My Chocolate Chip Cookies for Sweet New Zealand

It really doesn’t feel like it, but I got married one year ago today. Which means that one year and three weeks ago, I was locked in my kitchen, making batch after batch of my favourite chocolate chip cookies.

Lemme splain.

It's very hard to get past this stage without consuming the entire bowl of dough.

See, I’m American and Jonno is Kiwi, and we wanted to bring in elements of both our heritages to the food that we were serving, just to have some kind of direction to go in. We really went for this little mini theme in the deserts though. Our wedding cake was a traditional Christmas cake, Jonno’s favourite, made by Jonno’s mum. So I said, “Well then I have to have my favourite dessert in there somehow too!” We had the caterers do a bit of a dessert buffet with little mini bites of different things, like New York cheesecake (I die for this), kiwifruit pavlova (pillows of heaven), brownies (how could we not?), and a lemon curd-passionfruit shooter (apropos of absolutely nothing, but it was a hit). 

The pink cookies, or at least we tried to make them pink!  Still delicious though.

And I made four batches of chocolate chip cookies. How I decided that there needed to be four batches, which is approximately 4 hand-sized cookies for each of the 40 guests we invited, I’ll never know. What I do know is that we ended up taking about three quarters of them home with us. Not because they weren’t good though! I think it might have had something to do with how much other food there was to be consumed at the same time. I don’t think I took all that other food into account when I did my calculations!

But it worked out in the end though, because we were able to bring those cookies as our contribution for a BBQ and another party, which meant less cooking for me to do post-wedding and pre-Christmas/packing to move, so that made me very happy.

I think my love affair with all things chocolate chip cookie began back when at the rollerskating rink when I was 9 or 10. My best friend and I would spend Friday night skating around a stinky gymnasium, gossiping and giggling and working on our backward skating. Then we would risk life and limb and walk downstairs in our skates, just to buy some warm magical chocolate chip cookies. It made all the risk of skates flying out from under us as we gingerly side-stepped down two flights of stairs totally worth it. Totally. For sure.

These cookies really are all that and a box of chocolates. I’ve given out the recipe so many times, it’s more than I can count in my brain. I’ve made them in blue for the staff at a fundraising event I was a part of, and they went so fast that I never got any. I’ve made them in pink just for fun, and my workmates devoured them. They’re addicting. Kind of like heroin, but they don’t leave tell-tale track marks on your arms. Just crumbs in your lap. Deliciously addicting crumbs.

White chocolate chip Wish cookies. 

The trick to these cookies is under-baking them, so that they’re soft and moist and just melt in your mouth. You can freeze the dough and bake up to a year later – just roll the dough into a log, cover in baking paper and stick in a sealed plastic bag, and when you want to bake, just slice the dough into 8mm/1/4” slices, place on baking sheet, and you’re away laughing. And giggling maniacly.

You could substitute white chocolate chips for the chocolate ones, like I did above in the blueish-green cookies.  You could use M&M's too.  You could smother some vanilla ice cream between two of these puppies and then roll in even more chocolate chips for a sinfully cold treat.  You could even get cheeky and substitute another kind of flavouring in for the vanilla - strawberry perhaps?  This recipe is but the basic canvas for your artistic expression, rendered in butter, sugar, and chocolate.

But please, for the love of all things delicious, use good-quality chocolate chips, not the cheapo ones made using palm oil or whatever crap they’re putting in them these days. The good stuff, people. Nestle or Whittaker’s should do the trick.

I'm submitting this as part of Sweet New Zealand, a monthly blogging event for Kiwi foodies, hosted this month by the lovely Mairi at Toast!

Christina’s Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 225g (2 1/4 cups) all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 225g (2 sticks, 1/2 pound) butter, softened
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 350g or more (2 cups, 12 oz package) semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Combine flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl.
2. Beat butter, sugars and vanilla in large mixer bowl. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition; gradually beat in flour mixture.
3. Stir in chocolate. Try not to eat too much of the dough now!  Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.
4. Bake in preheated 190 C/475 F oven for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Let stand for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.
5. Cookies will keep for as long as you can stand not eating them, store in a sealed container.

