Kitchen Alchemy

We had an odd set up at our place when I was a kid. My dad was a salesman, and his territory was the far reaches of country New South Wales. So he would leave for work on Monday mornings - well before dawn - and come home on Friday nights. Mum had a job as an egg collector on a chicken farm. She mostly worked Saturdays and Sundays, so my sister and I were faced with a unique situation - Mum all week, Dad on weekends. Dad was not as experienced a cook as Mum so often in her absence, we were confronted by some very er... whacky meals. And tha'ts putting it politely! I remember one meal of scrambled eggs which were hopelssly burnt. We smothered them in tomato sauce and ate them. Another of Dad's favourites was Camp Pie - a remnant of his Army days, and a sure fire way to catch Mad Cow's disease these days, is you ask me (Camp Pie is tinned English beef). One thing Dad did serve up to us, which he considered povo food, but which we thought was a gastronomical delight, was boile...

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A quiet revolution has been taking place in cafes around the world. It is a revolution that is round, approximately two to three inches high, and comes in multiple colours with a plethora of flavours to make even the most stalwart dieter come skipping with delight. It is the humble cupcake I am talking about. No longer left solely for kiddies parties, cupcakes are taking the place of fatty friands, mega-muffins and banana bread as the preferred morning snack. But just what is it about cupcakes that has taken hold of our tastebuds? I cast my mind back to the parties I attended as a child, and the sweet fare spread across the table that was nothing short of a sugar-fest designed to titillating our tiny tongues and send us home in an insulin haze. My party preferences were always sausage rolls and cocktail frankfurts for savouries, followed by fairy cakes and toffees for sweets. I was also partial to chocolate crackles, but knew full well that ingesting an entire one meant certain sicknes...

There are times in your life when you realise it’s just possible that friends can do as much for you as family can – if not more. I was nineteen years old when I first figured this out. It was my first year out of high school. I’d been working for about eight months as a proof reader in a Braille publishing facility. I still lived at home but I’d bought my first car and I was fast becoming an independent young woman. My birthday is in September, and up until that point, my school friends and I had been in the habit of going out to restaurants to celebrate. My friends at the time were Tory, Leanne, Lisa and Tracey and sometimes Larrissa, although she came and went from the group. I hung with Tory the most, because we liked going clubbing together. We often took Tracey with us, and we frequently caught up with Lisa, who had moved into the city with another friend Peisha. But we were all in Penrith the weekend of my nineteenth birthday, and I had been told that I was in for a birthday sur...

A few years back when I was still single I decided Christmases were better spent with friends. My inaugural Christmas trip away from family was to Cairns to visit an old school friend Peisha. She was actually my first flatmate too, and was very instrumental in teaching me how to be a high stepping Eastern Suburbanite. I had lost track of Peisha years previously. She had gone off to live in Italy, I’d had a stint in Hong Kong, and it wasn’t until 2002 when I was organising my high school reunion that I finally located her whereabouts. She’d been in Cairns for several years, and while she couldn’t make it to the reunion, we did catch up for lunch and then dinner when she was in transit to and from Italy. At dinner I quite unceremoniously invited myself to Christmas at Peisha’s. It was really rude, when I think about it. Luckily for me, Peisha was a very welcoming host. She owned a fantastic big old Queenslander which was a complete two bedroom house upstairs and a whole second three bedr...

Back in 2003 when I began my most recent baking odyssey, I acquired a Sunbeam Mixmaster – the remake of the classic retro mixer from the fifties. My mother had a Mixmaster which she bought in the seventies, and which I did most of my cake baking with as a teenager (when the obsession truly took hold). She still has that Mixmaster today, although it is significantly worse for wear – the plastic cover over the light is broken and they haven’t made the bulbs for years, so there’s a “live” cavity where the light bulb should be. I can vouch for that because I stuck my finger in there accidentally last year and got a nice shock from it. I paid quite a lot of money for my Mixmaster and it held pride of place on my kitchen bench for three years. That is until I had it running one Sunday and one of the motors blew up! I discovered that the twin motor “600 watt” power it claimed worked in two ways: 1. to run the beaters; 2. to turn the turntable the bowl sits on. After seeing flames shooting fro...

