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Chocolate Stout Cake

On a autumnal day where the sky was the photograph above and we had hot cider and fresh doughnuts for breakfast in Massachussets, we stopped into the Barrington Brewery near Great Barrington to buy a "growler". A growler is a 32 oz jug that they pour for you to take home (if you are man enough to be able to carry it).

Having tasted all they had to offer, M and B decided on some Black Bear Stout and got a few slices of stout cake to boot. I'm not a beer drinker, but their stout was chocolatey, coffee-like and downright yummy. The cake was absolutely sublime; fudgey and ridiculously chocolately, like the stout had compounded the chocolateyness of the chocolate (if that's possible). It reminded me of a cake my mum used to make, a chocolate cake with coca cola in it. Obviously you can't taste either the stout or the coke, but something in it makes the chocolate even better.

So I knew when it was Lizz's birthday I had to make a very good cake. Lizz always makes the birthday cakes for everyone, and she does a damn fine job. Seeing as I made the disgusting red velvet cake for her Oscar party, I had to redeem myself. Thank God I did. Recipe is here, and I would encourage any chocolate lover to try it. In fact, I'm going to go and have some right now.

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The Wooster Group presents Hamlet at St Ann's Warehouse

As we walked out of our building on Water Street in DUMBO, we saw a shiny, brand-spanking-new Mercedes faltering at the intersection. We knew it was lost because shiny new Mercedes aren't indigenous to DUMBO, so it only meant one thing. The owner of the car was going where we were that night, St Ann's Warehouse. That's the thing about The Wooster Group. They have a very loyal and dedicated following and the great thing is that people will even follow them –gasp!– over the river.

The Wooster Group's foray into Shakespeare is certainly not your mother's Hamlet, well not my mother's, anyway. And it is certainly not like any Hamlet I have seen before and that's a good thing. The Wooster Group describes it as an "archeaological excursion into America's cultural past". What that means is they were highly drawn to the 1964 Richard Burton Hamlet which was filmed with 17 cameras at differing angles, the actors in rehearsal clothes. The footage was then edited into a film and shown at 200 theaters around the country for a period of 2 days only. The film was then supposed to be destroyed, but Burton's widow kept a copy. All in all, an alluring concept, and very well done.

The Wooster Group takes this film as the platform for their own Hamlet. Well, not a platform but a basis, an imitation and homage. The film is projected as the backdrop to the play, and the players stay impeccably true to its parent, imitating their stage directions, gestures and movements. This sounds simple enough, but this imitation is true to the angles that the 17 different camera create on the film version, meaning that the angles and views change constantly. The Group deals with this by moving themselves and also the props and furniture (which luckily for them was minimal) in accordance with the camera angles, stage front being the screen.

If this doesn't sound complicated enough, the Group also skips through some of the footage (although not much; the play is a bum-aching 3 hours long) and the film also has a few blips, all of which are faithfully translated by the players on the stage. But the film and play are also sped up and slowed down so that the speech is in tune with the original iambic pentameter; the meter in which most of Shakespeare's plays are written, the meter of English poetry. This would normally be fine, but this requires the jerkiness of changing the film to be in accordance with the meter and then the players also. Confused yet?

The film is also toyed with a little – characters are erased from the screen to compound the ghost-on-ghost theme of the play and also this particular production of it. You find yourself testing them as you watch their jerky hand movements and stage jumps that are always a meticulous mirror of what is going on in the backdrop of the film behind them. I have to say that whether or not their production was successful, their execution of their intent was flawless. And their intent was a massive feat.

Was the acting good? Certainly. Hamlet himself was powerful, troubled and arresting. What was particularly effective was some of the later scenes in Act IV, when Hamlet's demise is being discussed but he is not actually part of the scene. LeCompte uses Hamlet to move the props on the stage, wheeling the furniture around, present but not quite there. Hamlet is also the controller of the footage – he pauses it, skips through it, controls it and owns the story and quite literally this stage. Gertrude and Ophelia were both played by Kate Valk, which heightened the contrast between the innocent young girl and incestuous mother in a very interesting manner. The film's graininess and poor quality lends itself very well to being a symbol of the flickering ghost, a constant reminder of Hamlet's father, ever present. It's all really rather clever: the use of a transient ghost of a film being used as symbolism for the ghost on the stage. Do I sound sarcastic? Well, maybe just a little bit.

The Wooster Group's intention was fulfilled technically extremely well. Did it lend me any further understand or emotion connected to the underlying meaning of the play? Not at all. But I don't think it intended to.