Apologies for the crap photos, they are all pre-iPhone, and I haven't made these babies in a while for fear of taking them over to the corner and eating them all myself. 

Not for Thanksgiving: Vietnamese Spring Rolls

Thanksgiving is next week and I am a very sad girl because for the third year in a row I’ll be missing my Mom’s delicious t-giving food. I love most everything about Thanksgiving – drawing up the menu, making a shopping list, doing the big shop, helping Mom in the kitchen, making the table look pretty, seeing my aunt, uncle and cousin, eating so much food it hurts, and passing out without attempting the dishes.

I don’t love getting dressed up for the holidays. Never have. Fights used to occur over what my sister and I would try to wear; we favoured jeans, tees, maybe a cardi, but inevitably we were sent back to our rooms to try and find something a little more ‘festive’ and ‘nice’ to wear. We don’t do dressing up for holidays very well. There might even be a pact afoot between us and Cousin to have holidays all in our pajamas, with minimal fanciness. Maybe.

We'd still have the same food though.  Even a power outage won't stop us from having our traditional Thanksgiving food.  (True story!)

Right now, every American foodblogger and their monther is and has been sharing Thanksgiving recipes (click here if you still need some ideas, there are 101), and I wonder how many of them will be used by other people. See, my family has a pretty set menu of culinary demands when it comes to Turkey Day and we rarely deviate from it, and I kind of have the feeling that most Americans are like us.  But that doesn't stop me from wanting to try new kinds of Thanksgiving, just not on the actual day.  I almost feel like I need a whole week of Thanksgivings just to try all of the foodcoma-inducing recipes that are flooding my Google Reader right now. Dear Mr. Obama, could you please make Thanksgiving last a whole week? Worldwide?

Meanwhile in New Zealand it's all windy and sunny and the flowers are blooming and I just feel like skipping down the street with a basket of freshly-baked goodies under my arm and singing at the top of my lungs. Except I don’t sing, or skip, so it would be more like me just walking down the street with (let’s be honest here) a plastic Farmer’s bag with something bad for you in it, grumbling about having to go to work in an office instead of being outside.  Which actually does happen, just about every morning really, because I'm (a) not a morning person, and (b) sitting in an enclosed box all day while the sun is taunting you can really suck.  And then there are the people out on the harbour sailing and kayaking and I just wish I had a robot that looked like me to do my job so I could go out and join those people in their boats.

Boaty people at the Boatshed doing all kind of annoying boaty things in the sunshine.  Boaty.

When I was a kid, I declared I’d never have an office job – I would have a job outside if it killed me. But then I realised that if I wanted to make more than minimum wage I couldn’t be a lifeguard forever, and there’s also this thing called Winter that kind of makes working outside a bit less glamorous than previously thought. I’m still considering a career change though, I hear being a Woman About Town is exciting!

Geez, it’s like Random Tangent Day in Christina’s head. Are you following all this?

Please excuse my creepy pink fingers.  It's the filter, I swear!

So because the holidays are coming and that means you need a lot food floating about the place to feed your guests, and because the weather is glorious and I'm guessing that probably means you want to spend as little time as possible slaving over a hot stove, I give you my favourite no-cook (and therefore no hot oven to overheat you) appetiser – Vietnamese Spring Rolls. Or, around my house, Spling Lolls. We’re silly.

These spring rolls have a great fresh flavour, which combined with the mint and a hint of the fish sauce, the crunch of the cucumber and peanuts, and squidginess of the wrapper makes for very fun eating.  It's also a great way to get people (husbands, children, sailors suffering from scurvy) to eat salad without them realising it!  Who can't resist finger food that looks like....spring rolls. 

A word of caution, however: these are a bit labour-intensive, so get some other people involved in the assembly bit. And for heaven’s sake, give them some wine while they do it. Unless they’re children, then something highly-sugared should get them through.

These spring rolls are enjoying the sunshine, but the sweet chilli sauce is being all moody over in the dark.

