Last weekend I was lucky enough to participate in a tradition totally new to me & not at all new to the boyf. Every year since they were youngins he & his sisters get together to make gingerbread houses.

It was pretty obvious it was my first time unfortunately. I’ve not yet mastered the roofing weight limits or the decorative sugar cement placement. I did however create a gummy bear fire pit scene. (The fire was a jaffa!)

The real masterpieces came from Brend’s sisters (and boyfriend) with decorative shutters, flake gravel roads, chocolate button tiles, and jaffa baring apple trees. There was even a chocolate car!

Brend’s house was less ‘perfectly pretty’ and more ‘all the colours & all the candy’. Closer to what our real lives are like instead of the lives in magazines.

We elected to keep our gingerbread house at Brend’s parent’s until xmas. Lest I start trying to sneak the bits no one will notice till the house is bare and crumbling.

+ // +

Everyone loves food. Delicious home cooked food is even better. Delicious home cooked food that mixes in all the best ingredients – best ever!

A pretty parcel of salted caramel cookies tied with a bow. Chocolate mixed with berries and chilli set into the shape of unicorns. Pint sized rainbow cakes in mason jars (if you do it right they will keep unopened for AGES so you can make them well in advance). Mini pulled pork or bacon and egg pies. Olive and rosemary bread. Jars of bacon infused whisky. The possibilities are endless and interesting.

However.

You could go one better for your people that love to cook.

Instead of making them something how about giving them the recipe and ingredients. Hand craft a fancy recipe card from card stock, doilies, and fat felt pens – you could even laminate it so the butter and flour wipes right off.
If it’s cookies or cake you could layer the dry ingredients in a jar. All they need to do is tip it into a bowl and add eggs and butter.

If you’re super amazing (and have lots of time) think about making a collection of your favourite recipes.

If you’re like me you’ve got recipes bookmarked all over the internet, post its in your cookbooks to mark pages, and print outs that people have emailed you. Type them up, scan them, or work on writing them out over the course of a year. Print them in a book. Stick them on themed recipe cards and present in a wooden box. Hand out card stock to everyone and get them to write up their favourites.

If you go the recipe card in a box option make sure you include a few blanks for them to fill in later. Note the size of them down for yourself and you’ve got xmas and birthdays sorted forever!

Boom.

We scored three artichokes for $1.50 in the sale bin at the supermarket yesterday which is a saving of $4.50 PER ARTICHOKE apparently.

I love artichokes but I’d never actually cooked and eaten them whole like this before, usually I’d have artichoke hearts with an antipasto platter or on a pizza. Brend reached back into his mind grapes to remember how they ate artichokes in Spain. People would turn up to parties with bags full of them and they’d steam them and eat them with nothing else!

We steamed ours for about 20 minutes until they went dark green, then dipped the edible parts of the leaves and the hearts in a butter, garlic, lemon thyme, and basil sauce. So good.

Make sure you get rid of all the fluffy stuff in the middle (the choke) before you eat the heart, it gets caught in your throat big time. No fun.

Did you know that making lamingtons is super easy if you use store bought sponge?

I’d only made these lamingtons once before, and they were the classic kiwi raspberry flavour. This time I decided to treat my friends to some lime lamingtons for our election gathering. Lime is green and most of us are Green voters. Geddit?

What you need:
1 store bought sponge cake
1 packet of jelly
Dessicated coconut

• Make jelly up with 1 and 1/4 cups of boiling water (instead of the 2 cups the pack asks for). Let it cool in the fridge till it just starts to set.
• Trim the dark edges off your sponge and cut it into about 12 pieces.
• Dip all sides of the sponge cake in cold jelly mix and then roll each piece in coconut.
• Repeat for all of your pieces. Cut a slit in each lamington and add cream if you like it like that.

How easy is that!

I fucking love laab. I actually came up with a back up career idea the other day in which I open I restaurant that makes nothing but laab. I would call it Laab Actually. Clearly I’m a genius.

Laab lends itself to puns quite nicely. We discovered this while in Asia and painfully tested it at every opportunity. We’d gorge ourselves on the delicious meaty salad and then groan that we were going into laab-er.

Laab is pretty easy to make. It’s a traditional Laotian meat salad. It’s meant to be served at room temperature, I prefer it slightly warmed though. It’s really as simple as throwing meat in a pan and cooking it. We’ve even made it slightly different every time, depending on what ingredients were at the market and what kind of meat we felt like eating.