Nicole's Birthday Dinner

I was very flattered when Nicole asked me to make her a birthday dinner – just for the four of us and, of course, the lovely George. The menu was very long and she had a few requests: capers, fresh foods (as opposed to slow cooking), sausage, edible flowers and strawberry shortcake. So the menu went as follows:

Caramelized onions, paprika pita chip, chorizo on a happy spoon

Dates stuffed with gorgonzola wrapped in bacon

Soft boiled quail egg and sopressata on a slice of baguette

Seared sea scallop wrapped in bacon

Seared tuna with a warm caper and cilantro vinaigrette with edible flowers and micro greens

Nobu miso black cod with wasabi mash and blackened scallions

Individual bundt strawberry shortcake with sabayon cream

I didn't take pictures of everything, just the cakes really, because I like taking pictures of cakes. But it was a very lovely evening, running from 8pm to 2am...almost a whole working day!

A Bird's Nest

N & S's dog, Georgia found a bird's nest the other day. Georgia's a great dog, she find good things, and she's a small miracle because she looks like a big dog that has been zapped by a minimizer wand. And acts like it too.

N is giving the nest to George, a wonderful painter, who will no doubt will find it useful. He very kindly let me photograph it before taking it to his studio.

The poignant thing about this nest is that it isn't what you would expect from a normal bird's nest. It's a city bird's nest, with man-made objects muddled in with the usual twigs and leaves. There's ribbons and string, and it couldn't have been more perfect if I had imagined it.

Homemade Blood Orange Liqueur

Two months of patient waiting, stringent sourcing of the correct bottling products and hemming and hawing over what to put on the label, I finally bottled the Blood Orange Liqueur. The precious stuff has gone to three of my very good friends whose birthdays lay within days of one another.

Wincing slightly, I gave a bottle to Martin, a blood orange afficionado, and the person that gave me the recipe in the first place. I nervously suggested that it needed to be drunk with a slight chill, to quell the sweetness of the liqueur, which he poo pooed, flipping the stopper and pouring it into shot glasses. I see now why it was left for so long – the sweetness is not overpowering and the blood orange flavor really came through. We were left with a beautiful blushing liqueur that has good body to it due to the strength of the grappa. I bottled it in 17 oz glass flasks from The Container Store, sterlized first, and labeled them with handwriting and marked them with a vintage metal stamp.

Whitehouse Cox

Whitehouse Cox was established 1875 in the West Midlands, UK, so it is pretty old school & thus the quality is amazing - They make high end leather bags, briefcases, wallets, belts & other accessories.

Unfortunately, and what always is the case with the best gear, this canvas/leather collection only seems to be available in Japan.

Actually I just found out that these are not in production any more.........shame!

photographs courtesy of Midland Ship

The Bravery at Bowery Ballroom

Every now and again I stumble upon a band that really does it for me. The Bravery is one of those. Capable of turning me into an iPod zombie on the morning subway commute, but with a ridiculous smile on my face.

So, I decided to take in the sold-out show last night at the Bowery Ballroom - one of New York's finer live music venues. I found the show via what is quite possibly my new favorite Web 2.0 invention, iConcertcal, which ostensibly loads a local concert listing into iTunes based on your I.P. address and the contents of your music library. Genius and life-changing, really.

New York-based The Bravery look like all those despondent boys you see on the L train, or stand behind on line at Oslo Coffee in Williamsburg. Front-man Sam Endicott stole the show, and is every bit the rock star - including the cultivated Brit-pop look with requisite skinny jeans, studded belt and black-tie-white-shirt-v-neck-sweater combo.

In addition to their heady meld of New Order meets Franz Ferdinand on the self-titled debut disc, the boys doled out a handful of instantly addictive new tunes from their sophomore release, "The Sun & The Moon," due out on 22 May; I'll be running, not walking, to pre-order my copy.

We unfortunately arrived a bit too late to see the opening act "The Head Set," but from the sounds of their MySpace page they were worth checking out, too. Next time.

(photo courtesy of The Bravery's website)

Monday at The Monday Room

I love going out on Monday nights. None of the crowds, hustling for a table and a judiciousness of knowing that it's a school night and you couldn't care less. So when Therese suggested going to The Monday Room, I jumped at the idea.

As you can see from the photograph (taken from their site) it's an intimate space, evocative of a gentleman's club with bank overtones thrown in. It's pretty, it's comfortable, and the chairs are of the sort of padding you expect in the manager's office. I don't believe they allow standing room – there is no bar to stand at as such – which means that even on a busy night it probably doesn't feel clasutrophobic. The Monday Room achieves what The Back Room does not, undoubtedly due to Avroko's involvement. It feels pretty real, pretty believable, where a lot of places, such as The Back Room, fall down by feeling contrived and reminiscent of an adult's Disney World.

