I've been debating whether to commit to a longer-term volunteer role with the Children's Society; or with any VWO types for that matter. While I always think that I want to help people, my efforts are frequently half-hearted, ad hoc and a bit "三分钟热度". Long-term commitment seems to be an issue for me and so I don't recall having volunteered at the same place for more than a month? (except the one time I volunteered for several months with the Oakland Children's Hospital autism intervention program). This often also means that I don't really stay long enough to make much of a difference to whoever I was hoping to help.

Coincidentally - as I was pondering more deeply about underlying reasons for my lack of commitment, D shared his PS' recent observation of good-hearted Singaporeans who lack stamina in volunteering  - with most just volunteering once-off, or for ad-hoc events. So perhaps I should feel less guilty in that 'poor stamina' in volunteering isn't all that uncommon. But then again, comparing yourself to people who are 'worse off' or just like you is typically but a self-consoling/ feel-good strategy. So maybe this is really something I ought to work on in the new year :P

I wonder if it's coincidental that various wise words about giving also recently popped up, both secular and non-secular. Maybe it's really time for me to try to step out of my comfort zone and be more serious about giving.

"You make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give" - Winston Churchill 

"Do not withhold good from those who need it, when you have the ability to help. Do not say to your neighbour, 'Go! Return tomorrow and I will give it,' when you have it with you at the time" - Proverbs 3:27-28

I had a pretty good start to the year - managed to catch up with a few old friends over brunch/ lunch/ dinner/ whatsapp the past week; successfully baked two blueberry-themed cakes (I've blogged about one of them here); checked out some possible volunteer opportunities and made a sensible decision to perhaps start looking out for and hopefully secure a suitable job in the next couple of months. I also restarted yoga lessons with my neighbourhood instructor this morning, and with 2 pairs of new running shoes - hope to be disciplined enough to exercise more the rest of the year.

I also decided to give myself a new hairstyle, and I can't decide if I should laugh or cry at myself now. I now have a very short fringe - which is a fine line between high-fashion chic and looking like what I used to look like in Sec One. Given how little time I typically devote to styling my hair, I am afraid it will soon deteriorate to look like the latter...

Anyways. It's one-hour to a girly gathering at my place tonight, where I'd get to taste J's home-made banana walnut froyo and get some feedback on my dark chocolate sunken souffle cake... :)

A belated but happy 2013 to all!

It's scary how almost 5 months have flown by since I left my job. Am still thinking about my options, but time seems to be ticking away really quickly - while I have figured out a few things I'd probably not want to do for a living, I still haven't quite figured out what I really want to pursue. Thankfully a couple of friends in similar situations have been somewhat encouraging, that it may not be too bad an idea to take more time to think it through thoroughly either. Hope I will make good use of the next few months to gain greater clarity.

On a happier note, I discovered a flower in my garden this morning! Check it out here! :)

It's been a crazy few days of baking - made 60+ over 120 cookies, a pecan pie, a cashew 'cheesecake' and pumpkin cake the past 2 days.. N more cookie baking later today!
Think I'd take a baking break over Christmas!

Below: Some self packaged home-made cookies ;)

My very first Christmas tree!

I came home slightly disappointed with Bali - I think it has probably grown too touristy for my liking. And even Ubud (where Julia Roberts' character retreated to in the movie Eat, Pray, Love) was not spared from the "assault" of tourists...

I can see how Bali can be a really charming place, but the swarms of tourists (esp in the Kuta area) just put me off somewhat. Perhaps the tourism industry has provided a good source of income/jobs for locals, but have mixed feelings whether such development is good or bad for the locals... having little kids walk past you (even in the villages in Ubud) calling out "money money" makes me feel like tourism has corrupted their innocence. The frequent traffic jams have also prob made Bali a less liveable and much noisier place. Perhaps I happened to only see the really touristy areas, but I feel like I should have visited 10 years ago!

Ironically though because the Kuta part of Bali has become so internationalised, I was actually able to do some decent shopping at a newly opened mall Beachwalk. And ended up buying 1 dress, 1 top and 3 pairs of flip flops for myself..

