I Love Baking

Hooray! Hooray! My gloriously feminine and shockingly pink baking apron arrived in the mail today!

Little bit suppressed 1950's housewife, little bit Barbie Stepford wife, little bit Bree from Desperate Housewives (who is, by the way, my favourite character on the show for the entire two seasons that I could be bothered to follow their increasingly absurd storylines), and a whole lot more interesting than baking in my regular clothes which inevitably get soaked and splashed and stained... I present to you my new kitchen armour. Sadly, there is no baking accessory that can keep me from getting flour in my ears and batter on my hair, which always happens when I bake, for the same inexplicable reasons I get food all over my clothes when I eat, but I think it would be a lot more bearable having flour ears and batter hair if I were wearing this.



I do bake on and off and when I feel the rare urge to get domestic, but I've decided (Umi, you would be so proud) to make a concerted effort to cook more. Also, I found these amaaaaazing things which may or not have fueled my decision to onward my quest to domestic goddessism.

1. iPodch recipe apps. They are GENIUS. GENIUS! So simple to use, to easy to scroll through the millions upon bajillions of recipes, with ratings and fellow cooking buddy reviews (call me an elitist, but I don't use any recipes with less than 100 reviews and less than a 4-star rating) and the AllRecipe app even has a recipe spinner! That you can shake and that will reveal what magical food item you should make! Like an 8-ball, for your tummy.


2. Robot Salt & Pepper Shakers: all the shaking fun of regular salt and pepper shakers (if you're the kind of person who finds fun in shaking out salt and pepper; I don't judge, whatever floats your boat man) but in robot form! I don't particularly like robots, but I DO like animating and giving personalities and names to otherwise inanimate objects. Saltrino 5000 and Robotimus 6000. At. Your. Flavouring. Service. *robot voice*

http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/cf87/

3. Ninjabread Men Cookie Cutters! A cookie cutter so cute, not even the resident Ninja Man in my life could fail to appreciate it (although he doesn't like cookies, and even ninja-shaped cookies may not entice him to develop a sweet tooth. So... hmmm. In any case, these are awesome. I could even burn my cookies black and it wouldn't look like a mistake. It would look like a ninja suit. [I don't know what ninja outfits are called, but I'm sure there's a name for them.])

http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/e55a/

4. Not Boring Toaster. With capacity to produce toast bearing messages, like "Bite Me", that may prove useful to bleary-eyed zombies waking up in the morning with giant hangovers and too little sleep. You know, in case brain of the bleary-eyed zombie has not started functioning and bleary-eyed zombie doesn't know what else to do with his or her toast. I haven't quite deciphered what secret message the crazy-eyed toast face is trying to convey, but I can imagine trying to decipher said message would be quite entertaining while one sips coffee and generally tries to wake up. Existentialist message: "We're ALL Crazy Like Toast Face"? Ode to Laziness: "You Are Loco Like Your Toast Face For Waking Up So Early This Morning"? Sympathetic Understanding for the over-worked corporate drone: "You Think YOUR Job Drives You Crazy? Toast Face Looks Like This ALL The Time!"? The possibilities, and secret messages, are endless.


http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/e76f/images/

5. Virginia Woolf Tea Towel. Though my kitchen makes do with a regular, non-literary inspired kain buruk, one could always use a bit of pizzazz by way of bookishness in one's kitchen. It would also be ironic that a key feminist text is emblazoned on a teatowel which belongs in a kitchen. Much like a woman would be expected to belong, if you weren't a feminist and still held such outdated beliefs. Trippy.

http://www.theliterarygiftcompany.com/virginia-woolf-a-room-of-ones-own-teatowel-1355-p.asp

6. I totally saved the best for last. I will be getting my hands on these suckers one day (hopefully soon, but not in the next few weeks, for I have gone overboard with the internet purchases and must rest my credit card and the weary company mailman who keeps delivering boxes of random internet purchases to my desk at work). YUMBOT CUPCAKE HOLDERS! Regular paper cupcake liners are a thing of the PAST. The robots have come to take over my baked goods, and I, for one, welcome our new cupcake overlords. Could be quite distressing eating their little cupcake brains, unless you are robot savvy like me and know that robots don't have brains and therefore eating the cupcakes in their heads won't actually hurt them. Would also not be distressing at all if you weren't like me and didn't try to anthropomorphize anything that is cute.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/e559/

