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i’m filling in a questionaire at the moment, and the number one question is: what is your secret food shame? it took me aaages to think of something. i mean, i eat a lot of crap, but i’m not necessarily ashamed of it. i recently came to the conclusion that my favourite food may well be hot chips, but i wear that badge proudly. (figuratively, mind; i might now have to set about making an actual thing with a pin in it, oh boy!) i don’t like oysters? is it not possible to have a dedicated interest in food while studiously avoiding those slimy, putrid bivalves? sure!

and then it struck me: my secret food shame is that i horde food. i don’t mean to. behold, this rather dramatic looking chocolate mooncake that i won off grab your fork way back in — ahem — september last year. where does the time go, i ask you!

do not fear. it has been cryogenically preserved in my fridge, still sealed in its ornate plastic packet with its little sachet of desiccant. i broke it open this afternoon, desperate for a mid-annual-report-layout snack. the bag emitted a barely perceptible sigh as i cut it open; at last the mooncake would fulfill its destiny.

it was the smell that struck me: an aroma so rich and chocolatey that i was surprised when i bit into the skin, and discovered it actually wasn’t. instead it was mild and cakey, with an undercurrent of regular mooncake pastry. no, the chocolate lay beneath.

GAH. a big, moist mouthful of fudgy chocolate. mmm… quite trufflicious. and here’s the surprise: a pure white heart of mochi. well, ok. so i wasn’t so surprised. having eaten a couple of them not quite — ahem — six months ago, i knew of the chewy treat within. and also, there’s the sticker on the pack that says, “o-mochi mooncake”.

yes folks, this is mooncake innovation at its… well, that level a little way short of “finest”. the mochi isn’t really there for flavour i think, but it does a good job breaking up the mass of sweet, sweeet, flavoured lotus seed paste — mellows out the flavour while providing some thought-provoking texture. and how striking it is, against the chocolate.

i like it. taste aside, i love the sharp impressions in the skin, from the mould. it looks like it’s been carved out of ebony, no? the macha omochi mooncake looked to be an objet d’art crafted in jade. when mooncake season comes round again, i’ll be looking out for these in the usual chinese grocery shops.

so yes, i am a little bit embarrassed that it’s taken me six months to eat it. but hip hip hurray for those food technicians who engineered this long life mooncake, still delicious after all that time.

anyway. the reason i’m filling in this questionaire is that a picture i submitted on a whim to eat. drink. blog. was selected to be part of the SBS photo exhibition at the inaugural australian food and drink bloggers’ conference in melbourne this coming weekend. hopefully it doesn’t melt away into a little puddle, my snapshot of a watermelon and pineapple ice pop, amongst such illustrious, gorgeously styled, DSLR macro company.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 March 2010 at 11:46 pm

permalink | filed under blog, cake, chocolate, snacks, werk

i’m about to disappear down a tunnel of work again. only seven pages into an annual report layout, and my head has gone spongy, and my eyes are a-twitchin’. but do not worry, there is pearl jam in the background, a large cup of almond tea to the right of me, and to my left…

an adorable mini chocolate kugelhopf from lüneburger. it is a rich burst of cocoa for a mid-afternoon slump, moist and just a little bit sticky (awful in late summer weather but just about perfect in a cake). and scattered here and there, chocolate chips. such a tiny treat! and at $2, quite the cheap thrill.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 March 2010 at 3:24 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, werk

the official birthday celebrations kicked off the night before, with the drama of a thunderstorm beating against the plate glass windows of ocean room. two cousins, the kid and i, presided over by my good father, sat down and ate some really good sashimi, some anchovies topped with tomato sorbet, some soft-shelled crab tacos (not quite enough soft-shelled crab tacos, if you ask me), some shoe-string fries topped with a tantalising sprinkle of shichimi pepper — and here’s the thing, you think japanese, and you think delicate little bits of food, but we also had a whole wing of of a yellow fin tuna, so large that it came with a map to guide us.