Vietnamese Spring Rolls

• Packet of rice-paper spring roll wrappers (available in Asian supermarkets and specialty shops)
• Vermicilli noodles
• Half a head of cabbage – green or purple, or both if you’re fancy
• One carrot
• Bean sprouts, a big handful
• Cucumber, cut into thin matchsticks
• Fish sauce
• Fresh mint leaves, chopped
• Peanuts, chopped
• Sweet chilli sauce for dipping

1. Chop up your cabbage into thin slivers and shred the carrot.  Boil the vermicilli for a few minutes, just until they're pliable.  Drain off the water.
2. Chuck the cabbage, carrot, noodles and bean sprouts into a wok or other large vessel on medium heat.  Splash (not douse, not drown, but splash) some fish sauce over the veggies, about two quick turns around the pan should do it.  Cook the mixture down for a few minutes, then transfer to a bowl.
3. Chop up the mint and the peanuts and set out in bowls for your assembly line.  Cut cucumber into matchsticks and set out on a plate.
4. Grab a bowl big enough to submerge your spring roll wrappers and fill it with hot water, but not too hot that you can't stick your hands in it. 
5. Spring roll construction: stick the spring roll wrappers about halfway in the hot warm and let it soak for 15-30 seconds, turning the wrapper every 10 seconds or so.  The hot water turns the wrapper all soft and pliable.  Rub your fingers against the wrapper to help the wrapper soften. 
1. Lay out flat on a clean plate.  Pick up a handful of filling mixture and spread in a line along the top hemisphere of the circular wrapper.  (If the wrapper were an America-centric map of the world, you'd be spreading it over the good old USA.) 

2. Place a few cucumber sticks along the length of the filling, and sprinkle peanuts and mint over the mixture.  Fold the top of the wrapper over the mixture and tuck under.

3. Fold the sides over, toward the middle.

4. Roll the filling down to the other edge of the wrapper, using your fingers to tightly tuck everything under along the way.  You want the spring roll to be quite tight, not floppy and loose, because let's face it, no one likes a limp.....spring roll.

5. The wrapper will stick to itself.  Serve with sweet chilli sauce!

How do you like my diagrams, eh?  Some fancy work in Microsoft Word goin on there!

For the Love of Food, And Cookies

HALP!! Can someone please tell me what day it is? What time of year?? What am I supposed to be making for dinner?!

I am so confused!

The weather’s just gone all glorious in Wellington in the past week or so, and all I want to do is sit outside with a sweet, fizzy adult beverage and read my book. But then when I read the blogs from America they’re all about Christmas and the cold and winter and leaves falling, and my body says, “Yes!! That’s what you should be feeling right now, the intense need to wear sweaters and bake massive amounts of cookies!!”


My cookies talk to me, do yours?

Well, I’ve certainly got the baking thing down. That might even be my life’s motto: When in doubt, bake. Maybe I should rename my blog to that?

Speaking of blogs!! I attended the first New Zealand Food Bloggers Conference last weekend in Auckland! My head is still exploding with all that I learned and the people that I met. It really was an amazing (and slightly scary) experience for me.

Many of the attendees have already posted their impressions and photographs from the day, so I will not attempt to beat a dead horse into the ground. However, I will try to put into words the important things that I took away from the conference. And then I will sweeten the deal with a cookie recipe – actually the cookies that I made to bring to as a wee giftie to Mairi for hosting me. Seriously, Mairi, you were awesome and I really do love the ‘eclectic chic’ style of your house! And your wine rack, yummm.

It all started off with a bit of a blogger’s slumber party at Mairi’s house – she generously offered up her lovely home to four of us Wellingtonians (Mrs. Cake, Domestic Executive, @ Down Under). We all talked shop over nibbles and pretty pink rose’, cookbooks and blogging and celebrity chefs and food... I had my phone out and was taking notes on new books that I had to have and new blogs that I had to read.

Saturday morning came around quicker than my not-a-morning-person-everrrr body would have liked, but it was a gorgeous morning and we drove out to The Tasting Shed all aflutter with anticipation. Not many of the bloggers had met other bloggers at that point, so there weren’t any pre-formed groups to try and break into, which is one of my all-time social fears. There’s nothing that makes you feel smaller than a mouse when you walk into a big group of people who all actually know each other and you’re the new one. So the fact that we were all (mostly) new to each other actually made it easier to talk to lots of different people throughout the day, without feeling like I was intruding.
 

