tragedy on black friday.
Category Archives: cake
i finally got the anabanana today. it’s just, i’d gone savoury at breakfast, and around lunchtime, i found myself needing something sweet, and i peeped into zumbo just to see… and i’d never seen anabanana looking like this before. actually i don’t think anyone’s ever seen anything look like this before.
it’s like one of the happy little elves back at the workshop went postal, and dumped the entire sack of brown sugar over the lot of ’em.
i’m not complaining, mind. in fact, i’m quite in awe of the bold, sugary statement. there is no finesse in this pastry — not today anyway — but there are roughly chopped walnuts buried in the sweet avalanche, and a stream of cinnamon running through the light and crunchy brioche feulletine. (yes! there is pastry beneath the sugar!)
there are no bananas though. weird, huh?
[edit: a source close to the cakebox has informed me that the bananas are rolled in between the layers of pastry.]
i like it quite a bit. i expect i will like it tomorrow too, and possibly the day after, for that is how long i expect it will take me to get through it.
singapore girl finally made it to balmain last week; she’d heard about a particular cake shop i like to go to. so there we were, thinking we were safe by going for lunch beforehand, to line our stomachs, but we left zumbo with two cakes for now and a bag of macaron for later.
reading it off the little plaque in the shop, charlotte o’hara sounds like one of those eccentric ladies with too many voices in her head: biscuit cuillere, ginger and vanilla bavarois, lime creme, fig, basil and pistachio jelly… and if you were to eat each element one at a time, as i did to start, then you might think the bavarois too gingery, or the jelly too figgy. but i’ve heard more than one person say it — including the countergirl — that all the flavours come together into one great superflavour, and it’s true.
truly, this is alchemy at work. i could not decide if i should eat it fast, or slow. it was light and delicate, and certainly could’ve been inhaled. but that would only have brought matters to an end much too quickly.
after all, she got all gussied up for us: see her bonnet of bright raspberries, plump and bursting with tart flavour. the neat ring of meringue, the fine ribbons of lime zest and white chocolate. the finery on the outside, though, belied a primness within. we took our time with her.
the pace slowed even more for essaouira. turns out that charlotte o’hara is all sweetness and light — but only while you’re eating it. once it’s down your gullet, all the richness of the cream and butter remind you how debauched your time together really was.
but try and stop. try and say no to the slim plaques of dark chocolate that break with such a satisfying crack. try and resist the piped rows of dark chocolate chantilly creme, and the ones beneath of orange ganache. the base of cakey hazelnut dacquoise and crunchy praline feulletine were most persuasive. all up, essaouira reminded me of the chocolate-covered, orange-flavoured wafers of my childhood — which only made me love it more.
and i did stop eating it after all, for i feared that i might die. i left the smallest little corner for quite a way after dinner. i ate it in the dark.
another saturday, another $10 teacup. this one at least i can drink tea out of.
friday, after a couple of weeks of half-hearted to-and-froing, deborah and i met upstairs at fratelli fresh. please understand, there was no reticence about meeting for eating. it’s just, we couldn’t decide if we’d rather eat at danks street depot or sopra… so you see, we did not really mind which way the day went.
the plan was to read the menu board at sopra, and if nothing took our fancy (as if!) we would head across the road. as it turned out, the 1 o’clock lunch crush was so impenetrable that our decision was made for us before we were even within reading range.
i used to go to danks street depot fairly regularly, usually when an invoice got paid. it was just up the street from where i used to live, and it was a great space in which to eat… well, anything really. back then it was just starting up, and you could see into the kitchen from the big central table. back then the kitchen wasn’t even in a different room; the only thing separating it from the diners was a bench on which produce sat and chopping happened. once i was there, and the chef himself came up and cleared our table. then at some point, the service started to get a little surlier, and sopra opened up across the road, and i moved away… and i reckon it’s been about four years since i was last in there.
and gosh — gawsh — is it fancy now: swirly room dividers, precision seating, shiny bar extension. no more that warm, fuzzy, sunlit feeling of sitting in uncle jared’s kitchen. it was a high-powered, well-dressed lunch crowd, and very, very noisy.
so. the decision had been made for us about where to eat, but we still faced the quandary of what to eat. the wild rabbit and pork terrine was a definite, but we spent many minutes trying to figure out its complementary companion. i was leaning quite severely towards the slow-cooked broccoli and eggs, and eventually i fell over at its feet.
because it was great! who would think of garnishing a serve of golden, buttery scrambled eggs on toast… with broccoli? it had been roasted, i think, with chili, garlic and white wine, an enormous stalk of it in a most appealing shade of olive green. and on top of that, chunks of salty and creamy fetta. i would eat this at least once a week.