On a separate note, i think Qatar Airways prob has one of the best airline entertainment systems around! They let you watch movies right away after you board, and continue to let you do so even after landing! Heh. I managed to catch 2 rather different but good movies - Tim Burton's Frankenweenie and Never Let Me Go (Based on Ishiguro's novel). Sadly since the flight wasn't very long I didn't manage to finish Never Let Me Go - but it turned out to be surprisingly good (though depressing).

I also found a new favourite song with meaningful lyrics and a very catchy tune - the ending song for Frankenweenie Love Is Strange. Enjoy!

Am off to Bali for a short weekend trip! It's first time in Bali but prob the last trip for the year.. :) And with a pair of new sports shoes, I shouldn't be struck with falling soles a 4th time ;P Hope we can also come home with an affordable but nice painting for our house!

[afternote: we arrived 2 hrs late due to flight delay and since it was getting late decided to try the pizzeria at the resort.

We ordered a signature 'volcano pizza' - which turned out to be this inflated bao1-looking thing with a 5-second blazing fire. The bao1 skin was later cut and removed to reveal a steaming normal pizza within ;) somewhat gimmicky but definitely memorable ]

Sports shoes with falling-off soles.

Sounds familiar? Maybe it happened to you once... or twice? But it happened to me 3 times in a row, and each time when I was travelling. In Laos, my 7-yr old trusty Skechers walking shoes decided to give way halfway while walking towards a waterfall (maybe it's about time). At Club Med Bintan, portions of my Nike running shoe soles kept falling off one after another after I wore them for badminton the first day (as a result I couldn't quite do any of the other very sporty/ active stuff the subsequent few days). And most recently at church camp in Seremban - my relatively old New Balance shoes also gave way one the first day. Blaming lousy glue on soles aside, perhaps I really need to get myself some new shoes ;)

On a slightly unrelated note - I wrote a new blog post about my baby veggies! You can read about it here :) 

Attended a wedding dinner yesterday and D's friend's daughter Grace told me that this was her favorite song. The sweet little 6-year old girl couldn't quite remember the full name, only that it was by "Gotye" and it had the word "Somebody". Her very musically-inclined elder sister Rachel said, it's "Somebody That I Used to Know". Well sounded kinda familiar to me but I had no idea which song it was. So we googled for the Youtube video and to my surprise it was this song with an MTV not exactly very appropriate for little girls?? Haha or maybe I live in the old era.

Actually I've heard this song several times and kinda like the catchy tune but the purpose of the "body painting" in the MTV baffles me a little.

I've been listening to Class 95 when I bake and this morning Yasmin shared this youtube video/ song - Dumb Ways to Die. It sounds morbid/ silly but the video by the Melbourne Metro is really cute and song very catchy. I had difficulty relating this advert jingle to train safety though (faintly reminded only when the last 3 cartoon characters run into train-related accidents!)

I have been working on a few posts for the food blog; though there are various small touch-ups to do, I guess it's about 75 - 80% done! So you can take a sneak peek here if you are interested :) Hopefully by being open and including some of the recipes I use etc I can eventually attract like-minded dessert lovers to the food blog to exchange ideas/ tips too!

In other news - D highly encouraged that I catch Skyfall with him and so we did last Sun. These days I wldn't have watched all these action/ blockbuster type movies left on my own - but being a bit more open-minded has its benefits/ surprises :) And in this case, Adele's opening song at the start of the movie really caught on and it's tentatively a new favorite song. Dunno why - it's not really my type of song but am kinda drawn to it. She has such a soulful voice.

We had an early birthday celebration lunch for Dad today and since the health-conscious him wasn't too fond of cakes, I decided to make him a real tiny one. The cute tiny cheesecake I made a few weeks ago immediately came to mind. I remembered it being nice and toasty immediately after baking and so decided to bake it this morning so that I cld bring it to lunch.

