(past christmastime at mediterranean wholesalers, or whenever really, you can pick a little cake from the display and sit yourself down at a table at the coffee bar. the pistachio bigne comes filled with a smooth custard of palest green, and encrusted with chopped nuts like so many barnacles. do not feel like you must order a hot chocolate to go with. it is made with cadbury’s powder, and even then, not nearly enough of it. if it’s still close enough after christmastime, they will sell you a generous slice of panettone for a dollar to go with whatever beverage you end up with.)

in the weeks leading up to christmas, we embarked on a mission of reconnaissance at mediterranean wholesalers. down the back, where it’s normally wafers, stood a great wall of panettone. there was plenty to choose from, but our choice was mostly immediately clear: the etna. the year before, we saw actual etna from a great distance as we rode the sicilian railway from agrigento to catania. now was our chance to observe the volcano close up. the box was very persuasive: see how the candied fruit dances above the cake, just like an erupting volcano! before we left for the countryside, we returned to the shop to claim our own.

in fact, this was one of those times when the product matches quite closely the depiction on the packaging. despite the manhandling at the cash register, it was more or less perfect when unwrapped. the food technologists in italy are doing a sterling job. it was melty hot outside, but the stabilisers in the vanilla icing — rich and creamy — worked hard to maintain the illusion of a snow-capped mountain in our kitchen.

underneath, the chocolate cake was the bready sort, not too sweet and possessing a pleasant cocoa flavour. much of the sweetness came from the hidden reservoirs of blood orange sauce, and the candied… something.

it wasn’t orange peel; my memory seems to recall the packaging listing maybe arrowroot as an ingredient.

it made for a run of festive breakfasts as we counted down to christmas, but all too soon, it was gone.

2012 clicked over without too much of a to-do. i think it was about 11.55 on the night of 31 december when i went to bed, no longer willing to play the guessing game of “will harlan wake up for a feed in ten minutes, or three hours?” i heard the fireworks going off in the city. harlan awoke about two hours later. but it’s not like we’ve been having an uneventful summer.

just shy of xmas, we hightailed it out of the city, into the northeastern corner of victoria, where the boy has a little patch of dirt. we brought along our kmart xmas tree, and scattered a handful of presents underneath. then we got along with the business of a summer holiday. bike rides for some…

and dipping our toes in sunshine at the nearby woolshed falls…

(while others of us dozed in the shade of the björn)…

(and elsewhere).

there was the endless washing of washers.

evenings, we walked the town, listening to birdsong and spying on wild bunnies. around the train station it’s rife with bunnies.

during the day we hid from the heat, or we searched out local delicacies. at the aldi in wodonga, we bought ham steaks and maple (flavoured) syrup and a six-pack of mince tarts. dinner sorted, we said, pleased, as they came up the conveyor belt. (though we were kidding — dinner was at the local chicken shop.)

another day, i came across a wonderful mulberry dacquoise at the beechworth pantry. crunchy hazelnut meringue sandwiching fat berries in cream. there may be no better cake in this pocket of victoria.

and then there was christmas, at the town called the rock — a glut of prawns and an endless supply of miniature chocolate bars. there was lemon tart and cream sprayed from a can. there were presents, oh my word, yes.

back in chiltern, we resumed the evening strolls. the weather had cooled down some and everything was green,

green,

green.

so guess who doesn’t have diabetes anymore.

there was cause for a celebration a couple of nights ago (not the return of normal blood sugars at that stage, although i’d had my fingers crossed for the last week and a bit following my post natal glucose tolerance test), and we found ourselves around a table at hellenic republic, bathed in the golden light of the early evening, with lamb and potatoes and cypriot grain salad (and cabbage salad, yes, and eggplant dip and calamari and octopus, and hell why not, a spanakopita and three lamb chops), and these amazing chargrilled green chilli peppers all smoky and succulent. the platters are small at hellenic republic, but when one of the birthday girls orders double of everything for the table, you suddenly find yourself approaching a dangerous level of satiety.

dangerous only because you must leave room for dessert. the kid and i are never two to go past a mess, so we got the hellenic mess to share. unexpectedly, it was plated in a bowl — a jumble of rosewater meringue, orange blossom jelly, vanilla-infused cream and a dribble of strawberry ouzo sauce poured at the table. (the waiter dispensed it from a small bottle, and i thought he might leave it after the ceremonial pour, but no, he whisked it away.)

