These Things Take Time

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(Yes, that is The Smiths I’m quoting in the title. ) Finally! A new post. It has been a long time coming. Uni is keeping me good and stressed, and I have a presentation and a 2500 word essay to pull out of the air this week…

Above: Bla, bla, chocolate shmocolate. Yes, I made another chocolate cake, this time the Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cake from Nigella’s marvelous Feast for Emma’s 22nd birthday; the cake was amazing, the photos weren’t, but I rather liked this swirly shot.

I’m sick of seeing sweet things on this blog, and I’m sure you must be too, but bear with me – I’d hate to lose a reader for want of a sausage. (heh!) Because I’m temporarily relying on our old digital camera which is really…not very good (I know, artist – tools – do not blame) and our actual camera is still unavoidably detained, the only way I can take blog-worthy photos is if there is natural light. Considering our flat gets about 14 minutes of natural light per day in winter, and that it has been raining non-stop for the last month or two…well. It doesn’t make for snap-happiness. Plus, it’s always dark by the time I start cooking dinner. During the day is when I bake. So that’s what you get to see. It’s a pity, because if I say so myself, I’ve been making some pretty nifty dinners lately – pumpkin and black bean curry, corn chowder, bobotie, raw salad with hot and sour dressing and sesame noodles, mushroom risotto…but for you: more sweet things.

There were some blackened, rock-hard bananas that had been in the freezer forever. Because our freezer space is limited at best, and because they were just sitting there balefully, annoying me, I decided to turn said bananas into some muffins. Sounds dull, sounds obvious, but once you bite into one – fresh from the oven, with the warm tickle of cinnamon present in your throat and the flavour of honey flooding your tastebuds – it makes me wonder why I don’t encase this fruit in lumps of quickly-stirred batter more often. They’re squishy, they’re sweet, they take five minutes to make, and they freeze well. This particular recipe of Nigella’s is quite apt for the current economic downturn – minimal butter and sugar, no eggs…

Banana Muffins (from Nigella’s equally warm and cinnamon scented How To Be A Domestic Goddess, my love for this book is intense!)

30g melted butter
60mls (1/4 cup) honey (I sometimes use half honey, half golden syrup)
3 large, very ripe bananas
150g flour
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
Good dash cinnamon

Heat oven to 190 C. Mash the bananas, add the butter, honey and cinnamon. Carefully fold in the dry ingredients. If it looks tooooo dry add a couple of tablespoons of milk. The main point is not to overmix them. Spoon evenly into a 12-bun muffin tin lined with paper cases (or use a nifty silicone one like I did) and bake for 20-25 minutes. Leave in the tin for five minutes before removing. Eat.

Not revolutionary…but delicious.

Because it seemed as though on this particular day we were going to get more than our 14 minutes of natural light, I decided to really go nuts (yes, this is my version of living it up) and make cupcakes. Wait, it gets better – Pina Colada Cupcakes.

Nigella’s cupcake recipe has served me well. In each of her 6 cookbooks (all of which I own – ker-ching!) she includes one or other form of cupcake, and between the simplicity of the recipe itself and the amount of times I’ve reproduced it I hardly ever actually consult the text. Not everyone is as vigilant as I though. This variation on Nigella’s ur-recipe runs thusly – take 125g each of butter and sugar, cream thoroughly, add either a drained can of crushed pineapple in juice or about 200g chopped real pineapple, then two eggs, 125g flour, 2 t baking powder…a teaspoon of Malibu if you like, and a splash of milk if the batter needs it…divide between 12 cupcake cases, bake at 180 for 15 minutes. I iced with a slapdash buttercream (you know, butter, icing sugar, bit of water) to which I added a pinprick of Boyajian orange oil…finally I strewed some coconut over the fragrant cupcakes to complete the Pina Colada effect.

Even though I didn’t soften the butter enough and so it sort of affected the baking process, the finished cakelets tasted fabulous. There’s something about coconut and pineapple, they’re such a classic combination. Which is why I’ve appropriated it here and then tried to take all the credit for something really quite unimaginative…

I realise it’s bordering on churlish to complain about my rapidly diminishing time and then talk about a film that I watched, but I couldn’t spend the whole weekend doing schoolwork. Anyway, Enchanted – you know, that self-reflexive Disney film – has come out on DVD and I rented it from the video hut down the road. I ended up watching it alone because Tim’s a hater, but it was actually really very good. I laughed out loud more than I expected. And it has Idina Menzel in it! She doesn’t even sing, she just acts, which is pretty cool. It’s a small but relatively pivotal role, and they could have gotten, oh I don’t know, Demi Moore or Rachel Griffiths or…I don’t know, even Hillary Swank to play the role, it’s not like they didn’t have the budget for it. Anyway, Idina is very cool in the role, she looks gorgeous and it’s nice that she didn’t get the “bad stepmother” story arc. James Marsden, as the uber-prince Edward, is hilarious. He manages to wring every drop of physical humour out of his role, and I love how he exaggerates the trad Disney prince. Susan Sarandon, for someone so awesome, is surprisingly…meh…Patrick Dempsey does a decent straight man, and Amy Adams is really likeable. I’d seen pictures of her and she didn’t look like she had a lot of spark, but she lights up on screen. Timothy Spall is as nifty as ever.

Speaking of movies, okay, so I often catch the cable car into Lambton Quay for work. On the swipe-card turnstiles there are these signs saying “No Entry for Small Children.” Every time I see those signs, I think to myself, “Gee, I should buy No Country for Old Men for Tim. It’s violent, Oscar winning and Coen-penned – he’ll love it!” And then I think happily about Javier Bardem for a spell. And then I soberly nay-say myself, refusing to be jettisoned into capitalism by a suggestive sign. Don’t fall into their trap, I think with caution. This can go back and forth. And it happens every time I go to work. I’ve tried to catch myself in the act, but those signs get me every time. You know what I’m talking about, right? (*small voice* just me?)

