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the sydney design trail continues. today, singapore girl met me, half and hour late, because that’s how long it took for her bus to inch its way forward between the broadway shopping center and the queen victoria building. apparently it was following a slow-moving dumptruck traveling in the bus lane all the way. why did the bus driver not overtake? why did the girl not get off the bus? and walk??? it certainly would’ve been quicker. but these are questions which will forever remain unanswered. upstairs at the QVB, workshopped awaited us.

this showcase of emerging australian designers included all manner of curvy plywood chairs, whimsical pendant lamps, and chocolate-covered cheese. yes! bizarro! under a plexiglass case were sculptural hemispheres of gorgonzola, goat cheese and a washed rind cheese, covered in dark, milk or white chocolate. you could even buy them at the chocolate shop downstairs, which i did not, because, um, weird, and also, i was far more interested in the shop’s selection of teja — peruvian milk caramel enrobed in chocolate — that i’d recently read about in “good living“.

i never go upstairs at the QVB, but because we happened to be there, we stumbled upon the amazing, well-stocked boutique of sydney fashion designer, alistair trung. it was the neat row of colourful cloven-toed sneakers stretching all the way to the back of the shop that initially caught my eye, but once we were inside, we were mesmerised by the collection of dramatic necklaces and scarves, each of which, according to singapore girl, was equivalent to two weeks’ rent. the shoes, though, were a hundred bucks, and what can you get for $100 these days? ok, so my current pair of sneakers — pink plimsoles — were $6 from the sportsgirl bargain bin, and my other current pair — navy blue jack purcells — were $50, but both have holes worn through their soles, and they let the rain in, and so i need new sneakers now, dammit.

but did i need these $100 sneakers? with their grungy print of chunky misshappen numbers, white on black? oh how i miss grunge! oh how i loved these shoes! and their inventive fastening mechanism of thick thread and metal tabs. and their secret inner lining of soft khaki cotton. and the specialised cloven-toe socks with the same numeric print, except white on pink, for an extra $15.

what i needed was to leave the shop. we walked through the park and partway up the horrible bit of oxford street to object gallery for a strange little show of contemporary craft — multi-eyed monster potato heads shaped in glass; plastic plates covered in cheery fabric and stuck to a wall; a vast expanse of lace curtain cut from black rubber; ceramic rope… and then we had to break for a light lunch.

we are not girls who know restraint, necessarily, but we knew we must save room for afternoon tea at patisserie lumiere, just tripping distance from object, and something else i had come across in “good living” — the most useful of newspaper supplements, no?

faced with a multi-level case of choux this and danish that, and a kaleidoscope of pretty tarts, it was like being in zumbo! we were poised to order at the counter, but were shooed to a table for proper service.

eschewing the plump and seductive paris brest (filled with hazelnut creme, and i think you know how i like a creme filling), i picked the chocolate tart, handsomely goldleafed. it was crisp chocolate-biscuity shell, meltaway chocolate filling, and a secret layer of squishy raspberries hidden within. truly, it was the gilt-edged eastern suburbs cousin of zumbo’s envie tart, and very delicious too. singapore girl couldn’t decide between the pristine meringues sandwiched with chocolate and the glistening raspberry tart, so she had both. it was our plan to discuss the issue of $100 japanese sneakers over tea, but by the end of it, nothing had been resolved (because we discussed anything but), and i was now concerned that buying cloven-toed shoes would mean i would need to invest in a whole new supply of appropriate hoisery. also, my head was having issues with the sudden burst of chocolate into my bloodstream.

we caught the express bus back to the city, so that she could go back to studying for her PhD in speech pathology, and so that i could go look at those shoes — my shoes — again.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 August 2007 at 10:53 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, chocolate, shoping

why is there no apostrophe in bakers delight? are they saying that what bakers do, is delight?

