My predictions for Wellington on a Plate 2018

Tomor­row is my favourite launch of the year — the Welling­ton on a Plate pro­gramme. In advance, and with­out hav­ing looked at their web­site, here’s what I think it will include (or not) so we can look tomor­row and see if I was right or wrong. There’s always a trend­ing meat (wow is that a […]

What Jonny did next

We have always been fans of any­thing the McKen­zie broth­ers do, so we were super excit­ed when we saw Jon­ny tweet­ing about a new waf­fle place. Sad­ly it turns out that not only is that waf­fle place in Auck­land, but he’s not even run­ning it. As it hap­pens, Jon­ny McKen­zie is bow­ing out of the pub­li­can […]

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