Easy eh?

AT FIRST GLANCE Easy A is one of those All-American high school films which make me go "I will watch this at some sleepover.  Two years from now.  On a pirated DVD from Hong Kong."  The trailer made me yawn and irritable for more reasons than one - I was fixated upon the line where Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) says "Tom Cruise?" with a scrunched-up face to Amanda Byne's pious remark about some higher power judging indecencies.  I didn't get it, and I still don't.  When I watched the film I winced when it came to that line. Somebody please explain?


However the premise of the film, bar that single irritating line, is adequately original.  A modern take on Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Woman", Easy A scores high in its frank humour and refreshing focus on something greater than the usual fare of tension between girl loser, popular hotties and desirable male figure named Corey X.  Sadly, the fact that such an archaic concept of "hating on the whore" still makes perfect reasonable sense today is a disappointing reflection on feminist standings and gains.  What's more interesting is the entrepreneurial aspect of Olive's decisions to get in the red.  It's more or less a tale of "girl sells illusion of sex for money".   Whilst there is no actual hanky-panky going on, there's some kind of socio-tabloidesque prostitution happening here which I don't have a certifiable opinion on, but it's certainly interesting.  "Let's not, but say that we did" - marketing for teenage abstinence?  Or perhaps pathological lying?

This is how pretend-sex blossoms between a heterosexual girl and a homosexual boy.  

The best scene I must say, comes early on in the film when Olive turns down a camping trip with 'Big Tits' best friend Rhiannon (Aly Michalka) to spend the weekend at home, belting out the lyrics to "Pocket Full Of Sunshine", courtesy of Granny's birthday sing-along card.  Happily the incessantly groovy song makes a recurring appearance as Olive's ringtone throughout the film, a massive perk to be sure.





Another highlight is the genius casting of Olive's parents in the form of Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. Like the refrigerated-yet-still-fresh leftovers of the summer of '69, two such amazingly liberal and self-liberated parental figures could not be more welcome to teenaged viewers.  Amazing people.  And despite the  clichéd appearance of the token black adopted kid (Bryce Clyde Jenkins), it's feasible in a family as chill as this one.  Moreover it was probably inevitable that he got ticked off the list of 'what white people like'.

Relaxing is good for many reasons.  White people like to relax in the presence of a black person, as indicated.

The portrayal of religious zealots in this film was another commendable take. Amanda Byne's overly-wholesome Marianne functions as little more than the conservative plot device to stir up opposition, whilst her boyfriend/family/devotees/cult members are largely exposed as hypocritical sex-deprived perverts.  Go team!

Your teeth are too white.

Some faux-Christian noob. Twilight can only get you so far bro. The last shot of him in the film is of him scratching his balls.

The only thing that niggled was the amazing persistence of Hollywood films in perpetuating the MSSE (Miserable Secondary Schooling Experience).  Perhaps this may ring true in most American high schools.  But really, enough is enough.  I want to watch a film where a teenage noob-geek studies real hard for their SATs and triumphs by getting into Harvard.  Like Pandora from Skins, but with noticeably more effort.  


At the end of the day all is good as every Hollywood teen film should be.  Olive bows out gracefully with a song and dance, gets the guys she's meant to end up with and they ride off into the sunset on a lawnmower.

Moral of the story is - always trust Woodchuck Todd.

Thus painful as it is for me to end a review in this way, the cast and originality of the film made it difficult to resist cracking this pun - a big fat A for Easy A.

In the Falkland Islands a thumbs up can get you arrested, deported and fined 500 Falkland dollars.  Sticking out one's thumb heaven-ward is deeply offensive to the local culture.  

[disco.read]

How to make a... Rainbow Cake!

We all love rainbows, everyone loves rainbows! Rainbows are fun and colourful and happy happy happy! So when I stumbled across Whisk Kid’s Super Epic Rainbow Cake I knew this was something I needed to make. So this is actually the second time I’ve made the cake… I sort of forgot about the possibility of blogging last time.

Rainbow-y Goodness

With this cake, everyone's first impression is wow! Then eww! Wow because it looks amazing, eww because they immediately think about how much food colouring has gone into it. I am a fan of food colouring. There is very little that can turn me off cake. But in saying that, I would just like to point out that this cake uses gel colours which means you actually don't put much in it because the colouring is strong. It's not actually that much colouring... and what's so bad about food colouring anyway? It looks good! It's called food colouring for a reason - to be eaten! Eat the cake, people! Okay, okay. I'll stop my rant now.

