which of these adorable beehouse teapots will be mine?
what is this ethereal thing, all nestled in white tissue?
there is a stall at the balmain markets, selling small, gluten-free cakes. you may think that small, gluten-free cakes would be mean little pellets, like hockey pucks… but they are not. after standing in front of the display trying to choose between the raspberry-coconut (pictured above, so you already know who won) and the lemon curd (a sunny yellow thing topped with a swirl of meringue), the shopman helped me out.
“the raspberry-coconut is very good” he said.
“yes, i cannot decide between that and the lemon curd.”
“ah,” he said. “that is very good too. but take the raspberry-coconut.”
“i’ll come back next week for the lemon one.”
“yes, come back, next week is my last week here.”
“…” my face was a question. “and you’re never coming back, ever?”
“i have a baby,” the shopman said, “and so i have found another job, working for someone else, less hours for the same pay. so i get to stay at home sometimes and my wife can work too.”
to which i nearly fell over, because goddammitt, that is the complete opposite of the life i live. i’m not bitter, o wait, yes i am.
i came away from the markets with a short stack of old books, despite my resolve not to buy any more cookbooks. but one was a 1970s penguin paperback of japanese recipes, written by a european couple who had lived in japan for a few years “and spoke the language”. and another was a slim hardback, also from the 70s, called “chinese dinner party” from the “international party series”, offering not just a menu and recipes, but advice on “dressing up for your party” (“oriental styled clothes are fairly popular and easy to find. specialty shops and department stores often carry beautifully designed oriental dresses, jackets, slacks and fashionable slippers.”) and “oriental hospitality” (“you can create a relaxed party atmosphere with a smile and a simple bow as you welcome guests to your home for a happy and wonderful time.”)
the raspberry-coconut cake was a layer of almondy-biscuity stuff, with a raspberry-studded cakey bit, and then a macaroony crust on top. it tasted of sweet, and i wanted it to be somehow better. i think i should have picked the lemon curd.
are some cakes created better than others? is it just, four cakes good, two cakes bad (well, ok, less good)? if a dainty little cake sat next to a homely lamington cream sponge, i know which one i’d pick.
but there were no lamingtons on offer at la renaissance patisserie francaise, so friday lunchtime, after sharing a boeuf, leek and mushroom pie with the baby, and after she discovered how to suck lemonade and peach sirop though a straw, i picked out monsieur coupe cézanne from the display case.
he was: moist, alcohol-soaked sponge cake, mousse — chesnut mousse?, surprise chunks of marron glacé, cream, cream, cream, chocolate and pistachios, all sitting in a crisp, dark chocolate cup. he was délicieux.
but the thing is, now i also have lamingtons! [more to come on this matter…]
the best excursion ever…
[ well, ok, the best excursion since that time nellie and i stole the car and drove north, to ikea, for swedish meatballs and daim cake ]
…was on saturday. it started with a banh xeo and a dried longan drink, continued through the messy middle bit with the baby wiping every piece of food on the table before eating it, and ended with the unearthing of a selection of tasty treats in a vietnamese grocery along illawarra road. among them:
a tray of “gourmet mushrooms”
a just ripe pineapple
a bottle of rose cordial
a tin of jackfruit in syrup
the mushrooms were shiitake, enoki, oyster and shimeji (so pleased to meet you all!). this evening they were folded through olive oil and cream, with parsley and garlic, pepper and salt — and somehow i managed to resist eating them straight out of the mixing bowl at this stage — before being baked en papillote to be tossed through angel hair pasta and topped with shaved parmesan. this was slurped down so quickly that i felt i had to make dessert.
“would you like some pineapple?” i asked the boy.
“ummmmm… … … no,” he replied.
“but what if i fried it in butter and brown sugar, and put vanilla ice cream on top?”
of course, the good thing about making something that requires two egg yolks (refer: gnocchi, previous entry) is that it leaves you two egg whites with which to fashion a pavlova.
i once helped to make a four-egg white pav, a pav so big we ended up making it in two parts: a large meringue at the base, and then the whipped cream and fruit, and then another, smaller meringue covered in more cream and fruit, and shaved chocolate, which was a bit controversial with the purists at the table. finally assembled, it looked rather like the titanic, suitably festooned for its maiden voyage. the pav, though, never even made it through the first night.
two egg whites yield a much more modest and manageable pavlova. this is the third pav i’ve made, and all according to stephanie‘s recipe. sort of.
sort of, because this time ’round, i thought i’d try and get the meringue into the oven before putting the kid to sleep, and in my clock-watching, distracted state, i managed to forget all the ingredients after the sugar.
