Dandenong Tour

Earlier this year I received a brochure about the Melbourne Wine and Food Festival. I found a tour of Dandenong among other things. I couldn't go at the time. One of the surprising things I saw was a tour of the Afghan precinct. I was curious to find out more.

I rang my friend A. 'How do you feel about coming on a food excursion?' Happily she was up for it and we agreed on a mutual day.

I picked her up at 7.30 on a Friday morning and we headed off on our road-trip, well a mini road trip.

First stop, Dandenong Market. We had a look around, plenty of fruit and veg. There wasn't too much in the way of meat, fish and delis as the market is undergoing refurbishment, so there were quite a few temporary structures.

We were thinking of some breakfast options and this place was looking good.

This place definitely ticked all the breakfast boxes, hot and bready. There were plenty of ready made golzemes.

You can also order a custom made one if you are happy to wait five minutes. We were too hungry to wait so we ordered one of the little beauties sitting behind the glass.


I had a spinach and cheese golzeme and A had a chicken and cheese golzeme. $6.00 of warming deliciousness.

This is one of the new stalls at the market. It will be interesting to see the market when it's complete. We've already locked in a return visit for next year.

I am lucky enough to live near Footscray Market and Little Saigon Market so I am pretty well looked after for good inexpensive market items. My friend's closest market is Prahran which is good for specialist items but not particularly cheap. She was very impressed with the prices and started buying up lentils and polenta.

This guy had plenty of tasty treats, nuts and sweets. A winning combination.




We left the market to check out more of Dandenong. This place is very close to the market.


If you need some biggish cooking pots, then this is the place!


Further into the centre of town is Dandenong Plaza, a shopping centre with Myers and all the usual shopping centre tenants. It had a rocking fruit and vegetable shop. I love that even for a grocery nerd such as I myself I can still see things I haven't heard of or seen before, such as Indian Apples (top right) and Hog Plums (bottom left). They are on my list of things to Google.


This place had a great range of Indian, Asian and European produce, including a decent load of cavalo nero.


Near the fruit and veg place was a poultry place with heaps of turkey. There was a butcher too with a great range of meat including several different cuts of goat.


We finished our look at the plaza and headed off through the streets. I saw this big blue block. Melbourne Cake Decorating School. However inside was magic. A huge range of cake tins available for hire. Heaps of icings, colourings and decorations. I was wishing this place was in Footscray!



Rob's British and Irish Butchery. This is the place if you are after some traditional black pudding, pork pies or haggis. A very fine smelling shop... if you're a carnivore that is. I don't why I didn't take a photo inside the shop. I think I was too busy checking everything out!

More walking and we got to the Afghan Precinct in Thomas Street. It's not overly massive but there was a mix of Afghan grocery stores and cafes.


I'd picked out our lunch spot prior to our visit, Afghan Pamir Restaurant.


We shared a plate of food that included rice dotted with barberries, some bread, and these very tasty kebabs. The food was mild but tasty. I thought it might have been a bit spicier. It isn't the cheapest place but the food was good. Definitely worth a revisit. I'd like to try some of the other places in the area too.


Next we headed to 'Little India', mainly Foster Street area.


At the Punjab Sweet and Indian Takeaway in Mason Street, there is an area where you can buy take away meals but also shelves loaded with Indian sweets. For the address and details of this place and similar places, I found an article from The Age, in 2003 by Matt Preston...before he was famous!

A tray full of jalebi, crispy and sweet. (well, I had to taste one!)


We saw two Middle Eastern stores on our walk, this one Spring Cake and Pastry Shop is in Foster Street (not far from the train station). The other shop is A1 Bakery in the main street of Dandenong, Lonsdale Street. (A1 have another shop in Sydney Road, Brunswick)

Three flavours of turkish delight cut to order! Of course I pick my favourite, the rose-flavour.


One of my favourite middle-eastern sweets, contains pistachios and is topped with kataifi pastry. (yep, got one of them too!)


On the City of Dandenong website, I found a link to a walking tour type map which was quite helpful and details of various other tours available.

