If bitters interest(s?) you, go read this description of a bitters tasting, complete with fascinating stuff like why the ‘Ango’ label is bigger than the bottle, and what goes with what: ‘Ango’ pairs well with rum, whisky, gin, coke (!), and coffee (!), but not with Cognac, while Peychaud’s works with Cognac, tequila and whisky, but not with gin.

Even more interesting is what led me to that post in the first place, which was my own sneaky suspicion that bitters and ice cream would rock. And so they apparently do – over at the Angostura site their advice is to ‘to dash 5-6 dashes of Angostura aromatic bitters onto some plain vanilla ice cream. Voila, your ice cream is transformed into a gourmet dessert!’:

Gourmet yawn. Nah, what we need is the bitters in the ice cream. I am talking rock shandy-flavoured creamy goodness. Made with creme fraiche, a touch of lemon, and plenty of the red stuff to offset all the sugar in the condensed milk. The perfect post-Christmas tonic.

Now excuse me while I go talk to my ice cream machine.

The next day (assured by Google that it wasn’t a completely hair-brained thing to do), I rolled blue cheese into the pastry. It looked a bit weird, but then I had a(nother) glass of wine and everything seemed fine. I cut it to size, scored it and put it on top of that Guinnessy goodness, gave it an egg wash, popped it in a hot oven and hoped for the best.

I was quite pleased with the result, but our dinner guest claimed it actually was the BEST Guinness pie she’d ever eaten. She’s apparently eaten lots (of Guinness pies), and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten any, so I’ll take her word for it. (Even if I do know that she on occasion eats baked beans out of a tin for dinner.)

So maybe I could get into this pastry thing. There is something rather splendid about taking a puffy golden pie out of the oven. And how cool is it to make funky crusts. What’s next: roast chicken with a goat’s cheese crust? The previously dreaded apple pie with a cheddar crust? (I now get the cheesy crust, but in a sweet pie??) What cheese goes with lamb?

Then again, maybe our guest wasn’t even talking about the crust. She did reveal that whoever used to make her Guinness pie pretty much put beef and Guinness in a pot with, like, nothing else. (Did I forget to mention that mine obviously included onions, celery, garlic, rosemary, tomato paste, salt, pepper, a squirt of Worcestershire, and extracts from the blood of a leprechaun?)

Whatever it was, it worked. As did the Guinness ice cream, which should really be called genius ice cream: sweet, bitter, creamy, and thanks to the addition of caramelised and salted cashews, salty and crunchy too. All food groups in one delicious mouthful (and then several more).

But no more food now. Is it beer o’clock yet?

Sláinte.

Alas (as one of my friends says way too often), with the last few months occupied mostly by getting through three burglaries, sino-bronchitis (ugh), finishing off one book, starting (and very soon finishing) another, oh, and teaching/marking/invigilating/attending meetings, I have regrettably failed to get it together.

But birthdays are no time for regrets. If he can’t throw birds at pigs, he can at least enjoy a solid Danish birthday breakfast (because nothing will stand in the way of me channelling my inner Viking):

These are kanelsnegle, or cinnamon snails. Did I go all out and make proper puff pastry? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the dough does contain an essential, if little known, ingredient for Danish pastries, which is ground cardamom (any “Danish” that does not contain cardamom is an impostor – could even be a Swede!). And with the leftover dough, this:

This does look pretty Danish, and it would be if it was full of stuff like raisins, cinnamon, and if we’re going to get really fancy schmancy, marzipan. Instead it’s stuffed full of Dairy Milk Whole Nut chocolate (for which there incidentally exists a very silly advert). To be honest, I don’t know if such an un-Danish thing has ever been pulled off before, and I have no idea how it will go down.

But how bad can cardamom-scented bread full of chocolate (for breakfast) really be? Pain au chocolat and all that. I’d sure rather eat that than a stack of double chocolate pancakes. There are limits!

Besides, we wouldn’t want to spoil our appetites, or dampen our fighting spirits. Imagine if a flock of angry birds suddenly pulled in and darkened the birthday sky…

I never thought I would get a fourth birthday card again, but this was a stroke of genius. See, just over four years ago, we had a little impromptu gathering with a few friends, telling them we had some important news. Thinking that we were oh-so clever and funny, we told them that we’re having a baby… and its name is wedding.