there were three zones marked out, and the meat — slow roasted over 40 minutes — tasted different from each part. milder white meat up top, slightly dry, and more intensely fishy flavour, from the moist and dark underside. all even more delicious with the crushed cucumber ponzu dipping sauce.

friday morning, i marked the turning of 37 with a tall paper cup of rich hot chocolate, and a short plastic one of central baking depot‘s house granola. it’s oats and sesame seeds, and sunflower seeds, and whole hazelnuts, and dried dates, and a bunch of other stuff too i’m sure, baked golden brown, broken into crunchy chunks, and topped in plain yoghurt and tart stewed fruit.

is it healthy? i don’t know, but it was packed with enough hidden oils and sugar to keep me fortified for a terrible hour-long busride out to bondi for sculptures by the sea.

it’s true, what all those bondi locals have been grumbling about. the coastal walk slowed down to a coastal crawl, as every body stopped to look. and look. and look. even funner than seeing the sculptures was watching the hardcore joggers trying their best to run around the punters, the school kids, the old ladies, the dogs, the sculptures, and then looking irritated to find their path blocked, again. again. dear bondi locals: stop grumbling! find an alternative jogging route for a couple of weeks! do you see me spleening about the queues out of zumbo, keeping me from cake?

the funnest thing of all though, was the magical dream house on top of the hill, a life-sized cubby house completely covered by one jane gillings in an armour of found toys and plastic bottle caps.

oh how we wanted to buy it and take it home with us! instead we opted for hot chips and potato cakes down by the beach.

we had gelato then, once the spuds had settled, not by the sea, but tucked away in the cool and dark of messina. the mythical gingerbread gelato eluded me, so i made do with a triple chocolate extravaganza. chocolate fondant — rich and creamy with a hazelnutty edge; chocolate sorbet — smooth and light and intensely cocoa-y; and chocolate yoghurt — milky with a pleasant tang, my pick of the pack.

and you might think a birthday would end there, what with the kid falling asleep in the car on the way back to my dad’s hotel suite in the city and all…

but she performed that trick of bouncing out of bed about two minutes after she was tucked in, so we trekked into BBQ king and they brought us soup, all porky and ribby with a single chunk of carrot.

then they brought us a great bowl of roast duck congee, infused with delicious ducky flavour and a wonderful surprise of ginger slivers hidden deep in its heart.

and then a platter of fat, fried you tiao. the rice grains in the porridge had broken down into lush creaminess, just perfect for dipping.

now that’s how you end a birthday. lips glistening with oil, a starchy rice mass expanding slowly in your belly.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 November 2009 at 9:03 pm

permalink | filed under around town, art, breakfast, chocolate, dinner, ice cream

i woke up the other morning, and my room was bathed in a glorious golden light. just beautiful, it was, until the kid and i thought we might open up the blinds to see what was causing this enchanting illumination. at this point it became just weird and scary. we were quite unsettled to see… well, not much really. our entire vista had been blanketed in a silent orange fog. we were to learn later that it was a tonne (actually, many thousands of tonnes!) of red dust blowing in from the desert. good thing we hadn’t been up an hour or two earlier, when the sky was red: we might have just crawled back into bed and cowered until the apocalypse was over. at least, had we been forced to bunker down, we would’ve had snacks!

appropriate, no? “remember the passed food” indeed! i don’t remember these from my past (perhaps it is taiwan-centric — note the evocative island-of-taiwan-shaped logo), but i guess someone out there must be nostalgic for these little bricks of puffy fried dough bits held together with a barely perceptible glue of brown sugar. after the soft crunch of the first bite, the delicate block yields to become a chewy mass that sticks to your teeth, and tastes mildly of the sum of its ingredients: wheat flour, milk powder, maltose, brown sugar, vegetable oil. simple pleasures, yes, with a slightly oily (and not thoroughly unpleasant) aftertaste.

next! behold the exotic chocolate gift presented to me by ms d on her return from new york city: the bacon bar from vosges haut chocolat, which contains not only smoked bacon, but smoked salt.

when i first showed the package to the kid, and i mused, “i wonder what chocolate deborah gave us,” she paused a moment to decipher the large clue on the box.

