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Category Archives: ice cream

let’s call this the holy grail. i’d been trying to visit icekimo for the last two or three years, ever since my sister thrust a slightly dog-eared business card of theirs into my hand. and perhaps i didn’t try hard enough. i mean, this is an ice cream cafe pretty much in the next suburb from the family home, but it was never the right time, or there was just no time (no time for ice cream! whoulda thunk!), or… see, there’s just no excuse.

but we finally made it. saturday night after korean bbq, we circled the block twice looking for parking, ran across the big street in the path of fast cars, ducked beneath the scaffolding that armoured the building, and finally stepped into pink, corrugated, c u t e icekimo.

there were more flavours that i wanted to try than i could reasonably expect to consume after korean bbq, but fortuitously, nellie and the kid sorted themselves out in a most agreeable manner.

maeve had an enormous “small” scoop of bandung, a rich and rosey concoction in a most fetching shade of pink. my sister intoned “dino milo” at the counter for some time before picking cempedak, which was just as i had hoped. it was a sunny orb of yellow, and the perfume of the fruit filled my mouth when i licked a proffered bit off the little plastic paddle. they’d been generous with the chunks of cempedak all the way through.

me? i had a scoop of teh tarik, and a scoop of jasmine. both were light and milky, and comforting in the way of a cup of tea. there was wistfulness as i scraped away the last dregs at the bottom of the paper cup.

singapore has been good to us… except for that moment on friday morning when my permanent residence visa was revoked, finally, after almost thirty years. “um. our records show that you are not employed in singapore,” said the auntie behind the counter at the immigration department. “yes,” i said, and she was almost apologetic. “try and come back to work before may,” she suggested, “and if you stay for a year or so, we may reinstate your status.” so that’s it then.

tomorrow night we leave, our bags packed with such treats as apple kitkats, strawberry marshmallow oreo chocolate pies, a muji shirt, moomin candy. several bags of quality german xmas gingerbread just to keep the japanese contingent in check. when i next return, way, way after may, i will have a bedroom here, and a bank account, good times and treats, a mother and a father… and an unsettling feeling that i won’t be able to stay for as long as i’d like.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 February 2008 at 11:34 pm

permalink | filed under ice cream, trip

the days go by, all at once fast and slow, and accordingly we are dilligent and lazy. which is to say, we are doing plenty of nothing.

we hang out at the local playground — just before sunset the previous evening, a small boy practised his trumpet, solo; this morning, three high school kids smoked cigarettes and thrashed about to tinny metal — and we go to muji, and we eat.

yesterday, post-dimsum, we fell into a booth at a japanese dessert cafe and ordered treats all-round. mine was a maccha parfait: from the bottom up, clear jelly, maccha jelly, whipped cream, corn flakes, more maccha jelly, a scoop of maccha ice cream, a swirl of maccha soft-serve, two slices of tinned peach, and a crisp wafer.

(pre-dimsum, we ate too many slices of kaya toast at the kaya toast place in the belly of the local mall.)

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 February 2008 at 10:21 pm

permalink | filed under ice cream, snacks, trip

it had started out so promisingly, the launch of the sydney chinese new year festival. when we got to the marktetplace, it had not rained for several hours, and a great sumo panda was wandering amongst the trees soliciting photographs. the first stall we saw was the korean ice cream vendor, hawking watermelon-shaped icy-poles (as previously documented here) for a dollar, and this amazing corn ice-cream sandwich for a dollarfiddy.

a true-to-life corn-shaped wafer shell, with a heart of chocolate-coated corn ice-cream. straight out of the bag, the smell of corn was intense and pure — the taste less so, though the light and creamy was punctuated by little bitlets of corn.

corn!

but it all went downhill from there. as we progressed down the rows of stalls, it became apparent that this was a sham of a market: a few stands of standard supermarket asian brands — oyster sauce, curry paste, exotic drinks, feh; a few too many toss-and-“win” sideshow amusements run by scary carnies; an array of asian streetfood, all deepfried, most on sticks…

there was a stage, too, and a large pink rat-shaped lantern, but at some point, as we considered a dinner of takoyaki and papaya salad — the healthy choice — the DJ interrupted his mandarin rap record to say, “due to inclement weather, the official proceedings have been cancelled.”

