Le Cafe - Soya bean tarts

It's easy to overlook and forget the old school dessert stores amongst the flurry and hype of the newer bakeries opening.

Le Cafe is one of my favourite old school bakeries - the golfball pineapple tarts here are very famous (but not something that I like cos it's too buttery and crumbly), and their old school butter cream cakes. But my favourite desert from Le Cafe has to be their soya bean tarts.

The mixed flavours box has 2 plain tarts, one with longan, boiled peanuts, red bean, gingko nuts with white fungus, egg white and herbal jelly. I like the last 3 tarts, and the plain ones the best. The tarts aren't small either, and it's filled with lots of the delicious fresh tasting soya bean filling.

It sells like hotcakes so to avoid disappointment, do give them a ring before going down. A box of 8 mixed flavour bean curd tarts only costs $9, which is extremely affordable, considering that cupcakes these days can cost $3-4 per pop.

Some of my other favourite old school bakeries is the Rich and Good cake shop at Kandahar Street, as well as Love confectionary at Alexandra village.

Le Cafe Singapore
Elias Building
264 Middle Road Singapore 188990
Tel 63372417

Spruce Taqueria

Part 2 of Day 1 of Annual leave! Pardon the interruption from the Truffle Infused Creme Brulee I was so overjoyed after eating it I had to blog about it stat.

I've positively been dying to try Spruce Taqueria but their office worker unfriendly cos their opening hours are only weekdays 12-3pm. So I used my annual leave day 1 (for this posting) just to try it (and many other yummy foods which I will be blogging about later).

Somewhere around 2pm, we arrived at the much awaited Spruce Taqueria (right on top of the hill, at some obscure corner of phoenix park). Underwhelmingly, it's a little black and white shack with a small shelter infront and some plastic/wooden tables and chairs thrown around. Suprisingly, there was a rather huge group of people there feasting on the tacos already.

We decided to have the set with 2 tacos, corn chips and their salsa, plus a drink ($9). For the set, you can only choose one type of filling for both tacos, so we settled on the pork carnitas. There's other choices of beef tongue, grilled snapper, portobello mushroom etc but pork it was... No regrets about the pork - insanely soft, juicy and with a bit of that porkey smell, its a generous portion (for $3 per taco) of succulent tasty pork topped with guacamole. Though it got a bit soppy and wet after a while when the pork released its juices on to the corn tortilla and onto the plastic plate...

It's purely al fresco seating right next to nature - think having a nice picnic with wooden tables under a large shady tree, with all the ants, houseflies as well as a cacophony of crickets to accompany you and your meal, not to mention patches of birdshit on the tables and chairs... We found ourselves taking refuge in the car - the carpet of decaying leaves and lots of ants under our table was too much to handle. Of course, the tortillas being slightly wet from the juicy pork made it even trickier to eat inside the car...

I really pity the people working hard inside the little shack during midday, when the sun is scorching hot. No air con inside either! But thanks to them, yummy soft corn tacos for a super worth it $3 a pop.

The watermelon with lime drink (it's some fancier name in the menu, but essentially, it's watermelon with lime) is extremely refreshing, and I think it'll taste even better with a dash of vodka... Though I must say it did the perfect job of washing down the spicy salsa dip...

I really cannot figure out why Spruce would want to have this little shack instead of opening up their main restaurant. But it's really yummy so if you're not afraid of the heat, the long trek up the slope (unless you drive) and if you happen to be free from 12-3 on a weekday, do go down to try some tacos. Though if you're a non-nature lover like me you would probably want to drive and have it inside the car...

Spruce Taqueria

320 Tanglin Road

68365528

Btw I have 1 more post before I blog about my annual truffle affair at Otto! *satisfied and highly contented sigh*

Honeymoon Dessert 满记甜品- Vivo City

Honeymoon dessert is a pretty new Hongkong Dessert restaurant at Vivo. I've visited it twice (before it got crowded), and attempted to visit it again a third time, but I was really put off by their incredibly long queues. The seating area isn't small, yet it's immensely popular thus the long queues. Hailing from Hong Kong, Honeymoon desserts have a huge variety of desserts, including the famous Mango Pomelo Sago. Prices aren't cheap (I think it costs about $4 for the mango pomelo sago), but taste wise, it's pretty good. Desserts have been consistently good the 2 times I visited it.

