I Heart Halloween (& Cupcake Pops)

Up until about two hours ago I was completely unaware of this thing called cupcake pops. How?! Why?! This is completely unacceptable and a tragedy of a magnitude equal to that of Arsenal losing a Champions League match (ahem or should I say THEORETICAL Arsenal defeat... cause we won 5-2 last night BOOYA yes I just wanted to mention that somehow).

But really, combining cupcakes and lollipops? Which happen to be two of my favourite things in the world (granted, I have a long list of favourite things... but it's because I happen to be easily pleased, not because I'm liberal with my favourite-things label)?! GENIUS. Ms. Bakerella, you are a modern day hero, and officially my new favourite blogger.

Some of her Halloween ingenuity:

My favourite is the Bad Ass Pumpkin third from left... though Anime Pumpkin on the far right is also a looker

Distressed and dismayed Caspers

Superfluous confessions time: masks scare me shitless. Regardless of who wears them. So while these mask cakepops are the cats pyjamas... I wouldn't eat this last batch. They creep me out.

Chocolate Mousse; The Apartment

Still craving chocolate.


And perhaps because it's been raining consistently tropical monsoon style every day for the past few weeks, am now also coming down with a cold. Actually it's either that I'm nursing the beginnings of a cold, or that my new perfume is making me sneeze uncontrollably, triggering emergency nasal mucus production. If it's the latter my nose will just have to soldier through. I smell like a hyperfeminine magical walking rosebush and I love it.

Warm Chocolate Chip Cookie with Hot Fudge Sauce and Vanilla Ice Cream; Bijou, Mont Kiara

Well girls and boys, it is that time of the month where I crave cupcakes and kisses and chocolate and ice cream floats. Okay fine, I crave all this every DAY of the month, but I know when it’s THAT time of the month (does anyone else think that combining uppercase letters and euphemisms is sort of like a schizophrenic literary technique: Pay attention to what I am saying! Wait, don’t pay attention to the fact that I am talking about something gross and unsavoury! But pay attention to the screaming uppercase disguise of this gross thing!) when I suddenly find myself irascibly argumentative and completely intolerant of stupidity, inadequate customer service, and, my personal PMS pet peeve: people who think they know everything when clearly they do not, or if they DO know that thing, then they should realize that I know it too, and how dare they imply that I didn’t know whatever they were pointing out to me, regardless of the fact that they probably thought they were being helpful and harmless by pointing it out? (“Hey Iman, the KLCI is below 900 points.” “YES. I KNOW. PLEASE STOP INFORMING ME OF BASIC KNOWLEDGE TO WHICH I HAVE ACCESS AND INSTEAD DUNK YOUR HEAD IN COFFEE”).

Basically, anyone who either talks slow or thinks slow grates on my nerves like manicured nails on a blackboard right about now. I feel like I need to quarantine myself from people with an IQ below a certain level. I am so mean. It's completely irrational. Most of the time I am a warm, bright ray of sunshine. Right now I am a ray of blinding sarcasm and razor-sharp-will-make-you-bleed contention.


Chocolate makes me feel better though... so I am posting this picture of dessert that was the SHIZZLE. All my favourite things--Haagen Dazs ice cream (albeit vanilla), warm chocolate fudge, chocolate chip cookies, cappuccinos-- literally served on a platter and ready to be ingested so they could come together in a hari-raya-fireworks-type explosion of the chocolate variety in my mouth. THE SHIZZLE.

I Heart (iPhone) Cupcakes

THE DEFINITION OF CUTE:

I miss Hermes the iPhone. How come no one's ever come up with a cake inspired by the BlackBerry? Severe marketing flaw, guys. You're losing out to the iPhone in the cutestakes.


From daniellebilton.com

Chocolate Fudge Cake; The Daily Grind

Because I've been neglecting my poor little pink blogspot baby for too long, I now have a backlog of photos to post and a yawning hole in the part of my brain that retains restaurant and food information. Hari Raya, Brunei, my family, a global financial meltdown and a goose have been preoccupying me of late. Also since I sold Hermes the iPhone (I miss you intensely but sadly our very touching relationship--see what I did there?!--was just not meant to be) I've been dependent on other people's cameras, which makes picture taking both inconvenient and inconsistent.

Yes, yes, excuses are for wimps and the faint-hearted. But you know what's NOT for the faint-hearted (unsuccessful segue but hey YOU try it)? Giant slices of chocolate fudge cake.

I loveeee monster cakes that figuratively attempt to devour you at the same time that you are literally attempting devour them; I loveeee the challenge. Also please be mollified by this peace offering; I really am trying to update more.

Tiramisu; Alexis

Not such a fan of chopped nuts on tiramisu, so I don't know about this, Alexis. I may be partial because I'm not really a fan of nuts in general. They make my teeth nervous.


Also they make me feel like I'm a starving child in a developing (third world is not p.c. anymore) country and the white humanitarian missionaries are like 'we come bearing food!' and then they give you nuts which are supposed to be healthy and organic and full of fiber and my impoverished developing country mother, who possesses an abundance of common sense if not worldly goods, is like 'dude we could have picked these off the plants ourselves'. But we eat the nuts anyway because neo-cultural (and religious) imperialism has permeated even the realm of food. They also make me feel (at the same time) that I'm a vegan lesbian with blond dreadlocks who sews her own clothes and underwear, and only bathes once a week in an attempt to save water, and survives on a diet of nuts and seeds and organic toothpaste. Once in a while, and thankfully not often, eating nuts also makes me feel like I'm a squirrel. And squirrels just FREAK me out cause they're all twitchy and conniving and glassy-eyed, which is how I would imagine animals on crack would behave, since that's how all the humans (okay, there's only been one) on crack that I've seen have behaved.


