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the fizz is nice against the prickle. distracting, anyhow. for i am falling sick once again, and in need of distraction, from the sharp (in the back of the throat) and the cloudy (all around my head). my rose-print drinking glass is filled with rose-red fizzy. i’d been searching for a while, in a cursory and on-and-off manner, for a bottle of rose syrup cordial. this involved falling into any indian spice-and-video shop i might happen to pass, and not finding a tall bottle of red. last thursday, though, i got lucky. so. rose syrup + soda water = the bestest red fizzy ever.

thursday was lucky for several other reasons. first up, we dropped the kid off at playschool. and then nellie said, “let’s have breakfast at bourke street bakery.”

at the bakery’s broadway outpost, we lucked into the corner booth. well, the only booth. my sourdough toast with house jam came with a just-right portion of salty butter, wrapped up in a twist of waxed paper to look like candy. my hot chocolate came in a wide, low bowl. it was perfect fuel for a day of trudging through the rainy streets of surry hills.

a litany of old favourites unfurled. at object gallery, we found ceramic thongs hand-painted with intricate blue-and-white scenes. at christopher’s cake shop, we bought a bag of shortbread, filled with jam, dipped in chocolate. we moseyed, ambled up bourke street and down crown, and finally came to climb the galvanised staircase at fratelli fresh…

…to sopra. here’s a tip. get there a little way past two. the masses will have lunched and departed, and the water jugs, though empty, will be refilled with a smile if you bring one up to the counter.

the handwritten blackboard, as high as the ceiling, confounded me with choice, so i fell back on another old favourite: the antipasto plate. there are always four parts, and three of them change according to the seasons; the one constant is egg mayonnaise, which sounds a bit low-rent, but in fact it is a perfectly boiled egg draped in… silk. in the silky mayonnaise there are great chunks of chopped-up cornichon. it is great. great, i tells ya.

today, the lineup included some asparagus, pickled beetroot with gorgonzola, and boiled fennel with salsa verde. everything was simultaneously light and intense, the kind of delicious that makes you slowly whittle away at each element, one at a time, as you weigh up in your mind which you want as the final taste in your mouth.

as it turns out, the final taste in my mouth that afternoon was of an ethereal (and ephemoral) buttermilk pudding, which collapsed halfway into its own puddle of berry sauce.

we caught a break in the rain, and a bus to the city, and then another bus back out to get the kid, and after spending some time looking at pyjama pants and petshops, it was dinnertime. we had lured maeve to playschool that morning by promising a sushi-train dinner afterwards, and we are not girls who fall back on their word.

especially when it involves tomodachi. upstairs at broadway shopping centre, they do a fast trade in exotic sushi filled with schnitzel and cream cheese, or topped with blowtorched scallops and kecap manis. we had a plate of maki, whose crowning glory was a sliced of grilled cheese.

for dessert we pulled this off the train: an azuki mochi, divided into bite-sized portions, decorated with aerosol whipped cream and fresh strawberries.

it’s like all the fun in the world happened on thursday.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 March 2008 at 11:15 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, dinner, lunch, nellie, snacks

this is how the holiday goes: you arrive, and the three weeks are spread out before you, full of promise and possibilities. your life slows down, a little. an early morning trip to the wet market with your mother, a meal at a little pink cafe… this could be your everyday life. and then suddenly you’re three days away from the plane trip out, and there won’t be a return visit to the little pink cafe, and — even worse! — you have not had a single dosai, nor a bowl of meepok, and the opportunities to slot these meals in are diminishing fast.

