I love vareniki, and I know they love me too.*

If you Google "vareniki" you will find one very interesting Wikipedia definition and about a thousand blog posts on them.  I had to stop myself from opening each one and salivating over my keyboard.  I love vareniki.  They are simple in form, yet labor-intensive to make, but the hard work and sore muscles are worth it in the end.  My Babushka's (Ukrainian for Grandmother) vareniki were the best, the pillar of Ukrainian comfort food to me, and I miss her something fierce, but she made sure that all us girls in her family could make these pillows of heaven too. 

Vareniki are essentially big dumplings filled with a potato and onion mixture, then cooked up with some bacon and onions.  (Bacon makes everything ok.)  And you must slather them with sour cream!  Otherwise, we can't be friends.

So the other day my darling seester KK sent me this photo:

Heaven!

She and mom were making vareniki, thousands of miles away in Washington D.C.  That wench!  Then this happened over the next 48 hours:

C: In the post to me, they need to be. :)
KK: I know you will sob, but they have all been nommed!
C: Outraged am I, and now I will cry.
KK: Hey I'm not your elf, go make some yourself!
C: No I cannot do it, it takes more than one person to get through it!
KK: well it seems you're screwed, now eat some other food!
C: Jonno made me some fish, and it was delish. 

Now I need to schedule me in a day to make some vareniki.  Cara - you up to the challenge again?? :)  I'll pay in Ukrainian treats!  *Subject line blatantly stolen from Cara's tumblr, which is awesome in a very girly way.  Check it!

SPCA Cupcake Day

This was supposed to have gone up yesterday, but THINGS happened to my computer, and thus, no post. 

.................
Right now, I’m sitting at my desk at the end of the work day with a hot wheatpack on my left shoulder coz it hurts something chronic – I’m pretty sure I pulled a neck muscle while yawning excessively and doing squats during Pump class at the gym. It started off as a lovely day, and the Husband and I actually dragged ourselves out of bed early enough to walk to work. That in itself should have caused the world to end.



A big ol’ bank of low gray clouds has moved in, obscuring everything on the other side of the harbour. As we like to say, “we’ve lost the Hutt.” And there are some sailboats heading out too – I’m not sure that this was the best decision those sailors could have made, since it looks like the sky is about to dump on them.


But I’m snug up in the office, content in my heroic efforts for SPCA Cupcake Day, basking in the money I’ve raised for the puppies and the kitties.  Our little office has gorged itself on cupcakes frosted the American way - that is, piled high with a pure butter-and-sugar frosting.  Ain't nothin better. :)

Jonno and I were up at the crack of 11am on Sunday to begin production.  Initially, this was an all-me project, but Jman saw the amount of work I had set myself up for and selflessly volunteered his body for science.  Or maybe he just likes the batter. 

I *may* have gone a little overboard - we made three different kinds! 
 

Very Vanilla Smurf cupcakes

I decided the very intense blue qualified them to be called Smurf cupcakes.  I totally adored that cartoon as a kid, and cannot wait for the movie to come out.  Hopefully it doesn't turn out like the Yogi Bear movie, which I didn't actually see because I saw the trailer and ran in the other direction.  How could they take a classic like Yogi and Booboo - institutions of cartoon fun! - and just ruin them with lame, overdone stupid humor.  Oh wait, they did the same thing with Alvin and the Chipmunks.  Eesh, all the childhood treasures are going down the tubes.
 

Peppermint Hot Chocolate cupcakes

Yes, I stuck RWC country flags into them, it made it more interesting around the office.  These Peppermint Hot Chocolate cuppies are these hot chocolate cupcakes minus the ganache and whipped cream topping (coz, let's face it, whipped cream in a can is nas-tee), with peppermint buttercream on top.  The cupcakes themselves were dense, but not very moist so they probably needed the ganache, but the taste was lovely.  The peppermint was my idea - usually Jonno is the one to throw peppermint flavor into everything we bake.

True story: last year for his birthday Jonno baked a Chocolate Slice and topped it with toothpaste-blue peppermint icing.  No one at work knew what to make of them, but they got eaten!
 

Cookies & Cream cupcakes

Finally we have these beauties - Cookies and Cream!  I got the recipe from the wonderful Bakerella, but made vanilla buttercream frosting with pulverized Oreo pieces instead of her frosting recipe, which contains shortening and I absolutely yak when I see shortening.  

the Cupcake Table!

The final two cupcakes to be left on the table were Scotland and South Africa, so my workmates reckon that's a sign about something to do with the Rugby World Cup.  What kind of sign, they're not altogether sure, but it means something, darnit!

