The effortless razzle-dazzle of ice cream cake
On a no-fuss dessert to end the year with, the treasured Auckland bar and venue that's at risk and an update on Bluff Oyster Festival.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter produced in partnership with Boring Oat Milk. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
I considered tying up this newsletter for the year with some kind of sweeping roundup of 2022 food news or even a philosophical ponder on the turbulent year that’s been, but honestly, as vital as it is to take moments of reflection – I’m eager to end the year on a light note.
So if there’s something I want to leave you with in our final edition for the year, it has to be a sparkly, celebratory dish that I hope you’ll find a moment to put together over raumati: a very easy seasonal ice cream cake.
I’ve been all about desserts lately, and this one is largely inspired by a recipe from Nigel Slater’s 2005 book The Kitchen Diaries. Part of me didn’t want to share this recipe when I stumbled across it so I could keep it to myself. It delivers on the ultimate cooking equation (to me at least) of minimal effort equaling abundant impact. While tempting to keep it to myself – really, there’s nothing to lose in more of us having something so lovely in our “cooking” toolkit.
In short, this is a pile of store bought sponge, store bought ice cream and whatever fruit you fancy (I intend to use raspberries and apricot for my next version). No cooking required, just assembling, freezing and dealing with the guaranteed oohs and aahs upon serving. It would make an excellent Christmas day pudding contribution (close enough to a trifle to appear traditional), just as it would a delightful dessert to store in the freezer and demolish sliver by sliver over a couple of summer nights. Here’s how you do it:
Ingredients
A plain sponge cake (square or rectangular-shaped is best)
A tub of vanilla ice cream (although, chocolate would be lovely too)
2.5 cups of fresh berries or other (chopped) fruit.
Icing sugar or melted chocolate
I prefer to use a loaf pan for this, but you could just as easily use a square cake tin. Line your tin with glad wrap or baking paper and use half of the sponge (this should be as tidy as possible) to line the bottom of the tin. Make sure you save enough sponge for the top layer.
Let the ice cream soften slightly in its tub. Meanwhile, shower half the fruit over the sponge layer in the tin.
Scoop ice cream on top until you’ve almost filled the tin to the top. Smooth the ice cream and scatter the reserved fruit over. Then cover the top with the remaining slice of sponge cake and press down firmly so that everything is packed in.
Cover the whole thing tightly with glad wrap and freeze for at least an hour.
Take your cake out of the freezer half an hour before serving.
Flip the cake onto a favourite plate and decorate with either a dusting of icing sugar or a drizzling of chocolate.
Thank you for reading The Boil Up this year. I’m looking forward to being in your inbox again in 2023. In the meantime, eat, drink, be merry, and be safe(!). ❤️💚
Iced coffee season is here.The sun is getting hotter and higher in the sky, and the days are stretching out in preparation for summer. Admittedly we’ve been chugging oat iced lattes all year long, but for those of you still leaning into Mother Nature, this is the PSA you’ve been waiting for. It’s officially iced coffee season.Head to boringmilk.com for your summer supply of New Zealand-made oat milk, straight from the source.
Weekly bites
At its subterranean Karangahape Road premises, the Wine Cellar is one of the few remaining jewels in the increasingly bare crown of Auckland’s music venue scene. And after almost two decades in operation, the place has cultivated a delightfully symbiotic relationship with the surrounding kai spots. It’s a spot for a drink before a restaurant booking at Pici, or the place you head to for a gig or poetry reading after a meal at Uncle Man’s. But, Chris Shulz reports that their ex-Shortland Street landlord Paul Reid has threatened a 20% backdated rent increase and with a quiet January looming, if it goes ahead, the place would be forced to close. The Wine Cellar is a treasure, so, if you’re in town over summer – consider heading to Wine Cellar for a gig, a supportive pint or, my favourite, one of their tamarillo Purangi Estate fruit liqueurs (owned by the family, and you can buy them online by the bottle too) with soda water and ice.
Abundant with oysters, blue cod and an array of other Southern delicacies, the Bluff Oyster Festival is one of my favourite food events in the country, so I’m lamenting the news that the festival has been cancelled for the second year in a row. While this year’s event, due to be held in May was cancelled due to the threat of Covid-19, next year’s event has been called off after the building adjoining the event’s site was declared dangerous by the local council. The committee has been urged by Invercargill Mayor Nobby Clark to shift the festival to an alternative venue in Invercargill, though according to reporting by Stuff, the committee (understandably) isn’t entirely sold on the idea of hosting the Bluff Oyster festival outside of its namesake town.
Despite changes to immigration settings announced this week, Hospitality New Zealand says restaurants, cafes and bars could miss out on business because chefs were not part of the announcement. Kim Hill spoke to Hospitality New Zealand CEO Julie White about the complicated web of factors (including pay rates, the number of restaurants, cafes and bars and the looming recession) playing into the hospitality staffing shortage that’s an issue both locally and overseas.
Meanwhile, halal meat processors were included on the government’s immigration Green List which will give faster residency to those who fit the bill. The Meat Industry Association chief executive Sirma Karapeeva praised the changes and told RNZ that the industry has a chronic shortage of halal butchers and needs 250 more to meet demand. According to the report, only around 100 halal butchers are employed at processing plants around Aotearoa. Karapeeva said halal-certified products contribute billions to annual export earnings, so having enough specialty butchers is vital.
I adored this essay on Pakistani singer Meesha Shafi’s song Hot Mango Chutney Sauce. It’s part of a new series of articles exploring food imagery, themes and lyrics in Punjabi music from Vittles. Culture writer Aiman Rizvi describes how Shafi uses instances of food to comment on class, identity and cultural belonging in her lyrics, by “stringing meaning together with the various social values that Pakistanis attach to different kinds of food, from daal chawal to sushi and samosas”.
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Talk next year!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
