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!

I finally baked something this morning, after a > one-month break! Was quite happy to find jappy (many of them were translated from Japanese to Chinese) baking recipe books - and I got a few at Eslite in Taipei. It takes a while trying to understand the ingredients in Chinese, but it's still easier than the Japanese ones. My stash of baking cookbooks is now more diversified, with several exciting Jappy/ Jap-influenced baking recipes to try!

So I tried out a simple recipe from one of my new recipe books this morning - green tea muffins with cream cheese filling. Back at Berk my fav muffin was the black bottom choc muffin at the Free Speech Cafe - these were extremely chocolatey muffins with very generous portions of cream cheese goodness (sinfulness?) tucked within. My green tea muffins are kinda similar - but a lot healthier cos I put less sugar and less cream cheese...

 

 Sneaking in the cream cheese in the middle... heh maybe there isn't so little cream cheese after all...

 Topped with almond flakes and ready to go into the oven!

 Nice and fluffy and un-deformed!

 Effort to create a 'zen-looking' food plate heh.

Stash of new cookbooks!

Home! 

Got home last night! After a week of early mornings I cldn't sleep past 730am this morning so decided to wake up and be a good wifey haha. Strolled to our neighbourhood NTUC to get some groceries and prepared brekkie for D... I miss and really appreciate the convenience back home. Back at the farm I think I'd need to like stroll a good 20 min to get to anywhere heh.

Surprisingly I found mozarella cheese at my NTUC - and so I decided to make grilled tomatoes wholemeal toast with mozarella cheese and fresh basil from our garden! Paired with fresh mango and dragonfruit topped with yogurt and muesli... Heh felt somewhat proud of my relatively inspiring breakfast :P I think my farming stint (and staying with ppl who cook a lot) has kinda inspired me to be less lazy and to try cooking a bit more (with fresh ingredients).

Hope this is not just 三分钟热度 and I will continue believing in this philosophy haha (though I suspect my enthusiasm will gradually wear off a little).

 Toast, fruit salad and a cup of Nespresso coffee

Had a leisurely Saturday exploring Hualien city after packing copious amounts of various veges the entire Friday! I don't think I can sustain v long in a packing job ha...

Yest was my lucky day- managed to secure a night's stay at a lovely little min2 su4; there I also bumped into 2 friendly locals and they recommended some cool quirky places (cafes, farmer's market, bookshop etc) to check out in town :)

Also had a pretty much full day outing to a dairy farm, old sugar factory-turned ice cream joint place, nearby carp lake and a beautiful beach near the Hualien airport.. Thanks to the friendly farm worker Peng Da Ge who drove me all ard today!

Tmr's my last day of work and it will be home sweet home come Tues! :)

Photos of work and play (sorry the order is a bit jumbled up though):

It's my 4th day (technically 3.5 lah) and I'm actually starting to enjoy myself a bit more.. :) taking a break after a morning of planting (some vege called qing jiang - there are quite a few never-hear-before veges they grow without corresponding English names..) and there was a slight sense of achievement at the rows of vege planted..

An relieved how there is some variety in work done - eg most of yesterday was spent preparing many many substrate trays for germinating seedlings. It was pretty tricky trying to drop ONE minuscule seed into each hole though!!

Though I am kinda getting more used to it, I still think that farming is really hard, tiring work! Even the Sri Lankan worker at the farm says he gets back pain fr farming! Apparently organic farming is even more labour intensive with a greater need to guard against insects, snails, and lotsa weeds.

But the extra work does seem to yield tastier and healthier veges. Both the co owners of the farm are avid cooks.. And my dinners the past two days (of various veges the farm grows) have been pretty delicious. The corn n carrots in particular were really sweet! And I had this vege which was apparently the younger leaves of the bird's nest fern...

Attaching some photos! Blogger mobile doesn't really allow me to caption under each photo, but I'm sure u can roughly figure out what is what lah :)

Maybe I am really not cut out for farming after all

Arrived at the farm yest evening n was immediately roped in to help with some last min packing.. Hmm the place is kinda dingy and sanitary/ sleeping conditions a bit sad.. As result of bad pillow I think I only slept 3 hrs last night (came home late n had to wake up at 530am) - just finished some 3 hrs of bending n squatting to plant romaine lettuce n spring onion seedlings.. Now taking a break to nuah before heading back to work after lunch!

Am not sure how long I can sustain doing this because it is really physically demanding hard work bleah.. N maybe i am slightly spoilt wanting a clean place without being the one to clean up the existing mess heh. It doesnt really help that there are 2 needy cats that keep wanting to play/ be fed n meowing the whole day :P

K I shall stop complaining n remain positive ;)

And so D just left for the airport and I am making full use of the remaining 15 min or so before leaving for the Taipei train station to write a short post using the hotel lobby free wifi...

It's been a great weekend and the work will begin tmr morning. Feeling nervous and not v well prepared actually cos my plans to read up on organic farming were shelved again and again :P

Just hoping hard first for nice hosts, clean bed/bathrooms!

