Happy Birthday 2013 and My First Pavlova

{fireworks bringing in the new year at corogold 2012/2013}

Happy New Year everyone and a big Happy Birthday to 2013!
(Seriously, did anyone else keep finding themselves accidentally texting "Happy Birthday" instead of "Happy New Year"?? So easy to do no???)

We've just come back from the epic eat-a-thon that was Christmas and a rowdy sunshine and gumboot filled New Years.  Aaaaaaand straight back to work. 

{how new zealand does christmas}

But during our break, I did get time to do some musing whilst lazing around in the sun: how would one sum up the year that was 2012?  The year the world didn't quite end.  A year of big changes: moving city, getting to live with husband again, having two new Hospices to our Baking for Hospice run and adding a new nephew to the clan.  And year of big sadness too, for far too many awesome people I know and also for people a world away.  A year of saying bye to good friends, saying hi again to old friends and making brand new ones.  A tornadoey Hobbity kinda year.

And, as it turned out, it was a year of Pavlovas.  Of this particular Pavlova Stack with Lemon Curd, Strawberries, and Mint to be precise. 

B for Baby Brandy Baskets with Vegan Lemon Cream and Passionfruit Curd

This post is brought to you by the letter B.

B is for Busy Busy Busy.  After weeks of being a bit of a bum and not doing much, I went straight into an action packed event extravaganza of the last three weeks.  Got myself a summer job as a civil servant (when in Wellington...), went back up to Auckland twice, saw a pre-screening of the Hobbit in all its 48 frame 3D glory (ah-mazing - everyone should go!), made my very first pavlova (post to come!), finished up our last Baking for Hospice round for the year, and that's not even counting all the prep for Christmas!!  So B is for need a Breather and Being very sorry for the lateness of this post!

B is also for Back to School. I was lucky enough to get to go back to my old high school's leavers dinner.  2012 marks ten years since my last year at Rangitoto College...but it sure doesn't feel like it's been that long!  Was really awesome getting to catch up with old teachers as an 'adult' to discover that they are all actually hilariously fun people.  Go Rangi!

And finally, B is for these Baby Brandy Baskets with Vegan Lemon Cream and Passionfruit Curd.

I LOVE brandy snaps.  They are just the right mix of gingery, crispy caramelly, and creamy.  All cigar-shaped and cream-filled, they were the height of sophistication in the 80's, so totally retro cool now.  

Crazy bout choux: Pink Ribbon Mini Eclairs for Breast Cancer Awareness

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.  ~Frank A. Clark

I wish I had exciting stories to tell you about what I did in the last month, like that I had travelled to tropical climes sampling exotic cuisine, or that I'd been whisked away on a baking boot camp run by a cantankerous celebrity chef but, alas, reality is far less delicious.  I've had exams which basically means I've spent the last four weeks huddled over a desk cramming info into my brain and coffee down my throat.  Boo.

And how I've missed you, dear readers!  I thought about you often and wished constantly that I could be back in the happy world of blogging where there are no neural pathways to decipher or anatomical tomes to memorise. 

But we are now finally on the other side of exams and I am back on the blogging bandwagon!

Ok, it wasn't all doom and gloom over the exam period, I do have one piece of exciting news - I am now a Wellingtonian!  Moved up last week and Capital City has been as windy as it has been wonderful.  This weekend I got to celebrate the end of exams, my birthday, and the end of our long distance days.  Lots to be stoked about!  Although now the long process of hunting for a summer job begins...

What have you been up to?  How are your summers going?  It has been far too long!

I've got loads of posts on the back log to catch up on but I thought I'd start with these Pink Ribbon Mini Eclairs.

Mmm Malted Milo Malteser Ice Cream

Ice cream is exquisite.  What a pity it isn't illegal ~ Voltaire.

I got brain freeze walking home tonight.

Yes, an ice cream headache just because it was so darn cold down here in Dunedin and not because I got to eat delicious ice cream.  Talk about jipped.

I gotta say though, despite the freezing temperatures outside, I could still totally do a big bowl of ice cream for dessert.  Just what is it about this classic frozen dessert that makes it so universally loved, so good, so addictive?  The endless flavors and toppings?  Maybe its dreamy smoothness?  Or the way it melts into creamy sweetness in your mouth?  Whatever it is, there's one thing that's for sure: ice cream equals happiness.

{via icanread}

Getting that pseudo ice cream headache just made me long for this Malted Milo Malteaser Ice Cream I made a wee while back.  It's a glorious malt bonanza.  Chocolate malt powder, malted milk power AND chocolate coated malt balls.  Coz let's face it, everything tastes better as ice cream.

I heart Sidart's Tuesday Test Kitchen

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our *two* weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our *weaponry*...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again. 