I mean, I don't know if that's a sign of a hyperactive imagination or whether I just really dislike nuts. I still eat them, and I ate this cake, which, other than the nuts, was decent. I especially liked the random bloody pool of raspberry sauce on the plate. I have this theory, that I've put a lot of thought into, that if you put whipped cream on any kind of dessert, your food will taste 70-85% more delicious, and in comparison your waistline will only expand by 2-5%. I won't go into the details but there is of course a dense and convoluted mathematical formula for this theory that I painstakingly constructed on an excel spreadsheet (aka the canvas of my working life), involving a regression of the happiness levels of a sample population (me) against how much my waistline has expanded after I ingest whipped cream. Anyway, the common sense that my imaginary developing country mama has, as well as economics, dictates that we should therefore put whipped cream on everything dessert-related because the trade off/payment is negligible (what is 2% really? If you round down like all politicians and analysts and fund managers do with statistics then it becomes zero). Anyway my point is raspberry sauce makes a similarly compelling argument for Things to Always Put on Desserts. I need to construct a mathematical formula for this theory too, of course (you didn't really think I pulled all this out of my ass, did you?) but hmmm food for thought.

I have no idea why I just wrote such lengthy drivel about nothing in particular. I'm hungry.

Kimberley Red Ribeye Steak; Prime, Le Meridien

There were like fifteen billion different types of steak at this house of carnivorousness! By fifteen billion I really mean... five or six different types, but since you can pick the sizes (12 oz. of meat too much for you? No? Then how about 16 oz?), doneness (which apparently really IS a word, but is used only in reference to cooking meat) and how many days the steaks are aged (between 80 to 200 days), I bet if you did the math and multiplied that all together it'd come up to fifteen billion.


Also they had three different kinds of butter, two different varieties of bread and five different types of sauces! Factor THAT into the how-many-options-does-this-steak-restaurant-have equation. In fact, if Prime were affiliated with a US political party and stance, it'd be a vehemently feminist Democrat! (Cause it's so pro-choice! Get it? See what I did? No? It was lame? I should leave political references out of restaurant descriptions? I'm sorry, it's the lack of food in my system)


It was all so classily cooked that I feel bad reducing it to such vulgar terms as "that yummy quarter-kilogram slab of medium-done meat". But that is what it was, and it was delicious. MMM slab of meat covered in truffle sauce! Thank you goosey! My stomach appreciated it. Observant and grammatically-anal readers will notice that that sentence was rendered in the past tense. Because my stomach does not appreciate remembering what steak tastes like at this very moment because it is fasting and starving. Sigh. And no I will not stop complaining about this... another 20 days to go of blog posts that will detail how hungry I am when I post. Lucky you.

Shrimp Scampi; Tony Roma's

Buka Puasa meal that I (surprise, surprise) couldn't finish, and had the waiter pack to go so I could finish it for sahur. This would have been an economical and unwasteful plan had my amazingly reliable, dependable, and not at all holey memory not forgotten all about it and walked off without it. I'm still mourning the loss of the shrimp scampi sahur that never happened.

Butter Chicken, Garlic Naan, Mango Lassi, Papadums; Khaana Peena, Mont Kiara

The last pre-Ramadan supper:


I love this restaurant. I love Indian food. I may be terribly biased right now because during Ramadan any sort of food looks intensely appealing but I stand by those two statements.

On a side note (because with my blog you get pictures AND a little random story) I used to want to marry an Indian man because I love saris, Indian weddings, and Indian food. Only by 'used to' I mean 'sort of still do.' And by 'sort of' I mean 'admittedly'. Call me superficial, but how awesome would it be to wear a pretty sari at your wedding and have people dance around you Bollywood-style while munching on naan and papadums and washing it down with lassi?!

PRETTY DAMN AWESOME I tell you.

Chipotle Shrimp; Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.

I haven't been able to update because it's Ramadan, I'm fasting, hungry all the time, and my stomach growls ferociously at the sight or smell of any sort of food. Which means that I am not even able to look at this blog for fear of inciting the growls (that my coworkers so graciously pretend they do not hear). I think I've come up with a solution though... if I update in the morning when I'm not as hungry then my stomach might not make as much noise... wait, never mind, it just growled. I kid you not. My stomach likes proving me wrong.

As I was saying... it is Ramadan, in which the epic, annual, monthly battle between willpowers and stomachs the world over takes place. I do NOT like losing. If this is all a power struggle to determine whether food controls me or I control food, then dammit (I know I know, don't curse while you're fasting, but it doesn't count as cursing if it's typed), I will prevail and fast and be happy about it. For this one month. And during the rest of the year I will quite happily let food control me.

What I ate before Ramadan (not the last supper, but the last lunch):


Chipotle shrimp! I am just a sucker for shrimp and cheesy things. And garlic bread. And nachos (on the rice). The fact that chipotle was actually an ingredient in the meal as well was moot, because I liked everything else anyway.