Photos of: yummy-looking mont blanc cakes at Agnes b cafe that I did not buy; tea at Maokong tea house; sale cookbooks at Eslite bookstore and a very huge piece of fried chicken chop we got at Raohe night market :)

Home-made banana pancakes!

I was inspired by my Laos guesthouse owner to make my own banana pancakes... It's D's birthday this weekend and I had originally planned to bake a nice cake. But time was a little tight with the preps for Taiwan trip and random errands I had to run. So the grand cake plans were shelved and I prepared a mini birthday breakfast instead.

The pancakes didn't look that great, but they tasted quite decent nonetheless :) Actually as D was in a rush to get to work he had the slightly uglier pancakes without the banana-slices topping heh. But he got a rock melon mint fruit shake to go with his brekkie whereas I didn't :P

 Pancake batter (instant one lah) with lotsa fresh bananas!

Dunno why one of my pancakes turned out looking like a zucchini or potato pancake...

 Had two big pancakes drizzled with maple syrup (on a chio MUJI plate haha) to myself !

 One pancake gone!

 And down to the last slice :)

Am off to Taiwan tmr and another 2 weeks of volunteering at a Hualien organic farm. Many family members and friends weren't too confident that I'd be of much use at a farm (actually I am not certain I'm up to it either haha) but hopefully I will be able to rough it out a bit; lose some weight and grow fitter; pick up some useful skills for my own garden and not get too tan...  :)

We finally decided to invest in a mini auto irrigation system for our garden and our gardener came to install it this morning..

As usual he also helped to pluck out some weeds in the garden- and cautioned about a particular one growing in one of the flower pots.. (see 2nd photo) This one had to be gingerly plucked out.. Failing which the violent plucking motion wld instead release thousands of tiny new seeds into the soil!

The close-up photo below shows the yellow seed 'bags' neatly hidden and tucked at the underside of the leaves... These are usually invisible when looking at the weeds top down, which we usually do... Such a devious and clever way of propagating itself!!! And what an interesting science lesson this wld have made for a pri sch child :)

Got home late last night - and my own bed suddenly felt super soft and heavenly! :P

On my 2nd last day (Friday) in LPB I -

treated myself to a leisurely breakfast at Le Benneton Cafe - a quaint french bakery place opposite the temple I teach at in the evenings. I ordered a fruit salad, latte and a chocolate pear puff pastry - this place supposedly has amazing and authentic french pastries. Sadly for me the pear in the pastry was the coarse yellow chinese pear (commonly found here) and not the typical green pear (which I guess they dun get in LPB)... so the choc-pear filling felt a lot more grainy than expected and tasted a little strange heh.

completed a mini feat of buying 20 English-Lao/Lao-English dictionaries as farewell gifts for the novices from a local market (at wholesale prices) and transported all of them back to the guest house via hanging a bag on each bicycle handle;

ran out of patience at my stencil class after 2 hours and made the owner's brother finish the outer circle of my design for me (btw his brother was checking his FB acct in the background); 

and finally towards the end of the day I received a whole lot of little presents (which I definitely did not deserve) from students for a class I co-teach with another volunteer...

 

At the Bangkok airport before catching my flight back to SG - I also discovered that Auntie Anne's (I used to be a fan of their pretzels back in my secondary sch days) also did amazing sandwiches - using sandwich buns that taste faintly of pretzels! Erm it was kinda mildly sweet and had a nice texture. The club sandwich I ordered was really tasty. They may do better in SG today by switching to sandwiches heh... ;)

And so this kinda concludes my mini teaching stint in Laos - it was a good experience but it's also lovely to be home again! :)

p/s: If you recall the Japanese restaurant lady I blogged about in my previous post - I found out upon returning to the restaurant a 2nd time for lunch that she got married on the same day as me in Laos!! So coincidental that I had to double check a few times to make sure we were referring to the same date... :) I guess maybe we were fated to meet heh. 

I finally tried the food at Sonphao Lao-Japanese restaurant this afternoon. Treated myself to a nice tonkatsu set! These days lunch is the best meal of the day where i can indulge a little in nicer food.. The other volunteers don't seem keen to spend more than 3 or 4 US dollars a meal, so we've mainly been having dinner at places where the locals go. I have decided that while i don't mind a more 'local' experience; it's quite nice to treat yourself to better food in a foreign land too :)

The highlight of lunch was being able to chat with the lady owner - in a mix of Japanese and English.. I actually asked her if she had watched the Hotaru series.. But she seemed pretty clueless after having been living outside Japan the past few years.. Maybe I will go back again to show her heh..

The funniest sentence made by a monk (in his late teens) today was.. "I want to be beside you forever" (he was trying to make a sentence with 'beside') I was amused cos half the monks seem pretty interested in making these silly love-themed sentences... But I guess it's normal to think abt these things at their age... They wld prob be extra attentive if their Lao teacher teaches a "how to write love letters" class haha.. But oh well that is definitely not going to happen ;P

(photos of set lunch and caramel pudding :P)