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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...
Served on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 08:50 a.m.
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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.
Served on Monday, May 5, 2008 at 09:13 a.m.
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speaking of pizza...
here's one i picked off the zumbo countertop a couple of weeks ago: a double-carb masterpiece of thin, puffy flatbread with an artful arrangement of sliced waxy potato. see the dainty sprigs of rosemary, and the whimsical daubs of mild and musky goat cheese?
it was even better after i emptied the rest of a jar of pesto-marinated fetta over the top of it.
+++
are you like me? do you get grumpier and grumpier the hungrier you become? especially if it's someone else preventing a meal from happening? grrr. i don't have to be hungry, is the thing, and i rarely am... except for right now, i feel a little hollow beneath my belt, but my jeans and i, we've only recently reached a truce, and i don't want to antagonise the situation.
the situation in the rest of the world is more dire. over at avaaz.org there's a petition calling on G8, UN and EU leaders to take immediate action to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation, and to tackle the underlying causes by ending harmful trade policies and investing massively in sustainable agricultural productivity in developing nations.
gaaarn. sign it. they are just over three quarters of the way to 100,000 names.
Served on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 03:41 p.m.
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a couple of days before i went away, i popped into the blood bank to donate 470mls of my finest, stickiest, type B+.
[ B positive! hah! ironic really, when you think about it ]
but so, after the bleeding, and the complimentary made-to-order strawberry milkshake, and the healthy snack pack from which i wolfed down two biscuits that must surely have contained a good dose of transfatty margarine they were so yellow... i wandered northward about two blocks, and finally made it to central baking depot.
i kept forgetting it was there, this bigger, fancier outpost of those bourke street bakers, in a part of the city i just never get to. but there it was, all good, honest, industrial chic, with little tables hewn out of big trees, and even littler faux milk crates fashioned out of... i dunno, galvanised steel fencing? in any case, it's about eight more places where you can sit -- and quite a bit more breathing room -- than at the other two bourke street bakeries.
with more room comes more cake! there were trays of cake behind glass -- slabs of flourless chocolate cake, and something hummingbirdy, and what i remember to be a caramelised banana cake sandwiched with a fat layer of cream, for which i must return, oh yes. in the window there were danishes and twists. on the counter there were bowls of chocolate meringues.
so i went the pizza route. this one, a pleasing crunchy base topped with roasted capsicum, pancetta and ricotta, with pesto, was that delicious amalgam of slurpy and squishy and salty. up front they were thin slabs arranged just so on a tray, but they arrived at the table sliced up and sandwiched. thoughtful, no?
i imagine it must get busy at lunchtime, but around 11, it was just me and the couple at the next table, the girl making the most orgiastic noises over her sausage roll. so i left them to it...
...and stumbled into the babycakes boutique right across the road, where the cupcakes are bite-sized and the variety boggling.
but that's a story for another time.
Served on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 03:32 p.m.
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the tourist cafe in cooma is quite an institution. above the main counter, above the decades-old kitschy souvenirs that no-one ever buys, there is a lurid painted frieze depicting a range of traditional greek delicaies. but that olde time menu is now somewhat surpassed by a range of hearty australian dishes, all of which come with chips. even breakfast! this is where i had a mushroom omelette a couple years ago -- a large, rubbery omelette riddled with small, rubbery mushrooms.
so this time, i thought i'd play it safe and order the toasted cheese and tomato open sandwich. look how it glstens! and look at those chips, fried up just how i like -- overcooked and dessicated, with a whiff of stale oil. i like chips cooked in many, many ways.
the kid had an order of cinnamon toast: cheap and nasty white bread, well-buttered and generously dusted with cinnamon sugar -- the cook had used the edge of the plate as his boundary, rather than the edge of the toast. (and what a plate! much better than the trendy square of white china on which my cheese-on-toast arrived.)
but the very best thing about tourist cafe is the iced chocolate. a comically large glass of milk and ice cream doused in chocolate syrup, and topped with a cloud of whipped cream as big as your head. if you have a small head.
i ate a lot of meat that week away: meat pie followed by meat pie followed by pastie. a home-cooked roast beef in rutherglen with all the fixin's, and then another one at the ex-services club in cooma, with an endless bar of serve-yourself condiments. one of those meltaway supermarket tandoori chickens in a bag. a good portion of a salami marked down for quick sale. it was a pattern broken only when we returned to the civilisation that is the harmonie german club along one of canberra's indistinguishable arteries: some slabs of fat, roasted pork, practically quivering in the shadow of a great mountain of red cabbage.
after i arrived back in sydney, i spent the first two days eating bowls of noodle soups for almost every meal.
