May 1-2, 2009: Red velvet cupcakes

Brownies weren't my only contribution to the tea party. This party's premise was the 30th birthday of a rather smashing lady, and I felt compelled to scroll through my Dessert bookmarks for more inspiration. Red velvet cupcakes caught my eye. This version comes from Simply Recipes and is written by cupcake creative Garrett McCord - I'm a regular and admiring reader of his other food blog, Vanilla Garlic.

The 'red' in 'red velvet' doesn't come from raspberries, beetroot or any other produce; it's the biggest dose of red food colouring you might ever ingest in a sitting. The cake also includes a little cocoa but doesn't have a strong chocolate flavour at all. These proved to be pleasant and mild; it's their looks that are more memorable.

But, oh - the icing! Red velvet cake is iced not with traditional buttercream but with a cream cheese-based version. And it was the lightest, smoothest spoonful of heaven I may ever have tasted. It seems likely that I will never bother with buttercream again (though ganache will probably still get a guernsey at other times and places). Not one for piping, I slathered it onto the cupcakes with a teaspoon and rather liked the effect.

Garrett's recipe is a fabulous rendition of a southern U.S. favourite. The cake has a lovely texture, but I reckon it's the icing that's the absolute keeper - I'm looking forward to teaming it with other flavours.

Red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing
(a halved, metric-fied, and Aussie-spelled version of Garrett McCord's recipe at Simply Recipes)

cake:
3/4 cup sugar
60g butter, softened
1 egg
1 1/6 cups plain flour
1 tablespoon cocoa
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup buttermilk
3/4 tablespoon red food colouring
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon white vinegar

icing:
60g butter, softened
120g cream cheese, softened
1 - 1 1/2 cups icing sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Set 10-12 cupcake papers into a cupcake baking tray.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. (I had real trouble with this! Most likely because my butter hadn't softened enough.) Beat in the egg thoroughly.

In a large bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa, bicarb soda, baking powder and salt. In a second smaller bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, vinegar, vanilla and red food colouring.

Gradually and alternately beat the flour and buttermilk mixtures into the sugar/butter/egg mixture, until the cake batter is smooth and homogeneous.

Spoon the batter into the lined cupcake tray, filling each cup about two-thirds full. Bake for 18-22 minutes, checking them with a skewer. Allow the cakes to cool before icing them.

For the icing, cream together the butter and cheese, then beat in the vanilla. Gradually beat in the icing sugar until the sweetness is to your taste (I found that 1 cup of icing sugar was just right). Slather the icing onto the cupcakes.

May 2, 2009: Ray III

With all of the new breakfast options popping up around the place, it's been a long time since we made it up to Brunswick to visit our old favourite Ray. Not much has changed in the intervening months - same laid back, slightly disorganised staff, same Middle-Eastern inspired breakfast menu and the same divine coffee.

We both decided to try something new - Cindy went with the French toast with sweet labna and maple syrup ($8 - see above). The Turkish bread makes a particularly good French toast, and the combination of labna and pistachios works nicely. It was probably a bit heavy on the maple syrup, and could have used a bit of fruit to mix things up a little. Still, at $8, this is an oustandingly good value sweet brekkie.

As much as I love the poached eggs at Ray, I decided to branch out and try the Baharat baked beans with chilli, labna and toasted pide ($8.50).

This was a rich savoury delight, heavy on the chilli and loaded up with a wide variety of beany goodness. Again, the bread was top notch, and the whole meal really hit the spot - by the end I wasn't even regretting the lack of eggs.

It's nice to see that Ray is keeping things steady - great breakfasts, amazing prices and delicious coffee. You can read about our previous trips to Ray here and here.

April 29-May 2, 2009: White chocolate brownies

Over April and May, Robyn pulled a little trick in the calendar she made for me. Choosing a recipe too long to fit on one page, she revealed the tantalising list of ingredients for white chocolate brownies in April, leaving me hanging until May to actually see the preparation method! This actually worked out well - I baked the brownies late in April for a tea party held on the first weekend in May.

As you can see from the photo, this brownie isn't without cocoa solids. In fact, there's almost half a kilo of three different kinds of chocolate in the smallish tray I baked. The batter, which contains some of this chocolate, serves as little more than a binder for the chocolate chunks. As a consequence this is one of the firmest and least fudgy brownies I've sampled. That didn't affect its popularity, though - the 24 modest pieces that I cut this into had completely disappeared before I left the party.

A quirk of the original recipe was the inclusion of 125g plain flour and 40g self-raising flour. I don't keep self-raising flour in my pantry since it can be substituted with a combination of plain flour and baking powder. By my scrawled estimations, this recipe is requesting 164g plain flour and just a gram of baking powder (give or take, uh, a gram). I humoured my batter with that pinch of baking powder, but given that our favourite brownie recipe doesn't include any leavening, I suspect these can safely be baked without it.

White chocolate brownies

125g butter
150g milk chocolate
50g dark chocolate
1/2 cup castor sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
165g plain flour
125g white chocolate, chopped
125g milk chocolate, chopped

Preheat over to 170°C. Grease and line a 20cm square cake tin with paper.

In a medium-sized saucepan over low heat, melt the butter, first 150g milk chocolate and the dark chocolate. Remove the saucepan from the heat and allow it to cool for about 10 minutes.

Whisk the sugar and eggs into the melted chocolate butter. Thoroughly stir through the flour, then fold through the chopped chocolate. Pour the brownie batter into the cake tin, smoothing over the top. Bake for about 30 minutes, testing with a skewer.

April 30, 2009: Gigibaba

28/02/2013: Based on Ed's tweet, it appears that Gigibaba is no more.

