Tis the season. Perhaps the best thing about this time of year isn’t just breaking bread with loved ones, but the bread itself – especially if that bread is as delicious as Baker Bleu’s panettone with sour cherries bursting from its seams, or if that bread is not bread at all and instead a smoked, trussed and bagged ham from Smith Street’s most respected butcher.
There is, of course, no more delicious gift than getting tickets for yourself and your loved ones to Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. But if you’re looking to make your eating all the more enjoyable this silly season, we reckon it’s worth looking up what the makers, shakers and producers of Melbourne and Victoria are putting down this December:
A limited-edition Christmas pudding
Lake House, Daylesford’s favourite lakeside fine diner and boutique accommodation is harnessing the power of the pud this Christmas with a Wolf-Tasker family special. This 900g showstopper is rich in dark ale, rum, Sherry and Madeira – they say it’s a combo that makes for “sophisticated depth perfect for an Aussie summer Christmas” but all you really need to know is that this thing is damned delicious.
Lake House’s limited edition Christmas pudding is available for preorder now. Pick it up or have it delivered mid-December.
A pandoro gelato cake
Do you do the most at Christmas? Looking for a big cake to match your big Christmas energy? Right this way. We’re talking layers of chocolate over layers of cherry cream over layers of redcurrant gelato, we’re talking all of those things housed within a delicate Italian pandoro sponge that’s lacquered in a chocolate raspberry spray. And the cherry on top? Well, that’s an edible bauble – made with single-origin Dominican Republic milk chocolate no less.
Pidapipo’s pandoro gelato cake is available for preorder until Sunday 21 December, with limited numbers for pick up in store.
A serious Christmas ham
How do you capture the flavours of Christmas in a ham? First, you source rare-breed Victorian pork and brine it for 48 hours, then smoke it over German beechwood for a while. Sounds like a lot of work, and that’s because it is. When it comes to Christmas ham, leave it to the professional ham hustlers over at Meatsmith.
This year, Meatsmith is offering half cuts, full legs, on the bone and boneless starting at $120.
Meatsmith’s signature Christmas hams are available for delivery and pick up now. See the full range and order yours at meatsmith.com.au.
A year of really good coffee
What if you could express your love and/or friendship for someone dear to you by somehow making sure they had really good coffee at their disposal for the whole year? Market Lane can make it happen. You may have admired their totes, but until you’ve tried their coffee subscription – roasted fresh, ground or unground, filter or espresso, different beans each time, or the set-and-forget Brazilian option, every two weeks or every month, as you see fit, shipped anywhere in Australia.
Order a Market Lane subscription now (and buy yourself that tote while you’re at it)
Fresh, locally baked panettone
Eating panettone in Australia used to mean cakey sweet bread that was frequently dry and loaded with enough preservatives to make it keep till the rapture. You could toast it and spread it with ricotta to render it palatable, but was it truly delicious? No, it was not. But times have changed, friends, and they have changed very much for the better. Panettone is famously difficult to get right, but the bakers of Melbourne have lately really stepped up their game. At MFWF we can vouch firsthand for the quality of panettoni baked at the likes of Baker Bleu (the sour-cherry option is a delight), Iris (“fragrant and citrusy with a soft, buttery centre”), To Be Frank (“an incredibly soft peel and intense flavour”).
We haven’t yet tried the signature Milanese panettone from new bakery Oji House, but given that founder Quentin Berthonneau, of Q Le Baker fame, trained with France’s national panettone champion from the Panettone World Cup, we reckon it’d definitely be worth a look.
Check out the full range from Oji House here, and head over this way for more on Baker Bleu’s panettone.
A Middle Eastern-flavoured Christmas hamper
It’s the closest thing to spending Christmas with Shane Delia, and it features a whole spread’s worth of magic from the Maha kitchen: well-loved favourites including the slow-roasted lamb shoulder make an appearance, as do those honey-glazed carrots, Turkish beef dumplings and the superbly smoky hummus. Dessert, meanwhile, is deployed across the table as four courses, calling on a classic Christmas pudding, rocky road, Turkish delight and a ready-to-bake brownie.
Ordering for Maha’s Christmas hamper is open now. Pick up from its sibling bar Jayda on Monday 23 or Tuesday 24 December.
An extremely fancy and expensive matcha stick
Not just any stick, mind you. It is in fact a tea scoop fashioned from foraged fallen eucalypt timber by anonymous Zen artisans and sold (in a fine paulownia box) by Collingwood matcha gallery Samu. Each of these chashuku is given a name, and is “rated according to your skill level and appetite for risk”. The expert-level stick spoon, for example, “the double black diamond territory of the tea world,” is $201, and best suited to tea aficionados looking for a jaw-dropping piece of art”, while the intermediate casual option is a mere $135.
For more matcha and matcha-adjacent gifts, head on over to Samu.