Pandan Tiramisu; KL Convention Centre

Things One Should Know About Me In Order To Properly Understand My View on Pandan Tiramisu:

1. I freaking love tiramisu, but feel very strongly that because it is so classic, the urge to improvise to differentiate makes it all too easy to fuck it up completely (shout out to Dome of the horrifically crap tiramisu)

2. I am a big fan of fusion (theoretically, at least), as mixing one good thing with another good thing should in theory produce a good squared thing (shout out to algebra)

Cases in point: Malay-Arab-Persian weddings with traditions/costumes from both (shout out to my cousin and new cousin-in-law!!!); fusion food

3. I freaking hate Malay desserts, and most Malay dessert ingredients (pandan, coconuts, santan, gula melaka, durian-as-a-dessert-ingredient-not-as-a-fruit, rice-as-a-dessert-ingredient-not-a-savoury-food, yam?! corn?! red beans?! What would possess anyone to stick these into a dessert?!)

Given the illustrious and super enlightening list above, it makes sense that my view on the pandan cheesecake I ate several days ago is (still, several days later) very bemused. On the one hand I kept eating it because my mind was like score, tiramisu in a martini glass! On the other it was like dude that is PANDAN and it's GREEN.


So I only ate half. Too pandan to finish and too tiramisu not to eat. BEMUSING.

Chicken Rice Balls; Restoran Famosa, Malacca

Oh those Malacca-ites, coming up with off-the-wall variations of tried and tested foods.


Apparently Malacca is famous for its chicken rice balls. I had no idea. I only started to vaguely realize that everyone comes to Malacca to eat chicken rice balls when we had to jostle our way through a bustling crowd just to get into a winding line that lead into an even more crowded restaurant, presumably because it was the biggest chicken rice ball restaurant on the heritage block.


I was also very mistaken about what the chicken rice balls actually WERE. Is it just me, or is the term 'chicken rice balls' somewhat misleading? Are they chicken? Are they rice? We know they're balls: but balls of chicken AND rice? Or chicken OR rice? Or 40% chicken 60% rice or vice versa or chicken flavoured rice or rice flavoured chicken?! The possibilities are mind boggling. Naturally, my boggled mind immediately and wishfully went for the first option (because it is the most awesome, obviously: why, yes, I WOULD like to have an entire mini chicken rice dish mouthful in one ball, please), so I was more than a little disappointed to discover that the chicken rice balls were actually just rice balls, albeit balls made from the rice used in chicken rice.


I was also disappointed by the actual balls. I couldn't get over my initial well-that's-just-WEIRD reaction to eating rice formed into tiny spheres. I mean I don't like bubur (so nay to rice in porridge), ketupat (nay also to compressed rice), or pulut (hell to the nay to glutinous rice) so it didn't come as a surprise that rice balls evidently also do not do it for me.

I think of these chicken rice balls as a result of the hyperdiversity of Malacca's historical culture and aftereffect of having endured Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, Malay, Chinese, Arab, Portuguese, Dutch and British influences in the space of just six centuries. My theory is that Malaccan food is now having some kind of culture shock hangover that is manifested in the rolling of rice into balls. (BALLS, people. Why would possess you to want to roll RICE into BALLS? It serves no function. The balls aren't bite size, so they don't become any easier to eat. They totally lose the chicken rice flavour, so the core of the balls just become bland. And they were CHEWY!) This is clearly a culinary cry for attention. Perhaps the equivalent of teenage arm cutting or myspace suggestive-picture-whoring, but in any case, an unmistakeable attempt to highlight its colorful cultural ancestry in order to distinguish itself from its peers by saying look at me! I'm different and unique, I have this wacky take on a beloved Southeast Asian food dish!

Yes, chicken rice balls are that addled Malaysian teenager who speaks with an MTV-honed American twang despite not really speaking proper English, who is desperately seeking to leech off perceived "cooler" Western cultures and as a result morphs into something wholly unique and amalgamated, but yet, not cool. Not cool at all.

Chocolate Souffle & English Cream Puffs; Theobroma Chocolate Lounge, Pavilion KL

A vocabulary lesson for the edification of Theobroma Chocolate Lounge
(If I sound vitriolic and thus pedantic and patronizing, I apologize. It's because I AM.)

What Theobroma is guilty of committing:

(the fallacy of) misnomer \mis-NO-muhr\, noun
Any misnaming of a person or thing; also, a wrong or inapplicable name or designation.