which was all we needed, really, to hightail it out of there. dinner was had in a brown booth across the road, at cafe de macau. and what a strange, strange dinner it was. macau food eh?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 February 2008 at 1:57 am

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream

stuff i might miss over the summer.

we came running down the hill under the harbour bridge, knee-deep (for some of us) in grass, stopping twice for dandelions. we came down over the hill, and we saw the pink and white van.

we may have gone overboard on the sprinkles.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 December 2007 at 7:59 pm

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid

one thing i remember about two days after my birthday is that it was dirty, stinkin’ hot. it was about 11.40 when we left the park, and just before noon when we arrived at about life; i was slick with sweat, and the lenses in my sunglasses had steamed up from the heat coming off my cheeks. the kid was fresh as a daisy, perhaps only slightly wilted, because she’d been in the pram while i’d been pushing it up that god-damned hill. at least one of us looked presentable; it was like we were about to meet the queen.

all morning, maeve had been going through a list of what she might do when she met maggie. “i might dance for maggie,” she said, “and then i might sing a song for maggie, and then i might say hello…” we have “the cook and the chef” on every week, so maggie beer is like, i dunno, a familiar grand aunt? and she was at about life signing cookbooks that day, as well as launching her new range of fancy ice cream.

and amazingly, as i stood there in the doorway trying not to puddle on the floor, someone handed me a tiny cone of ice cream, and one to the kid as well. now that’s a welcome. a smooth and creamy welcome, with a rich vanilla flavour and… an intriguing tang. that something else, when i managed to read the label on a tub a little while later, is elderflower. i wish that i had had a moment longer to savour it slowly, for bang on twelve maggie appeared and began signing books for the handful of people who’d shown up punctually. i popped the rest of the cone into my mouth and grappled for the cookbook in my bag.

a couple weeks before, i had told the boy that if he bought a copy of “maggie’s harvest” for his mum’s birthday, that i’d take it to get signed. so there we were, inching forward towards the grand lady. “where’s maggie?” said maeve, and there. she. was.

“hello!” said maggie, brightly. but maeve was not singing, and not dancing, and not even saying hello. there was something very interesting on the floor just right of maggie’s feet. so i told maggie how excited we were about her ice cream, and she said that she was too, and we got through it in the end, and then it was time for lunch.

the salad display at about life is a wall of great big bowls bursting with colour and delight. it was extra delightful that day, because of a small platter of grilled lamb cutlets sitting unobtrusively to one side. it became very important to me that we should acquire a portion of these… but what constituted a portion? the counterstaff did not know, because it was a one-off special for the day, but they helpfully suggested that i tell them how many i wanted and they’d put it on a plate for me.

so i asked for two — one each for me and the kid — and some of the tomato and hand-torn mozzarella salad on the side. and some bread and butter, please. oh, and also that amazing strawberry tart in the cake cabinet.

and what showed up was a heaped platter of colour and delight: the lamb was well-marinated and tender, with just enough charred fatty bits on the edges; the tomatoes were big and juicy; the cheese tasted pure, of cream. the bread, after it had been put to good use soaking up lamb juice and olive oil… sigh…

but by that stage the kid had already moved on. swiftly and methodically she picked off the perfect glistening strawberries atop the tart, and started on the stewed rhubarb at the same cracking pace, until the intense sourness stopped her. mm! it was sour! but i ate it all, relishing the tartness. what didn’t get eaten (shock!) was most of the pastry. “pastry”. it looked lovely on the shelf, all dramatically misshapen and caramelised, but it was chewy and ultimately unyielding, a handful of seeds and grains pressed into a pie dish, and tasted like what i imagine those moulded birdseed things taste like. sigh. (this is a different sort of sigh from the one in the last paragraph: it is a healthy cake sigh.)

following the banoffee pie debacle of a couple months back — there were a couple thin slices of banana atop the cloud of cream, and i thought that there might be more banana hidden beneath, mingling with the caramel… but no, those were the only two whispers of banana in the whole thing, dried out from being baked. and the cream wasn’t cream; it was some sort of soft meringue, i think. and the biscuit base was too big a slab. and… and… well, it just wasn’t a very good banoffee experience (my first time!) and i would hope that it gets better from now on —

i guess i’m trying to say… well, i’m hesitant to put the kibosh on cake at about life, based on two out of two not quite stellar instances… but maybe go all out on the savoury stuff — the salads, the tapas plates, the wraps filled to bursting point and served with a handful of undressed rocket — and if there’s lamb lurking about the glass case, order it! and then buy a tub of maggie’s ice cream from the grocery department.

