i made this!
a thing of beauty, adapted from nigella lawson’s kuchen recipe in delicious magazine. this one has grated lemon rind mixed into the bready dough, and is topped with cherries, almonds, raw sugar and mixed spice. it’s just out of the oven! i’m excited!
the thing about having a list of things you might like to do when you go somewhere, even if it’s a very small list, is that you might end up not being able to do any of it. so that even though you might have eaten chocolate until it seeped out your pores, the fact that you didn’t eat any chocolate from the one place you really wanted to… well, it makes you feel like you’ve sort of failed, doesn’t it?
right now i would like to go to a nice hotel, just me, where there is room service, an in-house DVD library, and a cakeshop next door.
i need to recover from my week away:
—
by the time we get to melbourne, at 3pm on a friday afternoon, we have already been on the road for a couple of days. this means there have already been pies filled with lamb mince in rich brown gravy and pies filled with creme patisserie and syrupy raspberries. in fact, as a testament to the cake frenzy i found myself in on thursday afternoon, the recipt from the bakery reads: 1 beesting, 1 snickerdoodle, 1 raspberry harvest cake, 1 fruit eccle, 1 cup of tea. it wasn’t all for me! i like buying cake for other people!
our brand spankin’ new serviced apartment (complete with stainless steel galley kitchen and villeroy-boch china) is touted as being on the edge of carlton, so i kinda figured we’d be feasting italian every day. however, the reality is a billowy outpost quite a hike away. nevertheless, it is on the tram route straight to the city, so before too long we’re riding into the sunset and reacquainting ourselves with the monstrosity that is federation square
— it’s not as ugly as it used to be —
and having hot soupy noodles in chinatown.
and then what does one do in melbourne on a drizzly friday night, when holidaying with a toddler? one takes the kid back to the hotel, washes her and puts her to bed, puts the boy on babysitting duty before he can arrange to go out drinking with his friend, and then one catches the tram back into the city to see you am i at the forum.
i’d seen the poster as we walked along the twilit streets and thought i’d call up to see if there were still tickets. who knows? who knows if people still go out to see 90s aussie rock? maybe it would be sold out. but it wasn’t. when i rocked up (so to speak), the crowd was like the mid-to-late nineties; comforting, in a way, like so many plaid shirts. the theatre is a gorgeous old building, with a gilded foyer, and a hall full of banquet seating. there are classical sculptures perched over the bar, and the domed ceiling is blue like the evening. i found myself a spot inbetween the dancefloor and the seats, on a step, so i could see.
i last saw you am i, like, in 1998. so long ago. friday night, they sound the same (maybe louder). sound as ever, as it were. tim prefaces every second song with, “you think that’s a corker, wait till you hear this one!” (and it’s true!), and punctuates with windmills. it’s all fun and good until the stupid girls in two groups to my front and back start getting drunk and falling over. on me. repeatedly. and they think it’s funny, and their friends do too. and what the hell is wrong with people these days? well, what is wrong with girls then, because the boys in the group look over my way and smile, and say things like, “would you like to stand in front of me so you can see?” and “i have a spare beer, would you like it?”
even though i turn on my heels right after the final encore, and bypass the merch stand selling footy scarves with YOU AM I woven into various team colours, i miss the last tram and walk for a bit in the rain before a taxi comes by. it’s nice.
the next morning we walk past bakery lane…
…en route to the queen victoria markets, with its aisles upon aisles of fruit and veg, and its warren on delicatessenal delights such as picked octopus and festive sausages (you will see, if you squint, one of these starbusts says “wedding sausage”).
but i resist the lure of the salami, and even the hot kranski with sauerkraut. or any number of continental pastries; this morning the spinach and cheese borek calls to me. it all works out in the end though, because the boy goes back in after his sausage, and reappears with a wedge of kolace: a yeasty base topped with poppyseeds, sugary ground walnuts, sour cherry jam, and soft white cheese. thank you, boy.
come back later. i’ll tell ya all about it.
this year i got over my… well it’s not a phobia, not even distaste really, but you know that icky feeling you get from handling library books? your fingertips seem dusty or grimy or… that sensation i just can’t describe, when there’s stuff in that gap between your nail and the top of your finger, and in the webbing of your fingers. you know? the way my hands feel right now even as i’m merely typing about it.
