Sundays with Sezzy - Cardamom, Dark Chocolate & Olive Oil Granola

I threw up this granola all over the streets of Milan but I promise you'll love this recipe + life updates and your weekly content creator tips!

Hope you all had a gorgeous week!!! Mine was full of no sleep, lots of food, the odd meltdown (from said no sleep), a trip to the NGV and I visited my friends farm with Elwood. I remember saying when I first fell pregnant that I wasn’t going to talk about mum life much but it turns out when you become a mum, your entire life is devoted to your baby and its kind of hard not to talk about it lol. I promise I’m not making being a mum my whole personality but since I’ve always sprinkled a bit of my personal life into my content and my baby is my whole personal life now you will be hearing a tiny bit about it every now and then.

It was a good friends birthday on Friday so I drove to the city with Elwood and a group of us had dinner and browsed some French Impressionism at the NGV. Elwood and I especially loved Monet’s work. Elwood is a very curious little man so I knew he would love the gallery and now that I’m not petrified of leaving the house with him it’s actually really fun bringing my little sidekick everywhere.

On Saturday I saw another friend at her farm, she lives 5 minutes from me (this is exciting for me because being in Regional Victoria, most of my friends are typically over an hours drive). Elwood met a horse for the first time which was cool to see, he got very excited. My friend gave me a huge bunch of rhubarb from her garden and I made an incredible upside down rhubarb cake with it which I’ll be sharing in next Sundays newsletter (sneak peak pic below).

On my current wish list;

I get a little rush from online browsing. I open up 20 tabs and add 50 things to my cart and then by the time it’s time to check out the dopamine spike has dropped and I don’t feel like spending money anymore. Here’s what I’ve spotted lately…

ps. if you happen to look up the prices, I know some of them are insane (dont look up the salt and pepper grinders if you’re triggered by expensive stuff) but I am fascinated by the luxury and dream of owning the finest and most unique things in my home one day haha.

Creator Question of the week!

Since i’m going into so much depth with these questions and I don’t know how to give simple answers I’ve decided I’ll answer one a week… (sorry if i kept up with 2 or 3 it would just take up the entire newsletter!!)

Q: What equipment do you use to shoot your recipe videos, and do you have any budget-friendly recommendations?

Okay when it comes to shooting recipe content this is all you need

1. Good lighting

2. A kitchen or bench to shoot on

3. A camera

Lets break these down..

Good lighting: in my opinion the best lighting comes from the sun. Can’t get more budget friendly than that considering the sun is free haha. I bought a ring light once but I didn’t like the light colours and it actually made my content look more grey, dull and weird. Videos where the sun is directly hitting the pan or the plate of food always perform better because glowy golden sun can make even basic dishes look magical. You don’t always need direct sunlight though, an iphone will give you crisp high quality footage at most times of the day if you set up the positioning right and are close enough to a window. This reel of mine is a good example of no direct sunlight but i’ve set up a cooking station next to the big windows in my old living room so there’s still plenty of natural light filtering through. When I set up this cooking station in my living room I placed a plate of food on it once and got my iphone out and filmed this one plate from all different angles. Some angles and standing on the other side of the bench looked a little darker and the camera couldn’t focus as well but I found a sweet spot. My point is don’t just set up your camera in one spot wherever and hit record, try and test different angles and hyper-analyse how well your camera focuses, when you do this you’ll realise you don’t alwaysss need direct sunlight (but I mean direct sunlight does always look the best. At the moment the sun hits my bench at 1 30 and disappears at 4 30/5ish, I try and film most of my recipes in that sweet spot).

A kitchen or bench to shoot on: so i love shooting on an iphone and as I mentioned you’ll get pretty good quality footage if you have enough natural light. In my past three rentals the lighting in my kitchen has been shocking so I invested in an ikea bench to sit next to my window in my living room to shoot on. In the beginning I was hesitant because I thought it was weird that I wasn’t shooting in an actual kitchen but my content started performing better than ever with this change. Bench next to sunny window = good lighting = high quality footage & better looking food which scrollers enjoy watching. I got my Ikea bench off of facebook market place for about $200. I’m not sure what the name of it is but I guarantee there’s probably 50 of them for sale right now on facebook in your area, just search “ikea island bench”. As the sun moves across the sky I can move my bench to fall under direct light along my long window. Also if you hate your kitchen like I currently hate the one in the rental we’re in (blue benchtops iykyk) the Ikea bench is a great backdrop. It has wheels so I’ve even been wheeling it outside and testing out a different filming style too. Depends on your kitchen though I guess, lots of creators don’t use this kind of set up but its been a game changer for me especially bc I’ve been in 3 rentals in the last 12 months with shit lighting in the kitchen.

Camera: I own the Fuji XT-30 which I absolutely love for both video and photography however I ended up buying an iphone 14 pro max just to shoot my content on and I’ll choose it over my professional camera any day. First of all iphones camera quality is perfect for social media, content doesn’t look too perfectly curated filmed on an iphone which I believe makes recipes look more achievable. Second of all you can film, edit and upload all from an iphone which is easy and convenient. When you shoot on a camera you typically need to export the footage to your computer, edit on there then export back to iphone. Also basically everyone owns an iphone (or samsung/phone with a decent camera) so there’s no need to buy a thousand dollar camera when the quality of a phones camera is great anyway. I always shoot in 4k 60fps.

Now for the best granola recipe you’ll ever try

Gross I know, but last year I flew to Italy, pregnant, for my besties wedding. I was 17 weeks when we landed in Milan. Funny story actually… after 30 hours of flying from Melbourne to Milan we arrived at out airbnb at midnight. It took us an hour to work out how to get in and once we were in we realised the aircon wasn’t working. Since it was 33 degrees in an apartment the size of my bathroom (the lesson here was not to let Jacob book the accomodation) and my pregnant ass couldn’t breathe in the stuffy heat we had to move. So by 2am we were in a new apartment on the other side of the city only to realise I left my engagement ring in the first apartment. Poor Jacob had to get an Uber back to the first apartment, crack the Da Vinci Code to get in again and then Uber back.

We ended up getting to bed at 5am and waking at 7am because of jet lag. Desperate for a decent coffee we found this cute cafe called Loste Cafe. They did an amazing cappuccino, beautiful pastries and some kind of breakfast burger if I remember correctly. I was obsessed with fruit and really fresh food when I was preg so I opted for their yogurt and granola bowl. I wasn’t keen on the fact it had chocolate in it though, I’ve always thought chocolate in granola was kind of icky buuut to my surprise the chocolate slapped and since then I’ve been a choccy in granola gal.

Oh but when we were walking back to our accomodation my pregnancy nausea got the best of me and it all came up in a pot plant. I was truly devo. It was extra disappointing during my pregnancy when I ate something extra delish and couldn’t keep it down.

Anyway, then recently Richard Hart was in Melbourne and I was invited to meet him at his bakery pop up for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. He had these delicious cardamom buns there and since smashing them at this event I’ve been hooked on Cardamom too.

So I really wanted to make a choccy granola with cardamom, you’d think it would be pretty easy to master a granola recipe but this is probably one of my most tested recipes. I found figuring out the right amount of cardamom to use difficult but got it bang on after 5 goes. Asides from the warming cardamom that makes this a delicious winter granola recipe, my other favourite thing is that when you add the chocolate at the end, it melts a little and then once it solidifies again you get these yummy chocolate clusters.

Cardamom, Dark Chocolate & Olive Oil Granola Recipe