Words that Theobroma is evidently ignorant/sadly mistaken about, which is somewhat disturbing seeing as it is not only supposed to be a highly specialized dessert place, but is also an restaurant chain originating from an English-speaking country:

souffle (dessert) \SOO-fley, soo-FLEY\, noun
A light, airy baked dish made fluffy with beaten egg whites combined with egg yolks and other ingredients, typically lemon or chocolate. Will "fall" after 20-30 minutes so should be served and eaten quickly.
Derived from the French verb souffle which means "to blow up" or puff up--which is what happens to this combination of custard and egg whites.

profiterole \pro-fit-er-OLE\, noun
A small hollow choux pastry that is typically filled with cream and covered with chocolate.

Desserts that Theobroma misnamed:

i) Chocolate Souffle with strawberries


ii) English Cream Puffs with chocolate and strawberries


What The Desserts Really Were, To Anyone With Half a Brain Or Access to Google, Which Clearly Excludes the Theobroma Management:

i) A rock hard, carved slab of chocolate, which is fine if you really feel like satisfying your craving for a chocolate brick but NOT FINE when you order a souffle! Come on, Theobroma! What is this? You can't tag fancy French names onto desserts that are pretty much the complete antithesis of what you're describing just because they sound pretentious and chocolate lounge-y! What are you, the Restaurant of Opposites and Irony?!


ii) Profiteroles. This one was just redundant. Profiteroles = tiny cream puffs with melted chocolate drizzled over them. Therefore in the interests of efficiency, economy and accuracy in general, I'm proposing a novel idea: call a spade a spade and english cream puffs with melted chocolate on them profiteroles. Revolutionary and ingenious, I know. Please try not to fall off your chair in shock.


I was too huffy to enjoy the chocolate "souffle" but in spite of that I LOVED the "cream puffs with chocolate". Even though they were tiny and you only get four and it was sort of like eating a mistaken identity. I really, really didn't want to share, but goosey kept repeating that he'd only help me eat dessert if I insisted (obviously, in hopes that I would insist). Luckily I am a generous and kind person and insisted, albeit reluctantly (also he once gave me a lot of shit after I said I wasn't going to share my Cheezels and then couldn't finish them and had to ask him to help finish them; I wasn't about to risk a repeat of that). Also X Files sucks balls, please don't watch it.

Chocolate Moist; Alexis, Bangsar

Was not moist. At all. In fact, should have been called Chocolate Dry-and-Crumbles-In-Your-Mouth instead.

I am ashamed to admit I enjoyed it anyway, because you can pretty much drip hot melted chocolate over anything and I will instantly and automatically become a fan. An even better idea would have been to not bake the cake at ALL (seeing as the highlight of the dessert was actually the melted chocolate, it wouldn't have been a huge loss) and leave it as batter. Then the whole THING would be a veritable soup of Chocolate Moist and the decision to become aqueous would be the cake's way of rebelling against its previously deceptive "moist"-but-in-actuality-dry-as-sandpaper form by going the extreme in the other direction. I realize that salmonella is an unpleasant disease and one should not make a habit of eating raw eggs, sugar and cocoa powder, but I blame this perverse addiction on my former maid, who was either unaware of salmonella or was trying to poison me because I would smack her butt fifty times a day for fun. Whenever she made cake she'd ply my sisters and me with cake batter. Also she would make us fight for it. In retrospect this behaviour seems very suspect. I probably didn't notice it at the time because I was too busy licking bowls of cake batter.

Cookies & Chocolate Ice Cream; Häagen Dazs Bukit Bintang

First of all I feel the need to point out that I LOVE Häagen Dazs ice cream more than ANY OTHER ice cream brand in the WORLD. Occasionally, I admit, I give into curiousity-induced temptation and fool around with NZ Ice Cream (too watery, not milky enough), Baskin Robbins (too sweet, not creamy enough), Ben & Jerry’s (Phish Food has MINIATURE CHOCOLATE FISH and MARSHMALLOW SWIRLS in CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM. I mean I love my HD but no mortal woman is strong enough to resist that ingenious combination) or even slum it with—gasp, I know, I am ashamed— McDonalds (in my defence, their chocolate sundaes are decent and the fudge is always heavy and sticky). But I always regret it, and I always come back to HD. It’s the fattiest and creamiest: therefore it’s the best.


