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I think that's "Just William" or something similar. In all honesty, I haven't been thrilled by the chocs I've bought there personally on occasion.

From your profile location I assume you're in fact in Sydney:) I can't help with local producers, but I know in Melbourne many people like to buy butter sold at the Queen Victoria Market, produced down Warrnambool way. I'd suggest calling one of the small NSW cheesemakers and asking if they can give you a friendly recommendation.

Welcome Phil. I've certainly never seen any real restaurant with even a hint of nutritional info on a menu. (Not something I long for either, but that's a separate discussion.)

THanks so much Mark:) They're tasty too. LOL. I can well imagine, as K8memphis says, that a piping gun would be hard work for large volumes... I should devote myself to my bag technique for a while.

Thanks Kerry! Glad you enjoyed them. I'm hoping to post a light overview of fillings in the next 24 hours. I use liquid colourings mostly (other colourings (such as powders) are fairly hard to obtain in Australia unless you have professional connections). I find fresh, very finely grated citrus peel can do wonders as well. I haven't tried working with extra egg white (I assume you mean in powder form) as I prefer the Italian meringue technique and that is less touchy. And, again, egg white powder is harder to find in Australia for non-professionals than it is in the US and some other places. If I were stuck with the French meringue method then I'd have a cupboard full of egg white powder!

As someone who hates getting their fingers sticky (yet loves making bread and cake), I have to agree about disliking piping bags. Messy, sticky, unwieldy (for me)! I have much more success piping macarons from an icing piping gun. Mine has an 8mm mouth (ie, without nozzles attached) which is perfect for piping macaron batter.

This thread took a long time to go cold, so I thought I'd add something... I've just worked on a series of articles about making macarons and it seems that overmixing is the biggest killer (wrinkly and cracked), followed by high temperature (if you're using the more reliable Italian meringue method). There are illustrative pics on my site if anyone is curious.

How odd. I had thought about going as it's not far from me, but the information for the event was a bit patchy!

re Maggie's Harvest: This is a wonderful book, perhaps to become one of the iconic works in Australian cookery-focused gastronomic literature, alongside Stephanie Alexander's Cook's Companion (and a few others). I've reviewed it here. re Movida: it certainly smells a bit odd, though I think it might grow on you. LOL. The loose heavy paper cover adds, perhaps, to the flimsy impression, but at least it folds out to form a groovy (or irrelevant) poster;) As a whole, the production value of the book is visually impressive but physically odd -- I assume this is part of the increasingly innovative (but not always user-friendly) design of cookbooks. I hate to think how much those costs affect price points/author fees/editing/etc!

Both of these are great! "Cheese Slices" incorporates the great stuff from Studd's older work "Chalk and Cheese" and adds more - it looks like a great read and resource. Justin North's "French Lessons" is accessible but serious very modern cooking. An impressive volume.

CKatCook, assuming that the recipe(s) is/are correct, I would guess (1) your instant yeast is old, or (2) that the yeast needs a little hydration before incorporation in the dough (unlikely for rapid rise), or (3) you are activating/hydrating the yeast before incorporating it and it is dying/losing power because of this (temp?/age?). Under most circumstances, there should not be such marked differences between recipes made with compressed yeast and the same recipes made with the correct equivalent amount of a dry yeast (and there's some latitude there).

Goodness me, I never thought I would fall so thoroughly in the other camp! In fact, just reading the descriptions of all these slightly green-skinned bananas makes me want to be sick (no exaggeration). Unripe banana is foul stuff, in my opinion. As NimaCooks put it above "That slightly bitter taste and dry mouth feeling of eating an under ripe banana just ruins it for me." Icky. Astringent. Icky. Pasty. Icky. For me a good banana has a ripe banana flavour to it (rather than just pungent ethers). The skin is yellow and developing small black speckling. The flesh should be cream coloured with, at most, maybe a small softening beginning. Meanwhile, i was always revolted by my nanna's preference for black, squidgy bananas!

If I read about another "wicked" piece of chocolate/chocolate cake/hot chocolate/chocolate idol/chocolate hallucinogen I shall grown horns and a pointy tail and wreak vengeance.

You're straining my memory now. Sometime in the next two weeks I think!

MoVida, by Frank Camorra and Richard Cornish, is due out in November. A$45

Hi Ce'nedra. There's nothing wrong with the food as far as I can see (recipes seem interesting and the modern touch is also positive) -- my reservations are to do with quality of the narrative and the generally very poor editing of the book. I've written more about it here. If your interest is in the food, then the book seems to be a good choice.

I haven't yet had a chance to look at the new Kylie Kwong and Jill Dupleix volumes, but the Pauline Nguyen title Secrets of the Red Lantern didn't live up to expectations, I felt.

Greg Duncan-Powell is a well respected wine writer and also an editor at Vogue E+T. I'm not sure that i see the Fearnley-Whittingstall parallel (apart from the double-barrelled surname ), but haven't had a good look at this new volume.

It's not just lush, it's very serious cooking! I was reading through it on the weekend and it's an impressive volume. I've posted a mini-review on my site. Paul Wilson (the chef/author) will be talking at Books for Cooks in Melbourne this Thursday evening (9th Aug) so give them a call if you want to reserve a spot.

I'm not sure if you are focusing on the name of the category or the number of categories. Either way, the sizes given are the minimum sizes of each whole egg including shell in a carton in a given category. At farmers markets, etc, larger eggs can be purchased loose.

Baggy, I think it's pretty clear that the retail weight of an egg is the gross weight (ie, shell plus edible egg) in all markets.

The Australian Egg Corporation says this: on their eggs.org.au site. The size categories are minimum sizes per carton. A 12-pack of Large (50g) eggs is labelled as 600g. Each egg must weigh at least 50g (ie, no averaging). The standard egg size used in Australian cookbooks is usually described as '55g', '55-60g' or '60g', which is mildly confusing as this overlaps the current 'Large' and 'Extra Large' categories.

What I've seen as onglet in France and the UK is strips of skirt (as it is called in Australia), with the layer of tough tissue removed. As PCL mentioned, skirt is available from Asian butchers. With advance notice, or on a lucky day, most other butchers will also have skirt. In Australia this cut is not usually (in my experience at least) sold with the tough tissue removed, however.

Pat, I'd be very surprised if rolled oats weren't readily available in Belgium - perhaps there's a linguistic misunderstanding interfering? flocons d'avoine (FR) or haverflokken (NL) should be fairly easy to get. A simple Google (Belgium) search yielded numerous hits for recipes, and some commercial sites, so clearly they are available. Health food stores and places which sell a range of mueslis are also likely to sell coarse rolled oats.

I suspect Libertine is treading a fine line between great success and disappointment. Julian's description sums it up nicely. My sister loves the place, had had two 'perfect' meals there, so the whole family went a few weeks ago. Service was fairly good, friendly, accommodating and the wine advice was good too. The fish dishes were pronounced good by those who partook. The chou farci was a ball of bland utterly unremarkable stodge. A fig tart with roquefort cream consisted of a small pastry case filled with frangipane and one or two small slivers of fig, topped with a cream which was simply too pungent to permit much else to come through (not that the notional presence of fig had much likelihood of coming into its own anyway). Other desserts were impressive. If I hadn't had the misfortune of choosing the two dud dishes, I'm sure I would have come away as impressed as Shinboners. But I didn't.