Both the blogosphere and traditional media have been abuzz over Gigibaba since it opened about 6 months ago. Its no-bookings policy means that it's almost impossible to get a table on demand after 7pm on any night of the week (though turn up at 6pm on a weeknight and you've a good chance of scoring your seats straight away). We spent about 40 minutes relaxing at Grumpy's Green across the street after Michael added his name to the wish list.

The menu offers well over a dozen teeny tasting plates and about a third as many main dishes. It's worth noting that the menu seems to change regularly. On this night, none of the mains were vegetarian (save for the choban salata lingering alone at the end of the same menu page), but almost half of the tasters are veg-friendly and I was happy to graze my way through them. These saucers of food are so teeny, in fact, that Michael and I tried every vegetarian dish on the menu except one (the salt cured black olives, since you asked).

Before we go any further, let me apologise for the photos. This is a hip and in-demand establishment; the lights are low and the majority of customers (including Michael and I) are seated at a bar, facing the jovial but bustling staff. It wasn't a night for flash photography or desktop tripods! Moving on to the subject of this photo - Gigibaba offers great bread. And though they'll present it in smallish servings, there seems to be a bottomless supply of this soft sourdough.

And what better way to enjoy fine bread than with baba ganouj ($6)? It was lick-the-plate fabulous, though baba ganouj often seems to have that effect on me.

These are cabbage sarma ($8), cabbage rolls stuffed with flavoured rice. They were pleasant, but a little bland to my taste.

The tomato and capsicum ezme ($8), by comparison, was vibrant in colour and acidic flavour, with lots of oily juice to mop up with our second bowlful of bread.

The smoked eggplant salad with basil and roast peppers ($9) seemed almost like a fusion of the smoky baba ganouj and tangy ezme; a great combination but a little repetitive under the circumstances.

Michael was rather keen for the slow braised runner beans (fasulye, $8), but their mild saltiness didn't quite live up to his expectations.

The hummus ($6) was lovely, but suffered by arriving after the knock-out baba ganouj.

We finished off our savoury succession with the sprightly choban salata ($8), a mix of tomato, cucumber, onion and parsley, dressed in lemon juice and olive oil.

It's not often that I sample seven savoury plates and find room for dessert! Here I like Gigibaba's style - rather than offering a dessert menu, the chef provides a selection of sweets that follow his current whim ($8 per person).

The baklava was stuffed with walnuts and though it was certainly sugary, it wasn't dripping with syrup as they often are. I liked that.

This is a sliver of poached quince, draped with a creamy choc-hazelnut sauce.

Finally, a pot barely larger than a thimble. It contained a panna cotta-like dish scented with rose water and topped with tangy pomegranate seeds.

Michael washed his share down with a Turkish coffee, while I opted for the sweeter, less caffeine-laden option of apple tea.

Our Gigibaba experience was a most pleasurable one, but we're in no rush to return for more. It's in ridiculously high demand and while the food is excellent, the tiny portions and less-tiny prices make for an extravagant night out. The aromas wafting from the kitchen hint that there are some amazing spices and marinades that us vegetarians are missing out on; given the $90 bill we racked up, I'd guess that the $55-per-head banquet could offer great value for the omnivores, at least. As for us, we're more likely to be requesting a more accessible table at Cafe Zum Zum, Rumi or Cafe Najla when we're in the mood for a Middle Eastern-style feast.

Address: 102 Smith St, Collingwood
Ph: 9486 0345
Fully licensed
Price: veg plates $6-9, dessert $8

April 25, 2009: Cryptic cookies

This is my first attempt at something from the sweeter side of Veganomicon. For all their Plain Jane looks, I've dubbed these cryptic cookies for a reason - they have a lot more going on than they let on at first glance. The initial hint for the non-scoffer is the curious aroma. The first bite confirms it to be rose water; then there's sourness before sweetness and as chewing continues, a golden roastedness and hint of salt to round out the flavour.

The rose water's backed up with an all-star line-up of vanilla, lime, cardamom and sesame seeds. These are actually supposed to be decorated with chopped pistachios (hence their original name, pistachio-rosewater cookies) but designated shopper Michael lamented that there wasn't a pistachio to be had in Fitzroy, and I took a chance on the sesame seeds in the pantry. I wasn't immediately convinced, yet they snuck their way into my favour over the course of a few cookies.

Isa and Terry promise cookies "pretty as a picture" and I'm sure they'd be a little more eye-catching if studded with the recommended pistachios. However, my dough was far too runny to roll into balls so they seemed doomed to this blobbly shape. I can imagine, though, how lovely they'd look if the dough was piped into thick S shapes using a star-shaped nozzle. Warm from the oven, the cookies had the perfect balance of crisp outer and chewy centre; once cool they were uniformly crunchy, a fine candidate for dunking in tea.

Cryptic cookies
(based on the pistachio-rose water cookies in Veganomicon, by Isa Moskowitz & Terry Romero)

1 1/4 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup canola oil
3 tablespoons oat milk
1 tablespoon rose water
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
juice and zest of 1 lime
1/4 cup cornflour
1 3/4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 cup sesame seeds

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line a baking tray or two with paper.

Whisk together the sugar, oil, milk, rose water, vanilla, lime juice and zest in a bowl. Whisk in the cornflour until the mixture is smooth. Thoroughly mix through the flour, baking powder, salt and cardamom.

Drop large teaspoons of the dough onto the baking sheet, leaving plenty of space between cookies. Sprinkle the blobs with sesames seeds, then bake them for 10-13 minutes (mine needed no more than 10 minutes). Allow them to cool and firm up on the tray for 5 minutes before transferring them to a rack.