Overall my office coughed up at least $150 for the puppies and the kitties, which is brilliant considering there were all of 20 people at work that day.  Also, I would just like to mention Trends Gifts out in Johnsonville mall, where I got all my supplies - the sales chica was right on the money with what frosting tip and disposable frosting bags, she saved my bacon!  Long live the disposable frosting bags!!

Jman came to the rescue with the frosting.  He whipped out three separate batches, quick like a bunny, and then incredibly he cleaned everything up after we were done baking and frosting.  I was flabbergasted, not only that he willingly helped me make cupcakes, one of the most girly things on the planet, but that he cleaned all of my dirty dishes too! 

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Playing in the mud

Last weekend a rift opened in the spacetime continuum - it was not all about food.  It was about clay, and I was arse-deep in it, literally - my beloved 'pottery pants' (old-as crappy faded jeans) wore themselves a hole in the gluteus.  And of course, me being me, I sat that hole down in a puddle of watery clay, giving myself a nice cold clay bath all the way to my birthday suit, in front of a boatload of people that I had just met.  Faaaaantastic.

But good things happened too - we had a two-day workshop at the Wellington Pottery Club, learning about sgraffitto!  Which is basically graffti on a pot, doodles in clay.  And if there's one kind of drawing I'm good at, it's doodling.  And boring meetings are my muse.  There really is no better time to think and draw than when you're actually supposed to be concentrating on what someone is saying!  Just don't ask me to repeat anything...

A major accomplishment for me this weekend was throwing something bigger than a shot glass.  I've been doing pottery courses for 8 months or so, and everytime a coconut my stuff turns out so damn small that all it's good for is holding tomato sauce.  But this time, under the sharp eye of Vivian Rodriguez, potter in residence and neighbour extraordinaire (true story, we send each other flashlight messages at night through our bedroom windows) I was actually able to throw something usable - plates!  And these plates really begin life as big bowls, so I suppose you could add that to my repertoire as well.  Great, now I'm up to thimbles, plates and big ol' honkin bowls!

An infant sgraffito'd plate starts out life as a bowl.



Look Mom, I can throw bowls!

 After they've dried a bit, you have to do a bit of hard labor to make the slip that will be the colored part of the pot.  This is where you can take out a lot of pent up agression and frustration.  In some ways pottery is therapy.  I spent at least an hour (1) banging a rolling pin over some dried clay, bludgeoning it into a fine powder; (2) mixing in the colored stain, (3) adding warm water and stirring til it reached thick-frosting consistency (my recent cupcake efforts came in handy here!), and (4) the worst part: straining the mixture through the finest sieve-thing ever possibly made, three times.  Holy crap it was a pain in the ass trying to persuade beat-up clay through fine mesh multiple times.  Hopefully it was worth it.  I picked some vibrant colors for these jobbies, no fussing around with subtlety for me!

This plate will be cobalt blue, supposedly.  My first attempt at scratching designs turned out pretty geometric, and I thought a little basic, but I was quite surprised how good it looked when I was done.  Sometimes simple is better!

Second plate: inside will be Sea Blue, outside will be Pea Green.  The swirls are kind of "my thing".  I love the organicness (is that a word?) of them, and they can never really be symmetric so there's no worry about even trying to make them even.  I just fill all available space with pretty spirals, and it works!  This plate is now my baby, I ain't never gonna give it up.  It's going straight to the pool room!  This is how they looked at the end of the weekend, and I still can't believe that I made them.  I'm pretty sure some alien abducted my hands during this whole thing actually.

Not too shabby!  They still have to be bisque fired, sprayed with clear glazed, and fired a final time, but I'm already proud of my lil bowlie-plate things!

In other news, we partook of Wellington on a Plate's burger challenge at Cafe Polo in Miramar and then I had a food baby.  Cafe Polo lost last year by one vote, one stinkin vote!! So I made sure I texted my vote in right there at dinner, courtesy and convention be damned!  I'm sayin, I have never been so in love with a vegetarian anything, it was uh maze ing.  A patty of four cheeses, beetroot, aoili, and some other non-meaty things, accompanied by truffled fries.  Yeah, food baby FTW!

Also, I made Cookies & Cream cupcakes (from Bakerella, of Cake Pops fame) for the pottery workshop's shared lunch.  They were such a hit, they decided to put them in next month's newsletter!  And they were also deemed "very American" - apparently putting Oreos in baked goods is Yank territory.  Good thing I'm American then, coz I love me some Oreos.  I can down a pack by myself no question, and my mom used to have to hide them from me when I was a kid.  My favorite thing to do was pry the cream off the biscuit and add it to another cream to make the ultimate-stuf Oreo, as many layers thick as possible.  Yummmm. 