Mango Pomelo Sago with additional bean curd. The bean curd doesn't really go well with it, in case you're wondering... But the mango pomelo sago itself is delicious. Chilled sweet mango, sourish pomelo segments and lots of chewy sago balls in thick mango juice and milk. Looking at the picture makes me salivate... Crappy I just visited Vivo city yesterday, but I was too stuffed from lunch to go to Honeymoon :(

Sesame and Almond paste
I really like almond paste, but eating a whole bowl of that alone can be boring. So I usually get the mixed version with sesame and almond, so I can get the best of both worlds. I think that it usually comes with a nice half white and half black pattern on top, but then I prefer almond to sesame, and I'll usually ask them to put more almond, thus I never have the half black and half white pattern on my desesrts.
The sesame paste is thick and smooth, and doesn't have the bitter or oily aftertaste which I dislike. You can also have the option of adding other goodies and toppings to your desserts. I usually add tofu to my almond cream. It has a nice soyabean taste, but had a weird texture - it's more of a gelatinous texture than the freah beancurd you get from the market.

Mung Bean Pudding ($4.30++) - it's a coconut pudding with some mung beans (like the tau suan kind of bean). This isn't my personal favourite, but my grandmother loves this and she can eat 3/4 of this on top of her dessert (pretty amazing since she's usually very cautious about her diet). I don't particularly like mung beans unless they're in tau suan, but the coconut jelly is not bad, not too sweet and it's served chilled.

Service here, when it's not so crowded, is decent and the waitresses are helpful and polite. Though the super long queues are a major put off for me.

Honeymoon Dessert
#01-93, Vivo City
http://www.honeymoon-dessert.com/

Yuan Yuan Claypot Rice - ABC Brickworks

It's getting harder to find places which serve clapot rice, probably because its terious and no one really wants to slave over a hot stove. So I went to try the claypot at ABC Brickworks after reading about it in the weekend Business Times (love the CEO Hawker guide section!). The claypot stall was doing a roaring business. The claypot rice goes for $10 or $15, meant for 2-3 people. I got their mixed claypot, which has everything. There's one with chicken only, and another with minced meat and salted fish (I think), but I decided to try the mixed one so that I'll get the best of both worlds. The claypot rice is cooked from scratch over a high flame (not so sure if it's charcoal tho), unlike some of the newer stalls which 'cheat' by pre-cooking the rice. Tender morsels of chicken, fatty pieces of chinese sausage, a few fragments of dried fish and a serving of vegetables (which is cooked separately) are placed on top of the rice. Dark soya sauce and some aromatic sesame oil is drizzled over the top, and the huge pot is brought to your table. Since it's cooked from scratch, the wait is about 20min or more.

After furious stirring, to mix the ingredients well. The chicken meat is very tender, and there were little bursts of extreme saltinesses from the preserved salted fish. They could do with a bit more veggies - just a little clump of veggies in the huge claypot.

Some people enjoy eating the crispy rice stuck to the base of the claypot, but I don't particularly liked that burnt taste.

Stacks of claypots.

Yuan Yuan Claypot Rice
6 Jalan Bukit Merah
#01-38 ABC Brickworks Food Centre
Tel: +65 6276 5259

Pek Kio Prawn Noodles

I've never heard of Pek Kio's prawn noodles until very recently. I was reminded why I don't really blog about hawker food when I made a trip down to Pek Kio specially to eat their famous prawn noodles. It was just my luck that the 'famous' prawn noodle store was closed (they close on Mondays). So I ended up trying the prawn noodles from the un-famous store. The cheapest bowl of prawn noodles is $2, but if you want pork with your prawn noodles, it's minimum $3. They don't have big prawns, so I suppose that the $5 bowl just has many small prawns. The prawn soup had a mild prawn taste, but was nothing to rave about.