Brownies and fruit for breakfast?  Yes please!  Thanks Tasting Shed!


It’s not often that I get to eat such lovely food as was provided by the Tasting Shed, and being newish to the foodie-sphere I was tasting things I had even heard of before. Harissa sauce?! This needs to be in my life now, forever. Pork cheek? So amazing that it was very hard not to scarf it all down myself. I had to send it down the table away from me and my line of sight. I was secretly doing a happy dance inside as each dish came out, the day could have ended at lunch and I would have been happy as a clam.

The one photo I did get of lunch and the harissa sauce that is now my fave!

 The talks given by fellow food bloggers were absolutely fantastic and gave me a lot to think about. Andrea Wong from So D’lish talked about the technical side of blogging, including layouts, which put in me in mind of all those Marketing classes I took in college and trying to figure out what prompts consumers to buy things. So what makes blog readers look at certain parts of a webpage and not others? Time to step out of my writer’s shoes, put on my marketing hat and get to work on the physical appearance of this thing!

Jaco Swart from Rainbow Cooking, a blog about South African cooking in New Zealand and new to me, talked about how to utilise social networks along with your blog. It’s a funny thing for an introvert to try and promote their blog when the whole blog thing really started as a way to say things without using your real name! I started blogging because I really loved the anonymity of it, knowing that the only people that were reading it were my parents and maybe some friends, but now that other people are reading it I sometimes have internal existential conversations with myself. “Why am I doing this?! People who know me are reading this, more than just Mom and Dad, they might be judging me! Wah!!” Going to the conference and meeting lovely people who are most definitely not judging me for what I write or how my photographs look was a great wake-up call, and allowed me to free myself from some debilitating fears. Now I’ll be able to use what Jaco’s talked about and put myself out there.

We got a reality check about writing for different media from Alessandra Zecchini, whose honesty about what it’s like to be writing for yourself versus writing for a client has made me (and a lot of us I think) stop and really think about where we’re going with the whole bloggy thing. She challenged us to write about only our own recipes for a month if we’re thinking of writing a cookbook or for magazines, and seeing how I’ve only conjured up about two of my own originals, I really don’t see myself going down the path of publications. Cue more internal existential debating, as well as the realization that you may think that you came up with something new, but just give it a Google and you’ll find out that brilliant idea has already been thought up by someone else. So now I’m thinking to myself: is this all about coming up with my own recipes, or sharing awesome ones that I’ve come across with other people?

With all this internal strife, good thing there was good wine and conversation to take the edge off. Wine is one thing I do know a decent amount about, having taken a few courses in college and have visited who knows how many vineyards and cellar doors and tried as much wine as possible in the name of research. I love varietals that are not mainstream, so the Cooper’s Creek people had me when we walked through the door and they said “gruner-veltliner”. Hell yes, give me some more! There was also a beautiful non-pinoty pinot noir that I declared I would jump into the vat of, and probably the best sticky wine I have ever tried – a dry late-harvest Chardonnay. The only reason I didn’t buy any right then and there was because I wouldn’t have been able to carry as much as I wanted through the airport. I’m getting it shipped. :)


A happy-drinker snap during the wine tasting at Cooper's Creek, conveniently across the parking lot from the Tasting Shed!

To end the day, Bron Marshall gave us a bit of a primer on food photography, of which she is an absolute pro and I love her work. We didn’t have too much time for the practical application of it beyond some playing with reflectors and diffusers, but even just that little bit was enough to get the juices flowing! I’ve even found myself analysing photographs in the food magazines I read, in the hopes that when I finally do get around to making something photo-worthy I will be able to apply what I’ve learned. And also I just like pretty colours.

How to hold up reflecting cards and direct light to your food - hardware store clamps!

