ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: cake

we find ourselves, quite regularly these days, at azuma patisserie in the belly of regent place in the city. a $2.50 takeaway cup of maccha froyo — light, milky and above all, surprisingly tangy — is just the antidote to being a little bit sticky and rumpled after walking about the muggy city. or the perfect dessert after any manner of chinatown dinner. it tastes so healthy! (although i’m sure, despite all its benefits handwritten on the chalkboard menu, it is only deceptively so.)

one evening we ate in, and put together a dessert degustation of our own. a twist of frozen yoghurt, a pair of macarons — blackcurrant and pistachio (somewhat sweeter and soggier than they needed to be), and a mini maccha ganache tart. within the sturdy tart shell, the rich and intensely green filling (in flavour as well as colour) had a pleasing — almost diabolical — bitter twinge, but i am sorry to say the kid was completely happy to eat her entire half-share.

midweek just past, we sought refuge from the summertime out on the streets, but it turned out the cafe was even more stifling. the ovens, you see, disgorging an array of chiffon cakes. the maccha latte will just have to wait, perhaps for a freakishly unseasonable cold snap come january.

instead, i picked the white peach mousse with white wine jelly from the counter display. how the jelly glistened like shards of broken glass! it was a very grown-up dessert, with a surprising depth of flavour to the delicate jelly (and quite an alcoholic punch for this non-drinker) contrasting with the considerably milder, somewhat overly aerated peach mousse. at its heart was a hidden pocket of peach gel. it was pleasing all round.

the kid was similarly pleased (perhaps more so) with her eat-in cup of yoghurt, this time a mixed swirl of plain and green tea, with a topping of milk and white chocolate flakes. it cost a dollar more for the pretty ceramic cup (slightly larger than the takeaway tub), and then a dollar on top of that for the sprinkles, but i begrudge it nothing. next time, i might have to order one for myself.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 November 2010 at 10:24 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake

i still remember… it was 2007, and there were but a handful of members of the adriano zumbo appreciation society i’d created on a whim. “when we hit 50 members, we’ll have a cakewalk!” said zumbo. and then, nothing… nothing… and then fast forward a little, to masterchef, and queues, and the little fan club ballooning to 1200 and counting.

and then one day a couple of weeks ago, i got a message in my inbox saying how sbs were producing a 6-part (!) tv series about one adriano zumbo, and how the cakewalk was finally happening, and would i please let the fanclub know, and would i come along too?

why, yes!

we walked up to rosebud restaurant just short of 7 last night, and the queue went a block ’round the corner. but here’s the thing: having had the foresight to set up the zumbo fanclub all those years ago meant we didn’t have to queue, yay. with the tv producer’s best wishes, we crossed the road for a modest stomach lining of salmon and avocado maki, and then settled in front of the cafe windows to watch the models do their practice runs.

over and over and over again.

which only meant that once we were ushered in quite some time later, and the models finally made their parade down the runway, they moved smooth and smiley, and no-one dropped a single cake.

cake! there was a strawberry bubblegum cake, and a sweet corn cake, a pineapple cake, a milo-in-a-glass topped with a chocolate dome and straw, a mandarin tart, a lime tart, a raspberry tart, a glossy black licorice log, a caramel wheel, an eclair topped with wasabi peas… being the summer collection, there were also bikinis.

bikinis bearing macarons.

[i must say, i think the cakes would have been much more arresting had they been rendered in oversize softies by dawn tan, and sent down the runway with the models concealed inside. but y’know, that’s just me.]

the pastry chef himself strutted down the catwalk, with a tray of strawberry bubblegum macarons. i ate one, too quickly, and my teeth shriveled up inside my cheeks. (might hang out instead for the pancake and maple syrup macaron, instore.)

there were other miniatures to sample: here’s a tiny cookies ‘n’ cream sandwich. the biscuits are totally the consistency of something straight out of the ice cream freezer at your corner shop. the surprise — hidden within the creme filling in the regular size version — is a chocolate shell filled with liquid(ish) chocolate. altogether, quite agreeable.

and then suddenly it was over. oh but wait, it wasn’t! suddenly there were full-sized cakes streaming out of the kitchen, and i lucked into the raunchy raspberry tart. thanks, counterboy. ’twas just like old times.

a mound of yoghurt mousse covered in italian meringue and fresh berries. hidden within, a cone of tart raspberry jelly. now this one was every bit as luscious as i hoped it would be.

under the bright tv lights, we picked at the plump raspberries and meringue peaks for a while as we marvelled at the shiny licorice cake snared by team ooh look. but it was way past bedtime on a school night after all, and the kid (who’d somehow discovered backcombing during the long wait between samples) was suffering the effects of a steady stream of small sugary treats.

the rest of the tart made it only halfway home.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 November 2010 at 10:29 pm

permalink | filed under cake

it was my birthday yesterday. the kid got herself out of bed and crept into my room with coriander and dumpling (stuffed cat and rabbit, respectively). happy birthday, she intoned cheerily, you’re thiiirrrty-eight.