Basically the cake is made of 6 layers, each one coloured a different colour and then all iced together with white (buttercream) icing. It really doesn’t take too long, it’s just a bit of effort, but then what isn’t? So because I am rather lazy, I actually use cake mix… hehe! For each packet, I make 2 layers and bake them at the same time. This means, 3 lots of cake.



Cake mix..



Wilton Gel Colours - a must!



I figure cooking/baking is an imprecise art, to me measurements aren’t that important… maybe it’s because I’m just too lazy, but instead of measuring out the cake when I divvy it, I just guess. It works alright and uneven layers can easily be turned around to look straight.

(Sorry about the sideways pictures, I can't figure out why it came out all sideways and couldn't rotate it! Help?)



Mixing in (blue) colour

Ka-Pow! Blue cake!

Dyeing the cake is the tricky part. Well it’s not really, but you must must must make sure you use gel colours! There is no other way you will be able to achieve such vivid colours. You would have to use a tonne of liquid colour and still not get the same effect, whereas with gel colours, you only need like 1/2 teaspoon of colouring or even less! I use the Wilton gel colours, which are pretty pricey and I only have red, blue and yellow so had to do a bit of mixing... After this second go, I have realised mixing colours, especially purple is extremely annoying, it’s probably time to invest in a wider range of colours! (just editting this - I was given so much food colouring for chrissy I now have no idea what to do with it, please everyone make this cake and borrow my colours!) The red also needs a lot of gel to get a bright colour, so if you’re planning on trying, be prepared to use a substantial amount.

 

Here’s an artsy shot of all the cake layers pre-icing. Now we get excited!!



The cake starts to come together... excitement!

Buttercream icing is super easy to make. 2 cups of icing super for every 125g of softened butter plus a tablespoon of milk and a teaspoon of vanilla essence. (I think I used 4 cups of icing for this cake... or maybe it was 6. I'm not sure, but it does use a lot of icing and better to have too much than not enough!) Start with the softened butter and sugar, then when combined add in the milk then vanilla. Beat everything together until it’s smooth - be patient with this. I used to be incredibly impatient which meant my buttercream was never smooth. Now I've realised beating is very therapeutic (haha!) and it looks better too!



Buttercream icing... mmmm

Make sure you beat it until it's smooth, be patient!

Then we get to put everything together. I start with the purple layer of cake. Put it on a cakeboard, top it with some buttercream, then blue, then some butter cream, etc, etc until I reach red. Make sure you spread the buttercream right to the edges, but don't freak too much, you can fill it in later.



Yay!

Now because I’m icing the cake white, we really don’t want to get any crumbs in the icing and ruin it. So the trick to this is crumb-coating the cake. This is when you ice the cake with a really thin layer of icing first and let the icing set so it effectively catches all the crumbs. That way, when we get to the real icing, we can just ice/spread it easily and there aren’t (well shouldn’t) be any crumbs in it. That way you get that really neat finish. (Unfortunately for me, on this particular day it was really hot, which meant the icing wouldn't set so I couldn't get it all nice and smooth...)

If you are able to get the icing to set and want to make it smooth, what I would do is I get a knife that's not too serrated (or a spatula) and dip it in hot/warm water and then go over the icing. This sort of smooths out the icing and makes it pretty. On an interesting side note, I was watching Cake Boss and they use a clothes steamer which sort of melts the fondant (which they use instead of icing) and makes it all smooth and shiny! Same idea really.

The cake is white!

Then decorate the cake as you like (I liked it better when I left it blank white last time, I didn't really like what I did with it this time..) And voila! We have our rainbow cake. A little effort but not too much skillz involved. Just make sure there are lots of people to eat the cake because it's kind of massive. Enjoy!

Yay! As you can see, I gave up on smoothing the sides
and spiked it instead, not my best effort, but I tried!

c.c.

Review: The Tourist

When news of this movie first came out, I think everyone was salivating. Angelina Jolie + Johnny Depp + Florian Von Donnersmarck = kickass movie. Then everyone saw the movie and changed their minds... I think they were justified.

In theory, this movie had everything it needed to be freakin' awesome. I think the problem was that it was missing an underlying charm/excitement/je ne sais quoi. I felt as if Johnny and Angelina just turned up on set every day, read their lines and left because that's what they were being paid to do.

The plot is simple enough: Elise (Angelina) is the lover of a fugitive who has had plastic surgery and is therefore unrecognisable, she picks up Frank (Johnny) to confuse the authorities into thinking Frank is actually the fugitive, they inadvertently fall into mutual love with each other, they spend the rest of the time dodging bullets in Venice from a gangsta.