well, i guess i’d buy that. i’ve been delighted by some of the white yeasty things that appear on the racks of this franchise bakery chain. somewhat less delightful is the discrepancy between quality (and size!) of buns from one outlet to another. for example, the cheesymite scrolls from the bakers delight in albury are twice the size of the ones from the surry hills mall (and most of metropolitan sydney, i imagine; must be the good country air). and what about when a particular bun is completely missing from a shop? most undelightful indeed.

thing is, i first caught a glimpse of the chocolate mud scone in the display case of the balmain bakers delight, and oh what plans i had for it! i was going to smother it with whipped cream and sliced strawberries. however, when i did actually buy one, it was from the outlet at broadway shopping centre, and i was ravenous, and in the company of equally hungry kid and boy. we split it three ways, cold, from the bag, and wondered at how far this austere scottish bread had come. it was an impressive dark brown, rich with cocoa and a riot of chocolate chips. oh what plans i had for it!!

and then eventually i did have cream and strawberries in the fridge, and i walked up the street — gleeful — to the balmain branch to find no chocolate mud scones. my plans were in disarray! i thought maybe they had sold out, due to deliciousness, but no. i went by several more times, and it was as if they had never been there.

and y’know, maybe they hadn’t: maybe i had imagined the whole thing! maybe they are only sold in the bakers delight at broadway, because that is where deborah bought the one that she thoughtfully brought me on sunday.

and everything went according to plan: warmed up in the microwave, split and slathered in whipped cream and sliced strawberries, and then — an afterthought — more cream and more strawberries. truly, i was delighted.

but the kid made her dad lick the cream off before she would touch hers. is there an age group in which things are too delicious? because she’s in it.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 August 2007 at 4:33 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, kid

two thursdays ago, we walked along the tramline through north melbourne, to breakfast at the queen victoria market. there was a jam donut van parked in the heart of it, and two hot jam donuts with our names on them. there is a hand-lettered sign proclaiming 6 for $4.80, but you are not obliged to make a glutton of yourself. a handy pricelist taped to the window of the van lets you know that 1=80c, 2=$1.60, 3=$2.40, and so on. it was a very long list.

the kid face was all smiles and granular sugar. when she hit the main artery of runny, red jam, she seemed surprised: “it’s like blood!”. i was already onto a fat kransky buried in a mound of sauerkraut. i had asked for double sauerkraut, but when the lady brandishing the ladle asked if this was enough — about five times what you get at those twee german sausage stands at cultural festivals — it turned out that that was the normal amount. wuh!

we wound our way into the city, poking about in some of the shops surrounding the market. so by the time we made it to the larger-than-life-size pixar logo outside the acmi, it was princess maeve in her $2 tiara.

we swanned around the art gallery for a while, and then caught a tram to the prahran market. two markets in one day? well, i was on a cupcake mission. we must have found the crabapple bakery a little past noon, but most of the cupcakes were already gone. “i had a rosepetal one today too,” the shoplady said helpfully, gesturing towards a little tray empty but for a scattering of crumbs. the kid had no trouble choosing; her pink-iced cupcake was also pink on the inside. i hovered for a while, eventually deciding on the chocolate-raspberry cupcake: a mudcake base with raspberries baked in, topped with a swirl of ganache.

the boy had no time for cupcakes. and so, with this fragile package in the crook of my arm, we barrelled on, stopping for a large bag of tiny mandarins, on the lookout for the chocolate stall.

and there it was, three aisles down, monsieur truffe. the frenchman himself was not there that day, but a very hospitable girl offered us truffley treats from the array of samples before her. having already done my truffle dash at koko black, i thought it would be improper to acquire more of the luscious, meltaway beauties. no matter though, because monsieur truffe also peddled a great variety of bars. milk bars and dark bars of varying percentages of cocoa, organic bars, single origin bars, single origin bars with cocoa nibs… i was having a very hard time choosing.

but the shopgirl rescued me, asking what my preferred level of cocoa content was, and then saying, “that’s my range too!” when i told her it was somewhere between 65% and 75%. she recommended a few, and brought out secret samples from the fridge behind the counter. and so i learned that this was wonderful, creamy dark chocolate, not at all like the usual dry and shattery french stuff. before too long i had a little brown bag stuffed with four slim bars. it’s not really hoarding if it’s from interstate, right?