My $5 big prawn noodles from the famous stall (Wah Kee, it has ieatishootipost's blogpost printed out right infront of the stall :P). I didn't enjoy my prawn noodles at all. I had it with kway teow (usually I get kway teow mee cos I don't really like the waxy taste of the yellow noodles, but that day someone was helping me order) and the kway teow was super weird - it was all fragmented, each piece not being more than an inch long, so it felt like I was eating semi solid food. On top of that, the soup was very very garlicky and didn't have a nice prawn taste. There were many small bits of whitish garlic floating around my soup. I probably caught them on an off day, but the soup was really very horrible that day. The soup version - $5. I was looking at ieatishootipost's pictures, his soup has a much more intense colour than mine (which looks super pale and tasteless). Since it was $5, I ate the prawn but left everything else since it tasted terrible.

Unfamous store, with a quite long que on a Monday morning. It's very cheap (hard to find $2 prawn mee now!) and the lady boss is very friendly :)Famous stall, with a mega long que during lunch.

I'm glad to say that both prawn noodle stalls have pleasant lady bosses! They're very smiley and helpful - despite being very busy :)

Btw, my fave prawn noodles is the one from Hong Lim complex (or is it Hong Leong?), Adam Road (for the convenience) and the one at East Coast Road.

DSC Coffeeshop (don't know what the real name is)

My lunch at the coffeeshop in the same block at DSC. Not sure of the name (didn't see any sign board, but I wasn't looking out for it) but under this multi storey carpark.

The fishball noodles from the stall (which is famous for lor mee) is pretty bleagh. I actually ordered the bak chor mee, but then the guy must have heard the wrong thing and gave me fishball noodles instead (didn't realize until after I started eating). So I decided not to waste space on my fishball noodles, and ordered the Famous Sungei Road Laksa instead. It looks very 'popular' lots of those stickers and food award things stuck outside. If I'm not wrong, I might have watched the Chan U episode where they came to this stall? The laksa here is a no-frills laksa, and costs a mere $2. It comes with beansprouts, fishcake and cockles. The laksa gravy isn't the super thick coconutty kind (like the Katong laksa) but instead, it's more watery, but packs lots of flavour from the dried prawns. My $2 laksa + $1 cockles. The cockles here are pretty good - not those puny dark looking weird smelling kind. They're nice - pink and juicy, fresh and clean (no gritty sand bits).

Chicken wings ($1 each) from the 'famous' fried chicken wings stall, which wasn't very exceptional. Just tastes like the kind you can find from the nasi padang stalls (but it's a Chinese stall).

The coffeeshop is extremely dirty - there were so many flies buzzing about and there were also bees hovering around us the whole time we were eating. I am pretty sure all the flies come from the poorly located rubbish dump which is pretty near the coffeeshop.

For the people going there, I think that the Jalan Besar food center probably has much better food - it's well worth the walk over.

South Buona Vista Rd Boneless Duck Rice

I freaking sound like some old grandmother - but the portions at this duck rice stall is really shrinking. The plate in the picture is $3 and there's hardly any duck inside! I dapaoed the $4 packet (cos I thought since $3 has such a miserable amount of duck, I must as well get a larger pack) and it was just marginally more. Of course, the main draw is the duck being boneless, tender and doused in sweet sauce. Also, as much as I hate adding chilli to my food most of the time, the sweet and sour chilli sauce goes really well with the duck. The sourish vinegar balances all the dark sweet sauce drenching the duck meat. However, you will have to ask specifically for the watery chilli sauce. They seem to be very secretive about the watery chilli sauce - they won't give it to you unless you ask.$3 portion of sambal kangkong. We were just saying that in a yong tau foo stall you can get a similar portion for 30 cents... at least it tasted good - the stoves at home just can't cook some vegetables properly, and sambal kangkong is one of them. Kangkong has to be seared at extremely high temperatures or it'll just turn to a dark green, mottled soggy mess.