[The Inquisition exits]

 ~ Monty Python

I got the biggest surprise this week.  No, nothing at all like the Spanish Inquisition, in fact, the opposite.  A good surprise, nay, a GREAT one.

I was having a sleep in after a bit of a late one the night before when a knock on the door wakes me up and who should show up on my door step but...my husband!!!   He had purposely not told me he was coming down and got me totally by surprise!

Best. Surprise. Ever.

{beautiful auckland from our table with a view}

The element of surprise is also a big part of the Tuesday Test Kitchen degustation menu at Sidart Restaurant in Ponsonby, Auckland.

Sticky Date & Dulce de Leche Cupcakes with Homemade Dulce de Leche

He has fallen from the donkey, but has found a date ~ Iranian Proverb

Like the man who finds a date on the ground (2 minute rule right?) I also completely subscribe to silver linings.

Take this weekend for instance.  I was up in Auckland briefly to visit my husband.  The weather was gorgeous: sunny and warm, we had all these grand plans of doing lots of exciting things and eating yummy food but alas, I ended up with the nasty head cold making its rounds in Dunedin and spent most of the weekend in bed with a box of tissues.

The silver lining however was having my darling husband and his family look after me and keep me all snuggley and warm and topped up with paracetamol and decongestants.  Sooooo much nicer being sick when surrounded by loved ones than alone in freezing Dunedin and having to walk to the pharmacy for meds.   I'm beginning to see why men are tempted to pull out the man flu.

The recipe in this post however, has nothing to do with colds or donkeys, but everything to do with dates.  Dates and Dulce de Leche to be precise with these Sticky Date & Dulce de Leche Cupcakes with Homemade Dulce de Leche which I made as part of my cupcake renaissance.  

Now I know I tend to gush about things I like but seriously, these cupcakes are spectacular.

They are quite simply, amazingness in a cupcake.

Flavour of the Month: New Flavour, Mt Eden

花よりだんご (hana yori dango) Meaning: Someone who prefers dumplings over flowers ~ Japanese proverb

I am a dumplings over flowers kinda girl.  


Whilst the Japanese saying implies the person prefers practical gain rather than aesthetics, for me the meaning is more literal: give me food over pretty things any day.  


My husband caught on to this early on.  While in the eight years we've been together, he has not yet bought me a bouquet of flowers, he has taken me out to many a delicious meal.  The boy knows the way to this girl's heart.   


For this particular delicious meal over summer we went on a double date with my brother in law and his wife to the restaurant that everyone seemed to be talking about: New Flavour on Dominion Road for some handmade dumplings and noodles.

A week in para para paradise: The Piha Cafe, Piha

We'll get there fast and then we'll take it slow ~ The Beach Boys, Kokomo

Ahh Dunedin.  I've been back down south for a whole week now and already it feels like I'd never left.

Not without the initial adjustment pains mind you: adjusting to going to lectures, adjusting to the freezing cold, adjusting to doing the whole long distance relationship thing again.  It's been like getting back into a pair of jeans that have just gone through the dryer.  A bit tight and uncomfortable to start off with but comfy again with a bit of wearing.

It definitely helped that we hit the ground running.  Lectures, labs, and miserable weather galore.  In fact, it was just our second day back and we were already performing our first craniotomies.  I was literally holding someone's brain in my hands.  Once the centre of their personality, all their thoughts, hopes, and dreams.  Incredible, awe-inspiring, just wow.

Despite all that excitement, I couldn't help but long for the balmy summer days back in Auckland.

Just before I headed back south, C and I took a week vacation at his family bach in Piha.  It was the one week over the entire summer when Auckland had amazing weather.  Score.  A whole glorious week of lazy mornings, nana naps in the arvo, and strolls through the beautiful Waitakere Ranges.  It was our little place like Kokomo.

The boys came and stayed for a couple of the days and since some of them were heading back to the UK and Australia, for their last morning in Piha we treated ourselves to brunch at The Piha Cafe.

Originally, there was a bit of controversy over the opening of the cafe.   Local Piharians are staunchly protective about keeping their slice of paradise pristine and uncommercialized.  Awesome for us visitors wanting to admire the scenery, not so awesome for businesses wanting to get a foot in the door.  After years of wrangling with resource consent shenanigans, fast-forward to 2012 and The Piha Cafe is a firm fixture on the Piha scene, offering some of the best views a cafe can offer, along with great tucker at very reasonable prices.

{via thepihacafe.co.nz}

A study in lanterns and dumplings

The lantern festival marks the 15th and final day of the Chinese New Year holiday and every year the Asia New Zealand Foundation puts on the Auckland Lantern Festival: a lavish three day long extravaganza with glorious techni-coloured lantern displays filling Albert Park and street stalls of delicious asian food lining the length of Princes Street.