[ takes a deep breath. ]

so this morning — noon, really — even though we had scheduled leftover popiah at home for lunch, we called halftime from our mustafa excursion and froggered across the street to a shiny indian vegetarian cafeteria, gleaming with anticipation.

a dosai makes any day a good day; a rava dosai is even better, crunchy with semolina, and embedded with a festive mix of sliced green chilli, mustard seeds, minced onion, ginger and whatever else the house mix might be. a ghee rava dosai is a magnificent and superior being, surrounded in a golden halo that comes from being fried in clarified butter.

one ghee rava dosai and a cup of syrupy masala chai later, i laid my head on my mother’s shoulder. oh! such contentment. we would have come to little india sooner, but my mother had been gravely concerned about the chikugunya-riddled mosquitoes that had colonised the area recently. fresh out of the car, she brandished a tube of mosquito repellant at us. but we live on the edge, dammit! look at us, choosing bindis with not a care in the world, trying on amusing shoes in the basement.

so today, we snuck in two lunches. but here’s what i snuck in last week.

on our first morning in port dickson, a roti bom. breakfast of champions: an extra buttery paratha, sprinkled in sugar. it came with a puddle of dhal and a slurp of fish curry gravy. unwrinkle you nose; the tangy, peppery curry is a most suitable companion for the crunchy, sweet bread. the kid drank half my teh tarik and then ate enough of the roti that i felt i needed to order another. i didn’t right then, but i couldn’t wait until the next day so that i could have it again.

as it turned out, i did not, because a murtabak presented itself, stuffed with dry chicken curry, with extra chicken curry gravy for sloshing around in. it was big enough to feed five, i believe, but i ate it all. the kid did not eat any of it, naturally, or any of her sardine murtabak (which i’d persuaded upon her in the guise of something a cat might enjoy), but she did drain most of my beaker of teh ais.

T minus three days and counting, i’ve finally learnt my lesson. my masala chai today was all mine, because the kid had her own golden column: mango lassi, which she drank in a single slurp. and then we did get home — late — for popiah. i had the best intentions to wrap modest little rolls, but they took on a life of their own. you start spartan, with a lettuce leaf, but then the turnip-carrot-tofu-beans, and the sprouts, the shredded cucumber, fat baby sauce, minced garlic, crushed peanuts, sprigs of coriander, fried shallots, crabmeat, prawns, an extra drizzle of sauce… and you are sunk.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 February 2008 at 11:55 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, kid, lunch, trip

the first day of the new year, we joined the convoy of nice, nice 2 and nice++ buses up the highway to the shimmery hot centre of kuala lumpur. it was past lunchtime when we finally arrived at my grandmother’s house, but lunch was there waiting for us.

just in the door, we caught up with our once-a-year cousins on the unyielding rosewood chairs, but our mother, always straight to the point, was already at the big round table, hunched over a small bowl of new year noodles. what it is, is meesua, roughly hewn bits of chicken, and a whole, perfectly hard-boiled egg. it was only the first of many meals to come.

because what else is there to do when it’s shimmery hot outside? we did venture out, full of bravado, to the playground across the street one morning, but we were quickly humbled. so we visited the old aunts, the ones who confuse us year after year. third grandaunt on the grandmother’s side? fifth grandaunt on the grandfather’s side? i thought i had it finally worked out, but now… nothing. next year, we start again.

one thing that is constant: the glass jars of salty pistachios. the kid discovered a taste for them, and a monkey-like trick to open each nut with the half-shell of the preceeding one. anything else was a random bonus: sarsparilla cordial, or van houten scorched almonds, each one coated in a thick shell of wax-glazed milk chocolate. twenty years can go by, and these are the tastes you remember. soft, juicy dragonfruits, an unnerving red on the inside — these are new, but whisked out of a gentle aunt’s well-stocked fridge, they are slurped up, already a favourite.

and every few hours, it seemed, we returned to our grandmother’s house for another feast. one lunchtime it was assam laksa, the ingredients meticulously sliced and laid out for fine-tuning the flavour; the pungent broth simmering in an enamel cauldron just beside. one lunchtime — our last — there was a fish, and acar, and otak otak. stuffed crabs and lobak. jiu hu char wrapped in lettuce leaves. two soups: one of porkribs and salted vegetable, and the other an innocuous broth of pig intestines. three generations of relatives came and ate in three waves, and i sat through them all.