Another thing about this place - the carpark here is nearly non-existant, especially during lunch time. Just park at the Village Centre and walk over - not worth worring about getting caught by the parking attendant or getting your car scratched...

Lim Seng Lee Duck Rice Eating House 林成利鴨飯餐室
38 South Buona Vista Road
Tel: 6475 9908

G7 Sin Ma Frog Porridge - Cheong Chin Nam Road

I like the Geylang Lor 9 Frog Porridge, but it's really very far away, and the parking is insane. So I haven't been there for over a year. There's a frog porridge place along the row of shops opposite Beauty World, which I've heard about for the longest time but never tried (due to the "backyard syndrome" [which ieatishootipost coined]). Frog porridge - frog legs and the sweet and salty dark sauce. I really like eating the legs, but I hate the body cos you can see each vertebrae and there's hardly any meat.

The porridge also comes in a claypot - it's very starchy and has a few discrete rice grains, and it tastes best when mixed with lots and lots of the frog sauce.

We had 5 frogs and 1 porridge (enough for 2 ppl) for $22. Much cheaper than the Geylang one, though I do think that the Geylang frogs are better - they're more tender. We tried both the kung pao sauce as well as the spring onion ginger one. I think the kung pao sauce tastes better than the spring onion ginger. As far as I can remember, the sauce tastes about the same.

Although it's not as nice as the Geylang Lor 9 Frog Porridge, I'll definitely come back here when a frog porridge craving hits - it's in a really convenient location, and I don't have to stress over finding parking. Also, the place feels cleaner and is brightly lit - no need to dine next to the dumpster.

There is a huge painting of 2 (ugly) frogs on the wall outside the restaurants. Totally unappetizing! (That's why I sat inside - fortunately they didn't have glass tanks full of slimey frogs piled on top of each other wading in murky water. Yucks!)

Thery also serve some other tze char dishes, which we didn't bother ordering since we came here specially for the frog, as well as dry chilli cat fish which the waitress was trying to convince us to get (obviously we weren't convinced).

I think there's also another branch for this G7 Sin Ma Live Bull Frog Claypot Porridge in Geylang in Lorong 3. Never been there but if it's the same as the one in Bukit Timah, you must as well go to the Lorong 9 one.

G7 Sin Ma Live Bull Frog Claypot Porridge

3 Cheong Chin Nam Road

Singapore 599730

Tel 64677317

Provence - Kaya Wassant (croissant)

I'll make this short and sweet - my school's killing me! Hope I don't age 5 yrs in the next 9months!!!!!!:/ Provence has a new wassant (croissant) flavour - on top of the usual custard (my fave) and chocolate, there's kaya. It's 60 cents per kaya wassant and it's as fresh, as soft and maybe even slightly more fragrant than the other two. I think the layer of kaya is spread too thin for my liking - can hardly taste it (but I have no problem smelling it). Maybe it's cos I like kaya too much and I usually put a rather thick layer onto my bread.

Btw, I'm spelling Wassant cos they pronounce it that way - in fact, when I called to order croissants, the guy didn't understand me until he figured out that I was calling his Wassants 'croissants'. Ok I didn't check the exact spelling - hope I'm spelling it correctly!

