Prawn fried rice + the best chocolate birthday cakes
Plus, bubble tea for spring 🌸
Birthday-month eating is the best. There was late-night carbonara, slices of cake in front of the fire and a few home cooked meals to even it all out.
In this edition you’ll find favourite cake recipes from birthdays past, the best dinners I made last month, and some Sydney recommendations for coffee, cookies and bubble tea.
Three very good dinners
🥕 Nourishing: Sometimes you just want to start the week on a veggie-filled note. Heidi Sze’s baked lentils with feta and dill are great for this and an easy Monday meal, especially if using tinned lentils. Heidi is right about every step of this recipe bringing comfort, from gently frying your veggies to the scent of just-ripped bay leaves going into the pot (definitely buy yourself a little bay leaf plant if you’ve only ever cooked with dried).
I loved this as a simple dinner served with buttered toast and can also imagine making it for brunch with friends and baking this banana bread with chocolate chunks, black sesame and tahini swirls for brunch-dessert.
🍤 Extremely comforting: Fried rice is my favourite meal to eat on the couch while watching a show, especially when I’m home alone. Eric Kim’s prawn fried rice with yum yum sauce is great (NYT Cooking) and you can get the gist from his YouTube demo if you don’t have a subscription.
A couple of things make this dish really quick — it uses frozen veggies and garlic powder, so there’s hardly any prep. The yum yum sauce has cocktail sauce vibes and felt very nostalgic to me, as someone who grew up eating fried rice with tomato sauce smileys drawn on top.
🍜 Noodle-y: And for a meal that tastes like takeaway, Adam Liaw’s chicken hokkien noodles are the best hokkien noodles I’ve ever made at home. If you don’t eat meat, the technique and sauciness of this recipe reminded me of Hetty McKinnon’s hor fun with plenty of veggies, which I also love.
Bake your own birthday cake 🎂
I love baking my own birthday cake and do it every year. This time round I chose Eric Kim’s chocolate-cherry cake (NYT Cooking). It had all the flavours of a black forest cake without the fuss of making a layer cake.
Every component of the cake is easy — you can make the chocolate olive oil cake with a few bowls and a whisk, there’s a layer of cherry jam, which you can buy, and it’s topped with chocolate whipped cream, which is super fluffy and reminiscent of chocolate Yogo.
If you’re baking a birthday cake for yourself or someone else any time soon, here’s a shortlist from years past:
Easiest: Martha Collison’s favourite chocolate cake uses melted butter, so you don’t need to plan too far ahead. I made my brother’s wedding cake in March 2020 (🤪) and used this recipe for the chocolate layer, which a few people asked about!
My other go-to chocolate cake is Smitten Kitchen’s ‘I want chocolate cake cake’, which has a video demo and a frosting recipe too.
Chocolate but not too chocolatey: Try Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Guinness cake with cream cheese icing, which is dense, moist but not too sweet.
Not chocolate: I love the simplicity of a butter cake with lots of buttercream swooped on top. Thalia Ho’s vanilla cake with choc hazelnut buttercream is my pick, it has has a hint of cardamom and a Nutella-inspired frosting.
Sydney highlights for coffee & bubble tea 🌸
I’ve been travelling for work again and visiting the mainland is extra exciting now that I live in Tasmania. Most mornings I get up early so I can squeeze in a little Sydney excursion before heading into the office.
I loved everything about the Chinatown Country Club cafe. It’s a peaceful spot inside a city boutique with excellent coffee (plus pastries and tea) in a beautifully designed space. If you’re there before the shop opens at 9am, the entry is tucked away on Market Row.
Sometimes I go to bakeries and order the granola… The one at Brickfields Bakery always comes with lots of colourful, seasonal fruit.
And then there’s A.P Bakery on the roof top of the Paramount House Hotel for a roasted buckwheat chocolate croissant and hefty chocolate and ginger cookies for the plane ride home. Their baked goods can make most flight delays OK.
For later in the day, a few work friends were telling me about Bubble Nini for bubble tea with freshly made pearls. So on a rare sunny break, I ducked out to try the yuzu sparkling tea with Sakura pearls. Finally, if you’re a bubble tea fan, these bubble tea ice cream bars from Asian grocers are really fun.