Chihuly Lounge- Summer Weekend Afternoon Tea

Take a feast on all the names. Passion fruit mango éclair, casis violet écclair, mango éclair, caramel écair, mac-clair, cherry écair, cookies and cream écair, gula melaka écair, chocolate écair, green tea écair, mixed berries écair, hazelnt éclair, apple écair.

An Equador Rose

Say it with me. #iloveyouimissyousecretfriendshippleaseforgivemeremembermethankyoubemysweetheart. On a rose.

Chihuly Lounge- Summer Weekend Afternoon Tea

Take a feast on all the names. Passion fruit mango éclair, casis violet écclair, mango éclair, caramel écair, mac-clair, cherry écair, cookies and cream écair, gula melaka écair, chocolate écair, green tea écair, mixed berries écair, hazelnt éclair, apple écair.

An Equador Rose

Say it with me. #iloveyouimissyousecretfriendshippleaseforgivemeremembermethankyoubemysweetheart. On a rose.

Chihuly Lounge- Summer Weekend Afternoon Tea

Take a feast on all the names. Passion fruit mango éclair, casis violet écclair, mango éclair, caramel écair, mac-clair, cherry écair, cookies and cream écair, gula melaka écair, chocolate écair, green tea écair, mixed berries écair, hazelnt éclair, apple écair.

Archive for May 2011

Pika Noodles

Tuesday, May 31   keyboard  

Sunny


Instant noodles feel better when there are fishcakes inside! The naruto kamaboko, the white ones with a pink spiral.


The kamaboko have the same logic as our sticky or Sweet Enchantment hand-made rock candy, little loaves that are sliced and worked so that a slice can look like an object. Or anything, like a pig or pikachu face!


Sanyo Pokemon Noodles Shoyu (SGD 3.50) and Sanyo Pokemon Noodles Seafood (SGD 3.55)

The tougher pokemon for the shoyu flavour, and the baby pokemon for the seafood flavour?





The blue pokemon and pikachu, the squirtle/totodile/mudkip of the times.


The pikachu remains as the pink and white kamaboko, while the rest have changed like icing cookies.

P.S. From red, green, blue to jewel shades, we were once greatly confident of its next move. Orange, purple, and pink, proclaiming in delight. We never think it would be Black and White.

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Green Cookies

Sunday, May 29   keyboard  

Cloudy

The japanese love matcha so much that besides the grasses, their wheat and margarine is also green! In place of where Chips Ahoy is supposed to be, and things that go well with chocolate.



Bourbon Petit Choco Chip Matcha (SGD 2.00)

From a foreigner's perspective, matcha and chocolate is not that bad. One would have been more curious in chocolate chips. Like what is this flavour, something called chocolate that is chipped, and broken into little pieces as chocolate chip?


How does chocolate and matcha smell like? Open the stick of cookies and wheat and maple comes to you, yes, like quaker oatmeal bars or granola. The smell of autumn or harvest.

P.S. Besides this, the cookies have a very mild matcha taste. Interestingly, they are also much sweeter than the chocolate chips themselves, like the maples or honey, while the chips balance with a delicate bitter cocoa.



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Green Bak Chang

Friday, May 27   keyboard  

Cloudy

To meet the festivals, to meet the festivals. This seems to be on everyone's mind. Be it a f&b company or a lunching individual, we all have promotions to make this time of the year, as if it is a duty we put onto ourselves.


So everyone will start to look at each other, or at their possible patrons' creations. Nowadays it is common to sight dessert, tutti-frutti or chilled rice dumplings. Sweet pudding in dumpling shape. Probably wanting us to feel how it is like when we first saw and behold a snowskin mooncake; a rice dumpling's era earlier.


The bak chang is considered to be one's comfort foods. One has scoured the island to look for new creations, enjoyed its brown rice jasmine, and has been concerned with the rising prices of the black mushrooms before. Therefore the Dragon Boat Festival, or rather the common eating part of it is rather meaningless to me. Luxury groups and hotel talking about the numbers of grain of rice, etc.