“mmyes,” i replied. “but at least i still have all my teeth.” the kid lost her first tooth three week ago — somewhat unsettlingly, there are no signs that anything is growing back to take its place.

the kid cocked her head. “you’re not so old,” she said, reassuringly.

but the time, she goes by. my mother came to town; my cousin got married; i went to melbourne for a week to see what life could be like. i started packing up a house — 16 cartons of booksmagazinecomics and counting. packing stalled; meals consumed; mortality confronted; cancer averted, for now. my father came to town; we jetted off to hamilton island; we discovered there are places in the world where people will pay $8 for a packet of smiths crisps. i became the sort of person who sits in a restaurant while a waitress brings over a cake all aglow with candles and a sparkler (the restaurant was azuma kushiyaki where the vegetable special of the day was a ramekin of garlic cloves roasted in butter; the cake was an entire maccha chiffon cake from the patisserie next door, festooned with fresh berries and whipped cream and a biscuit plaque with my name writ on in chocolate, organised in the best — read: worst — superspy manner by my good mother) and the live jazz trio will play happy birthday while the diners in the room sing along, and it will not be as excruciating an experience as i may have thought.

and yesterday, we caught a couple of buses with large zumbo cake box on my lap, and showed up moist and wilted from heat and humidity, for morning tea at ms d‘s tidy haven in ashfield.

it is the height of civilisation to be offered a glass of iced tea upon arrival, and to have an electric fan directed at you, while in the kitchen — shimmery from the heat of the oven and the smell of cheese — a small feast is assembled. fat pickles into vintage green pyrex; mustard into sturdy china. while dispensing ham onto a platter, ms d kept a watchful eye on the gourges. it made for good eating, all salty-moist-crunchy-sour in a pleasing palette of yellow-pink-green.

there was pink cake too. the one we’d picked from the counter at adriano zumbo patisserie was a hefty spraypainted block of raspberry-lychee teacake, lavishly adorned with a single rose petal, freezedried raspberry crumbs, and what i’d assumed to be shards of meringue. later, we were to discover that it was rose-flavoured sugar, perfect for nibbling on after the cake was gone.

i haven’t had “normal” cake from zumbo before. there’ve been tarts, viennoiserie, moussey this, chibousty that, more macarons than necessary, even a flourless chocolate fondant or two in my time… but never just “cake”. here is a fine specimen: dense and moist with a sturdy crumb, and a distinct rosey flavour, and, every now and again, a surprise bit of sodden lychee. the kid abandoned her slice just short of halfway, but kept returning for the fragrant crunchy decorative sugar. it was like crack, i tells ya.

but this came late in the afternoon, when what i’d thought was maybe 3 o’clock turned out to be 5. a short time after the savoury course, lloyd had ducked downstairs to collect something, and when he returned — from the next suburb — it was with this baroque vision of a gelato cake from pasticceria papa.

behold: custom-curated scoops of lemon, raspberry and chocolate, artfully arranged on a biscuit base with an expressionist drizzle of chocolate. the icing on the cake, so to speak, was strategically placed strawberries and lemon slices, frozen, and the crowing glory of a rocher wrapped up in a curl of lemon rind. just gorgeous.

we ate quite a bit of it before it could melt away — the smooth, mildly tangy lemon sorbet was most therapeutic — and then sandwiched second helpings of rich chocolate gelato into homemade chocolate chip cookies. the makings of third helpings were packed into an esky and delivered to our doorstep, with us in tow, as the drizzle kicked in at sunset. much later, waiting for cheese and tomato toasties to brown, i learnt that the rocher was actually a sphere of mudcake rolled in chopped nuts.

so this is how it ends: an unexpected cake sneaks in at the end of a sweet birthday; the cheese on the edge of the toastie is especially caramelised and delicious; indy saves the children from the clutches of the evil mola ram; a bitter edge encroaches, from the realisation that some favourite people will soon be too far away. x

