We finally made it to Zilver! I’d been wanting to try this restaurant in awhile, having read many glowing and enthusiastic reviews. A good excuse (not that we really need one, to go out and eat) came along when B was recently officially accepted as an Australian citizen. Instead of celebrating with a round of Vegemite sandwiches, we decided to go chinese! Doesn’t really make obvious sense, but a meal is a meal, and besides, I think it’ll take a lot more years of being a citizen before B would even so much as stand next to a Vegemite sandwich.

On our first visit to Zilver, we order off the menu – a task which in itself takes a considerable amount of time because everything sounds so good. Their salt and pepper calamari and whitebait is truly something. The tender calamari is very thinly sliced and coated in the crispiest batter, with just the right amount of seasoning. The whitebait is equally crispy, but fried just-so, such that it’s not dry inside, despite being very small morsels of fish. The crispy skin chicken is also incredible. Under a thatch of shredded shallots and coriander leaves, are pieces of chicken with beautiful lacquer-brown, crackly skin and super succulent flesh. The only let down for me was the eggplant and pork mince hotpot – which B and I always order whenever we go to a chinese restaurant. Zilver’s version is slightly sweet ‘n’ sour, with a tang reminiscent of canned pineapple, which isn’t bad, but also isn’t what I look for in an eggplant hotpot.

If you’re coming here for yum cha, don’t do what we did, and arrive on a Sunday morning with an empty stomach. The hour+ wait it took us to finally get a table had me almost wanting to gnaw on the arm of the lady announcing the numbers through a microphone. Come oooon, number 92! Finally, bingo!

The wait is definitely worth it; the atmosphere, fantastic. As you enter, the dining room before you is just a sea of tables, around which gather heads bowed over rice bowls. An army of smartly dressed waiters flit between tables, clearing empty steamer baskets and refilling pots of tea, while trolleys of goodies make their slow circuit of the room. Highlights include the salt and pepper spanner crab, vegetarian dumplings and the egg custard tarts we had to finish the meal. Some people judge their entire yum cha experience by these tarts alone. I don’t, but these warm, incredibly flaky and intensely yellow morsels are definitely one of the best I’ve ever tasted.

Zilver Restaurant
Level 1, 477 Pitt Street
(snr of Hay Street)
Haymarket 2000.

A very Happy Easter to everyone! I trust no one has overdone it yet, with their chocolate consumption? I must admit, I’m a bit cheap. B and I usually wait until after Easter before we start foraging for chocolate eggs. Half-price chocolate eggs, that is. All that surplus from the easter bunny’s basket usually makes it’s way into our shopping basket a couple of days after the event.

To tide us over til the egg hunt, I decided to bake a cake. As serendipity would have it, I recently picked up a packet of Herbie’s fragrant sweet spice. This spice mixture is an exotic blend of coriander, cassia, cinnamon quills, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, blue poppy seeds, cloves, cardamom and rose petals. It added a touch of intrigue to a batch of mini spiced cocoa cakes last week, and I couldn’t wait to find another excuse to use it again.

Enter Lynne Mullins’ recipe for an apple custard cake. As if the words ‘apple’ and ‘custard’ weren’t enticing enough (rhubarb and custard, possibly the only other two words that could beat that), she uses the aforementioned spice mix to evoke a sense of Easter; cinnamon in particular, being one of those must-have ingredients in hot cross buns or simnel cake. The result is a soft and warm buttery cake topped with spicy apple slices and with a thin layer of vanilla custard running through the middle. In other words, a cake perfect for Julia’s Easter Cake Bake.

Fragrant Apple Custard Tea Cake:

Custard
1 cup milk
3 large egg yolks
55g caster sugar
30g plain flour
2 tsp vanilla extract

Cake
200g soft butter
110g caster sugar
2 eggs
225g self-raising flour, sifted
2 small apples, cored and thinly sliced (about 140g each)
1 tbsp butter, melted
2 tsp caster sugar, extra
1 tsp fragrant sweet spice

For the custard
Place milk in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Remove. Whisk egg yolks and sugar in a small bowl until thick, then add flour and whisk until smooth.

Pour hot milk onto egg yolk mixture and stir until smooth. Return mixture to saucepan and stir over low heat until mixture comes to the boil.

Stir constantly for 1-2 minutes until thick, then remove from heat, stir in vanilla and chill, covered in the fridge.

For the cake
Preheat ove to 180’C. Mix butter and sugar in a bowl and beat with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy.

Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Fold in flour. Spread half the mixture into a 22cm greased and base-lined cake tin, add custard and smooth with a spatula. Add spoonfuls of remaining cake mix and spread carefully with a spatula to cover custard. Arrange apples on top of cake mixture and brush with melted butter. Combine sweet spice mix with extra caster sugar and sprinkle over apples.

Bake for 60 to 70 minutes or until cooked with tested with a skewer. Cool in pan before turning out.

Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging event has given me the impetus to highlight one of my favourite herbs. Lemon rose geranium was introduced to our household late last year, and has chosen to grow into a lush, verdant, and most importantly, robust plant. Given my propensity to be unlucky with certain pot plants, I was thrilled to bits when it continued to grow and do it’s thing on the balcony, with the minimum of fuss and bother.

Not only is it evidently hardy, it also has beautiful purple-pink flowers and incredibly aromatic leaves; the scent of which fills the air like a cloud every time you brush past it. You can use the leaves to make a rose scented sugar or a flavoured syrup that is good mixed into plain yogurt or used to poach fruit. Here, I have infused cream with the chopped leaves and made a thick custard out of it. The custard is then poured into individual cups and chilled. When ready to be served, they’re sprinkled with sugar (here’s where the scented sugar will also come in handy) and passed over with a blowtorch. The result is a lemony brulee with a hint of rose that goes very well with lychees. The original recipe by David Everitt-Matthias calls for lychee sorbet and even popping candy, but having neither, I opted for slivers of fresh lychees.

Rose Geranium Cream :

75ml lemon juice
grated zest of 1 lemon
15g rose geranium leaves, chopped
200ml double cream
1 egg
4 egg yolks
65g caster sugar

Place the lemon juice, zest and chopped geranium leaves in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 1 hour. Return to the heat, stir in the double cream and bring to the boil again.

Whisk the egg, egg yolks and sugar together until pale. Pour the cream mixture on to the eggs, whisking all the time, then pour back into the saucepan. Cook over a low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon (it should register about 84’C on a thermometer). Be careful not to let it boil or it will become scrambled. Remove from the heat and strain through a fine sieve, pushing on the leaves to extract as much flavour as possible. Pour into ramekins or other heatporoof bowls and leave to cool, then chill.