Nevertheless at Shangri-La Hotel Singapore, (probably because we only know Shangri-La Hotel, our Shangri-La,) it is said to house a very special rice dumpling. Yes, sweet rice dumpling. Green tea. Now you'd probably act like what you did when you first saw a snowskin mooncake a few years ago. How does it look like? How does it taste like? Is it green outside, inside or what?


Sweet Green Tea Dumpling (SGD 7.50)

You want to tear it open now and see its true face. Ok, so it is a kee chang! Of all sweet rice dumplings, weren't they a kee chang also, concealing sweet bean paste inside?(!) Yes so of course it is a kee chang, but ever so bright and luminous like an inside out sunrise, the colours of a rainbow inverted, with the murky green inside.

P.S. Or maybe before you realise it is a kee chang, or even ask what a kee chang is, you started eating it already. This is one of the best alkaline rice dumplings, the rice mound silky and tender, because the rice is so severely fine, and pearly like cotton! The alkaline taste is gentle and pleasing. Seeing the cream white with a green-filled centre, instead of the usual dark red bean kee chang, it is like owning a limited-edition toy, the batch now in another shade besides the changed taste!


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Green Rice

keyboard  


26 Apr, 2011

You can say this is the end of it. Finally, somewhere which stops and screams you from taking photos. So imagine yourself with a plate of hot rice, fried, against the lime-green melamine lookalike table. Every bit looks tempting and perfectly fine, until you notice the rice grains coated in a thin green colouring.






Green Tea Fried Rice (SGD 3.30)

Yes, it is green tea fried rice. Also to note there are the usual carrots, peas, corn and char siew. The green tea must have been a salty paste, lathered over the rice when stir-fried, causing them to turn a leafy green and a strong scent of jasmine over to you when the plate is ready. With the smell, yet the taste is ordinary like fried rice, every grain firm and distinct with a savoury smoky flavour, well-balanced with the toppings. You can't really taste the green tea, it only comes to you as a bitter aftertaste after you finish your meal, the taste of mints or herbs.

P.S. And I am not going to say where it is, either. Green tea has come to us in all fashion and assemblages until we forget what it really looks like/is, until it touches on the very mundane on us such as fried rice. There is also green tea salad, or green tea sold elsewhere. All this remind us that before green tea was green, or green, it was a paste. Yes, the paste which does wonders.

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Green Dim Sum Dumplings

Tuesday, May 24   keyboard  


Sunny

Dim sum can make your meal look more interesting, with their reds and emeralds peering from the translucent white skin like porcelain pieces.


Mushroom & Seafood Dumpling (SGD 3.50)

These are not casually put on the menu, without seriousness but food! They do have a consumer group of their own and sell out within half a week. Having some meaning themselves and it is up to your luck/chance to catch them.


Brocoli Dumpling (SGD 3.50)

One of the best-sellers is this green-skinned vegetable dumpling! It is the most interesting dim sum because enoki mushrooms are used as the center of the dumpling. The proportion of mushrooms is so great that you are practically eating the mushrooms, their salty, velvety texture flowing through the dim sum. Believe it or not, the skin is coloured by broccoli(?) and there is also some susceptible asparagus/broccoli stalks for garnish, though you can't really taste them because they are also simmered in the stock till soft.


Vegetarian Dumpling (SGD 3.50)

Another lovely technique on the dumpling- the drip paint! The green slowly melting into nothingness. To add on to the decor there is the goji berry, sort of wrinkled from steaming, and carrots(well no actually there is no carrots, they are just strips of dough of the same composition snipped to bits and dyed in orange.) Just for fun, like drip paint.

P.S. No doubt about it, while most novelty foods dress themselves up in glitzy appearances, they also become unavailable on the menu. Not this dim sum. While it is often missing on the menu, it is not because of wearing demands, but because they are really sold out week after week! Even if it is for many weeks now.