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 November 2010 at 8:52 am

permalink | filed under cake

it is nice to see that there is order in other parts of my world. my immediate surrounds are teetering piles of papers and magazines, some destined for new homes, some headed for the great recycling bin in the sky, some — the tiniest little scraps, really — are somehow imbued with great sentimental value, and languish in the purgatory of my lounge room rug, waiting…

but the ceremonial red folding chairs were arranged just so last wednesday in the rather lovely leichhardt town hall, and the leichhardt celebrity brass band were resplendent in bright yellow, as i, amongst sixty others with interesting — if not purely long and challenging — names, became citizens of australia. yes, i have only been here since 1989, but here, as the mayor said, is where my migrant journey ends.

it was a jolly ceremony, with pop classics up front, and advance australia fair coming up the end, with friendly words, a pledge of allegiance and a gift of a baby tree in-between. the mayor, in his ceremonial, fur-lined robes, was proud to boast the live band — bugles! trombones!! — accompanying the national anthem, the made-in-australia flags which were handed out to all inductees, and the lamingtons in the back of the hall for the post-ceremonial reception.

and what lamingtons! first of all, they were huge. secondly, there were moist, with a good coating of rich chocolate and coconut. thirdly, there were enough that i managed to have three of them.

yes. the third one was actually surrendered by the kid a few bites in after she realised that she only liked the idea of having a second lamington. immediately upon handing it over, she started making eyes at the last remaining custardy fruit tart on the table. at this point, i steered her towards the door…

and on to dinner. what better way to celebrate becoming an aussie than to stuff oneself with italian food? the most mediocre of italian food, even. we were privileged to have ms d as witness to the naturalisation, and pleased to dine together at a laminate table in the balmy courtyard out the back of bar italia.

i have not been to dinner at bar italia for the longest time. some years ago, i ordered off the non-pasta dinner menu, and the size of the piece of broccoli which accompanied the meat stuck in my head for evermore.

when the food arrived, i was overwhelmed by the wonderful aroma of cake. i thought it was a nearby flat white, but once i started eating my veal marsala, it became clear that the sweet smell was coming from my plate. it was an enormous serve of soft meat in brown gravy — just as i remembered, and look at that broccoli! — but what had escaped my memory, and perhaps the dish has changed over the years, was that the sauce was so sweet that the meat seemed to be coated in caramel syrup. i thought the kid might like it, but she was quite repulsed. i expect it was the confusion of candied meat.

(but where was the problem? she likes candy, she likes meat, she likes bakkwa…)

we had a garden salad (dressed with the finest — not! — bottled dressing, ah memories of youthful folly) and a large bowl of chips (very nicely cooked, but so aggressively salted in parts that it hurt to eat them), and after it was all gone, we sought to right the wrongs (so wrong they were right, kind of) by eating copious amounts of gelati.

it’s insane how much gelati they can scoop into a flimsy plastic cup at bar italia. i was slow in naming my flavours so much of the cup was filled with an almost savoury, full-of-nutty-bits pistachio. the counter boy made up for it by piling the bounty gelato into a large cloud above the rim of the cup.

it was very moreish, unfortunately, packed with shredded coconut and a number of dark chocolate shards. unfortunate, because after the meat and veg, and salad and chips, and yes, the three lamingtons, i could eat no more.

here’s one for the album: eating my first lamington as a new australian (all the while keeping my eye on my second lamington).

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 September 2010 at 1:09 am

permalink | filed under cake, dinner, ice cream, misc

it’s come to this. yes folks, i am stock-piling pop tarts.

last month, i was alerted to the woeful news that frosted pop tarts are no longer allowed into australia. pop tarts haven’t been widely available for a while, but you could always count on specialist retailers or david jones food hall for small-scale imports. no more. the gelatin used in the frosting is believed by the guys in the quarantine department to be an agent for mad cow disease, so there.

i’d had usafoods.com.au bookmarked for a while now, though i hadn’t ever placed an order. now seemed like a good time to try them out. their supply of frosted pop tarts was already running low, so in a fit of mild panic, i got a box of eight frosted blueberry pop tarts, and a box of 12 frosted s’mores pop tarts. in their newsletter (where the news of impending frosted pop tart drought was broke), usafoods had helpfully suggested that a cheaper and fresher tasting substitute was toast ’em pop ups, so i got a box of those as well.

