paper bottles of Mothers Ruined Gin on a beach

A ginterview with the mothers of Mothers Ruined

Full dis­clo­sure: I have worked with the Moth­ers on Boom Gin — a col­lab­o­ra­tion with my eth­i­cal cloth­ing com­pa­ny, which is fund­ing a schol­ar­ship to the week­end for fat babes that I run. Even if I had­n’t done that though, I would still think they are very cool and inter­est­ing peo­ple who make deli­cious prod­ucts […]

A couple of new(ish) bars

Hey, remem­ber when we used to be on top of all the open­ings and clos­ings in town and filled with reviews? Yeah me nei­ther. The ‘ista is old and prop­er­­ty-and-busi­­ness own­ing now, and we have Twit­ter instead of our group mail­ing list. But we can still try! So to that end, here’s a cou­ple of […]

Eat. Drink. Power. People. Pods

Our Kris has been doing an AMAZING job with all her the­atre reviews, while the rest of us slack off, so let me attempt to put that slight­ly more in bal­ance with one post about all the things I’ve been mean­ing to write about for­ev­er. Eat / Drink / Pow­er / Peo­ple / Pods Jano. Go […]

Cocktail tales in the Capital

Two cock­­­tail-relat­ed news bites for you today. Item one! Last week saw the offi­cial launch of The Black Spar­row, a beau­ti­ful space with very deli­cious food and drinks. You might be like “huh, what, where?”. We’ve already writ­ten about the bar, but that was when it was con­fus­ing­ly called Deluxe — it’s under the Embassy […]

The Roxy: it’s a little bit foxy

On Thurs­day I took a step back in time to the ear­ly 1930s and entered the Roxy Cin­e­ma. Dan will, I’m sure, tell you more lat­er about just what sort of cin­e­ma the Roxy is. For those who can’t wait it’s the first pur­­pose-built 3D cin­e­ma in the coun­try, with the best tech­nol­o­gy out there. […]

WOP: Cupcakes and Cocktails

 On Mon­day night my sis­ter and I went to our first Welling­ton on a Plate event — the way sold-out (they added a cou­ple more ses­sions even) Cup­cakes and Cock­tails at Martha’s Pantry. Giv­en that nei­ther of us is a slouch in the kitchen or bar, we weren’t sure how much we’d actu­al­ly learn from the event, but since cup­cakes and cock­tails are two of our favourite things, we thought we’d give it a go. And when we walked in the door and saw that the McKen­zie broth­ers were doing the mix­ing, we knew we were in safe hands. 

I fig­ure I’ll do this post basi­cal­ly just a series of cup­cake porn pho­tos. You don’t mind, do you? Good. 

This was what was wait­ing for each of us at the tables — sand­wich­es to nib­ble on, cup­cakes, icing and the cup­cake recipe. We were also giv­en Win­ter Pimms Punch to drink.

piping

We had a cou­ple of demon­stra­tions about dif­fer­ent ways to pipe, and were let loose on our own cock­tails. 

piping

You can see here that we had vary­ing tech­niques and lev­els of suc­cess with that. 

Then, before too much icing could acci­dent­ly end up in our mouths, Justin McKen­zie, wear­ing one blue glove that was kind of creepy let us in on the mag­ic for­mu­la for cock­tails: two parts strong, one part sweet, one part sour. It’s so sim­ple, I wast­ed all that mon­ey in Hooch and Hawthorne and Cuck­oo for noth­ing!

cocktail ingredients