Provence

17A Lorong Liput

Holland Village

Tel: 6467 6966

Peranakan Inn

Haiz! I'm salivating and getting hungry at freaking 12.04am cos I'm looking at the photo above! It's the sambal kangkong with cuttlefish (I can't remember the price, but I think it's around $6?) which is super yummy! The kangkong is fresh and crunchy, the cuttle fish is springy, and the sambal sauce is absolutely delicious. I've never been so blown over by sambal kangkong before I ate this dish. Perhaps I shouldn't rave too much or not everyone will have super high standards and tell me 'cheay this isn't the best sambal kangkong around'... The sauce is slightly wet, and looks a bit blackish, but it's a perfect balance between the dried prawn, saltiness and sweetness. The ayam buah keluak ($6.50, comes with 3 nuts) comes right off the stove in a clay pot, and is extremely aromatic. Although the sauce looks red and firey hot, it's not that spicy - pretty manageable by my very low-chilli-tolerance standard. Compared to Charlie's Peranakan, the sauce base is more robust. Also, it's more similar to the kind that my family eats (at Peranakan restaurants, since I'm v sadly not peranakan) - Charlie's Peranakan ayam buah keluak has a thicker, blacker sauce, while Peranakin Inn's one looks more like curry.
Babi Kepiting - Minced pork balls in clear soup with sliced bamboo shoots. This isn't one of my favourite dishes, but the pork balls were very soft and tasty, and didn't have any porcine smell. The soup was flavoured with deep fried shallots, parsley and spring onions.I like the skinny otah here - although it looks rather pale and sickly, it's bursting with flavour and since it's a skinny otah, the middle isn't a bit soggy (I don't really like fat otahs cos the middle is usually a bit soggier than the outside). I don't know why the leaves were so wet - I didn't want to find out if it's oil or whatnot. If I'm not mistaken, it's $2.50 per piece. I think I can easily eat 5 pieces cos it's so delicious and not very spicy!

Ngoh Hiang ($4.50)- minced meat with water chest nuts, shredded carrots, wrapped in beancurd skin and deep fried. This was served with the yellow sweet sauce (I prefer yellow sweet sauce compared to the black one). The skin outside is nice and crispy.

The place is very old-school, and I think they probably haven't renovated for very long. But just as long as this keeps the prices down, I'm fine with it! :) Just that this place looks very dingy and dim (but it's clean! - cleanliness is very important!) - even though there are lots of lights on the ceiling, the place still looks so dim. The entrance is also very inconspicuous - I would have very easily walked right past it without knowing that there's a hidden gem inside. The service is pretty fast - my friends were all very amused at the indian waiter who was very efficiently serving the rice and food, and he also announced the names of every dish that he served. Iced water here is self service, which is great cos I invariably end up drinking alot of water even if the food is mildly spicy.

Overall, I think that I prefer the food here than at Charlie's - though if Peranakin Inn were full, I'll just go over to Charlie's. The difference isn't that big, just that I really like the sambal kangkong here (even though I haven't tried sambal kangkong at Charlie's). But if I were to bring people to eat at a Peranakan restaurant, I'll probably bring them to Charlie's cos the ambience is much nicer -you're not wedged up against the next table, and have to squeeze through tiny gaps to get out from your seat. I think I must go back soon to try more dishes!

Do call and make a reservation if you're going to Peranakan Inn, especially during weekends - it was so insanely crowded on the Saturday evening I went, that there were so many people crammed into the restaurant, and a more people waiting to get in. And don't be like me - make sure you call after 6pm - for some unfathomable reason, the lady refuses to take any reservations till the restaurant opens o_O

Peranakan Inn and Lounge

210 East Coast Road

Tel: 6440 6195

Opening Hours: Daily 11am - 3pm, 6pm - 10pm

Alright, as you can probably tell, I'm going thorugh a Peranakan food phase now - crap I'm going on holiday soon and I forsee myself suffering from withdrawel symptoms...

Journey to the far East: Tampines1 - Luo Chun Ge

At these panfried Shanghainese paus from Luo Chun Ge - I ate them pretty early, around 5pm cos I was hungry and in want of a pre-dinner snack. After my dinner (at Manpuku), I saw an uber long queue when I walked past- I was feeling so pleased with myself since I beat the queue. And I wouldn't have bothered to queue up to try the panfried pau with such a long queue.

The paus are panfried with lots and lots of oil, and the bottom is crispy and brown. The pau skin is pretty good - fragrant, sweet and slightly chewy. There's lots and lots of juice inside - when I ate my first pau, it spurted so much juice (onto the floor, fortunately not onto my foot, since it was steaming hot). The pork meat inside is not as porky as ding tai fung's, but I'm not a big fan of pork meat found in paus/xiaolongpaus/dumplings/gyozas so I'm not going to comment on it.