V8 cake Adriano Zumbo

Of all the Zumbo cakes I've seen on Masterchef, the V8 is the one I'd most like to eat. It was the most appealing of his creations.

I had a closer look at the recipe and thought about the possibility of making it. I had a look at the Masterchef website forum and someone made a comment querying the cost of making it. Interesting thought. In true food nerdery, I went through the items and listed them in an Excel spreadsheet to work out the overall quantities of items and the cost.

First things first. Okay so we know it is a vanilla cake. According to my working out, there are eleven vanilla beans listed in the total ingredients!. At roughly $4 a bean (depending on the quality and where you buy them) that's $44 even before you've bought some couverture chocolate. There is a fair swag of ingredients that you can get from the supermarket, liquid glucose, almonds, flour, sugar, eggs etecera, so that's a manageable purchase.

The tricky items under the 'molecular gastronomy' banner are possibly going to be fiscally challenging. Locating the items is also a bit of a challenge.

The Melbourne Food Ingredient Depot has quite an extensive range of items available for purchase online, including fruit and vegetable powders (such as beetroot powder used in the Zumbo Masterchef macaron tower project). They also stock gelatin leaves which will set you back about $7.00. The gold strength gelatin leaves, well, I could only see titanium strength (maybe they are the same?) and only 1kg packs available at $88. That's a lot of jelly and mousse cakes! A 150g tub of gellen will set you back by about $110. To buy enough titaniaum dioxide for the recipe will cost about $24. Books For Cooks in Gertrude Street Fitzroy stock a few of their ingredients and I spoke to the owner and he said he may be able to order other items that they stock. He had gellen, strawberry powder and half a dozen other molecular gastronomy items instore the day I went.

Off topic, Books For Cooks is fantastic. They have a massive range of books. New and used, cook books for the home cook through to the professional chef, biographies of chefs and foodies.

Imports of France have a great range of imported items, and patissierie items. (I found this company in my search a few months back, for brik pastry or feuilles de brick - which they stock). They are out in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and the lady I spoke to advised people to call first about inquiring/purchasing items rather than just turn up. There are a couple of product lists on their webpage, go to the first list, it has items for V8. Unfortunately there are no prices.

They sell the miroir/mirror glaze but in 8kg quantities. The also have pailette feuillitine in 2.5kg quantities. They have a large range of other V8 cake items including nut pastes, acetate rolls and disposable piping bags.

With some items in large quantities, you could always find friends to split the items with!

I had entertained the thought of trying to make the V8 cake but after looking at the quantity and cost of the items it may be easier to order the cake and fly to Sydney to pick it up. Split between 6 or 8 people, it's not implausible.

I rang Zumbos and the cake is available after the 26th July, they require 3 days notice and it will cost $150.

Melbourne Food Ingredient Deport

508 Lygon Street, East Brunswick, Victoria 3057 Australia

Public Shop Hours: Thurs - Fri 10am till 5pm. Other times by appointment - please call to confirm

Trade Shop Hours: Mon - Wed by appointment

Ph 03 9386 3206

Fax 03 9386 1888

On their contact details page they have a link to a PDF product list

Imports of France

Unit 6 / 38 Thornton Crescent

Mitcham Victoria 3132

Ph 03 9872 3945

Fax 03 9874 0199

Visits to their office are by appointment only

Goods collection:

Monday to Friday 9.00am - 12.00pm or 2.00pm - 4.30pm

Books for cooks

233-235 Gertrude St

Fitzroy VIC 3065

Australia

Ph 03 8415 1415

Fax 03 8415 1418

Opening Hours

Mon-Sat 10-6

Sun 11-5

Open most public holidays 11-5

Adriano Zumbo

Pâtisserie 296 Darling Street

Balmain NSW 2040

Ph 02 9810 7318

Opening Hours

Monday to Saturday 8am – 6pm

Sunday 8am – 4pm

Chocolate cake with fresh raspberries

I made a chocolate cake for my niece's birthday.

I used this recipe for chocolate cake from Exclusively Food. This is an Australian blog and the recipes are usually no fail. The recipe says to cool the mix before adding eggs and flour for 15 minutes, but I left it for 30 minutes because it still seemed a bit too warm and scrambled eggs were not part of my plan!