Aint No Sunshine

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Another day, another chocolate cake. Seriously, I’ve eaten more chocolate cake in the last month than I normally do in a year. It has continued to rain steadily in Wellington – indeed, over the whole country – and there was even a sizeable slip not far from where my flat is. But on Saturday morning I felt the oddest sensation. I woke up with the sun streaming through the windows. I didn’t know what to do with myself at the sight of blue sky. I felt like a babushka from Old Rumania, shucking off my winter cloak to prepare for the feasting of Springtide. Well, it wasn’t so much “sunny” as “not raining” but Tim and I took the opportunity to zoom into town to do some jobs and that afternoon, while there was still more blue than grey in the sky, I made a cake.

I had some cream cheese leftover from the cheesecake I made for Tearaway magazine, and although it would have been entirely more economical to use it in some pasta sauce or something, I decided to build a chocolate cake around it. And no, I didn’t use it in the icing, which is more conventional, but in the actual cake mix. The recipe comes from the bountiful Nigella’s Feast, a cookbook which keeps on giving. No matter how much batter I shmeer on it, its pages never get stuck together. No matter how many times I read it, I always find something new I want to make now. In this case, the Tropical Chocolate Cake, which hosts an intriguing mix of pineapple, chocolate and coconut flavours.

I decided to modify Nigella’s method somewhat. She makes an enticing two-layer cake sandwiched and slathered with a coconut meringue frosting. She says, a little snippily, to “lose the Bounty connection” if the idea of meringue palls somewhat, but I decided against it because I just couldn’t be bothered. Instead I made one bigger, bungalow-type cake smothered in a coconut custard buttercream. Still sounds good, right? In fact that’s all I’m-a talk about today, uncharacteristically. Because this cake is the only thing I’ve managed to get decent photos of.

Above: This isn’t exactly photographically sound, but then the food-processor shots don’t really have to be, do they? In fact they don’t even offer anything at all; they are what my media studies lecturer would call a “kernel,” that is, a sort of light, C-plot segment that doesn’t move the narrative forward but offers light relief from the main thrust of the action. Consider yourself schooled!

Tropical Chocolate Cake, adapted slightly from Feast

1x400g can pineapple pieces in juice
75g cream cheese
200g butter, pretty soft
200g flour
100g sugar
100g brown sugar
40g cocoa
2 eggs
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
2 T malibu or juice from the can of pineapple

Set the oven to 180 C (360 F) and line a 23cm Springform. First you want to whizz up the pineapple and cream cheese. Then add the rest of the ingredients, scraping occasionally with a spatula. Pour this alluringly delicious mix into the caketin, bake for roughly 40 minutes, maybe more. And uhm, that’s it. Simple, no?

I iced it with a mixture of 40g butter, 1 T custard powder, enough icing sugar to turn it into a cohesive substance, 1 t coconut essence, and a tablespoon each of milk and water. And then I thought I might as well dust it with chocolate sprinkles that I found in the cupboard. They were a year or two past their best before date, but how bad can sprinkles get?

It is moist, fragrant, delicious, and a genius combination of flavours. Very summery too, with elements of Pina Colada and Hawaiian Tropic Sunscreen. This hardly a bad thing; I say this as someone who can happily pass several minutes’ time sitting there inhaling the scent of a bottle of SPF 40+ (truly, it’s gooood.) As soon as I finished taking the photos of the cake it started raining again and hasn’t really stopped (it’s now Monday.)

Since the little tacker was so popular last time, and because Tim managed to catch this doozy of a picture, I thought we could be graced by the presence of *cough*Oscar the non-existent kitty*cough*.

I love that flagrant disdain he has for the laws of, you know, breathing.


Next time: well, the bread photos weren’t so crash-hot, hence their lack of presence here. Who knows?

Grainspotting

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It has recently occurred to me that while I frequently wax lyrical about rolled oats and quinoa flakes and kibbled dust and the like, I rarely consider them in their most natural state: porridge. I have a few childhood porridge-memories – my late maternal grandfather making it for me when I stayed with him, having a bowlful at Nana’s place and bemusing her (I distinctly remember this bit for some reason if you’re reading Nana!) by sprinkling over white, instead of brown, sugar. To be frank I wasn’t the biggest fan of its blandly creamy flavour, I ate it more out of an early-indoctrinated sense of politeness than anything else. But, as you may have gathered from my endless praise, I’m having something of a porridge revolution. I guess that would make this Revolution 1 (as opposed to “number 9…number 9…” get thee to the Beatles White Album if you don’t know what I’m on about. Not that I know what they’re on about.)

Even though it sounds faintly vile, I tend to have cold ‘porridge’ in the mornings – just oats, and whatever other kibbled and ground bits I have to hand, with cold water stirred in, and a dash of cinnamon. The oats soften remarkably quickly – I usually leave them sitting wetly for about five minutes – and the fragrant cinnamon makes me feel like I’m actually eating something more than paste. The ratio usually goes something like; 2 1/2 T oats, 2 1/2 T quinoa flakes, 1 T wheat bran, 1 T ground linseeds, 1 shake cinnamon, water to cover. What you see in the picture above though, is actual porridge…after a Swiss Ball class at uni on Wednesday I felt like something a little sustaining and warm, as it was inevitably raining again. So I microwaved the bowl of oats for a bit and added a swirl of golden syrup – perfect! It’s funny, even though I was not, as aforementioned, a massive fan of it as a child, there seems something so wonderfully comforting about eating it now.