and then it rained. and we went into too many secondhand shops along chapel street, and the boy bought a year’s worth of clothes for $4, $6, $8, and i bought vintage paper coasters from a box out on the street. we were riding the rollercoaster of missed naptime, but a late afternoon cupcake back at the apartment made it all better. for a short while.

getting from north melbourne to north richmond at dinnertime is a trial. the tram you think will take you there would have stopped running, and so you will end up catching a tram to a tram to a tram. the kid will get louder and shriller before the jugga-jugga motion rocks her to sleep on her father’s shoulder, five minutes before you need to get off. but it all works out in the end, because dinner is the biggest banh xeo in the world, somewhere in north richmond.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 July 2007 at 10:22 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, cake, chocolate, dinner, kid, trip

waffle interlude…

i found the waffle place — waffle on — right by the subway entrance on degraves street. it was a little nook and cranny, cosy red and warm. i ordered a waffle, plain, and a hot chocolate. “chocolat chaud?” confirmed the proprietor, while indicating that i pull up a stool to the high counter in the corner.

not too long after, he whisked this suger-dusted beauty down before me. there were wispy strands hanging off it, that i took — with a lurch — to be hair, but it turned out to be threads of caramelised sugar. i broke off a corner and nibbled at it, and was immediately won over: satisfying crunch gave way to chewy inside. this wasn’t some common variety of flluffy waffle that you could just shove into your mouth and swallow. i tackled it slowly, all its burnt sugary bits, stopping every now and then to answer a question — “c’est bon?”, or to learn a bit more about the man and his waffles:

lived in sydney — left sydney — doesn’t miss it — ran a cafe in darlighurst — le petit creme — ran with the victoire crowd — doesn’t think much of fluffy americain waffles — imports his beet sugar from belgium

and then monsieur waff, he brought me my hot chocolate. ah, merci!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 July 2007 at 1:28 pm

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

so, two mondays ago, i hit the ground running. actually, walking as fast as i could with a large pack on my back, halfway up the spine of the city, after waking up at 5, after a flight that included no food except for the half-filled paper cup of hottish water and mediocre teabag that i paid $3 for and, thank god, the chocolate treat slid across to me at zumbo a couple days earlier — all chopped almonds and dark chocolate coating, over a luscious, meltaway salted butter caramel core… excuse me, my mind wandered. and so after the airport shuttle dropped me off at southern cross station, and after i found out that the next hotel shuttle would be 20 minutes away, i slung on my backpack and walked.

the shop right before my hotel entrance was a kitchenware emporium, with 400 pink and white balloons in the front window, suggesting, “let’s cook!”. if they had said, “let’s eat!” i would have taken it as a very good sign.

still, the hotel turned out to be just a block away from koko black, so that is where i went first. as i neared the royal arcade, it struck me that there was a queue of people stretching out into the mall, and i became immediately concerned that there would be no tables available at the chocolate salon. but the queue was to enter the jewelry store on the corner. phew.

you enter the koko black, and it’s like running the gauntlet: bars on the left, truffles on the right. straight ahead it’s a drink station and a wall of gift boxes and a staircase leading up to the salon. it’s all marble tables, and plush chairs, and the chili hot chocolate that appears quite a while after you order it is like a saucy painted lady. the heat is right there at the front of your tongue, and lingers after you swallow: afterglow. it is rich, though not thick and cloying, and there is just enough of it. if you take your time and sip gently, the pink fancy in the crema will last, more or less unscathed right until the very bottom of the cup, when the slightest inhalation will suck it right into your mouth before you quite realise what has happened. afterwards, you will want to return, tomorrow, for the cinnamon hot chocolate.

