Kitchen Alchemy

There would be few people in Western civilisation who haven't heard of the cola juggernaut, Coke. But how many of us have ever heard of Inca Kola? My husband and I stopped at the markets in Bondi Junction this morning to show off our baby son to some stallholder friends who sell South American food. Displayed amongst the cans of Coke on their counter was a gold can labelled "Inca Kola". I asked what it was and my husband spouted some wise crack that's not worth repeating here. I can't resist trying something curious and new, so I laid out $2.50 for a can of Inca Gold and cracked it open. I peered in through the hole in the top of the can and what do you know - liquid gold in a can! I took an eager sip and was surprised to find that Inca Gold tastes a lot like creaming soda. It is neither black, nor has that acidic, tooth decaying, gut destroying quality of other colas we all know and drink from time to time. I looked Inca Gold up on Wikipedia and discovered ...

It's not often that I will plug someone's product on this blog. But when you find something really good, I don't think I should hold back. While shopping at Campbell's Cash & Carry this week, I checked the freezer for their bulk buy cakes and found something new - Chef's Pride Raspberry Dessert Sauce. Sold frozen in a 500ml squeezy bottle, you simply snip the top of the squeezy tube and squeeze onto what ever you like. I immediately saw applications for my husband - he continues to be obsessed with raspberries and yoghurt. Since the cost of the raspberry sauce is comparative to a 500g box of frozedn raspberries, I thought we'd give the raspberry sauce a try. I fully expected, since it is labelled as a dessert sauce, that the tart raspberry flavour would have been destroyed with sugar. Not the case! This little beauty couldn't have tasted better if I had made raspberry coulis myself. I tried squeezing it around a plate with a chocolate cupcake on it...