, but not essential – they have an oddly artificial smoky caramel flavour and terracotta hue, but work with the juicy chunks of apple and warm cinnamon. 
Muffins are so easy to make – for one thing, you barely have to stir the mixture, in fact the less the better – and also they take hardly any time in the oven. Just enough to make your house smell snugly of cinnamon. They’re a lot smaller than your usual muffins from a shop, but they also have a tenderness that mass-produced ones tend to reject in favour of adopting the texture of a foam shoe insole. For a beige shoe.

These are just really delicious and comforting, and handle being frozen and then microwaved back to life as snacking needs dictate. And in case you missed it, again, the recipe is here. From…2010. At least it was late 2010!

Other life things:

Had a Campari and grapefruit cocktail during a last brunch before dear Kim and Brendan travelled overseas for seven weeks.

Started knitting a beanie with the leftover yarn from my cape. I just found a pattern online and worked out how to ‘read’ it, and started knitting. I’m very proud of myself for this progress.


Ate floor pizza and wine for Sarah-Rose’s birthday. Strewed nerds candy hither and yon, but luckily mostly into my own mouth.
Went to my first ever No Lights No Lycra. Just dancing around in the dark for an hour: it was euphoric.
In most pressing news, changed my usual eyeliner from flicky to overloaded and smudgy (this is probably the most important thing I’ve ever said on this blog.)

AND: I’ve been in cahoots with Delaney to plan my Auckland cookbook launch next Tuesday! The venue is only wee so if you’d like an invite for yourself or someone else, just email it and I’ll send it your way. I’m really excited – I get to make another speech! Come along! It will be fancy! If I have to say the word fancy once every five seconds!

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title via: Britney. I still remember the dance from the chorus to this song.
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music lately: 
Every now and then I listen to a lot of Kate Nash and howl at the moon from all the feelings it produces within me. We Get On does this in particular. So do all the rest of her songs.
Super Rich Kids, Frank Ocean. I adore this man. 
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next time: I will have had a sleep, I promise. And I also will have made some food that I can blog about. That I didn’t post about in 2010 (late 2010, at least!) 

this is my idea of fun

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Halloumi fries: they’re not just A Thing, they’re really something.
For all that I go on at length, such length, about how my brain can make my life difficult, occasionally it serves up an idea of distinct majesty that almost makes everything else worth it. Most recently: it was a frustrating, and frustratingly typical sleepless night when I had the idea for halloumi fries. What if you slice halloumi into thin rectangles, dust them with flour and deep-fry them? Would they be crunchy on the outside and melting on the inside with the stability of fries and the yielding salty tumescence of cheese? Or would they dissolve into puddles the instant they hit the hot pan, melting messily everywhere and absorbing half the oil and being generally horrific, in terms of taste, texture and money squandered?
Happily – rapturously, in fact, mere happiness doesn’t quite convey the um, rapture of the situation: it worked. I’m pretty used to things going disastrously wrong in the kitchen. Sometimes ingredients just don’t do what I assume of them, sometimes I am very clumsy, sometimes an idea is misguided or, like athletics and mathematics and haircuts, simply better done by a professional that isn’t me.
But these were perfect. Really, really, sorta bafflingly exceptional. Given the propensity for things to go wrong – halloumi is expensive, hot oil is intimidating, I am me, I couldn’t believe how breathtakingly straightforward the path to deliciousness was.

Simply coating these in flour before frying makes them so spontaneous-fist-in-the-air crisp and crunchy, yet the insides still have that soft, buttery halloumi bulginess. They are delicious, so delicious that you will eat them with brows furrowed in wonderment at how you’ve hit the one of the (hopefully many) high points of your very own existence.

(I don’t know, I kinda like this recipe, I guess.)

an unattractive but necessarily informative picture for you of the cheese frying. So now you know that this is what the cheese looks like when it’s frying. 
 
They are sufficiently sublime on their own, but if you want some kind of accompaniment, I’d suggest a tomato relish of some form, or a mix of wholegrain mustard and mayonnaise, or maybe aioli if you’re able to handle the rich-rich-rich of it all, or perhaps even just a dish of balsamic vinegar, which takes me back to pairing fish and chips with vinegar as a child.
 
halloumi fries
 
a recipe by myself. I considered adding chili powder or paprika to the flour but minimal is best here, to show off the excellence of the cheese and the frying process. My one main caution here is make sure you use a brand of halloumi that you know is firm and holds its shape. Some brands are more melty than others. I used Axelos since it was all the no-good supermarket had, and it worked fantastically.
 
serves two, but only if you really like the person and can manage to huffily, begrudgingly sacrifice some of these fries to them (I’m such a dick, I know.) 
 

1 block – 200g or so – of halloumi
1/2 cup plain flour (I initially wanted to use polenta but I only had flour, so: flour.) 
Plain oil, such as rice bran or grapeseed, for frying

Slice the halloumi into relatively even rectangles. I can’t tell whether I like these better as slightly wider, flatter shapes or thinner, more french-fry esque, so tend to do a bit of both. Any bits that crumble or fall off can still be used as a mid-frying snack for yourself. 

Heat up around an inch and a half of oil in a saucepan – really, that’s all you need – using a little offcut of halloumi to work out when it’s ready to go – put it in the pan and there should be rapid bubbles moving around it. Then eat it, of course.  

Place the flour on a plate and put about half the halloumi on it, turning over each slice to thoroughly coat it. Spoon each slice carefully into the pan – they might slowly float towards each other but they shouldn’t stick or anything. Also I just used a regular metal serving spoon for this, tongs might be easier but I didn’t want to dent or break the cheese slices. Allow the oil to bubble away and turn the slices over after a minute or so, once they’re golden brown on the underside (obviously you will have to check this, I don’t expect you to just know somehow.) Remove with the spoon to a plate with a couple of pieces of paper towel on it, and continue with the rest of the halloumi. The second batch tends to cook a lot faster, because the oil has really hit its stride in terms of being blastingly hot. 

Seriously. Thanks, brain. When I was eating these, I thought “this might actually be the most significant and valuable discovery of 2013“. I think I was being pretty sincere, too. Which is a little concerning. But you eat these, and then try telling me I’m exaggerating. Presuming you both like and can eat cheese in the first place, of course. I know hybrid foods – the cronut, the…um, cronut, it’s all I can think of right now – can be both overwrought and overdone till they’ve lost all sense of context and of being an actual food. These may speak of gimmick and wilful excess, neither of which I really have a problem with, but I promise you, in a fairly confident and calm manner, that these are simply incredibly good.

Also maybe some kind of potential phenomenon, if only in my brain. Which is not such a bad place all the time, after all.

Also: I finished my latest knitting project, a hooded cape. I am so proud of myself about this – it’s a large garment, it involved hours of stitching, I learned so many new moves, and…now I have a witchy cape which is hugely warm but also practical but also makes me feel a bit like Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens. Not that she had an easy life, but she sure knew how to dress cunningly.
Finally, I had a lovely, super-fun interview about my cookbook in Canta, the Canterbury Uni student magazine. You can see a pdf of it here, and I’m on page fourteen. Yay interviews, I love them!
Finally-finally, I am still trying to organise an Auckland launch party for the cookbook so if you have any perspicacious thoughts regarding that, get in touch.

title via: Lana Del Rey, Video Games. She knows a thing or two about a thing or two. 
music lately:

Little Mix, Move. If you liked Girls Aloud’s Biology, that kind of twenty-two-pop-songs-whisked-into-one sound, then this should appeal.

Kanye West, Mercy. I love Kanye more every time he does something. Literally, almost anything he does, I’m like “yeah, Kanye!”

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.