On dessert, and birthday macarons at Zumbo's Cafe, part 2

We leave behind the hustle and bustle of Zumbo's matchbox-sized boutique and head down Darling St to another Zumbo hideaway, Cafe Chocolat.

It feels like Christmas as we excitedly pick a sunny spot in the cafe's outdoor seating area and let spill our precious haul: parcels and parcels of colourful macarons.


Packets of colourful goodies!


Sweet and crisp macarons, with surprising undertones of savoury and tangy - iced vovo, golden gaytime, fig & blackcurrant, tanzanian salted chocolate, mango & tonka bean and vegemite sourdough


maple syrup bacon pancake, lamington, chocolate-dusted passionfruit and turkish delight macarons
haha you can see from the scribbling we got confused about which macaron was which

Chocolate and passionfruit had a nice fruity zing, which was a relief after super almost-sickly sweet turkish delight, which had us crying out NO MORE NO MORE. Lamington was not too sweet and very coconutty, which was a lovely surprise

Macarons are not something you can eat in the dark - they need to be ogled before they are chowed. Desserts should be beautiful to look at, and these macarons have it down pat. The crazy colours, the curious taste, and the way words like 'golden gaytime' and 'maple syrup bacon pancake' just roll off your tongue, you can't help but want to try every single flavour.


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Macaron Party at Zumbo's, part 1
Cakes and Icecream at Norita's
White Apple dessert cafe
Saint Honore bun shop
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Italian biscuits and sweets at Gelatissimo

Hectic Macaron Day at Zumbo's PHOTO DUMP ONE

Talking to wendy the other day. Conversation went something like this:

wendy: I like pig's heads. and macarons
me: I like macarons too. wait I've never tried macarons
wendy: wtf? omg hey... I know we have 101010 exams to study for BUT zumbo's releasing 99999 flavours of macarons for his birthday
me: how do you know this
wendy: I religiously stalk zumbo's website

(sort of...)

So this morning we ditch accounting and engineering to visit zumbo's cafe (aka. land of macarons)

AND HERE, MY FRIENDS, ARE PHOTOS
Hopefully you are viewing them from the other side of exams =P

Boxes and boxes of macaron love

Wendy picks her macarons from the list of 60!
To the right you can see the blue chupa chup macarons that she loves so much

More boxes and boxes of macarons

My packages of macaron love x)
+ eden's order of 'cheeseburger, iced vovo, cheesecake, mango &tonka bean" macarons
+ helen's "5 'unconventional' flavours'
+ couldn't find the 'chocolate ciabata' my cousin recommended!

My macaron flavour hit list

Hmm yes it was hard to narrow down the flavours..
Oh black truffle turned out to be worth five macarons! Ten dollars coz it's made with Real Truffle!

Hectic macaron madness inside zumbo's!

Rainbow macaron packages!

Filling up boxes and packages with macarononarons for us
Don't have a photo but there was a lovely girl at the shop helping me find my macarons, she recommended the fig & blackcurrant, lamington, and the salted caramel macaron. And apparently Caramello Koala is also great!

omg burnt toast is so interesting and yummy
and chocolate passionfruit
and salted tanzanian chocolate
and lamington
my faves :)
Close up of wendy's blue chupa chup macarons

My favourite :) burnt toast macaron!!! YAAAAAY I COULD EAT 50 OF THESE, almost

Wendy's ten macaron package wheeeeeee

Haha we might have gotten a bit over excited by the boxes and boxes of macaron flavours =)
Although I did talk to a girl in the shop who, with a few friends, ordered ONE OF EVERY MACARON. A $120 macaron haul! They are clearly going to be eating macarons for breakfast lunch and dinner for the next week or two (SO JEALOUS)

A very happy wendy at Zumbo's cafe ! next door to zumbo's

Oh we saw vyanh and her (boy?) friend here! eating chocolate soup!

The pretty macarons! and I

Yaa I wore black and white on purpose to complement the rainbow macarons

THE HAUL. Too many macarons? LOL GET OUT OF HERE

Notice the bright red one in the bottom right package! That, eden, is what your Cheeseburger Macaron looked like before it got squashed and melted into nothing (by the time she got it at university haha)

bottom left clockwise: cheesecake, turkish delight, lamington, yoghurt mint and cucumber, maple syrup bacon and pancake, and another lamington (was meant to be vegemite!)
bottom right clockwise: cheesecake, mango and tonka bean, iced vovo, CHEESEBURGER

Anyway this is a super photo-dump-and-run because final exams continue all next week! Good luck to all other uni peeps / others with exams =]
A bunch more macaron photos to come later ya

--

PS. Peanut butter vegemite day was great fun, thanks to everyone who came and had a sandwich! and shaheer for his loaves of bread and eden for her tub of vegemite :) and haha the commentbox is ...très amusant

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Peanut Butter and Vegemite Sandwich Day

Next tuesday is the 3rd November ie. Peanut Butter and Vegemite Sandwich Day!
so we are bringing peanut butter vegemite sandwiches to uni for lunch.

