Akland street, cakes & mug-ach-cino

I’ve uploaded a couple of older sketches again, of a gorgeously seductive green eyed beauty… unfortunately most of my sketch of that era have gone all crinkly.. I did take them to new guinea where I had a lot of them on display on my wonder wall (see the first picture I posted, …. scroll to the bottom).. mais oui… a number of them must have gotten damp and when I try to scan them they look bad, even squashed under 4 phone books!

On reflection I noticed all the worst ones where painted on normal photocopy paper…. So I got up early and went into Akland street looking for a art supplier for some good quality watercolor paper….

Akland street and St Kilda is a very bohemian part of Melbourne and I’ve always liked it… it is also the gooey cake center of the universe… but alas the real art supplier is no more …so as compensation I bought a collection of cakes.. next stop was my current lady friend’s place (I’m not allowed to call her my girlfriend, because of a slight decade or two age difference), where I’ll be staying the next few days… she was so excited by the cakes and showed me a magnificent older style espresso machine, which hadn’t breathed in some time… but it only too a little tinkering and it sprung to life… buy know a lot of her friends had materialized getting ready for a shopping excursion, which seems there main interest in life… so suddenly I had orders for 4 cappuccinos and a latte… simple enough you say..

Now I’m not a coffee snob, and there are a lot of them here in Melbourne (they would have let you know it is quarto cappuccini not 4 cappuccinos, buggar I just did that too ) but the original Italian coffee with milk frothed is a pretty fixed recipe and that is particularly related to quantities… and there were suitably sized cups, the royal Dolton or whatever was out… just use mugs they all yelled, sensing shopping time was a wasting…heathens

I decided to just make two mugs full.. I’d rather be considered a bad coffee maker and not asked than have to make bad coffee all the time (there is a deep insight into my being in that statement)… the first coffee was prepared under their instructions and the second a scaled up (one and a half espresso starter size) directly in the mug, which actually became a little too hot to handle… but it is truer to the Italian style…with a little cocoa dusting… the mug-ach-cino was born…

well 8 mug-ach-cinos later and my box of gooey cakes all gone the girls are still giggling away… a small victory for sigh and enough for this post.