This from 13 December.

The first major influence was our trip to Australia earlier this year.  I’d already been introduced to flat white an excellent coffee shop near my work, named in honour of an Australian and Kiwi style of preparing coffee.  But I hadn’t quite clocked the antipodean connection, so it was a very pleasant surprise to discover that really good coffee is pretty much expected in Aus and New Zealand.  Even at Café Splash, my brother’s café in the quiet residential area of Toormina, where a non-Australian might expect a mediocre brew, the coffee is way better than anything I’d had on the high street in London.

And if Aussie/Kiwi baristas set the bar for good coffee, they do so particularly in the area of latte art.  So I learned to seek out these baristas and watch them.  I also started casing youtube for videos of people pouring latte art.  Another win was the discovery of taylor st, another excellent Australian coffee shop in London.

But even with all this observation, the best I seemed to be able to do was a slight swirly pattern, which you get by pouring the milk into the cup off-centre, and this causes a whirlpool effect as the cup fills.  Clearly I had an equipment problem, and the first suspicion fell on the glass jug I’d been using for some time to froth the milk.  All the web articles I could find advised a proper stainless steel steaming jug, and all the baristas I came across were equipped with such.  I wistfully mentioned as much and come father’s day this year, I received my very own stainless steel jug.  Hallelujah, and well listened Jonathan!

This really was a coup and for the first time I found myself blending a silky smooth micro-foam into the milk to give a delicious velvety feel in the mouth.  What was the difference?  I’ve no idea, perhaps the fine texture on the brushed stainless steel finish inside the jug, perhaps the narrowing of the jug towards the top, maybe something else entirely.

The other major equipment factor is the cup.  I’d been using plain old straight up and down coffee mugs.  But I noticed one day that the baristas spend a lot of the pour with the milk near the top of the cup, and thus the surface near the jug’s spout.  How to increase the amount of time spent with the surface near the top without overflowing?  Simple, use a tapered cup!  I rushed out with a somewhat reluctant Julie in tow and found a suitable looking tapered rocks glass.

And I soon learnt that getting the milk and the cup right is half the battle.  Once it is right (or approximating right), getting at least something like art is not too great a stretch.  My first great success, which you see on the left, photographed for posterity, leaves a lot to be desired.  There are very few leaves in the pattern, the dark areas are quite pale and the milk is decidedly bubbly.  Nonetheless, a pattern!

I’d like to say it all took off from there, but over the next several weeks I didn’t achieve much better, and very little worth photographing.  Here’s one of the few noteworthy efforts, this time with two cups and a much better consistency to the milk, and more leaves, but somehow an underwhelming geometry:

And then it all changed.  I’d heard for some time about our new barista at work (who makes coffee for the clients), and how he’s so passionate about coffee, he’s teaching anyone who’ll listen to do latte art.  So one afternoon I wandered over and asked for some tips.  This is what I came away with:

• Full fat and skimmed milk are best (not an option, I’m afraid – Julie has spoken).
• Swirl the jug before pouring to get the correct surface texture.
• Use a wide-rimmed, rounded cup (one of which I procured).
• Keep the flow constant!
• Practise lots!  Any old brown liquid will do (like cocoa).

The next morning, armed with this treasure trove of knowledge, I did this:

We’re back to bubbles, but never mind that, I have had the milk right before.  Now, for the first time, though, the geometry is right.  I’ve successfully managed to shoot the milk across the surface as I poured to get stretching and swirling I’ve never managed before!

And I’m getting better. Here is the best one so far.  Better contrast, much more fine-grained structure and great micro-foam:

And a last picture, from this very evening.  Taking the cocoa advice, I’ve also started doing hot-chocolate night-time drinks to keep my hand in.  I quite like this one:

So, all in all, not quite ready to make a youtube video yet, but getting there.

I learnt how espresso contains the most aromatic parts of the coffee, leaving behind the less tasty stuff. And how espresso has only about half as much caffeine as filter or instant, so you can drink twice as much without getting wired. I learnt about the art of preparing the shot, grinding the coffee to just the right fineness and then tamping it with just the right pressure to make a puck of coffee grinds which will allow water through at just the right speed for a perfect extraction.