slightly buzzy (only chocolate and liquids so far; why oh why no breakfast foods, koko black?), i walked to the ngv and tried to be impressed by the sneaker exhibition. but the majority were macho terminator sneakers, and generally uncharming. so i went down to the cafeteria instead and was charmed by the dessert bar: a cluster of fat jam donuts, glasses of chocolate mousse and what’s that? i asked the countergirl. it was bannoffee pie, but not like any banoffee pie i’d ever seen. prepared ‘slice-style’, a crumbly biscuit base, with sliced banana, a pillow of whipped cream atop a blanket of thick caramel. this is what i’m going back to melbourne for. because at the time, i thought i should eat something not made solely of sugar.

overlooking the great, grey hall of the gallery foyer, i had a large bowl of chickpea and bacon soup, with bread and butter. the bacon makes all the difference.

and then i caught the tram to fitzroy, but being monday, half the fun stuff was closed. the enormous dangerfield clearance warehouse at the start of brunswick street though, that was open, and welcomed me with this rather fetching t-shirt with a merry skull print: hours of fun mixing and matching ahead.

later i walked the city streets in the drizzle. the sun was setting, then set, and everything was dark and glinty, except for the dazzling oasis that was lord of the fries. i ordered a cone of fries with “european mayo”, and a mini burger, and couldn’t think of anything more trashy than to eat it sprawled on my grand expanse of hotel bed.

the fries were delicious: hot waxy potato — real potato, you could tell from the skin still attached — with a tantalising crunch upfront. i was underwhelmed by the mayonnaise, but maybe it was just the residual tang of strepsil on my tongue interfering. the burger, i didn’t get to until i was back in my room, so it was somewhat tepid from the ten minute walk in the cold. it went down like a regular fast food chain burger, somewhat squishy in the patty, and now that i have the innernet at my disposal once more, i have discovered that the patty is not meat at all! the company website proudly reveals that they “use a product called Textured Vegetable Protein” [their caps]. well!

and then, you know what? i fell asleep. barely past nine-thirty, struggling to follow “brothers and sisters”, i gave in to the crisp white linen and the four fat pillows.

so far, so good.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 July 2007 at 9:40 am

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, dinner, trip

welcome to the dollhouse.

or the new tax year, or something, which is significant only because i have to lodge not only another BAS, crap, but also my tax return. crap crap.

but that can wait. i’m off to melbourne tomorrow, chasing down some eating adventures of my own.

yesterday, charlie zumbo asked “do you like chocolate?”, and deborah snorted somewhere to the left of me. “chocolate is, like, my favourite thing ever,” i said, and suddenly, silently, a nut-dusted, chocolate-covered, pointy macaroony thing was whisked into a bag and slid across the counter towards me. i’m saving it for breakfast on the plane, along with the pale pink rose macaron, only slightly squished from falling into the bottom of my tote.

this afternoon, after a slightly fraught morning of wallpapering a dollhouse (the non-wrinkle glue i’d bought for the purpose wrinkled!) i walked up the street and met sonya, popping into zumbo just long enough to procure a passionfruit macaron for an impromptu picnic in the (chilly, oh so chilly) park. she brought me my very own matchbox, which means i don’t have to go skulking about searching for the hidden ones. magical, they are, i tells ya.

she made me not open it in her presence, and now that i am home, i have discovered a small bounty of dark chocolate chips and a recipe for chocolate chip pancakes. the weird thing about it, is that when she placed it in my hand the moment we met, i was surprised by how heavy it was, and the question i asked in my head was, “is it chocolate?”. ok, so maybe not so weird after all.

internet friends who give me chocolate, i thank you.

other internet friends, i hope to bring you wide-eyed gushy tales of good eats in that cold southern city. until then, may i recommend the archives? the last three months were pretty good, i think. ZUMBO!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 July 2007 at 5:09 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, misc

the coughing started towards the end of matt moran‘s masterchef theatre at the good food and wine show. as matt moran arranged raspberries atop a creme base, the one sharp point at the back of my throat grew into a great spluttering fit. i don’t think it caused too much disruption; the applause for the raspberry tart drowned me out.