Alas - my birthday cake turned out ugly, sad and somewhat soggy - totally not befitting a birthday cake for Dad :( Was rather upset and thought my underbaking it must have been the reason (which I did lah) .. until I came home and suddenly realised that I had forgotten to add the few tablespoons of flour!! How clever of me. Thankfully my family was nice and still enjoyed my sad-looking cake. It's comforting to have supporters who say nice things even when you felt like you fell short.

Added a sugar heart to draw the eye away from the imperfections at the side hehe. Also packed 2 mascarpone cheese choc cupcakes I made yesterday in my DIY cake bento - sadly they were too dry and even D wasn't v keen to finish them. Yesterday/today were really bad-cake-days :(


In other news, I have been working on another personal project - a food-centric blog where I can share my baking adventures and photographs. Hopefully I can get it up by end of the month - it's taking a while as I am trying to self-learn some basic HTML/CSS to customise the look. Ready-to-use blogger templates aren't exactly that pretty... And actually this blog needs some mini facelift just that I am a bit inertiaed to do it heh. Meanwhile if you have ideas for my food blog/ any feedback on all my food post ramblings here feel free to let me know too!

Rosette cake from cake decor class! 

I fell in love with the rosette cake and wanted to make one myself - so I showed my teacher the photo and asked her to teach me how to make it! I had some mini boos boos (which I patched up) but otherwise my cake turned out quite nice for a beginner lah and made me childishly happy. The insides of my cake is bit ugly and too yellow though cos I just got store-bought butter cake from GIANT ha - no time to go and bake 2 cakes for 2 days of class.

Turned out that there were only 2 students in class - and with the guidance of our very patient instructor, I definitely picked up some simple but v useful cake creaming/ piping skills! :) Serious cake decor is so time-consuming though!

Home-baking has suddenly turned into my new full-time job... and working on personal projects can be extremely time-consuming, though pretty fulfilling :)

Today I tried baking level cake layers (no muffin top cakes) for the carrot cake I'd be baking on Sun - and succeeded! Yay. Two out of the three layers wld be brought to a cake decorating/icing course I'd be taking over the next 2 days while the remaining layer was self-decorated with cream cheese frosting from another recipe.

Was inspired by various sources and the availability of this cute little herb in my fridge to come up with this look - a minimalist chic kinda decor heh. Practice really helps 'cos this turned out looking better than the very DIY design D got for his birthday carrot cake two weeks ago heh.

Hopefully my cake decorating powers doubles after my 2-day course. Excited! ;P

I think I am getting addicted to baking and taking food photos. I keep telling myself to do more rational/sane things like reading news and keeping up with current affairs etc (ha!) but the force is too strong and my weak will keeps succumbing to the growing baking addiction. My stash of new recipe books and ongoing discovery of wonderful food blogs fuels the addiction.... aargh.

And so I baked myself a swiss roll (since I had leftover but unexpired mascarpone cheese fr my carrot cake) on Fri, one day after getting home from Bintan. The original recipe was for a banana mascarpone roll - but cos I had recently gotten a bottle of Valrhona cocoa powder, I was quite excited to try it out to see if this supposedly premium powder produces significantly yummier choc cake (conclusion: I think it does as my choc sponge cake was infused with quite a rich and nice chocolatey flavour) I also chanced upon some fresh strawberries from the neighbourhood NTUC on Fri morning - so I decided to turn the recipe into a chocolate mascarpone roll with banana/ strawberry bits :)

The roll cake turned out OK, but 'cos I'm still relatively inexperienced in making roll cakes the last 1/5 or so of the cake base decided to dislocate itself while I was rolling it... So I decided to turn the broken strip of cake into pieces of deconstructed choc cake with strawberry topping instead heh. Though this swiss roll didn't turn out as pretty as my green tea one, it still tasted not bad lah :) Quite like making swiss rolls (though I'd need to improve) cos of the many improvisations u can play with (eg. you can easily vary the filling, change the size of the roll, use the cake base for other random cake creations etc)

 

my deconstructed chocolate swiss roll :)

