Christina Tosi from Momofuku in Sydney

I was very lucky last week to get to meet Christina Tosi from Momofuku New York. She is here for the Crave food festival in Sydney and also visited us at Breville to give us a bit of an insight into her little success story. She is a pastry chef and runs a quite unique and highly successful bakery in New York called milk.

I found her story most inspiring and despite the success she seems to be very grounded. She told us that she always enjoyed baking, even as a kid and naturally would chose a path in the hospitality industry. She did a degree as pastry chef and worked in kitchens in the US, one of them was WD40 in NY.
Even though baking was her thing she wasn't too happy in restaurants kitchens and started an office job, at Momofuku. Missing her home baking though she would bake when at home to feed her colleagues and they were all in awe of her creations. Her boss (David Chang) took notice as well and when he got offered a small property spot in NY to run a bakery he came to Christina Tosi.

She now runs several Milk bakeries across NY and has gone from strength to strength in her endeavor to challenge the pastry world with unusual adaptations of old time classics.

Take her compost cookie for instance. That's what I heard first off. A very tasty cookie , so American in shape but with a list of, at first, weird ingredients, but it so works! And so it goes on... Milk also invented the cereal milk - toasted cereal steeped in cold milk, then strained and bottled up. She uses different types of cereal milk for her cookies and cakes but reckons that cornflakes gives the broadest spectrum of yummyness.

Instead of shortcrust she uses a range of crunches to cover the base and one of her most popular pie is the crack pie, which I yet have to try myself thanks to her cookbook. So far I have tried a few different cookie recipes and my family was most grateful. Home baking, but a little bit more fancy without the queues, that's quite something.

 

  

 

Kiss Me Cake

I know Sonja, the owner of Kiss Me Cake, through our mutual friend Peggy Porschen. We both worked with Peggy in London (at different times though) but we had to move to the other side of the globe to get to know each other. She also worked for Konditorei and Cook in London as cake decorator and it's there where she decided to specialise in this trade.
Coming to Sydney she worked for the French cafe and patisserie "La Renaissance" in the Rocks and "Sweet Art" in Paddington.
However, it has always been a dream of hers to open her own shop and Sydney seemed to be the right place at the right time and so she started "Kiss Me Cake" in 2006.

The bakery.

Getting the order ready.

Square cupcakes - bestseller at Kiss Me Cake.

Off to the decorating corner...

Yum!

Rolling the fondant.

The Grounds in Sydney

There is something new and very hip right now in Alexandria - The Grounds!  It's a cafe, but actually a little more than that. It's a coffee roaster (of course) as well as nursery, or is it just a garden. There's a not so hidden Secret Bar and it seems soon a stone pizza oven in the garden.

We only had toast and jam but from looking around at others people's orders everything edible comes served on a chunky wooden board. The lemonade arrived in a mason jar with handle (very trendy at weddings too) and the lights hanging from the beams are also masons jars. The sun was shining and after a few days of heavy rain it was the perfect day to hang out at The Grounds and enjoy a nice coffee and fresh sourdough toast.

Ragamuffin in Leichhardt

There is a fairly new cafe in Leichhardt where you can not only get a damn good coffee from a lever and piston espresso machine but also gluten free muffins, they have a different flavour each week.
Ragamuffin on Norton Street, check it out.
Couldn't help but hear Gentlemen music in my ears...

Jesse knows how to make good coffee.

Danii, owner and chef.

Haylea and Jesse, always a smile for their customers.

Are marshmallows the new cupcakes?

I came across an interesting article recently. Daily Mail online forecasts a new sweet trend on the horizon: New York artisan bakers have taken on the marshmallow to dress them up and make them more appealing for us grown-ups. I suppose nearly every child likes marshmallow and doesn't mind so much the bought dry stuff as long as they are pink (well, that at least applies to my daughter:-).

I had my first yummy marshmallow a couple of years ago when I was at the Yellow Cafe in Potts Point, Sydney. Homemade and fresh they are beautifully soft and sweet. The Yellow Cafe had a few different flavours but I was cautious and only tried the coconut marshmallow with toasted fresh coconut flakes. They were superb! I then made passion fruit marshmallows and since then I am hooked - but they really have to be fresh. Honestly, forget the packaged ones.

I now make them from time to time as they are not so hard to make and also very versatile (not very healthy though), you can mix almost any flavour in you can think of. What you do need is a sugar thermometer because you have to make a sugar syrup and get this to the right temperature.

I can understand why bakeries in New York have chosen the humble marshmallow to be the next big thing on the sweet sky. It's versatile and the creations I have seen look very far away from the dry and rubbery marshmallow you'll find at supermarkets.

Here is a collection of Marshmallow aficionados and their creations:

Marshmallow mug toppers by Plush Puffs.

Beautifully wrapped marshmallows by Fusion Sweets.

 

Watermelon marshmallows by Mia Mallows.