it would be harder to eat the rabbit and pork terrine that often; such a solid, meaty slab. deceptively so, for it is mild pink striations with pale green pistachios and seedy figs peeping through the layers. still, the flavour was at once clean and rich, and just gamey enough. it came with a tidy stack of figgy toast triangles, a tangle of perfectly dressed rocket, and some paper-thin slices of sweet pear, none of which helped to overcome that porky feeling at the end of the meal.
you will not be shocked to know that at this point, we got up, paid our bill, and high-tailed it back across the street to sopra. almost 2.30, there were just enough empty tables that we did not feel bad about ordering just dessert. the waitresses, though surprised, were most supportive.
and truly, i had just been thinking banoffee pie, but suddenly, there we were, with that and the biggest fat bastard of a tiramisu to ever belly flop onto a plate. it really was the most obscene looking thing, and we fell upon it with gusto. gusto which soon turned into confusion, because — what were those raisins and bits of orange peel doing in there? does sopra really make their tiramisu with panettone? the cakey bits certainly had that bizarre stringy texture of panettone soaked in an alcohol bath.
(the creamy bits, on the other hand, were sheer perfection.)
the banoffee pie was pretty good, although there could have been a few extra bananas beneath the gorgeous blanket of freshly piped cream — you’d think bananas were still $13 a kilo. tchk. but aside from all that, and aside from the twinings tea bag that passes for an order of tea, sopra is still possibly my favourite place to eat.
(by which i mean, i get out here only two or three times a year, but i love it when i do.)
we sat for a while, fighting the good fight, woefully distracted by the men at the next table and their antipasto platter, and tray of cured meats, and, ahem, seafood basket. but eventually the cakes won. well, the tiramisu did anyway.
the kind and patient waitress commiserated, and pointed the way to the cash register.
it was just gone four o’clock.
good morning.
a fine way to start the morning, and the week, is to break open a new box of tea and brew a pot. T2 have a shiny new boutique beneath the old gowings building in the city — perfect timing, really, for i was in the market for a new breakfast tea.
in the shop, there is english breakfast tea of course, and irish. but there is also sydney breakfast (scented with bergamot) and melbourne (vanilla). i was curious about the indian breakfast tea, and asked enough questions (fewer than you’d think necessary) that the countergirl packed a little sample — “enough for a small pot,” she said — in a baggie for me to take away. i love that!
in the end i came away with the morning tea, a hearty blend of broken leaf tea, according to the spiel on the box. and it’s true; it’s the kind of robust tea that tastes of the bush from which it was plucked.
it was the perfect foil for a wedge of coconut brioche, a light and chewy bun in a sturdy helmet of sugary desiccated coconut — reminiscent of something from a chinatown bakery — which i had procured on yesterday’s excursion to petersham.
we don’t really do mother’s day, but y’know, any excuse to have cake… so two mums and two kids and a sister and a brother descended upon honeymoon patisserie for second breakfast. i made it through the wall of people at the counter, only to be confronted with a second, more impressive obstacle: what to choose.
there were slices of a brown slab cake with pink icing and silver dragees, three layers sandwiched with cream and custard. i resisted. there were custard tarts in three sizes, and i had been thinking about them all morning, and yet… i sort of wanted bacon and eggs, so i picked their opposite: a rather ostentatious caramel tart. and a jam donut. and, because i don’t like playing favourites, the coconut brioche to go,
the donut was excellent. dense and chewy with a generous smear of sugary red jam. it wasn’t hot, but that was part of its charm. i should’ve gotten the big one. should’ve maybe not gotten the caramel tart, because after i ate that, i felt somewhat unbalanced. (it must be said that the caramel was lovely and soft, and very compelling. it compelled me to eat its entire self after all.)
afterwards, we ran around the park, and worked up an appetite for baked beans on buttered toast. normalcy returned.
there was quite a bounty of macaron at adriano zumbo patissier last week. besides the four you see here, there was also mandarin, liquorice, and fresh mint.
“won’t you try the fresh mint?” asked counterboy when i had made my selection. i wrinkled my nose at the lurid green.
“i don’t like mint-flavoured things,” i explained.
