all that's fit to grow

In the dead of winter, still they grow, up and up. I want a good macro of the stamen of that orchid but my camera doesn't do things like that. Scary obsessions with orchids are so very justified - they are instantaneous existential questions.


Reaching for the lifelocus. Basic horticultural demonstrations in cotton wool.

tea and crumbs

Crumbs of a super chocolate chunk cookie at Each Peach, which makes excessive use of pastels, souveneir teaspoons, and thematic tea towels. When you can do anything all day, you make very good choices.

chili chocolate puddings

There is always dessert.

pumpkin carraige

I've got some pumpkin abundance. They're in season and I keep getting more before I use the ones I have. This blue pumpkin came from a stand on the roadside outside of Bright, VIC. A quarter of it went into a 'pumpkin masala' which taught me some things about making Indian food. Or just showed me how few of them I know now. It's mushy but fresh and spicy.

The seeds are in the process of becoming pepitas, roasted cajun-style I think. Retrieving these seeds from the flesh of the pumpkin was a sensuous activity. When I know where something came from I want to consume all parts of it, to experience it completely, to dig right through it and all its textures and components. This was one such occasion. The seeds are big and fat and healthy and they pop out of the flesh with little encouragement. Very satisfying, a feeling of harvesting the fertility from this big body. I got to dig the last few rows, which are sort of rib-like in their arrangement, out of the flesh with my fingertips.



photos by the man with whom I shared the experience. iphone loves to blog.

stoutly

Bicycle mechanics with beards and grimy fingers are for lovers.

so much special all at once

This is a celebration cake. It's divided into several celebrations that I didn't even realise I was celebrating (the recipe yields 2, and I could have halved it...).

It's this girl's birthday. She is mucho special, for reasons I know in secret and for the ones she will happily tell you. Here is her cake, to be shared among an office full of people who I know are lovely but simply couldn't be with today:



It's also another girl's birthday. She is Lauren and if she has any web presences I don't know about them yet. But I do know that she is very special in some circles whose opinions I tend to respect, and that makes me feel like we are connected in this web of special-ity that is constantly being built up around us, ladies that we are in this land of the foreign and the familiar. Here is her cake, bearing her initial:



Tonight is also the night where Penguin Pete makes so many musics in a room. I think it will be beautiful. I have seen him before and he is doing some tiny squeal boom box rumpus room comfort sounds. They are special too. This is Penguin Pete making some sounds:



This is his cake:



So much love goes directly from my bursting heart to Bobby and Lauren and Pete. Directly.

And so that's the story of how one little cake celebrated so many things on this day of common excesses, which happened to be a day I randomly decided not to go to the grindstone of my wagework and decided to live instead.

p.s. This is Lauren's cake and Pete's cake looking like Ls and Ps, which is what you get in Australia when you drive somewhere with very little experience.

chocolate and beetroot cake

The first time I saw a slice of chocolate and beetroot cake it was displayed behind plexi-glass on the counter at Loafer, looking moist and shapely and deeply cocoa-coloured. I might even go so far as to use the word 'quivering' to describe it - it's a very sexy cake, and so very moist and spongey that you can almost detect movement in it the way you could with a pudding or jelly. And it's so packed with amazing that you envision it sort of jittering around on the plate until you break into it for the first bite, causing all of that energy to explode.

When we talk about beetroot there is always the preoccupation with the colour - the depth of it, the way it stains your fingers, your chopping board, your tongue. When you combine that with cocoa, well...you need to see it, really, and I'll need to take some photos through the process. There's also something, for me, about root vegetables that is really affirming, hardy, familiar, solid. The stuff reaches down into the ground to become what it is - there of course is something to be read in that - isn't there?

So when I saw that row of generous slices of chocolate beetroot cake, it went on my mental list of baking ambitions and showed up on the table a few weeks later. I served it to a couple of special friends, still warm, and the room was mostly quiet whilst it was consumed. It was a small event on a Sunday evening and everyone felt full of it. It is velvet and perfect. Vegetables making moisture in baked goods is the way forward.

The recipe, with credit given where credit is due:

chocolate and beetroot cake

the cake:

Roast 2 medium beetroots in foil @ 180C for 90 mins. Leave them to cool. Then mash them however you are able - puree is best, so food processor, blender, or knife/fork/immersion blender combination.