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Pink Wife Biscuit

Saturday, May 21   keyboard  

Sunny

These aren't pink actually, but a sort of red. Red from a kind of rice called red yeast rice.


Taiwan Wife Cakes (Anka Flavor)(SGD 2.80)

When you see anka, it is actually not the japanese anko, sweet dark red bean or adzuki bean paste. Which would actually be very logical for a pink coloured traditional pastry, the sides coated pink to remind the bakers that these are red bean-filled, another of those old fashioned fillings.


These wife biscuits are really anka! The inside red yeast rice with maltose, the outside red yeast rice to give it a superb colour. Red yeast rice is very popular in Taiwan, they like to add it to foods to give it a red colour, besides a hype and boost in health.


We may have heard of red pink tau sar piah and/or marriage cakes; but now this is the larger version, the traditional wife biscuit, in pink, directly from Taiwan in one of the food fairs. One of the significance of the many country's food fairs found in Singapore. Getting or having your Taiwan foods without an occasion, or needing a reason.

P.S. Even if it is all the way from Taiwan, the pastry skin is still moist and supple, with tiny studs of flour on it. The filling is incredibly simple, red yeast rice and maltose, yet it tastes the same like any other wife biscuit winter melon and lotus filling, good, delectable and hearty. It has an additional fragrant bean jam taste probably evoked by such a lovely colour, and it is considered very light and not oily like a rustic bread.


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Steamed Yam Biscuit

Tuesday, May 17   keyboard  


Sunny

This is an interesting brand with foothold in China, Taiwan, Singapore. Your favourite chinese desserts bean curd or yam in the form of thins.


The arched logo, fat fonts and muted picture promising enough of an old traditional shophouse, where you can sit down and nurse bowls of handmade dessert made from a heritage. If you notice the package, the yam biscuits are a light greyish(!) purplish hue.


Taro Cracker (SGD 2.30)

When you lug them home, there is already this sweet aroma of yam or pandan, that makes your place smell like it is constantly baking vanilla. Textured and heavily dusted in aroma, they provide a tactile sense to your eating, the baked yam flavour condensed and ending up in crisp, quick bites.

P.S. The biscuit itself is actually very light, and on the savoury side despite its fragrance. Even though it is yam, it is such a mellow or neutral one in a compelling biscuit base, hence people who don't like yam will also adore it for a biscuit. One also likes that the biscuit is so thin, your molars can grind on it until it develops into an intense, roasted wheat flavour, perfect for lingering in that slow afternoon.


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Pink Soy Milk

keyboard  

Humid

These are packeted as candy as juice. With many flavours and colours to choose from. Its like unfair, why can the milk be flavoured in such a wonderful array of yummy ingredients and colours, yet still considered normal and popular? Why not the soy milk? So Yeo's tried to change the prejudice against soy milk, making it sound as delicious as the milk.


Yeo's Bandung Soy Drink (SGD 2.95 per pack)

The same logic as the milk, they are all very versatile fluids, readily fusible with other foods yet retaining their integrities in their own special ways. Sometimes even creating vastly different, or new personas. In terms of the quality and texture.


So maybe you should try the bandung soy milk, the mirror parallel of the strawberry milk, one of the best partners/match with soy milk. Somehow when it is bandung, it is always with soy, and not milk.(?)

P.S. Unlike your milk, you have to shake this before serving. There are little peptide particles at the bottom of the carton. The taste is thin, and very refreshing, honeyed like it is drinking juice, when it is actually milk. Good to cheat on people to getting their soy, chilled, or just out from the packet!


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Pink Mushroom

Sunday, May 15   keyboard  

Sunny


When we hear of Meiji, we think Meiji Hello Panda! Pocky! Meiji milk. There's something else Meiji is proud of. Its nature-themed cookies. You know the mushrooms heads, tree stumps, acorns.