there was a neverending jelly, multilayered, and each layer tasting of itself: coffee, or evaporated milk. pink even… we made it down to the last sliver on the afternoon we left, sitting around the big round table with our once-a-year cousins. the older one talked about the iron man competition she is confronting in a couple of weeks; the younger one whisked the paiseh portion — left purely to be polite — out from under our noses.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 February 2008 at 9:58 pm

permalink | filed under lunch, snacks, trip

“it is 34 degrees today,” txted singapore girl, “so aircon is good.” just before noontime, thursday, we met in the air-conditioned wonder of miracle supermarket in chinatown, to stock up on hello kitty rice crackers and green-tea salted-plum candy (and to consider the possibilities of durian mochi), and then we walked a couple of blocks westward to the air-conditioned wonder of mamak.

we were shown to a table in the back, directly beneath the air-conditioner. “it will be cooler here,” said the waiter, but still, it wasn’t quite cool enough to order any of the familiar and comforting numbers on the menu. not today, the sambal kangkong, or the sambal sotong, or a murtabak even, which was available with a chicken or lamb filling. it might have been different if they’d offered a sardine murtabak; back home, the roti uncles fill it with mashed-up fish, straight from a tin, sticky-rich with tomato sauce.

but it was too hot for anything meatier, so i picked something light: the roti bawang, stuffed with slices of red onion. and a teh ais.

the tea showed up first, a beer stein of sweet condensed-milky tea. sweeeet. the roti, when it arrived, came with two curry sauces — a homely chicken curry gravy, and a welcome and excellent surprise of an assam curry hiding little bits of fish.

oh, it was good! the crunchy and succulent just-cooked onions in flaky pastry, the alternate mouthfuls of contrasting curries. by the time it was over, i was sorry to discover that there was no room inside of me for dessert — none of the sweet rotis on offer, or the ais kacang which promised rose syrup instead of a generic sugary flavour. sigh.

so i will be back. it’s great to have found this shiny red restaurant, and its litany of old favourites. it’s only a little bit less great when we think about how much this food costs in singapore.

but here’s the thing — i am in singapore. surprise! me and the kid flew in on saturday, gliding in on a wave of vomit. there are so many things to eat we don’t know where to begin. this afternoon i had a sardine sandwich in the cutest pink cafe ever, followed by a cup of tea and a share of a limonata cupcake, and a chocolate one. i wanted nothing more than to move in.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 February 2008 at 10:26 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch, trip

my arms are covered in bruises. perhaps this is how inner turmoil manifests itself, on the outside. the most gruesome one at the moment – since the original matching set on the inner edge of each elbow, from scaling a wall a week ago, faded — is the one with the sharp, slightly blistered burn surrounded by a purple blossom of bruised tissue. that one was from lowering my forearm onto the rim of a pot while boiling pasta, and mysteriously, it does not hurt at all. there are two others, on the inside, and outside, of my upper arm, which i assume came from walking into ill-placed doorhandles, and i do that once or twice a day, so they’re nothing special.

but let’s talk about bruises that matter.

sigh.

just past sunday noontime, we met deborah in the narrow corridor of adriano zumbo patissier, to procure supplies for our luncheon picnic. you may recall, we attempted such a picnic months ago, to herald the spring, and were rained out (or, in, as the case proved to be). despite the steady light drizzle, our summer picnic barreled on; we were defiant!

i’d been thinking about the scuro all week. from the original zumbo lineup, it’s been revived for the december best-of collection. i have no recollection of it in the early days; back then it was all about the macaron. but to see it, this manly slab of flourless chocolate biscuit, and mousse, and layers of assorted caramel concoctions… in my head, it was a dense and sticky thing.

so it was a surprise when we popped open the cakebox in the park to discover that scuro had swooned like a lady. fallen with such force, actually, that it had embedded itself into the passionfruit tart beside it. it was not too warm out, and we had not swung the carry bag, so who knows what happened. perhaps it went insane with desire? the tart is rather ravishing after all.

and ravish it we did. the crisp pastry shell, the rich filling that filled our mouths with a warm passionfruity glow. the vibrant technicolor sunset across the top of it was contained within a barely-there layer of gelatin, but even that was enough to give a welcome, wobbly edge to the passionfruit creme below. this one, deborah had been thinking about for months, and i would say it was not at all a disappointment. deborah?