research, you understand.

so this carton showed up in the mail room a few days ago, and the kid and i immediately leapt into action and hustled an after-school snack. here before us we have a blueberry pop tart and a strawberry pop-up. pretty much identical, in their stay-fresh foil wrappers, like hapless adventurers wrapped up in emergency blankets, no? little snacky cakes, this is where your adventure ends!

and were they the same? well, the kid kept referring to her strawberry toaster pastry as “pop tart”, so i’ll say: yes. even i couldn’t really tell the difference. side by side, the toast ’em does look more “picture perfect”, with its smooth biscuit and non-bleedy sprinkles, but essentially both are crunchy pastry envelopes filled with sticky, almost-fruit jam, adorned with a shell of hard icing. mmm… i wouldn’t normally have picked strawberry flavour, but it came in the bumper toast ’ems assortment box, alongside frosted apple and frosted brown sugar cinnamon.

it’s a damn shame one of the selection wasn’t “frosted cherry”, which is my favourite. it kills me — so unfair — that this development (regression?) occurs just as pop tarts world opens its doors in NYC. and what can you buy at pop tarts world? frosted cherry pop tart flavoured lip balm!

how’s that for a first world problem?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 September 2010 at 12:59 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, cake, shoping, snacks

at maruyu the other weekend, i could not resist this package of choco pies. mochi choco pies! a whole box of ’em for $2.50! maruyu sits on clarence street, a block west of the queen victoria building — possibly the best city block in all of sydney, with this two-level japanese minimart (that’s, maruyu), an affordable and unfussy french cafe, and a very interesting exhibition space within doors of each other. i’ve gotten many a bargain at maruyu. sure, a lot of it was exotic junk food just past its expiry date, but this one is still good until at least january next year.

so i opened the box, and was somewhat surprised by the size of this little packet. i mean, i assumed each one would be individually wrapped — it’s the nature of this sort of asian snack food, but i really did think that seven to a box would yield a slightly larger pie. what with the plastic wrapper within the carton, and then another cardboard tray in which the little packets of choco pies were nestled, it was a much smaller handful than what i had expected when looking at the picture on the box.

and then when i got that sachet open, all i could do was laugh at the tiny disc inside. choco pie? it looked more like an after-dinner mint.

when i first saw this on the shelf, i was drawn to the mochi part of it, and then the black sesame. that it was covered in chocolate was a bit of a bonus i suppose, but chocolate in asian confectionery is decidedly hit-or-miss. sometimes it’s floury, or grainy, or oily; sometimes it just has a peculiar wrongness. such a gamble, but in this case — chocolate-covered black sesame rice cake — it was a gamble i was willing to take. plus, y’know, two-fiddy.

this particular chocolate — a thin shell — broke with a soft crack when i bit into it, and melted smoothly away. it was not too sugary, and had a rich, dark chocolatey flavour. the soft chewy mochi, which replaced the marshmallow portion of a traditional choco pie, pleased me with its mild sweetness. the inner layer of black sesame paste delivered a nutty taste that lingered, and it was all i could do to stop myself chasing it with another serve.

so i’ll concede that these turned out to be the perfect size after all — the delicate and well-considered balance of the various flavors and textures just called to be contained in a package this petite. and i grant that the individual wrappers make you pause a while, instead of just shoveling the little cakes into your gob, one after the other, until they are all gone, because they are that delicious.

if only they’d thought to put more of ’em in the box.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 September 2010 at 10:49 pm

permalink | filed under cake, candy, chocolate, packaging, snacks

more pink cake! we found ourselves in newtown on friday afternoon, quite famished, and stopped into black star on our way to an errand. being close to the end of trade, there wasn’t all that much left in the counter. on the counter, however, was a large jar of macarons. such pale, encrusted beauties. when i learnt they were rose and lilac, i was a little bit hesitant, because apart from rose, i am not a fan of floral flavours in food.

i should not have worried. the biscuit was crisp and then chewy, and then all heady rose perfume wrapped up in smooth ganache.

it was so good in fact, that post-errand, even with the sidewalk stools piled up high and the countergirl wiping down the counter for the day, we sweet-talked our way into buying another one.

on saturday, an impromptu and fun excursion with my cousin took a displeasing turn after lunch when we found no cake in the city.

no. cake.