 

 generous filling which D thinks looks like pizza topping (?!). The delicious mascarpone cream however was a bit too fluid and oozy :(

 and guess you can tell what happened to all the cream... this was not a very successfully assembled swiss roll due to the cream leakage, but oh well, healthier with less cream lah :)

On a separate note - an ex-HDB colleague actually asked if he could order a carrot cake from me after seeing my FB photos! None of my baked goods are for sale really but I decided to take up the challenge and will be working hard to make sure my first customer is a satisfied one :)

I made some pumpkin ice cream (with walnut and pumpkin bits) last week - it was not exactly for halloween (since I haven't seriously 'celebrated' halloween since freshman year at Berkeley); but more because I had recently come across several pumpkin inspired recipes heh.

Pumpkin ice-cream, pumpkin spice donuts, pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake... I'd prob try making the donuts and cheesecake some day - but if only pumpkins weren't so tough to peel and cut!

My pumpkin ice-cream came out a tad too icy - prob cos I trusted the recipe and didn't churn the mixture v much before freezing. Next time I should be more kiasu and get more air into my ice-cream anyways..

 

The pumpkin and walnut goodness that went into my ice-cream!

iPhoneography@Club Med Bintan

It's day 4 of our family holiday (with D's family) at Bintan and we are starting to feel too lazy to participate in the sports activities here... Rest of time will thus prob be spent nuahing ard...

Wanted to be hardworking n practise phototaking skills with DSLR but also got lazy n ended up taking shots with my iPhone only so far.. But with the help of some cool apps I've realised that iPhone photos can look pretty decent too! :)

Some months ago, we were pleasantly surprised that one of our pre-wedding shots had been selected for NHB's monumental weddings exhibition (you're eligible to participate as long as you took wedding shots at some building of historical significance etc)

We were quite excited and wondered how big the photo wld be etc, whether we won any prize blah blah. We finally went down to the national museum last Sun and to our disappointment it was so tiny we missed it the first time we went thru the exhibits haha!

Oh well, better than nothing bah.. And in any case this was not one of our fav shots heh... So here it is- the tiny shot of us outside the Singapore Art Musuem ;)

Pop-up bakery?

Early this week I had a wild idea- perhaps I can try to make a few cakes/pastries etc really well and have a mini bake sale somewhere. Like a flea market/ bazaar or something. But what would I sell? And who would buy my stuff? So the wild idea is still v fluffy and prob needs more serious brainstorming - in the meantime though I have started to somewhat look out for desserts I can sell at my imaginary bake sale haha.

Below - carrot cake cupcakes with mascarpone cream cheese frosting! Had enough batter left from the carrot cake I made yesterday to make 2 little ones... may do a full post on my tedious efforts to make ONE carrot cake (sigh) if i start my food blog project heh. If I don't get lazy!

Tiny cheesecake I

After securing the cutest mini cake tins from a secret store in the East, I excitedly tried making a mini 12cm cheesecake this morning. It turned out looking not THAT appetising/ pretty (cos of the ridged and collapsed top portion) but it was prob one of the better cakes I've made! I'd say the texture falls somewhere btwn that of a typical dense cheesecake and a light FIESTA cheesecake - prob closer to the latter :)

Each little slice can be gobbled up in one mouthful - and my mini cake yielded a total of 6 bite-sized pieces. We easily finished half the cake as a late morning snack when it was still warm :) I'd definitely be making more of these little (and somewhat healthier) treats and experimenting with other flavours!

 玉兔s over the moon ha (originally Easter Bunny decorations compliments of C)

 Ripped off the parchment paper on the side

 Cute tiny slices of cake - the book was translated from a Japanese one. But of course, who else wld come up with recipes for such dainty little cakes? ;)

On a food-related note, we came across a surprise ice-cream find while lunching near our church today - this place called the Ice Cream Gallery. I had a scoop of their sea salt caramel (with toasted almonds) and earl grey with fig (both were REALLY creamy and flavourful). Yay to a another good ice-cream place near us!