That said, I was super pissed off that they didn’t have my favourite flavour today. I mean some flavours are just staples: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. If you are Häagen Dazs, that list of staples should also include Chocolate Chocolate Chip. That is not a suggestion. It is a fact. I made sad faces at the ice cream guy and he said he was very sorry but there was nothing he could do except make my ice cream scoop extra fat. Though Cookies & Chocolate was the closest thing I could get to my beloved Chocolate Chocolate Chip, fewer things get my goat than setting my mind on eating something and not getting it in the end. This is almost as bad as the time that I went to Planet Hollywood, got the set lunch with the expectation that I would be getting chocolate cake for dessert (I even asked the waiter to double check and he confirmed that the chocolate cake was in fact the dessert of the day), and after eating a chicken lunch that I only endured in order to get to dessert, was presented with a gelatinous excuse of a mango pudding for dessert. AFTER I had set my stomach on chocolate. And when I was like where is my cake, homies?! The waiters looked at me like I was a deranged woman. Like there's no difference, apparently, to the Planet Hollywood staff, between CHOCOLATE CAKE... and MANGO PUDDING. These things are important to some people, okay! My stomach has dessert expectations! You deceived, lied to and betrayed my sweet tooth and I will not take this injustice lying down! And while I am ranting, when I ask for Coke and waiters bring me Pepsi or, even worse, Diet Coke, and I'm like dude this isn't Coke... do not look at me like I am psychotic! I don’t drink diet anything! I hate the taste of Pepsi! Because it tastes different from Coke! They are not the same!!

Must calm down now. Am getting too agitated for a Friday afternoon.

Passionfruit Ice Parfait in a Coconut Crepe; Mandarin Oriental

The dessert otherwise known as: Block of Solid Ice That I Was Not Able to Eat Gracefully For Every Time My Spoon Tried To Chip Away at the Ice it Would Hit the Plate With a Resounding Crack. Which is a little too long and Iman-centric to fit onto a menu, so I can understand why the Mandarin Oriental named it what they did.

Usually I inhale desserts like they're pure oxygen and I just ran a 100-metre sprint, but this parfait was just too pretentious and required too much effort to eat. Passionfruit... AND coconuts... AND the self-consciously pompous tiny portion... AND an icepicking adventure upon which one must first embark in order to even ingest it?

Oh, M.O., M.O.... no, no, no. Desserts should be soft, squishy and leisurely. If I wanted a workout and an overload of tropical exoticism I'd go jogging in the jungle.

Lollipop; the Office

I am, of course, just as aware as the next Americanized twenty-something-year-old that the lollipop to which Lil' Wayne refers in his perplexingly popular hit song "Lollipop" is not, in fact, the hard candy on a stick. Mr. Wayne seems to follow in a line of rap artists who enjoy deceiving their unsuspecting, hungry public about the topics of their lyrical offerings (other guilty parties include Fiddy, for "Candy Shop", and Luda, who named his album "Chicken & Beer". Though Luda is sort of forgiven because I actually get the reference to African American stereotypes... assuming, of course, that this was what he was referring to, and that he didn't just name his album after the only two legal things he enjoys imbibing).

But "Lollipop" is yet another generic, hyper-masculinized phallic reference laced with misogynistic overtones and implications of Mr. Wayne's supposed sexual prowess. It shamelessly corrupts the beloved hard candy enjoyed by children of all ages as well as old people, who probably have no idea that Mr. Wayne (aside: every time I refer to him as this somehow I think of the real Mr. Wayne, Batman Bruce) sings about the confectionery in such a debasing, demoralized manner.

Unfortunately for my brain, misogynistic, female-bashing rap music is one of my many guilty pleasures and I cannot stop listening to this song. Also unfortunately, it makes me really want to suck on a lollipop so I had to run down in the middle of the morning and buy this:


This is all Mr. Wayne's fault. Also, and I digress, this song makes me think of the Lollipop Guild of Munchkin Land in the Wizard of Oz, because Danny has a habit of requesting at the oddest moments that I sing the Lollipop Guild theme song (hopefully because I like lollipops and have a beautiful voice, and not because I am a munchkin). Also a digression, and your candy fact of the day: Salvador Dali designed the swirly Chupa Chup logo. True story. Unless you knew that already, this post just added to your stock of knowledge. So Mr. Wayne... I guess you're not so bad after all.

Chocolate Mille Crepe Cake, Food Foundry

A little memuaking because/and consequently it wasn't sweet enough. I know exactly what my mom will say when she reads this: your sweet tooth is insanely developed/you need to cut down on your sugar intake because you are now too used to eating things that are too sweet and too salty and too bad for you/you are tempting fate with your inherited diabetic genes.

YES, UMI, I KNOW. But the truth is the truth and you raised me to be a straight-talking honest young lady (except when it's better to tell a white lie, which, come on, isn't really a lie at all) and it really WAS lacking in the sweetness department.

I also know exactly what she is thinking right now: Nurul Iman you are also too much of a smartass.

Tiramisu; Dome

The most tiru tiramisu (couldn't resist) I have ever (half-)eaten. I wouldn't have such an issue with an oversaturated pudding masquerading as a tiramisu if it were at least edible, but memo to Dome: 99.9% marscapone cream and 0.1% coffee + ladyfingers does not a tiramisu make. It makes, instead, a soggy, fatty, lardy dollop that will incite people who are particular about their tiramisu to write meaningless tirades about it.