WRX Cake

Glen Tan should get this for his birthday :P The hardest part was to cut the cake!100% chocolate wheelsLooks like a car crash
This was how the cake looked like on the website - the picture really doesn't do it justice!
There's really alot more detail and everything was edible (except the satay sticks for the spoiler, but the spoiler was marzipan), from the white chocolate airscoop, sideview mirrors, chocolate wheels to the silver tinted exhaust pipes.

For more cakes, go to www.ecreative.com.sg

White Dog Cafe

Was debating on eating either Fren(s)h or to try a new place for lunch. Ended up eating at the White Dog Cafe cos it was one of the more affordable ones.


The set lunch was $10.80 ++ (about $12 after extra charges) and it comes with soup, main course and coffee/tea. The set lunch had 18 choices of main courses to choose from.

The soup of the day was 'Chicken Consume' with a slice of garlic bread. The soup didn't live up to it's fancy name - it tasted more like the instant noodles soup, the kind where you cook your maggie mee and drink up the msg soup.
The garlic bread was well buttered and had nice pieces of garlic on it - too bad the soup was a let down.

This is all the chicken I got in the whole bowl of soup - perhaps they were trying to tell the consumers that they had indeed used real chicken and not only used chicken cubes for the soup.

The garnishing of chopped spring onions only served to remind me futher of how my wanton mee comes with a bowl of clear soup, quite like this one, with 'chong' on top.

There was an amazing variety of mains, which included both fusion and western choices such as Creamy mushroom linguini, Tiger prawn in black pepper sauce linguini, chicken saugsage aglio olio linguii, sliced marinated beef cooked in japanese sauce linguini, fresh chicken stripes in carlic cream sauce linguini, fresh squid ring in spicy tomato sauce linguini, grilled striploin with black pepper sauce, grilled fresh chicken fillet with mushroom sauce, deep fried marinated chicken fillet with garlic mayo, deep fried marinated dory fillet with tartar sauce, pan fried tuna steak on garlic buter, pan fried sword fish with lemon sauce, glazed salmon fillet, beef noodles soup, ham and cheese omelette served with mixed green salad, wild mushroom omelette, and wild mushroom pizza.

From which, I chose the Pan Fried Tuna Steak on Garlic Butter.

It came with calrose rice and shredded cabbage with thousand island dressing, and with a generous heap of garlic butter. However, the tuna was a let down - it was very tough. Unlike what the waitress described it to be slightly pink in the middle, the steak was throughly cooked.

I guess it was a blessing in disguise cos I was supposed to be fasting for dinner buffet - just that I was so hungry after OSCES that I had to eat. The table next to us seemed to have made a better choice of the linguini - it looked quite good and they finished the whole dish. The mushroom pizza was a thin crust pizza which also seemed to be nicer than the tuna.The Ice Bomb (left, $4) is essentially a root beer float - great for A&W fans.

You can get coffee or tea, and iced tea with the set.

Desserts are add ons to the set:

$1.50 for a single scoop of ice cream

$2.50 for mango pudding or black glutinous rice with ice cream

$3.00 for White Dog Speciality Cakes

The Set Lunch is available from Mondays to Fridays, 11.30 am to 5.30pm, Sat and Sund from 11.30am to 2.30pm, excluding Public Holidays.

White Dog Cafe

#02-131/132 Vivocity

Tel 63769970

Opening Hours 11am - 11pm

Qun Zhong Eating House - Zha Jiang Mian (炸酱面)

Zha Jiang Mian is a Northern Chinese speciality - it's minced pork fried in a brown sauce over white noodles. There is also a Korean version of this dish, and it's called Jajiangmyeon.This is my first time eating Zha Jiang Mian - prior to today, I've never heard of it. The menu describes it as "Noodles with minced pork and soyabean paste"($4). It reminds me vaguely of spaghetti with ragu sauce / Bolognaise. It comes with a brown gravy, and spinach, finely sliced cucumbers and beansprouts. It's not as oily as it sounds, the sauce isn't oozing with oil, and the bowl isn't covered in grease after you finish eating the noodles.Initially, I thought that the sauce was a bit too salty for my liking but the noodles had the fresh taste - like when you eat freshly made tang yuan there is this taste in the skin. The chili was also very tasty, don't forget to add it into your noodles before you eat.

Hot and Sour Soup ($2.50)Noodles with Sliced Pork and Szechuan Vegatables ($4)Xiao Long Bau ($7 for 7 pieces). I thought this was too fatty for my liking but the skin was just right - soft, and won't burst when you pull it up, but the pork inside was very very very fatty.