but i have been coughing for just over two weeks now. at its worst it was the kind of cough that brings up brown and lumpy from my lungs. now, the germs seem to have all gone, but i wake up at four in the morning, still coughing, and the only way to get back to sleep is to watch cindy crawford’s informercial (“i never thought i’d be in an informercial…” she says, not batting an eyelid.) and read another chapter of “snow“.

having only vicariously experienced the good food show of previous years via grab your fork, i asked helen for some tips. “bring a backpack… get $25 worth of samples,” she offered helpfully.

so we hit the ground eating, deborah and i: lavosh bread topped with figs and white cheese, unusual jams — strawberry-balsamic vinegar-black pepper — on bite-sized scones, little cups of ready-peeled crabmeat, south australian pasta sauce made with south australian tomatoes, pomegranate green tea, chocolate…

for me, the show was all about chocolate. five minutes in we had found an organic chocolate stand with samples of buttermilk chocolate (“it is very sweet,” warned the samplegirl. and it was.) then we found the lindt stand, where a lady distributed raspberry lindor balls, and right behind her stood another lady handing out orange lindor balls. then the adora stand, where you present your hand, palm up, and the kind counter ladies filled it with callebaut chocolate buttons. the ikea stand missed a great opportunity to supermarket their range of swedish food (they were selling kitchens) but there was an enormous bowl of daim candies for the taking. not an hour into the show, we were walking down the aisles, woozy and lightheaded. but not one to let a feeling of unwellness stop me from eating chocolate, i plundered the sample trays of the three or four other organic chocolate stands, a generous hunk of a triple chocolate cookie and a teaspoon of wattle seed white chocolate mousse.

we sampled savoury for a bit — dried figs, fish tofu, curry on rice (twice!), corn chips — and then we bought the donna hay magazine show bag. curiously, it contained no donna hay products (besides the magazine, which irritates me), but was startlingly value for money. $7.95 bought us a couple of mini samples: a small packet of cardboard corn cakes and a tiny bottle of shower oil, but also a host of full-sized products like a pump pack of liquid hand soap, a tin of moroccan spice flavour rub, a 750g carton of raw sugar, a dozen dishwasher tablets, a pack of disposable plates edged with blue daisies, and a loaf of bread (!). [edit 22/06: and a three-pack of chocolate brownie-muffin bites, and a bottle of fiji water.]

across the aisle, the delicious magazine showbag upped the stakes with gourmet samples and a bottle of wine and a coffee voucher and a lindt chocolate cupcake, but you only got the showbag if you took out a subscription to the magazine. fair enough. but in a glorious twist of fate, deborah bought herself a subscription, and then handed me the cupcake. thanks, lady!

and so it was this moist, dark cupcake with the lush chocolate ganache that sat in my lap during the matt moran cooking show, though it didn’t really make it past the first few minutes. being in row g, we missed out on the plate of salt and pepper squid that got passed ’round the early birds up front, but he sure made it look easy, cleaning the squishy beast. “even simple enough for donna,” he quipped. then he picked up his cookbook several times, stroking the cover gently, like a proud papa.

the theatre disgorged right by the glitzy display of curtis stone’s new cookware range. silicone sheets with shallow star-shaped moulds for making wafers. double-walled glass ramekins. nice, and of course, we need more celebrity chef cookware. but the bright yellow C logo all lit up like broadway gave us the giggles.

we did a last lap around the exhibition hall, to buy the things which we’d been listing in our heads. there were other things we might have bought, at special show prices, if those prices hadn’t been tied to unmanageable quantities like five tins of powdered stock, or four bottles of soy sauce, for $10. (though at the kikkoman stand, we learnt that a teaspoon or a tablespoon of soy sauce in a dessert such as a lemon tart could really bring out the… tartness. when quizzed further, the counterman admitted that a tablespoon would actually be a lot, and the recipe developer actually recommended more like a teaspoon. perhaps the recommendation should actually be no soy sauce whatsoever in your dessert. anyone care to try this?)