Knowing how to make good sandwiches can help you hook up. Score your dream job. Make new friends. Make cool friends. Make any friends. Because really, your popularity can be measured by how well you make sandwiches
At the moment I have no friends. But this will all change Tuesday

Okay so why and what the hell. well yesterday I got a message from eden:
SIF NOT HAVE TRIED PEANUT BUTTER & VEGEMITE ?!
it is awesomely awesome :D oh so awesome especially on toast !!

so I'm like, SOUNDS GOOD. I'll have it for breakfast! with rice if there is no bread!

The next morning I wake up at 11am and realise I am going to be 4 hours late for class. Make that 5 hours if I miss the next bus, so I grab a banana to eat on the bus and leg it.

Then I remember my casual promise about breakfast. Oh crap. Run back to the kitchen and find a croissant. Grab a butter knife. Locate a tub of Vegemite, a tub of Kraft Crunchy Peanut Butter and on an impulse, the kaya, and start buttering at light speed


this is kaya, aka sweet green fragrant coconut jam

Ran down the hill with half the croissant in one hand, the other half sticking out of my mouth. Almost tripped over a sunbathing hobo, he looked at me strangely. Didn't really care, I was going to miss my bus, but damn this croissant was good! Peanut butter and vegemite really do go great together

I make the bus. At uni, I'm early for law!
hey eden, I say, I tried your peanut butter and vegemite combination! it was pretty sweet!
She looks up suspiciously. what? I said BUTTER and vegemite, what on earth is this peanut butter and vegemite
mee: are you serious
but as we can see SHE TYPED PEANUT BUTTER

Anyway, like french toast and pistachio icecream, a good peanut butter & vegemite sandwich is something that every person should try before they die. And to help support this experience we are all going to eat sandwiches at uni next week

Except for chris, who does not enjoy vegemite, peanut butter, bread, and being cool.
And raju, who cannot wake up at 5:30am.
and all the people who have exams, do not have uni, do not have facebook and do not know how to make sandwiches (whaat the hell)


The required ingredients for peanut butter vegemite avocado banana and kaya sandwiches

Don't worry we'll eat your share =)

Italian Biscuits and Sweets at Gelatissimo

No, really. Where's the joy in keeping a food blog if you can't engage in some healthy cake display voyeurism now and again?

Peanut Crusted Tartufi at Gelatissimo

Chocolate Rum Balls

Some pointers on cake voyeurism: You should feel 100% no shame at all.

By all means buy your florentine, but don't forget your number one perogative, and that is to get The Shot, being the one where the florentines are stacked five on a plate, sparkling against the cabinet glass with a printed card proclaiming in curly brown font that they are indeed florentines

We don't care how you do it

Pretend you are the food inspector if you must
Pretend it's for a school project

JUST SHOW US THE FOOD

Italian Florentine Biscuits
No seriously, I would like to say thank you to all the cake and bakery shop owners out there. Thank you for creating beautiful foods for us food bloggers to take pictures of! Without you we would be lost and lonely and we would probably have to discover more meaningful things to occupy our lives with (sacrebleu!!!!!)... ....oh how we love to perve on pretty foods!


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Saint Honore Bun Shop, Chinatown Sydney

WHY are there so many different delicious buns in the world?
That is a question no one can answer
All we can do is try and eat them all

Saint Honore is a chinese bun shop in the city that has most of the classics and then some

Dan tarts (or egg tarts)
Notice that these have shortcrust pastry which is not my style but may be yours

Sesame balls with red bean paste

A thin pancake wrap with sweet cream and sponge inside

From memory, fillings on offer include strawberry, mango, banana and chestnut I THINK and the fruit ones are made with fresh fruit mmm so for about $2.50 these are totally worth trying

Mochis are round fat balls of glutinous rice with dessicated coconut sprinkled on the outside and usually sweet filling on the inside - from left to right are taro, green tea, mango, peanut and mooore to the right haha there should be red bean somewhere

Taro and green tea are pretty heavy - one or two mochis at a time is usually pretty satisfying btw! and the peanut mochi was surprisingly not a peanut buttery style paste but rather a loose filling of crushed peanuts, sugar and more coconut!