argh!!
um. so i’ve been taking the kid to the library. sometimes to get picture books, and sometimes for organised storytime. some days i find the latest issue of a glossy magazine on the rack, with a bit less dust or grime to get in-between my fingers.
recently, i borrowed an only slightly dogeared copy of “delicious.“, from june of last year. in the first few pages, there was a half page on max brenner and his “chef’s own” recipe for hot chocolate, which pretty much amounted to: 1 tablespoon of max brenner hot chocolate mix, 1 cup of milk, marshmallows. dissolve chocolate powder into hot milk. if you want a richer drink, add more chocolate.
really.
but i got past it without too much derisive snorting, and came upon a recipe for sticky lemon pudding. in the photograph was a vintage enamel bowl on a waffle-weave tea towel. in the bowl was a spongey yellow cake with a golden brown top and a puddle of lemon curd at the bottom. for almost two weeks i thought about making this pudding. and then for almost one week after that, things kept happening to postpone the making of pudding. but reading of santos‘s lemony l.a. adventures only galvanised my intentions. yesterday afternoon, with the magazine’s due date fast approaching, i thought i should just do it.
it turned out to be one of those recipes where the end result looks exactly like the picture, except that because my pudding bowls are smaller than the prescribed size, i had two! it even tasted like its name: the cakey bit had a slightly chewy, slightly sticky mouth feel, and the tart lemon flavour (i cut down the sugar in the recipe) went all the way through the cake to the curdy bit below. YUM.
howzzat? an uppercase YUM in a lowercase blog. the recipe is from jill dupleix, and goes a little something like this.
according to the internet, uludag is the highest mountain in western anatolia. its name translates as “big mountain”, and from its peaks is where the gods watched the trojan war. we didn’t make it as far (or as high) as uludag last saturday; instead we went to auburn.
i had checked the street directory before i set out that morning, and so it was with only slightly wavering conviction that i pointed helen, sue and sarah in the direction of the RT Delight factory. [nellie, it will please you no end to discover that the RT on the logo stands for Real Turkish] as it turns out, getting off the train and walking down the station stairs had confused me such that we found ourselves in the exact polar opposite location from where we were meant to be. fortunately, deb arrived not long after and saved us from…
well. there was the first lebanese bakehouse, full of baklava and biscuits and a quite fierce baker who ordered us out as soon as he saw the cameras. (he was easily placated by some of us buying biscuits. yummy sugar-dusted, lemon-iced biscuits filled with crushed pistachios or walnuts.) there was the second lebanese bakehouse, next door, where helen sensibly thought to buy real food in the form of a za’atar pizza. there was a grocery shop, and this is where deb showed up and turned us around in the right direction.
there was a vietnamese bakery, and suddenly every one else had real food too: pork banh mi with chillies, not too shabby for almost eleven on a saturday morning.
’round the other side of the station, we found ourselves finally in the turkish delight factory, which is less a hot and heaving kitchen with vats of sugary paste and rosewater being stirred by sweaty turks, than a gleaming white showroom manned by a stern woman overlooking trays of chocolate truffles in glass cases. but where? the turkish delight? it is all pre-wrapped, sealed in plastic bags, or cardboard boxes or foil packaging, or combinations thereof. ch.
the chocolate was mediocre: my chocolate indulgence truffle tasted like an uneasy union of milo and nutella, coated in a hard shell of milk chocolate, dusted with cocoa powder. the turkish delight — with almonds, and covered in milk chocolate — was no better than any other turkish delight i’ve had here, and certainly no match for those individual little cakes of the stuff dipped in thick dark or white chocolate, studded with a single pistachio or almond and retailing at nigh on $80/kilo (just over $4 a piece!). mmm… but that’s another story.
deb led the way to arzum market on rawson street, which truly was the aladdin’s cave of shiny treasures. just look at this:
– smiling strawberry jelly biscuit, from eti
– multi-coloured, sprinkled, marshmallow biscuits, also eti
[ when i was in turkey a few years ago, i bought a packet of oreo-like biscuits, called “negro”, which is one of the eti stable. i considered bringing it to my sister in new york, but i thought maybe the customs officials at JFK would be somewhat less amused. ]
– a tube of special hazelnut cocoa cream from ülker… ah ülker, we share fond memories, don’t we? i know it’s just nutella, but a tube!