the scuro was much more delicate than i had imagined, quite light for something so dark. i especially liked the cakey bits, drenched in chocolatey juices, and the very pleasant burnt caramel flavour in the mysterious foamy middle layer. and it did my head in, in the end; i can no longer sit down and eat and endless quantity of quality dark chocolate, without suffering dizziness or a turn in my gut, but with the scuro, i was compelled to keep eating until it was gone.

i will not tell you how we ate it, this collapsed ruin of a cake, but just know that deborah, the kid, and i have eaten together enough times over the last two years that we had no qualms about seeing each other like that. spoonless (zumbo had run out that day). with crude (though genius!) shovels fashioned from the cardboard bases of our pastries.

it was not all depravity, of course. we had real food to start. mine was quiche! and i never order the quiche. but this one had been giving me the eye every time i walked in the shop, and finally i bit. sue, she is called, filled with spinach, goat’s cheese and blueberries.

the pastry was still crisp, and the one real fear i have about quiche filling — that it will be a mouthful of eggy-cheesy-eggy — never materialised. they were serious about the spinach. look at it! a great knot of greenery. the goat cheese was mild, and the blueberries not at all discordant, and i would love to try this again, warm out of the oven, and with a knife handy to make sense of the clump of spinach.

and that, folks, is the last zumbo post for a little while. in a sudden turn of events, i suddenly lucked into a plane ticket to london (and a train ticket to paris). lucky for the 12 hour overnight transit at changi airport, and the freezing cold that awaits me. and lucky, really, for the sister at the other end of the planes and trains and automobiles.

i leave in two days, and i have not begun packing. i have yet to buy me some of that expensive european money, and a piece of beautiful hand luggage, and travel insurance. at least i managed to buy two polypro skivvies at the adventure shop sale yesterday. i still have print deadlines to attend to – just, and the house is a mess. i am so clenchy, and the tightness in my throat, and the knot in my stomach…

but you know what else awaits me? cake. by god, will there be cake. and falafel.

if it turned out to be the kind that’s green on the inside, that would be just tops.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 December 2007 at 10:31 pm

permalink | filed under cake, lunch, trip

one thing i remember about two days after my birthday is that it was dirty, stinkin’ hot. it was about 11.40 when we left the park, and just before noon when we arrived at about life; i was slick with sweat, and the lenses in my sunglasses had steamed up from the heat coming off my cheeks. the kid was fresh as a daisy, perhaps only slightly wilted, because she’d been in the pram while i’d been pushing it up that god-damned hill. at least one of us looked presentable; it was like we were about to meet the queen.

all morning, maeve had been going through a list of what she might do when she met maggie. “i might dance for maggie,” she said, “and then i might sing a song for maggie, and then i might say hello…” we have “the cook and the chef” on every week, so maggie beer is like, i dunno, a familiar grand aunt? and she was at about life signing cookbooks that day, as well as launching her new range of fancy ice cream.

and amazingly, as i stood there in the doorway trying not to puddle on the floor, someone handed me a tiny cone of ice cream, and one to the kid as well. now that’s a welcome. a smooth and creamy welcome, with a rich vanilla flavour and… an intriguing tang. that something else, when i managed to read the label on a tub a little while later, is elderflower. i wish that i had had a moment longer to savour it slowly, for bang on twelve maggie appeared and began signing books for the handful of people who’d shown up punctually. i popped the rest of the cone into my mouth and grappled for the cookbook in my bag.

a couple weeks before, i had told the boy that if he bought a copy of “maggie’s harvest” for his mum’s birthday, that i’d take it to get signed. so there we were, inching forward towards the grand lady. “where’s maggie?” said maeve, and there. she. was.

