what is this beastie?

several years ago — could it have been seven years ago? argh! — my sister and i went to coney island, in brooklyn, in the springtime. the beach was windswept and deserted, and after we ate our obligatory nathan’s hotdogs, we sauntered down the boardwalk and came upon a softserve icecream stand. it was like, the softserve stand of your (my) dreams, with unexpected flavours like banana! and pistachio! and you could get a twister with the two combined! so i did. see, the banana would have been good, or the pistachio, on their own, but the fact that you could get the two so gloriously entwined in each other, that made it at least three times better.

so when i walked into zumbo on the weekend, with the intention to not buy anything, and the first thing i saw was this chocolate-pistachio croissant… well, you can guess the rest.

what you may not guess is that the pistachio frangipane is not just a lush, velvety cushion on the inside, but also an extra layer slathered onto the top of the pastry so it bakes golden brown and crunchy, like a sweet nutty biscuit. i was so enamoured of the fallen-off bit i ate right at the start, that by the time i cut the croissant in half and discovered the dark chocolate nestled within, i had forgotten it was a pistachio and chocolate croissant, and was thus pleasantly surprised.

oh this is a rich bastard of a croissant; i could only manage half with the blackest of teas, before we headed off to see the kites.

the bondi festival of the winds was not the hellish entanglement of kite strings that i may have been expecting, thanks, probably, to the weather, or perhaps, the apec luncheon. after an hour or so of bus-train-bus, we skipped merrily down the grassy hill towards the pavilion, straight into a cluster of kite stalls.

“i want a kite,” said the child, “i want a kite. i want a kite.”

so we bought a windsock in the shape of a fish, and signed up for a kite workshop on the front steps. for a dollar, you got a piece of waverley council’s best scrap paper — the back of ours was printed with the schedule for some library event — which you drew on, handed back to the facilitator, and watched in awe as she deftly folded and stickytaped it into an actual kite! we took it down to the beach later, and it flew, dammit, alongside all the other grownup kites.

which meant nothing to the kid. nothing. after all the kite talk, what she really wanted to do was fill her fish with sand. and then her boots.

we ate beach festival food of course: corn on a stick, fairy floss and gelato. the gelato came at the end of the afternoon, and we walked back up the hill to pompei to get it. the kid picked the boldest of three pinks: raspberry sorbet with a sharp burst of fruitiness. i got a scoop of dark chocolate, which was delicious, and a scoop of tiramisu, which had a wonderful texture, smooth and milky, and punctuated by whole slabs of almost adequately coffee-soaked biscuit.

here’s the funny thing: i don’t drink alcohol or coffee, but i really like a good tiramisu. the zumbo tiramisu is called “throw me down”, which sounds sexy as fuck, and is totally next on my list.