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Sometimes ugly food is the best food; galbi jjim, Korean beef short ribs, braised for 5 hours in honey, pear juice, soy, soju, mirin, black pepper and garlic. Soooo meltingly soft and a total umami bomb. With mini king oyster mushrooms, and chunks of carrot and daikon that I specifically commissioned my bf to shape into perfect rounded golf balls for me, by commanding him to hone the sharp edges of each chunk with a vegetable peeler. If you didn't know that trick, that's the secret of a non-cloudy braise and keeping vegetables in stews largely intact, btw; because a long cook will break down the edges of the veggies into a pulp that clouds a stew. The Koreans and Japanese hone their vegetable edges for exactly this reason.

Getting back in my cooking groove, could not be happier; Sunday breakfast - haemul pajeon, crispy Korean green onion, squid and oyster pancakes. Scallop kimchi on the side.

Nah. Chocolate and ancho chile.

It's a long story as to why. Don't ask. But I made a Day of the Dead cake. And yes, I made the buttercream flowers.

And my last name IRL is...Pritchett.

Monday morning office cake. An 18 lemon cake - lemon and limoncello pound cake, impregnated with lemon syrup, doused in lemon glaze, and covered in candied lemon slices and crystallised lemon peel. Would you like some lemon with your lemon?

No; it's like a crumble topping, with butter, flour, cinnamon and sugar and spread on a tray and baked until dry and rubbly. Though any topping-like preparation that suggests rubbing butter into flour, I just melt the butter and stir the dry ingredients in because it's quicker, and neither the texture nor the taste suffer ill effects.

Made a cake last night..a four layer devil’s food chocolate cake, filled with thick salted butter caramel, coated in salted caramel buttercream, hazelnut praline with smoked salt, feuilletine, brown sugar crumb and edible pansies. And yes, it’s supposed to be roughly and thinly frosted like that, I figured there was more than enough sugar for my vulture colleagues to feed on as it is. I personally think it’s an abomination, but after I made that healthy pineapple and brown rice syrup ‘cakelet’ thing for the fitness and paleo blogger chick in my office last week, the chica whose birthday it is THIS week requested that I “put all the sugar that I took out of that cake into this one”. So I did.

It might be because I (medically) have no sense of smell; I'm always looking for more intensity of flavour, perhaps to compensate. Lemon things never taste lemony enough to me; if a recipe says 1 tablespoon of ginger, I want 9 tablespoons, etc. Your instinct is probably the hallmark of a more nuanced cook; I just want more. MORE.

Aha. No, that's not me - that's my colleague, the birthday girl. Imagine someone who looks the exact diametrical opposite - very, very short black spiky hair, skin pale as paper, masses of eyeliner, rotund in the all the wrong places - THAT'S me. Anyway, today's effort: because it's Monday and I bloody LOVE Mondays (not kidding, not sarcastic) - ginger and pear cupcakes. But not just any old ginger and pear cupcakes! These have a base of Fever Tree ginger beer (the gingeriest I've ever found) reduced to an intense syrup, chopped candied stem ginger, crystallised ginger, dried powdered ginger and grated fresh ginger. And roasted pear that I then pureed in pear nectar, a dash of Poire William eau de vie, and freeze-dried pear and mascarpone buttercream topped with candied pear wafers. I'm very into improving my baking to make ingredients/flavours (the ginger, the pear) taste the most OF themselves that I possibly can without being overwhelming, and layering them in texture and intensity so you hopefully go, "Wow, I have never tasted anything more pear-y. Even the last pear I ate was not as pear-y as this." (See also: that time I spent 2 days pureeing and reducing a whole watermelon, injecting fresh slices of another watermelon with the resulting watermelon reduction, and vacuum packing the lot overnight to produce a watermelon slice that SLAMMED YOU IN YOUR MOTHERFLIPPING FACE with watermelon.)

This is dinner. Times 10. (The crackers, not the glasses of fino.) Sobrasada (raw, cured, spreadable chorizo) and brined cockles on Jatz crackers, a very cold glass of fino sherry on the side.

Pretty common in China to eat fresh soft tofu with chili oil etc for breakfast. This isn't too far from that.

Strange-flavour burrata for breakfast; a 12/10 mashup of Italy and Sichuan, with fresh burrata I bought direct from the makers in Marrickville. Burrata, if you're not familiar with it, is like a fresh mozzarella, but instead of being soft-solid curd on the inside, it's filled with fresh cream, that oozes lusciously forth when you cut it. It's not often sold in shops, because you need to get it fresh enough that the cheese carcass doesn't soak up the cream and ruin the prized pornographic gushing. With 'strange-flavour' dressing, the name for the classically fiery Sichuanese combination of nutty roasted sesame paste, Chinkiang black vinegar, toasted chilli oil, crushed raw garlic, green onion, soy sauce, fermented black beans, and green onion and sesame seeds. It's hot, it's salty, it's sour, it's nutty, and it's DELICIOUS against the cool, white, fatty creaminess of the burrata.

For the alcohol, or the cakes? You realize I don't eat the cakes by myself, right?

