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February 4, 2013 · 11:13 am

Bread, cakes, ale and printworks

This isn’t about food, clearly. It’s about some wonderful prints we’ve recently acquired.

They’re the work of Russell Frost, a triple-nationalitied landscape architect, ale enthusiast, mean mandolin player and proprietor of Hooksmith, a small letterpress operation recently of Hamilton, New Zealand, but now based in NE London.

I noticed the “Fresh Tea Brewed Here” print on his site, and thought that’s something every self-respecting tea drinker should have in their kitchen. It also seemed a good idea to get a print made featuring the name of this blog, and those three great pleasures: bread, cakes and ale.

This is another one he included in the consignment, which is somewhat poignant for me as I do miss my bike. I’ve cycled all my life, in my hometown and during the 15 years I lived in London, but just do not dare cycle in Rome, an ancient city that’s perversely all about the combustion engine, and its dehumanising dangers. Never mind the state of the roads themselves…

For more information on Hooksmith and to contact Russ about commissions, head on over here.

[No idea why the portrait format photos rotate into landscape on clickthrough. WordPress doens’t play nice with portrait photos.]

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January 3, 2013 · 2:19 pm

Usciun

I cannot find a single mention of these anywhere else online. And I’ve only encountered them once in Italy. Capodanno (New Years), 2012.

We went to dinner with two friends. She’s Neopolitan, he’s from Cassino (yes, the town virtually destroyed during one of the grimmest battles of World War 2). He says these are unique to Cassino. I don’t have any reason to doubt him.

They’re basically deep-fried, filled dough balls. Not unlike castagnole, but savoury. The ones they made for us had uva secca (dried grape, so raisins. Which is a bit of a mystery to me as I have never found raisins for sale in Rome, but do see uva sultanina, sultanas).

They also said larger versions can be filled with baccalà (salt cod), and other savoury fillings.

I believe they’re not unlike certain pizzelle napoletane fritte, which can be small discs, but can also be balls, like here or here.

I’m kicking myself for not taking a photo, but I only had my phone. A bowl of doughballs would be hard to photo at the best of times, let alone with a phone, in the half-light of New Year’s Eve, lit only by candles and the flashes of seasonal explosions going off outside.

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September 10, 2009 · 4:39 am

Videogaming meets cake-making

Two of my main hobbies indulgences seem to have a fairly lively culture of convergence out there, as recorded on t’internet.

Dr J Russell sent me this link to a blog entry entitle Console Cakes!, where the blogger has rounded up a load of pictures of cakes shaped and iced – with varying degrees of skill, to varying degrees of success – to look like games consoles, and even a few arcade cabinets. The best one is probably this Nintendo Wii.

Which was bloggged about over here. I do not approve of things like “Use Betty Crocker yellow cake mix” (when you’re this inventive, why not make a cake mixture properly?), but the results are certainly fun.

The first blogger also provides a link to here. A much higher standard of icing-craft here, with some fab Mario-themed cupcakes, and better still an elaborate Katamari cake.

The unique, distinctive Katamari games have inspired all sorts of craftiness – costumes, knitted items, soft toys, and hybrids of the above, but the baking is rather funky – and edible (ish, food colourings are by and large thoroughly nasty things. I found some of them even carryied health warnings about the potential detrimental effects of their E-numbers when I was looking into doing coloured icings for a cake course).

I am slightly disconcerted to find myself linking to blogs on Sanriotown, the Hello Kitty official site, though.

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