More like yum times a million.  That is all.

Soup and Soldiers Night – Pumpkin Kumara Soup

I wish I had made this realization about10 or 15 years ago, but oh well, such is life. Yesterday I decided to leave writing my blog post til the last few minutes at the end of the day, when normally I will take a 15 minutes break in the morning to write, and then finish it up at lunch time. It turns out that my muse must be on a strict schedule – I was coming up with great ideas all morning, thinking that I’d remember them and just throw it all down on paper later. Muse said nope, no way, ain’t hap’nin. I stared at my screen for the full block of 15 minutes that I had allotted myself for writing, slightly drooling like an idiot. I got nuthin’.



I can only imagine how much easier it would have been to write all those papers in college and grad school if I had known that my muse likes the before-lunch timeslot!


Back to the issue at hand - soup and soldiers. Now, I grew up with ‘Soup and Sandwich’ night, but when I met Jonno, I was introduced to the beautiful thing called “soldiers” – toast cut into four thing strips. Perfect for soup dunking! Who needs to go through the extra steps of making something to go in a sandwich when all that does is reduce the amount of soup you eat. Unless it’s bad soup, then it’s your moral obligation to eat something with it that will cover up the bad soup taste. And you do have to eat your soup, otherwise the Boogie Man will get you, right? Guys, right?


The view out of the office window, depressing and gross.

The weather since Sunday has been absolutely horrid, with all kinds of gross wet stuff falling from the sky. In our little Hataitai valley close to sea level, we’ve only gotten rain and a pile-up of sleet, while pretty much everywhere else in Wellington and the Hutt Valley has gotten snow. The in-laws called on Sunday night crowing about the four inches they had on their lawn out in the Hutt.


Crappy weather = hot soup night. Power flickering while shopping at PacNSave and also cooking dinner = husband prepares Emergency Kit, complete with beer and chocolate, just in case it’s a real emergency. Priorities, people!


Torches, batteries, matches, candles, chocolate and beer.  The Complete Emergency Kit!

Soup! This is adapted from Mrs. Cake’s recipe, who got it from Alison and Simon Holst's Very Easy Vegetarian Cookbook.


Soften up an onion or two and some garlic. I’m pretty sure this is only to get your kitchen smelling good so that you can tolerate staying in your kitchen for a little while longer.

Get your spices together: curry powder, coriander, chilli powder.

Pretty spices!

Add them to onions and garlic once they’re translucent. Chop kumara and pumpkin.

Drain and rinse a can of lentils and put them in a bowl of hothot water to soak and soften. Mix up 4 cups of chicken stock with your sword. What, you don’t have a sword handy? Maybe a nice spear?

Throw it all in with your spicy onion/garlic mix and bring it to a boil. Let it simmer for 15 minutes, or until the pumpkin is easily mashed with a spoon. Add a heaping big spoonful or two of peanut butter and mix it in a bit with the rest of the soupness. Souperness. Souper!

Puree the heck out of it with a hand blender or mixer. Try not to make a mess! And please for the love of cheese, turn off the power switch and unplug your hand blender after you’ve finished with it, because it’s way too easy to shred yourself with those ninja blades. I might know from experience. I might have had to throw away a batch of pie crust I was trying to pulse because blood may have somehow gotten into it. Maybe.


Add your drained and bathed lentils. Go make your soldiers and let the lentils soften up a little more in the soup.

Now serve it up quick and get out of the kitchen! Go find the warmth!


Here's the printable on Tasty Kitchen.
 
Pumpin Kumara Soup
 
Ingredients:

• 250-350g pumpkin
• 1 large kumara 
• 1 tin lentils (can also use Cannellini beans or Kidney beans)
• 4 cups chicken stock 
• 2 Tbsp peanut butter
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1 onion
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• ½ tsp curry powder
• ½ tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp chili powder
• ½ tsp salt

Directions:


1. Finely chop the onion and garlic.


2. Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add onion and garlic and cook over low heat until soft and translucent. Add the spices and stir in the stock.


3. Drain and rinse the lentils, and then leave to soak in a bowl of hot water.

4. Chop the kumara and pumpkin and add to the saucepan.  Bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes or until the pumpkin is mashable.