“it’s not mint-flavoured,” he insisted, “it’s fresh mint.” and then he handed me one over the counter to prove his point.
and whaddya know — it really was minty! not toothpasty in the slightest. but, eh, mint.
so we left with the four: chocolate, which the kid picked for herself; rose, which is my all-time, number-one favourite; passionfruit and yoghurt, which is a softer, more delicate version of the bright and brassy regular passionfruit…
…and tomato sauce. yuh!
look at it! all gussied up with fancy jewels of crushed-up flotsam. don’t let that fool you; this was heinz big red through and through. it was surprisingly salty upfront, umami even, before rounding out the edges of my tongue with the familiar sweet and sour of childhood. through the power of suggestion, i could almost taste ground beef too. well. i liked it anyway, and i suffered an immediate craving — still unfulfilled — for a big, fat hamburger.
i wonder if the pastry chef would make a banh mi macaron — baquette-flavoured biscuit, with a tangy pickled carrot and radish ganache, and a dab of pork paté hidden in the middle. i wonder…
this time last week, the cold, harsh light of day saw me finishing up the last, leftover slice of a sour cherry pie with a pistachio crumble topping. i was sad to see it go. it had been long, long overdue, and the previous friday afternoon i had arrived for a weekend at my aunt’s house with two containers of dry ingredients measured and mixed and ready to go. one was to become the crust, and the other, the crumble.
more weeks ago than i’m prepared to specify, the good people at penguin mailed me a crisp, new copy of “the sweet melissa baking book“. i must admit i was not immediately enamoured of this book. aside from feeling generally ambivalent about cake (!) after the nonstop cakefest that was xmas, new year, chinese new year, sister-in-town… there was the somewhat lacklustre publication design to get past.
it’s 2008 after all. who puts out a cookbook — a cakebook, no less — with no pictures but for an 8-page colour section two-thirds of the way through? the rest of it — 240 pages in total — is cheap black helvetica on cheap white paper, with copperplate headings and mustard yellow embellishments. there are bees on every second page — the logo of the eponymous brooklyn-based bakery. it really looks like an early-90s effort, and even coming from me, with all the golden memories of the early 90s, this is no compliment, humpf.
but. see. the more i flipped through the book, never really wincing less at the just too large italicised helvetica introductions to each recipe, the more i came to realise that you really shouldn’t judge a book by its interior design (the cover is… fine. not “ooh baby, you so fine”, but just, “oh, alright. fine.”: there is an honest photograph of a chocolate cake, crowned in nubile and glistening berries; but there is also a subhead in 12pt helvetica bold.). in fact, the book is so packed full of delicious-sounding things, that i could not decide what to tackle first.
there is a good selection of trusty basics: orange-scented scones, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate walnut brownies. there is a chapter of some quite over-the-top layer cakes: sweet almond cake with lemon curd and lemon mascarpone frosting, roasted pecan cake with caramel orange marmalade and burn orange buttercream, (there is a classic red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.) there is a bit up the back full of truffles and caramels. and in between, there are buns, pies, cookies, cakes, and cookie cakes.
eventually, i picked the sour cherry pie with pistachio crumble, because i love every single word in the name (yes, even “with”.). also, in her introduction, sweet melissa claims it is her favourite pie, and a best-seller at her bakery. there was even a glossy colour photograph of it. i set to work.
the section on pies begins with a lesson on pie dough. it is a comprehensive breakdown on all the elements that go into the crust, and what to do with them. there is a page on pie dough technique, followed by three recipes for different sorts. all up, it’s 11 pages of thorough instructions, about an hour and a half of combined chilling time alone, and me, a pastry novice, making a rather wonderful crust that baked up golden brown, light, crisp and flaky.
yay.
the crumble topping, with its whole oats ground to a flour and its pistachios hand-choppped, was even more wonderful — sweet and crunchy with a rich, buttery, pistachioey flavour. the cherry filling — now that’s where i came unstuck. i’m blaming the kilo of frozen cherries; i’m going to argue that they released a lot of moisture as they thawed in the oven. at the end, they were so plump and juicy that the base of the pie crust disintegrated into soddenness. delicious sod, mind, which more or less rendered this pie into a crumble with a pastry crown. and we all fell upon it like bears.
one of my favourite memories of new york is of sitting in the upstairs cafeteria at bloomingdales, eating a wedge of blueberry pie to recover from the ordeal that is accompanying my mother shoe-shopping. the crust on top was light, crisp and flaky, and sprinkled in sugar. once i figure out how to overcome the soggy fruit, i think this book will take me right back.
it’s true what they say: icing sugar makes anything look better.
the kid was quite adamant that we should make cookies on a rainy afternoon last week, but i managed to lure her down the madeleine route by telling her they were little cakes like cat paws. i have a new madeleine tray, and wanted to see if i could avoid the alien pods of doom — you may remember — from last year. i feel heartened enough from this batch to give those darned maccha madeleines another go.
but not just yet. this morning, we are padding quietly on our paws, out of town aboard the slow train to albury. back in a week, i think.
so it’s been about a year since i first stumbled into adriano zumbo patissier. right now, there’s a big pink 1 in the window; happy birthday, zumbo! truly, an occasion that calls for cake.