We had dinner at my new happy place – Cook the Books. Cookbooks plus food equals heaven. And their food, oh my, the corn and miso cakes were like little pillows of heaven. It’s really a good thing they weren’t put down in one place, because I would have parked myself next to it and never stopped eating them. Of course I did buy a book – the Tassajara Bread Book, which I am really excited to get stuck into and eventually wean us off of grocery store bread entirely. Is there anything better than fresh homemade bread? I made toast out of some White Mountain Bread (from the Bread Bible, which I borrowed from the library and then copied like, 15 recipes out of) with some of Mairi s marmalade, and good golly miss molly that was a new level of breakfast nirvana. Srsly.

The demo kitchen at Cook the Books and source of heavenly corn and miso pancakes.  Drool!

To top off a fantastic day, Mairi  took the Slumber Party girls out to The Bramble for a cocktail and I’m pretty sure my Lemon & Passionfruit Meringue cocktail was just about the very best liquidy non-chocolate thing I’ve ever had. My new mission in life is to recreate it. Our liquor cabinet assures me we will succeed.

So what have I learned from this experience, other than I need to park myself in front of my blog and tweak the hell out of it, and also maybe get Jonno to learn some HTML (it’s always the men that do those things, isn’t it?)? I’ve learned that it won’t kill me to get completely out of my social comfort zone for a weekend, especially if I get to chat with lovely people who love food as much as I do. I’ve never met a group of more interesting, sweet, generous, and incredibly creative people, and it just inspired me to keep doing what I’m doing – eating, cooking, baking, and photographing everything that goes into my mouth.

So here are the cookies, as promised. They’re from the fantastically wonderful Bakerella. 


You can't resist these, so stop trying.


Dark Chocolate Chip Comfort Cookies

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup butter, slightly softened
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 packet dark chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350F/180C degrees.
2. In a small bowl, mix flour, cocoa, soda and salt using a wire whisk and set aside.
3. In another bowl, cream butter, sugar and peanut butter until light and fluffy.
4. Add eggs and vanilla and mix until combined.
5. Add flour mixture to creamed mixture and mix until combined.
6. Stir in dark chocolate chips.
7. Roll cookie dough into 1-1/4 inch balls, or scoop using an melon baller.
8. Place on parchment paper covered baking sheet.  Bake 10 minutes.
9. Cool on rack and try not to burn your mouth on the hot ones.  Luckily they cool fast. 
10. Makes about 30 2-inch cookies.

Tuesday Things

1. When I got home from the gym last night, I had an unshakable desire to bake some bread. So I did, and miracle of miracles, it actually rose! Not like my previous attempt during the winter. I’m thinking that putting the starter in the sunshine to prove may have had something to do with it.

2. Then I ate Nutella straight out of the jar. True story: I only discovered the existence of the glory that is Nutella when I went backpacking in Europe when I was 20. Why was this beautiful thing not a part of my life before then?! Mom, I’m looking at you!

3. Speaking of Mom, I found myself dancing around the kitchen, snapping and singing along to Michael Buble just like she does. I actually thought I was my mother for a moment, like an out-of-body experience, it was weird. I kept on cooking anyway.

4. For dinner I made a recipe out of Dish magazine that looked and sounded amazing in theory, but in practice it was little more than aromatic yogurt-covered chicken with cashews thrown in for fun. And I totally followed the recipe this time, so it’s not my fault that it wasn’t great. But it really makes me wonder about recipes in magazines – how many are actually trialled? Is that the way the chicken is supposed to taste? Who decides that a recipe is actually good?

5. I need a Dutch Oven. Not that kind of Dutch Oven – ew, get your mind out of the gutter! – but the cast-iron enamel-coated kind. I need a Dutch Oven like I need my coffee in the morning. Desperate need. I keep seeing mouth-watering recipes that use Dutch Ovens over on the Pioneer Woman Cooks, like this one for Pork Roast, and I’m just dying to make them. But the Le Creuset Fairy hasn’t yet seen fit to visit my house.

6. We watched a show called ‘Wild Mongolia’ on the Discovery Channel on Sunday night and our cat Spice loved it. She watched every minute of it. Her favourite scenes were the ones with the little meerkat-like rodents running around and popping out of their burrows, she went batsh!t crazy for them – jumped right up on the TV stand and tried to catch them, and even tried looking behind the TV for them. I don’t know who the show was more entertaining for – us or the cat.

Look - sheep!!