to be precise: we did not want dried-out-from-sitting-in-the-display-case-all-week cake (city center); we did not quite want fancy french moussey gateaux (the rocks); we did not want spongy airline chinatown cake (chinatown). two of us wouldn’t have minded cupcakes, but one of us has an ideological issue with them. so we went our separate ways and in lieu of cake, the kid got her first pair of lace-up shoes: silver all stars.

zoom-zoom.

and we saved the cupcakes for sunday. this is what you get when you rock up to cupcakes on pitt and tell them you don’t need a box for your cupcakes because you are going to eat them right away: a little cardboard cupcake caddy. adorable, no? my zero-packaging plans were derailed, but if i remember to tuck it into my wallet, i will always be ready for a cupcake on the run.

i expect i will always be ready for this raspberry cupcake: moist raspberry cake, and a fat swirl (and then some!) of raspberry buttercream. infinitely pleasing, and gone in four chomps.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 August 2010 at 12:24 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kid, snacks

we headed out of melbourne for a mini-roadtrip. it’s not my favourite thing, sitting in a car for hours at a stretch, watching the scenery whiz past, however the regional bakeries sort of make it worthwhile.

it was just after 9 on day 2 when we entered the bakery on the main street of kyneton — the country cob, i think it was — looking for a breakfast that would last us the drive back to the city (and out again to the snow). i cast my eye over the standards in the counter: scrolls, snails, slices, and would probably have settled for a large lamington when i caught a flash of colour from an adjacent display case.

look at that amazing pink cake! filled with chunky jam and just the right amount of cream, topped with sugary pink icing and shredded coconut. the cake itself was moist and strawberry-flavoured in a most agreeably artificial way. when it was gone i had to have a couple of stern words with myself about not getting another one for the road.

the other thing i like about the countryside is its easy curation of vintage signage. sometimes it’s a small moment of pleasure as you past it at 100km/h on the highway. other times you might arrive at a little town where the highway is the main street, and you might stop for a while for a more leisurely review.

pink cake can make you foolhardy, and will propel you into the middle of the road so that you can get a picture of that historic tea mural on an old building on the other side. or you might stand in the gutter just so you can fit a giant rooftop ice cream in your viewfinder.

these lovely signs will soon be just a smidge closer. come january, i am moving to melbourne. in short, the alternately estranged and absent boy came to the decision that he might actually want (and like) to have his family around him. for the last year or so he has been working a new job in melbourne, both of which factors have made him far less grumpy than we have been used to. so, we shall see.

i had been somewhat resistant to relocation, but then a couple of months ago i read of loobylu’s crazy plan to pack up a suburban melbourne existence and head off on an island adventure in british columbia. it struck me that melbourne wasn’t such a stretch after all.

what will be a challenge, will be packing up the house. i’m hoping that when i open up the boxes on the other end of the move, there will be less — maybe even a lot less — than i have around me right now. i like my stuff, and people who’ve been around here have been kind enough to point out what a blast packing it up will be, but i’ve also been reading of people who live with 50 things (or even 75, or 100 things). so, um… we shall see.

i am working on convincing myself that it’s actually just the idea of my stuff that i’m attached to. so far i have been very bad at even starting the cull, and i know this relaxed attitude will turn around and bite me in the ass in four or five months.

in the meantime, i calculate how much gelato i can eat at messina before the summer arrives, and i watch the sunsets over the harbour, coloured ever more rosy by their finiteness. aside from my lovely aunt, who cried out, “how can you leave me?”, people have been saying, “oh melbourne! i love melbourne! i’d happily live in melbourne!”, and i’m hoping that they follow through and come with me.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 August 2010 at 12:32 am

permalink | filed under art, boy, cake, trip

so, golly, it was just about a month ago that we were in melbourne. warm-and-sunny-in-the wintertime melbourne, whoulda thunk it. we did such typical school holiday stuff as go the the circus (the amazing circus oz, with no horses or elephants, but wonderful and strong girl-acrobats, and funny and hot — h.o.t. — boy-acrobats, and a rocking live band) and hide out in the tim burton exhibition on the one day it did rain.

first off though, we braved the sunday crowds at the queen victoria markets. i don’t know how i never noticed this before, but in-between the boreks and bratwursts there is a stall — colour of earth — that offers a big range of ready-made pizze. what made the choice even more boggly of mind is the number of different bases available. there were regular bases in white and wholemeal, but then there were a number of gluten-free bases. now, my normal reaction to a gluten-free version of something which is not traditionally gluten-free is to grimace and turn away, however these bases were a rainbow of happy toy colours, corresponding to their flavours: black rice, corn, pumpkin…

i couldn’t go past the beet and meat: hot salami, fetta, capsicum, zucchini and olives on a bright pink beetroot base. they didn’t heat it up for quite long enough in the oven — the center of the bready round was stone cold. however the bits around the sides had developed a pleasing crust around the chewy, slightly mochi-textured interior, and the toppings were generous and fresh.

