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 / PeopleĀ / 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