Cream 3 eggs and 1 cup of sugar in with the beetroot puree. Add 1 tsp vanilla (or the insides of a vanilla bean if you're so slowmantically inclined) and 3/4 cup veggie oil (or other preferred oil).

Sift these together:
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1/2 cup cocoa
and then combine with the wet ingredients.

Pour the batter into a lined cake tin, however you like them to be shaped, and bake for 40 minutes. Check for doneness, the size and shape of the pan will vary baking time. Let it cool for a little while and turn it out onto a plate.

the icing:

I didn't use this exactly. I wanted it to have cream in it so I whipped some cream and added some icing sugar to it, and a melted Lindt bar (100 grams of 70% dark). I may or may not have used a bit of vanilla, and I just add sugar a few tablespoonfuls at a time until I'm happy with the sweetness - I want the flavour of the chocolate to be the main feature, only a hint of sweetness. The beetroot provides so much sweet, and it is quite natural-tasting, mellow and sort of like real cane, it actually tastes a bit like a plant. So yeah, you can do what I did or figure out your own icing. This one, though, was amazing. I spread it on when the cake was still warm so it got a bit melty but in the perfect way - the first slices were definitely the best ones, and it's a whole new (still indulgent) experience the next day.

This is what it looks like.

the roots

At this week's market, a basket of multi-coloured carrots from Daylesford Organics. I particularly love purple carrots - there are some of the nantes variety sprouting on my windowsill - and am still searching for the perfect blue cheese dressing to adulterate their simple nutritional goodness. Taken by a special visitor who later turned a few of these babies into curry.

edible glitter

Easter cupcake from Babka. Lemon-flavoured and sprinkled with edible glitter, which is under-utilised in this modern culinary trend to minimalist aesthetics.

Yesterday was the perfect day, autumn at its best. Crisp and sunny and bright blue.

chocolate chip cookies

My mum made chocolate chip cookies as a semi-profession, and so of course I will probably never use any recipe but hers - there's really no need. Hers were always thick and cakelike, but not dry - they were airy and pleasant to eat. You definitely would call them a cookie and not a biscuit. She had the timing perfect and they were never burned - she was very methodical and always working with the same equipment, not like us renters who have to move on just as we're figuring out the temperament of the oven that happens to us.

I've been making them since I left home, but I tend to modify the recipe as I've got more of a taste for flat, buttery, chewier cookies. I use real butter also, unsalted, a 250 g block of it (about a cup). I also use much less flour than she does - 2 cups, maybe a little more, but that's the thing you have to tailor very specifically to yourself. I prefer brown to white sugar so sometimes I only use brown. I also experiment with combinations of the two and find that 2 cups total is too much for me, so it's usually more like 1 1/2.

When I bake them I try to brown them a bit more, which isn't hard since they're so full of butter, and I go overboard on the chocolate chips because that tastes good to me. Or I do half the batch with a reasonable amount and then add a bunch extra for the last dozen. I also find that they are better as large cookies - ones you'd share or eat over a whole day - maybe 3 or 4 inches in diameter. That way they get crispy on the periphery and chewy in the centre, which gives you all of the textures you want. When you've got a small cookie you get a more uniform consistency, and I just want some heterogeneity.

I share them with everyone I can think of. They are the sort of thing that, unlike a slice of cake or a tart, travel well and can be passed from one hand to another. When I moved away from home at 18 my mum used to send them to me express post and they'd still be good on the other coast.

I can't bring myself to reprint her recipe in any other form than the original, so I have not listed my bastardisations - you'll have to scan the text above for them or, better yet, just figure out what sounds best to you and try it. After the first batch you'll know which way to go to get what you want.


Faukes Family Chocolate Chip Cookies

Oven at 350 F, 185 C, or gas mark 4 (knock of 15 degrees for fan-assisted, those horrible things)

Combine:
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup margarine (softened)
- 1/3 cup Crisco

Blend these together until smooth, whether you're strictly manual, pedal-powered, or electrically labour-saving in your method of creaming things. Assemble your dry ingredients and sift them together:

- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking soda (bicarb soda, sodium bicarbonate)
- 3 1/2 cups flour

and turn these into the wet ingredients until it's all absorbed.

Dump in 1 packet or more of your chocolate chips of choice and stir to distribute. Spoon them onto a cookie sheet and place in heated oven for 12 minutes. Sell them to your friends and their friends and the ladies at the bank, and then use the money to buy your kids' Christmas presents.