5. Add the peanut butter.  Puree with a hand blender until smooth.

6. Add the lentils.  Let the soup simmer on low while you make the soldiers.

7. Serve warm!  The soup also keeps well for a few days in the fridge.

Greytown In A Bottle And On A Plate

This weekend Mr. Baker and I made the trip over the hill to the Wairarapa in order to partake of two of his favorite things: pies and pinot noir.  Wellington On A Plate were so accomodating to incorporate these two things into one great tasting event in such a lovely location for me, just so I could gift J with tickets and a weekend away for his birthday!  Or maybe I just got lucky....

We shacked up in style with a cozy little cottage, complete with woodburner and spa tub.  That's a huge improvement for us, Lords of the Oil Heater that we are!  Some wine, bread, smoked salmon (more luxury!), sausage and a selection of cheeses was our dinner on Friday night in front of the fire.  

Let me tell ya, this former Girl Scout rocked that fire!  I was using all my fire-building knowledge I learned when I was 13, making an upright A-frame with small bits and newspaper underneath to take it from little wee flames to rip-roaring bonfire.  What's that you say - I smell like woodsmoke?  That's just my fire-building badge of honor, sir/ma'am!  It's a lovely fragrance!  Eau de campfire!  It'll be all the rage next season!

I love Greytown.  It has some great lovely wee shops, and I can always find lots of stuff I want, but can't have yet because old Mr. BankAccount and his strict ways.  Also the things I so covet really belong in a nice house, not our leaky make-do flat.  Not that I don't love our flat, but I dream of the great farmhouse kitchen that I will build one day, and all the storage space it will have, and the shelves that will display my beautiful thingses.  Like these!


Me likey!



I want to make these pitchers, in this cerulean glaze.  Coz I lurves them.  I might sneak back here to buy one.

Both found at Mondo on Main Street.  Shopping and not buying is thirsty work, therefore a stop at the White Swan was in the cards.  Jonno never passes up the opportunity to check out a new watering hole!

Some refreshment before the main event!


Now for the Pies and Pinot, to be served at the lovely Wairarapa Wine Cellar.  Inside, it looks like a library of wine, my kind of decorating scheme!  How can you not buy a bottle when greeted with this lovely sight?

We were presented with five courses of pies, each paired with a different Pinot Noir, specially picked by some muckity-muck to do with some big hospitality organization.  He wore a big green collar thing with a gold chain and heaps of pins on it and pretty much looked like the Mayor of Pies and Pinot.  Sadly, I did not get a photo of my new hero.  I cry. 

The pinots, I don't really remember - let's just say the pourers were quite generous with their quantities and since we were all standing up at barrel tables, I felt tipsy pretty quickly.  And five rounds is quite ambitious.  Oh!  They greeted us with a glass of bubbly too, that was a nice way to come in from the cold and rain. 

The pies, they were a mixed bag.  We had coq au vin, rabbit, pork, angus beef, venison, lamb, and chocolate peach - all from different bakers.  They served each round with cards detailing the pie and the wine, some with actual recipes so that we could recreate them at home if we were so inclined.  I don't think I'm quite that adventurous - my favorite pie was the rabbit, which I'd never had before, and I don't really see myself rolling up to the butcher to buy me some bunny for dins.  Nah, don't think so.  I'll just eat the finished product, thankyouverymuch.

5x large portions of pinot makes for 1 tipsy pie-taster!

The only thing to do after many pies and pinots is to stumble back to the spa!!!  Then sleep it off in front of our crackling fire.  Ah, luxury. 

On our way out of town we detoured down south to Lake Ferry, mostly because I wanted to have lunch at the Lake Ferry Hotel, which I'd read about on the Crate Outdoors.  I was a bit underwhelmed - we were the only people there for lunch until about1:30 except for two suspect-looking chaps with many many tattoos, and the food definitely left us wanting.  The view out the window was lovely though, I could have sat there all day with a glass of wine and a book in front of their fire, if I didn't feel like I was being watched by some interesting folks. 


view at Lake Ferry during a brief spell of sunshine!

After lunch, it was a little more exploration of the South Wairarapa, then back over the hill.  We walked in our door ten minutes before the threatening southerlies arrived and the sky opened up with freezing rain (in our neighborhood) and snow (just about everywhere else in New Zealand).  I lit a candle, cranked the oil heater, and we cuddled down under some blankies, and it was almost like we were still in our cozy Greytown cottage. 