“meat chocolate?” she asked.

“yeah! but i wonder what kind of meat it is.”

“bacon?”

“yeah!!”

her smile was wide. “can i have some?” she asked. o, proud moment for a parent!

so we packed it as part of our picnic two weekends ago, and after the cheese and apple sandwiches, and the mandarins, and the chocolate-dipped greek shortbread biscuits sandwiched with sticky red jam, we were suitably impressed by the rich milk chocolate, the comforting tang of salt, and the nublets of bacon packed all the way through. the meat was not always crunchy — alas — but it was a fine contrast to the sweet and creamy. it’s true, what the slightly overwrought, overwrit guff on the back of the package says: you can smell the bacon. even better, you can taste it! the smoky flavour is most enticing, and the randomness of sometimes crunchy bacon edge, and sometimes chewy meat makes it seem you’re eating the real thing. i will be hoarding this chocolate, making it last. truly, a worthy snack to bring you to the end of the world.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 September 2009 at 11:15 am

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, snacks

it became apparent as we approached the chocolate shop, that it was housed in the old digs of oh calcutta!. i’d never been inside oh calcutta!, and i’m sure it was nice and all, but i can assume that it looked nothing like boon (the chocolate experience), which looked very nice indeed with its glass-enclosed, marble-topped jewelry shop counter and blond wood panelling.

in fact it was deborah who initially alerted me to this store’s existence — “they have a tea room! and chocolate ornaments!” is essentially what the email said — and then i read some in-depth reporting over at the unbearable lightness of being hungry, and as the plans for our day fell into place, it became clear that boon would be a stop along the way.

and so. we stepped up to the door, and opened it, and the smell of chocolate that engulfed us was really quite exhilarating. because we had come from sopra, and gelato, we were in no condition to climb the narrow stairway up to the tearoom. but there was enough downstairs to keep us entertained.

behold — indeed — xmas baubles rendered in chocolate. dainty bags of nibbly things. smart canisters of biscuits. across the way, laid out just so in the long counter, exquisite little squares of handmade filled chocolates, with pretty names to match.

alas, my note-taking is wanting, and i have no recollection of what any of the names are. but in my box of five ($10), i had a quite savoury one of peach and cardamon, one of jasmin tea in a dark ganache, one of rose in a white ganache, one of anise and vanilla (it wasn’t too liquoricey, as the shopboy had said, but the air of aniseed hung around my mouth for somewhat longer than i’d like), and…

…something. told you my note-taking was poor.

the chocolates, on the other hand, were wonderful. crafted by a belgian-trained chocolatier, their fillings were lush and smooth, their flavours subtle and sophisticated.

five chocolates go by too quickly (six even, if you count the sample the countergirl offered me after i’d made my selection), so i’m hoping that the bizarre weather continues, and throws me a summer’s day cold enough for hot chocolates and belgian waffles upstairs.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 December 2008 at 10:54 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate

it’s beginning to look a lot like xmas! there’s a dark cherry mocha frappucino awaiting me a starbucks, but now that starbuckss are few and far-between, i made do yesterday with the festive cookies ‘n’ christmas beverage at gloria jeans.