so for me, what ended up in my shopping bag were three bars of single-region lindt dark chocolate (and a coupon for a free lindt macaron at the lindt cafe) for $5; the $25 adora chocolate showbag containing one each of their sixteen truffles, a dark chocolate bar, a bag of chocolate-enrobed turkish delight (from iran), and another mini belgian chocolate bar; and a carton of the organic triple chocolate cookies sampled earlier in the day.

way earlier. a week ago, i asked helen if two hours would be enough to see everything. wisely, she’d said to budget for three. as we left the exhibition hall, an announcement came through that the show would be closing in 15 minutes. i guess this means we’d been there close to six hours.

the show closed at six, but by five, the exhibitors had already begun scrubbing down their counters, and the samples were long gone. en route to the exit though, we were stopped in our tracks, because the good man at king island dairy was still handing out little tubs of chocolate creme dessert. what it is, is pure thick cream (53% milk fat, no vegetable gums or whatever) combined with belgian chocolate. genius.

i immediately wanted more, but it was dark outside, and there was a healthy walk to the buses ahead of us, and how were we to know that halfway through, it would begin raining sideways?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 June 2007 at 11:16 pm

permalink | filed under around town, bookshelf, chocolate, shoping, snacks

how has a week gone by already? it’s like time travel i tells ya. last sunday morning we were a flurry of activity, pretzel-dipping. this time i roped in eager little hands: grabby fingers to break up a lindt bar, agile fingers to fish pretzels out of the chocolate bath, grubby fingers from samples along the way.

we packed a picnic then: buffalo mozzarella and pesto sandwich for me, tasty cheese and avocado sandwich for the kid, and a little box of sliced tomatoes for on-site insertion. a couple of mandarins in the basket, and a few chocolate-dipped pretzels for good measure. we were off to the acoustica festival, just up the hill and then down the hill from home.

from the crest we looked down into birchgrove oval, and it was like a quaint village through the clearing. an arc of little white tents lined the perimeter, some festooned with balloons, proferring all manner of festival foods, sunglasses and quick massages. there was a giant inflatable slide, and a swing-carousel, and something with a row of clowns’ heads that swiveled to and fro.

in the middle of it all there was a boy and his guitar. he was the first act of the day, and the front row was his friends from high school. there was no second row — it was very early in the proceedings — so we sat a couple metres back, on my $10 “burberry” picnic rug, and minutes later, as he played an elliott smith song, all the food was gone.

“can we go and buy some ice cream?” asked the kid. it was a reasonable request, even though the new zealand natural ice cream stand was charging an unreasonable $4 per scoop.

we returned to our rug to catch as many minutes of act number two as it took for the pink ice cream to be eaten, and then, “can we go to the face painting?”

we returned to our rug — one of us hopping all the way — to see the third act of the day, but it was perhaps too much to ask of the kid. she was already being pulled in the direction of the playground up the hill. we left in the middle of some pretty good 12-bar blues.

considering the last live music i saw was baby proms at the opera house, and the second last live music was a playschool concert, i was pretty happy.

this makes me happy too: the six-month expired box of royce nama chocolate in my fridge is still completely edible! these little bricks of fine chocolate, each one dusted in cocoa powder, pack a punch of dark chocolate flavour and melt away to nothing on my tongue. actually, the google translated page tells it better:

it is the raw chocolate of the sweetness moderate adult. …the elegant fragrance starts overflowing, V.S.O.P was blended in the bitter chocolate. tastefulness it is the raw chocolate of the adult taste where the elegant fragrance and the bitter impression of overflowing do not accumulate.

all true. it is made with fresh cream, and apparently has a shelf life of one month. but i have put it to the test, and six months past 27 october 2006, they are still perfect. now that’s time travel.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 April 2007 at 9:15 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, kid, kitchen, snacks

in the midst of one of those two-hour, long-distant calls to nellicent the other night, i asked, “um, where is your sainbury’s?”. i thought that i’d made it seem an innocent question, apropos of nothing, though my index finger was making random loop-de-loops on the magazine page.

she gave it serious thought. “oh. it’s in [name of suburb], on [name of street] and –,” she paused, before the shrieking began. “i know what you want!!”