The Best Hot Drink for 4pm at Work

This hot drink is brought to you courtesy of my little brother-in-law Josh, who knows way more than me about coffee even though I've been drinking it longer than he's been alive.  Let me clarify: homeboy is just barely 18 and I was a very precocious coffee-drinker, we're talking at the tender age of 9 or so.  I would drink some of my parents coffee on weekends when they left the lounge to go to the bathroom or something, even if it was cold.  And we're talking the drip-style not-the-most-expensive brand of coffe grounds, because my parents weren't the discerning caffeine-lovers they are now back then, they just needed the hit of energy in order to keep up with us two crazy-weird girls.  My parents have since refined their palate and also visited Melbourne and Wellington a few times, and now consider themselves connoisseurs. 

Anywho, Josh introduced me to his concoction after working at Coffee Creations in Petone, and I am hooked.  It's my go-to 4pm drink when I'm tending towards falling asleep at my desk and need something to smack me in the face a little bit, but it's not going to keep me up til 3 am like a straight flat white will. 


Glory!

I *may* have set up this shot with some file folders.  Hey, you need something to make it interesting when the day isn't quite over yet, right? 

So here's how you make this guy - in your coffee cup make half of your normal espresso-based drink (i.e. I have two shots of espresso from the machine, so I only put one in this), add one(ish) heaping spoonful of Milo, and fill the rest of the cup up with steamed milk, adding sugar to taste.  Maybe get a little arty with your foam if you feel like it.  Or get overexcited about having said drink, and spill a little on your desk. 

Who does that?  Not this girl, nooo!

Now enjoy!  Or enjoy right up until you get a linky email from a "friend" with the subject line of 'Love Doll Race' - how can you not check out the link it sends you to??  (Beware, Not Safe for Work, or Children, or anyone with certain sensibilities!)  Because let me tell ya, I had to struggle to keep the look of incredulity and sheer shock (not bad shock, just very surprised shock) off my face at work!  Click if you dare!  Or just make this drink and be happy.

Bread and Recreation

If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.  -Edward Bellamy

Well last night we certainly turned bread-making into some serious recreation!  It started off well enough, with Jonno mixing up the dough like a good husband should.  I was busy making dinner so wasn't able to supervise directly and I'm wondering if that had any effect or if he actually got it all right.  To be fair, we make Wholemeal Bread from the Edmond's Cookbook, and all the recipes are written in paragraph form, with no breaks or delineations between steps, making it super-easy to inadvertently skip something.  Not that I've ever done that, noooo not me!  

The Baker is baking!

Poor husband, he's a little kitchenly-challenged.  He started off well, mixing the dry ingredients with a whisk, aerating as directed.  Then after he incorporated the wet ones, he continued mixing with the whisk, unbeknownst to me.  All of a sudden I hear, "Ugh, shite ya bahstahd!"  (He likes to pull out the Scottish accent every now and then, especially when he's swearing.  It makes life more fun!)  I look over and see him trying to mix everything together with the whisk, and half the batter is stick up in the middle of the wires.  "How are you supposed to mix this stuff?!"  Oh poor boy, he had such a forlorn puppy-dog look on his face, how could I not take pity on him?  It was his first loaf of bread, after all.  

We fixed up the mixing situation, and I used my innate Ukrainian sense of all things wheat-related to knead the dough into a beautifully elastic ball.  Seriously, I'm pretty sure that all Ukrainian women come out of the womb with the ability to make bread.  I wouldn't be surprised if some over-achievers were busy baking inside their mum's tum instead of kicking!  You feel a consistent pushing in there - oh yeah, that's just little Katya, refining her kneading technique!  

So, bread kneaded and needs to rise.  "Cover and leave to rise in a warm place" the recipe says.  The only warm place in our house - warm being not frostbite territory - is on or near the oil heater.  Therefore my brain says to put it in a bowl on top of the heater, coz you know, heat rises.  And oh baby, rise that sucker did.

Rising to infinity, and beyond!

It rose to completely encompass our flimsy silicon loaf pan.  It rose like the Stau-Puft Marshmallow Man.  It rose like it was going to take over the world.  That's when I thought it might be time to bake this blobtastic thing.  Well wouldn't you know it, as soon as I walked out of the lounge, permanent home of the heater, into the icy cold kitchen the whole thing deflated like whoopie cushion!  I stuck it in the oven anyway, hoping it might rise back to its former glory, but no dice.  We ended up with a wide, flat loaf, and who knows how it turned out on the inside.  I'm afraid to cut it open, I think it might eat me!

I went back and had a wee squizz at the recipe and realized I skipped one very important step - splitting the one big dough ball into two smaller dough balls to make, you know, TWO loaves of bread.  Like the recipe says.  Huh.  Two loaves.  ......Ooops! 