mmm… it was a lovely mishmash of flavours and textures. the pistachios were crunchy to offset the crisp meringue; the jelly was wobbly and ethereal. in fact, the delicate orange blossom flavour was probably a bit overwhelmed by the strawberry sauce. but then i was a little too: the ouzo made my belly clench. perhaps if there had been more cream…

no matter. it was gone in minutes (the kid had three helpings), helped along by a pot of mountain tea. see how pretty, the basket of pale green herbery. the internet tells me it is ironwort.

it was still daylight when we left the restaurant. it was a jolly walk home.

what is this charred and glistening beastie?

do not be afraid. it is a fresh-out-of-the-oven torta di mela which the kid and i whipped up in our slightly dysfunctional kitchen a few sundays ago.

a backstory: packing up the house in sydney earlier this year, i discovered that i had two electric hand mixers: one, which i’d been using regularly, and one which i unearthed from the back of a deep kitchen cupboard, that i’d forgotten all about. this forgotten mixer had been entombed with a box of attachments — a stick blender! a mini food processor! — and in a fit of why haven’t i been using this one instead? i walked old faithful up the street and gifted it to my friend on the corner.

and then we moved to melbourne, and one day i tried to cream softened butter for a batch of biscuits, and the mixer’s spindly little arms, spinning so merrily in the air, immediately ground to a halt when confronted with the soft yellow clumps. i was mostly inclined to not continue with the biscuitry, but these were for the kid to bring into class the next day for a classmate’s farewell do. so i grabbed a wooden spoon and went at it. people in ye olden days used to do this all the time, didn’t they?

i wore the blisters halfway into the week. and in the end, only six biscuits out of the entire batch were eaten by the kids (someone else had brought a bowlful of nerds, and those turned out to be the biggest hit, alongside the potato chips. pah, kids.)

but i was willing to give it the benefit of doubt: maybe the butter hadn’t softened quite enough for a domestic handheld mixer. even my metal whisk had had a hard time. however, some weeks later, i tried the food processing attachment on what i’d hoped would be a salsa verde for dinner. the blades hit a parsley leaf in a puddle of olive oil, and stopped cold.

:/

i took great pleasure in exorcising any ill feeling by bashing together the parsley, oil, garlic and anchovies with my trusty pestle-and-mortar, and we did eat copious amounts of delicious salsa verde that evening. but also, i started visualising how good a pistachio green kitchenaid would look on my benchtop. later in the night, i accidentally dropped the errant mixer on the floor while putting it away, and i didn’t feel a shred of remorse.

but kitchenaids take a while to materialise (i’m thinking a birthday present to myself in a couple of months), and a few weeks ago, i came across a recipe for the apple cake in a freebie gourmet traveller cookbook. at the height of apple season, it called for a cheap kilo of granny smiths, and just under half a block of melted butter. it was all i needed to ignore the shortcomings of my inherited oven: the worn-away temperature markings, the peeled-off door seal, the heat escaping through the door which made any contact with the stainless steel exterior painful and burny…

the kid and i worked away for twice as long as the recipe indicated, building up layers of lightly spiced cake batter, toasted almonds, dried figs and sliced apples (she is quite the apple arranger, the kid, and also an expert breaker of eggs), and then, there was cake. it tasted wholesome, and almost healthsome and made us feel that we were still in charge of our appliances.

it made a good breakfast over the next few days, with a spoonful of thick cream and a cup of milky tea, eaten after the school run, nestled in my new $10 ikea cushions on the old couch in my sunny backyard.

the salted caramel cupcake from little cupcakes is another beastie altogether: a fine-crumbed chocolate cake topped with a sculptural spiral of thick, sticky caramel. this one’s for the sort of person who would mainline dulce de leche if such a thing were possible. or, the kid. (i know it doesn’t look like it, but i really don’t feed her cupcakes every day.)

we ate these sitting on a step in the city one overcast afternoon, and i wish i’d had a cup of black tea handy to keep things in check; even the small, bite-sized version was enough to render me slightly delirious. it’s good though, knowing there’s a little place downtown where a lovingly hand-crafted sugar jolt can be had for a scrape over $2.

