settling slowly, and bananacakesuccess

We don't have these trees in Melbourne.

Having changed location this year, it's taking a little while to get settled in. Moving creates different kinds of crises, and incurs cake-making.

And I have finally DONE IT, made a banana cake that really pleased me. (It's not really the first time, but as I haven't followed an exact recipe for banana cake in a while..)

Banana cake as it should be:
Because an anonymous flatmate (I don't know who) felt the love to cover it.

After one day, this is how it should look:
This is how I know it wasn't just me. It is good. This is the word of the Melbourne flat.

While I didn't have the book in front of me, I did use a recipe that comes from a book. I'm sure the lady who put it in there won't mind me sharing.

BANANA CAKE from the Boort Fiesta Cook Book
3 overripe bananas, mashed
60g butter
1 cup sugar (this is too sweet for me, I use 2/3 cup)
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 egg
1/2 tsp bi-carb soda, dissolved in 2 tbsp milk
1 1/2 tsp baking powder (ish)
1 1/2 cups flour
handful of sultanas and walnuts

Cream butter, sugar and vanilla. Add egg, beat til smooth.
Add everything else. Make sure it's all mixed together, without beating the life out of it.
Bake at 180 C for about 50 minutes, depending on your oven and the tin you're using.
At home (yes, it's a Mum recipe) we use a biggish loaf tin. Here I used the only tin I have, which is in fact not mine or even a resident in my flat, but is a borrowed tin. It's round. It was a HUGE SUCCESS.
I didn't have walnuts, but this meant I got to use up some cashews/pepitas/sunflower seeds that weren't going to get eaten. Toasted them in the preheating oven and chucked them in at the end. Yum!

culinary prototypes

Continuing with the nostalgic theme and eating a Golden Delicious, which used to be my favourite kind of apple, it became clear that "apple" now first evokes the image of a Pink Lady - a miniscule of a second before just meaning any apple, which to me is a Jonathan, Granny Smith, Akane, Gala, Fuji, Golden Delicious, or (hopefully not) Red Delicious... all those fruits that are sweet with varying bite/sourness, crunch, colour outside on a thin skin, whiteish flesh.

Of course, then there is cooked apple, which for me means Granny Smith, and which is green when it's cooked. (It's an appropriate name if you consider that for many, Granny Smiths are purely for cooking, and have that wonderful grandmotherliness of apple crumble, apple cake/slice, apple sponge, etc. or just stewed apple. Mmm.)

Further in this linguistic vein, did you know that 'apple' just used to mean fruit? And then at some stage.. I think it was due to the Norman conquest and the French introduction of the word 'fruit' (not sure what happened with 'pomme') that then the meaning of 'apple' narrowed to refer only to that particular fruit we now know as the apple.

Apples go with cream. It's approaching that season.

Food Love

Apparently I am a nostalgic person. I love being nostalgic, and also happen to have a good memory for food.

I was just eating half a banana muffin (wholemeal and homemade, of course) practicing restraint, after an unrestrained few days that were really quite excessive. I ate two teaspoons of ice cream with the muffin and it was delicious, which brought me to thinking nostalgically.

The ice cream I bought when I wanted my college apartment to feel like home: Bulla Vanilla, 4 litres. It should last a while, depending who comes over.
We always used to buy the same ice cream, Peters Original and it was the Best. Then they 'improved' the recipe, so now it's Original with New Improved Recipe. Hm. New Improved recipe tastes and feels like marshmallow, sweet, gooey and empty. I seem to recall my dad reading out that the first two ingredients were sugar and water, then milk, or something like that.
So now we always buy Bulla ice cream. It's not for any amazing culinary sophistication. It just tastes like ice cream.

Lamingtons. Grandma makes them. Also in this category:
Sponge cakes, sponge kisses, jelly cakes, fruit cake (Christmas, weddings, and big birthdays), sultana cake, apricot jam, pav.

Apple cake/slice from Nanna, and cassata
Corned beef, sigh. I've never liked it much.

Marmalade!! I love marmalade.
Nanna always has marmalade on toast for breakfast, with a cup of tea, and I always think of her when I have it. I also can't help thinking of Mum, who makes THE grapefruit marmalade of the world.

Speaking of citrus, the whole-orange syrup cake from Women's Weekly Cakes and Slices cookbook has high sentimental value for me. The two boys I love most in the world have both made it on separate occasions: my brother, who made it first, and a non-family member, who has made it enough times in quick succession to make up for not having made it first.

Yo-yo biscuits and ANZACs always make me think of Mum.
As do cheese and chutney hot sandwiches. Made traditionally at our house with Colby and Rosella fruit chutney (known originally as cheese and children's chutney).
Also, I always think of Mum when I make a pavlova. We always hide a little layer of banana under the cream, and strawberries normally go on top.

And, not with any necessarily personal association...
Vegemite (derr). Is not vegemite on toast such an Aussie comfort food?
I have had fantastic palmiers with Vegemite and parmesan, too. Don't knock it until you try it. And in fact, I'm pretty sure these will always remind me of the friend who has made them twice recently.

Patty cakes. Vanilla. Choc chips optional. The best are made by my sister. They are what a cupcake should be.

I could go on for a long time. Potato flan... lemon slice... Blue Castello... you know.

:)

It's raining again

Dear world,
Please forgive the incoherence of this post.

I've moved interstate for the year. It rains a lot here at the moment.
I've worn a jumper once in the last month.
My enthusiasm for food has changed over the last while. Perhaps my attitude has become healthier? Maybe it hasn't changed at all. But the food fascination is definitely of a nature I'm happier with.

Anyway, while I still love food, I've been enjoying it over the summer in simple ways. Often nostalgically.

