Posted by Bel. The time is 2.34pm here in Wellington NZ.

This faux trailer "Jane Austen's Fight Club" is the latest mash-up: Elizabeth Bennett meets Tyler Durden, with a bit of Kill Bill thrown in for good measure. These ladies look fun!



Austen has found herself in back the spotlight recently, with the release of what is now a series of books, starting with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. When I first saw this floating around the internet, I assumed it was some kind of perverse fanfic art.

But no, it was for real - the Noughties unconquerable love of all that is undead, sucking blood, ninjafied, or, alternately, cupcake-sized and so exquisite you hardly bear to bite it (oooh back to biting - there we go!).

Tiger Beatdown guest blogger Garland Grey has written a brilliant piece on Austen, the male author of the new books and how the co-opting of her work is part of a greater issue of white male privilege exploiting minorities in any way possible.

I bet Ms. Austen had to work very hard to hammer out a structure and a flow and a rhythm to the story, and you pull up next to that process in your giant SUV of male privilege and start plugging your electricity and water into it, taking all the work that Austen did to get the thing published, all of the work that made her writing world famous, and you make YOURSELF world famous. And then you talk about how easy it was on NPR, a necessary addendum to the telling of the story of this book. Austen would probably prefer the story of this book to be about HER in some way. But let’s just talk about you and your rip-off.

PS I googled "Jane Austen cupcake" just to check if the internet had actually come full circle, and got this:

Uhh...?

Lou, you are the expert. I'm still stalled 30 pages into Persuasion. Is this Jane Austen recreated in chocolate icing, or did we miss when Te Papa branded their Giant Squid merch for the afternoon tea crowd?

Posted by Lou. The time is 9.35pm here in London UK.

This past weekend I had the good fortune of sharing afternoon tea with two wonderful ladies in a gorgeous backyard on one of the sunniest most beautiful days I have seen in London.

We shared out a course each with Heidi providing sandwiches, Kelly (our host) the baked course, and me sweet treats. I decided to keep it simple and make two different sets of mini tarts, going for citrus and chocolate (which, of course, between them are the cornerstone of my cooking life!).

My first set of tarts were bitter chocolate meringue, which consisted of a basic biscuit base (approx 100g crushed digestives per 25g melted butter, mixed till they hold form when squeezed in your fist) with a dash of cocoa added, with an extraordinarily simple filling of 70% chocolate melted (200g) with cream (1/2 cup).

After they have been left in the fridge to set for a while, chuck on meringue (4 egg whites beaten till stiff with approx 220g castor sugar gradually added), and cook for 15 mins/ until golden.

Lemon in the ramekins on the left, bitter chocolate in the

silicon muffin cases on the right (not that you can tell the difference)

Second was lemon meringue, with the same base as above minus the cocoa, and a filling of lemon curd (I use Delia's simple recipe), meringue chucked on top. Conveniently, by the time you've made the lemon curd the bitter chocolate filling will be chilled so they can go into the oven together (if you happen to be making both!).

The added bonus was that with leftover egg white you can make some (flat, in my case) meringues as an extra treat!

I perhaps went a little bit too not-mini on the size as after eating Heidi's delicious cucumber and bellpepper cream-cheese sandwiches over a cup of tea, followed by Kelly's perfect scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream over a couple of glasses of bubbly, we were feeling a bit too full for the whole sweet delight. But managed to get it down in the end, of course.

Please note the awesome doily tray Kelly scored for £1 in a local store

Posted by Lou. The time is2.55pm here in London, UK.

I've realised that if I'm to post here consistently and regularly I need to find something in my life that is worthy of posting beyond the occasional review of films and books. (Beyond live-blogging my watching of Mad Men season 3 when it turns up...) The answer is... baking! But in the guise of avoiding copyright infringements I am not actually going to include the actual recipes (the real reason being that I can't be bothered writing them out).


First up:

The Baklava Cupcake Incident

For my birthday last year the lovely Kelly gave me a wonderous selection of glorious baking-related items including this recipe book Cupcakes: A Fine Selection of Sweet Treats and some silicon cupcake/ muffin cases. (I will tell you a fact to keep with you for life: silicon bakeware is the shizz. I will never look back. Especially after this one incident, in which I forewent the silicon bakeware to my demise.) This recipe book is also the shizz - it has a beautiful textured hardcover, and each recipe is is accompanied by a delightful full-page illustration that has you foaming at the mouth.

So I was heading to a birthday picnic in the weekend and decided to try out the Baklava Cupcakes recipe. Essentially it is rather simple: a fairly basic cupcake mix with a combination of chopped nuts (walnuts and almonds in this instance), sugar, butter and cinnamon placed in the middle and on top (pre-cooking!), with warm honey brushed onto the cupcakes as they cool.

The mistake I made was in defying the silicon moulds. I didn't have enough, so thought "hey, why don't I just put some paper cupcake cases into a large rectangular dish?". Do not do this. This is the second-stupidest thing I have done all year*. In case - like me - you haven't picked up on the obvious: there is a point to cupcake moulds. Paper cases do not keep their shape. You will end up with a big blob of a cake-like substance rippled through with paper cases.

Thankfully I had a brain-wave and recovered the situation by allowing them to cool, cutting them into smaller square shapes, and placing them delicately in the remaining cupcake cases. Of course there was a second disaster in that they turned out to have not actually cooked all the way through due to the lack of space between cupcakes, but this allowed the second brainwave of pushing the not-quite-fully-cooked bits cut off the sides into the magical silicon cupcake moulds before the second attempt at cooking them through, which left me with the bonus of having Drunken Cupcake Snacks when I got home in the middle of the night.

The Baklava Squarecakes were very well received and I can testify - on the basis of extensive testing of the square, cups and scrappy bits - that they taste mighty fine. Mighty fine indeed.


*The stupidest thing I have done all year is the fatal decision to take the number 100 bus home last Tuesday during the torrential downpour. This led to me spending more than an hour and a half on a hot and damp bus surrounded by wet people and their even wetter umbrellas and bags as we made a tour of all of London's traffic jams in defiance of the usual 40 minute travel time. I nearly cried.



On a happier note:

The Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes are the One Of The Best Things Ever. They are not-too-difficult to make, look amazing, and taste like heaven.

Essentially you: make a plain vanilla cupcake, only 3/4 filling the moulds and only 3/4 cooking them. Scoop out the centre. Put in a big fat dollop of lemon curd (I home-make mine but will only judge you a little bit if you buy it in a jar). Put an even bigger, fatter dollop of uncooked meringe on top, and bake just a couple of minutes until they start to look brown.

Et voila:

These specific ones were made for a Ladies Afternoon Tea Party.

Please note the glorious silicon cupcake moulds, which both

look good and slip off without even a hint of sticking.

My tip to enhance the experience of these is to scrunch the bits of scooped-out cupcake into the bottom of a smallish dish (or larger muffin moulds), spread on your leftover lemon curd, ditto with the meringue, and you have some mini- lemon meringue pies for that all-important Drunken Midnight Snack/ Hangover Breakfast.