“hello!” said maggie, brightly. but maeve was not singing, and not dancing, and not even saying hello. there was something very interesting on the floor just right of maggie’s feet. so i told maggie how excited we were about her ice cream, and she said that she was too, and we got through it in the end, and then it was time for lunch.

the salad display at about life is a wall of great big bowls bursting with colour and delight. it was extra delightful that day, because of a small platter of grilled lamb cutlets sitting unobtrusively to one side. it became very important to me that we should acquire a portion of these… but what constituted a portion? the counterstaff did not know, because it was a one-off special for the day, but they helpfully suggested that i tell them how many i wanted and they’d put it on a plate for me.

so i asked for two — one each for me and the kid — and some of the tomato and hand-torn mozzarella salad on the side. and some bread and butter, please. oh, and also that amazing strawberry tart in the cake cabinet.

and what showed up was a heaped platter of colour and delight: the lamb was well-marinated and tender, with just enough charred fatty bits on the edges; the tomatoes were big and juicy; the cheese tasted pure, of cream. the bread, after it had been put to good use soaking up lamb juice and olive oil… sigh…

but by that stage the kid had already moved on. swiftly and methodically she picked off the perfect glistening strawberries atop the tart, and started on the stewed rhubarb at the same cracking pace, until the intense sourness stopped her. mm! it was sour! but i ate it all, relishing the tartness. what didn’t get eaten (shock!) was most of the pastry. “pastry”. it looked lovely on the shelf, all dramatically misshapen and caramelised, but it was chewy and ultimately unyielding, a handful of seeds and grains pressed into a pie dish, and tasted like what i imagine those moulded birdseed things taste like. sigh. (this is a different sort of sigh from the one in the last paragraph: it is a healthy cake sigh.)

following the banoffee pie debacle of a couple months back — there were a couple thin slices of banana atop the cloud of cream, and i thought that there might be more banana hidden beneath, mingling with the caramel… but no, those were the only two whispers of banana in the whole thing, dried out from being baked. and the cream wasn’t cream; it was some sort of soft meringue, i think. and the biscuit base was too big a slab. and… and… well, it just wasn’t a very good banoffee experience (my first time!) and i would hope that it gets better from now on —

i guess i’m trying to say… well, i’m hesitant to put the kibosh on cake at about life, based on two out of two not quite stellar instances… but maybe go all out on the savoury stuff — the salads, the tapas plates, the wraps filled to bursting point and served with a handful of undressed rocket — and if there’s lamb lurking about the glass case, order it! and then buy a tub of maggie’s ice cream from the grocery department.

which, in case you are interested, also comes in quince and bitter almond, and burnt fig jam, honeycomb and caramel. on the way out, i bought a tub of the latter for the boy, and briefly considered having it autographed by maggie, but she was outside in the sunshine, eating a big plate of something delicious. we sidled past into the heat. “where’s maggie?” said maeve.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 December 2007 at 9:32 am

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid, lunch

so this is what 35 feels like: like any other day, except with all the love and virtual cake that facebook has to offer. due to unforeseen circumstances, i actually ate three zumbo cakes yesterday (which, never fear, you will hear about one of these days), so i had to consciously steer today away from the real-life cakefest it otherwise might have been. it was going quite well too, until my aunt and grandmother showed up at around 10.30 in the morning with a whole ricotta cheesecake.

my good parents had left me birthday cards when they were here in october, and i opened them to find one — from my mother — covered in an enticing cluster of gem biscuits (one of my favourite biscuits ever, and ones that i don’t actually eat enough of, because i don’t actually eat a lot of biscuits), and the other — from my father — adorned with a velvet cocktail dress and its sparkly accoutrements, as well as the phrase “paint the town red on your birthday!”. which is interesting, because now i know that my mum thinks i am five (or perhaps she cleverly surmised that i need a warm, comforting childhood memory to cling to), and my pap thinks i am a vamp. huh.

inside this somewhat unsettling card, he had concealed a crazy and unexpected amount of cashmoney, so what i did was take everybody out to lunch.

i pointed my aunt in the direction of zilver, where i’d tried — unsuccessfully — to get in once before, at lunchtime, on a weekend, when the queue was out the door and almost down the escalators. just past 11 on a tuesday morning? no problem. the usual suspects were lined up: ha cheong, wu kok, char siu sou, char siu bao, a plate of bright green vegetables with its accompanying dish of oyster sauce, a cluster of steamed scallop dumplings, and egg tarts to finish. i love that, where most dimsum places give you three piece of whatever to a serve, zilver give you four. i love the light, flaky pastry in the baked treats — clearly they are packed with shortening. sadly though, the egg tarts — quivering circles of gold in their meltaway pastry shells — numbered only three, but my aunt and grandma were happy to share.