The first cat I ever knew was Bill. Sir William Sneddon, to be precise, but Bill to everybody who loved him. Bill was a completely black cat with yellow jewel-facetted eyes. He arrived in our family when I was about four or five years old, and became a constant source of enjoyment to my sister and I. He was an incredibly tolerant cat - allowing us to mess with him in a way most young cats would never allow. My sister and I particularly enjoyed dressing Bill up in dolls clothes. We'd put a frock on him, complete with a lacey bonnet, then put him to bed in my sister's dolls craddle. Mostly he'd stay there for a second or two, then bolt, sending my sister and I into peals of laughter as he tried to walk away without tripping on the skirt of the frock, his dignity only just in tact. But there was one occassion when Bill actually thought the craddle was a good option - we have pictures of him occupying that little bed for a nice afternoon kip, blanket and all! Our back yard was ...

A few years back I took a stab at starting a cake design business. I lay in bed at night thinking about the kind of cakes I would really enjoy eating, whether I bought them from a cake shop, or whether they were sold in a chi-chi city cafe. I settled on three different creations, each one individual sized, and proceeded to work out the recipes for the cakes of my dreams. I invited six of my close friends over for an afternoon tea (a tradition that is seriously underrated, let me tell you!) and greeted them with a table covered in cakes - a pink one, a chocolate one, and an orange one. I watched pure excitement creep over their faces as I gave them free license to try ALL THREE of the cakes. They sat down, plates in hand, and began to sample my work. I viewed the table with an overly critical eye - one is always more critical of one's own creations than is necessarily within reason, don't you think? Never the less, I announced that I felt the orange cake was incomplete. My frien...

I used the recipe for Traditional Christmas Cake as my wedding cake [http://www.ourspringwedding.blogspot.com]! I had to cook three large round fruit cakes to produce my wedding cake, which was a three level high column cake. I actually ended up making six cakes - three that were the right size, and three smaller ones with all the cake mix I had left over. I aged the cakes for six to eight weeks, and found they were still quite moist regardless. I consultated a lot of cake experts, and despite the cake decorating instructions saying otherwise, I did a few things to the cake which in the end caused more problems than improvements. Namely, I sandwiched the cakes together with marzipan which eventually liquified thanks to the weight and moist of the fruit cake. I also stuck wooden skewers through the cakes to provide them with more stability. The skewers ended up poking through the fondant, which luckily was covered by the flowers all over the top. I wanted to use crispy white egg white i...

My sister was in the Brownies when she was a kid. She put on her uniform every week and went off somewhere mysterious to me, taking pledges, doing things to win badges... she even went off on a camp (which made me interminably envious because it required she be bought a pair of bedsocks). She made Brownies look like it was fun. As soon as I was old enough, I begged my mother to let me join. The problem was, my sister's Brownie pack was too big. So they formed a new pack which it was determined would meet in the new hall. Now the new hall wasn't like the old hall - it had been brought to town on the back of a truck and had been plonked down next to the old hall on ugly, exposed brick stilts. It had none of the dignity of the old hall - it was garish and offensive. To make matters worse, the new pack would have a new Brown Owl. She took forever to turn up, and when she did, she didn't seem to know what she was doing. Her tongue was sharp, her tone snappish; she seemed more th...

When I was a kid I ate a lot of eggs. Both my mother and my father served them up to me in all manner of ways – soft boiled, as omelettes, and scrambled. I think my favourite might have been soft boiled, but only because Mum also made me very excellent toast soldiers slathered in butter to dip into the runny egg yolk. Yuk! I would never eat such a thing now. I had a bad run in with eggs in the late seventies, thanks to my Mum taking up a job as an egg collector on a Steggles Chicken farm. That job knocked two stone off my mother’s figure in a matter of weeks! It was totally hard yakka – dirty, hot and the chickens, especially the roosters, were not friendly in the slightest. Mum came home one time with a massive gouge down the side of her face – a rooster had gone for her and sliced her cheek open with one of its claws. She didn’t need stitches, thank God, but the attacker left his mark. Even after all these years, there’s still a feint line across Mum’s cheek. Mum used to...

