After visiting the Blue Mountains in Australia, a couple of friends whom I met up with recently asked me if they sell Blue Mountain coffee there... The ignorant me was like... erm, got meh? It was only after attending a Barista Workshop this morning that I realised there's also another Blue Mountains range in Jamaica, and that the famous Blue Mountain coffee actually comes from there. So suaku... heh. I also realised today that coffee beans are extracted from bright red coffee berries... and goes thru pretty extensive processing, roasting etc before they are ready to be used for making coffee beverages... There's so much history and 学问 behind coffee it's amazing. Actually I think it's the same for many other types of foods/ drinks; just that we busy creatures are often too pre-occupied with our seemingly impt work to set aside time to learn about these cool facts...

Tonight I go to bed with a semi-blocked nose... :(

Everything's kinda broken today. Me, my laptop. Came home around midday to sleep away a bad sore throat. Then when the work monster in me wanted to log on to Outlook, smart card refused to be detected for some weird reason. Oh well, perhaps it's destined that I shouldn't work this weekend.

I also received two saddening emails from friends this week; and both were about the pain experienced in losing someone close. Dunno, though I've never quite experienced something like that myself, they led me to fear the days when these things will happen and how I would deal with them...

Ricotta strawberry cheesecake

I attempted to replicate Mowelicious' ricotta strawberry cheesecake yesterday, and it turned out... not too bad for a first try lah. Here's the final product, looking relatively appetizing, but the texture of cheese portion and cake base still need improvement.

I'm actually not familiar with diff types of cheeses, so I wasn't quite sure what ricotta would taste like. But 'cos Mowelicious made it seem so yummy, thought it couldn't be that bad right. Turns out that ricotta hardly tastes like cheese.. more like cream with mild flavor of cheese... texture-wise, it's soft and also a little grainy/ powdery. Apparently Italians love it and use it for their lasagnas and stuff, but I'm really not quite used to it. Nevertheless, it's lighter than cream cheese and after refrigerating the cake overnight, it seemed relatively firmer and yummier... according to online sources, it's less fatty than cream cheese, so I'd prob consider trying some ricotta recipe again :)

Texture of cheese portion was a little more fluid than it's supposed to be 'cos I was bad at melting gelatine and think ended up putting in a lot less than I was supposed to. Then cake base was erm bit hard cos the clever me forgot to add baking powder bleah....

Fresh cut lime and strawberries for my cheesecake! These days it seems pretty rare to come across an entire box of regularly sized nice strawberries in the supermarts... Perhaps strawberries are all genetically modified now - just cannot avoid getting those contorted-looking giant ones in your box. Some come with scary outgrowths or like a tiny twin... I want my nice triangular shaped ones! (was still somewhat lucky lah and I managed to get decent proportion of nice small ones in the end)

The cake looked somewhat dubious when I first removed it from the baking pan... A white sea of dubious bumps... heh

But the strawberries magically made it look pretty yummy!