What are those funny sheep doing?

They have camels too?!

7. Behold the Ugli Fruit of New Zealand. It’s kind of a cross between a grapefruit and a very juice orange.  I was absolutely astounded by it and had to buy one just to see what it tasted like.

It's seriously ugli, but not really all that ugly.  Confusion abounds!

8. I have eaten asparagus pizza four times in the past two weeks. I may start sprouting asparagus shoots soon.  Have I mentioned that Jonno makes some killer pizza crust??

9. As part of Apple-Gate 2011, I made applesauce like Mom used to make after a trip to the orchard and cooked up some filling for a future apple crumble. However there is still a bowl full of apples occupying my counter, and I’ve already made two apple cakes, so I need a new vehicle through which to dispose of my extraneous apples. HALP!!!

10. When making the aforementioned applesauce, I did not skin my apples. Big. Mistake. I spent probably an hour trying to fish the skins out of the cooked-down applesauce and used at least three different utensils in my efforts. There is no best way to fish out the skins, the only way to eliminate them before they become part of the applesauce. Like, seriously guys, why did no one tell me this? Mom?

11. I’ve been appealing to Mommy lots recently, and in a little over a month, I get to see her for the first time since I got married!! And Daddy and Seester too! Jonno and I are skiving off to spend four weeks in the States, including Christmas. Christmas in the cold again, woo hoo!!!! It’s been three years of warm Christmases so far, and I really can’t get into it. My body won’t let me feel like it’s Christmas unless it’s frickin freezing outside and you have to bake copious amounts of diet-unfriendly foods in order to keep warm.

12.  I wish my kitchen wasn't so freakin yellow.  It causes all of my photos that are taken at night to turn out with a yellowish tinge, and I'm not fancy enough to own a lightbox setup, or even a DSLR camera for that matter.  It's just me and my iPhone, making yellow pictures!

If you've made it to the end of this post, thank you for your patience!  Sometimes I just like to ramble and show off my kitties and asparagus pizza. 

Getting Rid of Extra Fruit - Pear Almond Cake

So you know how I’m seasonally challenged? Well I’m just going to say that this recipe is for the Americans, because pears are still sort of in season over there. So yeah, Mom, this one’s for you.

A progression of the Pear Cake - here we are, bathing in the morning sun.

Also, remember Apple-Gate 2011 – the box of fruit that was occupying my hallway? Well it also included a big lot of pears, which I adore and don’t really understand why I hadn’t eaten so much as one of them the whole time they were sitting there. Maybe because they were in the hall, and who picks up something to eat in the hall? Halls are for storing things that are in a transitory state, things that need to be dealt with and you need a visual reminder to do something with them. Like dirty laundry, winter clothes that need to be moved to the closet in the other room coz yours is too small to hold everything, or in my case, aging fruit.


Pear Cake 2 - wearing a light coat of icing sugar and reclining in the sunshine.

The secret to this cake is to age your pears way past their prime. I have become a master of fruit aging recently. It’s a science really – you have to leave them long enough to be nice and sweet, but you can’t leave them too long or they’ll just fall apart when you try to peel them. I really do recommend buying a whole bunch of pears and apples at the farmer’s market, leaving them somewhere out of the way and completely forgetting about them for a while, then one Sunday night at about 9pm remembering that your fruit is about to go off and you must use it NOW or the HazMat people will be storming through your door tomorrow in their big shiny suits and helmets. 

Coming soon to my hallway!

Oh, and be sure that wherever you leave the fruit is cool and dry, coz you don’t want your fruit to go all manky. Heh.

Pear Cake 3 - an orphaned slice awaiting glory.

I have gotten no less than two emails and three walkovers (from faraway desks) from workmates today raving about this cake, and that is no mean feat when your office only has twenty people. That’s a 25% positive response rate! And it’s not including the people who sit near me and thanked me for the fantastic cake as they walked by, so I reckon that the real number should be something like 120% positive response.

Pear Cake 4 - what the office fought over.

Note: this post has been edited to reduce the number of exclamation points. I find I over-exclamate.