Gingerbread house party

This past Sunday was the 3rd Advent and it rained and rained and rained. Quite unusual to have so much rain in Sydney at this time of the year but on the other hand the best weather for staying indoors and bake and make gingerbread houses. It's a beloved Christmas tradition in Germany to bake (well, if you're pressed for time you can buy them already made as a gingerbread house kit. I saw them at IKEA the other day.) and decorate the house with smaller Lebkuchen (gingerbread) and anything that you can think of. Years ago I bought a gingerbread house mould from Chefs Tool Box. The mould guarantees that all sides are even and makes assembling the house an easy task but you'll need a lot of royal icing to stick it all together. Don't make the icing too runny or it will take too long to set. I always stick sugar cubes inside the corners to make sure the walls are standing upright and prevent them from going lopsided. My daughter and her friends were adamant to decorate the houses themselves and the three of them got quickly very busy and sticky ;-). It was so much fun to watch them but I was also very much looking forward to a nice glass of wine in the evening. However, when the evening came the rain stopped, at least for a little while, and we got invited to join in to a pre-Christmas street fete. It was beautiful to share a merry moment with some lovely neighbours and everyone enjoyed themselves including the kids scooting up and down the pathway.

In Germany gingerbread (Lebkuchen) is made in two forms: a soft form used for cookies, slices and cake and a harder form, particularly associated with carnivals and street markets such as the Christmas markets (I really miss those markets) that occur in many German towns. The hard gingerbread is used for shapes, which are then further decorated with sweets and icing. The German-style Gingerbread is often used to build Lebkuchen Haeuser similar to the "witch's house" in the German fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. These houses are popular Christmas decorations everywhere in Germany and often built by children with the help of their parents.

This recipe makes one house and gives you a bit extra.

125 g brown sugar
a pinch salt
300 g treacle
1 tablespoon ground ginger
180 g butter, softened
500 g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees Celsius.
2. Beat sugar, salt and treacle, ginger and butter in a large mixer until combined and lighter in colour.
3. Add flour and bicarb soda and whisk until mixture forms a thick dough.
4. Place on lightly floured workbench and flatten with you hands. Press dough into mould.
5. Place mould on baking tray and bake for 20-30 minutes or until firm to touch (dough will crisp up once cooled).
6. Cool before removing from mould.


Use royal icing to assemble the house. I am sure your kids will love to help decorating the house with candies and Christmas cookies.

Brasserie Bread Bakery

Am Donnerstag bin ich nach Banksmeadow gefahren, einem Stadtteil von Sydney, der so weit draussen liegt, dass ich dort noch nie war und auch nicht gedacht hätte, dort jemals einen kulinarischen Ausflug hin zu unternehmen.

Die Bäckerei "Brasserie Bread" liegt genau dort, wo man eigentlich gar nicht mehr viel erwartet und überrascht mit hervorragendem Sauerteigbrot, einem groovigen Cafe und köstlichen Teilchen und Törtchen. Wie der Name vermuten lässt ist alles sehr französisch angehaucht, das Cafe allerding eher im frankophilen New York Stil eingerichtet. Vom Cafe aus kann man direkt durch Fenster in die große Backküche schauen und von Zeit zu Zeit werden auch Backkurse für Erwachsene und Kinder angeboten, die sich großer Beliebtheit erfreuen.

Die "Brasserie Bread" beliefert viele bedeutende Restaurants in Sydney und ist dadurch bei Chefköchen schon lange ein Begriff. Die Autoren und Besitzer der "Bourke Street Bakery" übrigens, an deren Buch ich viele Monate gearbeitet habe und welches gerade veröffentlicht wurde, haben hier ihre Backfähigkeiten gelernt und verfeinert.

Sydneys beste Bäckerei auf Erfolgskurs

Am Samstag war die Eröffnungsfeier der nunmehr vierten Bourke Street Bakery, in Marrickville. Seit gut vier Jahren gibt es schon die Bourke Street Bakery in der Bourke Street in Surry Hills, dem hippen Stadtteil, in dem alles began. Schnell began sich rumzusprechen, dass es dort nicht nur unglaublich leckere Törtchen und knusprige Kopenagener und Croissants gibt, nein, es gibt sogar echtes Natursauerteigbrot! Bis vor kurzem noch eine echte Rarität in Sydney. Auch wenn das Brot nicht so schmeckt wie in Deutschland, und ja, ich vermisse ein richtig gutes deutsches Schwarzbrot, ist es doch von sehr guter Qualität. Die Besitzer und Bäcker, Paul und David, legen viel Wert auf Handarbeit und kaufen, wenn immer es geht, Biozutaten direkt von den Erzeugern ein (die Butter für die Croissant allerdings kommt aus Belgien). Das ist löblich, und ist mittlerweile in Sydney bei guten Restaurants und Bäckereien zum guten Ton geworden. Kein Wunder also, dass die Bourke Street Bakery zu einer Art Pilgerstätte der hippen Urbanier geworden ist, aber egal wie hip und trendy man auch sein mag, wer am Samstag nicht früh genau aus den Federn, der muss sich ganz weit hinten anstellen, um an seinen flat white mit rhubarb danish zu kommen.