Chinese Pizza ($9)The crust was supposedly very nice (but I'm not a crust person) and it was filled with pork and chives. The filling is very juicy, and pastry is evenly cooked and crispy on the outisde.Yet another porky dish - guo tie ($7 for 16 pieces)
Highlight of the day - Lotus Seed Paste Pancake ($9)
This pancake is one of the better chinese pancakes that I've eaten - the crust is a good thickness, just enough to give you the nice crispy bite on the outside, and thick enough for you to chew on. And there is a generous slather of Lotus Seed Paste inside - topped with fragrant seaseme seeds and served piping hot to the table.

Here's a picture of the specialities served in the restaurant They don't have service charge but they do charge $1 for the peanuts, and $1 for free flow of tea and wet towels. Other than that, the prices are reasonable for restaurant food. I think today was pork overkill - everything had pork inside. I don't quite like the smell of pork, especially in xiaolongbau and guotie, but the noodles were really good - I'll definately go back to eat the noodles again.
Hmm I'm not sure of the address but it's along the same row of shophouses as Tea Chapter.

It's in Chinatown near Duxton Road, just a short walk down from Maxwell Food Center.


Another highlight today was Yilin's Peach Crumble :DEach tart is lovingly made by Yilin and it was only after much persuasion that she baked it and let us have a try :D

Tonkichi

Went to Tonkichi after gg to Serene Center

But don't worry I didn't eat much! Just pinched stuff to taste.


I just drank the free tea (they didn't charge for tea :D)

Tonkichi specialises in pork chops.
This is the pork and oyster set (I think it costs $20 something) and they're really generous with the salad. This place kind of reminds me of Tampopo in Liang Court, which I also like. The food at Tampopo (means Dandelion or Daffodil or some flower in Jap) is really good too, and my favourite dish is the pork chop gratin and the miso ramen.The pork chop is nicely done, juicy inside and crispy and evenly breaded on the outside. We initially thought that the pork chop wasn't cooked cos it looked slightly translucent, then after we sent it back, we realised it was fat.
I think they use real japanese rice - see the nice glossy rice grains? very fragrant! Japanese rice is the only white rice that I like to eat! Yum!

Tonkichi is located in Iseatan at Shaw and its on the 3rd floor i think? or issit 4th? all the restaurants there lah...

Oishi Pizza Buffet

Contary to what the poster said, SGH was pretty boring today, with my favourite ward lacking patients who we could examine. After tutorial, we declared it lunch time at 1130am.

Keeping up with our CG's tradition, we yet again went on a food expedition for lunch. We went to Serene Centre to have Oishi Pizza Buffet - at an affordable price f $9.90 nett.

We had Chicken with Chicken Ham, Chicken Aloha, Beef Teriyaki, Kimchi Chicken, Salami and Ham. Apparently the beef teriyaki was the bestest pizza, but I can't say. I liked the chicken ham one and i thought the chicken aloha sucked cos it had too much teriyaki sauce and it was too salty. The Kimchi Chicken is really very spicy, with lots of kimchi and peppers.

They're not stingy with the ingredients, and the crust is crispy and of a medium thickness. The toppings were generous, with every bite yielding ingredients and enough cheese.

I've tried the Seafood Wasabi before, and it's very tasty - wasabi mayonnaise with prawn, squid and crabsticks, and corn kernals and onion slices - too bad it wasn't included in the buffet menu or not I'm sure to eat lots of that.

We somehow agreeded that the salami and ham pizza tasted the best - maybe cos the rest of the pizzas had such generous toppings that it was a bit tiring to eat after a while. For the salami and ham pizza, the cheese was unadulterated and fragrant - unlike the other pizzas where the many ingredients and sauces used masked the cheese taste.

After that, we went to Island Creamery to eat ice cream to wash down all that greasy pizza.

Bukit Timah Hawker Centre

Argh! I have only just realised what a retard I've been - I just realised, about 3 mins ago, that the laptop that I have been using has an SD card reader, which is what my handphone uses! Grrr i've been wasting all that time uploading photos from my hp to my black dell because the laptop can't read my hp through the cabel! GRRR



anyway, since it's now so so so so much easier to upload photos, I shall do another post before I go and read my storybook (which I just bought from Kino, it's by Haruki Murakami - the Wind Up Bird Chronicle).

Went for dinner at the Bukit Timah Hawker Center which is, again, very near my house. I don't like eating at crowded hawker centres cos they're usually dirty, hot, smelly, dirty, full of flies, crowded and wet. This one was dirty, crowded and lots of tables weren't cleared (and lots of food lying around) but thankfully there weren't any flies.
I tried the bean curd from Soyako, which is very famous - lots of newspaper clippings and photos infront of the store - but I think it's seriously overrated. Unless you're very particular about having gypsum and want soyabeans from canada, I guess that this isn't the best soyabean in Bukit Timah Hawker Center. I had the bean curd with ginko nuts and a soyabean bandung.

