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

Wishin' and hopin'

These coupla weeks have been alternating between boring, tiring or interesting. I can't exactly describe what I feel about my life right now. Perhaps I should be thankful that I'm actually having more time to meet my friends now than before. But then overall, life's pretty much the dumps for me.

My granny's in the hospital right now and I feel quite sad for her. She's so old already, she's 89, yet she's in and out of hospitals quite a few times these last few years. Living till her age should be a good thing, yet I see her shrunken frame, numerous medications she has to take, dialysis sessions and so on. It's quite depressing actually. Even though I can't confess to a close-knit relationship with my granny, I mean, she's still my granny. So when she faints and has sort of like a stroke/coma like situation, I think words are hard to describe how I feel actually. Upset? Angry? Shock? Hopeful? A mixture of these and more, for various reasons untold.

I'm looking to move on from my current internship because of several reasons, so I'm currently back in the market searching for jobs through jobs website portals. Got loads to think about. As I count down to my last days at my workplace, I can't tell exactly what I'm feeling about this. Happy? Sad? Wiser? Relief? Worry? I seem to be stuck with so many emotions at this one point of time (if you add in the ones I mentioned above).

Hopefully, this down period will pass soon and I can be upbeat again. I had wished that 2010 is going to be a better year than the past year, so please please please to those up above, pray tell me that what I wish for is gonna be true.

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...

Happy 2010

I've been wanting to blog within my last post till now. But then, I procrastinate. As usual. There were so many things that happened, that I wanted to pen my thoughts down so that I'll be able to look back, smile and go all sappy when I think of all those memories. Guess it just didn't happen. Sometimes I just feel as though there are too many things going on at once, and I just don't have the time to think about how I should jot that partiular thought/incident/memory down cos I just want to live through that moment. To savour it for its own, rather than think of how I am going to save the memory through photographs or words. Do you get what I mean?

Anyway, the most memorable thing that happened in the past week that was supposed to have a post by itself was actually my class outing with the secondary school mates. It's been like what, six years (?) since we graduated, but we still take the time out to meet and I always ALWAYS enjoy myself tremendously. We met in the morning at 10ish to go Sentosa, played the day away, had dinner, bowling, camped out at one of our friend's hall at NTU playing our favourite games till 3am-ish. Man, it was a total blast. That's what I call things that make me go "awww".

It's 2010 for two days already. Let's cheers to friendships and hope that everyone, no matter how busy they are, take the time to sit back, chill out with their friends and enjoy. (: