it be's that way sometime

At my brother's recommendation, we went to Canelé Pâtisserie Chocolaterie at Robertson Quay today. Although the cake's weren't really super super super fantastic, they're were pretty good lah, haha. And the place was quite pretty, and not too crowded. You can see some of the stuff they had up as decorations below. Interesting I guess. I didn't manage to take photos of the prettier bit as it was in plain sight of the counter, haha. But basically it's their chocolate section? Lots of lovely brown stuff, and my brother said they offer printing services so you can personalize your chocolates to be given away! And they had this hugeass wedding cake in the kitchen, like, about half my size! It was really quite pretty and swirly. Their kitchen's pretty cool, reminds me of Made To Order's kitchen, you know, the professional clean looking, lots of stainless steel type, haha. You can look into the kitchen because it's separated by a large glass window.










An odd looking shoe holding cookies, and some iced present boxes I think.


The cakes we ordered: Chloe, Cafe Noix (shouldn't it be Noir?), Jupiter. Jupiter was by far the best, haha. Describe in more detail later on. Will talk about Chloe now, since I don't have a nice close-up of it. From what I recall, it had peaches, citrus yoghurt, a lot of other things and rice krispies (-___-). It sounded really fabulous, but didn't quite live up to the standard. A passable cake, but could definitely have been better. Maybe they shouldn't have made it sound so promising, haha.

Cafe Noix was not bad too, better than Chloe, but we've had better coffee cakes I think. Still, it did look good, and was quite nice, so maybe I shouldn't be so picky. But did you know Canelé's by the Les Amis group? Haha, maybe that's what made me expect so much.

This was really good! It was better than expected actually! The ganache was really rich and bittersweet, the way I like it, and the mousse inside was quite smooth. The best part is that it had layers of tangy cherries(?) inside which offset the sweetness and thickness of the chocolate really well. Very thirst-inducing, but would definitely get this again. Forgot to get a picture of the inside because we were too busy eating. Oh well, guess this just means that we have to go back again =D

Well, after eating all that, we decided to go walk around and explore a little. I don't know how this came about, we crossed some bridge and walked along some bridge and came to this park-like place you see in the centre picture. It's outside some condo which is evidently expat area. Very nice to stroll through, quite relaxing. Or so we though =p Some stupid 15 second rain made us run into an underpass, which led us to a really odd place. But we decided to be adventurous and explore a little, and we somehow ended up at Clarke Quay! How miraculous, that little bit of rain, haha.


On the left is the view of Robertson Quay from across the river, the condominium side. Quite pretty and very typically Singapore I should say. I think this is the picture they always use to lure expats and tourists, haha. On the right's the view of Clarke Quay from across the river too.

There's a new shopping mall right at Clarke Quay MRT called the Central. Reminds me of Novena Square, very typical and all metal and glass. But there was this Hokkaido Ice Cream stall with pretty good ice cream! Maddy got Banana Choc, and I got Rum&Raisin. Her banana really tasted like it had bananas, and mine really tasted like it had rum, haha. If it weren't so soft I'd say it was perfect. So we brought our ice cream down to the riverside and sat there to chill, watching the boats go by =) Despite the sun, it was really very nice and relaxing. Wind blowing in our hair, and just the whole happiness of it all. Oh! And this mom with 2 young sons went by in a boat and went 'Wave to those pretty girls!' Hwah, pretty girls leh!! Hahahha, happy, hahaha.

Anyway, we can go visit Clarke Quay more often now, Maddy has a straight bus there! And I obviously have a straight train there. They have a lotta cool food places, we must try okay! Morrocan, Persian, Mongolian, etc. A bit expensive, but like, can at least just walk around and enjoy the riverside at night =) Set okay!

Lastly, look! Ultimate Fried Rice leh!! Ultimate okay! At Clarke Quay too I think? Or was it Robertson Quay? I'm amused, haha.










Oops! Nearly forgot! Maddy just reminded me, haha. We bumped into Wong LiLin and Allan Wu with their family at the riverside! Second time I've bumped into them already. Maddy couldn't get over how hot he was, hahaha. But he really is better-looking in person. Kay, that's it for the celeb-sighting, haha.

the feeling of jazz =)

Made Pomegranate-Cherry Soft Serve Ice Cream yesterday at work! Exciting right! Did you know that 7-11's Mr Softee is made by Marigold?? I never knew! It's actually pomegranate-raspberry because the cherry flavour was really awful, like cough syrup, but no one should know, haha.

After many rounds of testing different pomegranate and raspberry flavours (in juice) however, I've concluded that pomegranate and raspberry each just have that cough syrup taste. A lot better than cherry, but undeniably cough syrupy =p The ice cream tasted okay I guess, but I don't think it'd be very popular, haha. Can't beat the chendol flavour.

Here you can see Mrs Yap (my i/c) working the machine.

The finished product! Looks quite nice right? =D My dad said it looked like Elvis, so here's another photo, haha.



It was very simple making the mix, so using the machine was really the highlight. Kept trying to make pretty swirls =) But eh, I tell you guys, you can't eat too much of this soft-serve. I always thought it was okay, cos like, so soft, so must be very watery right? But no! There's a lot of palm oil (to make it creamy) and sugar that goes in it! Before using the machine we had to taste the mix and flavour it, and man, it was crazy sweet! I already have quite a sweet tooth right, so if I thought it was unbearably sweet, it must be quite bad. Dunno why it becomes okay when frozen. And the other girl told me that palm oil has a lot of saturated fats, so it's bad for you. Another thing that pretended to be healthy, cos you know, compared to butter oil palm oil sounds so much better >=(

On another note, anyone interested in Mosaic Music Festival's Live at the Duke's Place - The Music of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong? We must hurry to book, only $60 (stud price) tix are the cheapest left! And the orchestra's gonna be conducted by Duke Ellington's grandson, Paul Mercer Ellington, how cute right!

never winked back at fireflies

Look what we saw at Pak Wai's sendoff dinner! Mac's has Fancy Ketchup! Fancy that, haha. Did they always have this? I don't remember ever seeing this. But well! Guess some places are just too high class for me, haha.


Outside Chee's office. This was where we started our little exploration of Singapore. It doesn't really feel like Singapore here I think, it seems too pretty.


A very typical shophouse at Haji Lane, this feels very like Singapore, haha. Haji Lane was very disappointing! All the online articles and blogs made it sound so cool and arty farty, but it's really very secluded. Along the whole lane, there were only a few shops open? The rest were all empty shops. And we kept bumping into these 2 girls, because well, there were only those few shops to browse through. They even had bad graffiti!! Someone spray-painted 'Pigeon' on the wall -____- so much for angry rebellion.

Another picture of Pluck, the boutique-cum-ice cream parlour. They had cute wallpaper, you can see it behind Maddy. But later we went to another store that had the same wallpaper. Guess it comes with the place?

You can see the transparent glass cups they had at Emperor Cafe. Never really seen these before. Transparent teapots are still quite normal, the cha guans they brought us to in primary school always had them. But I thought transparent cups were pretty cool. The highlight of the place really, haha, considering how the shopkeeper kinda spoilt the experience a little.

Parkview Square was really very cool! Never imagined we would find all these sculptures and everything! It reminded me a little of Finland. Very very cool! A little odd to hide all these here though, where only the office people can see it? My mom told me that this building's very picky when it comes to tenants. Only very famous and rich companies are allowed to rent office space here. Here you can see Sun Yat-Sen, Churchill, Lincoln and Plato.

Beethoven doing his thing on the roof.

They had these on all 4 corner pillars. Quite interesting.

Dante and Dali on the other side of the square, together with Chopin and someone else I can't remember, who got cut out of the photo.

Not-quite-Atlases, also on the roof of the building.

Oh! And here's a picture from the corride of the cafe that cheated our feelings! It looked so pretty and nice from the outside, like the perfect place to make our usual hangout. It was tucked away in a corner of the square, away from everything else and quite hidden from the world. You'd have missed it at a quick glance. It even had a pretty okay name, Spice Tea & Coffee, everything seemed perfect. But when we stepped in, the tv was switched to channel Suria, no music, the waiter was speaking in Malay (not even mat english! That's still better right?) and the menu was very lousy! Why?!?! It seemed such a waste, and at very contrasting odds with the rest of the place. They even have half price off cakes and pastries after 4pm, it's such a pity the atmosphere is so wrong, haha. We must take over their cafe next time kay! They don't even need a revamp, the decor is quite nice, just the menu needs an overhaul.



Okay, onto another subject, here's the week-late fruitcake. It was surprisingly easy and fast actually (if you don't include the week-long soak in brandy and the 2 hour baking time), and tasted quite nice. Just the right amount of moistness and denseness. Quite hard to screw up actually, considering there isn't much cake in it, haha. It's not too sweet, unlike most fruitcakes, and if you like to booze up the cake a lil more like me, you can feed the cake brandy for a few days before starting on it. Well, the recipe actually said to feed the cake brandy every 2-3 weeks for 2-3 months, but that's just crazy -__- we couldn't resist that long.

We actually halved the recipe in case it didn't turn out nice, but we still ended up with a pretty large cake. And it was chockful of fruits too, despite cutting down on the fruits slightly. There's no real need to find all the different types of fruits if you can't, feel free to substitute. We left out the dried figs and prunes and substituted the macadamia nuts for almonds cos we couldn't be bothered to search outside the bake store for them. Worked out fine to me. We didn't make the icing either, and changed the baking time to 2hours.

Traditional Christmas Cake
Ingredients (for cake):
500g sultanas
200g glace cherries, halved
110g cut mixed peel
110g ready-to-eat dried figs, roughly chopped
110g ready-to-eat dried apricots, roughly chopped
110g ready-to-eat dried pitted prunes, roughly chopped
1 small orange, grated zest and juice
255g unsalted butter, at room temperature
255g lexia raisins
110g currants
150ml brandy
5 medium eggs
300g plain flour
200g macadamia nuts, roughly chopped
200g dark muscovado sugar

To Make
Put dried fruits in a large bowl and pour over the brandy, orange zest and juice. Mix well, cover and leave to stand overnight. (We left it for a week just to make sure, aha)

Line the base of a 9" cake tin with a double thickness of parchment paper. Line the sides of the tin with a double thickness of parchment paper so that it comes 2" above the edge of the tin. Wrap a sheet of folded newspaper around the outside of the tin and secure with string. Stand the prepared tin on a folded sheet of newspaper. Preheat the oven to 150C

In a large bowl, eat the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, adding a little of the flour if the mixture starts to curdle.

Add the fruit, its soaking liquid and the nuts and mix well.

Stir in the flour, taking care not to over mix it. Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and level the surface with the back of a spoon.

Bake for 3-4 hours or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. If the top of the cake starts to get too brown, cover with a sheet of baking parchment.

When the cake is cooked, remove it from the oven and leave to cool completely in the tin. Store the cake in an airtight tin, wrapped in greaseproof paper and foil for between 2-3 months. Feed the cake with brandy every 2-3 weeks until you are ready to decorate it.

Tea Cosy at Eclectic Attic

Eclectic Attic is the vintage store situated right next to spotlight at P.S. They have lots of breakable porcelain figurines, antique european furniture, antique chinese pottery, ethnic beaderies, dusty globes...

Most importantly, they have an old English style instore bistro called Tea Cosy. The specialty, apparently, is some strange foie gras concoction. Ordered 'This&That', which was a platter of 3 miniature cakes (Tiramisu, Strawberry Mousse and Carrot), a Raspberry Mint Tea, and finally a platter of 3 mini-scones.

The scones were smelt heavenly. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good pic of them.

I loved the plates! Pretty rose paintings, gold trimmings....fit for a queen!

Haji Lane!

Eggy's off-day + Maddy's off-day = Adventures on Haji Lane!!

We went into Pluck, which is a boutique-cum-icecream parlor thingy. They have alot of random expensive things, like antique clocks, meditation radios, vintage jewelry, used philosophy books, artsy teeshirts, handbag charms, pretty notebooks, etc. The sales lady was really unfriendly, which was nothing like we had expected from such a cool homey boutique.


We tried the Ebony&Ivory ice-cream (vanilla with choc chips) at Pluck's ice-cream parlour. You can't go very wrong with ice-cream. Ebony, Ivory, Living in perfect harmony... After ice cream, we continued exploring the other random boutiques along Haji Lane. There was even this brand new clothing store (opened just 3 days ago).

We found the indie music store Straits Record, funky graffitti and all...Yay! Unfortunately, it was really run down and basically, abandoned. Crap! The sign on the door said that they had moved to Bali Lane, and we're like, WHERE"S BALI LANE??
After Haji Lane, we continued walking and found Bali Lane by accident! (A nice surprise, since the sign on Straits Records mentioned that they had moved to Bali Lane and we initially had no clue about where that was.) So we found Straits Records, but didn't dare to go in at first because the shopkeepers looked fierce and unfriendly (we're such cowards...) Anyway, we walked on and decided that we'll step into the CD store on our way back. We found a quaint little coffee shop furthur down Haji Lane, called Emperor Cafe. It's a tiny home business, with very VERY personalised service. The boss kept talking to us, he wouldn't shut up. He was obviously very extremely passionate about coffee...he tried explaining the history of coffee to us, explaining about how coffee was an aphrodisiac, explaining what an aphrodisiac was (-__-) , explaining how the royals in Europe drank coffee, explaining how they had jesters for entertainment while coffee-drinking, explaining the history of Merlin....etc etc. Then he decided to do some magic tricks for us, supposedly channeling the 'spirit' of Merlin or whatever. So he showed us some stupid rubberband and card tricks, and there we were nodding along, fake smiling, acting dumb, sending telepathic messages for him to fuck off and leave us alone :)

Anyway, we ordered a pot of Rose Orange tea, which was kinda bland. The only plus side was funky transparent cups and plates. I guess their specialty is supposed to be coffee afterall, not tea. A pity we aren't coffee connoisseurs After tea, we finally escaped the clutches of Mr Merlin-Coffee Guy...and mustered the courage to explore Straits Records, though we were too music-retarded to truly appreciate the stuff they had in there. The only band I recognised was Forced Vomit >__< onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8u2258xy2n8z2_FNRtiNJ-GIvIxF7PsyRcAqgvC38OEC5mB65CFqxizBc4pBFcGMVr6UXZxbtvxTzFtc-eU1-HM7rT6M2535FUTb_12y6-QRLYkxk4ZbS5graFBiuC1ZQBOO_AM2FJ5g/s1600-h/CIMG0043.JPG">
Strange phoenix structure at the center of Park View Square, set before a beautifully clear blue sky.
Park View Square building from a midget's perspective...You can see the reflection of the sky on the building's windows. Cool building, eh? It's such a rarity in Singapore.


When you explore Singapore as a tourist, our country actually seems pretty cool...well, i guess they would call it 'unique'.