Forget what the Milo and Cornflake and Nutella ads tell you about sustained energy for today’s kids, oats are so filling it’s ridiculous. When I wasn’t having them for breakfast, I always would end up feeling all light-headed and incompetent around 10am, and now I just feel incompetent (sh-k-boom!) but in all honesty, I can putter along quite happily till 1 or 2 without really needing to eat a thing, I realise this is hardly a new revelation – I’ve mentioned it before on this blog in fact – but until you try – she says wide eyed and evangelically – you have no idea of the difference it makes.

Before you run away in fear from my Flanders-like enthusiasm (“it’s less fun that way!”), I present you the dairy-laden spectre of cheesecake.

In the name of journalistic integrity, I can’t tell you toooo much about this cheesecake, as I made it for the September issue of Tearaway magazine. I was getting a bit freaked out because it has been raining nonstop here in Wellington (and most of NZ in fact) for the last couple of weeks – oh, you think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. Utterly, utterly mercifully, it eased up on Tuesday afternoon and I had a window of opportunity to take some photos in natural light. Thank goodness, otherwise who knows what I would have done (my deadline is a-looming!). Anyway, I won’t show you all the rather nice photos I took, because they’re for the mag, but I couldn’t resist just one, especially because it is such a great recipe, and absolutely fuss-free – no gelatine to deal with (which, in my case, inevitably turns into gooey strings instead of folding coherently into the mixture) and no baking. Five points if you guess who the recipe is from. Oh that’s right…

Cherry Cheesecake from Nigella Express.
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By the way, this is only ‘cherry ‘ by way of the conserves that she specifies you heap on top of the finished cheesecake. I’m sure you could use anything you fancy without the Cheesecake Police coming after you.
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Base:
200g plain sweet biscuits (Nigella says 125g but friend, I like a thick base)
75g soft butter (I tend to trust Nidge’s instinct for butter, and didn’t add any more)

Blitz the biscuits in the food processor with the butter, press into a 20cm Springform.

Filling:
300g cream cheese (At room temp, unless you have serious guns)
60g icing sugar
Juice of a lemon
250mls cream

Beat the cream cheese, sugar, and lemon juice. In another bowl, whip the cream, then fold, about quarter at a time, into the cream cheese. Pile onto the base, smooth…refrigerate for 3 hours or overnight…and that’s it. It does hold together, despite not having much to it, and is coolly, creamily, tangily delicious. I don’t know if it’s just me – do all family parties have a buffet table? – but it is just begging for a can of drained, crushed pineapple to be folded through the mixture too.
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By the way, thanks for the suggestions regarding the brisket, I cooked it tonight (didn’t photograph, as I still find it difficult to make stews look anything other than sloppy), slowly with canned tomatoes, garlic, onion, cumin, nutmeg, a pinch of…tumeric…twas delicious! As I said before, natural light is a bit of a rarity here. Not only does it rain whenever I leave the house, it also seems to be particularly deluge-inous whenever I leave the house for Swiss Ball class at the uni rec centre. Maybe someone up there is trying to say something. We don’t have it so bad though – Mum and Dad have been repeatedly without power, their driveway was flooded and a tree fell over, and Tim’s parents’ farm is a complete mess, with several sheds absolutely smashed. It’s scary how quickly it all happened.

Next time: might be a little while off as I am getting freaked out with assignments for uni. However, I absolutely excelled myself as far as time management goes by mixing and kneading a loaf of bread this morning before work (at 7.30am). I left it to rise in the fridge, and baked it to go with dinner when I got home at half five, and I will blog about it when I get the chance, should the photos be useable.

Finally – finally – Tim and I splashed out on tickets to see the marvelously hilarious Bill Bailey (of the intensely funny Black Books show, etc) when he comes to New Zealand! They were pretty expensive but we run a fairly tight ship most days of the year and it will coincide with his birthday. Tim’s, not Bill’s. And we are totally going to wait at the stage door for him! Squee!

Solid Gold Easy Action

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These potatoes are neither radioactive nor laced with the sort of E-numbers that will keep a three year old awake for a week. It is in fact, my new friend tumeric, which I’m sneaking into everything these days. It has a squillion medicinal properties (and Mum, according to Wikipedia it repels ants if you sprinkle it in the garden), a delightfully earthy sweet flavour, and stains your food pleasingly, eye-scorchingly yellow.

Panchphoran Aloo, or potatoes with whole spices, comes from Nigella’s seminal text How To Eat and is what I made for dinner tonight. HTE is so densely packed full of wonderful recipes that with initial reads it is impossible to take everything in. It took me a while to pick up on this fabulous potato dish but now I’ve made it so many times that I don’t even use the (tumeric-smudged) book anymore. What you want to do: Get lots of floury potatoes, scrub them and then parboil for five-ten minutes. Nigella doesn’t instruct you to do this, but it makes them a lot easier to cook. Drain and dice the potatoes, then toss them into a hot, non-stick pan, stirring occasionally still somewhat golden. Add a spoonful or so of the following and stir: cumin seeds, coriander seeds, fenugreek, fennel seeds, mustard seeds…tumeric. There’s a bit of standing and stirring involved but it’s really simple to make and tastes marvelous, especially with plenty of sea salt.

This is a very cheap meal for me because I have all those spices to hand (including a 500g catering-sized pack of cumin seeds that I’ve made surprising headway with) but I can see why the lesser-stocked amongst you might freak out at an ingredients list like that. I find health food stores really handy for cheap bags of spices and things if you want to start somewhere. There’s one on Cuba Street which has all manner of enticing wee bags of things…that I am quite embarrassingly addicted to purchasing. Last time I was there (on the way to The Dark Knight) I walked out clutching 2 bags of quinoa flakes, a bag of kibbled rye, a bag of ground linseeds and a bag of bran. It’s addictive I tells ye.

