Beyond Bourke Street: Taste of Sydney, 2012

This past Monday marked the start of university for me for another year, and surprisingly, the week seems to have flown by. Even though the work load hasn't reached critical mass (yet), I am finding it difficult to dedicate time and attention to this humble blog of mine. Therefore, my apologies for the lack of updates!

As a way of blowing off steam, and also to celebrate the reappearance of blue skies, I spent the better part of Saturday at Taste of Sydney, a festival which show-cases dishes from some of Sydney's best restaurants. Foodies are given the opportunity to sample small portions of a wide variety of dishes, essentially creating their own "dream degustation".

This year's festival, as with previous years', took place at Centennial Park, under the blessing of a beautiful cloudless sky and ample sunshine.

The weather was simply perfect for ice cream. A pot of sweet sesame halawa ice cream from Booza cooled me right down. I've always wanted to try this 'melt-resistent' ice cream, which derives its stretchy, elastic texture from the addition of certain tree gums and powdered roots. I couldn't really taste the sesame, but this was really fun to eat, and the first time I've had to chew ice cream ;D

Stretchy ice cream laced with tree gum, from Booza

The Booza ice cream stand.

Wish I'd gotten an action shot of the ice cream being stretched!

Foxy's Premium Frozen Yogurt were handing out sizeable samples of their products, and I took full advantage of their generosity. I tried two of the four flavours - the 'Naughty Pash' (honeycomb & caramel chunks), and the 'Sassy Pash' (vanilla bean & strawberry hunks). Let's put it this way - as far as low-calorie frozen desserts go, these were pretty good. The texture was similar to that of a granita's.

I spied the Adriano Zumbo stand from a mile off...

...and secured myself a box of Zumbarons:

I think the flavours were (from left to right): chocolate brownie, finger bun, caramel, some other sort of chocolate, something citrusy?, and vanilla bean. My favourite was definitely the caramel. So chewy and addictive!

While we're on the subject of sweet things...check out these adorable hamburger cupcakes from The Sweetest Things!

They also had plenty of other beautiful edible creations. Easily one of the prettiest stands at the festival :D

Some other highlights from the festival: Maya Sunny Honey giving out samples of honeycomb.

Ice popsicles from Fresh Pops; I tried a sample of the fig and cinnamon one, which had huge chunks of fresh figs in it, and it was so good.

As always, the sugar-coated macadamia nuts from Morish Nuts had me wanting to inhale the whole bag.

Same with the impressive range of muesli from Farmer Jo. Did you know that there's a Farmer Jo cafe in Surry Hills now? Serving their muesli, presumably :) I tried the 'burnt fig and cinnamon almond' and the 'hazelnut and chocolate orange'. Think I may have trouble limiting myself to one serving for breakfast!