The chemistry between Johnny and Angelina was absolutely dismal. I was expecting something more from these people who are supposedly the hottest people on this planet. The development of their relationship went from some limp conversation, a bit of staring, longing at each other through closed doors, a (somewhat) tame kiss and then an 'I love you'..... WHUT?! There was no logical progression underpinning this at all. Why would he love a woman who very obviously dragged him into a situation where he is getting shot at? Unless we're to believe he is so very superficial as to fall for her looks (but I don't blame him, she's smokin' hot, and the close-ups of her swaying derriere attest to that).

As to the storyline... the twist ending (which I shall not reveal) only made me more confused due to the improbability of the situation. Another gripe is that I felt there could have been something more intellectually stimulating embedded into the plot. There was also the concept and imagery of doubles which I thought could have been taken further given the ending. However it remained, at best, a superficial idea.

I guess the other reason this movie was so MEH was the hype surrounding the director Florian Von D who made The Lives of Others which was (most definitely) a superior film. This movie proved that it's hard to live up to your former glories.

I'll end on a good note by saying Angelina's wardrobe was yummy. But she was wearing a tad too much make-up. That's all.

It gets a 6.5/10

~ Hurley Who?

Journey to Zumbo's Part 2

So getting to Zumbo’s Patisserie proved a bit of a journey. Not that it’s particularly difficult to get to, but just because I’m a little bit of a terrible guide. In fact, all my food journeys seem to involve very long detours…

Anyway, this time we drove over to Darling Street and managed to park too far away. So we started walking out and about 5 minutes in realised we were about 300 houses away. But as She-Wears-Skirts helpfully pointed out, “they’re skinny houses”. So one 25 minute walk, a promise to return to Kazbah for a breakfast feast and yet another detour later, as She-Wears-Skirts and I bypassed the patisserie by almost 50 houses, we arrived. Was it worth it? Most definitely.

Destination found! Sorry we were a little too embarassed to take pictures of the inside...

The Patisserie is choc-a-block full of pastries, cakes and macarons, and completely stuffed. It’s tinily tiny and really doesn’t have much space for bad-decision makers and sightseers. But the staff are very nice and the cakes are absolutely beautiful. We decided on lunch in the form of 2 pizzettes – a roasted vegetable and pinenut one ($7) and a potato, rosemary and goat’s cheese one ($6). Of course, She-Wears-Skirts and my detour was not without purpose and we walked back for lunch in the park we’d seen.

Potato, Rosemary and Goat's Cheese Pizzette

The pizzas were both really delicious and filling. Between the five of us, we couldn’t even finish it! The pizza base was very thick and a bit chewy, almost like Turkish bread, and the toppings very generous and really yummy! My favourite of the two was potato pizza, which I will be attempting to recreate sometime soon. I especially liked the goat’s cheese on that one, and the sweet potato and olives made a really tasty balance on the vege pizzette. Taste and value wise, the pizzettes were really super! They were heaped with toppings, just the way I like it, so that for cold pizza, they were still delicious.

Roasted Vegetable and Pinenut Pizzette

The cakes at Zumbo’s are a little too pretty to leave Balmain without, so just before we left we picked up a few goodies for home… and some free Banana macaron samples! (very very nice banana filling) Yay for free samples! We also had a selection from Pancakes and Maple, Peach Tea, Chocolate and Macadamia, Dark Chocolate, Ginger Beer, Pine and Lime, Toasted Marshmallow and other flavours of macarons I can’t remember. We had a few of those and picked up a few cakes – a Pineapple version of the famous Pear Perfection called (It Tastes Sweeter which apparently is a dirty name according to the guy who served me???), a chocolate trifle (pronounced try-fle), a lychee, coconut and ginger cake and another passionfruit tart.

Of course those goodies are for our families so we haven’t quite tasted those ones yet… and photos may or may not be coming... (depending on when I get them and if I bother) But overall, our rather epic trip to Zumbo’s was well worth it! And rating-wise? I think I’d give Zumbo’s a 6 out of 10 for the actual café and patisserie (a 6 just because we got to see him). It was a bit too squishy and small for me. And an 8.5 out of 10 for the food – really yummy and really beautiful to look at! Definitely two thumbs up from me!

So until next time! Hope you all had a lovely chrissy and have a super duper New Year!

c.c.