!!
which is exactly half the list. oh no! while waiting for the meringue to be done (done for?), i googled such questions as “what does vinegar do in a pavlova?” but my research proved inconclusive.
so i asked the boy, “is there such a thing as a bad pavlova?”, and his reply, “hmm… i do not think there can be a bad pavlova,” spurred me on to whip the cream, fold in a dollop of yoghurt, and arrange a bloom of thinly sliced mango on top. it were pretty good.
i ate the last wedge tonight while watching “save the last dance“, which i think i like because it reminds me of being eleven and watching “fame” on tv.
over the weekend, i chanced upon a recipe for spinach and ricotta gnocchi. usually i like the idea of gnocchi, but i can’t imagine eating more than maybe two or three before i get bored and start looking around for, um, tiramisu or something. (strangely, i have no problem sitting and eating mounds and mounds of mashed potato, even to and beyond the point of pain.)
this recipe though, was more than just mashed potato. in fact, there was no potato at all. and just look at the picture in the magazine: so green and enticing! and covered in butter and cheese.
so yesterday, after i stopped being distracted by cake, i went up the street and bought a kilo of spinach and a wedge of ricotta, and stood at the stove for a good part of an hour, following the recipe exactly.
after i dropped the first four balls into the lightly salted boiling water, they disintegrated and looked like a bubbling swamp in the pot. hmph. the next four held together a bit more, but when i drained them and put them in a dish, they sighed into each other and became one large, soft… i don’t even think you can call it gnocchi (gnocco?).
each subsequent batch ended up being floured a bit more, and left to cook a bit longer after they had risen to the surface of the water, so by the end it looked less swampy-mulchy and more italian cuisine. sadly, by this time it had been rejected by the baby (and in a cruel twist i ended up making her mashed potato instead, and baked beans), and forsaken by the boy (who thought it was tasty but soft and lacking meat, and then quickly moved on to cake and ice cream), which is why this afternoon, i ate a large plate of them for lunch.
they were still softer than the magazine ones look (oh, maybe the food stylist put some sort of firming agent in to stop them collapsing under the lights, yes yes, that is my excuse), but gawrsh, so yummy.
when i made the banana frosting on saturday, i read the recipe then cleverly deduced, “feh, 1/4 cup butter and 1/2 cup mashed banana — that will surely yield me enough frosting for like, seven cupcakes. hence, i shall double the recipe.”
and so it came to be that on monday, i still had a sizeable tub of leftover banana frosting in my fridge. clearly, i had to make another cake.
that is all.
oh, and also that my mother, who only ever has two mouthfuls of cake at the most, ate the entire slice that graced her plate, and then picked off the crumbs one by one with her fork. i don’t expect this will ever happen again. i just wanted to record this moment for posterity.
i think you know that i really, really like cake. however i am not so much of a baker. my electric mixer broke down a few years ago, and it always seems easier to walk past a shop window with a cake inside, and suddenly i am in there too, buying the cake! than to sit in the kitchen for an hour or so creaming butter and sugar with a hand whisk, and even then not getting the mixture soft and fluffy enough.
but in the tradition of libra babies, whose birthdays stretch across a week, and maybe into a month, saturday meant a birthday picnic in the park. and what better to bring to a picnic than cake?
i anticipated the gasps of glee and horror from the gathered grandparents as i wheeled out the enormous cake with a photo of maevis printed onto the thick white fondant icing… however in the end i opted for cupcakes. sensible yet fun! and the one bowl chocolate cake from “martha stewart kids”, which required half a cup of olive oil rather than a block of wrist-spraining butter, made the choice clear.
when it came to the frosting, i again felt a twinge in my wrist (i have small, delicate wrists). but i found a recipe for banana buttercream frosting which actually contains real mashed banana and not so much butter at all. the instructions said to beat until frosting is fluffy, but alas, my hand-whisking was no match for a pink kitchenaid. in the end, it wasn’t a big swirl atop the cupcake like those lickable american ones, but it did the job, and looked vaguely natural and healthy (because you couldn’t see the three cups of icing sugar that went into it)… and well, the kid seemed to like it.
no, really.
dinnertime thursday i was running about the house, grabbing whatever chocolate i could find and stuffing it into my going-out handbag. in the drizzle, we walked briskly up the hill, caught a bus, realised it was the wrong bus when it stopped way (way) short of where we wanted to be, walked even quicker (downhill, thankfully) for about twenty minutes, and arrived at the wharf just as the ferry did. on the top deck, in the drizzle, looking at the twinkly city, i tore open my emergency bag of muji roasted black soybeans covered in soy chocolate. do not be alarmed — there was only the thinnest shell of soy chocolate coating the crunchy, pulsy soybeans, and i ate many of them.
before too long, in the drizzle, a pointy thing covered in fairy lights appeared on the horizon: luna park! it got bigger and grinned at us, and soon we were there.
we were there to see eels!
somehow the boy had managed to get us on the guestlist. ’tis a very useful thing to have friends of friends.
in the big top (which possessed none of the magic and flair conjured up by its name) there was a russian animation about a crocodile and a small furry bear-like creature; a girly folk singer channeling phoebe buffet; and a bar of lindt pistachio chocolate.
“chocolate at a rock concert. that’s funny,” said the boy, as he helped himself to a square.
“funny, how?”
“funnier than beer and cigarettes.”
“i don’t think that eels are so beer-and-cigarettes a band.”
and in fact there was a string quartet, a double bass, a couple of keyboards, a saw, some other stringy things, and E in a bowler hat and a sharp suit, who drank what appeared to be whisky, and smoked a cigar. there you go.
eels = so very, very good.