– bananko! from the croatian confectioner, kras. i haven’t tried it yet (or any of the others actually), but the company website assures me that “a fluffy banana-flavored filling and rich chocolate coating make bananko a delicious treat.”
– also from kras, a somewhat familiar trapezoid-shaped milk chocolate bar with hazelnuts and honey.
– a roll of turkish cherry candy
– the beautiful bottle of turkish fizzy you see at the top of this post
– and in case you think i just blew my budget on candy, a jar of honey.
if you read deb’s account of the adventure, you will see that we were both torn between the honey with whole nuts, or this one with the intricate pattern of crushed nuts (and cumin and coconut and raisins and apricot stones). when we asked the jolly shopkeeper if he recommended the honey, he opened up a jar of his favourite — the plain one, put it down on the counter with a fresh loaf of turkish bread, and invited us to try. it tasted of flowers. mine tastes of peanuts. i think they reversed the order of the ingredients on the label, so that groundnut, which appears last after pistachio, almond, hazelnut, and walnut, is actually the predominent nut. in fact the impressive tiling you see here, it is only a couple of millimetres thick. the rest of the bottle is a sludge of indistinguishable chopped nuts. nuts. i think you got the better honey, deborah.
back on auburn road, we stopped outside mado, where we only briefly considered what flavours of ice creams to get… before we found ourselves at a handsomely appointed table in the depths of the restaurant (not quite the inner sanctum though; that was a child’s birthday party waiting to happen, with a pointy paper hat on every plate). it is warm and glowing in mado. the walls are festooned with brass treasures and leather booties and satin turbans. the booths are plush and comfortable. the waitress is patient.
if you were silly earlier and ate a whole pork roll, forcing you to choose something light off the menu because of course you have to leave room for dessert, what you will have is a bowl of hot soup. a surprisingly light and creamy red lentil soup served with a lemon wedge and chilli sprinkles and two great slabs of bread. and then as the others feast on the salad with walnuts and (allegedly) pomegranate syrup, and beans in tomato sauce, and charred lamb cubes, you will sink into the plush and comfortable seat, under the warm, golden lights, and feel sleep come upon you. only the promise of dondurma will keep you in the realm of the awake.
but just dondurma? it’s just that, on the way in, helen and i had spied platters of oozy puddings on the dessert counter. it was labelled “caramelised pudding” in the display, and “charred pudding” on the menu, but what had really attracted me was the pale, plump pudding innards, oozing from beneath the golden brown crust. there was a half-hearted dicsussion on whether or not dessert would be a takeaway affair, but then cups of turkish tea and salep milk were ordered, as well as ice cream and pudding. we were in for the long haul.
the raspberry dondurma was bright red with an intense, tart flavour. the date was mellow with datey bits all the way through. the plain white salep was extra chewy and quite comforting. but the pudding! soft, oozy pudding, with the caramelly crust, with the sprinkle of cinnamon, with a lingering aftertaste of toasted marshmallows. you could sit around eating bowls of this pudding, and then one day your belly would peek out from your waistband, looking like pale oozy pudding too.
a week ago today, my mother and i sat at a tucked-away table in the leafy courtyard of la renaissance patisserie, at the rocks, eating french pastries (after our lunch of french meat pies). while she perused someone’s left behind tabloid newspaper, i photographed my gateau. then she said, “you know, the baby is really sweet and good, but sometimes it’s nice to go out without her.”
“mowmy, it’s always nice to go out without her,” i replied, which is sort of maybe an exaggeration, but that afternoon at least, i was happy to be left alone to eat my hazelnut biscuit with chesnut puree, vanilla bavaroise and candied chesnuts. the “biscuit” was actually a dense sponge cake studded with chopped hazelnuts, and its base was a thin layer of dark chocolate. it was a small cake, compared to the monster wedges you get at other cafés around the city, but mmm… it packed a lot of cakey, creamy, nutty, chocolatey punch. and because my mother is practical, she wrapped the decorative star anise in a serviette and told me to take it home to flavour a soup with. really, the cake that keeps on giving.
the next day she got on a plane, and flew back home to a stack of old newsapers that she will be compelled to spend a couple hours each day reading, until she has caught up with all the news she missed while she was away.
me and the kid? we spent the last week getting used to normal life again. coincidentally, the last vestiges of illness — the lingering cough, the leaky nose — also vanished. so now it’s playgrounds and parks in the sharp morning wind, and then healing hot chocolates and baby-cini after. it’s watching maisy DVDs on demand or listening to the child sing, in perfect pitch, the maisy song (or versions of it in which “maisy” is substituted with any number of two-syllabled words: mummy mouse, or water mouse, or nana mouse, or potty mouse… you get the idea.) it’s trying to squeeze maybe a flier design or a bout of invoicing in during naptime. it’s kind of awright.
wednesday, after a harrowing morning spent buying a fridge (and then later finding out it was $100 cheaper online, with free delivery, but would you buy a fridge online? wouldja?? in retrospect, yes, i would.) me, my mum and maeve retreated to the much more warm and welcoming arms of sopra, upstairs from fratelli fresh, where we stood in line for twenty minutes? half an hour? who can tell, when yer starving. anyway, the truth is, my mum stood in line while maeve tried to dismantle a display of bulk-bagged italian chocolates artfully arranged at the feet of a classical roman statue of a lady.
i last ate here more than a year and a half ago, when i lived just down the road, and my mum was in town, and maeve was just a few weeks old, strapped sleeping to my front. back then i ate antipasto, because of the inclusion of what is listed on the menu as “egg mayonnaise”, and arrives a perfectly boiled egg, halved, with a slurp of tangy real mayo over the still moist, golden yolk. after months of being careful about properly cooked eggs, it was exactly what i wanted.
wednesday afternoon it was sort of what i wanted too, but after we were seated, and the waitress approached, the words out of my mouth were, “oyster mushroom salad, with asparagus, kipfler potatoes and caciota“, the last of which i thought would be some sort of cured meat, but turned out to be a curdy white cheese. which was just the first pleasant surprise, because when the salad arrived, it was a mound of mushrooms, an entire small harvest really, and little discs of sliced potatoes, both of which had been grilled to the point of crunchy bits, in butter and oil and salt. and the blanched asparagus and cheese, and some mesclun, for light relief.
i wanted to eat and eat, so it was just as well that maeve was intent on guzzling the innards of her own bocconcini-and-tomato panini and was disinterested in my lunch; after losing the battle with her over the strawberry granita, it was only right that i got to eat every last mushroom.
and then having only had a light lunch of mushrooms, i thought it was necessary to have dessert. i sort of wanted the buttermilk pudding with mixed berries, but i truly, madly wanted the eton mess with strawberries.
“and um, could i get the eton mess, please?” is what i said to the waitress.
she beamed wide. “of course you may!”
it came, this great big dollop of pink on a plate. just strawberries and their juices folded into cream, atop chunks of sticky-on-the-inside meringue. oh yes. “i could eat this every day,” i told my mother, although for $12 a pop, i was being figurative. maybe.
“really?” she said. and then she had a spoonful. “oh, it’s quite nice.”
because, as you may remember, my mother does not like sweet things, i was not too concerned with the dent she was making in my pud. but the battle with the baby had already begun. she didn’t quite match me spoon for spoon, and i was making sure that my spoonfuls were bigger than hers, and really, it wasn’t hard to just keep shovelling this magic into my mouth… but at the end of it, i wanted another one, just for me, to eat very slowly in sunny sopra.
since nothing happens around here except for vile illnesses, i thought i’d tell you about the sunday morning in london, about two and a half weeks ago, when we waited for the rain to stop before deciding that, yes, we would catch a bus up to the columbia road flower market.
at the bus stop, a slightly dishevelled woman tried to sell us a suitcase. “£20 in the shops, but i’ll let you have it for ten.” we demurred. it would have been hell trying to drag that thing through the thoroughfare of the market. for what we discovered is that the sunday market is a stretch of road with stalls set up on either side, selling all manner of potted plants and cut flowers. aside from the brief moment where nellie stopped to buy a mint plant — how’s the mint plant, nellicent? — we were just propelled down the middle of the street, people shoving, stepping on my shoelaces, being nudged in the heels by the wheels of our pram.
“it’s empty!” hissed an indignant woman.