[ it pained me to order it — i had to stop speaking halfway through and check the signboard to see that it really was called “cookies. and. christmas”. ]

but it didn’t hurt to drink it. it was mildly chocolatey, and not overly minty, and if that doesn’t seem too exciting (it wasn’t), well! the self-serve sprinkles at the condiment bar will surely do you in.

here are some other exciting things i’ve found lately:

sweet william not nuts chocolate bar
i remember being told about dairy-free sweet william chocolate a few years ago by this vegan girl i knew. because i’m not vegan, or lactose intolerant, i did not think to venture down that route.

but! a new variety i stumbled upon at banana joes last week compelled me to put one in my basket. “not nuts!” it proclaims on the wrapper, for those allergic to peanuts as well as dairy. or for those, like me, who do not care for peanuts in their chocolate. instead, it is packed full of whole roasted soy beans. hurrah! the crunchy, beany little nuggets are a treat indeed, and surprisingly, so is the chocolate: smooth and creamy (though a little too sweet), and devoid of any of that weird soy flavour you get in regular non-asian soy milk products.

how do they do it? amazing!

also…

coca cola lip balm
i really do like coca cola, but i really have to be in the mood to drink it. i have to crave it, actually, and i give in to that craving two, maybe three times a year. oh, to feel that caustic fizz work its way down my throat is a wonderful thing.

voila — coca cola lip smackers!

the bumper pack i bought had regular coke lip balm, vanilla coke lip balm, and a liquid lip gloss that rolls on via an enormous silver ball bearing. it tastes and smells just like the real thing! and i don’t have to actually drink any of that crap! i am extremely happy about this great development in lip balm – junk food cross promotion. do not think i have not considered applying it over my regular cherry lip balm for a walk down cherry coke lane.

i resisted — so far — the fanta pack, which included a stick each of orange, strawberry and grape. perhaps i could just buy a grape one; grape fanta is so hard to come by these days.

– – –

bet you didn’t know i felt so strongly about coke!

what better time to finally address that meme i got tagged with the other day. ok, fine, two weeks ago. i am very bad with memes. but two people tagged me for this one, so it must be important.

so. the rules of the game:
• link to the person who tagged you
• post the rules on the blog
• write six random things about yourself
• tag six people at the end of your post
• let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog
• let the tagger know when your entry is up

that is a lot of rules, so i’m only following half of them. the first half. told you i was bad with memes! also, i think you get quite a lot of random things about me in the day-to-day running of this blog — i really like broccoli, for example, and “america’s next top model” — so i’m really scraping the barrel here.

1. i really like coca cola

2. i eat floor food
sure, it depends on the food, and the floor; i won’t eat food off a wet or grimy floor, even if it’s picked up quickly. but the five-second rule is fairly elastic around here. once, at the national art gallery cafe, a fat artichoke shot out of my sandwich when i took a bite out of the other end. i waited until i had finished the whole sandwich, and then i retrieved the artichoke from under my chair where it had rolled, on carpet, and i ate it, after checking for hairs.

3. i eat expired food
i am right now eating a bag of japanese milk-tea-flavoured corn snacks, best before date: 07.02.23. they have a pleasant, sweet, milky-tea flavour, and are only slightly stale… a bit like those flushable corn-based packing peanuts (it’s true, i nibbled one the other day to see if they were the disintegratable flushable kind).

4. i remove the pegs from the clothes line while bringing in the washing
i caught the tail end of this debate in the herald’s column 8 section earlier in the week. apparently such people are deemed to have some sort of obsessive-compulsive affliction. but really, how can you put out new laundry when the lines are littered with randomly placed pegs? you’d have to hold the damp piece of clothing bunched up in one hand while you claw at the pegs to release them before clipping them back on. you’d be unable to flick out the twisted wet bundles to rid them of their wrinkles. you’d… ahem. wait ’til you find out i’ve also been known to match the colours of the pegs to the colour of the clothes. and hangers, let’s not forget hangers.

5. that guy known as “the boy” moved back in
it’s neither an overly good nor bad thing — maybe it’s both, and maybe they cancel each other out — but i thought it might be useful to note, in the interest of narrative.