By the way, I apologise for the harsh photography. I’m having ongoing camera issues, which, coupled with the total lack of natural light here (it has rained for about 3 weeks straight) does not good food porn maketh. I also apologise if this post is lacklustre…these assignments are keeping me stressed and busy, instead of stressed and stationary.

With the rain and the sleet and the damp and the cold comes a couple of benefits. For example: steamed pudding. I first bought my pudding steamer in the infant days of this blog (back when I had permanent poor exposure and no depth of field, ah, circularity) and it occurred to me that it hadn’t gotten any use in a while. A casual flick through Nigella’s delicious How To Be A Domestic Goddess (while I should have been doing something more productive) had me longing suddenly to introduce butter to its amigos sugar and flour. You have to get going in advance – the whole two hours steaming thing – but apart from that these things practically make themselves. And they’re so delicious, not stodgy at all, but miraculously light. And I love the way a fat, golden jammy slice of this pudding slowly soaks up the milk pooling in the base of the bowl…I highly recommend you look up all your very old cookbooks, you know, the sort that have recipes for salads set with gelatine, and make yourself a darned steamed pudding. Unless you’re in the northern hemisphere in which case maybe wait a few months. It’s one of the best things about this weather.

If I can’t be perky, nothing livens things up like the neighbourhood cat – seriously, I defy you to view this and not feel the slightest stirrings of mirth in your soul.


Above: This isn’t our cat. If the landlord is reading, this isn’t even a cat, it’s…a teddy bear (ceci n’est pas un chat?) But seriously, it’s this kitteh that hangs round our ‘hood and occasionally stands by the door looking cute and vulnerable and what would you do? Turns out that its most natural, ideal sleeping position is…face-planted. Did you know cats can breathe out their ears?

Next time: I’m not sure, again, so I’m also not sure why I persist with this “next time” feature. I bought some brisket though, with a view to cooking it slowly somehow…any suggestions?

The Dark Of The Matinee

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Overheard:

Tim: That was amazing.
Me: Oh my gosh yes. I haven’t been this moved by a film since Rent.
Tim: *exasperated silence*
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Well, since everyone else in the world is talking about it I might as well too…Just a quick post to say that we (myself, Tim, Emma, Paul, Scotty and Matt) went to see The Dark Knight when it opened here in New Zealand on Tuesday night…okay it was actually 5.30 in the afternoon but it was pitch black and howling with sleety wind so none of the excitement was lost. Anyway; WOW. I hate scary movies and go out of my way to avoid them, but this wasn’t so much scary as intense and brilliant. The hype is pretty well justified, I’d say. Heath Ledger was just electrifying as The Joker but it was eerie seeing him, so recently dead, 20ft tall across the screen. And Christian Bale is quite amazing as Batman/Bruce Wayne – darkly charismatic. Maggie Gyllenhaal I could take or leave, but Micheal Caine was as fun as ever. A very, very good movie.

In other housekeeping, I’ve just discovered that I have about 470 assignments and presentations due over the next three weeks so posting might be a little light. Or, you know, daily. I am also having…erm…camera issues…and clumsiness issues…and warranty issues (you join the dots) which is very depressing and might take a while to sort out, thus impinging on my already dubious ability to take blog-worthy photos.

You can find my articles (2 so far, another one on the way) for Tearaway magazine here, if you feel like wincing at my overeager attempts to sound down-with-the-kids, or indeed trying the recipes, which are quite good I think.

And I’m done. Cakes below. Not sure whether I’ll pop back in here or not at this stage, but have a good weekend!

A Cake Is A Cake Is A Cake Is A Cake Is A

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Tim and I have been studying the sometimes-unapproachable poetry of Gertrude Stein in our American Lit class. I didn’t know an awful lot about her before this, apart from the fact that she was namechecked in (a) an Anastasia Krupnik novel and (b) the La Vie Boheme number from Rent. (Interestingly, Langston Hughes, who we will be discussing in our next lecture, also had a glass raised to him in this song.) It would be pretty cruel of me to write this post to write this post in the style of Gertrude Stein, if I were to write this in the style if I were, if I were, if I were to write the style of, if I were to, would it, if I were, in the style, in the in the in the Gertrude Stein if I were, if I were to, would you if I were, would you throw your computer out the window and send me hate mail?

And would I even be writing in the style of Gertrude Stein or in fact of the publisher who archly rejected her? “Hardly one copy should sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”

Anyhoodle, enough highbrow literary references – on with the cake!

I’ve made Nigella’s Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake from Feast before, and her Chocolate Fudge Cake from Nigella Bites, and this cake above, the Chocolate Sour Cream Cake from How To Be A Domestic Goddess is in fact somewhere in the middle of the two. It disappeared quickly and is, like the others in the tripartite, a rather perfect cake. It’s not overly rich, but moist and cocoa-y, and has lots of lovely, creamy icing which softly sandwiches the two layers together. It’s also simple to make, the sort of thing you can knock together on the spur of the moment – as I did. A rose is a rose, but a cake is not just a cake, it brings joy – well, maybe the making of it only brings happiness to a food nerd like me, but the eating of it is something else altogether.