Because I’m hardcore, I did indeed get home from a cocktail event last night, catnap for a little, and then got up again at 4am, STILL QUITE DRUNK, to make a four layer pineapple and coconut chiffon cake, filled with homemade lemon curd, fresh blackberries, roasted pistachios, almond buttercream and a dehydrated pineapple flower crown. For a colleague’s birthday morning tea a mere few hours later. #drunkbaking

Hey, I know Andy Bowdy!! And his new cafe is very near my house in Sydney; and he sells miniatures now: The Tony; cocoa nib cake, raspberry mousse, baked cheesecake, salted caramel, lemon jam, candied hazelnut, milk crumb: And the Rita; spiced ginger cake, passionfruit bavarois, coconut chew, caramelised pineapple, toasted coconut cream, candied pecan, ginger milk crumb:

Host's note: this topic once again exceeded the ability of our servers to handle efficiently; the previous installment is here: Dinner 2017 (Part 5). Freezer-bowels digging meal - I had some Korean neuk gan sal beef. That's the intercostal strip of meat from between each beef rib, sometimes called the rib finger. It's incredibly tender and tastes unctuous without actually being fatty. It's a rare cut, very prized. Marinated it in soy, honey, mirin, black pepper and garlic and then stir fried it and ate it on top of Korean green tea buckwheat noodles (nokcha naengmyeon), with a dressing of wasabi, soy sauce and a drizzle of sesame oil, and topped with green onions and toasted sesame seeds.

Thanks for your kind words, everyone. They mean a lot, more than you know. Anyway, after saying above that I'm totally out of the zone of cooking, I spent all yesterday...cooking. Mostly baking - savoury Suzhou-style pork belly mooncakes with hot water and lard pastry, and a gigantic strawberry, coconut meringue and mascarpone cake. You can see them over on the eG baking forum here And for dinner, I actually made some proper, non-alcohol food - baby squid, that I painstakingly gutted and scored, and a deeply fiery Malaysian sambal with roast prawn paste, chillis, garlic, ginger, candlenuts etc, that I made in a mortar and pestle and then stir fried with the squid. Not exactly an appealing food photo but nonetheless.

Sunday baking for Monday office morning tea - I actually didn't manage to get a photo of the cake before my locust colleagues started cutting it, so I present to you instead screenshots of THEIR Instagram feeds - my favourite thing about baking for my office is how all my colleagues instantly Instagram, Snapchat and Boomerang my cakes with such genuine excitement and glee. In this case, strawberry, coconut meringue and mascarpone cake - a mammoth enterprsie; 24 eggs, 3kg of strawberries, 1.5kg of mascarpone..phew. And for those with more of a meat-tooth than a sweet-tooth (like me), savoury Suzhou-style mooncakes, with proper hot water and lard pastry and chopped pork belly, ginger and white pepper filling.

@chefmd, I'm so sorry - and best wishes for your travels, and your father. I myself am on the verge of some kind of breakdown for international travel + family reasons, having JUST returned from a hellish week to the wilds of British Columbia in Canada, where my brother in law has committed suicide, necessitating what has been a very upsetting trip. As a result of the stress, the jetlag, the grief, the shock and the general psychic distress of all combined, my dinners lately have basically consisted of things like this - a Rum and Rum and Rum and Rum and Raisin; Flor de Cana aged rum, Mount Gay Barbados rum, Sailor Jerry spiced rum, a rounding of treacly Pedro Ximenez, and giant, fat golden raisins that I've been macerating in rhum agricole for nearly 2 years. One day soon I'll cook again properly, as I struggle to find my new normal. Love and light to you all.

Thanks for the recommendations, all (particularly @Shalmanese) - in a whirlwind three days in SF, ate at: El Farolito in the Mission - strawberry and pineapple aguas frescas and carnitas, al pastor, carne asada and chorizo tacos (and nachos for my friend in background): Dynamo Donuts - passionfruit and chocolate, and bacon, apple and maple: Mission Chinese - tiki pork belly, lamb dumplings, chicken fat and ginger fried rice, thrice cooked pork and Chongqing chicken wings. It was OK. Shalmanese is right, even hipster Chinese food is better in Sydney. Chez Panisse, for the most disappointing and overpriced meal I've had in years - I've always wanted to go there, but while the quality of the produce and the atmosphere was nice and all, I seriously feel like I cook more interesting food on a bog-standard Tuesday night. I would call this quality of cooking 'medium level wedding catering food.' AND it was all too salty. Bah. Brenda's French Soul Food - a GREAT recommendation. Hangtown Fry with a biscuit and hash, crawfish beignets, and pork belly with grits (and strawberry mimosas): Kazan sushi in the mission - the nigiri set was excellent: Excellent roasted crab and garlic butter noodles from Thanh Long: A strange dish I don't really understand - biscuits and gravy - from the Dipsea Cafe in Marin: And then, in a hat tip to the eG Baking threads, I lugged all my piping tips and food colours and lustre dusts and glitters to San Francisco to teach my friends' kids how to make my floral cupcakes - not a bad effort for kiddlios and a very jetlagged RRO: Then straight after SF, it was on to Golden, BC in Canada, where I didn't eat a single thing of interest or note!

Ah right! Thanks!

I might give these a go, I have a lot of rhubarb left over! One question; what's the quantity of millet to use? I notice it's in the directions but not the ingredients list. Thanks!

The top view is a bit prettier: