One of the many frustrations of being a photographer

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It’s just typical of me to unpack my photography muse from its long vacation just as we’re headlong towards winter when the light is less forgiving to a photographer.  It’s like being all dressed up with nowhere to go. I have all these ideas swimming in my head but they’ll have to stay there until [...]

Sweet As: How I Conquered My Chocolate Nemesis

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My world of baking insecurity started over ten years ago when I tried and failed several times to bake the River Cafe Chocolate Nemesis and joined the legions of people defeated by what was reputed as one of the trickiest bakes for home cooks.  As I now think of how that chocolate tort defeated me I [...]

Sweet As: bringing the magic back into baking

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Taking wheat flour and sugar out of a baking recipe is like breaking the spell so the magic disappears. Excluding other high carbohydrate starches makes baking a dark art practised only by those with supernatural powers.  It was once said that I looked like Harry Potter – don’t ask, it’s a long story – so [...]

Feeling like a gooseberry

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I never intended to step away from blogging for so long. Before I knew it, a few days of ambivalence stretched to weeks and then a month. The exciting prospect of talking about my daily exploits was gone and with it my inclination to take photographs and the stories that have so freely danced in [...]

Sweet As: Chocolate Cream Mini Cakes

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There is nothing that makes you more concerned about the food you eat finding ways to address a specific health condition.  Our battle to reduce MT’s  high cholesterol has forced us to research the science behind foods and it’s been an enlightening discovery of human biology and biochemistry.  Earlier in the week we were in [...]

Spring Greens and Other New Starts

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There is something rather elicit about a long weekend created by a public holiday.  It feels so much more of a gift of an extra day off work than those long weekends created from your holiday entitlement. Not that I get paid holidays of course, self employment doesn’t quite have that perk.  Technically speaking I [...]

Kitchen garden dreaming

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When it comes to gardening I fall into the hopelessly romantic camp.  Even crawling along hand-weeding and hating the drudgery of it all, it isn’t long before I fall into day dreaming about the beauty of large walled kitchen gardens with fruit, vegetables, herbs and cut flowers jostling for attention.  I dream of a garden [...]

Sweet As: Lemon and Ginger Cheesecake Cupcakes

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I have never been so wracked with self doubt and fear in the kitchen as I have in the last three months.  For  while there wasn’t much I cooked or baked that was worthy of putting on the table let alone featuring here on the blog.  Being consciously incompetent has been a painful lesson in [...]

For the love of food: take 2

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Being jet lagged and off eating sugar and wheat are hardly the perfect ingredients for being a delegate at a food bloggers conference but I didn’t let that hold me back.  Less than a week arriving home from our UK trip I found myself at the new Le Cordon Bleu School in Wellington at the 2nd [...]

Magnifique

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The first time I heard his characteristically French “oo la la” I was almost suffocating under a mound of coats piled into my arms by VIPs at corporate function.  By the time I had dumped the offending garments into the arms of one of my staff and I’d regained my executive composure the moment to [...]