With the arrival of autumn, I felt a strong desire to make this apple and date cake from such a lovely honest blog.
I don't peel the apples, and I reduced the sugar to 3/4 cup and omitted the topping, and it is dense sweet meltingness - as much as you could want. Next time I'll try 2/3 or even 1/2 cup of sugar.
It is a wonderful cake. Perfect with cream or not-too-sweet vanilla icecream.

Meanwhile, I think the most exciting role of food for me at the moment is with a bunch of friends around.
Even if it is a giant, ugly, delicious pot of non-authentic curry.
It's supPOSEd to be green. It was extremely yum.

more from december: bakery tour no. 2

Well! Guess what I forgot to mention before going on holiday in December.

Early in the month, it was a very wet day for a walking bakery tour, but we'd already postponed so many times that it HAD to run. So I brought my car, and the 5 of us ventured (..rolled) across to Fitzroy, its north, and Collingwood.

Stop no. 1 was the French Lettuce, Nicholson St. I can't vouch for all the vanilla slices in Melbourne - probably have only tried three or four in my life, but this was very good. Better than Louttit Bay's? I can't say, but on par. It was about $5, slightly more expensive than LB, and served with a raspberry coulis that it was really better without. Delicious, anyhow.
Apparently their quiche was excellent. The pastries all looked appealing.

Next stop was Nicholson St Baker, up in eastern Brunswick. We were also looking for Inferno Cakes next door, which turned out to be upstairs because it was the same shop.
I didn't get many photos, but we tried a vanilla cupcake with lemon icing that was heated up, which was buttery, smooth and not too fluffy - divine!! and there was a date and caramel slice that I thought was pretty standard. Also a decent sausage roll, I think.
Then we drove around in circles for ages making wrong turns, parked off Smith St and crossed Alexandra Pde to get back to Sainsbury's. Hooray for the little green man! *eeooooobupbupbupbupbupbupbupbupbup*
It was worth the trip. Not for M.M's chicken pie, which was perfect other than being too heavy on the pepper, or for the reportedly average coffee, but for my loaf of Norwegian Rye. There it is in its little bag down there.
I had this with pesto, marinated fetta and cherry tomatoes about a year ago at Doctor Java, fell head over heels, and then like a shy fool, left. But the next time I was there having coffee, I plucked up the nerve to ask what the bread was and have since then been on a mission to Sainsbury's.
This with avocado makes me a happy toast eater. I had some for lunch at home the next day. The rest of the loaf went into the freezer, where I expected to find it on return from Brisbane. Not so! Mum and Dad had polished it all off.
The portuguese tarts are apparently famous and delicious. Next time I'll have to sample one.
En route down Smith to Gertrude St, we passed a couple of nice-looking bakery cafes. We stopped for a late lunch for some of the party at Upper Crust, 206 Smith, where we found a chicken sandwich that by all accounts of its eater hit the spot.
I wished I'd had room for something from Melissa, but you can't eat everything.
And last on the list: Fatto a Mano, on Gertrude St, just off Smith - a couple of doors up from Birdman Eating.
I can't wait to come back here for lunch!
This time we came for $3 (thievery!!) brownie, on recommendation from my sister. Very generous, and not bad at all.
I wouldn't come here for the atmosphere, by the way. It reminds me of a fish and chip chop à la eclectic Fitzroy. But the people running it are lovely and the food honest and good.

Finally, about the same time - the day before heading off to Bris - raspberry yoghurt cake, chez moi. Recipe courtesy of Clotilde at C & Z, the blog that made me want to food blog. She actually has a recipe up for a raspberry yoghurt cake but I just used the plain one and chucked in about 250g of raspberries. And then cream cheese icing with a fair dose of lemon juice.
My sister said this was the best cake she had ever had!

December goes with cream: the mango files, and Christmas

I had a nice couple of weeks staying with my family-out-of-law this month. It was interesting to experience the lead-up to Christmas in someone else's house, and the way all this pressure and anticipation of family arriving and wanting your normal existence to go on while planning for a celebration kind of.. affects the dynamics of a house and of a bunch of people.
One thing I noticed early on: what happens with the politics of mangoes up here (in Brisbane)?

Some families have traditions of gifting mangoes to each other when part of the family lives in north Queensland, and those mangoes stay in the family. A friend of mine felt proud ownership of and looked forward to eating a couple of mangoes cheap at the fruit shop when price had since gone up. The friend's housemate, from Darwin, would have put mango in everything if it were feasible and paid us to get a box of them from the markets.

During my two weeks surrounded by the things (there were three boxes ripening outside the room where I slept), I learned to like them plain, though accompanying other things is still my preference.

Christmas may or may not get a post. We shall see you soon, though...

Well well well.

It's been a busy year. My first year studying in a new field.
A fanTAStic year!

And now it's holidays. Photos will be taken, and may make their way onto this blog.
There hasn't been much cream this year, actually.

I miss the Food Co-op.
Everyone at Melbourne made fun of me for talking about Wholefoods, because I connected it in my head with Wholefoods at Monash. But no, it's the Food Co-op. So last night I made dahl, and today lunch was a regal peanut butter and salad sandwich. Peanut butter (the good stuff, please), lettuce, tomato, cucumber, beetroot - ours was canned, so I sliced it into thin discs - and a fair pile of grated carrot. And salt and pepper, that I should have put in between the tomato and cucumber.

Don't you love sandwiches?

Plans for bloggable events this summer:

Mystery items along the Great Ocean Road... hopefully some decent cake. And maybe wine?

"Mangomisu" from December's delicious. Or some version of mango trifle.

More peanut butter and salad sandwiches, when my camera battery is charged.

Oh. Also from delicious, HOMEMADE CRUMPETS!!!!!