Too coarsely ground or lightly tamped and the puck lets the water through too quickly, resulting in a weak espresso. Too finely ground or heavily tamped and the water travels through too slowly and you get all the oils and caffeine you wanted to avoid. I learned about steaming and frothing milk to a chiffon fineness and the delicate, wonderful coffee foam known as crema which accompanies the perfect espresso shot.

Excited by this wonderful new world I started making plans. Julie has already reported on the subsequent purchase of a proper coffee grinder. And I’ve written about my burgeoning barista skills. But I very soon discovered that our decidedly cheap espresso machine was just not up to the task of preparing the best espresso or the best frothy steamed milk. In fact it’s a bit of a bust where steamed milk goes and for a while we used battery-operated hand frothers, but these turned out to be unreliable and didn’t produce milk as good as that made at best high street coffee shops.

So there we were with a perfectly functional espresso machine which flawlessly performed its function of making sub-par espresso and steamed milk: how could we justify throwing it out and buying an expensive machine while it still worked? We agonised over this for a long time and eventually adopted a wait-and-see attitude, hoping that the machine would wear out.

Finally, a few weeks ago we had our chance: the glass collection vessel received one too many hard knocks and broke. Immediately we packed Jonathan into his buggy and headed out to Westfield, the super-sized shopping centre which recently opened on our door-step. We had no trouble finding espresso machines, but there were a few drawbacks, one being price (especially given my out-of-work status). But the major difficulty was that collection jugs seem to have gone out of fashion and none of the espresso machines available come with them. So much for our excuse to upgrade! We agonised again and finally purchased a De’Longhi Café Treviso.

This turns out to have been a very good plan. The coffee comes out wonderfully, with a beautiful crema. With a little practice, you can froth milk up to towering foam, or a silky smooth body (my preference). The boiler’s head of steam is plentiful, allowing the milk to be warmed from fridge temperature to the perfect 70°C.

So now it’s just a matter of learning latte art, no mean feat if the last few week’s fruitless practice are anything to go by.

(The variation in banana size and stage of ripeness can make a big difference to the batter and therefore the exact cooking time required.)

Anyhoo, this time I thought I would get it spot on. I had 5 perfectly average bananas in a slightly advanced stage of ripeness (i.e. too spotty for me to want to eat them.) And this time I made sure I used caster sugar instead of regular sugar because it turns out our regular sugar doesn’t “cream” well with the butter and this lends a certain brick-like consistency to the finished product.

I followed the recipe diligently, knocking it out during an episode of Baby Einstein. Then got back to feeding Jon and waiting for my perfect loaf to bake.

I’d noticed some wateriness about the bananas when I was mashing them, so I wasn’t too surprised when the loaf hadn’t finished baking after the hour the recipe advised. I turned the oven down a little because it had attained a very pleasing brown colour already, and reset the timer.

Even after another half-hour of cooking, I still wasn’t overly suspicious about the preponderance of moisture inside the loaf, but when we got to the end of the second hour, enough was enough and I pulled it out.

I was musing over this strange sticky phenomenon while hanging up the laundry and waiting for the dubious loaf to cool. Tom meanwhile was reading out loud through the recipe which I’d left on the surface.

It was when he got to the line “Half a cup of milk and water”, that the hammer blow struck. No!! I’d put in a whole cup(!), roughly chucking in about half a cup of water followed by milk to bring it up to 250ml.

Good grief, half a cup of liquid extra, no wonder it wasn’t setting.

On the plus side, we dug into it (with spoons) while it was still warm and Tom decreed it to be the best banana flop ever. Warm, crunchy, chewy banana bread outside; soft, gooey banana-bread flavoured interior. Quite yummy and I think it would go well with custard.

I suppose as flops go, it could have been a lot worse.