“they just brought it along to bang into people with,” replied her fella.
because clearly we like to drag this unwieldy charriot out and wrestle with it on sunday mornings. no, silly english people, because if a baby was sitting in that pram, someone would have crushed her legs and another one, maybe you, would have taken her eye out with a potted cactus.
i don’t know how long that stretch of road was, or really even how long it took us to get through it. but some time later, we came to the clearing, and there was sunshine and fresh air, and also the real reason we had come all this way: treacle.
i had read in some travel magazine, before leaving australia, that the best cupcake shop in all of england was to be found at the columbia road flower market. they are only open when the market is, those scant six hours every week. we sold our mother this excursion on the promise of flowers. she played along.
the plate glass window was all brown diagonal stripes, and inside, past the vintage and modern and modern-vintage crockery, was a glass counter with drawers full of cupcakes. they were small and large (well, regular, then), and randomly decorated. oh those little cupcakes!
we could only pop in and out of the shop quite furtively at this stage, because we were waiting to meet friends for a tapas lunch across the road, and by the time we were ready for cake, the numbers had dwindled. there were just enough for us to make a modest selection: the baby had her own mini chocolate cupcake iced in blue; nellie had a vanilla cupcake topped with smarties; and i think i got the best one: chocolate with pink icing and red sugar (and rogue blue sprinkle). the cake was light, moist and very chocolatey, and frosting just the right side of sweet. the sugar was crunchy.
after i finished it, standing outside by the kerb, i wanted another. unfortunately, we were in polite company, and also, we had a plane to catch. sigh.
your trusty correspondent on the isle of wight, circa 1974, already cultivating a sneer of disdain for anything less than artisanal gelato (though still happy to guzzle whatever you might stick in front of her).
just as it was thirty years ago, it was my father’s idea to make a trip to the isle of wight this time ’round. what i thought was, eh, it’s in a beatles’ song; can’t be bad. we even rented a cottage.
in two days on the isle of wight, in-between car ferries, it is theoretically possible to have six, maybe eight, cream teas. this would depend on whether or not you’d have a cream tea at teatime, after substituting cream teas for all other main meals. the number of cream teas we actually ended up having is: two. hngh. but don’t hand-lettered signs like this make you want to go the extra mile?
no? what about this one?
the sign outside the first tea shoppe we tumbled into, late in the afternoon after a rainy morning spent in a flamingo park, which served up their clotted cream in hygienically sealed plastic tubs:
mmm… appetising… but after the lid was removed and the crusty yellow cream scum scraped off the top, all went according to plan.
the next day we had much more luck with cinammon scones and already-decanted cream.
but it’s not all about cream teas is it? what of the other regional british delights one may encounter on this wee island off the main island? amidst warning noises emitted by those who’d already seen behind the counter, my father ordered a cappuccino in a sandwich shoppe in an olde village. how they make it is, the guy behind the counter tears open a little sachet with the word “cappuccino” printed gaily on it, empties it into a cup, adds hot water and stirs. it’s even pre-sweetened. when it arrives at the table, it will be accompanied by a little square of good dark chocolate. if you ordered a normal coffee instead, you might whiten it with this:
“a blend of glucose syrup and vegetable fat”
i’m not saying the food on the isle of wight is not tasty. there was the first meal off the boat, in a greasy diner on the main street of ryde, where a mother sat fagging into her son’s chips, and the friendly counter woman warned me against the king-sized breakfast on the basis of it being really quite big (and also containing black pudding); the delicious and authentic indian takeaway later that night: curry, biryani and chapati eaten in the toasty warm kitchen of our cottage; and then dinner at the crab the following evening: a brie, mushroom and cranberry wellington, in which everything was wrapped in puff pastry and served with potatoes, vegetables and a jug of mustard-watercress sauce.
but it’s not all about gorging oneself on rich food is it? what of your father’s longing to rekindle the magic of your childhood, when no-one had disappointed anyone else, and years of recrimination and regret had yet to become an insurmountable heap? see, now he has a fresh baby with whom to begin anew.
i bought a bacon hock today, for the purpose of making a bean soup, and i was somewhat taken aback by how much the hocks looked like a pile of feet, lying all higgledy-piggledy in the glass-fronted trough of the supermarket deli. tasty, though.