When I was a kid we lived in a part of Newcastle that backed onto a massive expanse of paddocks and swamp. Our neighbours kept horses and cows in those paddocks, so we were lucky enough to grow up and a bona fide built up area with more than a little bit of country sensibility included. Despite this, and contrary to the desires of so many little girls, I did not spend my childhood pestering my parents for a pony. More over, I never even asked any of my neighbours if I might ride one of their horses. They were for looking at and feeding. Nothing else. One horse in particular, Boomerang, seemed to me to distinctly be the kind of horse one should never ride. My mother, my sister and I squeezed through the gate in the back fence one afternoon with the intention of feeding Boomerang and a couple of the other horses some apples that had gone soft. Unfortunately for us, Boomerang spotted the apples in our hands and came galloping towards us at a rate of knots. When we realised he wo...

For some strange reason, my parents never christened my sister or me when we were babies. Christenings aren’t that popular any more – people simply hold a naming day. But back in the sixties, Christianity was still in, so it was the norm to have a baby Christened. My sister was Christened when she was eleven years old – mainly so she could be confirmed a few weeks later with all her sixth grade classmates. As it turned out, I was also Christened when I was eleven – not because my parents were trying to establish some whacky kind of tradition. It was more about convenience. My cousin was being Christened – she was six months old at the time. I remember standing at the front door one night, farewelling my Aunty Kathy and my uncle Yuri. They were telling Dad about their plans to have Tashi Christened at the Wayside Chapel, by the Reverend Ted Knoffs, who’d Christened Tashi’s older brother three years previously. “We’ll get Pet done at the same time!” my dad declared! He and Mum w...

As a child my first encounter with sugar came when my dad slipped a chocolate under both my sister’s and my pillows while we were asleep. I woke up and found the chocolate and ate it immediately. My sister was still asleep at that point, so I got out of bed, retrieved her chocolate, and ate that too. This early acquired obsession led me to an exploration of sugary after school delights, in the absence of my parents of course! My favourite, for sheer ease of access, was the chocolate sprinkles jar. Step one: remove lid. Step two: pour contents into mouth. Repeat until satiated. I tried this one on my little brother recently. Since I’m a grown up and he’s not, I think he was shocked by my childish behaviour! Another favourite after school snack was Milo mud. You get a glass, half fill it with Milo, drip some fresh milk into and mix it until it forms a thick, pasty mud. Then you eat it with a spoon. I also liked making sherbet – only I didn’t bother with the excessive sift...

An anonymous reader left a message saying they'd over cooked their fruit cake, so I thought I'd add some more on this topic. Firstly, I want to say that where cooking is concerned, let your intuition be your guide. Begin with the aroma of the thing you're cooking - in this instance, the fruit cake. Your cake will release its aroma as it begins to reach completion. That's the time to start checking on its progress! 1. Check the surface of the cake. Is it shiny? Is it sticky? These indicate it's not yet cooked. 2. Pierce the centre with a skewer, pushing all the way to the bottom of the tin. Draw the skewer out and check for raw cake mix. If the skewer is clean, the cake is cooked. 3. Is time up? I've found all my fruit cakes require the full cooking time. I then give them an extra 15 minutes, just to be sure. 4. Is the aroma making you want to get out a Christmas tree and decorate it? Do you feel like bursting out into song? Namely, Christmas carols? If ...