Chocolate Sour Cream Cake (slightly adapted because Nigella seems to like using lots of bowls, which is all very well and good if you actually have a dishwasher)

200g butter
200g sugar
2 large eggs
40g best cocoa
150mls sour cream
200g plain flour
3/4 t baking powder
1/4 t baking soda
1 1/2 t best vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 180 C, and butter and line two 20cm cake tins. Beat the butter and sugar together thoroughly, add the eggs, cocoa, and fold in the flour, raising agents and sour cream. For some reason the mixture was a little too stiff (hee) for me, I’m sure adding a tablespoon or so of milk won’t harm anything. Spread between the two tins – and it will be stiff stuff – and bake for 30 minutes, allowing the cakes to cool thoroughly after. They will look woefully flat, but once sandwiched thickly with icing it will appear more pleasingly majestic.

Icing

150g dark chocolate
80g butter
125g sour cream
1 T golden syrup
Icing sugar

Melt the butter and chocolate together, and let it cool a little. Stir in the syrup and sour cream, and enough sifted icing sugar to create a deliciously spreadable mixture. Use it to sandwich an ice the two cakes, and then…lick the bowl.

Rather uncharacteristically, it was a two-cake week. Wherefore? Well, the local Glengarry bottle shop had a fire a while back and had only just re-opened…on a whim Tim and I went in for a look, I have to say the people that work there are always very polite to us and answer our questions very seriously (even if we’re wearing those grey trackpants with elasticated ankles…both of us…) Before I knew it Tim had purchased some Guinness and implored me to make Nigella’s world-famous-in-our-flat Chocolate Guinness Cake. I can’t say no to a request like that.

I’ve made this before, several times in fact, and it is always astounding. The combination of dark, bitter beer and chocolate cake may sound like some kind of fusion-nightmare, but it is a ridiculously, rapturously good pairing. It has just occured to me that while I’ve blogged about this cake many times, I’ve never posted a recipe for it, I might as well change that right now. This page in Feast has become smudged with cocoa and smeared with batter; when I open the book a small dust-cloud of flour rises. Therefore it is with no small recommendation that I give you this recipe.

Chocolate Guinness Cake

By the way, I didn’t mistype the amount of sugar. Yes, it’s a scary amount, but…it’s a big cake. And it’s not overpoweringly sweet in the slightest.

250mls Guinness
250g butter
75g cocoa
400g sugar
145mls sour cream (one of those little yoghurt-tub sized, er, tubs)
2 eggs
1 T real vanilla extract
275g plain flour
2 1/2 t baking soda

Okay. So, set your oven to 180 C and butter/line a 23cm springform tin. First of all you want to get a big ‘ol pan, pour in the Guinness and add the butter – cut into small pieces – and gently heat it so the butter melts. It shouldn’t bubble, keep the heat low. Now, simply stir in the rest of the ingredients – I use a spatula – and pour into your tin. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on your oven. The kitchen will smell heavenly, I promise you.

Once cool, ice with a mixture of 200g cream cheese (NOT low-fat), 125mls whipped cream, and 150g icing sugar folded together.

This, like Dame Helen Mirren, only gets better with time. I would find myself making excuses to go to the kitchen to shave off thin slices…and I wasn’t the only one, the cake swiftly shrank, chunk by chunk, getting denser and tastier and intensely more delicious with each day.

What’s that noise? Oh yeah. It’s your conscience, saying “mmmmaaaa-aaa-aake the chocolate Guinness cake…”

And finally, because like cakes, not all cookies are created equal, I bring you, erm, cookies.

These also make a very regular appearance, in fact I hardly even photograph them these days. However there was actually something resembling natural light outside yesterday (hey, it is Winter) after I pulled these out of the oven so I quickly started snapping. These cookies are amazing, as I said I make them lots, but the best thing about the recipe is that it’s so forgiving, and…it contains oats. Much like lentils, oats have a special place in my heart (perhaps near the arteries, holding a cool, soothing hand to whatever their feverish forehead would be) and I love incorporating them into my food wherever possible.

This particular batch of cookies contain shards of intense, 80% cocoa dark chocolate, ground linseeds, poppy seeds and – oh yes I did go there – quinoa flakes. I realise this makes them sound like Little Patties of Earnest Nastiness, but they taste exactly like chocolate chunk cookies ought to, because all the extras just sort of melt into them. They are in fact, my favourite permutation of these cookies, and trust me there have been several varations on this theme.

And they’re practically healthy. I mean quinoa. It even owns lentils in terms of greatness and lets face it, a few nutty flakes of quinoa are more appealing in a cookie than a paste of cooked lentils.

Pink Goes Good With Green

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Kay – the one who is not my mother – hit the nail on the head. The title of my last post was a pun on a quote from the musical Wicked. The long explanation can be seen on youtube in this video of Kristin Chenoweth as Galinda singing ‘Popular’ to Idina Menzel’s Elphaba. The short explanation – Galinda puts a pink flower in the green girl, Elphaba’s hair, and says “pink goes good with green” – I think it’s supposed to be symbolic of their friendship too (‘scuse my geekiness…) Not a real post today, because I’ve squandered all my time on wine, women and song; oops I mean I’ve been doing uni work and frantically writing my column for Tearaway magazine. And now I have to take off to town even though it’s bitterly cold outside because there is a football game on with The Phoenix, remember them? The team who played David Beckham last December? Anyway, I don’t even have time to make sure this post is actually coherent! I’ll edit this properly when I get home, promise! Au revoir!
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Update: We won! 1-nil vs the Mariners who are some team from Australia. They’re in “The League” though, and whatever this mysterious league is, apparently it’s quite prestigious and the Phoenix are the only NZ team on it. I have to say, football is more fun when it’s summer and…you’ve had a couple of red wines. Nevertheless it was a good time, even for a dyed-in-the-wool sports hater like myself.

While I have something resembling your undivided attention, may I direct it Helen Mirren-wards? I saw this post on Go Fug Yourself, a sassy blog dedicated to pointing out the lamentable flaws in celebrities wardrobes, they do however graciously concede when something is worn well. And oh my, how she wears a bikini well. In all seriousness, her cleavage is mesmerising.

