Kitchen Alchemy

When I was a little girl I absolutely loved the idea of the Easter Bunny. On Easter Saturday night I would go to sleep knowing when I woke on Sunday morning, there would be a swathe of chocolate eggs wrapped in shiny coloured foil waiting for me beside my bed – my very own sugar treasure trove to consume as I pleased, all delivered by a mysterious chocolate-making rabbit. I wouldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old when my sister decided to reveal to me the true identity of the Easter Bunny. She explained that our mum would wait until we were asleep, then sneak in and place the eggs beside our beds. I could not believe this was true so I hatched a plan to wait and see who exactly brought me my Easter eggs. It wasn’t easy staying awake – after all, I was just a little kid and I led a busy life! By bedtime I was normally exhausted! But I didn’t have to wait long until a shadowy figure appeared in the doorway and then snuck into my room. I remember it well, because I wa...

Now that I have a little boy, I find myself more and more preoccupied with thoughts of home made foods I can make him to eat. It’s so easy as a parent to just buy stuff and feed it to your kid. But when I think about my childhood and the foods I lived off, I mostly remember foods made by my mother for my sister and I. Yes we were bought packet biscuits – my favourites were Tim Tams and Rocky Rounds. But they were expensive “special occasion” biscuits and we weren’t treated to them often. If I wanted them, I usually had to trade crackers with butter and vegemite for my school friend’s chocolate biscuits (she had them all the time). But nothing made me happier than to open my lunch box and find a cupcake or a couple of biscuits, baked by my mum. Her specialty in the biscuit department was a coconut cookie that she topped with either pink or green sugar. She actually coloured the sugar herself. These days I buy kilos of coloured sugar at a time for cupcake purposes – it’s lazy, I...

When I was little my mother always included a pavlova as part of our Christmas fair. She loved Christmas pudding with brandy custard, but it just wasn't the kind of thing that kids enjoyed. So she would always make a pavlova for my sister and I - of course she and Dad ate the pav as well as the pudding. That pavlova has legendary status in my mind. I remember watching Mum mixing the merignue in a steaming pot sitting in another filled with boiling water on the stove. She'd have her electric hand mixer working over time as the meringue thickened and began to crust around the edges of the pot. Mum always coloured the pav - pink or green were the only colours in the seventies. When the meringue was ready she'd draw the outline of a dinner plate on a tray covered in foil, spread some meringue around the shape, then pipe a wall of meringue around it. Mum would put the pav in the oven, we'd go to bed, and in the morning, there it would be, a pink confection, still coo...

Well I haven’t gotten around to making the Caramel Cream Sponge yet. But I did have a chance to invent something new and special for a friend of mine who was celebrating a very special birthday. As her birthday guests snaffled the decorations off the side of her cake, I was reminded of my fifth birthday, where my friends did exactly the same thing. A lot of people ask me how I learned to make cakes, and I think that birthday would probably be the first time I was exposed to the art of sugar craft. My mum and Aunty Liz spent many nights hand moulding delicate pink sugar roses to decorate my fifth birthday cake. Back in those days a fondant decorated cake was normally white, but Mum decided mine would be pink. And usually the cake underneath was fruit cake, but Mum thought we could try chocolate and see how it worked out. I don’t remember if there was marzipan – there certainly wasn’t any chocolate ganache between the fondant and the cake. The thing I remember was being sung happy...

I've just come out of a meeting where I was day dreaming about a cake my dad used to buy when I was a slip of a girl. I'm going to call it Caramel Cream Sponge Cake. It was sold at a bakery a Greenhills Shopping Centre near Maitland, Newcastle. We didn't go to that shopping centre often. In fact, when I was a girl big shopping centres like Westfield or malls like Stockland weren't very common. I only remember going there a few times - one time being with my Aunty Liz when my little cousin stole a chocolate from the self select chocolate stand in Kmart. But that's a story for a different day. Dad took us to Greenhills once or twice during the time when Mum was working on the chicken farm as an egg collector. It was an awful job, and he'd buy a cake to have ready for when Mum arrived home. He had a thing for coconut and caramel, so the caramel cream sponge was the obvious choice: a double sponge with caramel and whipped cream in the middle sandwiched tog...

When I was 20 years old I got my first job in public relations, working for a boutique consultancy in Paddington, Sydney. Our office was in Underwood Street, which is parallel to Oxford Street, the main drag of Paddington and a major culture hub for the Eastern Suburbs. After working for a year in very boring and hum drum North Rocks, lunch times in Paddington were an exploratory delight. Apart from great shopping for nic naks at Opus (which is still there today) there was also a world of food that I was keen to sample. And because I was a mere slip of a girl in those days, I thought I could eat anything I liked, and dance it off at the clubs I went to four or five nights a week. One of my favourite destinations was the deli next door to the newsagency. They had a plethora of fillings to put on continental bread, but the thing they sold that I enjoyed most were Black and White Muffins. These were a black, squidgey, chocolate muffin topped with a gooey, cheesey white bit. The...