we made it home in time for cups of tea and slices of cake, and then all too soon it was time to eat again.

last night the boy had asked where i wanted to be taken to dinner. the act of which raised all sorts of issues in my head, and not just limited to: red lantern? flying fish? tetsuya? — well, we live in hope — (glebe point diner? bodega? ottoman cuisine?…) ultimately, i knew it had to be in the neighbourhood and affordable, and so i ventured that we could try again for rosso pomodoro, which, being a half-hour walk away, really pushed the boundaries of being “in the neighbourhood”. the first time we attempted to eat here, maybe a year ago, we fronted up to the door, and the doors, though open, had clouds of construction dust billowing out of them; they were renovating that week. last month we tried to get a table for the kid’s birthday family get-together, but it was booked out. tonight, with a 6 o’clock phone call, we managed to secure a table for 7.

i was excited!

and justly so. the tomato sauce is fresh and pure, the bresaola and rocket perfect foils. the pizza bases are crunchy, then chewy. they are thin where they need to be, and puffed-up slightly where it counts. the best part is, there is just enough cheese, and no more.

[ recently, we called up another local pizza place for delivery, and made a point of asking for half as much cheese as they’d normally put on. the guy on the phone was confused. “oh, so you want 50% more cheese?” he asked. “no, no,” we said, “less cheese. less.” it took a while to make things clear. ]

but, so, rosso pomodoro. we had wonderful pizze, and we were well looked after. the charming and friendly waiter explained all the specials, flirted with the kid, brought her fancy italian strawberry juice at the start, and at the end, chose a pink plastic paddle to go with her strawberry gelato.

me? i had a fat slab of old skool tiramisu, so boozy it sagged to one side, sitting in a thin brown puddle of itself. it was great.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 November 2007 at 11:23 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, dinner, lunch

i was going to say, “let’s go for three”, but the sonoma muffin post has turned out to be a zumbo muffin post, so. let’s go for four.

this is not a long-forgotten fred williams, not one of his later works with its vibrant and abstract marks of the australian scrub. i found it in the bread basket at zumbo over the weekend: the artichoke and mushroom flatbread. look at it! littered with wedges of marinated artichoke and tiny sliced mushrooms, and just enough tomato and cheese to round it out. but yes, redolent with memories of the sunburnt country, now that has gone all winter again. what is this? damn climate change. nevermind, it gave me opportunity to defrost that enormous green icecube of broccoli soup languishing in the freezer. mopped up with chunks of mushroomy, artichokey bread, it made a splendid lunch.

a few months ago, this was the flatbread on offer. yuh, more olives than you could poke a stick at; a great salty treat.

speaking of bread… i was shocked and saddened to discover, yesterday, that zumbo no longer stocks the sonoma soy and linseed in the shelves beneath the ceiling. “but why??” i may have wailed. turns out he’s flogging his own. i settled for a fat loaf of olive oil bread.

it was just as soft and squishy as counterboy had promised, with a welcome nudge of salt. i had it with butter and broccoli soup. the soy and linseed thing was not such a disappointment after all.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 November 2007 at 9:25 am

permalink | filed under lunch

halloween! halloween? in australia?

last saturday, the kid, my mum and i were just walking up the street to lunch, when we suddenly decided to get on the bus into the city. the spontaneous plan was to partake of the sydney food and wine fair in hyde park, but as we approached, we realised that the enormous crowd of people we saw across elizabeth street was just the queue to buy food vouchers. ghastly!

it did not take much for us to turn left up elizabeth, and head for the lindt cafe instead. how’s that for spontaneous, eh?

before too long, we were ensconced in plush white seating, surrounded by cool marble and glidey waiters, with a selection of well-crafted, modestly-sized (but satisfyingly filling) sandwiches before us. spicy sausage panini with yoghurt and grilled peppers; roast beef schiaciatta with mustard, vintage cheddar, marinated tomatoes and bitey cress; club sandwich with smoked salmon and goat curd with dill. we were so satisfied we couldn’t even order dessert! well, ok, so i did have one of those only slightly over-the-top $6 iced dark chocolates. but still.