When they are good, coconut cocktail buns are a number 1 option from any bun shop
Sweet, coconutty, fluffy with sesame seeds

and 90c each :)

If the sesame seeds are browned and toasty and the balls look large and sturdy, snap them up quickly onto your tray! and you will be rewarded with a fragrant ferrero-rocher crunchy exterior and hopefully a soft sweet red bean interior like these ones had, mmmmmmm

Saint Honore Bun Shop - how to get there
Entrance to Sussex St arcade, or
Just down the road from the golden tree

Happy bun shopping! =D

Gingerbread Men photo collection

Here are some gingerbread men biscuits! Snap their heads off, steal their buttons, squiggle icing sugar all over their ticklish bodies, hehe I like gingerbread men

STUFFED UP GINGERBREAD MEN

"That rare look of pure and unaffected happiness witnessed only on the face of a man who is up to his waist in doughnuts"

Oh, naked gingerbread men

"the great escape"

Ginger Nuts

Pretty christmas ginger biscuits :)


Gingerbread skellingtons

Faceless gingerbread men ! their eyes became buttons

the gingerbread men production process!

hahaha

:)

More Hungarian Pastries at Bondi Gelato Bar, Sydney

One happy day I decided to open up a bakery shop on Bondi Beach.
Here is a photo of the shop display:

The shop display of assorted SAND-MADE goodies
siu mai, chocolate fudge squares, mini-croissants and cinnamon swirls

Can you tell which is which :-)?
Sadly, I had to close up shop when the tide came in. Then everyone decided they wanted "some real food" so we went to visit Bondi Gelato Bar again and eat more of their famous strudels!


Pictures stolen from an earlier visit

When you are hungry, everything tastes 50x better.
Since these strudels taste 200% awesome normally, you can imagine how good they were after being thrown around in the surf (and shopkeeping harhaar) all day

We got the classic chocolate and walnut strudel again, because it is just that good! I love the crunchy pastry layers and the crunchy nuts bits and the way it's all held together with sweet sticky chocolate mmmmm!

And then there was an interesting new cheese and cherry strudel that we didn't have room for last time. The cheese is like cheesecake-cheese - soft and sweet - and the cherry filling is tangy and a bit sour and the way it goes together with the cheese is patisserie genius :]

Cheese and Cherry Strudel

This chocolate sponge cake used to be a triangle, but then it got chopped up.
because LOL all the poor hungry hobos sitting around our table just couldn't wait

In its glory days (before it was murdered) this cake used to stand up proudly with its chocolatey stripes at the vertical, so that it kinda resembled the arch window in Playschool :) except coated with deep, dark mud-cake-style icing..

There is nothing like a bowl of classic crunchy French Fries to help absorb the super strudel sugar buzz

Bondi Gelato Bar, Sydney
140 Campbell Pde, Bondi Beach

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Gelatissimo Display Cabinet Voyeurism
(Mostly) Happy Gingerbread Men

Emperor's Garden Yum Cha, Haymarket Sydney

Soft meatballs with mushrooms, scallops and wintermelon

Yum cha yum cha!

When it comes to the yummiest yum chas in sydney's CBD the pecking order seems to go something like this:
1. Regal
2. Zilver (used to be Silver Springs but underwent a posh renovation)
3. East Ocean
4. Marigold

Chicken Feet in Black Bean Sauce

And then there's:
1. Sky Phoenix (yet to visit)
2. The seafood restaurant on top of Market City (ditto coz the lunch hour queue is kilometres long, and Poporo is next door and cheaper)
3. The random one in Broadway that no one's been to

AND THEN along came another restaurant to shake up the hierarchy:
Emperor's Garden Yum Cha
'Where's that?' you may be asking... and WELL MAY YOU ASK. Despite its obvious location next door to Market City, this restaurant could well be the cbd's best kept yum cha secret

The view from within our secret alcove

It was the morning after the 20-year-old's birthday bash and we were were at Broadway campus and hungry for breakfast.
I particularly wanted to try xiao long baos (Shang dumplings with soupy juicy insides) since the pig had been talking about them non-stop since we woke up haha

In our quest for xiao long baos, we ended up at Emperor's Garden

If you're at all a fan of asian buns you will probabably know about the Emperor's Garden bun shop at the Market City end of Dixon St that sells custard puffs, four for $1.oo. They also sell dan tarts and other pastries for $1.3o each and guess what, this is because it doubles as the dim sum outlet for the Emperor's Garden restaurant next door.

Juicy steamed beef meatballs with a really interesting faint star anise ? flavour

I'd never tried these before - the best thing about going yum cha with someone else is you get to try all these random new dishes that you're normally too chicken to try :)

Gu Tsai Steamed Dumplings <---- yum cha staple! Another unfamiliar dim sum - steamed pork and mushroom parcels
mmm the dumpling skins were so good

Presenting: Pigden
hahaha this photo cracks me up

Shanghainese Xiao Long Bao!

juicy goodness inside *________*

The Sole Survivor... waiting to be gobbled up

DAN 'egg' TART
These were soft and still warm from the oven. They'd be nicer if they were browner on top but the pastry crunch factor was totally there

Lol with dan tarts, you have to make sure you're absolutely satisfied and don't wanna order anything else before you sink your teeth into the sweet golden custard because the golden rule is: your dan tart should always conclude your yum cha dining experience :D

So where does the EG rate on the yummiest of the yums? hehe Welll it was really comfy and relaxed at breakfast time and they had good food all round.. I'd say somewhere close behind Regal, buut I think we'll have to go back a few times to really make sure ;3