a couple of days later, we caught the tram to port melbourne, and then made the long trek along the beach to st kilda, just so that we (ok, i ) could get ourselves a kugelhopf from monarch cakes.

they sat in the window, like puppies in a petshop, waiting to be picked. all slightly misshapen in that lovingly handmade way. i picked my cake, and the countergirl weighed it.

“this one’s a bit heavier, because there’s more chocolate inside. is that ok?”

more of that thick, sludgy chocolate wrapped up in chewy, sugar-dusted yeasty cake? well, yes! she rang me up, and that was the week’s breakfast sorted.

one afternoon, we showed up at journal, by the door of the melbourne city library in flinders lane. it was packed to the point of throbbing, and the chatter and clatter of peak lunchtime was more than a little confronting. a harried waiter pointed us to two newly vacated seats at the corner of a large communal table, and then disappeared into the crowd for some 20 minutes before coming back to take our order.

which gave me plenty of time to consider the chalkboard menu. i picked the endive salad, expecting a few leaves on a plate with a dribble of dressing. so i was surprised and pleased when a great mound of shredded endive was delivered, barely concealing many strips of prosciutto, walnuts, and clumps of mildly musty blue cheese. a textural masterpiece! there was even bread, for mopping up the tart dressing.

it was delicious, but i must admit, there was so much of it that towards the end, it almost became boring. almost. nevermind, dessert would surely recalibrate up my palate.

because journal sits within that 10-metre city block of tasty treats, all we had to do was go round the corner, and buy ourselves a little cupcake each, from little cupcakes.

i had the bite-sized pistachio cupcake: moist, nutty cake with exquisitely piped frosting, and a gem of a pistachio placed just so. perhaps next time i’ll be having the large pistachio cupcake.

and then yes, the drizzle kicked in, and we hightailed it to the bowels of the australian centre for the moving image, where we admired the very large and very strange body of work that tim burton had created since even before he went to art school. drawings and models and costumes and statues, and clips of edward scissorhands and alice in wonderland, and a perplexing japanese-slash-new wave version of hansel and gretel that the kid quite enjoyed.

(though i suspect her favourite part was actually the back room with the low tables and pots of textas where ordinary folk like us could sit and draw their own monster outcasts.)

the exhibition goes until mid-october, and i’m recommending it if you like tim burton, or strangeness, and monsters, and drawing.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 August 2010 at 11:48 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, lunch, trip

more infirmary pudding.

i was in surry hills yesterday, to say goodbye to an old friend. well, ok, to be exact i was in east redfern, to divest myself of the flat i used to live in. i have not been inside my old building for about five years, but it was scrubbed clean and filled with diffused morning light, and i missed it afresh. an oldish lady from cremorne bought it, with the slightest twitch of her paddle. she wore a hot pink cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons; the topmost one was in the shape of a star.

after papers were signed, i had a celebratory rawa paneer dosai at maya on cleveland street, and a post-lunch stroll down memory lane, which in this case was quite literally bourke street, surry hills. we popped into christopher’s cake shop, where the kid picked lemon and strawberry shortbreads, and i picked a half dozen aniseed rusks and this majestic tub of caramel fresh cream.

we walked through the city and rode the bus home, and some time later i found myself afflicted with the most terrible headache — that kind of radiating pain that reaches from the top of your head back down to the base of your neck. my sinuses played along to the beat. was this miagraine or meningitis, i wondered, before taking two tabs of paracetemol and settling down to wait it out.

when the pain subsided, i sat up in bed with a copy of “the new yorker” and my little pudding. it consisted of caramel-tinged whipped cream, two layers of light-as-air sponge, and a crown akin to liquid amber — look how it glows! the scent of burnt sugar from this smooth and sticky caramel was strong, but the taste surprisingly tangy. it was a pleasing treat, much like the no-chewing-necessary airline desserts you used to get before they started serving commercial ice cream bars after lunch service.

of course, it would have been even more pleasing if there’d been a trifle more cream.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 June 2010 at 9:18 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake

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