i haven’t been in there a lot lately — a non-conducive combination of feeling poor and fat — but in the last week i seem to be able to fit into my jeans again (and i figure any day now an invoice will get paid), so friday saw me in the little corridor of a shop, eyeing the beauties behind glass.
and here’s the thing. friday mid-morning, it was just me in the shop and the boy behind the counter. it was like the old days, when i could — and did — ask any number of questions about the new cakes, like, “what’s this, like the cloud 9, except with the green powder?” (it’s a pine-lime custardy thing under meringue, like a splice.) or, “what’s this custardy-tarty-looking thing?” (it’s a custard tart), and i wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. these days, it’s a line of ardent admirers wanting pastries, and no time for lingering.
sigh. it was a great place to linger.
just before the next barrage of cake-seeking women hit the shop, i made away with miss marple.
all at once prim and saucy, she is a sturdy lass with a delicate bonnet of snap-crackle toffee and a petticoat ruffle of french crepe. the peekaboo through the sugar is enticing, no? a melange of slippery sliced strawberries and orange segments, tossed in grand marnier.
bundled up in the chewy crepe is a maple sugar mascarpone with more fruit for good measure. the mascarpone is smooth and custardy, and laced with grand marnier too — a hidden trap for those of us so, so allergic to alcohol — but it is so, so good i ate through the disturbing tightness that ensued. hem.
+ + +
a few weeks ago, the kid and i had a zumbo picnic date with the little matchbox girl. but it has become quite clear that a zumbo picnic is at odds with the ways of the universe, because — you remember the first two rained-out events — it was third time unlucky: as picnic hour approached, so did the big black rain clouds. by the time we stepped out of the shop, fat droplets were pelting down.
so we went to starbucks.
they were nice about it, at starbucks, turning a blind eye as i unwrapped my brown paper package, unsheathed my knife from my picnic basket (so much for positive affirmation), and divided up the handsome cake within.
and i’m sorry to have to type these words, it really irks me, but the unfortunate name of this cake is… “piste as she goes”.
-__-
because, yes, ok, there are pistachios in it. a pale green pistachio mousse actually, right on top, and it’s am-a-zing; bright with flavour. the subsequent chocolate mousse and caramel cinnamon ganache layers are luscious too. but as we delved deeper, into the slightly stale rice crispies in the praline riz souffle, and the slightly tough chocolate cake base, we became somewhat less enchanted. maybe the name was prophetic, after all.
if ever there was a contender for another glass version of a zumbo cake, this would be it. a tidy column of pistachio mousse, with a sash of chocolate and cinnamon — it would even be worth saying the name out loud for.
these are busy days. i’ve been laying out the program booklet for the sydney arab film festival for a week now. last friday, as i waited in the train station beneath the airport, i fielded a call — the most crystal clear reception in an underground station! — asking me, only partly in jest, why i was not at home laying stuff out. but it seems even super urgent and late jobs are entitled to five rounds of author’s corrections, so here i am, the millstone still tied to my neck. a very sleek millstone, mind, if i do say so myself.
night times at the computer call for simultaneously stimulating and comforting snacks. a cup of tea, definitely, and a rotating roster of small sweet things. a square (or four) of chocolate one night, a raspberry cream biscuit another.
this particular raspberry cream was unexpectedly good, though somewhat smoushed from being in its paper bag for too long. we found it at the cookie man concession at david jones, nestled close to the caramel creams. you get a crunchy shortbread sandwich, filled with sugary “cream” and anointed with a dab of sticky red jam. the caramel’s definitely on the cards for the next trip to DJ foodhall.
speaking of caramel…
i never dallied the mille feuille at adriano zumbo patissier, not even that season he filled it with mandarin creme. i don’t know what held me back — all that pastry cream, all that pastry — but i suspect it was that there was always something pinker on display. if he’d just remolded it into a cream horn, i totally would have bitten.
but all this is in the past now, because to herald the autumn, there it was: the salted butter caramel mille feuille. after a couple of weeks of missing each other in the shop, i finally had one cornered. and… the planks of pastry were crisp and very nicely sugar-glazed, the fat lines of creme patisserie most enticing. and while the richness of it was lush on my tongue, and i felt completely full after a mere third of the cake, i was left wanting more. more! more salt! more caramel even. i still have two thirds, just to make sure. but, just, more.
zumbo is a riot of colour at the moment: a rash of new cakes hit the counter in the last few weeks. there’s a fancy piped meringue thing crowned in fat, shiny cherries. there’s a slab of chocolate (and chocolate rice crispies!) beneath a wave of pistachio something. there is a multi-layered pink thing in a glass wearing a jaunty pink macaron beret, another incarnation of the macaron marie (ispahan), which will surely be the next thing i pick. but oh! the pink things to be had!