When I was a little girl, my family and I lived in a house that had a massive backyard (well it seemed that way at the time). In that backyard my parents took great delight in planting things that would yield food for us to eat. We had banana trees, which the cat enjoyed using as his personal scratching post. We grew strawberries and green beans in the veggie patch, which the dog enjoyed eating straight off the stalks. We had a peach tree, which never produced a peach worth eating. But we did have a lemon tree that fruited magnificently (which Mum frequently made lemon meringue pie from – a story for another day) and a passionfruit vine, which I regarded as my personal fruit supply. I would watch with anticipation as the passionfruit flowers bloomed and bees buzzed around them, working their magic. Soon after, green fruit would bud in the middle of the flowers and I would conduct daily checks to monitor their progress as they fattened and ripened. The second the passionfruit...

More and more we’ve found ourselves turning to big cakes for fun, and with our son’s first birthday approaching, Mark and I decided to put our imagination to the test. It started back in March when our friend Noah turned one. We begged his Mum to let us make him a jungle cake – a four tier high chocolate cake with fondant shaped like a canopy of leaves on top, sugar tree trunks up the side and animals looking out through the tree branches. It was such an easy and fun cake to make, we knew immediately we could adapt the design to lots of different ideas. We had a chance to repeat the jungle cake shortly after for a friend’s fifth birthday – albeit it without dairy. We were delighted to find replacing the butter in both the cake and icing had no impact on flavour or shape-ability. We swapped out the fondant tree tops for a piped royal icing instead and voila, our cake began to evolve. For our boy’s birthday, we knew we wanted an under water theme. I envisaged a blue cake with mottle...

I've been talking about it for years and finally it's happened - Kitchen Alchemy's first cupcake classes took place in June this year. With the help of a very organised friend, 11 ladies attended at classes presented by yours truly to learn how to decorate cupcakes. Because time was of the essence, no baking was included. However, cupcake recipes were provided for vanilla cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes and raspberry almond gluten free cupcakes. Each recipe was extensively explained to ensure when attendees tried their hand at baking at home, they had every chance of success. Since many in the class were Mums whose kids were approaching a birthday, two of the designs demonstrated were kids cupcakes. A tiger in the grass for boys, and a butterfly design for girls. But I also demonstrated how to decorate my double dutch chocolate cupcake, now that chocolate snaps are available again. And we finished off with a simple white glaze on the gluten free cake, dcorated with silve...

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...

When I first met my husband his interest in fruit was limited mainly to watermelon and bananas. Considering the wealth of fruit that is available in Australia, it was hard for me to understand how a person could be so exclusive in their enjoyment of what I consider to be the best part of summer eating. Yes – watermelon is definitely a great summer fruit! As a kid I had a book called “Summer” which concluded with a broadly smiling girl eating a whopping big wedge of watermelon. But summer, to me, says mangoes, nectarines, peaches, cherries, lychees and passionfruit. None of which my husband would choose to eat, or even put into the shopping basket. Yes, he’d eat apples – a staple in winter. But I couldn’t even get him to eat strawberries, simple and yet exotic, in my book. So imagine my surprise, several years into our marriage, when my husband comes home from work and announces he now likes raspberries! How, I enquired, did this come about? He worked at a training company that ...

As a child, my mother was very consistent in the way she went about preparing the feast we enjoyed each Christmas. In Australia, Christmas falls in the middle of summer, yet Mum always persisted in baking the traditional Christmas roast. I remember the oven going in the kitchen all day, while my parents made rare visits to the neighbours for a snifter of sherry, my sister and I playing cricket or totem tennis with the kids in the neighbourhood, pausing regularly to make an outfit change (we were always given about four complete outfits as part of our Christmas gifts). I loved those Christmases for their predictability. Mum only let us put the Christmas tree up the week before Christmas Day – I suspect it was her way of keeping a lid on the mania. We’d sit at the table and cut squares of red and green cellophane, and wrap bundles of Christmas lollies and nuts still their shells, and tie them to the tree as little gifts for kids who visited on or around the big day. Mum would make a...

I’ve often said that chocolate is one of the two original and best flavours on the planet. What I don’t often mention is that vanilla is the other. I recently discovered, much to my surprise and delight, that vanilla is the fruit of an orchid plant from Madagascar. In fact, the vanilla planifolia vine was transported to Madagascar from Mexico (and other French colonies) in the early 1800s. The vanilla plant is actually a vine, usually found winding itself around a bamboo plant or coconut tree, which grows an orchid-type flower. In Mexico, the vanilla flower is pollinated by a bee. Outside of Mexico, the bee cannot survive, so pollination is undertaken by human hand – a laborious process which is responsible for the incredibly expensive price of vanilla bean pods. The mature pods are harvested from the vine and dried to reduce the moisture content, thereby producing the distinct vanilla aroma we all know and love. I never stopped to question where vanilla came from before. Yet li...