Laab

or Larp or Larb or Laap

Ingredients for 3 servings

500g minced meat (beef, pork, chicken, turkey, whatever) or 1 filleted fish
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp fish sauce
1/2 Tbsp sugar
1 shallot – sliced
5 garlic cloves
Fresh or dried chilli depending on how hot you like your food. Traditionally laab is very hot.
100g lemongrass – thinly sliced. We use the rind of a lemon instead.

For serving
1 shallot – sliced
2 spring onions – sliced
1/2 cup of chopped mint or basil or coriander (best in that order, or in a combo)
Lettuce or cabbage leaves
Other salad vegetables like beans, tomatoes, and onion
2 Tbsp roasted rice powder

To make

• Fry the garlic and shallot in a splash of oil. Add the mince and brown.
• Add the lemon juice, fish sauce (more if you like it saltier), sugar, chilli, and lemon. Cook for a couple of minutes.
• Take it off the heat and add fresh shallot, spring onion, fresh herbs, and rice powder*.
• Serve with sticky rice** and cabbage or lettuce leaves.

Extra tips:
- If you’re using fish then marinade it first in the lemon juice with 1/2 tsp salt before squeezing and placing in the wok.
- If you like laab cold you can cook the meat first and leave it to cool. Add the rest of the ingredients once the meat has come to room temperature.
- Use more herbs if you like. The best laabs I had in Laos were full of mint.
- Feel free to not eat it with a salad. We stick to meat + herbs + lettuce + rice. In SE Asia it was usually served with cabbage cups but cabbage makes my stomach explode.

*Rice powder: Dry roast 2 Tbsp of rice in a pan then whizz in a food processor or grind in a mortar. It gives the recipe a crunch and a nutty flavour.
**Sticky rice: You should be able to find this in a good supermarket or at least your local Asian market. The easiest way to prepare it is to place a cup of rice in a bowl and just cover it with water for 10-15 minutes. Cover it with a plate and microwave for 1.5 minutes at a time until done.

1. Metropolis Cafe (Hamilton)



2. Coffee



3. Monterey (Newtown, Wellington)



4. Pies



5. Cambodian Seafood



6. Gin



7. Scones



8. Lasagne



9. Breakfast all the time

Viognier with Vigor. Another of the many themed gatherings I’ve attended lately. Another one centered around booze. (hurrah!)

It was the first time I’d ever tried Viognier and I’m sad now that I’ve been missing out! We tried 5 or 6 last night and they were all quite different but lovely in their own ways. The bottle I found by Anchorage was very fruity smelling, like melons and apricots. An excellent cheap option, and vegan to boot.

The winners though were wines by Coopers Creek and Terrace Heights Estate (THE). And us, for giving ourselves the chance to try a whole range of this full bodied “white wine for red wine drinkers”. Extra points to Jo for the idea and hosting, and to Laura who bought her cranberry white chocolate ice cream along. SO GOOD.

Honestly. People who say they would get bored if they won lotto and quit their jobs? Get a hobby and/or some friends you losers.

Shop

In shop news, orders need to be in by the weekend for shipping overseas by xmas time! After this weekend there will be a 2 week make time on custom jewellery until the new year while Super Laser Cutter Guy moves cities. As always email me (kim at cupcakesandmace dot com) or send me a convo on Etsy with any questions.

Having been introduced to good whisky by Brend and his Dad I’ve come to enjoy it without a mixer, or even ice. The way it should be consumed when the bottle is single malt and well aged, but the way it’s hard to drink when it’s blended and cheap.

Our friends like a wee dram of the good stuff as well. And so the Whisky Club was born. Every so often the host of the next Whisky Club gathering will buy a bottle or two of nice whisky to share, we all contribute $10 to pay for a share of the bottle, we gather, and we drink it. There is no room for wine, beer, or cider in whisky club. Not before all the whisky is gone anyway.

Yesterday was supposed to be a triple header of fun times. Mini golf, followed by a visit to Denny’s (my first time!), and concluding with Whisky Club. Unfortunately Wellington’s weather had different plans, as it is wont to do, and we had to cancel on mini golfing. The Denny’s plan remained intact and we grabbed the biggest booth in the place and filled the table with burgers, fries, pancakes, margharitas, coke floats, cakes, and breakfasts.

I pwned Denny’s. Chilli cheese fries to share, a millenium burger (meat + meat + cheese + bun. Making Ron Swanson happy), a pomegranate margarita, and a small stack of pancakes to finish (had to make Leslie Knope happy too). I have serious doubts about how I would have managed to get home if Jo hadn’t been driving. Way too much food. Maybe it was Denny that pwned me.