6. i am horribly shy and retiring
but i’ve met some great people through this blog. come say hello if you see me in the street… unless, um, you’re a scary stalker type. then yes, just walk on by.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 November 2008 at 9:46 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, drink, misc, shoping, something new

it’s a little sad, no? when things come to an end?

oh relax, you, my faithful four readers who come day after day, i’m not quitting the blog. not right now anyway, even though it’s too time-consuming, and exhausting, and… boring (or comment-unworthy, anyway), all terrible things to struggle with when you’re deciding whether or not to go on. and besides, it’s too hot to make that decision today.

no, i’m talking about zumbo. faster than i realised, the summer collection from adriano zumbo patissier is nearly upon us: tomorrow in fact, a rumble of foodbloggers informed me.

now, if you don’t count the pre-packaged single-serve blueberry pie that i bought myself on my birthday, i really have not had a birthday cake this year. (and if you do count it, well. it was still just a birthday pie wasn’t it?) either way, i thought yesterday was the perfect opportunity to finally get me the tanzanie before the winter cakes disappeared.

of course, now i am kicking myself, because i have left it too late to go back for seconds. here is a wonderful slab of decadent chocolate cake. if you stick a fork all the way down and break off a vertical portion, and put that in your gob, you will have a bit of creaminess here, and a bit of crunchiness there, and a rich, intensely chocolatey mouthful overall.

if you delicately pry each of the seven or so chocolatey layers apart, you will have the thinnest skin of dark chocolate ganache; milky chocolate mousse; a mysterious mass beneath that with a charred, smoky flavour; a voluptuous vanilla brulee; a crackly chocolate meringue; something i believe the menu describes as chocolate jelly, although it seemed a bit softer and fudgier; something salty! all on a base of flourless chocolate biscuit.

but no need to panic just yet: perhaps i can stretch it out another couple of days. i only managed half of it after all, while staying up too late last night watching “the shining” on tv, and even then i may have crossed my chocolate threshold.

and the cake peeking demurely round the back? you remember the cinque terre? chocolate mousse, lemon curd, raspberry cremeux, and candied olives beneath a quiff of billowing meringue? i was talking to the countergirl at the shop, innocently buying my tanzanie, when she suddenly said, “if you want that last cinque terre, i’ll give it to you.”

“i won’t say no,” i replied, calmly. if she could’ve spoken directly to my brain, she would have heard it screaming: yes! yes! yes!

oh, it was great to revisit. the kid — so unimpressed by the mango-caramel-lychee-chocolate-mint folly of last month — thought so too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 November 2008 at 8:39 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate

it’s old news by now of course. while i was eating my way through auburn last saturday, a select group of sydney’s finest foodbloggers descended upon zumbo cafe and ate their way through the dessert menu.

there were still only three up on the blackboard when i rocked up with singapore girl on tuesday, and just one that i was hellbent on trying.

“it’s not a hamburger.”

… is what it’s called. perhaps you say it like, “it’s nodda tooma.” plus there is a subtitle: “it’s a macaron.”

and behold: an enormous macaron-ice cream sandwich. beneath the initial crunch, the biscuits were moist and chewy, extremely chocolatey. on top were crumbs, from another darker, crumblier specimen. in between was a generous scoop of luscious dulce de leche gelato. there are plans for the ice cream to be made instore, but for now it’s shipped in from messina in darlinghurst.

and right at the bottom, was a layer of rice pudding. strange, no? but so delicious. it was sweet and cinnamony, and surprised me — pleasantly, no, joyously — with chunks of caramelised banana .

in its entirety, it was just enough to hit my chocolate threshold; perhaps if the kid hadn’t eaten quite so much of the caramel ice cream quite so quickly, it would have vanquished me.

singapore girl ordered the deconstructed miss marple. what began at the patisserie as a crepe-encased gateau, and evolved into a tart, now arrives at the table wantonly draped across a big white plate: a pair of slinky mascarpone-filled crepes, all glistening with syrup and crackling with caramelised bits, lay in a tangle with fresh strawberries and tart little orange jellies. but you see, frozen jellies. put one in the kid’s mouth and watch her eyes light up. it worked on us bigger people too.

