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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

the best part is that it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. i had just come from the medicare office with a $65 refund still warm and glowing in my wallet. it was lunchtime, and after i exhausted the list in my head of cheap and acceptable city eateries where i might find sustenance, it struck me that i could (should!) take myself to the lindt cafe while the kid was off bonding with her grandmother somewhere in the hills district, being plied with crayons and sketchbooks and fairy wings, and forcefed pink cupcakes.

it was all in the name of comprehensive research of course, but after the travesty of the guylian cafe “chocolate” milkshake, i thought i should give the one at lindt a go.

it was extremely busy, but the friendly waitress was happy to answer such questions as, “between the iced chocolate and the chocolate milkshake, which is milkier?” and, “and which is chocolatier?”. no, her bright smile never once faltered, as she replied that the milkshake is milkier, and that they were both chocolatey and decadent, and the main difference between the two was that the iced chocolate contained ice.

and it was just as a chocolate milkshake should be. a $7 chocolate milkshake even! rich, dark chocolatey flavour. just thick enough that your cheeks let you know you were making an effort sucking. served in a tall, weighty glass. topped with a mound of dark and white chocolate shavings.

bliss! and nicely tempered by a perfectly toasted (and corrugated) schiacciata filled with delicate slices of roast lamb, grilled eggplant, baby spinach and ricotta.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 October 2008 at 9:17 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, lunch

as we walked that stretch of circular quay between the lego blocks and the cardboard cartons yesterday, we were stunned to see that a chocolate cafe had materialised in the toaster, right next to the dendy cinemas. mid-afternoon, after the rain had cleared, and a modest skyscraper had been constructed out of five cardboard boxes, we popped into the brand-spankin’-new guylian belgian chocolate cafe.

it was an impulsive move: we had eaten lunch not too long ago, and the kid was in that precarious mid-afternoon mood. but what do you do when 1. you stumble upon a new chocolate cafe and 2. you decide on a whim to enter said cafe? you can’t really have just a cup of tea and a biscuit.

can you?

well. we certainly couldn’t. as i read down the list in the menu (which took rather longer than necessary to be presented), the kid expressed her interest in certain items by repeating them back at me.

“cheesecake!” she said at one point. and then, “milkshake!”.

all right then. the dark chocolate buche filled with raspberry cream would just have to wait.

the dark chocolate raspberry cheesecake, though, appeared soon enough, a squat slice cut from a fat, round cake. it was surrounded by swirls and puddles — raspberry coulis and white chocolate sauce — and the kid went straight for the heart-shaped pool of red. the cake itself was dense and chocolatey, sitting on a base of slightly soggy, lemon-scented biscuit crumb, and there were clearly bits of real raspberries in it: we crunched on the seeds. although it seemed like a modest serve when it arrived, in the end it remained unvanquished. would this have been different if we had been less laden with lunch? or if the cake had been that bit more delicious?

perhaps it was the milkshake’s fault. though for something called “chocolate shake”, it wasn’t overly chocolatey. in fact, i wouldn’t even say it was chocolatish. what it was mostly, was a glass of cold milk, with a small, partially intact scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, and the inside of the glass had been zigzagged with molten chocolate, which, by virtue of sitting in a volume of cold milk, had solidified completely. how very strange to have to scrape these trails of hard chocolate off the surface of the glass.

i guess if it had been an actual chocolatey chocolate shake, we might have died. as it is, we didn’t even get to the bottom of the glass. there were a lot of milkshakes going round that afternoon, and trade in general seemed brisk. when i asked the guy behind the counter when they’d opened, he said, only a little agitatedly, “two days ago”.

i really must work on getting my tolerance for rich chocolate desserts back up to the levels they were five years ago. you must know by now, the adriano zumbo chocolate cafe opens at the end of the week.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 October 2008 at 10:45 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, chocolate, kid

the more observant amongst you would have noticed a crusty little nugget in the previous macaron-skewed post. it is a caramel truffle, which, when i saw it behind glass, seemed unordinary, because its sugary surface was adorned with little beads of caramel. i took it as a good sign, but i had little idea then that when i bit through the granulated sugar crust, there would be nothing else beneath but soft, salty, buttery caramel; those beads were the molten caramel which had broken through!

thus, you might conclude that the crust is just a vehicle for getting a glob of caramel into your gob without making too much of a mess. thing is, i could’ve sworn that amongst those grains of sugar, there were also a few grains of salt. ’twas a fine vehicle indeed.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 July 2008 at 5:56 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate

breakfast, sunday morning, 9am.

saturday afternoon, we stopped by luneburger for lunch, on the way to the kinokuniya zine fair. as i finished my delicious sunflower-seeded roll filled with pastrami, cheese and salad, i glanced over at the counter and discovered that a whole new tray of sweet buns had appeared during the course of our little meal. it really was an amazing sight, and in my mind i was already eating one for breakfast before i had even returned to the counter to buy it.

[ countergirl, visibly surprised: "oh! you were just here!" ]

behold: the chocolate-crumble roll. a base of plain yeasty bun topped with a monstrous amount of soft, crumbly, cocoa-rich biscuit and a flirty zigzag of sugary icing. in fact, the edges of the pastry were all crumb, and in the end, too much even for one and a half chocolate-mad girls.

of course, we anticipated none of this after the zine fair, when we returned to the underground labyrinth around town hall station to finally cash in my krispy kreme birthday voucher from two birthdays ago.

there’s nothing like a free doughnut sundae to bring cheer to a random unbirthday celebration. i picked the current promotion doughnut — “chokkolate” glazed — and a scoop of boysenberry ripple, and the kid chose “rainbow”. mmm… lurid. honestly, i wasn’t expecting too much of the ice cream; i figured it would be like if you ordered a grilled fish meal at KFC… turns out it’s super premium stuff, rich and creamy with an almost stretchy texture. totally outdid the doughnut i thought, which was after all the regular yeast doughnut, with a fudgey chocolate glaze, just like the name sez. i don’t know why i thought it would be chocolate on the inside too.

it’s probably just as well it wasn’t though, given the breakfast we were up against in the new day.

probably.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 June 2008 at 10:47 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, chocolate, ice cream

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