Lemon and Licorice

Wow. I have overcome my concerns about preserved lemons. Tonight I'm spending a much needed night-in slobbing around in track-suit pants and watching tv. As an accompaniment, I finally got around to making Maggie Beer's chicken pieces roasted with olives, preserved lemon and fennel. I'd been a touch put off by my last lemony experience and was procrastinating on this recipe. The chicken was marinated with fennel, preserved lemon, pepper and olive oil. Then I roasted it all with black olives, leaving it in the switched-off oven to rest and go nicely golden at the end. Before serving, it was doused with verjuice and olive oil and mixed through with a stack of chopped flat leaf parsley.  I thought about how to serve it, and decided in the end to pile the chicken and pan juices on a couple of thin slices of sourdough bread and toss some grapes and chopped yellow roma tomato around the edge of the plate. Very medieval. Such an interesting combination of flavours: aniseed from the fennel, the strong lemon, sharpness from the verjuice and the fresh, grassy scents of the parsley.  The lemon was balanced this time; better mix of personalities at the dinner party. In the end though, it was too good to spend long periods of time contemplating, so I ate it instead. 

Earlier in the day E. (who is a serious and very impressive cake maker) and I took advantage of the autumnal sunlight to wander over to a little specialist cake decorating shop in Camperdown called Iced Affair. I guess I kind of realised that there must be shops like this out there but I was rather overwhelmed by the sheer variety of moulds and cutters for creating just about any botanical sample you might fancy in addition to pirates, gremlins, fairies, musical instruments, shoes, hand-bags and motor cars. Talk about a specialist industry. And who knew how specialised cakes could be? If you ever need a bright green wedding cake, in a heart-shaped tin with edible pearls and stars and decorated with birds of paradise flowers interspersed with high-heeled shoes this is definitely the place to go. In this affair, I think, there's a real risk of ending up with pink sugar on your collar. And maybe a tiny plastic bride and groom, poised in mid-domestic incident.