Soyabean Bandung, is, essentially, just soyabean and rose syrup. They're pretty heavy handed on the sugar - rose syrup is already very sweet - and the lady added a whole spoon (actually it was a small ladle) full of syrup inside, even when I already told her that I wanted less sugar. I imagine that she must have put 2 ladles of sugar if you want the normal one.

This is the bean curd (below) that my mother ate which wasn't from Soyako. It's from the stall in the last row, facing the HDB flats (right at the other end of the food centre, furthest away from the main road). The beancurd from this stall is much smoother - very silky and it was also much softer than the one from Soyako.

Obviously, I was not comparing the taste and ingredients - the sea coconut would obviously make the dish much sweeter - so I was only comparing the texture of the bean curds. Furthermore, I think that the Soyako owners are very proud, and purposely serve customers slowly so that they will perpetually have a long que infront of them.

Furthermore, I doubt that it's the end-of-the-day-bean-curd-getting-hard dip in quality - because when we went back a while later to take away bean curd from the second stall, the lady said that they finished selling the bean curd and were closing already.

Satay - 5 mutton 5 chicken. The chicken tasted slightly better than the mutton - but then there were quite alot of charred parts, which I didn't like.

Nothing fantastic, just satay. The pineapple sauce was slightly salty. My favourite satay is from Alexander Village, the Old Punggol Satay.

I was looking for the very famous bbq stingray - but sadly, I think I got the wrong stall cos this was too salty, very hard and really not fresh at all. Sigh!

Bukit Timah Hawker Center is located next to Pei Hua School, near Beauty World and Chun Tin.

Corduroy

I suddenly remembered that I had a $90 voucher floating around and since I'm prone to forgetting things, I decided to quickly use it up before it's either too late or I loose it.

It was pretty empty for a Saturday night, probably cos everyone is fighting it out in town for the GSS. If you don't want to compete for clothes, changing rooms and cashiers, and probably come down with flu cos it's so crowded and unventilated, it's best to stay far far far away from town. So we ate near my house.
The starter was complimentary freshly baked onion bread. Nice soft bread, all white no brown (good for me since I hate crust) and onions.

We tried the Spinach, Masheed Potatoes and Fried egg with truffles and truffle oil ($18). The spinach is blanched and not too soggy nor too undercooked, and it complements the creamy mashed potato which is infused with truffle oil.

I guess truffle oil is an acquired taste - when you put it into your mouth, there will be this truffle fragrance (which somehow reminds me of gas from the bunsen burner if you can't light it fast enough - but of course, truffle oil is more aromatic. It's the kind of smell that feels as if you're smelling in the back of your throat and not really in your nose). A bit like how when you drink hard liquer and the alcohol smell goes up your nose. Such a brilliant fungi...

I had a Triple Mushroom Soup ($10) because they only had the clear onion soup and mushroom soup today. I actually wanted the seafood soup. Like the crab soup I tried previously, it was very creamy, and the cream was quite overpowering. And it made me feel very full even though I hadn't even started with my main course. If you're planning on eating the soup, make sure you share it with a friend cos you won't be able to enjoy your main course!
Lots of thinly sliced mushroom - but hardly can taste anything but the cream.I made a mistake of ordering the Linguine with Mushrooms and some noiley dunno-what (it's a kind or liquer or something) but then after having the cream of mushroom soup, I really regretted ordering yet another cream tasting dish.
My family likes beef - I can't comment on these dishes cos I didn't try them. Roast beef sandwich with a side salad.

Rib eye steak, which was, according to my mum, done just right.

The potato salad was nice - reminds me a bit of the billy bombers one (which i quite like) but without bacon bits.

It was very filling and sadly, we didn't have space for dessert.

Corduroy & Finch Pte Ltd
779 Bukit Timah Road 5 3/4 m.s.
Tel 67620131

Strawberry Torte

My sister has just made a Strawberry Torte, which she says is highly aesthetically pleasing, so I must put it up on my blog to evoke my reader's cephalic phase.



I haven't tried it yet cos I'm so stuffed from dinner (made a wrong choice and ended eating 2 very creamy dishes) but it has cream and cream cheese inside, as well as strawberry puree and dunno what else. The fence outside the torte (whatever torte means...) is lady's fingers, which is a type of sponge cake (also used in tiramisu if you're feeling lazy).

It's happily sitting in the fridge now. I'll eat it tmr :D

*Edit

I've just eaten the torte. The white stuff reminds me of the white layer in tiramisu - cos there's cream cheese and cream :D acc to my sis, the recipe called for frozen strawberries, but she used fresh ones for the pink syrup swirls, so the colour isn't as intense.