Finally got ’round to photo’ing my hummus. For my recipe, click here …

My favourite coffee is a bowl of trim latte from Zarbos – a popular deli in Auckland. A bowl? Yes it really is a bowl with no handle. Double shot coffee and lots of reduced fat milk served with a tiny morsel of chocolate brownie on the side – yum! All that milk gives me about a third of my daily calcium needs and at least 200mg caffeine to keep me hyped for the rest of the day. A teaspoon of instant coffee has about 80mg caffeine and tea has less.  Health experts recommend we drink no more than 3 or 4 cups of coffee a day. One bowl of latte would almost meet the daily limit!

People vary in their sensitivity to coffee and caffeine – the stimulant in coffee, tea and cocoa. For some people, even one cup of coffee will set their heart racing and their hands trembling. And caffeine isn’t the only substance in coffee that people can be sensitive to.

I am currently on a self-imposed coffee restriction to alleviate arthritis in my hand. Cut the coffee and the arthritis goes. I’ve limited myself to one a week – although I don’t always stick to it! When I first worked out this coffee – arthritis link I could find no research proving it. But in the past 10 years a number of studies have found a link between excessive coffee intake and an increase in arthritic factor – a precursor to arthritis – in people who are genetically pre-disposed. Without any genetic tests I could guess that I have the coffee sensitive gene. I don’t think researchers have yet found the exact substance in coffee that causes this problem.

So now I am drinking mostly tea – black tea for breakfast, earl grey tea in the morning, green tea in the afternoon and chamomile at night. Nothing like a bit of variety! It’s likely doing wonders for my health – all those antioxidants. But I do miss meeting friends for coffee – the smell, the milky froth swirled into the shape of a leaf and the sublime flavour when it’s made properly. It just doesn’t seem right to pay $3 for a lonely tea bag floating in a pot of boiling water. I may as well stay home and write on my blog!

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Related article:
How do you like your coffee?

I found this cool cafe graphic on Digg by two eyes (flickr cc).

How do you like your coffee?   :-) C

I’m finally relaxing after 24 hours of baking pita bread pizzas, chicken nibbles, iced cup-cakes, choc-chip cookies, citrus slice and of course, birthday cake. This was no ordinary cake, it was a Pinata cake and totally not healthy. Oh well, it was my son’s 8th birthday and I don’t think he and his 12 friends would have appreciated carrot sticks and egg sandwiches!

Back to the Pinata cake: it’s a basic round cake with a hollow cut in the centre. You ice the whole thing with decadent chocolate butter icing and pile up rainbow choc-chips and gold chocolate coins in the centre. Then you melt a pack of chocolate melts and swirl the chocolate around a metal basin until it sets. I left it in the freezer overnight then this morning placed it over the cake, loosening the chocolate shell from the basin with my hair blow-dryer. Then I melted even more chocolate to stick M&M’s all over the shell. If you want the full recipe, it’s in the Australian Women’s Weekly ‘kids’ birthday cakes’ recipe book.

What more could a bunch of hyped 8-year-old boys want than a cake filled with chocolate and lollies that you get to smash open!

Oh, I did have one token to healthy eating: a basket of mandarins. They looked great on the table and I think someone even ate one!