which, in case you are interested, also comes in quince and bitter almond, and burnt fig jam, honeycomb and caramel. on the way out, i bought a tub of the latter for the boy, and briefly considered having it autographed by maggie, but she was outside in the sunshine, eating a big plate of something delicious. we sidled past into the heat. “where’s maggie?” said maeve.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 December 2007 at 9:32 am

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid, lunch

what is this beastie?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 September 2007 at 10:09 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, ice cream, kid

haberfield is a bus and then another bus away from me, and even though the trip surprised me by being much quicker than i’d expected, in the last couple of years, i have been, let me see, oh, just the once.

this is a pity because the main street goes something like this: chocolate, cheese, pizza, deli, cake, pasta, cake, supermarket where two or three aisles are filled with more shapes of pasta than you have ever seen, and then, on the corner, pasticceria papa.

it was raining monday morning, and though i had mostly psyched myself up to take on the temperamental bus schedule, i was very pleased when ana said she’d swing by and pick us up. so we arrived mostly dry, in great time, and ready to eat, which we did.

this is what two big girls, two little girls, and a one-week-of-gestation-remaining baby can put away, in just under two hours:
veal arancino
prosciutto pizza
custard tart with mixed fruit
cassata gelato
mixed berry and cream tart
mini ricotta cannoli
large ricotta cannoli
almond biscuit
three lattes
three babycinos

the gelato was especially good, a festive riot of hazelnuts, candied fruit, chocolate shavings and dramatic swirls of pistachio paste. good thing they were out of pink for the day; the kid was easily swayed.

still, it was the superlush ricotta cannoli that came home with me, four in a shiny brown box, along with a chocolate custard horn and a napoli biscuit and a fat schnitzel roll.

this is not your regular breaded cutlet on fluffy white buttered bread. behold: schnitzel, yes, and then roasted cherry tomatoes, eggplant, fontina, mozzarella, artichoke, rocket and prosciutto (though you could choose one with salami), in a chewy-soft roll.

i ate it, with a cup of darjeeling tea, for a late lunch, and it sat in my stomach well into the evening, when plans were already afoot for a return visit.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 August 2007 at 5:25 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, ice cream, lunch

it was way past naptime by the time we emerged from the powerhouse museum yesterday afternoon. we had spent a good slab of time waiting for our turn at schmuck quickies — a sydney design festival event in which the performance jeweller yuka oyama crafts you a piece of jewellery from recycled materials, on the spot. today, the spot was a long line.

we got there about 11.30 to find the musical robot bears switched off and the adjacent schmuck quickie salon brightly lit and full of cameraman and sound recordist and abc tv producers. our 15 minute wait swelled to just short of 40 minutes (without the musical robot bears!), when the organisers came around to say that everything was running slower because of the recording, and it was now lunchtime and could we come back at 1?

so we did. we scooted out for a picnic of hotdog with tomato sauce and pie floater, and returned to the deserted atrium and waited some more. at quarter past one, yuka was back in action, most personable, asking if there was anything out of her bags of stuff that i liked, or if there was anything i liked in general. “i like fabric, ” i said, “and acrylic. and pink!” and then she was rummaging in her trolley and pulling out great handfuls of bright pink ribbon and thin plastic tubes. she worked nimbly, fashioning a necklace from the material, with a scribbly little highlight safetypinned to my collar at the very end. she even made a matching one for the kid.