Finally in this update…Tim and I have been watching The Johnny Cash Show DVD, it has amazing footage – a ridiculously young Bob Dylan harmonising with Cash on The Girl From The North Country…Tammy Wynette, with mind-bogglingly vertical hair singing Stand By Your Man…and a personal favourite of mine – Neil Young strumming a guitar and singing Needle And The Damage Done. It is a silencingly good performance. We seem to acquire DVDs in our sleep, our collection grows all the time, but I’m glad we got this one.

Next time – I went slightly mad this week and made chocolate cakes, unfortunately the pictures are of dubious quality but that’s what happens when the cakes barely sit still long enough to be photographed…

Pink Goes Good With Grain

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If anyone can tell me what is behind the (admittedly forced) pun in my title you win a million dollars.

Not. But, I would be kinda tickled if anyone can work it out.

Mum got me a bag of quinoa – something which I have, nerdily, been quite wild to try for some time now. I never thought I’d come across something more virtuous than lentils, but here I am. Life sure can take you on some interesting journeys. The Incans called quinoa the “mother of all grains” and are you going to argue with that recommendation? It contains forty squillion different vitamins and minerals and has more protein than any other non-meat product, and with all this you’d expect it to be kind of high maintenance, right? But no, a two year old could cook it. All you have to do is let it simmer for ten minutes, no pre-soaking or anything. As if all that weren’t thrilling enough, it actually tastes really good. Closest in texture to couscous, but much lighter, it has a somewhat nutty flavour which lends itself nicely to having chunks of roasted vegetables folded through…


Of course, adding roasted beetroot instantly turned the entire bowl of quinoa bright pink. Also in the mix was roasted carrot, walnuts, chopped spinach, and a perhaps-slightly-toooo-generous spoonful of ras-el-hanout. I thought about drizzling in some olive oil but the quinoa is so light and fluffy that I didn’t want it to be bogged down with gluggy oil.


Above: I did something very similar with some wholewheat pasta – more roasted beetroot, spinach, etc, but this time I included some mashed cloves of roasted garlic. The sweet nuttiness of the beetroot complemented the nuttiness of the pasta (I really need a new synonym to describe nuttiness huh?) and the garlic was a perfect addition. Again, as soon as I gave it a stir, the whole lot turned irrevocably, gaudily…pink.

Above: Once more – with organic burghal wheat. You probably don’t need me to point it out, but this inexplicably became tinted the pinkest of them all, which contrasted pleasingly with the snowy feta (added at the VERY last minute here for photographic purposes.) After that I kind of cooled it on the beetroot front but look, they’re really cheap and good for you, okay? And sometimes you have to take what you can get.

So it has been a bit of a wholegrain orgy in my kitchen lately. I know I’m smitten with them, but trust me, they’re more alluring than their earnest, hessian-weave image would suggest. And it’s not all roasted beetroot, for example, witness rolled oats cleverly disguised as pancakes…

I made these following an old recipe of Alison Holsts’s. It doesn’t make a lot, so is suited nicely to a cosy, lazy Sunday breakfast for two. They are surprisingly filling, but aren’t stodgy or lumpen at all.

Oaty Pancakes

3/4 cup rolled oats

3/4 cup milk

1/2 cup flour

1 t baking powder

1 egg

2 T sugar

2 T butter, melted

Pour the milk over the rolled oats in a good sized bowl, and leave to sit for 5-10 minutes, perhaps while you potter round getting the rest of the ingredients. Stir in the rest of the ingredients without overmixing, and add a little more milk to slacken if the batter looks too stiff. I did. I also melted the butter in the pan I planned on cooking the pancakes in, before tipping it into the batter (thus saving on dishes! Like a true student.) These work best as smallish cakes, about the size of one of Jennifer Lopez’ hoop earrings circa 2002 (meow!) and need flipping once bubbles appear. Don’t leave them for too long though as the bubbles aren’t as obvious with all those oats in the way. Eat however you want, with butter, with golden syrup, whatever.

All these various foods – oats, quinoa, burghal wheat, wholewheat pasta – are not only delicious they are also incredibly good for you. They are filling – when I used to have toast for breakfast I would not only be intensely hungry at lunch, I would also have that horrible empty-head-empty-stomach feeling. This is why I eat so much of them: So that I don’t end up buying chocolate bars at 10.00am, and so that I don’t feel bad about the big ol’ chocolate cake that I made this afternoon (and will blog about soon…)

In other news, I’m really enjoying all my papers so far this term. I may not feel that way when I’m wading neck-deep through assignments but so far, so enjoyable…however I am being positively haunted by advertising for Wicked in Melbourne, even long-suffering Tim pointed out a poster in excitement to me before – “oh” – realising it’s an Australian performance. Nevermind, these things all happen when they’re supposed to and it wouldn’t be so bad to see it in the West End even if I have to wait a while…Speaking of Broadway I am currently in love with the Spring Awakening soundtrack, if you don’t mind a little salty language and teenage angst the songs are utterly gorgeous.

Sugar Never Tasted So Good

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I have been a little frugal with my posting lately. This is partly due to the useless light for food photography (it’s pitch black outside at 5.30pm and glaringly lit within by energy-saver bulbs), but also, happily, because my mother and godmother were in town on a conference and have been recklessly indulging Tim and I in many meals out in town. Being relatively impoverished students we rarely go to restaurants and cafes so this was rather thrilling. As you may have read in my last post, I have been making a lot of soup for dinner – it’s so cheap – but there has been the occasional sweet respite hither and thither amongst the lentils and wholegrains. When it’s this cold outside – and inside – can you see your breath when you exhale in your house? – dinner alone isn’t always enough, one needs more, more more in the form of something (inevitably) buttery and sugary.