Served on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 09:01 p.m.
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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.
Served on Monday, April 14, 2008 at 06:07 a.m.
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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.
Served on Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 09:27 a.m.
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and after that circus (refer: previous post), there was the easter show. yay. the last (and first) time i attended this grand display of warm and fuzzy rural-urban relations was about ten years ago. now that the kid is three, and cognisant, and a year away from having to pay to get in, i thought it was the perfect time for a revisit.
i was most interested in the prize-winning cake displays of course, and maybe a cheese on a stick. and a cream tea at the country women's association tearoom. the kid mentioned something about milking a cow.
we showed up early, the kid and i, because the bunny judging was on at 9.30. however, bunny judging turns out to be a somewhat unriveting cluster of studious types in lab coats standing 'round a rabbit, cupping it in their hands and holding it up to measuring tapes. huh.
so we wandered for a bit, stopping for a $5 ride on the mini ferris wheel (it went around so many times to make up $5 worth that the kid started heckling the lone carnie about when it would stop.) we played at being radio announcers at the abc caravan. and then when singapore girl finally showed up, we descended upon the woolworths fresh food dome, and that's when things started to happen.
the kid wanted ice cream, but for the first time ever she did not want pink ice cream. "i want green tea," she announced most decisively. as you wish. me, i stumbled upon the irrewarra homestead natural ice cream stand, selling organic ice cream made in southern victoria, without the use of chemicals, pesticides, artificial colours, flavours or preservatives. and truly, the banana ice cream was like eating creamy frozen bananas, and the blueberry was flecked with bits of fruit. it was delicious, but the taciturn dairy farmer type manning the booth said it was not available in sydney, and only in health food shops around melbourne.
we marveled at the regional produce displays with their giant animatronic frilled-neck lizards, and we marveled at the amazing decorated cakes in the arts pavilion next door. (at this point the kid tipped over her half-tub of sloppy green tea gelato, and the fun lurched off course for several sad minutes.) but distractions abound in the arts pavilion: just look at this clever champion cake in the shape of a selection of champion preserves. ha!
surprisingly, champion preserves were not a feature of the tea and scones at the CWA tearooms. what you do get with your two (out of a total 22,000 made throughout the show) fresh, still-warm scones are a little tub of whipped cream and two little packs of supermarket jam, strawberry and apricot. and a pot of hot water for your teabag. it was a moment of olde worlde calm before we headed back out into the blazing sunshine, straight into the clutches of the hot corn vendor.
and that is how the day progressed. in between the buttered corn and the yoghurt sample at the dairy farmers milking show, we fed the baby goats (and persistent, pushy sheep) in the nursery farm. in between watching an educational presentation of a pair of butchers cutting up half a carcass of beef and milking a real, live cow in the milking barn, we had a lamb pie and a sausage roll. just for milking the cow, we got some squeezy packets of purple berry yoghurt that you suck out through a nozzle, so we had that too, and by the end of the afternoon, when i finally tracked it down, there was just no space left in my stomach for the cheese on a stick.
because the kid doesn't yet know about showbags, i bought her another ride at the kiddie carnival before coaxing her aboard the train back to the city. she continues to speak of the music video she will make next year in the abc caravan. a grand time will be had by all.
Served on Friday, April 11, 2008 at 02:50 p.m.
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fucken tired and shit.
this time last week... well, see now, i started off saying "last week", and then it hit me that it was actually two weeks ago. crap. so this time two weeks ago, i was calling 'round likely candidates, trying to give away a spare ticket i had to the v festival.
which is harder than you'd think, even if it was two days out from the darned thing. in the end though, maybe i was just not meant to get rid of it. saturday, as i walked up to the gates, dressed in my best muji shirt, with an on-the-way bourke street bakery lamb-and-harissa sausage roll under my belt, and the scalper with the slimy, solicitous air muttered, "tickets? anyone got tickets to sell?", i hesitated just a beat too long, and the moment was gone. me and my spare ticket and VIP wristband were sailing through the bagchecks, going it alone.
which, as it turns out, is not a bad way to go. i squeezed down the front of hot hot heat, i trudged to this, that and the other stage on a whim, and when whimsy got too much, i found a shady spot in the grass for myself, my "new yorker" and a quite delicious veggie sandwich which i'd thought to get at bourke street bakery some hours before to save me from having to eat the hodge-podge of stodge that is festival food.