Then a bit later I was perusing one of my favorite magazines, Cook's Illustrated, and they had an article where they tested different rising temperatures.  Turns out that either putting your dough in the fridge for 24 hours or leaving it out in a cool area (read: my kitchen between June and October) over night.  So the lazy method works!  No need to rush the rising for only an hour, let it sit, they say!  Well in that case, I should make the best darn bread in New Zealand, because I am the queen of leaving things out over night, intentionally and not.  I'm pretty sure that's where the cats got their taste for certain human foods - snacking off last night's dinner left on the bench top!  Oh well, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, and I've shared my milk with Spice before.  She's a very clean kitteh!  She wasn't too impressed with our monster bread though.

Cupcakes and Kittehs and Goggies, oh my!

First, if you think "kittehs" and "goggies" is just babytalk and silly, then please go here and here and get lost in a few hours of cuteness and giggles.  It's ok, I'll wait....

....So, now that you realize the importance of the kittehs and the goggies to my everyday life - wait, you have, haven't you? coz I lurrrrves them! have you met Spice and Lucy? - we can move on to how they relate to cupcakes.  The New Zealand SPCA annually holds their "Cupcake Day" as a fundraiser, and really what could be more of-the-moment than cupcakes? 

Keep in mind that NZ is a little behind America on the "what's hot" radar, we haven't yet been cupcaked-out, and we're slowly starting to catch on to the macaron craze that's sweeping the States. 

*I totally just typed "sweeing" instead of sweeping, and I kind of like it.  It sounds like a combination of "weeeeee!" and swinging, which to me is just about on par with the peanutbutter/chocolate combination from heaven. 

Right, back to the cupcakes.  Of course I've made cupcakes before, but they've ALL been of the box variety because I am American and until I was about 20 I didn't even know that you could make cake from scratch.  True story.  So I know alllllll about the ins and outs of the different box cake flavors and which ones make good cupcakes, but making them from scratch is a whole new box of fish for me.  So I'm thinking a little practice is in order before the Big [Cupcake] Day, when I will be making people give me money for something that's supposed to taste good.  Not to mention the looking good part too, coz you know people aren't going to eat a cupcake that just looks like a pile of poo.  I'm pretty sure that would get me featured on Cake Wrecks! 

My first port of call for the lowdown on the cake o' the cups will be here: Glorious Treats' tutorial on basic cupcake baking.  You know, just to make sure I can actually bake a friggin' cupcake!

I've gone a little cupcake-crazy today and have just plundered the Kiwi Cake website for baking cups and icing colorant, and have my design scheme alllll planned about.  While these are cute...

...I'm not doing cats and dogs, or even birds or ferrets or fish, even though those aminals need lovin too. Nope, I have a whole different plan in mind, a completely different target demographic, and an utterly non-aminal gimic to go with it. Mwahaha, eeeexcellent!

Decorations - check!  Piping bags and tips - check! (Thanks Auntie Jay!)  Cupcakes - yeaahh about that, let's figure out which ones to make.  There are sooo many choices!!  These gems have been sitting in my Google Reader, just waiting to see their day in the sunshine:

• Cookies and Cream Cupcakes from Bakerella - love this lady, have you seen her Cake Pops book?  It's like, my bible.  I always know what I'm making for special occasions!  You had a baby?  Pink and blue cake pops!  You're getting married and owls are part of your theme?  Owl cake pops!  (Ok that was me.)  Your mother's sister-in-law's doctor's pet labradoodle is having puppies?  Newborn puppy cake pops!  You get me?
• Peanutbutter Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting from How Sweet It Is - but maybe the whole PB/Choc combination is more of an American thing?
• Heath Bar Cupcakes from My Baking Addiction - but that would require hunting down some Heath Bars, and I just don't know if I can be bothered to go that far...
• Chocolate + Coffee Cupcakes with Coconut Frosting from Steamy Kitchen - it WILL be a Monday morning, I bet coffee-flavoured lovelies would go down a treat!
• Vanilla Bean Cupcakes also from My Baking Addiction - maybe I'll just stick with these basic cups this year and branch out to the fancies later on...

Wow, how have I not made any of these before?!  I might have to turn in my Baker card if I don't get going on these soon!  [Ha, it's funny you see, because I've married a Baker, and I am a baker, but not yet a Baker because I haven't changed my name, and that's funny you know Baker/baker, capitalizing letters and stuff?!  Haha....hello? *crickets*]  I can take a hint, post done, off to bake the cupcakes, over and out!