I Love Wedding Cakes

I have always known that, secretly, in my own sanity- and logic-defying way, Prince William and I were meant to be. Ever since the day seven-year-old me, already harbouring delusions of princess-y grandeur, laid eyes on William's shiny blonde hair in one of my mother's magazines about royals (yes, she is a British monarchist; no, I don't know why, though that doesn't stop me from blaming the Oppressive Forces of Western Colonialism and subsequent brainwashing of our pliant Eastern minds, and also Princess Diana because she was so stylish how could you not love the Royals if she was one of them).

Behold the shiny blond locks to which I refer.

Today, my belief in the fact that Wills and I were once upon a time meant to be, which has floundered of late due to Wills' receding hairline and dulling of said shiny blonde hair, the fact that I have found my own prince (aww let's all throw up together now) and the fact that I find the British accent really pretentious and obnoxious, has, however fleetingly, been reinforced.

The dude has ordered a CHOCOLATE BISCUIT CAKE for his WEDDING. Take a minute to appreciate how AWESOME this is. This is the gastronomical equivalent of releasing 100 white doves after you vow to forever love and cherish your spouse and promise that they will always win future arguments and get to pick which side of the bed to sleep on and having an elephant show up and wish you nuptial congratulations (if Nicole Richie can have an elephant at her wedding, I can dream about it too okay). Obviously and as usually I am exaggerating, but only slightly, because I love chocolate biscuit cakes too. Admittedly I am not as posh as the Windsors and call it plain old kek batik and only eat it during Hari Raya, but it is one of THE great rewards of fasting for a month (the other being... you know, getting to eat during the day again). So potayto potahto, William: it's primarily chocolate, unbaked, contains crushed biscuit pieces (it's ingenious, those biscuit pieces!) ... we are lusting over the same thing.


So now you see, Wills and I were clearly meant to be united over our love of kek batik, and WE could have had a chocolate biscuit wedding cake. The only real problem with this theory is that I actually don't really want to marry him at all (anymore... one can only be so enamored of shiny blond hair for so long, and love of shiny blond hair a relationship does not make). I actually just want the chocolate biscuit wedding cake. Inside chocolate biscuit cake, outside, like this:

... as inspired by this. Not that I've spent any time thinking about this of course, but there are some things a girl has got to know about herself, and one of those things is what you want your wedding cake to be like.

Singapore: The Good, The Bad and the Pretty

The Good:

1. Yakitori Chicken Skin at the ION Orchard food court.

Which I am personally not into in large quantities, but which Goosey says he can eat by the bucketloads. I am sure this is a lie that, if tested, would end with a tearful vomit-ty boyfriend revoking such a ridiculous claim, but unfortunately for me and fortunately for him, I will not try to prove it.


2. Ayam Penyet at Confused Cook? (Deliberate ?, to denote the Cook's confusion, not mine)

I like ayam penyet and sometimes wish I was Indonesian so I could stake a claim to it, but really, who am I kidding, if the tempe and tahu are goreng-ed, I will automatically fall in love with you and then eat you, and it doesn't really matter what else is on the plate.


3. I Love Meat Sandwich, Confused Cook?

Goosey's sandwich, thus his hands all over said sandwich, trying to figure out how best to put all three meat layers in his mouth at one go.


4. Blackforest Profiteroles, P.S. Cafe

MAGICAL. Like chocolate ice cream cherry pastry MAGIC in your MOUTH.



The Bad:

1. The National, who, by the way, was the sole and much anticipated reason for the entire Singapore trip, CANCELLING THEIR SOLD-OUT SHOW. Because of the tsunami and earthquake. Which happened in JAPAN. If they didn't make such beautiful music I would never forgive this terrible oversight in geography and swear them off forever. As it is, I am swearing them off for a minimum of two weeks.

