Category Archives: cake
hurray for the queen; if not for her royal highness, there would be no public holiday to celebrate her birthday, in a land sorely lacking in public holidays. monday, given the choice between filing photocopies into a stack of new folders, and going for an excursion to cabramatta, the boy wisely chose not to file. that’s why he’s the school teacher. not too soon, we were on a good train — an express service with no stupid, reasonless stops inbetween stations, and airconditioned — whizzing our way out west.
a very short walk from cabramatta station, we fell into a small dimsum factory and found ourselves in possession of a small paper bag each of assorted dumplings. not ten minutes later, i was perched at a bakery counter, handing over $1.20 for a wedge of pandan chiffon cake. we decided we had to put a stop to this disgraceful behaviour by sitting down to lunch.
egg noodles, glisteny with garlicky oil, and an assortment of roast duck and porks.
something happens to the boy, where having eaten his fill, he is rendered incapable of thinking about and preparing for subsequent meals. fortunately i am free of this sad affliction, and despite our post-lunch activity being primarily the quest for a bamboo steamer (so much harder to find than you would expect in such an intense asian community), my cloth bag slowly (quickly) filled up with these:
an assortment from lawrence cake shop: green and red jelly cakes, a pandan slice and — oh happy nostalgia — a cream horn; and this:
the label says “sticky rice cake”, but in fact it is black sticky rice, and pandan flavour sticky rice, and sandwiched inbetween, mung bean paste and shredded coconut and ground-up peanuts, wrapped in a pancake. surprisingly, the rice is sweet, the mung bean salty, and it is all extremely flavoursome;
and a tub of ginger flavour tofu pudding, and bag of dried longans from thailand.
we were there only for two and a half hours, but it was freakishly warm for winter, and we were wilting. later that night, a dinner made up of a selection of exotic cakes revived us.
oh it’s winter. the sky is clear blue and there are birds chirping outside. if my washing machine wasn’t broken i could be putting a load on and then spending the rest of the day smelling clean laundry ripening in the sun. the repairman is coming today “after twelve”, which i got the friendly service desk lady to narrow down to “anywhere between twelve and three”. sigh.
yesterday i queued for half an hour at medicare to claim $100, and then queued again (20 minutes) at medibank for another $100. i was just down the street from krispy kreme, but when i walked past all casual-like, the line was out the door and onto the street, and i just didn’;t think i could queue anymore, not even for donuts.
instead a brisk stroll brought me to il gianfornaio, where a slice of mushroom pizza was had, and two sicilian canoli packaged up to go: one with a dark chocolate custard and the other with fruit-and-chocolate-studded sweet ricotta. there was also a bottle of fanta, the remains of which i have just realised are still sitting in my mr friendly backpack next to my foot, instead of in the fridge for later.
[ puts fanta in fridge ]
so, the new fanta label says “now with 5% fruit”. mysteriously there is not too discernable a difference in the taste of fruitless fanta and what is now described as a “fruit drink”. i suppose it’s 5%… what? healthier? i definitely didn’t feel as ill as i normally do after drinking a bottle of fanta, but i suspect that has more to do with me just drinking a quarter of it.
i am rambling. why am i rambling? sleep deprivation?; maybe i need some juice. or fanta.
it’s just that, the more hours i spend in front of mr computer doing actual werk, the less hours extra i want to spend sitting here writing. in addition, the volume of werk has an adverse effect on the type of adventures available to me.
want stories about me chasing up quotes from printers? it can cost between $300 to put a logo on 500 envelopes, and $1200. when you do show up at the $300 printer’s premises after not hearing back from them regarding your questions about supplying artwork or payment, you will discover that their system can only accept eps files (but will be updated really soon to take pdfs too!), and their press can’t print anything closer than 10mm from the edge. your client will not be too upset by this development, but he will ask that you make msword templates of envelope and letterhead so he can print them out as required. ugh, msword.
wurd.
fortunately there will still be days (a day) when you can disentangle from the mouse cable, and find yourself in granville sitting in a lebanese chicken shop by the train station, across the table from lena, overseeing a plate of half a grilled chicken, a dish of garlic puree, a dish of pickles, a shallow bowl of tabouli, a basket of flatbread and a little mound of chicken-salted chips, and everything will be eaten. after, she will take you on a tour of the main drag, including a stop at silly willy’s, a $2 shop where you can get a pack of twelve multicoloured dishwashing sponges for… $2. and abla’s, for a sitdown, a plate of sweet cheese and a cup of tea.