for dessert, i finally ate one of the macaron that my mother was given, gratis, by the head counter girl at yauatcha on the afternoon of our departure from london, because — “eh, kakilang!” — they were both from malaysia. lucky for me, my mother does not really like sweet things. when we got back to singapore, i left the bag on the kitchen counter overnight, under the misimpression that it was hermetically sealed. hey, i checked! but in the morning, i discovered that it was fastened only with a pretty pink ribbon, and that the cluster of brightly coloured macaron were quite imploding from the tropical humidity. let me explain: if i so much as nudged one, it gave. i was so alarmed, i whisked them into the fridge, and refrigerated they have remained, all the way back to sydney.
while we admired the macaron, back in london, my sister said that yauatcha didn’t make just any plain old flavoured macaron, and that these would be raspberry –something or lemon-something or green tea-something. i couldn’t tell what the something was in the bright pink one i had tonight, but even in its slightly squishy, slightly crumbled, slightly jetlagged form, it was um, really good. maybe even better than one of the ones i had a laduree. maybe.
the laduree story is, one drizzly sunday afternoon, after a slightly fraught luncheon (in which the child discovered how to undo the fancy birdcage-style highchair in which she was perched, and refused to sit in it any longer, and had to be walked around the harrod’s food hall, which calmed us both down immeasurably) of roasted scallops on parmesan risotto with vanilla-infused oil, my sister and i had two macaron and a cup of laduree-blend tea. each. for the information, i think hers were lime-chocolate and caramel. mine were rose and chocolate. the tea was floral. my mother, being neither a fan of sweet things nor tea, sat back and nursed the sleeping baby. as we made our way through the macaron, we offered bites to our mother. she was very obliging, even as she nodded then grimaced after each one. “i don’t really like sweet things,” she intoned, and we offered her sips of tea to wash them down.
when it was all over, it was duly noted that our mother, who refuses sweet things and cups of tea, had had one whole macaron and a cup of tea.
i have been coughing for a month. i am very tired.
[ this post is to be accompanied by such pictures as:
– a dumpling shaped like a goldfish
– a bowl of minted horseradish and turnip
– a pie swimming (or drowning) in custard
– a cream tea ]
the house is finally quiet. my mother and my sister, dressed in their flowery spring finery, are off at the opera, the child is asleep, and i have before me a cup of almond-scented tea from the neal street tea house in covent garden and an apple cider and cinnamon chocolate truffle from the borough market, south of the thames. you might realise that these are not typical singaporean pasttimes, and that would be because we are living it up in london.
but, hello. i have just reached into the truffle bag, and discovered that in fact, the apple cider truffle is off at the opera with my sister, and i have been left the cardamom and orange truffle. or maybe it is the extra bitter plain chocolate. it does not matter, because they are all divine.
i don’t know where the time goes. well, i do know that the first half of it disappeared into a haze of antibiotics; that tightness in my throat? from the last post? it evolved (quickly) into a demon bug that knocked me over on the train one morning, in singapore, before conjuring up a thick green phlegm and a fever of 38.7. a little over a week later, i’m weaning myself off the cough syrup, still coughing a residual cough.
in the meantime, i flew fourteen hours with a wriggly, sleepless little person strapped to my lap, and then spent three days waking up at one or three in the morning while this little person adjusted to a strange new timezone. fortunately, preparing yoghurt and strawberry breakfast at 2a.m. was only the first of many food adventures to come my way.
so. chocolate truffles at the markets, and little glass pots of fruity french yoghurt and pear and semolina pudding. salmon green curry made at home. dumplings, noodles and bubble tea in a chinatown café. a lamb burger (with a do-it-yourself condiment table) at a streetfair in greenwich. fruit pies, crumbles and lumpy custard from a greenwich pieshop. regional cuisine on the isle of wight, including a really good indian takeaway and not nearly enough clotted cream teas. chinese takeaway back in london. amazing grilled squid at the river cafe(!). a rose petal macaron at laduree(!!).
you have to walk the length and breadth of harrods to get to laduree, and in the hundred metres of sidewalk before the grand, gilt-edged entrance, the air is achingly infused with the scent of sugary donuts. turns out the door to krispy kreme, within the harrods foodhall, is just before the door to fancy french pastries.
but you have already realised, this is not blogging, merely listing. putting a sentence together requires more sleep, and tonight, all cool and drizzly, seems promising. maybe tomorrow (or next week), i shall be able to tell you more.