An hours rest between Denny’s and whisky gave me just enough time to digest a little and make some room for alcohol. On the table was Jura, a whisky we had seen on a show only days earlier and ordered from Whisky and More (who are awesomely discounted and have super fast shipping).

Jura is the smoothest whisky I’ve ever tried. Let’s just say it didn’t take long to go through the bottle between 8 of us…so we had to bring out the personal whisky and rum stash.

Can’t wait to do it again soon.

In other fun gathering news, a couple of weeks ago Laura and Tim hosted a mid-week Simpsons party! We ate Ribwich, pizza, all you can eat seafood buffet, twinkies, pickles, cheese slices, floor pie, and donut cake. We drank skittlebrau (occasionally through red vine straws). It was great.

This stuff is so good. Prior to the Asia trip my body couldn’t handle caffeine, I always figured it had something to do with my colitis, and while disappointing it just meant I couldn’t have coffee or coke like EVERYONE ELSE.

But, something magical happened in Vietnam. I tried the coffee and it was so delicious that I decided it was worth the stomach pain…and then there wasn’t any stomach pain. In fact since going to Asia my stomach has been the least sore it’s ever been in the past 10 years! I don’t know how or why, I just know that my medication is actually working really well. (I’m probably eating about 80% less dairy products as well.)

So, back to the coffee. It was delicious. In Vietnam your coffee is served with sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of the glass which you mix in to your liking. You can have it hot, ca phe sua nong; or over ice, ca phe sua da. We drank it over ice in the hot hot Vietnamese weather.

Vietnamese coffee is incredibly simple to make, a lot like plunger coffee. You’ll need a Vietnamese coffee filter that comes in three parts: the main pot, the lid, and the screw down damper; a glass; Vietnamese coffee; and sweetened condensed milk (though I have my hot coffee black now).

• Put a tablespoon or two of sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of your glass.
• Put a heaped tablespoon or two of coffee (Trung Nguyen is a good brand. You can get it at Yan’s in Wellington) in the filter and shake it down so it sits evenly. Screw the tamp on so it’s snug but not tight.
• Sit the filter on top of the glass with milk in it.
• Put a small amount of water in the filter and wait 20 seconds for it to swell the grinds.
• Fill the filter with water and place the lid on top.

• Coffee will drip through fairly slowly. It seems like everyone does it slightly differently depending on how strong they want it, so don’t worry too much if it seems like it’s going too fast or slow. If it tastes not quite right you can adjust your method next time.
• When all the water has dripped through take the lid and put it upside down on the table. Now it’s a tray for your filter! :D
• Stir the condensed milk into the coffee and then pour it over the ice if you’re having it cold.

Yum.

Brendan was determined long before arriving in Vietnam that he would eat pho for breakfast everyday while there. Once we finally arrived it was neither hard to convince him to stick to his plan or hard to find tasty pho wherever we happened to be.

Brend ended up loving pho so much he bought a shirt that says so.

I however am not a big fan. It’s fine, it’s just not something I seek to eat. Plus almost every recipe I’ve found for pho requires you to make stock from scratch with bones full of marrow. As if.

Thankfully I stumbled across a much quicker pho ga (chicken pho) recipe that just uses store bought stock and shredded chicken meat. It’s less traditional but brend still liked it and this is one pho I could eat often!

Pho Ga for Two

Ingredients
2 star anise
2 gloves of garlic
2cm ginger
600ml chicken stock (the better the quality the better it’ll taste)
1 Tbsp fish sauce
small onion (finely sliced)
1/4 tsp corriander seeds
A few cloves
1/3 cup water
pinch of salt
200g chicken thighs

Extras for serving
150g cooked rice vermicelli
sliced spring onion
bean sprouts
finely diced red chilli (chilli flakes are fine too)
Asian basil (regular basil will do if you can’t get Asian basil)
coriander
a lime or lemon cut into wedges

• Lightly fry the star anise, garlic and bruised ginger in a dry pan.
• Add the rest of the ingredients except chicken.
• Bring it to the boil. Add the chicken and simmer until cooked.
• Remove chicken and shred. Divide the chicken between two bowls.
• Cover with broth and add the extras to taste.

Pho is a dish that you really get to experiment with and everyone has it differently.
I like mine with lots of corriander, basil, and a couple of wedges of lime. Be careful when you’re adding chilli, it really gets into the broth and punches you in the face if you add too much.

I’m looking forward to modifying some pho bo (beef) and pho thit lon (pork) recipes using store bought stock instead of the undoubtedly tastier but far more painful way!