“argh!” i shrieked back, “i want it! i want it!”

“i know what you want! i have already bought it for you, in my head!”

“well,” i said, “i hope that you are not talking about cheese.”

because i surely wasn’t. a week ago, i’d read a story on anya hindmarch, in “vogue“, that mentioned a shopping bag she’d designed for sainsbury’s in the UK, in one of those everybody-wins exercises to reduce plastic bag consumption. and what a bag. before it’s even gone on sale at the supermarkets, it’s already sold out its online pre-sale allotments, and gone on to appear on ebay at forty times its original cost.

we went on to discuss the logistics of obtaining one (or two!) of these bags — which sainsbury’s branches might sell them, and if she might have to rope in one of her friends in case there was a one-per-customer limit (there is!) — and now that i’ve read a bit more about the madness, it all seems just a bit too stella-at-target.
so perhaps i won’t be getting one after all.

but what better time to spruik the raging yoghurt shopping bag? ok, so it’s not designed by anya hindmarch, is not a limited edition, will cost you more than £5, and will make me a couple of bucks too… but you can hang it over your shoulder and carry all manner of groceries in it, just like the sainsbury’s one. anyway, don’t you just need another canvas shopping bag? i myself have a selection of eight or ten hanging from my laundry door.

and while we’re on the hindmarch comparisons, look what i made saturday morning: chocolate-covered pretzels.

after breakfast (sour cherry jam on buttered rye and caraway bagel, yum) i melted down a 100g bar of lindt dark chocolate in a large bowl over a pot of simmering water. i tipped in a bag of salted pretzels, and stirred until everyone was well-coated. i fished them out with a bamboo skewer and laid them out to set on a sheet of grease-proof paper. it’s an effortless and addictive snack, i tell you, with the bittersweet chocolate (just a thin enough coat to start melting in the warmth of your fingertips), and the sharp crunch of the pretzel, and the lingering surprise of a random salt chip.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 April 2007 at 1:42 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, chocolate, kitchen, nellie, shoping, snacks

for breakfast this morning i had a cup of black tea and six (eight?) daim candies. it didn’t have to be that way; i had considered walking up the street into rozelle, to the newly-opened bagel house cafe. when i rode the bus past yesterday the doors had finally been thrown open, and there was plenty of hot, steamy action in the back. but it would have been too indulgent, no? to go out for fresh bagels when there were still three from saturday in the freezer? probably not.

this week past, i’ve eaten my way through toasted fruit bread, blueberry bagels (twice), swiss cheese and tomatoes on toast (that was tuesday, when i thought i should eat something that wasn’t just sugarbread, in preparation for the afternoon’s bloodletting), and yesterday, delicious spelt crepes stuffed with spinach and fetta, and topped with sticky fig jam, at the fair trade coffee company (i had tea).

the day before, breakfast had been the last three profiteroles from the profiterole cake. backtrack: the thursday before good friday, the last day of term, the boy’s staffroom had given him a farewell cake: a dozen or so custard-filled puffs, arranged on a large shortbread biscuit base. the whole structure was covered in chocolate and sprinkled with tiny coloured sugar flowers. oh, and foil-wrapped chocolate eggs strategically positioned in the swirly chocolate border. he got through a couple of profiteroles that night, and then friday, he left it in the fridge when he drove off into the big brown. so there i was, alone in the house with most of a profiterole cake for company. what to do?

it was easier than i thought, a profiterole here, a couple there, throughout the week, though the chocolate was compound, mixed up to have that certain oily consistency that you don’t really object to until it’s too late. you know how it is: you eat two profiteroles, and feel fine about eating the third, and that’s when it wreaks its revenge.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 4:33 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, cake, chocolate, drawn

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