“it is simple” said yuka, “but it is pretty.” and it was, but here’s the thing: as soon as we were done, the camera crew who’d been lurking in the shadows turned their machines and lights back on, and prepared to document the next participants. the ones who’d been filmed earlier in the day had quite elaborate pieces made; the girl from the tv station, in particular, had a resplendent brooch — an alien botanical specimen, really — attached to her jacket, spirited up from squirty nozzles from detergent containers and a cluster of colourful randomness.

would it be so wrong to imagine that the artist had rushed through ours so that she could make something more involved for the tv people? or had she really seen right into me, and discerned the correct flamboyant vs. low key ratio which makes up my personality, and worked accordingly? ultimately, i was pleased with my pink ribbon (and would have worn it out again today, but i couldn’t attach it to my shirt in as lovely a way as it had been yesterday, argh!), but maeve was rightfully disgruntled: she had wanted to be a bunny. we had barely made it to the exit when she began tugging it off. so we decided that we should go have pink ice cream.

if you are in chinatown, as we were, you might assume an obligation to have your ice cream at passionflower, or maybe the seven-years-out-of-date Y2K cafe. maybe you’d just pop into gelatissimo for a takeaway cone. but across from the entertainment center sits the inconspicuous shopfront of the cold rock ice creamery. i’d been wanting to try this for years: where they smoosh stuff into your ice cream on a cold marble counter. today was the perfect opportunity: it was the closest ice cream store out of all available options, and i was developing an uncomfortable chaffing from carrying the heavy, wilting child.

they had two kinds of pink ice cream for us, and one of them was turkish delight! at an adjacent counter were a great many things you could choose to have mixed into your ice cream for 80c a pop — famous chocolate bars, unlikely candy, frozen fruit, cookie dough, tim tams… and because of the company, i deferred to the unlikely candy option. surrounded by pigeons, gulls and their shit, we shared a cup of rose-flavoured ice cream with gummy bears. the ice cream was lovely and creamy, the gummy bears extra springy from being cold.

next time, perhaps in the company of myself, i shall have it with smooshed-in raspberries, and maybe, if i’m in the mood, smooshed-in chocolate fudge brownies.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 August 2007 at 9:53 pm

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid

so, wednesday.

two wednesdays ago, i woke up, made myself a cup of hotel tea, and considered the slab of chocolate kugelhopf i’d procured the day before at the monarch cakeshop on acland. my room wasn’t swish enough that it came with a microwave, however there was a column heater in the corner that came in damn handy for a breakfast of warm cake.

i was feeling a little antsy, because boy and kid were due in melbourne at some point in the day, and because boys like to be spontaneous, i had no idea what point that would be. so i checked out of the hotel and went to buy several truffles at koko black. i walked over to the queen victoria market, but it’s closed wednesdays. i caught a random tram and found myself at the casino. i thought maybe i’d look into the window of the prada shop for old times’ sake (god forbid i should actually set foot in a prada shop!), but the whole complex was clad in plywood scaffolding. they were still letting people in though, and it was right after i bought a cone of sweet corn pumpkin ice cream from the japanese stall in the food court, that the call came through: they were half an hour away!

and that pretty much sums up wednesday, because by the time i got the keys to our fancy serviced apartment on the edge of the city, and met kid and boy, and distributed welcome gifts of fruit bun and poppyseed danish, it was storytime, and then naptime. for me even. two days of walking around doing plenty of not much sure takes its toll.

afterwards there was a twilight stroll through gentrified laneways, and cheap chinatown noodles. and then i felt a duty to steer the proceedings in the direction of the trampoline store across the road — truly, they are everywhere — because the previous day, i had seen on the wall of the fitzroy shop, a poster with a caterpillar on it (the segments of its body were scoops of gelato) which said that people shorter than 90cm could get a free kid’s cone. (so, and, dwarves?)

and so she did. pink.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 July 2007 at 9:51 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, cake, ice cream, kid, trip

two tuesdays ago, i woke up in my hotel room in melbourne with a mission. i had to find the waffle place for breakfast, and then i had to be at acmi at ten, when the doors opened, to buy me a ticket to the pixar exhibition.

the waffles you might have already read about; the pixar show — well, by the time i waddled my waffle-laden ass over to the hideous yet brilliant federation square, there was a short queue at the ticket counter. yep. first day of the school holidays (they’re closed monday), and there were munchkins everywhere.

the three or four large rooms crammed with concept sketches, colour studies and clay models made me feel, alternately, awe and revulsion (awe towards the pixar artists, clearly, and revulsion at how i had squandered my life away and never did any drawing). there were touchscreen video kiosks scattered throughout the exhibition — ingenious foldy things that could be adjusted from full-height vertical to how-low-can-you-go? did i mention there were children everywhere? — video kiosks, before which you could stand for many many minutes (hours?) if you were so inclined, to watch behind-the-scenes everything on pixar productions. and then there was a zoetrope.