There were more than a few minutes of extreme awkwardness as our friends tried to figure out what the hell we were talking about, and how to respond. Or rather, they (all!) first understood it to mean that I was pregnant, and that we were going to call our child wedding. For some reason, both of those possibilities seemed to them silly/preposterous/insane, but they did what friends do and played along. I think a full half hour passed before someone was brave enough to ask if we were serious, and the truth finally came out: We were getting married (duh!).

Today Americans are going to gorge themselves on turkey and all manner of pies – some to ridiculous extremes - in the name of giving thanks (and good luck to them: I’ve attended one such shindig, and it was truly terrifying). Here, we give thanks to our wedding, which has finally grown out of its nappies and screaming fits and into something that’s old enough to be left in front of the television for a couple of hours a day. And since no birthday is complete without cake, I give you:

(Inspired by this banana cardamom cake with browned butter frosting: I added fresh ginger to the cake, substituted pistachios and coconut for the walnuts, and rum to the icing, because that’s how we roll.)

The best part? You can do this too!

All you need is:

1 good brownie recipe waiting for a new identity;

1 batch of goat’s cheese fudge lurking in the freezer (preferably homemade, and preferably blessed by Norwegian angels);

120 exam scripts to mark;

An oven.

In the approximate words of the immortal Nigella Lawson (or the Barefoot Contessa, or that Italian babe with the big head [GdL], or that annoying Brit who keeps annoying people whose job it is to involve themselves in childhood nutrition [JO], et al.), See how easy it is?

Anyhoo. Needed a gift for a dear aunt(-in-law), and needed to make something different. So I did what any good American housewife did, and I baked chocolate chip cookies. Not just any, of course. Only the best will do, which is apparently this number from the NYT. (They really are the best. All the bloggers say so.)

I’m usually intimidated by the sheer size of American-style things (those muffins: seriously?), but I must say I quite enjoyed scooping golf-ball size globs of batter onto the baking tray.

(That’s a sprinkle of salt on top, by the way. It’s the secret!) And then watching them turn into jumbo cookies:

Of course I tweaked the recipe. I added two teaspoons of ginger powder to the mix, and a handful of chopped preserved ginger. An inspired tweak it was!

But as good as these are – and I mostly hope aunty will think so too – I reckon my most important revelation was finally understanding why Americans confuse raw cookie dough with something that is appropriate for ice cream. I mean, just look at it. It’s suddenly an easy confusion to understand. Shame (as we say in this part of the world).

The Loading Bay, for all non-Capetonians (and that includes some of you who actually live in the city but who – like ourselves – roll on different wheels), is a clothing-accessory ‘luxury apparel’-coffee-food-shop. They serve food all day (including a burger), but Thursday nights they stay open just for burgers. ‘Capetonians’ know about this, and there are enough of them to make booking a necessity. This is how they describe their burger (veggie available too, but who cares):

Looks good enough, no? So we booked (accepting a rather early slot, which was the only one available), we went, and I got so Capetonian on that burger that I even ate the whole thing with my hands.

Yes, so I’m one of those irritating people who usually leaves the bread and tucks into the patty with a knife and fork (technical term: going Danish on a burger). It’s not that I don’t like bread. I like bread. A lot. It’s just that usually burger rolls turn into these soggy, useless discs of starch that add no value to the meal, except as useless, soggy starch. A bit like mashed potatoes, come to think of it.

But eating the Loading Bay burger was one of those rare experiences when the whole package just worked: good patty, righteous bun (lightly toasted, as I recall, and dense enough to serve a palatable function), good cheese, condiments, etcetera. Being a Capetonian is rather delicious, it turns out.

Then the Capetonian in me got greedy, and decided that we needed to search out the best burgers in town (which is a) yawn, and b) why bother when you’ve found something that works?, as my brother-in-law pointedly remarked of the venture). We have been impressively committed to the task, hitting some most of the spots people bother to talk and blog about in the burgerverse.