A seemingly straightforward concept, but they can permutate into so many variations that the mushroom head is raspberry chocolate, stalk dark brown, the mushroom head grainy strawberry, stalk normal pretzel, the mushroom head beige, caramel flavoured white chocolate, stalk normal pretzel. In this one, it is strawberry and white chocolate on a normal pretzel stalk, inspired by ichigo dipped in white chocolate. NTBC, there is another kind of strawberry and white chocolate, but it is inspired by the strawberry cheesecake, to be exact in Japanese ways.



Meiji Kinoko no Sato Tappuri Strawberry & Rich Milk (SGD 3.90)

When you look at them, it is just a pretzel biscuit with white chocolate hardened on it, as a mould, yet it can create so much waves of imagination! Depending on where you want to start first, the mushroom head is full on the berry flavour, intense with a fruity twang, followed by a smooth, rich white chocolate and finally complemented well with the plain, slightly fragrant and snappy stick. You'll be happy enough holding the salted sticks, ending up eating them to wipe off the sweetness of the berry.

P.S. Looking at the other nature-inspired cookies, the tree stump is a tree stump, but the acorn is actually not acorns but bamboo shoot buds! Speaking about japanese cultivation and its cuisine. These mushrooms in pink seem to be more than what it's about, some fungi from fairyland, an ice lolly, or an ichigo treat off a stick.


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Green Carnation

Wednesday, May 4   keyboard  


5 May, 2011

The green pumpkin bakery is like a living, breathing thing. That's why we love to visit it. Now and then, there will be subtle changes to its selection of breads, to adjust to the different seasons and days.


Durian Carnation (SGD 1.60)

Specially for Mother's Day, its pans are bursting with carnation flowers! As though they are showers of love, to our mothers. This limited sight comes in pink carnation for Mango Carnation, and green carnation for the Durian.


They are fluffy, round anpans with an immensely thin skin or skinless at all, in the soft stretchy consistency of a fermented bread. Inside, there is this dense paste that has strong durian essence! Good to chew with the white bread, and some stamps of green frosting for fun.

P.S. Tropical delights for your mum! Wonder how the mango looks; and tastes like. Having said so, the carnation may be the flowers on the bun, or the milk (carnation) on why the bread is so pale.

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Pink Fish

Tuesday, May 3   keyboard  

4 May, 2011

We like to look at The Taiyaki at Ion Orchard. It really has some unique fishes. Now and then, it would update its flavours. But recently, it has lost its sakura mochi version, the fish with candy pink paste inside.



Meito Puku Puku Tai S"berry (SGD 1.30)

Nevertheless, there will still be pink fish around. This time, including the skin of the fish! This is a pink taiyaki briefly introduced on the shelves.



The face of the fish is peachy pink! Showing true strawberry flavour. This taiyaki is harder than usual, you being able to rap on its surface. It looks sadder than its mate on the plastic, though.



The outline of the fish is seen clearly, and its skin is smooth and fine. It is made from air light wafer instead of the usual pancake cake, and has aerated chocolate instead of a custard or bean paste-filling inside. Such is the outcome of a fair-maiden pink taiyaki, if not we might as well be having them a golden brown-grilled in the stalls.



The chocolate does look fancy, hardly like one or something you'd think of to stuff in a taiyaki. Yet anything happens, in a pink taiyaki.



The wafer is very light and it snaps into the mushy creamy chocolate, which makes up for this very perforated skin. The chocolate, strawberry or anything like it is is very delicious in taste! Rich in strawberry flavour, it bursts into frothy circles when you are chewing with the wafer.

P.S. As long as it is pink, it is already legendary, departing from the rest of the taiyaki being tossed and grilled in the pans. In such colours, one can also expect them to be different from the usual configuration of a taiyaki. Like a wafer or monaka or ice cream, instead of waffle or pancake.



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