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cake sense? nonsense.

there’s a little place in Taman Megah called cake sense, which sells the worst macarons ever. you can make them collapse, they can look unsightly, but how on earth does one bake it into a rock? completely incensed, i dashed off this – in hindsight – very harsh email to them. i guess i love macarons too much. this only applies to the macarons. everything else should be okay for the trying.

To whom it may concern,

I’m shocked. Maybe disgusted. I’m also just plain appalled, since my first and only visit to cake sense has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Literally. I just bought a box of green tea “macarons” from your shop in Taman Megah, and am rather curious: has the person making the macarons actually tasted a real macaron before? They’re not supposed to be rock hard, nor are they supposed to crunch noisily when you bite down, or shatter to bits. Real macarons have a crisp-crackly shell, a chewy-cloud-soft interior, sandwiched together with..you know, a palatable filling. Not a thin oily tasting imitation. Nor are they supposed to smell rancid. The sour-it’s-gone-rotten rancid kind of taste.

This is a huge disappointment, coming from a cake shop which has gotten some decent reviews. It is not just the bad biscuits that appall me, it’s the fact that cake sense is actually trying to pass these off as macarons. Which they are not. No macaron, no matter how badly made, should ever be this hard. Or be this rancid. Think about the poor Malaysian consumer missing out on the true joys of the macaron because they tried one from your shop that wasn’t representative of the real macaron. Actually, misrepresentation is probably one of the worst things a shop can do. It’s dishonest and just not nice. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to supply really good macarons which would bring you more business? It’s a niche market that needs filling in KL, and you guys could do that if the macarons were actually good.

I really hope this is remedied. But that said, I don’t have any other complaints about your other cakes and stuff, which look perfectly adequate.

Yours hopefully, sincerely,

F.

edit: these people are kinder and more patient creatures than i

Dear Ms F.,

We thank you for your valuable input. In fact, we are calling back our macarons before receiving your email.  Our pastry chefs are working on improving our macarons and we are grateful for your kind gesture. Cheers

Regards,
Cake Sense Customer Service

A Mad Tea Party

CheshireCat+Spread

The Fourth One, the Cheshire Cat

some weeks ago, as we are wont to do my friend N and i began an idle discussion on cheese. cheese, people. glorious rotted bovine lactate*, ripened cow manna, fabulous fermented milk. a cheese-tasting party was clearly in order. it’s such a zippy phrase, too. just say “cheese party” in a girly squeal with extra exclamation marks. “CHEESE PARTY!!!” somehow or other, it became compulsory for everyone to wear hats. and somewhere along the way, it morphed into an Alice-in-Wonderland Mad Tea Party, and of course we had to have little cakes and cookies on Saturday in that case.

UnbirthdayTreats

clockwise from left: Sesame Coins, Linzer Cookies and Tea Roses, cheese platter

no Alice tea party would be complete without “Eat Me” labels (fixed by the Fourth One, or 3.14) or the various suits of the cards, the latter to be found in the cut-out centres of Linzer cookies which showcased the jewel-coloured strawberry and blackcurrant jam beautifully. being a bit of a pack rat, i’d picked these diamond/club/spade cutters up while holidaying in Paris last year and hadn’t used them till last week – these, a heart and a Playboy-bunny shaped cutter (the only rabbit i had) fit the theme perfectly. and since this started life as a cheese party, N brought smoked, Brie and blue cheese.

Tea Roses

the Tea Roses were adapted from Marcy Goldman’s recipe for Chai Spice Cake. instead of chai, i used Earl Grey, and added more cinnamon than the original called for as i didn’t have any mace on hand. moistened not with milk but with more of the same tea, it bakes beautifully in Bundt moulds (although they are a real bugger to clean). it’s rather obvious (i’m a real idiot in the kitchen) but do not try to unmould them straight out of the oven – they just crumble to bits. as usual – and you know my stance on this – i halved the sugar and liked it just as it was, but if you have a sweet tooth by all means keep the sugar. this is one recipe you have to try at least once. it’s sweetly spicy, not too rich and great for nibbling on. it’s even better when warm.

Walnut-Penuche Shortbread

Alice Medrich’s Gingersnaps featured, as did her adapted Walnut-Penuche Shortbread (pictured above). i’ve decided the gingersnaps just need more ginger. there were also Deconstructed Lemon Tartlettes (not pictured), with leftover Linzer cookies as the base, a dollop of Pierre’s lemon cream and a swirl of toasted meringue to cap it all. i wouldn’t recommend sticking this under the broiler, as the lemon cream melts and overflows without a shell to hold it in – a blowtorch, if you have one, is useful.

UnbirthdayLazySusan

centre: hummus; clockwise from left corner: roasted cherry tomatoes, garlic and carrots, tuna and olives, jab-chae, tuna and apples

my mother makes fabulous tuna, and whipped up two types just for the tea party (thanks Mum! and for just about everything else): one with olives, and one with chopped green apples. the latter may sound unorthodox, but trust me – it is so good. you don’t even notice the apple, which gives a lovely sweet-tart crunchiness to the whole mixture. i slow-roasted some vegetables with olive oil, salt and rosemary, and E – our birthday girl – brought some delicious jab-chae courtesy of her mother.