You really get the sense you're in some exotic bustling marketplace in South East Asia rather than the immaculately colonial Albert Park next to Auckland University.

Me and my girls from high school went last night on a beautiful if somewhat muggy Auckland evening and ate our weight in dumplings, noodles, donuts, and steamed buns.

{$4 for 6 pork dumplings. I kid you not. Make sure you get plenty of soy sauce and sweet chilli on these bad boys}

Chinese New Year Feast at One Dream, Mt Wellington

Kung Hei Fat Choi!  Happy Year of the Dragon lovely people!

Chinese New Year is THE most important event in Chinese calender.  It marks the start of the lunar year and starts with a family feast on Chinese New Year's Eve, followed by another massive feast on Chinese New Year's Day and ends with a feast for the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the lunar calender.

For our New Year dinner we went to our family's fav little Chinese restaurant in Mt Wellington.  It's a gem of a place.  Family-run and tucked away next to Harvey Norman on Mt Wellington Highway, One Dream specialises in home style Chinese cooking that's authentic, delicious, and incredibly reasonable.

They are usually closed on a Monday but the lovely owners open just for us for Chinese New Year Day.  Legends.

Takapuna Beach Cafe, Takapuna, Auckland

{house hot chocolate}

The three most important things in real estate is location, location, location ~ Unknown

You would really be hard pressed to find a better location for a cafe than the Takapuna Beach Cafe on Auckland's North Shore.

It sits literally metres away from Takapuna Beach with it's golden sand and sprawling pohutukawa trees, overlooking the ocean with Rangitoto Island in the background.  Combine that with the grandiose floor to ceiling windows and the uber stylish decor, and you've got the recipe for a cafe you just want to while away the day in.

When the Takapuna Beach Cafe (TBC) first opened, it was the place to be.  Be you a celeb, a lady who lunches, muso or suit you wanted to be seen having a coffee at the TBC.  Best people watching spot ever.

We used to go to the TBC all the time when I was living in Auckland, I loved the consistently excellent coffee, the impeccably attentive service and most of all the exceptional restaurant-quality food that was always creative and always delicious.  So when my cousin and his girlfriend were over for our wedding, I couldn't think of a better place to show off Kiwi cafe culture.

The question was, would the TBC still be as good as I remembered? Would the setting, coffee, service and food still be as good? Well...turns out 3 out of 4 ain't bad.

Wedding = love Part 1: Getting ready, the ceremony & arty shots

{by jel photography}

A photograph is memory in the raw.  ~Carrie Latet

 
Our photos are here, our photos are here!!!

The DVD arrived yesterday and I am so so excited bout sharing them with you all!

The very talented team of Eleanor and James at Jel Photography, were our wedding photographers and we had an absolute blast with them!  So easy going, so happy and smiley and boy can they take gorgeous photos!

So without further ado...here's our Wedding = love Album!

(All photos taken by Jel Photography unless otherwise stated)

Sneak peek: My wedding cake

Whether you think you can or think you can't - you're right ~ Henry Ford

I think I must have a bit of a stubborn streak. 

Whenever someone tells me, no no you couldn't possibly do that, it just seems to make me want to do it more.

So when everyone was telling me I couldn't possibly bake my own wedding cake, by golly it just strengthened my resolve to do just that.   

Sure I've only ever used fondant once before, sure I've never made a multi-tier cake before, and sure I'm living in a different town and am only flying back 2 days before the wedding...she'll be right, mate I said.

Now with only 11 days to go till The Big Day, the stress levels are getting up there and whether baking my own wedding cake was the wisest decision in the world is yet to be seen.  So, my lovelies, here is a little sneak peek of my wedding cake in all its bumpy 1.5 kg worth of chocolate glory.  Wish me luck!

Weddings weddings weddings and a lemon raspberry & yoghurt roses cake with cream cheese frosting

Goin' to the chapel and we're 

Gonna married,

Goin' to the chapel and we're
Gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and we're
Gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel of love   

~ Dixie Cups

Wedding fever is in the air.

Now go on, admit it, you watched The Wedding too didn't you?

I swear I wasn't going to.  I was going to resist the hype.   But then, like millions of others all around the world, I got totally sucked in.  The outfits! The hats! That dress!  It's the water-cooler topic of the year.  Everyone has an opinion, from the Pippa vs Kate debate to that hat worn by a certain princess.  It is everyone's fairy tale and a bright happy moment in these tumultuous times.

For me, I have a double dose of wedding fever.  Not only was there the Royal wedding to obsess about but my own wedding is in *eek!* two and a half weeks so I most definitely have wedding on the brain.  I'm sleeping, eating and breathing wedding.  There is just so much to do!  So many decisions to make!  It's like the proverbial eight headed monster - you tick one job off the list and two more sprout in its wake.