(my favourite city cupcake is probably still the pistachio cupcake from little cupcakes, which you might remember from this time last year.)

the initial dewy-eyed glimmer of love does not last long. take this mighty cookies and cream cupcake for instance, with oreos blended into the frosting and the cake, enough to make up for the sleight-of-hand optical illusion of just half a cookie tucked into the crest of frosting. mighty as it is, ’tis no match for the superhuman cake demolition power of a kid moments out of a screening of “kung fu panda 2″. in no time at all, it is but a pile of crumbs.

i don’t expect it comes as a surprise to you that around these parts cake is its own food group. at the tail end of the last school holidays, the cupcake central workshop put out its shingle on the shiny white honeycomb tiles in a tucked-away corner at the melbourne central food court. good timing!

after you get over your mint green envy of the instore bakery’s mint green smeg fridge, the vintage kitchen scales and the cluster of luscious peachy blooms in old drink bottles, you can wrestle with the task of choosing your cupcake. i picked two: a chai latte babycake, with a salty caramel chaser.

the chai cupcake was quietly pleasing, with a subtly spiced, delicate crumb and a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar on the creamy frosting. the salted caramel number, on the other hand, was an assertive mutha: rich chocolate cake made even moister with its secret puddlicious heart of salted caramel, and an artful drizzle of the same. it really was the perfect little mouthful… and i could’ve had another five.

though i didn’t.

some weeks later, lured into the city with the promise of a special run of bacon and maple syrup cupcakes, i succumbed to this adorable red velvet cupcake. it was typically, classically cake, impecably-frosted, moist and just short of chocolatey, and in some ways better than the main event.

now, i do ordinarily love the combination of salty bacon and sweet syrup, and this cupcake, with its hidden nubbins of meaty bacon and swirl of mapley frosting was just that. the feather in the cap of course, was the generous shard of bacon, but i dunno, i found it too chewy in this instance. consider, if you will, rather than a strip of lean oven-baked bacon, a streakier alternative: a blistered red ribbon fried crisp in oil, the fat offering a little explosive crunch with each nibble. perhaps it’s a salty little foil, maybe it has a sweet maple edge. either way, mmm…

of course, the kid was nowhere as critical. after inhaling her raspberry-white chocolate cupcake, she made happy noises at all the bacony bits through her second course. she saved the meaty garnish until last, and then chewed on it for twenty minutes or so as we wandered through the city. as far as she was concerned, it was the gift that kept on giving.

look what i ate during the just-gone school holidays: a small harvest of potatoes, fried up two ways. i blame the kid. we’d ambled up to the local takeaway on the main street of a little town in a northeastern corner of victoria — it’s the sort of place where under the counter there are lollies in jars to be had for 5c a piece, and behind the counter there is a handwritten board boasting such delicacies as hamburgers with the lot, pineapple fritters, banana fritters, and fish and chips and salad (which we’d ordered the last time we were in town; the salad was composed of a couple slices of tomato, some shredded carrot, a couple more raw onion rings than necessary, and half a dozen slices of tinned beetroot). this time, though, we were just after the chips… until the kid sang out, “and potato cakes. two each.”

i’m sorry to say that they were still mostly uncooked on the inside, crunchy, rather than just short of al dente. but you can tell, can’t you: compared to the golden brown chips below, the batter on the rounds of spud looks pale and flabby (much like one might look after subsisting on a winter diet of fried potatoes). not to worry. there was such a bounty of chips that even divvied up three ways (the wafting aroma of hot fat and vinegar was enough to lure the boy out from retiling the bathroom of his country estate), they proved unconquerable.

another day, i orchestrated a detour to the resurrected myrtleford butter factory, housed in a handsome brick building dating back to 1930. just look at the lovely lettering! here they churn out batons of cultured butter, salted and un-, wrapped in printed foil in a most fetching olde time design.

they had sold out of butter that day (and i can’t seem to track it down in melbourne — the perils of artisanal production, i suppose) but fortunately, mid-afternoon, the kitchen was still open for lunch.

i was having trouble picking one thing off the menu — garlic prawns? blue cheese tart in a buttermilk pastry? — when the waitress came over with a litany of specials. after she spoke the words “corned” and “silverside”, i only pretended to dally for the smallest moment before picking that.

beneath the rather aggressive balsamic glaze — to me it bordered on caustic — the meat was tender and comforting, and all sorts of salty-sweet-smoky. i was most won over, though, by the generous tumble of winter vegetables on the side. behold happiness: carrots, beans, tiny beets, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, a roasted onion and two waxy little potatoes. once my tongue had been beaten into submission (or perhaps the sauce actually did mellow over the course of the meal), the balsamic glaze served as a most agreeable accompaniment to the vegetables as well.