2. Falafel Wrap, Marmalade Cafe

Did not taste like falafel, but like bland mashed potatoes in a wrap.



The Pretty:

1. These books.


1. This bag.


Somehow it is easier to justify being a crazy book lady than a crazy bag lady (it might have something to do with the whole reading books imparts knowledge thing), but both are equally pretty.

Brunch; Home

Omg, I love my new iPodch.



I also loved the scrambled eggs and burger bits brunch Goosey made this morning (all by himself! And okay it was really afternoon, but it was a Sunday, so that fact is both expected and forgivable).

So when you combine both those things and they culminate in a picture of this brunch that I took with my iPodch and edited with my iPodch and am posting in this blog with my iPodch, the conclusion is omfg, I LOVE my iPodch.

Sang Har Mein (Fresh Water Prawn Noodles); Madam Kwan's, Bangsar

Let me introduce you to my newest Favourite Thing of the Moment. You may insert your own drumroll now before the big reveal (sorry, it's no longer 1998 and I'm no longer 13 years old so cannot justify inserting little midi thingies on my website... umm, not that I ever did, of course):

CRISPY. NOODLES.


Technically it was on the menu as just Fresh Water Prawn Noodles and there was no mention at all of it being crispy, which is not only deceptive but silly, because why would you exclude describing the key selling point of the product you are selling, do you hate profit Madam Kwan's? (Rhetorical question because Madam Kwan's clearly does not hate profit, judging by their prices.) BUT these are, indeed crispy noodles, though not explicitly described as such, and they were crispy noodles drenched in egg sauce, and accosted by two truly gigantic prawns, and they were GOOD.

I realize this is probably not revelatory at all to anyone else, but after having crispy type noodle numerous times at numerous consecutive Chinese New Year lunches, I have suddenly been converted from an Ignorant Of The Existence Of to a True Believer In Crispy Noodles and felt the need to preach it.

Also worth preaching about: my other recent Favourite Things of the Moment:

1. Parks & Recreation
It took me a while to get into it, but it's GOOD. And extra points for Amy Poehler's character, because she is so pretty and so funny and so feminist. Like a blonde Liz Lemon, but more organized. She even has a hyper-masculine male boss as her foil like Liz does: Ron Swanson = Jack Donaghy - the intense good looks + a lot more 'stache.

2. Sleepmasks
I don't care if they're unsexy, because lemme tell you, they ARE, even if you try to buy the cute and colourful ones so that you will look cute and colourful in your sleep since sexy is clearly a foregone option-- if you live with people who sleep at odd and insane hours of the night and early morning, sleepmasks are GOOD and I don't know how I went so long without them.

3. Wedding Videos
My new guilty ex-secret pleasure, to the point where I don't even have to know who the wedding people are, they just made me feel warm and fuzzy and GOOD. I have become quite the wedding video critic now, and am able to pick out trends. For example, Bruno Mars' Marry Me is soooo 2010. Don't use it for 2011. (I have more pearls of wedding video wisdom but they're actually quite good so no point spilling it for free here.)

4. Vacation Days
I am in desperate need of some.

Eggs Hollandaise; Fleur-De-Lys Bakeshop, Brunei

I shall kick off 2011 with a Metaphorical Pictorial Breakfast, because breakfasts signal fresh starts! The invigorating promise of a new day! Energetic mornings that may or may not slowly deteriorate into lazy afternoons! Who cares that we are already 10 days into the new year thus rendering this breakfast not too metaphorically fresh after all! In light of that fact we shall call it brunch, which I have always much preferred because brunch allows one to have their sleep and eat their breakfast too!


Exclamation marks aside (!), I don't believe in new year's resolutions (anymore, conveniently, because I suffer from a chronic lack of resolve and without fail fail to stick to any resolutions at all). So instead, I present my List of Things I Strive to Accomplish in 2011:

1. Read more. My bookshelf is already sagging and overflowing, but the goal for 2011 is for me to be forced to buy another bookshelf. So I have two, I mean, not by breaking the one and then having to replace it. Related point: must also try to read Middlemarch, which I have been resolving to do since I was 15 years old. This means I have been stuck on Chapter 3 for 11 years.