Pear-Almond Cake

• 3 large overripe pears/6 small
• 2 cups flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 ¼ tsp baking powder
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 200 g butter, melted
• ¾ cup semi-sweet choc chips
• ½ cup slivered almonds
• Icing/powdered sugar for garnish

1. Preheat oven to 190C/375F. Line and grease a springform pan.
2. Peel and slice your overripe pears.
3. In a large bowl, sift together flour, salt and baking soda.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk sugar and eggs together until creamy. Add melted and cooled butter and whisk together.
5. Add the wet mix to dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.
6. Spoon about half of the mixture into the springform pan, then lay half the pear slices in the mix.
7. Sprinkle over all of the choc chips and almonds and top with remaining mixture.
8. Lay the rest of the pairs on top in a fun pattern.
9. Bake for 45 minutes. Let cool in the pan.
10. Sprinkle icing/powdered sugar on top for garnish just before serving.

Guacamole is a Good Decision

I make really strange decisions sometimes. I’m not sure my brain is wired properly. I wear weird combinations of clothes that I swear look awesome before I leave the house, and then later see photos of and have one of those "what the hell was I thinking?!" moments. 

Once for bookclub, I brought two bags of yeast rolls as my ‘plate’ because I (a) had just mastered making a bread product with yeast (!), and (b) I thought everyone would love them as much as I do and of course 7 people would polish off 24 rolls. Heh. What really happened was that not one was eaten, even by me because everyone else brought food that was much more fun than rolls, and since I put the fresh-from-the-oven rolls in a plastic bag and the moisture couldn’t escape they got all soggy and I had to throw the whole thing out later that night. Sorry for the run-on sentence.

This ‘pasta’ (I’m not sure what it’s actually called because the packaging was literally all in Greek) was one such strange decision. I found it in with the foreign foods at the grocery store and thought that the long hollow noodles looked like fun. Wrong! They are slurpy little buggers and you end up wearing half of your pasta sauce on your shirt coz its gets into the noodles and then falls out when you try to eat them. Also, the sauce doesn’t really stick to them, so the meal ends up more like ‘pasta with a side of tomato sauce’ rather than your normal spag bol. I’m sure they have some practical food use, but since I can’t read Greek, I’ll never know what it is!

Guacamole, on the other hand, is always a good decision. Especially technicolour guacamole.  You can't go wrong holding a bowl of guacamole.  Just broke a lamp?  Make some guac.  Need to say sorry to a friend?  Bring a bowl of concilatory guacamole.  'Accidentally' adopted a new pet or three and have to break it to your partner gently?  Yeah, guacamole might not be enough.  But it would make a good start!


So bright, it almost hurts your eyes.

I learned how to make this from a waiter at a restaurant just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. They had a guacamole cart that they would wheel over to your table, with all the ingredients all chopped up, and then proceed to create avocado bliss before your very eyes. It’s so easy and visually stunning and not to mention yummy that you can’t not make it. The hardest part about making guacamole is just remembering all eight of the ingredients – when I’m shopping for the ingredients I pretty much have to walk around holding up however many fingers of ingredients I have picked up. It probably looks like I’m flashing gang signs whenever I do that. I try to ignore the funny looks.


Brightness dimmed by fun filter.  And yes, I did make this funky blue bowl, aren't I clever? :)

Serve this with plain tortilla/corn chips. The best ones I’ve found in NZ are the homebrand ones at Countdown, all nice and salty. None of this cheese-covered nonsense with my guacamole!! *Shakes fist* Also, don’t puree’ the avocado into a paste-like consistency. I’ve seen this done and to me it takes a lot of the flavour out it. I like my guac chunky, with lots of complementing flavours all mingling and getting to know each other in the bowl, not whizzed to greeny-gray gluey stuff.


Mexican-style Guacamole

• 2 large/3 small ripe avocados (they should be slightly squishy)
• 1 red onion
• 1 chilli pepper
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 ripe tomatoes
• 1 lime or bottled lime juice
• ¼ cup chopped coriander/cilantro
• Salt

Note: a food processor is useful, but not essential.