(funny the way you have to go to a big rock show sometimes, to get a quiet moment to yourself.)
i was killing time until the main event, really. to me, that was queens of the stone age. as evening fell, along with a light drizzle, and the beast of a drummer kicked in... OH it was great! you know... when the crowd seizes up, and you feel it in the back of your neck. it was that kind of great, monstrous rock.
and maybe it's a sign that i'm too old for outdoor rock festivals, but there were not too many moments of greatness that day, inbetween the trudging from stage to stage. duran duran were not great, but then again i was never a duranite back in the day. rosin murphy was pretty great, with her costume changes at each song and her funny, dramatic dance moves, and her funny, wonderful backing singers. smashing pumpkins started off great, with a lilting guitar anda wistful "today is the greatest day i've ever known...", but then three songs in i remembered why i don't listen at length to the pumpkins. the whining, the whining does not end.
and so (she whines), i left. i beat the mass exodus, and i caught a cab to my palatial bedroom at the vibe hotel in rushcutters bay, where i ordered copious amounts of room service and fell asleep in crisp white linens.
you are thinking, this is strange. why is she off to rock shows, and spending nights in hotels,and where is her kid? but i assure you, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. the kid had been deposited that morning with her doting aunties and smitten boy cousin for a day (and a night) of belated easter eggs, and vegemite sandwiches, and portuguese cakes, and as little as she could eat of a home-cooked corned beef and white sauce. and i, i had won a prize -- the subscription prize, and who ever wins those? -- from time out sydney magazine, of festival tickets, and VIP passes (read: clean toilets), and a night in a hotel, and a spankin' new mobile phone, and spankin' new phone credit.
(now there's a moment of greatness right there. although the collective two hours that i spent on the phone with three or four of virgin mobile's finest offshore call centre personnel, trying to convince them that i really had won a phone off virgin-sponsored competition, and that i hadn't stolen someone else's phone whose details were on file as the registered owner of the SIM card, and that they should please, please let me have goddamn access to my account, please... that was really not very great at all.)
but so, i was famished from seven hours of v fest on nothing more than a sausage roll and a veggie sandwich. and so, i ordered up big -- so big, i thought, that i was surprised and a little bit embarrassed when the food showed up and they'd only included one set of cutlery.
i had chips, of course, because you must have room service chips, and these were pretty good chips, all crunchy and golden and fat. i ate many of these before i even tasted the duck salad, which i'd ordered out of curiosity, because the description on the menu read: seared duck with lychee, capsicum and watercress salad, with raspberry vinaigrette. the duck was not seasoned, except for the crisp skin, which was, aggressively. the salad was two bitey and mismatched flavours of watercress and capsicum -- diced, and in three colours. the lychees strewn over the top seemed mismatched to that, and the raspberry vinaigrette was...um... sour?
fortunately, i got dessert too, because i was hungry at the time. but the vanilla bean ice cream was mostly melted by the time i got to it -- it had been delivered sitting atop the warm duck -- so i drank that with a spoon, and then i was much too full to have more than a taste of the belgian chocolate mousse.
so i had it for breakfast. rock!
Served on Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 9:52 p.m.
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the days streak by like lightning.
our baubles arrived in the mail today: shiny smooth perspex clouds, with dangly lightning bolts. i couldn't decide on gold lightning or pink, so i got one of each. you have until 10am tomorrow (wednesday) to get a bunch of plastic jewellery for a song. these ones are most appropriate for the weather right now.
right now, i'm working on a job that doesn't want to end. last night i breathed a sigh of relief and prepared to write up a hefty invoice, but this afternoon, there it was again, mocking me from my inbox. truly, it makes me want to staple my head.
it didn't stop us, though, from watching hours of kid's programming on tv as we played a gambly game of "i wonder if the rain's stopped now, so we can go out" (no.). it didn't stop us building a slightly flawed train network (much like our great city's) across the red carpet.
it didn't stop us from making toasted cheese/green apple/green peppercorn mustard sandwiches -- lightly toast some nice grainy bread, spread each piece with a little butter and top with thinly sliced granny smiths and tasty cheese. stick them under the grill until cheese bubbles. dab mustard over one of the slices, then plop the other on top. sweet-sour, wilted-crunchy all at once, with a double thick layer of oozy, mustardy cheese bang in the middle.
we split a mandarin for dessert, and then we bravely went forth into madeleine battle, round two. it was only 2pm, and the rain was relentless.
Served on Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 10:42 p.m.
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