oh. my. godddd.

there’s this small, dark room, right, and in the middle is a carousel of toys from “toy story”, engaged in all manner of acrobatic activity. it’s kind of interesting, this dimly-lit tableau of colourful little statues going around and around… and then the strobe lighting kicks in, and the music, and it’s the most amazing thing ever (4.2mb mp4, as documented by this guy). i went back in three times. kids everywhere.

so that sums up the pixar show for me: 3D “toy story” zoetrope. quick! go! you have until october.

and then it was lunchtime. i got a passout just in case, and guess what! went back to waffle on and joined the immense lunchtime queue for freshly-baked baguette sandwiches. truly, the man takes them out of the little oven behind the counter, splits them open, and fills them, still steaming, with such things as salty butter, ham and pickles, if you, like me, ask for le parisien. and if you do request le parisien, he will ask if you want cheese in it as well. “you will like it, i promise. it is very good gruyere.” it was. the whole unwieldy baton.

i tore bits off, salty-melty, as i walked up flinders lane, and then i devoured the rest of it sitting in the sun in fitzroy gardens until the lunchtime tree loppers cut short my reverie, sending a gust of sawdust my way. but no matter: it was time to cross the street to craft victoria, to see the scarves. so many scarves, and what’s the definition of a scarf anyway? i’ve been curious about learning how to knit, and now i see that if i stick to scarves, i may not need to.

i did a quick jaunt back up brunswick, to see if the shop i really wanted to go to was open (it wasn’t; they were renovating), and it turned out to be sunny enough that i could sit outdoors — in melbourne, in wintertime! — and have a cup of gelato.

here’s the thing: maybe you walked past trampoline yesterday, while poking ’round fitzroy. you might have even popped in briefly, just to see what flavours might lie waiting in the metal troughs. “chai latte” might have caught your eye, and probably “berry pavlova” — a bright pink concoction studded with uneven chunks of broken meringue. but you were sloshy full of lunchtime soup, and besides, there was no-one at the counter. today is a different story: with only a ham-and-cheese baguette under my belt, and two helpful youngsters behind the counter, i came away with a double dose of “chai latte” and “caramel pear”. the former had not much tea flavour, but the spices were intense and true; the latter was creamy and smooth for a sorbet, and had a sweet, dark caramel syrup running through it. dee-licious.

i caught a tram back into the city, and as i passed my stop on collins street, it occurred to me that i could ride all the way to the end of the line, because really, what the hell did i have to do? and so i found myself in st kilda. strolling aimlessly, with purpose, looking in windows, being seduced by those acland street cakes (and another trampoline outlet!).

“chocolate kugelhoph… now available in slices” said a hand-lettered sign. it comes in a large pan, and the surly countergirl will cut you off as much as you want. turns out i wanted $3 worth; it would do fine for breakfast.

and then the sun began to set, and i could’ve done that thing where you walk along the bay and see how quick the sun can drop away… but i had a movie to get to. back in the city, i was just in time for [mutters, lips unmoving] “blades of glory“. me and… well, at first i thought i had a personal screening, but then two, and then four, and by the end, no more than twelve, and will ferrell. it was no worse than i expected, and there were larfs to be had; just enough good stoopid fun for $8.50.

after, walking through chinatown and not being able to decide which noodle joint would be better than the others, i turned the corner onto lonsdale, and stumbled upon the international cake shop, right where i last left it years ago. glistening greek pastries called to me, like sirens, i tell you. once i was inside though, it became clear that i would have to break the perfect wheel of spanakopita sitting behind the glass counter. it was salty and good, and the tea service was not without charm.

the night was quickly crashing to a close, and the cakes behind glass — all manner of shortbread, filo, gateau, syrup-soaked temptation — put their best sides forward. i picked the chocolate sandwich sponge slab decorated with piped icing (over a golden semolina cake) and decided later, back at the hotel, that it was a slightly stale mistake. tchk.

i never made it back to see the pixar zoetrope.

– – –

one tuesday ago, i went to see “transformers“. wah!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 July 2007 at 3:22 pm

permalink | filed under around town, at the movies, cake, dinner, ice cream, lunch, trip

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