instead, i made do with a couple of special edition halloween lindor balls to go. the jack-o-lantern is a regular milk chocolate ball, and the spooky ghost one is a milk chocolate shell with a white chocolate filling (it also appears to use the font, template gothic, for smallprint — my favourite font from the 90s and boy does it take me back to that special place — although really, i think it’s just the effects of the limitations of printing small on plastic)… neither of which were extraordinary. i’m not even demanding an exotic pumpkin pie filling; just an orange-infused chocolate would have sufficed, and a dark chocolate shell for the ghosties. is all.

a day later, the crazy hot weather had rendered the filling a perfect liquid consistency, though by that same token it also sent the milk chocolate the wrong side of cloying.

i did get a raspberry lindor ball too, because, well, you know me and raspberry chocolate, and also, it’s wrapped in pink foil.

(and did you know you can now get bars of chilli dark chocolate? like, the regular 100g dark bar with a gentle burn in the back of your throat? for $4? bafflingly, the lindt shop is the most expensive place to buy lindt chocolate, but if you eat at the cafe, and present your cafe receipt at the shop counter, they take 15% off. so we did, and they did.)

but look! here’s the tricky raspberry-chocolate treat for you: adriano zumbo‘s raspberry-chocolate macaron. i got it monday afternoon, a lone specimen perched atop a case of plain chocolate ones. its speckled biscuit like a jewel in the raw, its fruity ganache mysterious and coy. but see, if only there had been more filling, i would totally be saying “voluptuous and jolly”.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 31 October 2007 at 7:22 am

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, lunch, packaging

i knew a girl once, whose wild teenage years were frittered away in the eastern suburbs. a few years ago, she had an appointment in parramatta, but she showed up at an address on the equivalent street in newtown, because she knew that the meeting place was in the western suburbs, and i guess newtown was as far west as she considered civilisation to have reached.

i don’t know what the point of that story is, just that it amuses me to think of it. i lived in surry hills for just over ten years, and now i don’t, and i miss it sometimes. i just had it in my head that the east was a bitch to get to, with the buses and the waiting and the kid… but now that the kid is able to leap capital T in a single bound, and survived the bondi expedition last sunday, i thought that maybe the eastern suburbs would be less painful to tackle. so during the week, we did it twice more!

wednesday, we loaded up on morning tea at zumbo, then caught two buses out clovelly way. halfway on the second bus, ana txted to say that she was going crazy inside her four walls, and could we meet at a cafe instead? um, sure, because after all, she did just have a baby.

we met up at clodeli, with the shelves along the walls packed with italian imports, and the glass case with its bounty of salads, sandwiches and fat cakes. there was a stand of mini cupcakes piled three-high on the counter, so that was the kid sorted. i had a slice of house-made pear and raspberry bread — toasted golden crunchy on the inside, slightly more soggy than necessary on the inside, and served with little dishes of ricotta and honey — and a pot of leaf tea, which at $3.50, was the same price as the cup of teabag that i had in the strand arcade a couple weeks ago: i’d asked the waitress if it was at least a good teabag, and she assured me it was, before serving up the twinings on a string, grumble.

but clodeli, it was pleasant, eating cake surrounded by the maple syrup aura of ana’s hotcakes, and reading the vintage little golden books provided. and because the newborn astrid kept up her end of the bargain and breastfed for a good forty minutes or so, it was soon time for lunch!

at last, the zumbo chorizo and olive baguette emerged from my bag, no longer the soft warm thing i’d bought straight off the delivery van that morning, but still delicious after a spell in the oven back at ana’s. in an amazing feat of bad timing and/or planning, she is laden with two-week-old baby, three-week-old (and counting!) roof repair job, and a host of new kitchen cabinets waiting to be installed in the current loungeroom by her fella (who evidently has a different idea to girls of what paternity leave involves).

the packet of zumbo baci biscotti was well-received, though not opened, but it looks like chocolate ganache sandwiched between hazelnut biscuits, so how could it be bad? the sour cherry and almond biscotti was totally part of my plan for morning tea, but after the cafe interlude, i thought i’d re-assign it after-dinner duties. back home, the intense sweetness of the sturdy biscuit crust and the sticky marzipan was tempered by the whole tart cherry hidden within.