So seeing as getting married is what all the cool kids are doing these days, it made sense to have a wedding-ey theme of Love & Marriage for the last round of Baking for Hospice.  For Round 15, I made Lemon Raspberry & Yoghurt Roses Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting - it's an incredibly moist tangy lemon cake dotted with bright bursts of raspberries and covered in cream cheese frosting roses.  The rosettes idea is so gorgeous and so easy to do, had I not already baked my own wedding cake (sneak peek to come), I would have been happy to have one just like this on the big day. 

Dragon's Gourmet, Epsom, Auckland and being a banana

I've always been a bit of a banana: asian on the outside, kiwi on the inside.

But it has recently come to my attention that my tastebuds may be just a wee bit more asian than I first thought.

I've lived in New Zealand since I was five and was for all intents and purposes was a kiwi kid: played touch rugby in primary, did the Kiwi Kids Triathlon, had a mince and cheese pie from the tuckshop for lunch everyday.  At home though, Mum and Dad were very Chinese in their tastes: Dad cooked traditional Cantonese dinners and when we go out it would be to Chinese restaurants and Yum Cha. I, on the other hand, have always preferred variety be it indian, italian, french, carribean, morroccan etc.  Just ask anyone, I'm an easy girl to feed: I'm just happy to be eating.  I've eaten everything from fetal chicken eggs to frog's legs to rabbit stew.  Be it bacon and egg pie or peking duck my motto is get in my belly. 
 
Or so I thought....

It's only upon moving down to Dunedin, where there aren't a heck of a lot of Chinese restaurants around, that I've discovered that I really miss good authentic Chinese tucker.  Guess it's like missing your mother's cooking yeah?

So, if like me, you're craving lunch Canto styles, and you happen to be in Auckland, then check out Dragon's Gourmet in Epsom for an authentic Hong Kong tea house experience.

{refreshingly tangy lemon iced tea}

So many herbs, so little thyme

For my birthday my awesome parents in law to be got me a herb planter and loads of yummy herbs.

So today, on a gloriously sunny Auckland Saturday, C and I got our green thumbs out...

Canton Cafe, Kingsland, Auckland

Canton Cafe in Kingsland serves my most favouritest seafood dish in the entire world: Steamed Garlic Prawns.  Big call, I know.

I dream about this dish.  I would marry this dish (sorry C).

The dish, however, is definitely not for the faint hearted....see piles of yellow bitty bits smothering the prawns?  That my friends is garlic, glorious glorious garlic.   You probably shouldn't order this on your first date, if you're a vampire, or if you plan to speak to anyone for the rest of the night.  But if you're like me and have an almost Gallic obsession with garlic, you just won't care. One can never have too much garlic I say.

Voted in the Top 50 Asian Restaurants in 2008 and Best Chinese Restaurant 2003 & 2005 by Metro Magazine, Canton Cafe is an institution on the Auckland culinary scene.

To be honest though, I've sat on this review for ages now.  We have about 4 or 5 Chinese restaurants on our favourite list and Canton Cafe is one of them. We've been coming to this restaurant for many many years.  My parents know the owners and the manager (having said that, the Hong Kong community in Auckland is rather small and Mum seems to know pretty much every Chinese restaurant owner in the city). We go there for birthdays, special occasions and even when we just don't feel like cooking.  We went there a couple of weeks ago to celebrate my Mum being cancer free for 3 years.

So how could I review this restaurant objectively? Maybe I'd be overly critical since we go there all the time or maybe I wouldn't even notice the flaws since it's pretty much our "local".

Well, I've decided I'm just going to tell you what I thought and then you can go try it for yourself and see if you agree.  I will also try and lay out what to expect from your Canton Cafe experience.  Sound like a plan, Stan?

Brunch at Savour and Devour, Grey Lynn, Auckland

There's something about the name 'Savour and Devour' that makes it really fun to say out loud.  Go on, say it with me: Savourrrr and Devoooouur.  You can't help but say it in your late-night-radio-DJ voice, sporting your best come hither look.

But the cool name is not the only reason to go to Savour and Devour, the food was pretty incredible too.

Yum Cha at Pearl Garden, New Market, Auckland.

It was a good friend's birthday a couple of weeks ago and she didn't want to make a fuss about it, so stayed pretty low key around the time of her bday.  So low key in fact, the day came and went without us getting together to celebrate.  Well, we weren't having any of that!  So A and I locked her in for a belated bday lunch at Pearl Garden in New Market.

Review: Jafa, Grey Lynn, Auckland.

The NZ Herald gave Jafa a rave review recently, so when the girls decided to have brunch on the Saturday of the Queen's Birthday weekend, we picked Jafa for a girly catch up.