Crumble is the pudding I always turn to when I am cold and require quick solace and am unable to ignore my instinct to continue eating after dinner. The other night, as with all nights, I was feeling that way, and decided that an apple crumble for Tim and I wouldn’t be the end of the world. I plumped out the apples with a diced kiwifruit, and made a veeeerry generous topping of crumble (well, what’s the point if it’s only a mere sprinkling?) out of all manner of good things – butter, flour, custard powder, brown sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, oats, bran…

They were, like every crumble in the world, absolutely perfect. In particular I liked the nuttiness of the oats, the creaminess that the custard powder imparted, and the sharpness of the kiwifruit…


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I made the Pineapple Upside Down Cake from Nigella Express quite a while ago now but never got round to blogging about it what with one thing and another. It couldn’t be easier to make and is very good, I do love canned pineapple (drinking the leftover juice straight out of the can was always something I loved doing as a child) and it caramelises nicely under the batter. Unfortunately my can of pineapple rings didn’t cover the tin properly so I arranged some dried apricots here and there to fill in the gaps. Though you may think Nigella’s assertion that the inclusion of pineapple juice makes the cake layer fluffier is fanciful at best but honestly, it does…

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

100g each of butter, sugar, and flour
2 eggs
1 can of pineapple slices in juice (by my calculations you need 7 pieces), juice reserved
1 t baking powder
1/4 t baking soda
2 T sugar, extra

Set oven to 200 C. Nigella recommends either a 20cm tarte Tatin tin or a 23 cm cake tin, I, like perhaps many of you, do not own a tin de Tatin and so used the 23cm cake tin…I think a 20cm one would be better but then I do prefer a thicker layer of cake. Anyway, if you’re using a cake tin it’s not allowed to be a springform or loosebottomed one – for once. Sprinkle the 2 T extra sugar over the base of your tin and arrange the pineapple on top. Then, simply throw the rest of the ingredients in the food processor (or proceed with a wooden spoon) and make sure you remember to add 3 T of the reserved pineapple juice. Spread this over the pineapple, and don’t go eating any batter because there’s not a lot to go round. Bake for 30 minutes then carefully invert onto a plate. Slice into golden wedges of retro-deliciousness.

.It’s not all puddings. Sometimes a gal’s just got to bake gratuitiously. Oh sure, I can tell myself it’s for when Tim gets low blood sugar – and these have justified its existence in that respect more than once – but really, I just made these Apple Blondies for the sheer what-the-heckery of wanting to bake. I knew as soon as I saw the recipe on Kelly-Jane’s blog – and see it too for reference – that I was going to make them, and soon.

The first time I made these, I reduced the sugar greatly (Well, there’s 5 cups! In once recipe!) and halved the icing. They were great, but I realised the icing was there for a reason: it’s frigging magical. So, when I made them again just the other day, I was a bit more careful. I reduced the sugar in the batter, and replaced some of said sugar with dark, crumbly muscovado, which is so dense and caramelly and perfect with apples. I reduced the sugar by about a third in the icing, which meant there was still a nice thick spread of it. I doubled the apple content of the batter and added some milk because it seemed quite dry, which made for a much nicer blondie than my first batch. So, I might as well give you my adaptation of the recipe, but see Kelly-Jane’s blog for the original. Can I just point out though, that the original recipe calls for 2/3 of a cup of butter. Are there any Americans out there who can enlighten me how you measure butter in this way? America has bestowed upon us some fabulous things – Motown, The Baby Sitters Club, Idina Menzel, Johnny Cash, the concept of peanut butter as an ingredient…but I can’t fathom how measuring butter in cups is a good way of going about things.
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Apple Blondies with Brown Sugar Icing
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180g butter, softened
1 1/4 cups brown sugar (or a mix of brown and muscovado sugar, which I recommend)
2 eggs
2 apples, skin on, diced
2 cups plain flour
2 t baking powder
1/4 cup milk
As many walnuts as you like…although I find Brazil nuts lovely here.

This recipe is delightfully simple. Set your oven to 180 C and line a medium brownie tin (13 x 9 inches is what the recipe says) Beat the butter and sugar till fluffy and aerated, then add the eggs. If you are using a wooden spoon like I was, this will take a bit of muscle. Next, merely fold in the rest of the ingredients carefully, adding a little more milk if you deem it necessary. At this point do not whatever you do taste the mixture or you will never make it to the finished product. It is truly delicious stuff. Spread it into your prepared tin and bake for 25-30 minutes. Once cool, make the icing…

125g butter
1/2 cup muscovado sugar
2 T milk
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
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Melt the butter and muscovado sugar together in a saucepan, then add the milk, stirring all the time. Bring to the boil, then remove from the heat. Stir in the icing sugar once it has cooled a little, I didn’t actually measure the icing sugar at all, just stirred it in till I was happy with the consistency. Using a spatula, spread over your now-cooled blondies…

This stuff is wickedly, ridiculously, marvelously delicious. Prepare to win friends and influence people as they bid for a slice of it. If you can possibly help it, hold out till the next day (baking this at midnight if you have to) because it gets even better with a bit of time sitting round. I say this as a big fan of caramelly flavoured things, but it seems to be a crowd-pleaser across the board. Such superlatives have not been bandied about in my flat since the Chocolate Guinness Cake I made for St Paddy’s.

It has been a busy week, inbetween having a lovely time catching up with Mum, Tim and I were also in our first week back at uni. So far my classes are interesting (I’m in my third year of tertiary education and ‘interesting’ is the best I can come up with?) but I think it will be full-on as far as assignments are concerned.