we sat and ate slowly — well, as slowly as we could; by this time, the kid had had enough of ice cream and jellies, and had grown bored and a little belligerent — each thinking our dessert was the better one, and of course we were both right.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 November 2008 at 8:37 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, ice cream, kid

it’s nice how things turn out, is all. one moment there’s a post on a blog, and the next there’s a flurry of txts, and just over an hour later, me and chocolatesuze are standing in the ugliest little courtyard in the world, way down the back of the ugliest little mall in the neighbourhood. but no matter, because the courtyard — oozing suburban backyard charm, circa 1972 — leads into a cozy wood-panelled room, with velvety cushions, and a red chandelier, and quite a bit of chocolate.

yes, adriano zumbo cafe chocolat finally opened. it was tomorrow after all. but yesterday, today. wait! come back! it is hot today, and my brain is melting.

it was hot yesterday too, though not as, so i was in no mood to try any of the hot chocolates listed on the chalkboard — cherry ripe, white and dark — and especially the one which was not — chilli. instead i had an iced tea, which came in a small carafe with bits of chopped up strawberries floating in it. the volume of the carafe exactly matched that of the handsome glass filled with ice, mint leaves and tiny slices of orange. it was all very pretty, but once the tea was poured from one vessel to another, it seemed like the energy expended could have been put towards more worthy tasks.

like eating chocolate! it was a very soft launch of the cafe, and what was on offer was mostly chocolates. i picked a couple: salted caramel mousse and vanilla caramel, and was enchanted by the effect of incredible salty salt crystals embedded in lush dark chocolate.

chocolatesuze proved her mantle by downing a hot chocolate as well as five chocolate truffles, including the unfortunately named “camel toe”, a shiny pink and appropriately moulded affair filled with a liquid red wine center. sigh. (not a happy sigh.)

the sugar only made me hungry for more, so i went back for seconds: a passionfruit caramel macaron. it was a full, moist mouthful with a burst of fruity tang. caramelicious!

two hours after we began, the smell of fried garlic and curry spices wafted into the courtyard from the indian takeaway next door, and i was reminded that i had to go home and make dinner, for dessert (spaghetti with smoked trout, green beans and asparagus, if you must know, in a parsley pesto).

the cafe’s dessert menu hadn’t really been implemented on this first day; besides the chocolate and macaron and a couple of pastries, there was only one available. we did not order it, but followed its trajectory with keen interest when it was delivered to the next table. there was a surgical steel kidney dish, you see, and an oversized syringe filled with what appeared to be the result of liposuction. but in the dish was a chocolate fondant, and in the syringe, raspberry coulis and vanilla creme anglaise, which was then administered into the pudding by the waitress. oh, if only she’d been wearing a naughty nurses uniform.

it will all be very interesting i’m sure, when it takes full flight on saturday.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 31 October 2008 at 4:54 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate

the mythical raspberry and lychee macaron has thus far eluded me at adriano zumbo patissier. however, when i went by the other day, there was another new flavour to herald the occasion of good food month.

[ i don’t know about you, but i actually do try to avoid bad food during the other eleven months of the year. ]

it was a plump and moist coconut macaron, and although it was told to me, i don’t recall what the green stuff was. it did have a somewhat lemongrassy taste though, which i guess makes sense?

because it was there, i also could not say no to a rice pudding macaron, and because it was an enormous beast, i had to ask the countergirl about the big brown one lurking in the corner of the display cabinet, somewhere between the macarons and the truffles.

“it’s chocolate macaron biscuits,” she said, “and in between there is chocolate marshmallow and chocolate hazelnut cream.” plus, you will notice, it is dusted in cocoa and the edges are rimmed in chocolate.

i brought it home, this chocolate monster, and made it friends with the other chocolate monster that lives inside of me. much happiness ensued.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 October 2008 at 10:32 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate

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