– – –

saturday — beautiful blue sky saturday — we got 'round the two-bus hurdle by catching one bus into the city, and then walking the rest of the way into the shiny heart of paddington. the kid was strapped into her luxury kmart stroller, so she didn't care. but we thought it was wise, me and deborah, because of the cupcakes.

whizzing home on the bus from bondi last sunday, i had caught a fleeting glimpse of a cupcake bakery, and thought we might have to investigate further. happily, the cofa spring fair was on just up the road, lending some respectability to our excursion.

we did our best to ignore the riot of colourful cupcakes by the entrance, and wondered at the amazing cardboard mainframe computer directly opposite, housing an art student, a manual typewriter and a very long strip of paper. i did the same thing i do every time i attend this open day: took a handsome flier for the fine arts course, even though i know i will never go back to school for three years to write long essays on art history just so i can have someone tell me to make some art. sigh.

we got tattooed in the inner courtyard, by which time the sun and free candy had worn a crease into the kid’s cheery demeanor. lunchtime, then.

i have no idea where we lunched. i mean, i know the building, on the corner of the street leading up to cofa, and i have a vague memory of it being gertrude and alice bookshop and cafe, which i only ever read about, and which sounded a little too literary and feminist for me. but my googling this evening has only unearthed gertrude and alice in bondi, and i don’t recall what the sign said, above the door, we were so hungry to get in and get eating.

what i do recall is that the risotto was surprisingly good, not the slushy-mushy mess you might expect from something scooped out of a large bowl in the glass display case: it was still just al dente, and salty with chunks of fetta. wilted spinach and ribbons of roasted capsicum all the way through. we shared this, as well as a greek salad, which was greek only because of what, the olives? the fancy green leaves were almost untouched by dressing. but we were mostly happy, sitting upstairs at a low checkerboard table, surrounded by old books. and then the kid started smearing the avocado from her sandwich over the handsome corduroy stool, and then tipped over said stool and drove it across the room, and we knew it was time to hunt down them cupcakes.

the saturday arvo promenade up oxford street is fraught with fashionistas; more skinny jeans than you can poke a pointy heel at, and all moving at a pace quite detrimental to getting somewhere fast. but we made it, eventually, to this cupcake bakery called the cupcake bakery, and we joined the queue out the door.

the thing is, there are lots of people behind the counter at the cupcake bakery, but most of them seemed focussed on icing the cupcakes. that said, the cakes on display were exceptionally nicely frosted. so it’s good they have at least that working for them, because the counterfolk were unblinking and surly, and the cakes themselves, when we finally sat down with them, were simultaneously dry and dense.

“like sponge,” we agreed. but not that light and airy feel of good sponge cake; really, it might have been useful for a spot of flower arranging. and still, it wasn’t bad cake. it just wasn’t especially good. the frosting was very sugary, in fact had a crunchy granular texture, but i suppose it needed that to hold its magnificent folds in shape.

we chose: a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting, a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting, and a chocolate chilli cake with chocolate frosting. mine, the chilli one, had a kick to it, a burn rather than a flavour, and i did actually like the bit where cake met frosting, that tantalising chewy crust of chocolate cake. in the end though, the iced teas were declared more of a success. the kid drank most of my iced spiced tea — an inventive concoction of chai mix, orange juice and flat lemonade which tasted a lot better than it sounds — before reaching into the glass with her pink-iced hands for ice cubes. deborah’s strawberry iced tea was a much more delicate affair, with pureed fruit mixed into green tea.

and then we walked way the hell back into the city, stopping only for a gander at the kiehl’s shop, and for the last minutes of the markets, and for a longing gaze into the windows of dinosaur designs, and then again for a pretend picnic on the grassy bit outside the barracks. we were pleased with what paddington had to offer us, and we were equally pleased that it might be months before we returned.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 September 2007 at 7:46 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kid, lunch, snacks

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