Things that make the winter tolerable

1. My kittehs, Spice and Lucy, even when they are giving me "WTF" looks like this, which they do with surprisingly regularity.  Maybe because I like to get up in their faces and talk like a baby to them.  But they don't seem to mind sitting in our laps and warming us right up on these frosty nights!

2. Sunday brunches aka my quest to find the best Mocha in Wellington.  They warm my soul.  Having delicious slices to go with it doesn't hurt either.  There are from Seatoun Cafe, and their Ginger Slice is uh-maze-ing.  

3. The kiwi breakfast of eggs on toast with Canadian bacon, mushrooms and tomato.  It's a bit of a mission getting all those flavors on one fork, but I have mastered the skill due to many mornings (actually it's usually more in the afternoons since we can't get out of bed on a weekend morning to save our lives) of practice and application.  What I want to know is why I hadn't encountered this heavenly combination until a Kiwi made it for us one morning, post-party.  Ah well, the mystery may never be solved, but I will never stop loving this cholesterol-fest!

4. Sunsets like these.

Pumpkin Bread

Humility alert: My work colleagues love me.  Not because I work hard or because I'm the smartest cookie on the plate (both of which I do/am, of course!), but because I bake.  I bake lots.  I bake at least once a week.  If I don't bake, they start to wonder what's wrong with me.  And their blood sugar levels start to collectively drop and they get the shakes, so I run home and whip up something to restore them. 

This week there was a big hunk of pumpkin sitting in my fridge, leftover from making Pumpkin Soup, and crying out to be used before it turned into a science experiment, which things are known to do in Fortress Moxham's fridge.  I'm pretty sure it's the fridge's fault, it aims its cosmic rays at some poou, unsuspecting piece of produce and makes it grow a nice woolly coat of white fuzzies.  Totally the fridge.  So I made some pumpkin bread out of said earlier-mentioned pumpkin for the work mates, just to make them love me a little more.  What can I say, I am a glutton for baking love.

Anyway, this is my pumpkin, of the crown pumpkin variety.  *Photography disclaimer: I'm using Instagram and Hipstamatic on my iPhone because (a) it's winter here in Wellington, and being so far south we lose any daylight before I get home from work, and (b) I haven't learned how to optimize my dinky point-and-shoot camera yet, and so I still take pretty average photos.  Back to my pumpkin - I only used that piece you see in front, that was plenty of pumpkin meat (pumpkin meat, really?! is that the term?) for this concoction.  I weighed it up, just for good measure, and it came out to 600 grams.  True story: before I moved to New Zealand, I had never measured by weight!  Must be my innate fear of scales.

So then I had to use all of the strenth that I possess, my sharpest knife, and whatever wits I had at the end of the workday in order to carve the skin off the pumpkin and not my own fingers.  And then again with the cutting the pumpkin into chunks - this thing did not want to cut up.  It acted like I was carving up its soul.  Poor little pumpkin soul.  I hope it rests in peace. 

So once you have de-souled the pumpkin, throw it in a pot of hot water and boil it up into a mash, much like you would for mashed potatoes.  When it's nice and soft, strain it, and mash up in a big bowl.  Add sugar, oil, water, eggs and shake what yo momma gave ya.  Or just mix it, if you're not feeling very enthusiastic.  Then mix up some dry ingredients - flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves.  You can sift them together, or just aerate them with a wisk in the bowl.  Either way, it's all about aeration.  On a completely different note, please don't judge me for my 80's bench tops and shoddy-looking drawers, we're renting! 

Ok now that that's out of the way and I don't have to worry about being harshly judged for my cracked-out kitchen, I can finish this bread.  Introduce the dry ingredients to the wet ones, preferably in an actual mixer if you don't fancy having to clean up stray flour, and beat until smooth.  Divide between two loaf pans and bake at 180 C for 55-60 minutes, or until a toothpick come out clean. 

This pumpkin bread does two things for me as an American.  First, it gives me a reason to cut up a pumpkin.  I may or may not have carved some eyes into this one before I mutilated it for the pumpkin soup.  And I may or may not have given him a crooked smile too.  Look, New Zealanders don't really do Halloween, and they definitely don't do jack-o-lanterns at Halloween, so I had to take the chance when I got it, k?  You can take the girl out of American, but you can't take all of the America out of the girl. 

The second thing this bread does is mostly fulfill my fix for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.  Although I am determined to do Thanksgiving this year!  But this will suffice for now, especially if I serve it warm with some real whipped cream.  *Homer drool*  Yes, this is a multi-tasking bread, and really when it's as cold outside as it has been, you need food that does many things for you at once!