The Journey to Zumbo's Part 1

Adriano Zumbo of Masterchef fame - famous for his crochembouche, making the humble macaron every cook's fantasy, the chocolate mousse cake, the V8 cake, his certain sexy-foodie appeal... Okay, okay, I'll stop there. Last week marked a milestone of a day. She-wears-skirts, The Omelette and I traversed the Gladesville and Iron Cover Bridges, cruised along the traffic-ridden Victoria Road and found our way to Adriano Zumbo’s Lab Café.

Zumbo’s new café is located on Terry Street in Rozelle, which is in the next suburb, but really just 2 streets over from his old café. Having been to the old café, I have to say I was a little disappointed. This “lab” was indoors, unlike the old lovely oudoorsy setup and extremely, and when I say extremely I mean can’t-breathe-in-here-I-feel-so-squished, small. Okay, maybe not that small, but once the more customers started arriving, people were squishing in to see the counter and we were being squished into the wall on our stools (which were almost too tall for She-Wears-Skirts haha). On the plus side, the staff are really friendly, the food is fantab, I love the little chopping boards as plates, and the window into the kitchen – and Adriano – is very cool.

Shall we follow with one of the few (only few!) stalker shots of Adriano Zumbo? Yes please! Courtesy of She-Wears-Skirts and my little brother.

Adriano doing his pastry thing

Along with She-Wears-Skirts and The Omelette, we also brought my little brother and cousin, so between the five of us, we managed to have (and share discretely) five pastries. I had the passionfruit tart ($5.50) – lovely creamy tangy passionfruit curd, very superb short pastry and absolutely beautiful, beautiful sunset-over-the-clear-ocean-in-a-tropical-paradise glaze on the top. We especially loved the three very specifically placed passionfruit seeds. Haha, gotta love that detail. This one was definitely my favourite.

Passionfruit Tart

The Omelette snapped up the pear and almond tart ($5.50), which was very nice. Other fruit and almond tarts I’ve tasted tend to have very little fruit and a lot too much almond (frangipane?), so I was a little apprehensive about this one. However, Zumbo’s is quite a winner, it had plenty of pear in it and wasn’t too almondy! And lovely flaked almonds on top! Two ticks for that! But being at Zumbo’s, I feel the pear and almond tart was a little bit just a pear and almond tart. Very nice, but not that special Zumbo zing, I feel.

Pear and Almond Tart

She-Wears-Skirts had a brioche and chocolate pastry ($4.50) which I’ve forgotten the name of, which was also quite delicious. It was sort of like a log of chocolate croissant, but with chocolate all through it. The three of us agreed while it was certainly yum, (and big!), it could have benefited from more chocolate. Otherwise, it was very nice and flaky!

Chocolate Brioche Thingie A.K.A. Log of Chocolate Croissant

My cousin had a pear and custard danish ($5.50). This was pretty much a normal danish but the custard was delicious! Really, really delicious creamy goodness mmmmmmm! Apart from that, it was a nice pastry, fruity and flaky. Yum!

Pear and Custard Danish

The Omelette and She-Wears-Skirts’s favourite was the raspberry and pistachio tart ($9). This one was just stunning to look at with all its raspberry-dinosaur-spines sticking out of it and that crushed pistachio! The pistachio cream was definitely brilliant, so so pistachio-y and creamy, I wished there was more – but maybe that was just my little tidbit. The pastry was also lovely and short and the raspberries nice and tangy – however my brother commented, a little stale tasting? Maybe we’re just being picky.

Raspberry and Pistachio Tart

Overall, the food was lovely, watching Zumbo (and team) cook was very fun, the decor was fun - I especially like the evil donut, but the jam-packed-ness meant we felt quite rushed and that we needed to leave quite soon.

You can also buy from here, so there was a nice selection of macarons (which we saw being made), pastries and tarts. But for the cakes, we made our way over to Darling Street in Balmain (which is really just the next street over)… This I will continue in the next post.

c.c.

The Calm before the Storm

c.l.

Glamour: Old and New*

Representing Generation Y: Megan Washington

Which Scene Kid wouldn't want to be photographer in B&W in an oversized (probs vintage) sweater?

Can't go past two-tone jumpers and multi-coloured fingernails. Oh and those ubiquitous glasses of hers...

From an altogether more different, refined, elegant era: Queen Noor of Jordan

On the left with Queen Liz and Prince Phil and King Hussein

*In my sartorially-challenged opinion: feel free to disagree. Also sorry the photos are so small, no idea why Macs do that! [edit: figured it out! but it'll take forever to change them all...]

c.l.