The results, in a word: Meh. With the exception, of course, of the glorious bacon and blue cheese numbers that the Philosophe himself conjured on the braai just the other night (coming a close second to another home-experiment involving hand-chopped meat and duck fat). And then there was this morning, when we found ourselves in the decidedly un-Capetonian hinterland of Somerset West Mall. Look, no-one forced us there. We happened to be driving past, and decided on the spur of the moment to watch a movie in the middle of the day (because that’s the sort of thing you can do when the only creatures you have to look after are yourselves, and three cats).

11am, an hour to kill. What to do? Spur of the moment indeed:

See that processed cheese? Now imagine some crispy bacon on there, and a good puddle of Spur’s secret BBQ sauce. And no, I didn’t eat the bread. But I had a bloody mary with it, and on a Sunday morning in Somerset West, it was the very best brunch to be had. Lessons learned (attention Heston Blumenthal!): why mess with something that works?

I know, I have said it time and again that I will stop this madness. But wait! This time I cracked it. Let me be clear: I have not found the perfect brownie, but I finally understand the brownie. And like all things in which one aspires to expertise, it has taken a lot of hard work. I have now read about, thought about, looked at, and actually baked, so many brownies that finding yet another page like this one no longer fills me with fear, trepidation, nightmares (!!), or the need to draw up shopping lists consisting of only eggs, chocolate, cocoa, sugar, butter and flour. Yes, there is a brownie called “Better Than Brad Pitt“, and I do not need it in my life.

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned is that you cannot trust pictures or words on the interwebs. (And, as Julia Moskin recently pointed out in The New York Times, you should not trust recipe search engines either). Take-home lesson: be distrustful.

Just look at this recipe, for example, for “Bakery Style Chewy Brownies“, which comes with this picture:

Well that looks like a pretty damn fine brownie, and the word “chewy” hits all the right tingly bits in my brain. But if you look at the original recipe, the description reads “Thick and almost fudge-like in consistency“… So what is it – chewy or fudgy? In the brownie world, those words are basically antonyms. Said recipe also tells us that “The key to this brownies [sic] yummy chewy top is beating the eggs and sugar together for several minutes until they become very light and fall off the beater in a ribbon, so definitely don’t skip that step.” Well, just the other day I made the famous Supernatural Brownies, and they got exactly the same top without beating the eggs for an age. (The supernaturals are supposed to be the “perfect chewy brownie“, by the way. They are not. They are damn tasty, but chewy they ain’t.) So if anyone tells you that you must beat eggs and sugar together for many minutes to get that special crackled brownie-top, just step away from the Kenwood and remember, that’s bullshit.

So in the spirit of distrusting everything I read, I decided to finally try these famed browned butter brownies, which are described as (ugh) “fudgy on the inside”. Here they are, in all their sweet-baby-jesus chewy goodness, and packed with peanut-power too:

Anyone for coffee and brownies? (If you don’t like peanuts, you can have Kahlua-toffee, or fudgy-peppermint…).

Oh, and one more lesson learned: brownies make an excellent breadbrownie-and-butter pudding. Soak chunks in custard, sprinkle tops with sugar, bake. Try not to burn. Eat with Tahini ice cream. Or, you know, whatever other whacky concoction lurks in your freezer. (PS. You can of course trust me on this.)

I admit I’ve coveted the KitchenAid ever since I saw it as a wee lass on Nigella’s counter on the telly. But after careful consideration, much research (including much eye-popping at the outrageous prices of those things in this part of the world), I settled on this little sexy number:

There are only a few things I hate doing in the kitchen. The first is making short-crust pastry (by hand), so that was the first item on the appliance-christening list. It worked like a charm (like, it works!!). We’ll see how it tastes later on a chicken pie, but so far so good. The second is being stuck in one place when you have to beat things like eggs and sugar till thick and pale (old-school, with a hand-held mixer). So much activity lost in those 3-5 minutes!