2. Sleep more. This does not mean hibernate on weekends. This means sleep at a decent hour each weeknight. (Decent is relative according to amount of interesting nocturnal distractions though.)

3. Get a Malaysian driver's license. It is appalling that I am still using my Bruneian driver's license. It would be more appalling if I had ever been pulled over by the police and asked to produce my driver's license, but thank the jeebus, I have not. So basically it's just appalling how paranoid I am every time I drive and see a cop car. This paired with my general unease in cars does not bode well for other people on the road and in my car.

4. Write more. It's therapeutic and I have a shitty memory, so venting in a blog seems like the appropriate thing to do.

5. Exercise. More. Okay fine. Exercise, period.

6. Bake more. I should say cook, so that I cover savoury foods as well as sweet, but the prospect of doing culinary-like things to chicken and meat and potatoes just isn't as appealing and playing with sugar, eggs, cream and chocolate, so... bake more. Cooking once a fortnight = bonus points.

7. Eventually turn the entire inside of my handbag pink. I've got a pink ipod, card case, blackberry cover, wallet and various pouches. But how pink can I go? I really want to find out. Please stop me before I become a crazed Hello Kitty fangirl though.

My goals! They are so great and lofty.

Happy puasaing!

No food pictures because it is Ramadhan, yet again, that glorious month-long period (or ordeal) of restraint and reflection (or starvation), where I cannot look at pictures of food for fear that I will drool all over my laptop. I know. Sexy.

All the familiar signs of a KL Ramadhan have returned: my stomach's deafening rumbles of hunger are being studiously ignored by my office neighbour; traffic in KL has gone back to being predictably bumper-to-bumper between the hours of 5pm and 7pm due to the exodus departing the city to make it home in time for buka (good luck, what with said traffic jam); I enter a food coma every 8pm on the dot and have to face the dilemma of whether I should just let myself fall into a state of delicious, satiated sleep, or whether I should suck it up, be a (wo)man and get dessert to make up for the lack of sweet food intake during the month. Also and very importantly, pasar ramadhans have returned, though this is a topic I get more excited about in theory than practice, because when I don't have food, I am just not in the mood to push and elbow my way through crowds of people. Not even to get murtabaks and different kinds of ayam goreng.

I spent the first few days of Ramadhan in a tortured state, being enticed by practically every kind of food I saw or smelled... but this feverish madness seems to have passed, and the obsessive fixation on such random foods as cempedak goreng, Daikanyama sushi, and feta cheese and olives (in fact I just finished my little jar of heaven yesterday; heavenly because this little jar has feta cheese AND olives in it and I don't have to share it with anyone! Heaven!) has morphed into the altogether more monstrous and infinitely more terrible (for my wallet) obsession with the Mulberry Alexa. I just can't win. Unless I finally decide on whether Oak or Black is better and buy this bag of course. Then I most definitely will win, because it's SO pretty.

Tiramisu; Jerudong Park Polo Club

Who goes home, eats the homecooked food that she loves so much yet is incapable of reproducing because she can't cook to save her life if ever she were to participate in an event in which one must cook savoury meals to save one's life (it could happen, okay), attends her sister's wedding vow ceremony and wedding reception with yet more albeit not home-cooked food, and then very cleverly forgets to take pictures of anything?

That would be me.

Though I did get to take a picture of the tiramisu at the wedding reception. You might not see it at first glance (because this dessert is like one of those really trippy optical illusion pictures of coloured landscapes that my third grade teacher Mrs Gibbons used to show her class, wherein one little third-grader at a time would shout out that they saw all manner of elusive objects camouflaged in the landscape, when all I ever saw was.... a picture of a coloured landscape. I was so traumatised by being such a failure at seeing things in these kinds of pictures, so agonised about why, why, WHY I did not see these things that everyone else seemed to see, was there something wrong with me, was I not looking hard enough?!, that I used to join in and lie and say I saw all those things too. When I didn't. I confess, Mrs Gibbons: I was a optically challenged competitive little third-grader), but in fact:
1. Those two letter Ss in the background are actually biscuits trying desperately to be kissing swans. My sister, who picked the menu, confirmed that they are biscuit SWANS, people, SWANS, while I can confirm that they are doing a poor job of being swanlike, because if anything, they look like kissing snakes;
2. That little teacup of what looks like black coffee is actually tiramisu; and
3. That dark imposter of a teaspoon is actually a chocolate, urm, teaspoon.