I doubled the cake mix and the ganache mix. I had a request from my niece for raspberries. I was going to try to make a raspberry mousse and use it as a layer in the cake, but I'm still on training wheels in the fancy cake making/decorating department and thought it best to practice the mousse business, so that's on the to-do list. Between the two cakes is some ganache and a few fresh raspberries. I would probably use more raspberries in the middle next time, in summer as fresh raspberries are more than double the price in winter, but they were really good.

I will be making this chocolate cake again. It is easy to make and the ganache is a total winner. The raspberries were great because they cut through the richness of the cake. When slathered with some pouring cream it was pretty damn good. Thank goodness there is a calorie moratorium on birthday cakes!!

Mooncakes in Melbourne

The Mooncake festival or Mid-Autumn Festival is on 22 September 2010 and the mooncakes are in some stores now. As a westerner, I am an observer of this festival. Due to my love of sweets and cakes, I've always been quite taken with these cakes. I love the tradition of them. There is beauty in the patterned pastry and lovely tins and gift boxes they are packed in. Each year I buy a mooncake with lotus bean paste, sometimes I get one with an egg, depends. I try and eat small pieces and save it but I usually eat the whole cake in a day. It's not because of the size, but because it can be quite an expensive cake.

I was having a mini-excursion in Richmond and had a look at Minh Phat Supermarket in Richmond which I had heard about but never been too. Near the entrance was a tower of tins containing mooncakes. There were two price lists from the different companies who manufacture the mooncakes. I checked the list of mooncake options and it was quite an extensive list. Mooncakes with lotus bean paste, with lotus bean and egg yolk, with 2 egg yolks, with 4 egg yolks and with 6 egg yolks! Also some with red bean paste. I've seen a mooncake with 1 yolk but 6 seems incredible to me.

There were two brands of imported mooncake at Minh Phat, Wing Wah and Mei Xin, both from Hong Kong. Great Eastern Food Centre in Russell St near Chinatown in Melbourne, had Wing Wah brand and some vegetarian mooncakes brand name Godly Jinding from China. I tried to find out more but no luck.

I ducked around the corner to Maxim's bakery to see what they had. They had no tins of conventional mooncakes but they stock in their freezer, Snowy mooncakes made by Mei Xin. I discovered these last year, well one flavour really, frozen black sesame mooncake with macadamia nut. There are quite a few flavours which look interesting. They are available in a pack of two or larger variety packs.

When I ate a packet of these last year, oh my goodness, the flavour of black sesame was sensational!

I have been dreaming of these and remembering the taste. The pastry doesn't have much taste of anything particularly but the filling is soft black sesame with some pieces of macadamia. I do believe that I could eat one of these every day and not be bored by them. I may have to buy another pack soon and then I will count down the days to Mooncake Festival time next year!

The birthday cakes

I volunteered to make the birthday cakes for my friend's twin boys. I bought some Thomas cake toppers the other week from Cake Deco in Melbourne. I kept it pretty simple as I haven't decorated too many cakes. I covered both cakes (a chocolate cake and a vanilla cake) with vanilla butter cream icing that I made. I placed the Thomas toppers on the cakes and got to work with the Smarties. To write the names, I used Queen brand writing icing from the supermarket, which worked quite well on the cakes.



Couldn't control myself. I made some Happy Face biscuits. I had seen them at another party a few weeks ago. I used one packet of Arnott's Marie biscuits. Topped them with icing (icing and water until suitable consistency). I sliced the bananas in half. The biscuits I'd seen the other week used the whole banana lolly which seemed a bit too big for the face. More Smarties for the eyes. I used the Queen brand writing icing for the hair. It was more a gel than icing and tasted not home made and smeared really easily. When I make these again I'll just make some icing, colour and use that. It worked okay on the cakes as it was on soft icing. Anyhow, they still tasted okay. The second one I ate served as confirmation!!

'Hurry up with the cakes, we have presents to open!'

Two year old boys wondering what all the fuss is about.

Hope you had a good birthday boys!!