When I was about 13 years old, my mum was invited by a work colleague to attend the Christening of her God daughter. This was a big deal because both she and the baby being Christened were Greek. If you know any Greeks, you'll know that everything they do is BIG, and the Christening was no exception. Despite us being significantly removed from the family of the baby, we were none the less welcomed with open arms to a joyous family occassion for something like 400 people. We attended the Christening ceremony at a Greek Ordthodox Church, which was an event in itself. While the structure of the building was hideous on the outside, the interior was incredibly ornate. The ceremony was entirely spoken and sung in Orthodox Greek - so we couldn't understand a word of what was said. And everyone in the church was clearly very Greek. We fifth generation Aussies looked distinctly unexotic next to everyone else. The God Mother stood proud as punch at the front of the church, holding the ba...

I don’t think there is an occasion more joyous than a wedding. Of course, once a wedding has taken place, many more joys follow, like the arrival of a long awaited baby. But it all starts with a wedding, and I find weddings to be chock-filled with hope. If you’re lucky, you only ever need to have one wedding – although some people have more than one, if not several! So the trick to getting your fill of wedding joy is to know lots of people who are planning on getting married. As a cake baker, I am getting to participate in weddings, baby showers, naming days and even funerals (although not too many of those, thank goodness)! I consider it a privilege to be invited to create cakes and cupcakes for these landmark occasions in people’s lives. We (my darling husband and I) always try extra hard to come up with something special that fits the occasion and the people who we’re baking for. And what we’ve discovered is trying extra hard allows us an opportunity for continuous improvement. When...

We are off to market again this week, with four new products to add to our range. We've had a great response so far to our three key products - chocolate, strawberry and vanilla cupcakes, but we decided we'd try a "flavour of the week" approach, and found that when ever we introduced something different, it sold out! Last Friday we tried chocolate meringues - they were gone by 11.30am! Then last Saturday, we tried raspberry passionfruit cupcakes, and again, they completely sold out. Our conclusion: variety is the spice of life. So this week we are bringing the raspberry passionfruit cupcake and chocolate meringues, along with a date and walnut and a banana cupcake to market. We're excited because it means we now have eight products! Hopefully we now have something for everyone. Even gluten free folks! If you're in the neighbourhood, do drop by and see us! We'll be at the Organic Food Market in Bondi Junction Mall, Sydney, Australia, from 8.30am to 5.00pm ...

My husband has always enjoyed the flavour of caramel more than chocolate, so last year when we went to Brest in Brittany, France, he was delighted to discover that caramel was also the preferred flavour in that region. On our first night in Brest we had the great pleasure to dine at a traditional Brittany restaurant with our friends and hosts. Of course crepes were the main item on the menu, and both Mark and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. I forget what I had for dessert because it paled in comparison to the confection that Mark accidentally ordered. When he ordered a bowl of caramel icecream for dessert he had no idea that there would be anything else in the bowl other than icecream. Imagine his surprise (and my utter envy) when the waiter placed a massive bowl of caramel and vanilla icecream covered with delicious, hot, runny, buttery caramel sauce, topped with whipped cream? Mark’s eyes nearly popped out of his head! In fact, it wasn’t just caramel that was so important to the...

We interrupt this blog to announce to chocolate and cupcake lovers every where that Cadbury Snaps are no longer available in Australia! Regular readers of Kitchen Alchemy will be familiar with our Double Dutch Chocolate cupcake, the crowning glory of which has been a Cadbury Snap. But no more! After an extensive search of the retail outlets in South Centennial and Pagewood, we can confirm that Snaps are no longer available on supermarket shelves. Rather than wonder in silence we decided to go straight to the source and find out who is to blame! A quick call to Christine at the Cadbury consumer information line confirmed what we at Kitchen Alchemy had long suspected: Snaps are a limited product only available at certain times of the year. In fact, Snaps are imported from the UK, where they come in additional exciting flavours like organge, hazelnut and honeycomb, as well as the flavours seen here: mint, caramel and of course the original. So, we are very sorry to announce that our Snap ...

Flush from the success of our first market stall, we've decided to plunge in the deep end and do it all again this weekend! It was hugely exciting to take our cupcakes to market last weekend. We were up and running by 8.15am, but didn't serve our first customers for at least another half an hour. When I finally relented and went off to get a latte, Murphy's Law kicked into play and Mark made our first sale in my absence. But further sales were fast to follow. It's great to see people we don't know happily purchasing our product and enjoying it! Apart from the odd homeless person (pickled in Jim Beam) we found the Bondi Junction Organic Food Markets an extremely pleasant place to spruike our wares. So we'll be there again this Saturday, July 12. Hope you can make it down to see us this time - and of course partake in a little piece of cupcake heaven.