Brownies, then. Which was opportune, as I had just picked up some cheapo “panned almonds” from Woolies with no clear intent except to buy them before someone else did, seeing as they were half-price (it’s the old rule: only buy chocolate after Easter). And seeing as these “panned almonds” had some sort of white-chocolate-strawberry coating (who knows), I thought it would be clever to introduce a bit of “French” nougat into the mix for some more sweet-berry/nutty goodness (the Sailor lately informed me, by the way, that he has never seen “French” nougat in France. He’s French):

So far, so better. Until I pulled the pan out the oven and discovered that those Frenchies don’t like being in the brownie mix one bit:

This almost takes the cup(cake) for the ugliest thing I have pulled out the oven. Ah well, who says it has to be pretty. Besides, exploding things have a tendency to be rather damn tasty, isn’t that right, little piggy?

Happy birthday to me. Now committed to making bigger and better mistakes in the kitchen, so you don’t have to.

That is, watch him try to feed hay-smoked mackerel paired with blueberries to a naval submarine crew who normally subsist on a full fry-up and something ‘comforting’, like steak and yorkshire pudding, followed by shortbread and custard (or some such) – every day. (This is HB trying to regenerate their tired, overfed, brain cells.)

Watch him get BA passengers to begin their in-flight meals with a nasal spray, which causes much nasal gunk to drip in the general direction of gravity, which is also in the general direction of their actual food trays: not pretty television. (This is HB trying to rehydrate their dehydrated noses so they can taste their food better.)

Generally he ends up looking like a tosser for the first 38 minutes of each 45 minute episode, until he finally cottons on to the (big) difference between the world inside his restaurants and the world the rest of us live in. Like that a naval submarine crew don’t have time, space, money, or any bloody interest in on-site hay-smoked mackerel and blueberries, but they respond very well to a good ol’ Irish stew (sous-vided for a couple of months, naturally). Or that BA passengers quite like to eat something they can recognise as food while they are hurtling through the air, like a good ol’ shepherd’s pie (taste-powered by the secret addition of seaweed, since umami is the only flavour that doesn’t get lost in the sky. Naturally.)

Each of these institutions has supposedly recognised that the food they deliver is shite, and each is genuinely (supposedly) looking for a real-life solution to that problem. And in the end, food-mentalist HB ends up being a totally wasted commodity, because the solutions he creates that can actually be implemented are totally pedestrian. And by pedestrian I mean the kind of ideas that anyone with a food-brain who can also cross a street would be capable of coming up with. Problem: Fresh ingredients take up too much space on a submarine, and too much time to cook? Solution: Cook them on-shore and vacuum pack them for easy on-board storage in the fridge or freezer. I can’t decided if Channel 4 is taking the piss out of HB, or out of its viewers.

Then there’s his popcorn ice cream in cinemas. (This is HB trying to get people to stop eating popcorn.)

Well, ok, that sounds pretty cool actually. Genius Heston strikes again!

Except that if he spent a bit more time on Google, and less time in his science books, he would also have discovered that that’s hardly an *original* idea (WTF Heston?). I bookmarked a recipe for that AGES ago (last year) already – not to mention that in 0.14 seconds, Google comes up with 7,400,000 hits on it.

Well I finally made it the other day. It goes against all my popcorn instincts. You have to soak the things (in cream, sugar and milk), which means you have to listen to all their delicious crunchy airiness die a slow pffffft into a soggy mess. Then when you’ve really drowned them good and dead (30 mins to an hour), you have to sieve them and mash the life force out of them.

Then you turn that creamy, popcorny goodness into a silky smooth custard (with an egg and mild heat). Churn that custard when it’s nice and chilled (not forgetting a good slosh of vodka to prevent it from freezing too hard), and there you have perhaps some of the most deliciously counter-intuitive ice cream. Go ahead and serve that with some salted caramel sauce, as recommended, and also a fudgy ginger brownie, if you have one to hand. It’s so delightfully wrong it’s almost like having HB in your kitchen.

(Disclaimer: Sorry, Heston. I’m just grumpy because the Philosophe recently ate a piece of pork belly that was cooked in one of your kitchens for 52 hours. I really should have been there. But you are welcome to come and try my popcorn ice cream – if you can handle defeat.)