It took us about half an hour to choose something to drink and eat (in that order of course). Because although the wine and food menus are very well thought out, I think they are alienating. The food menu is interesting and what you would expect of a subsidiary of Public next door. But it isn't really right in such a cosy, dark atmosphere. I am not sure I want to be futzing about with minute, pseudo-haute cuisine in teany portions when I am cosily esconced on a Chesterfield. The addition of a Scotch egg to the menu was cute, and had something of a nod to the past in it. The rest was all nouveau, precious and predominantly cold. I wouldn't normally fault this, but for a menu whose bites change very frequently, I think you would allow for some sub-sub-zero temperatures outside to influence your menu a little.

The wine list probably took us longer to wade through, with the white wine list being somewhat friendlier than the red. And it took us a good fifteen minutes to realize how shockingly expensive the list we were looking at really was. The trick of this menu – and I do mean trick – is that it ranges from half glass prices, glass, half bottle to bottle. However, you look first at the half glass portion to gauge the price of the wine you are looking at, as it is on the left. It slowly dawned on us that the wine prices ranged from $9 a glass to $37. Sixteen out of the twenty-two wines by the glass were over $16. We realized we were going to spend a lot of money whether we liked it or not.

As I'm in the business (as they say), I can't go without mentioning the branding of TMR. The premise is very intriguing and works themetically very well with TMR. However, it was very difficult to discern in the low lighting of the bar, and the brand name looked as though it just had black blobs around it, and you couldn't see the detail of the expensive looking printing. The two circles aren't in line either, but that's just me being pedantic. The graphic language is that of stocks and bonds, which is nicely in theme with the interior design and much better illustrated on their website than on their cards. All of this ties in nicely to their choice of name, which comes from a distinguished gentleman who had a room he would go to to drink in on Mondays, situated in his offices. And that's exactly what it feels like.

On the whole it was a pleasant experience, I'm actually going back there tonight and I think it would be worth trying the tasting menu. Perhaps Friday will be different at The Monday Room.

Monday at The Monday Room: Wine + Food (in that order)

On a whim we decided to visit The Monday Room, and sample our way through some old- and new-world wines. This beautifully designed enclave boasts impressive shock value on two levels: the first being a few out-of-character expressions of some standard-issue varietals, the second being sticker shock. It's rare to see half-glass prices go for what you'd expect from a bottle, which is well out of order in my book.

First up were the whites. I opted to go the Kiwi and Italian route, and Natasha the French. The 2005 Isabel Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough, New Zealand) was far more off-dry than I'm accustomed to, with heaps of pineapple and starfruit on the palate - but balanced nicely by a mineraly clay finish. The 2004 Cayega Roero Arneis (Italy) was more true to form, tasting of honeysuckle and little white flowers, with a finish of almonds. N. had a 2002 Les Perrieres Pouilly-Fuisse, which was a giant white. Viscous and full-bodied, with an amber tone and floral nose and overtones of dried fruits and raisins and unmistakable oak. This wine could stand up to some serious food.

To accompany our whites, we ate glazed eel with pickled bean sprouts topped by a lone, perfect little soft-boiled quail egg. The quail eggs will most definitely be making their way into our respective kitchens. Also, raw Tasmanian sea trout with piccalilli, shichimi and the most incredible toasted bread, as well as a dashi custard with lobster and lime (a bit too-too). On a Monday? Sure, why not. Life's short.

Then for the reds. I'm on a Blaufrankisch kick these days, finding this Austrian varietal sharing some of the unusual characteristics you find in northern Italian reds from Friuli-Venezia Guilia, Trentino Alto-Adige and other hyphenated regions. This particular version, a 2004 Glatzer Blaufrankisch (Austria), is hyper-concentrated with tart currants, raspberries and heaps of jagged tannins. N's foil to mine was a 2004 Costières de Nîmes, Domaine de la Petite Casagne (Languedoc, France).

Then for a new-world Pinot Noir taste-off. From Oregon, a 2004 Cristom Pinot Noir (Willamette Valley, USA) with a nose that that Natasha adroitly identified as "house paint," which was spot on, along with more predictable raspberries and marjoram on the palate. The other contender was a 2003 Ata Rangi Pinot Noir (Martinborough, New Zealand) from a very small growing area in the North Island that is producing some of their best Pinots. Once getting past the strong petroleum on the nose, we were treated to a spicy, herbaceous and balanced expression of this noble grape.

Accompanying these wines were an ultra-tasty smoked New Zealand venison carpaccio with licorice-pickled onions, and grilled chorizo with a puree of black beans and chocolate, plus an exquisite pickled pepper. For a last-minute whim, it was indeed a happy Monday.