i believe i came away all culturally ignorant at abla’s, walking along the counter of treats, pointing at each tray and asking the busy yet patient lady on the other side, “what’s that?… and um… what’s that?”. still, it yielded me a plastic platter (wih cut glass aspirations) of an assortment of pistachio pastries and a large custard-in-honeyed-filo contraption. it was meant to last for days, or, at least two days, but the boy ate his share before nightfall and the custard thing became school lunch the next day. a granville excursion is on the cards; the counter across the room had the rum babas and the chocolate cream cakes.
a public service announcement: krispy kreme doughnuts opens its first city store at wynyard, 7am on tuesday. first person in line gets a year’s supply of donuts. um. doughnuts.
a direct result of the impending opening as well as the enormous sugar-encrusted pastry wrapped in clingfilm and labelled “polish donut” i saw in a continental deli in randwick, was this dream i had two nights ago:
i was at a very large table in a hotel breakfast room watching my father have his morning coffee before he rushed off to a seminar. the coffee arrived at the table with an enormous sugar-encrusted donut. strewn across the table were the remains of breakfasts abandoned by other customers. these were all ornate silver trays, oval, about two feet long, bearing the crumbs and unfinished portions of a great variety of sugar-encrusted donuts. i walked my father to the lecture theatre, and it was clear that i would be returning to the breakfast room to have myself a tray of donuts too.
“and then i woke up, and it was all a dream.”
i ate this recently: a beautiful pink heart-shaped lamington, twice the price of normal brown block-shaped lamingtons because it was made for mother’s day. surely this is the best mother’s day product ever. beats the ugg boots, the cosmetic gift sets, the DVDs of “something’s gotta give”, the discounted kitchen appliances…
actually i came thisclose to getting the braun blender with the glass jug and five speeds including one labelled with “icon of bowl of soup”, which would be perfect for the impending broccoli soup experiment. but instead came away with special mother’s day priced “lost in translation” DVD. woo!
trivial, soup-related distractions aside, i think i’m finally getting back into the merry swing of werk, four, maybe five months after returning from overseas. the last few weeks have been spent tweaking logos: working out kerning in extremely small increments, debating whether a milky chocolate brown is better than a rich coffee brown, nudging a graphic representation of a fig around a box trying to make it look less turd-like and more fig-like (unrelated to previously mentioned brown issue), wondering if 5pt type is too small…
oh it’s been fun! and now the anticipation of getting it all back from the printers. crisp letterheads and lush, environmentally unfriendly, matt-celloglazed business cards. so i was quite horrified when amongst the penis enlargements (so many penis enlargements!) and cheap software i was offered in my inbox, there was this handy service. shudder, and sigh.
ah the wonder of easter that is everlasting salvation and chocolate mud donuts.
to the inexplicably loyal handful who show up here every day or so on the odds that there will be an update: this donut will have to last you all week, for i am an hour and a half away from taking my chances with the easter road toll.
hell, mentioning the all-week donut has reminded me of this story that i was told in primary school, so i’ll leave that with you as well.
“a long time ago in china, there was a boy who, being the only child, was spoilt by his mother. she would do everything for him, even bathing him and feeding him right into his teenage years. as he neared adulthood, his mother was one day called away to another village. she was reluctant to leave her son all defenceless by himself, but she had no choice. as he was incapable of feeding himself, she thought the best thing to do was to make a large biscuit, which she tied to a string around his neck; all he had to do was move his head and take a bite when he was hungry. by her calculations the biscuit was big enough to last a week. the bathing could wait until she returned.
a week later she came through her front door to discover her son dead of hunger in his cot. the biscuit had only been eaten only a small way through. the son had been too lazy and stupid to use his hands to turn the biscuit round and had starved when his mouth could no longer reach beyond biting range.”
yep. i don’t know what they intended to learn us, but i’m sure it was meant to be character building. and just look at me now.
happy cake news! an end-of-day grocery and noodle soup excursion to chinatown resulted in the reliving of the very cake that caused such cake-fueled hysteria late last year.
and also, krispy kreme finally opens a store in sydney. but not until may. ntch.
via alia, it has come to my attention that this week, starting today, is national donut week. bittersweetly, it is actually national “doughnut” week, because it’s happening in the uk.
sigh. how can it be that australia does not have an initiative that lets you save the children with every donut you eat?
