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