After getting the coffee grinder for my birthday, cappuccino for breakfast has become a something of a staple. There comes a time when an aspiring amateur barista starts to think about presentation. Having passed that point some time back and finding ourselves in Oxford street on other business, we popped into Selfridges a couple of weeks ago to see what they had on offer in glass coffee mugs.

After passing up a few likely looking, but searingly expensive candidates, Julie took the simple expedient of asking for directions. We were shown over to a display packed with Bodum coffee accessories at a price that feels better for people living just outside of Kensington. We came away with four mugs, and breakfast the next day was accompanied by the coffee you see pictured above. Mmm, frothy…

It all went swimmingly. Two days later, 15 minutes into the two hour delivery slot, two energetic blokes came bouncing down the stairs, with armfuls of bags, and created a massive grocery obstruction in the hallway. Sign here please and off they go.

I had put a couple of fresh veg items on the list to see how they coped with them. What I was expecting was several courgettes, two brown onions and two red onions. So you can possibly imagine my surprise when I got several courgettes, two brown onions and SIXTEEN red onions! They had an entire shopping bag all to themselves! (Quite necessary given their volume and the fact that they weighed in at 2.7kg!)

After negotiating a partial refund with Tesco’s phone support team, we then had to set about using the onions. Fortunately it was Delia to the rescue with her cool online site of great recipes – and a French onion soup one in particular. Mmmm.

We were never going to get even close to making stock using her recipe for this exercise, but in hindsight, something a little better than Knorr beef stock cubes would have been a ‘slim plan’ as they say in SA.

You can conclude from this that our onion soup had a bit more of the Oxo-type flavour than Delia’s might have had – but it was still very tasty – and the croutons that so elegantly float on top in her picture (ours didn’t look as pretty) – ah wow, these were DEE-licious. Heartily recommend the recipe, just buy some proper beef bouillon or classy stock cubes first.

Total so far: 4 onions in the soup, 5 given away – just seven to go! (Good thing that soup was so good…)

He made the first 2006 batch when we got home from the Good Friday service today and we started on them straight out of the oven, hot and fresh. They were yummy!

Although what it does is very straight-forward: mix ingredients and bake, it gives the opportunity for (a) being creative with new recipes and (b) adding the home-made touch, while still requiring minimal input in terms of time and effort. What more could you ask for from a kitchen appliance?

While the preparation for bread-making takes hardly any time, there is a certain element of planning involved in order to get the best use out of one’s bread-maker. For instance, half an hour before lunch, when the munchies are just coming on, is not the best time to begin a loaf on the standard program which takes just over 3 hours to run! (Especially when this will mean that the man of the house will be clamouring for food long before the dough has even got into its second rise cycle!)

There is a simple solution to this which, this morning, meant that as soon as we finished breakfast, I got started on our lunch-time loaf.

Today we’re making “Porter bread”. (Except that Morrison’s didn’t have porter on their shelves, so we took the closest alternative of a tasty stout with a quirky name – Theakston’s Old Peculier). Not exactly the sort of ingredient that you’d be thinking of sampling with the last of your morning cup of coffee.

I have two bread-maker recipe books. This one doesn’t have any of the glossy pictures, but it’s a real treasure in that it has a grand selection of recipes.

On today’s recipe, next to the 350ml porter, it said: “Pour this out and let it stand for 5 minutes”. No problem. Stout poured out and put to one side.

Then I went into auto-pilot mode. Ho-hum, bread-making is such a doddle – all these recipes that go with 500g of flour take 350ml of water. So in goes 350ml water, then the other non-flour ingredients: salt, tablespoon of honey, some oil. Right. Got everything, ready for the flour… hey, there’s the stout on the counter – I haven’t added that yet. Oh – hang on! – there ISN’T a line for water in this recipe, it only has the 350ml of stout!

Sigh. Out with the water etc., rinse, wash, rinse and in with the stout, and off we go again. But see how quick it is – even with that setback, I’m still done in 15 minutes.

Now — off to do other things while the bread-maker whizzes together some bread for us!