the second day of spring felt like the first day of summer. me and the kid did silly walks across pyrmont bridge, to get to the pacific on a plate festival at the national maritime museum. according to the publicity guff, this event would “draw together the culinary traditions of people who have migrated to australia from communities right around the vast pacific basin”, and it did.

it was an eclectic little festival with a curiously disproportionate number of peruvian stalls. still, we managed to work out a pretty balanced menu for ourselves: a tall glass (plastic) of bandung while watching the taiko drummers; a serve of takoyaki while listening to the mariachi band; an appropriately-timed oranagey teja for the kid during the spectacle of the peruvian folkdancing — and a canadian sugar pie for me; and right at the end, a blini stuffed with farm cheese and raisins, with sour cream and strawberry jam on the side, mmm:

i’ll admit it was the sugar pie that drew me to darling harbour, on a sunday. it turned out to be a little — tiny –disc of crisp pastry, topped with a thin filling made of brown sugar, butter cream and maple syrup . the cardboard mountie out front beamed at me as the stallholder squirted the tiniest little splodge of aerosol cream onto the tart. in an instant, it had melted down into a streaky puddle. $3 for this?

in contrast, the $5 shougun selection at colo tako was a grand four-ball combination: two regular octopus, one prawn, and one dramatic crab,which turned out to be rather more style over substance. but it won the kid over, from “i don’t want to eat the crab thing” to a bout of pincer hijinx. she then ate the prawn, and a piece of octopus — dubiously — and most of the graceful bonito, and the golden-crusty, squishy-inside batter of an entire ball. oh a proud moment for a parent! ever enthusiastic about takoyaki, i came away with a smooth blister in that tender spot where the roof of your mouth meets your two middle teeth.

at the end of it all, we trudged back over the bridge, just in time to catch the ferry back to balmain. we were all sunned out, but we stopped in at zumbo on the way home, just to see if the spring cakes had arrived, and they had! the countergirl said they’d sold out of five new cakes already — it was about two in the afternoon — and behind the glass sat a single lovely moulded pink moussey thing adorned with a shard of spring green chocolate.

but that’s another story.