Next time: I try Quinoa for the first time, thanks to Mum for giving me a bag of it…

O Broth, Where Art Thou?

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Just because it is summer in America, does not (unfortunately) mean it is summer in New Zealand. Just putting it out there – while y’all are consuming sorbets and frozen yoghurts and cooling salads, we have had snow in previously un-snowed locales, closed roads, gale force winds…Because of the said seasonal conditions, I have been on something of a soup kick lately. We’ve had it in various forms all week for dinner, and it’s ideal for combatting the incessant sharp chill of winter that permeates our damp, un-insulated, World Health Standard-violating flat.

Soup 1:


Above: Gold on gold…a taste of sunshine for when it’s rainy outside. This soup is something I came up with while riffing on my standard pumpkin soup recipe. Basically it is the same – roasted pumpkin, mashed roughly with a wooden spoon and with stock stirred in – but I added dense, mushy cooked red lentils, a good 2/3 cup which and pretty much made it a complete meal. As well as this I sprinkled over plenty of yellow tumeric, as you can see in this picture, and ras-el-hanout, a spice mix to which I am quite addicted. It isn’t too obscure, most places these days are stocking it, and it imparts headily warm, aromatic, gentle spiciness.

As well as being seriously healthy, pumpkin and lentils are two of the cheapest things around these days. The lentils I used were some organic ones my mum sent me and the pumpkin was from the local vege market. Mmm, moral fibre and actual fibre in one bowl.

To go with the soup, and to augment the sunny golden-ness, I whipped up a batch of cornbread. The recipe I use is Nigella’s and is a favourite of mine, it always works and can be fiddled and faddled with to no ill effect and is the perfect accompaniment to almost anything (particularly butter…)

Cornbread

175g cornmeal (or polenta, same diff so look for either)
125g plain flour
45g caster sugar
2 t baking powder
250ml full fat milk
1 egg
45g butter, melted

Set oven to 200 C. Grease whatever you’re using – a muffin tin, a 20cm-ish brownie tin, etc. What I usually do is melt the butter in a decent sized microwave-proof bowl. Then I stir in the milk and egg with a fork. Then tip in all the dry ingredients, mix till just combined – don’t worry about lumps – then pour into your receptacle and bake, for 20-25 minutes. I have made this with superfine cornmeal and the more granular stuff, and a mix of the two, anything is fine really although the granular stuff gives slightly more bite to your finished product.

We had this soup again, with leftover cornbread for mopping up, the next night. This time I roasted some carrots as well and mashed them in once tender. They gave an added note of natural sweetness which was quite effective…
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Soup 2:

One of my favourite things about Cuisine magazine is Ray McVinnie’s Quick Smart column, where he gives, every month – how does he do it? – an exhaustive list of meal ideas and recipes based on a particular theme. After reading his promptings to make any number of soups, I tried this. I sauteed finely chopped onions and garlic, then added some chopped free-range bacon, stirring till cooked. I added diced, floury potatoes, dried thyme, and porcini stock, and allowed it to simmer till the potatoes were utterly tender and melting into the stock. I sprinkled over some nutmeg and pink peppercorns and biffed in a crisp green handful of chopped spinach, which wilted on impact. This deliciously thick, comforting soup was what Tim and I ate while watching Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story on DVD. After we finished watching it we weren’t overly impressed, but the next day we were repeating quotes back and forth and cracking up…anyway it’s worth it for Jack White’s cameo as Elvis Presley alone.

On Friday night Tim and I had fish and chips, a decision perhaps fuelled by the amount of wine I had at after-work drinks that afternoon (nothing to worry about, but put it this way – I didn’t make it to Bikram yoga.) Through work I scored free tickets to see Samuel Flynn Scott, one of New Zealand’s most prolific musicians. He is well-known for his work with the Phoenix Foundation and the Eagle vs Shark soundtrack, as well as dabbling in other side projects yet…I’d never really heard any of his stuff. All I knew about him was that he was endowed with a fullsome beard and had participated in our Smoking: Not Our Future campaign. What can I say – we had a great night. He and his equally beardy band Bunnies on Ponies were tight, charismatic, fun, and the banter mercifully tended to err on the side of witty. Because I’ve never really heard much of their music I wouldn’t want to make any comparisons in case they were absolutely wrong but…they had a kind of ModestMouse-happyREM-SplitEnz thing going on. They finished with a rousing cover of the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, a ditty that I love…

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On Saturday I was lucky enough to catch up with my mother and my godmum, who were in town for a language teachers’ conference…after an enormous lunch with them at the Black Harp Tim and I had soup number 3 for dinner – a light, noodly Japanese-style broth.

Soup 4:

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I have stopped buying exciting ingredients with such mad gay abandon these days, partly because of money, partly because of lack of space, but when I found some dried borlotti beans going very cheaply at the Meditteranean Warehouse in Newtown I consciously ignored that rule…They were soaked, and simmered up for Nigella’s Pasta e Fagioli from Nigella Bites. It couldn’t be simpler – it is basically just cooked up beans and pasta. I added a tin of tomatoes and a splash of sherry, and it made for a perfect Sunday night dinner. No accompaniments necessary, apart from a spoon.

Tim and I start back at university tomorrow. It seems like just yesterday that I was dashing up hill and down dale in February trying to register for my classes in the sweltering heat and now I’m in my final term. I’m doing three 3rd year papers this semester, hopefully it’s not too gruelling, but then I think to myself, surely nothing could be as gruelling as the photography paper. By the way, I finished up with a good, solid B as my final mark for that particular gem of a class, not bad eh what? And in a matter of months I shall be Laura Vincent, BA…