Okay, so perhaps hidden object #3 is, upon further scrutiny, not so hidden and kind of obvious, but seeing as I have historically had problems with seeing what is always so annoyingly explicit to everyone else (I'm not still bitter about this at all, no no), I was pretty awed by this tricky little tableau.



And after I ate my dessert with my chocolate spoon, I ate my spoon! How many times in your life can you see your sister get married AND type out that sentence? (Rhetorical question as I have two more sisters, both of whom seem matrimonially inclined, and can foresee many more edible utensils in my future, now that I know of their existence.)

A Mango; My Desk

Am too nauseous, ill and queasy to look at pictures of fatty foods.

This is nobody's fault but my own because I didn't leave enough time to have dinner before going out last night, because I took a nap in the evening and as the boyfriend unfortunately knows, naps in the evening are the Mr Hyde catalyst to my normal Dr Jekyll state, because I love sleep, hate waking up, and especially hate being woken up to get ready and go out because that just seems like climbing-Mount-Everest-like unnecessary effort to sleepy Iman Hyde when the alternative would be stay in bed status quo, so I snapped at the boyfriend (he is very long-suffering) every time he tried to wake me up, and then finally woke up totally cranky, and then spent far too long getting ready because in my cranky Hyde state I was convinced I looked like a hideous monkey who would be turned away from Zouk, and had to be reassured by the boyfriend that I was not hideous and could I just find something to wear because I probably would be turned away from Zouk if I didn't put some, any kind of, clothes on, and then by the time we got to where we were supposed to be, the event was at full house capacity and we couldn't leave it to grab a bite to eat and now I have a splitting headache because I didn't eat dinner and stayed out too late on a weeknight.

The moral of the story is I should not take evening naps. Will I heed this moral? Of course not, evening naps are totally delicious and rejuvenating, and I am always eventually convinced that I am not a hideous monkey. But the point is I know what the moral is.

So no food, but I found the sweetest smelling mango on my desk today. Which is totally appropriate because I'm in the middle of Midnight's Children, which features a protagonist with a giant nose and superb sense of smell, as well as copious amounts of mango chutney. I will very much enjoy eating this mango while reading this book when I feel brave enough to face food again.

Mama's Beef Bolognese Spaghettini; Delicious

Who's going home tomorrow?! I'M going home tomorrow!!

The lovely unpolluted-cause-there-isn't-enough-industry-going-on-the-country Brunei skies are calling me! My bed is ready to be slept in (I lie actually, I no longer have my own bed, so what I mean is my sister's bed is ready to be slept in), my brother is ready to be cuddled (I lie again, in hopeful vain, because the monkey doesn't like being kissed and hugged anymore; what is up with that? It's not cooties if it's from your sister) and my little sister is ready to spill to me all her deep dark 16 year old angsty secrets, which I shall then divulge to my other sisters and my mother, because we know best, and really 16 is a cuh-razy hormone-fuelled age and experimenting is bad and testing your boundaries is unnecessary, because I can tell you exactly where your boundaries are by telling you not to do anything naughty.

And if those things AREN'T ready, they have approximately half a day to GET ready, because that is what I'm coming home for!

Along with home cooking, which I have missed dearly. My old maid used to make the best spaghetti bolognese. (See relevant photo below of sample spagbol). And my mom makes the best mee cina becak. Which sounds racist, but nobody knows what else it's supposed to be called so I think that gives us a pass. And my aunt makes the best tiramisu. And my grandmother's maids make the best tempeh goreng ever. And we always have feta cheese and olives in the house, which I try to replicate in my own home, but it's not the same eating feta cheese and olives at midnight without gossip and sisters.

I seem to be getting homesick, so it is a good thing I'm GOING HOME TOMORROW!