james test

October 22, 2016 That beautiful Persian love cake left me with half a tub of soy yoghurt... and I thought it tasted awful! Like silken tofu flavoured with vanilla and a pinch of sugar. No way was I eating that for breakfast. I thumbed through my cookbooks and found another yoghurt cake to bake it into. This basbousa recipe comes from the Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook. It's a cake I recall eating there and at other Middle Eastern restaurants, served in small dense diamonds and saturated with sugar syrup. I suspect the printed version hasn't been thoroughly tested - for starters, it would have you preheat your oven to 375 °C ! I assumed this was the temperature in Fahrenheit, and converted back to a more feasible 190 °C. The intended ingredient quantities are a bit of a mystery, too. My cake batter was too runny to press, roll or cut as directed. Even so, I was glad I ran my knife through it to trace diamond shapes before it baked - they were a handy guide when it was actually time...

December 28, 2015 & January 18-19, 2016 Dinner at the Moroccan Soup Bar usually ends with a plate of little shortbreads and pastries stuffed with dates or nuts and dripping with sweet syrup. The Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook contains a couple such recipes, but also some heartier sweet treats including sfenj /doughnuts and muhallabiya . As I mentioned in my last Moroccan Soup Bar post , muhallabiya is a dairy-based pudding flavoured with orange and lemon, drizzled with syrup and scattered with pistachios. I made little cups of it to finish a meal with Michael and our two brothers just after Christmas. More recently, Michael's mum and her two sisters visited us for dinner; on this occasion I tried churning and freezing the pudding as an icecream! Assafiri welcomes adaptations to her recipes and icecream-churning isn't the only change I made. On both occasions I increased the orange and lemon quantities. I should've known it would curdle the milk (!), but thankfully the mix...

December 28, 2015 I received the Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook for my birthday! The thick volume collates many recipes from the eponymous restaurant, which we've visited many times during our near-decade in Melbourne. (In 2016 we're likely to become even more frequent visitors to the newly opened sister cafe Moroccan Deli-cacy .) A visit to the Moroccan Soup Bar has always been much more than a plate of food, with the wild-haired and lion-hearted restaurant founder Hana Assafiri roaming the room, minimal table reservations, no alcohol, and a spoken menu of vegetarian dishes rich in herbs and spices. Likewise, the book is much more than a catalogue of recipes; Assafiri devotes many pages to her philosophy of generosity, actively supporting women within her business and creating a convivial, diverse environment that doesn't shy away from debate. (I was excited to see her featured in Ai Weiwei's Letgo Room of Aussie activists at NGV.) I devoured Assafiri's words on B...