i was too full for a sit-down dessert after that, but from the counter display, i picked a a wedge of chocolate truffle tart to come away with me. it was thoughtfully boxed with a small tub of thick cream and berry compote. i dipped into the rich sludgy slice at random moments over the rest of the day — just a spoonful at a time was enough for an intense chocolatey burst. right before bedtime, i gave in and finished it off, inordinately pleased.

so it’s not just outside trendy cafes and mexican cantinas that you have to queue; friday afternoon at the olde time hopetoun tea rooms in the block arcade, we waited behind the red velvet ropes for 15 minutes or so before a table became available. nevermind — the bejeweled waitress was kind enough to give us frequent updates on the table situation (“there should be people leaving soon, but they are just sitting there sipping at their tea.”), and we had ample time to consider our choices from the two cake-laden shelves in the window. on top: fruit crumbles, tarts of lemon or lime or pecans, teacakes and, yes, macarons…

down below: a spectrum of technicolor cheesecakes, and a couple of sponges layered with cream and festooned with berries and flaked almonds. inside, perched atop the counter, above a display of antique silver and heavy crystal, sticky date puddings with a towering jug of toffee sauce, caramel slices, and chocolate and strawberry swiss rolls. it really was quite overwhelming.

i’d been working myself up to a simple afternoon tea of scones and cream and jam, but as we approached the front of the queue, the thought of two lumps of breadiness sitting in my belly so close to dinnertime saw me veer towards a slice of the sunny orb of passionfruit tart in the corner of the window.

at our cosy table in the small and tightly packed dining room, i found that the filling was, as i had hoped, bright and tangy, but the pastry, though a fetching shade of golden brown, was much less crisp than i would have liked. it had a lovely buttery taste, but its texture lacked any real distinction from that of the passionfruit curd.

both my tart and the slice of pavlova that the kid picked to celebrate the last day of term were thoughtfully plated up with artful puddles of passionfruit and/or raspberry coulis, dollops of thick cream and extra bits of fruit. but i must say that the attention to detail might have extended, if not to removing the skin from the kiwifruit, then at least to removing the stickers from the kiwifruit skin. gah!

the tea service, when it first arrived, looked promising despite the splodge of red jam on the strainer. alas, my dahl house tea — black, flavoured with ginger and peach — was served with a litter of leaves on the floor of the pot, so while the first cup was light and fragrant, by the third cup, it had brewed itself bitter.

i’d really like to like this place. i mean, i’d like to like it more. i mean, i think, i like it fine. the waitresses are friendly, and will not rush you on even though a queue is forming outside. the decor, with the marble table tops, emerald green wallpaper and swathes of stripy fabric hanging from the rafters, is not without its charm. when you look closely though, at the lingering produce stickers, and the just-short-of-soggy pastry, and the endlessly steeping tea, and the torn and peeling wallpaper, you get a sad little feeling that this is not so much the grande dame of tea rooms as it is the slightly doddery aunt.

(which is not to say i wouldn’t visit again. because after all, who doesn’t like a homely tea-and-cake sit down with a doddery aunt in her well-worn sitting room? it’s just a little bit of pomp and some tired splendour. perhaps next time, i will have the scones.)

happy sunday!

yesterday, after the kid’s last chinese class of the term, i orchestrated the proceedings to the lunch counter at milkwood, where the kid, without hesitation, went for an encore of poached eggs on toast with avocado, and i ventured into baguette territory with a sandwich of thinly sliced pickled beetroot, creamy fetta, avocado and a generous thatch of rocket.

of course, the real reason we were at milkwood again was so that i could get one of those monster lamingtons i saw last week. this time there was also a sunny display of lemon meringue cupcakes to sway me, but my resolve was strong.

my reward, for breakfast this morning, was a hefty block of cake with a sturdy crumb. look at those fleshy chips of coconut! unlike so many lamingtons with their dusting of dessicated coconut and their dry spongy insides, the milkwood lamington gives a serious bite, through the thick chocolate-soaked layer all the way to its heart of tart raspberry jam.

perfect sustenance as we head out into the surprise sunshine in search of german sausages and gelato.