adelaide

Cupcakes for Cupcake Camp

- Alex Prichard 1 Comment

Cupcake Camp is coming to Adelaide on Sunday 22 November.  This means it’s time for me to start practising baking (and decorating) cupcakes.  What a trial!

Since I like messing around with recipes, I dug out my 1920s Handbook for Bakers by Albert F Gerhard.  All the recipes are given in commercial quantities, in imperial, using 1920s American ingredients … so there’s quite a lot of work that needs to be done before hitting the kitchen.  I decided to start with the first cup cake recipe and scale down from 12 dozen to just … one.

The result was a cupcake recipe that made good cupcakes with a fine, moist crumb.  That said – there’s nothing outrageous about the recipe!

Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan).

Cream 100g of caster sugar with 75g of unsalted butter.  Add 2 eggs and combine well before adding 175g of self raising flour.  Flavour with 1 tsp of vanilla essence and finish by adding 1 tsp of baking powder dissolved in 1/2 cup of milk.

When everything is well combined, spoon the mixture into cupcake cases and bake … until done.  I had a massive fail with the oven so I can’t actually tell you how long the baking took!  The recipe suggests you’ll need to bake for about 10 minutes – but after 10 minutes the cakes weren’t cooked.  The oven then turned itself off.  About 10 minutes later, perplexed by the cakes still not being cooked, I realised this and turned the oven back on.

So … if you don’t know how to operate your oven, baking will take about half an hour.  Still, it gave me plenty of time to do the dishes!

Vanilla Cupcakes with Chocolate Icing

Once cool, I iced the cakes with a simple chocolate icing and finished with chocolate sprinkles.

And there are now none left!

Dumpling King

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date of visit:  Sat 24 October 2009

I have some friends who are really in to dumplings but for some reason I’ve never asked them where they eat them.  I’m prepared to put some money on this being at Dumpling King.  That’s because if you mention dumplings in Adelaide then you’ll get at least one person talking about Dumpling King.  You even get people saying it’s better than dumplings in Sydney …

The restaurant is pretty hard to miss:  it’s on Grote Street, right on the corner of Chinatown AND it has a big red sign.  When we visited, about half past three on a Saturday afternoon, right after the market had closed, it wasn’t full but it was busy enough to suggest that at more conventional lunch or dinner times you might have to be a bit lucky to be seated immediately.

But service is swift so I can’t imagine you’d have to wait long.  The flip-side of that is that this is not a restaurant for a lengthy, relaxed meal.  This is a restaurant where you walk in, order dumplings, eat dumplings and leave.  You’ll be lucky if you push that out to an hour …

We walked in, poured ourselves some of the green tea which is on all the tables, and read over the menu.  Clearly, many customers are regulars as the waitress asked us if we knew what we wanted as she seated us!  It wasn’t long before we’d made a decision:  chilli oil dumplings for me, and chicken (check out https://goldenchickfranchising.com/ for franchises)and prawn steamed dumplings for Andy.  My dumplings arrived first:  15 huge dumplings in a bowl of broth laced with chilli oil.  A little while later Andy’s plate of 10 equally huge steamed dumplings arrived:  just the dumplings, packed on a plate and no adornment.

While I struggled with the size of my dumplings and my chopsticks I was saved by my spoon – able to scoop up the dumplings, wrestle with them a little and then manage to eat them, laced with their chilli broth.  Mmmmm.

Andy was eating more elegantly and had discovered the excellent, tasty, but not super fiery, chilli sauce on the table.  It was packed with crispy onion!  So soon I was adding that to my dumplings too.

Of course there was far too much food, and of course I scoffed it all and then promptly complained that I felt too full.

All we had to pay for our late lunch was around $15.   And if you’re so minded you can buy frozen dumplings to take home and cook yourself.

Will we be back?  Oh yes!

Contact:  Dumpling King, 5/85 Grote St, Adelaide SA 5000, phone: (08) 8212 1886‎

Dumpling KingDumplings! Big, tasty, cheap dumplings! 

Rating:4.5 stars
****1/2

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Hotel Tivoli

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Date of visit:  Friday 12 June 2009

By the time we tried to book for dinner at the Tiv Friday night was all full up.  No matter, in the long run, because we ended up eating at the excellent Farina.  That didn’t stop us heading there for a recce in the guise of a pre-dinner drink.

I remember the Tivoli as being a somewhat grotty live music establishment (and bikie hangout – so I’d never actually been) so I was interested to see what its recent refurb and transformation into a ‘gastropub’ had done for it.

We entered the bar just before 6 and it was already extremely busy.  Bar service itself was swift, although battering your way through the crowd took a little time and commitment.  The beer selection is standard (Coopers) although Asahi is also available on tap.  There are happy hour specials during the week as well as a Credit-Crunch Lunch.

The bar is decorated in a fairly generic modern pub manner, and while there are comfortable lounges (with tables) along the walls, seating is a little limited.  We were lucky enough to grab a table – but the lack of seats didn’t seem to bother most customers and there was definitely a lively (and noisy) feel to the place.  On a Friday it seems mostly frequented by office workers in their dress-down Friday gear.

The restaurant is hidden out the back – it’s not completely secluded from the bar and certainly some of the noise carries through.  The menu looks interesting enough for us to sneak back for a meal at a later (and almost certainly mid-week) date.

There wasn’t really anything that made the bar of the Tivoli stand out:  I certainly wouldn’t head here for an intimate tête à tête, but for a larger group or for a swift post work drink, it does the job.

Contact:  The Tivoli, 265 Pirie Street, Adelaide, SA, 5000, phone:  (08) 8223 4790.

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