There's even a sign showing the 'correct' way of eating these panfried paus! It's $3 for 2, and it's slightly cheaper if you buy more (can't remember the pricing).

Luo Chun Ge - found on the same level as frolick and the supermarket (I cant remember where, but it's either ground or basement)

Ikea's Ice Cream

I went to Ikea on Saturday cos my mum wanted to get photo frames but was too busy to go, and I ended up buying alot more than I intended to! I was quite glad that the one at Alexander wasn't crowded on Saturday - thanks to the new and bigger AMK hub Ikea, I don't have to contend with millions of screaming kids and prams rolling over my feet.

I got a good sized plastic rubbish bin for $3, a new yellow shower curtain (cos my old one is fungusy and gross), a black plate (cos it was only $2.50 for a pretty big plate, and it will be nice to take food photos with - on hindsight I should have bought 2 since the plates in my house keeps getting chipped), and the multi-coloured ikea plastic cups (6 for $3something). My plastic rubbish bin was incredibly handy, since Ikea is super environmentally friendly and charges for plastic bags. So I conveniently dumped everything inside it.

The best part about going to ikea is the Ikea ice cream. Even though the portion size has shrunk quite a bit, it still tastes great. It has a mild butterscotch after taste and is not overly creamy like the Macdonalds one. Its $1.50 for the cone.

Apart from the ice cream and hotdog ($1 per hotdog bun), I don't think that anything else is worth eating in Ikea. Especially the Rubberized Fish and Chips. (I wrote such an angsty post about the fish and chips last time - I must have been very distressed about eating at Ikea then!)

That reminds, me, I bought a bottle of Sweedish mustard from Ikea's food section ($4.20) but I don't know where it went - perhaps its still rolling around in the back of my car since I jam-breaked and my rubbish bin fell onto the floor and everything was rolling about in the back seat.
This is Fish, from 1.5 yrs ago - I think this was in Oct 2007. She was very happy when I told her that she actually looks a bit younger today, cos she wasn't wearing her specs. I'm the one holding the mad-looking puppet :P

Sultan Kebab

Kebabs are one of my more favourite foods but good ones are pretty hard to find (in fact, I don't know any except the one in Clarke Quay which I have yet to try). Used to go to Cineleisure's Kyros Kebab last time, but that one closed down. Only $5 something for delicious tasting lamb and lots of lettuce cucumber and tomatoes.

Managed to try Sultan Kebab (recommended by Claire) at the very ulu hard to get to Peace centre. I don't usually go there cos it's very hard to get to (have to pass 2 erp gantries if I'm coming from Orchard) and the carpark is insanely expensive (considering that there's nothing much to do there). I think it's authentic Turkish, and I saw them hand cutting lots of beef pieces into really thin pieces to make the Döner kebab (kebab on a vertical rotating spit, according to wikipedia).

Although it's pretty oily, and they put generous amounts of chilli sauce and lettuce into the a toasted pita bread. I ate the chicken one (I think it's about $5 or $6, and my sister ate the beef). If it's more accessible I'll definitely go back cos I like eating kebabs alot (but hate trudging around to get it.
Sultan Kebab

1 Sophia Road

#01-15 Peace Centre

Tel: 6338-8750

Ghim Moh 九江 Roast Meat

One of the few rice dishes that I like (other than sushi and fried rice) is the Roast Meat from Ghim Moh. They roast their own meats every day, and the husband and wife pair are very pleasant - not like those nasty nazi hawkers. They don't purposely dwaddle just to get a long que (or keep their long que long -like the horrible Clementi Popiah lady).

Personally, I don't like the roasted pork (with the crackling skin and layers of fat), so I usually get the char siew and duck rice ($3.50), or duck rice ($4).

The Shao La Fan is probably one of the best ones in the area, and the que gets really long during lunch time. I dont' know why I never ate it that much in JC but I did eat it quite a bit after that. Actually, I don't know why I even like this shao la fan cos I don't even eat the duck skin. But I like the sweet gravy that comes with it.

The stall is located in the middle (same row as the famous char kway teow) and its name starts with 九江 (red and white sign).