Here's the recipe, straight up:

Pumpkin Bread

- 600 grams of pumpkin, about 1/3 of a Crown Pumpkin

- 1 1/2 cups sugar

- 1 cup water

- 1 cup canola oil

- 4 eggs

- 3 1/2 plain flour

- 2 tsp baking soda

- 1 tsp salt

- 1 tsp baking power

- 2 tsp ground cinnamon

- 1 tsp ground nutmeg

- 3/4 tsp group cloves

1. Preheat your oven to 180C.  Grease or oil and flour two loaf pans.

2. Peel the pumpkin and chop into large chunks.  Boil in water for 15-18 minutes, until it's soft enough to be pierced by a fork.  Strain the water out as much as possible, squeezing the pulp. 

3. In a large mixing bowl, mash the pumpkin.  Add the sugar, water, canola oil and eggs, and beat until mixed.

4. In another bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves.  Sift or whisk together to aerate and combine.  Slowly add them to the pumpkin mash in the mixing bowl and continue beathing until the mixture is smooth. 

5. Divide the mix evenly between your two loaf pans.  Bake for 55-60 (ish) minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. 

6. Feed to your family/work mates/bestest friends, because you now have a lot of bread to get rid of!

Last Week In Wellington

• Peter Jackson is off location-scouting new places around New Zealand to film The Hobbit movies.  That means all the actors are on sabbatical - if they're smart they've left the country - and I won't be coming across dwarves sitting at a waterfront cafe' or Gandalf collecting donations for charity.

Ian McKellen, raking in the dough at the cricket.

• These top-ten quotes from LOTR makes me excited for Peter to get filming again.

• It's nation-wide school holidays.  This means packs of bored teenagers are roving around the city looking for ways to be as obnoxious and true to the stereotypes as possible, making it impossible to walk anywhere around the CBD, especially during lunchtime.  Thus I've been bringing my lunch to work for the past week.  Bugger trying to wade my way through schoolkids just to get food.

• Maybe that's why Peter Jackson is exploring the remote places of the country now, to get away from those crazy kids? 

• The Antarctic has relocated to New Zealand, leaving snow over most of the country and blowing wind so frigid through all the cracks in our non-insulated houses that we've all collectively gotten hypothermia and lost feeling in our legs.  That must be why all the boys are running around in shorts and jandals now.  Frickin weirdos,

• It only spit a few flurries into Wellington, which is more than they've seen in years.  Why do I live in the only place in the whole damn country where it doesn't snow?!  I love snow!  I love rolling in snow.  I love eating (clean) snow.  I love it when the trees are all covered with snow.  I love it when the cats first see snow and freak out, then come running back inside because they don't understand why this white stuff is so cold and wet.  I love snowboarding.  I don't love falling on my butt repeatedly when snowboarding.  I love it when the world is white and sparkly.  I love it when everyone has to wear a bagillion layers just to go out to get the paper, because then we're fat and happy.  Therefore, I'm not happy that I live in a no-snow zone.  I cry.

Happy Feet was happy to meet me. 

• Happy Feet has gone for a swim now that it's cold enough.  I'm pretty sure that he is just about the smartest penguin EVAR, because he knew that the Antarctic was going to move here, and he left home early enough to find himself a flash home and an endless supply of high-quality salmon.   

• I have learned the art of only heating one room of your house at a time with an oil heater.  You spend most of your evening in the lounge where the TV is, right?  So as soon as you get home,  you shut the curtains, close the doors to the lounge and crank up the heater.  Then make something for dinner that requires as little time in the kitchen as possible, or pile on 3 layers of clothing, hat, scarf, and fingerless gloves and brave the cooking.  Once you have procured hot food, hoof it back to the lounge, top up with a few blankets and maybe a cat or two, and stay there til the shows are over and you're ready to head to bed.  Make a mad dash into your pajamas, wave the toothbrush in front of your face while simultaneously washing your face, heat up a hot water bottle or wheat pack, then (and this is the key) drag the oil heater into the bedroom and seal the door shut.  Shiver under the sheets until your finally warm up, or if you're lucky like me, you can snuggle up to your own personal heater (read: husband who runs a few degrees higher than normal humans).  Then finally, hope like hell that you don't have to get up in the middle of the night to pee, because really at that point you are risking all kinds of unpleasant things like frostbite, hypothermia, and even death. 

That was last week.  Maybe this week I'll get around to actually posting something that I did for the purpose of blogginess?