I’ve mentioned my first cat, Bill, and I’ve mentioned my current furry friend, Derek, but I think I have completely overlooked Angus, the gorgeous ginger manx who came to live with us when I was seventeen years old. Angus came to us via Vesna, a girl at school who lived on a farm out near Ludenham. She spread the word at school that she was giving away kittens, and I thought my sister, who had just moved in with her boyfriend, was in desperate need of a little kitty kat. It took some time for Angus to be handed over – he was the last of the litter, and the runt to boot. His mother kept taking him off and hiding him in the paddock because she didn’t want to lose her last baby. Never the less, Vesna arrived at school one day with Angus in a box. He hadn’t been weaned yet, so I had to take him to Mrs Knoffs, an art teacher and a well known animal lover, who helped me show Angus how to drink milk from a saucer. He was a sweet little ginger and white angel who attended French class (he...

There have been some excellent animals that have transitted in and out of my life since I was three years old. Scrunch the Sydney Silky, Bill the black cat, and Angus the ginger manx. And for the last almost nine years there's been Derek Dog, a mad mini-foxy who isn't very mini at all and to my knowledge, isn't really aware that he's a dog at all. Derek carrived at a time when I really needed a friend. He was so insane as a puppy, he was an extremely good diversion from the woes that characterised that period of my life. He ate anything - my Converse One Stars, my best black lace bra, even the stone feet on my magazine rack! In fact, he was so crazy, I'm not even sure I really liked him until he'd clocked up his second birthday. But these days, Derek actually astounds me with his complexity of character. He is very cleary an individual with his own agenda and his own preferences. His daily antics never fail to infuriate and amuse me all at the same time....

In my family there is no greater tradition than the Christmas Cake. Unless of course we're talking about Christmas Pudding! As a little kid, I had absolutely no interest in either of these fruit-laden, booze laced Christmas staples. Their flavour was far too complex and mature for me to appreciate. It wasn't until well into my twenties that I started to take an interest in the fruit cake and puddings my mother makes. She and her sisters had obviously learned the art of Christmas cookery from my Nana, who cooked a wicked fruitcake in her heyday, if I do say so myself. But my interest in Christmas cookery always lay with the sweeter delicacies we liked to enjoy on the day - rum balls, coconut ice, mixed spice biscuits. I appointed myself at a very early age to cook the Christmas fancies, and took great delight in seeing my family devour them and grow fat as a result! A couple of years back, my dad suddenly passed away. When Christmas came round that year, my mother arrived...

I can't say I ever remember having pizza as a kid growing up in Newcastle - other than the horrid frozen abominations McCain's stocked in the freezer section of our local supermarket. Imagine my delight, then, when we moved to Penrith and discovered the full flavoured authentic Italian pizza served at Capitano's on the High Street. In fact, there were two pizzerias on the High Street - Capitano's and Renee's. My dad was attracted to Capitano's because it was more of a sit down affair than Renee's - if you dined in at Renee's you invariably had to sit in full view of the passing traffic (the seats were in the window), whereas Capitano's had a proper shopfront with tables and chairs set up well away from the window. Capitano's became a regular occurrence in our new lives in Penrith. We went grocery shopping every second Thursday, and always began the evening with a meal, either at Capitano's, or at a little burger cafe in the Medibank Arcad...

Tea. It's something that we very much take for granted these days. When we want one, we just put the kettle on, whack a tea bag into a cup, pour boiling water over the bag, jiggle it a bit and voila - a good ole' cuppa! But that's not the kind of tea we drank when I was a kid. We had a tea pot, a tin of tea leaves and a well weathered strainer. Tea bags were non-existent in my house! My parents loved a well brewed cup of tea. They also liked a good sleep in. So when I was about eight years old, I appointed myself the official maker of Breakfast In Bed. The menu was simple: toast and tea. Toast was easy enough, but the first time I made a pot of tea to go with it, I was mortified by my father's reaction. "Cat's pee!" he exclaimed after one little sip. This of course would be enough to crumble the enthusiams of most kids, but not me! The following Sunday I set about working on my tea making technique - with a little bit of coaching from Mum,...