Prive brunch with the girls

Mel is back in Singapore from Melbourne, and we thought that we should all meet up to catch up with one another. What did we do but to meet and eat. Seriously, what else is there to do in Singapore?!?! Haha.

Anyway, we chose to have a lazy brunch session at Privé two weeks ago, at the Marina Keppel Bay area.The atmosphere was really awesome. Tables spread out over the spacious area, so that people can converse easily over their meal without the sound of the next table's conversation flitting into your personal space. It was a good place to chill out with the nice ambience. The food was okay, good but nothing that makes the tastebuds go "Wow." (I'm spoilt by Australia's cafes' breakfasts - think West End's Tempo pancakes-, this is bad that I set that as the bar.)

Privé; Adeline's big breakfast; Seats; Melissa's eggs benedict with smoked salmon

Cookie monster

The first couple of weeks I started my internship, I made different cookies to bring to work to share and snack on. After that, I wisened up and left out baking cookies for fear of sitting all day and growing fat munching on cookies. snorts.

Anyway, I re-made these lime melts (previously lemon melts), but somehow they are starting to lose their appeal to me (probably cos of the layer of powdered sugar on the outside that made them all sugary sweet). They are still nice though. In small doses.

Vanilla bean icecream

People always seem to be divided between two choices when it comes down to basic icecream flavours. They either choose vanilla or chocolate. I wonder why, why can't they just choose both? ;) Anyway, I've made David Lebovitz's vanilla icecream recipe (from his book "The Perfect Scoop") like at least two times by now. It's simply yummy-licious from the addition of vanilla beans, and not to mention rich, from the all those egg yolks...

Vanilla beans; Mise en place

Birthday cupcakes

Time is sneaky. Sometimes it goes by so slowly you reckon that it is unmoving, still as the air. Yet, you look at the clock and see the minutes ticking away ever so slowly. Then again, at other times, it gallops past you, almost akin to a sprinter racing the way to the finishing line. You bat an eyelash and a whole day is gone.

Just like today, time FLEW by so much today. I blink and it's lunch hour. I blink again and lunch is over. The next time I blinked, it's already 4pm. Then  I blink again, it's 6pm, time to knock off but I don't cos you know, whenever it's nearing end of the day, suddenly there's like a multitude of tasks to complete. I leave at 7pm instead. It feels like today, I blinked and blinked, like I'm blinking in terms of hours. pffft.

Time comes and goes as it pleases, not caring if anyone wants it to go slow or hurry. And we all blow the candles once a year every single year - which reminds us that we are stealthily growing older and older. pui. Anyway, speaking of birthdays, I made these cupcakes in November for an aunt's birthday.

I wanted contrasting colours and flavours. No boring plain old (but scrumptious of course) chocolate. I decided to remake the ispahan (minus the lychee as it was a last minute decision and I used what I had on hand). To complement the colour tone of the pinkish ispahan, I wanted something citrusy bright. Lemon was akin to chocolate, yummy but just a tad overdone. So I decided on orange cupcakes (I secretly clapped my hands in joy as you know, I do have a bottle of Grand Marnier...that really really goes well with orange-anything.).

Piped cupcakes. I know how ugly they look. I mean, I did try my best...