Calypso Warehouse Blog

It seems as though everyone has a crazy abundance of lemons at the moment. The one single lemon on our tree (that has been growing since December I might add) is almost ready. Here’s hoping it’s not a dud!

Apart from my lone ranger, everyone else’s trees are going berserk! A few weekends ago, I went to a beautiful morning at Stackwood in Fremantle where everyone brought in whatever they had excess off in their gardens to trade - it was so lovely! And to reiterate - there were lemons. Lemons lemons lemons. 

So anyways, when you have hundreds of lemons (but no tequila!), you make Lemon Drizzle Cake, and boy is this one a beauty!

LEMON DRIZZLE CAKE

225g butter (at room-ish temperature) 225g caster sugar 4 eggs Fine zest of 1 lemon 225g self-raising flour (I can’t eat gluten so use the Orgran GF SR Flour and it works perfectly in this recipe - no adaptions required) ~~For the delicious drizzle~~ 100g caster sugar Juice of about 2 lemons, depending on how runny you want your drizzle to be. Preheat your oven to 180 celcius.  For goodness sake, oil and line your loaf pan at this point. Don’t be a nincompoop like me today who went to do this after I’d already made the batter (and already rushed out to the shops once to buy more eggs) and found the tiniest little bit of baking paper left on the roll. Though, thankfully, I placed that one tiny bit so strategically that the cake came out easy-as. Thumbs-up. Next, beat together the butter and sugar until it’s nice and fluffy and creamy. Beat in each egg, one at a time. Then turn your beater off. I repeat, turn it off.

Add in the flour and mix it in with a spatula or a wooden spoon. Honestly, do not try and beat it in, unless you like the look of flour all over you and your kitchen bench of course. Then add in the lemon zest and mix it all up. Pour into your lined loaf pan and then stick it in the oven. Next, fight with the nearest person over who will lick the beaters, spoon and bowl. Good luck! If you’re like me and like your cakes to be moist and even the tiniest bit raw in the middle then bake for 45 minutes. If you are like a grandma and like your cakes well-done, keep it in the oven for 50 minutes. (obviously these times vary depending on your oven. Do the ole skewer trick to be sure). Once your cake is baked, leave it in the pan to cool for about 15-20 minutes. During this time, you can mix together your drizzle. Remove the cake from the pan and put it wherever you want to serve it from (I usually put mine straight into a container if it’s for work morning teas) then pour the drizzle over the top. You can put a few little pricks into the top of the cake so the drizzle oozes through. Nom! Enjoy! If you know what’s good for you and give this recipe a go, be sure to let me know. #calypsocooks on Instagram or Tumblr so I can see.

Hola! And welcome to our Calypso Warehouse blog.

We’re Tim and Caity and we thought that you ought to know a bit about us before you go fuelling our avocado and mango addiction (more on that later)

Our Calypso story begins just recently, in December 2014 to be exact. We ventured the million miles to Canada and America for a hopeful white Christmas. The trip was wonderful, it was amazing, it was almost everything we had dreamed of – sadly, there was no snowy Christmas a la Home Alone 2 style. Frown face.

Whilst we had the most amazing time and loved every minute, we really woke up to the consumerist society we live in, especially in New York.  Every corner was a Starbucks or a Pret a Manager. Every store in between was the big guys like H&M, Zara or Forever 21. Finding any kind of independent store was as impossible as the sticky bandits ever succeeding against the likes of Kevin McCallister. It was hectic. So hectic. And that’s when we thanked our lucky stars that we had gone with our gut-feeling and booked accommodation in Brooklyn. Ah Brooklyn, you fabulous borough you. We found amazing coffee, we found the sweetest little stores, we even found a pop-up market so ideal that all our Christmas presents were bought there in an instant. It was like we were home. Only it was freezing cold and a million miles away from our family.  

In our 10 day stay, we ended up only making 4 trips into Manhattan. The rest of our time was spent enjoying Brooklyn’s peace and quiet, it’s cosy little coffee shops and very very rad people.  By the end of our trip, we knew what we had to do. We had to come home, open our own little independent store and stop supporting the big guys.  Don’t get us wrong, it’s hard. It’s really hard.  TV is plastered with adverts for the big guys, they send you catalogues in the mail trying to lure you in with their crazy cheap prices and sometimes their convenience is just too tempting.  We are in no way there yet…but we are trying! There’s one big guy that we just can’t pry ourselves away from but hopefully by the end of 2015 we’ll have ended our relationship and won’t ever look back. Baby steps.

The Calypso Warehouse is a place where you should be able to go to support the little guys. Where you can shop knowing that you’re supporting a local, not a multi-million dollar empire. Where you can be assured that your products have been made ethically, without the use of child or hard labour. And where you can feel guilt-free that your latest purchase won’t break the bank – we truly appreciate affordability. To put it bluntly, we’re tight asses. :)

We’ll be using this blog to share stories with you of the little guys who make the products we’ll be selling, of our progress in prying ourselves away from those big mean guys and any other random radness that we think you should know about.

For now, we’ll leave you with 3 fun facts to show you that we’re real human beings, not robots and certainly not multi-millionaires.

1. We are addicted to mangoes and avocados. We can’t bear to look at the price tags these days because that would just be too scary (and probably wouldn’t stop us anyway) There have been occasions where we have shamelessly stolen mangoes off overhanging trees and for that, we are sorry. In good news though, we have just planted mango and avocado trees in our backyard!

2. We have two Kelpies named Tiger and Mabel. They are monsters, absolute terrors but we just can’t stop loving them and talking about them to anyone who will listen. Sorry about that too!

3. Tim grew up in country Victoria before moving to Perth 4 years ago. Caity grew up in an ordinary suburban life in Perth. Caity cannot get over the fact that Tim couldn’t just walk to a local deli to buy a bag of mixed lollies as a child because a) it’s called a milk bar and b) it was 30km away. The whole thing absolutely blows her mind.

So there you have it, numero uno complete.