1. Finely chop the red onion and garlic cloves.
2. De-seed the chilli pepper and finely chop.
3. Halve the tomatoes and scoop the seeds and pulp out with a spoon. Dice up the remaining fleshy bits.
4. If you have a food processor, pulse the red onion, garlic, chilli pepper, tomatoes and coriander/cilantro a few times, until nicely incorporated but not pureed. If no food processor, just pile them all up on your cutting board and run your knife through it all until you have a uniform size going on. Dump into a bowl and incorporate well.
5. Cut the avocados in half and use your knife to remove the stones. Scoop out the green stuff into your bowl and use the back of a large spoon to smush the avocado up.
6. Sprinkle a pinch of salt and a good squeeze of lime juice, then mix everything together gently.
7. Make the guacamole a few hours before or up to a day before serving to let the flavours develop.
8. Store covered in the fridge to delay the avocado turning brown, then take it out a bit before serving to let it warm up.  Serve at or close to room temperature, not cold.

Gratuitous parting kitty shot: Lucy has a cute little beauty mark on her nose, like the little diva she is.

Moist Non-Ex-Boyfriend's-Mother Apple Cake

One of the suckiest things about breaking up is all the relationships you lose along with your boyfriend/girlfriend. I know this is nothing new, but the other day when I was trying to figure out what to do with the bagillion apples occupying my hallway (related to the trillion kiwifruit that lead to this kiwi cake), the first thing I thought of was an apple cake that my ex-boyfriend’s mother used to make. It was damn good. So good we would beg her to make us one before his parents would come to visit. So good we would freeze some to save for emergencies. So good that I almost picked up the phone to call her for the recipe. I miss that apple cake. So maybe my opening line should have been: One of the suckiest things about breaking up is the food you’ll no longer get from your ex’s parents. And the recipes you can no longer make, because really that’s just weird, making a cake for your current partner when it was a favourite of your previous partner. You get all kinds of crossover emotions and cooties and gross things when you do that.


This box of fruit has been sitting, lurking, waiting for me to do something with it.

I’m pretty sure that one of the unwritten rules about breakups is that you don’t really keep anything associated with the ex. Ideally all of it goes into one big ritual cleansing bonfire that you dance around like a banshee, but we all know that some stuff lingers around. I got a set of luggage one Christmas, and those suitcases have followed me all the way around the world, refusing to die so that I can replace them. Until now! Jonno and I bought a suitcase over the weekend for our joint use, and I can finally expunge the last bits of the ex-boyfriend from my life.

Two things that have nothing to do with the ex-boyfriend: strawberry-covered pavlova and MY apple cake.  Yesssss.

In the spirit of purging and being haunted by a box of apples, I decided that I would make an apple cake, but I would make my own apple cake, damnit! [Please note that this is a big thing for a girl whose awareness of how to make cakes did not extend beyond what came in a box before a few years ago.] So I found a recipe on Tasty Kitchen that I thought used a lot of liquid (a CUP of oil?! Srsly?!), but gave it a shot because it looked the least complicated and I had all of the ingredients in my kitchen. Result? Uh-MAZE-ing!!!

Then I tweaked it a little, just to give it that something extra, and it actually provoked emails of thanks from the workmates today. I’m not sure where that ranks of the Scale of Baking Gratitude and Glory, but I’ll take it! Et voila, a new go-to recipe whenever there are too many apples staring me in the face and making hostile threats of biological warfare.


Apple cake is a good reason to stop pottering!  (Those are my upside-down pots too, exciting!)

Moist Apple Cake
Time: 1 hour

• 3 cups apples (3 large, 5 small), diced
• 1 cup vegetable or canola oil
• 2 whole large eggs or 4 whole small eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup pecans or walnuts, chopped
• icing sugar for garnish

1. Preheat oven to 180 C/350 F.  Grease and line a springform pan.
2. Mix oil, eggs and vanilla in large bowl.  Add sugars and mix well.
3. In a separate bowl, sift the flour, salt and baking soda together.  Add to wet ingredients and throughly incorporate.
4. Fold in apples and nuts.
5. Pour batter in pan and cover with aluminum foil as it may spatter over the edge.  Bake for 50 - 60 minutes - a skewer should come out clean.
6. Garnish with sifter icing sugar over the top.