Cornets2

a little trompe l’oeil ala Thomas Keller was also in order with these “ice cream cornets“, filled with tuna and topped with a roasted cherry tomato. it must be parental-health-freak influence, but i shuddered while making these – a veritable sea of butter leaked out as each batch baked, and M. Keller seemed to have forgotten the “drain on paper towels” step in his book (which, incidentally, is wonderful). or am i the only one who balks at this much butter? this surfeit of butter was momentarily forgiven after trying one – salty, crunchy, buttery, utterly delicious.

Magic Mushrooms

more trompe l’oeil in the form of what i like to call – whimsically or just plain silly, you choose – Magic Mushrooms, knobbly every-shape meringue mushrooms. these airy, crispy-gooey sugar-puffs couldn’t be easier – it’s simply your basic meringue cookie batter piped into caps and stems, dusted with cocoa powder and glued together with melted chocolate.

Gateau l'Opera

Gateau l’Opera, or Opera Cake, from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets. a heart-attack-waiting-to-happen confection of eggy coffee-soaked almond joconde sponge, coffee buttercream and ganache, draped with a silky chocolate glaze of chocolate and clarified butter. not having appropriately shaped pans, my cake layers turned out inelegantly thick, and baking times had to be adjusted accordingly. finer almond flour also needed – a definite repeat recipe when the time is right.

no American patriots we on the fourth of July, but our cause for celebration our unbirthdays and E’s birthday. she photographs extremely well.

E-Collage

for the occasion, my very adorable friends came tripped out in appropriately kooky-cute alice-gear…

K-WhiteRabbit-Late

“oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!”

M-Alice

“Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast) she very soon finished it off.”

Three-Seeing-Dormice

Left to right: S, the original dormouse; Pie, Cheshire Cat-turned-dormouse; B, temporary dormouse

4N

N as blue-dress-Alice; NB as Red Queen

while some were just kooky altogether – NB was quite a drag as the Red Queen. putting a wig on him was the best move we made all evening. so what else do teens do at these tea parties? why, watch Alice in Wonderland, play Rock Band, and goof off very loudly, of course. i was in no state to be photographed, preferring to instead remain behind the camera and take photos of everyone else instead – i’m still not at all familiar with this camera, having only owned it for a week.

i don’t think i’ve ever baked this much in my entire life, not to the point where i had to plan out a week-long baking schedule, and especially not past the witching hour and beyond. exhausting? yes. exhilirating? yes. worth it? completely.

*Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

bubble tea quiero nada

i’m a bit of a Luddite where most pop culture trends are concerned. the clearest example would be the one where my dad owns a Blackberry, his friends have iPhones and i am content with my two year old Nokia. or where i hear about so-and-so who got together and broke up about six months after it happened. or where i happen to hear something on the radio that’s actually good (rarely happens) and ask about it, and discover that it’s been around for the past few months. it’s the same with food, which is why i haven’t had bubble tea till today. (”You’ve never had bubble tea? You must!” — R)

bubble tea was all the rage a few years ago. there were articles in newspapers and magazines about this trendy old-new drink that i never quite found the time or will to seek out, mainly because the notion of milk in tea is just wrong. milk obscures the delicate flavour of good tea, hides its characteristic bitterness and renders it bland. to my mind, milk tea is a cruel lie designed to deceive tea drinkers of the quality of their tea, though there will be and must be a chorus of cries to the contrary.

Illustrated

for illustrative purposes

to cure this bubble tea deficiency, The Second One* and A took me to Little Taiwan in One Utama. it’s a bright leaf green cafe with pretty lanterns and a very incongruous power point near the ceiling, which A pointed out. after ordering two glasses of the crappy and very misleading “Bubble Red Tea” which turned out to have been shaken to a froth (the bubble component, apparently) and contained no tapioca pearls, a glass of Green Pearl Milk Tea arrived (also another misnomer – the pearls were not green).

it was a very pretty drink, like the Taiwanese take on the local Michael Jackson, a layer of black tapioca pearls suspended in a creamy liquid in a big-bellied balloon glass. it is predominantly, peculiarly sweet and milky, with the barest hint of green tea in the background. it’s really tea-flavoured milk. (see, lies) the bubbles were the best part. not unlike miniature tang yuan, they’re chewy, faintly sweet and rather addictive. leave them long enough in the tea and they start to melt – lovely.

more bubbles and less tea would have been an improvement, and they should definitely be more specific with their menus. frothy tea is not bubble tea. i’ve concluded that you can make good bubble tea with crappy tea: the milk does a good job of disguising the deficiencies in their tea, which were sadly all too apparent in the Bubble Red Tea.

the staff were mostly Burmese, which meant that they had cute and exotic names (Kyaw Kyaw and San San) and didn’t speak much English. when i looked up from Carol Churchill’s Top Girls was two of the waitresses laughing, one resting her hand on the other girl’s breast. they noticed me looking and broke contact, and all three of us slightly abashed, resumed normality – i with my book and they with conversation. is this bodily camaraderie normal? i have no answers.

i still despise milk in my tea, though that doesn’t extend to tea-flavoured desserts or chai (which i have not tried). nor am i a bubble tea convert – maybe a small glass once in a long while. interestingly, not having milk in tea was also an indication of food snobbery, which probably says more about me than my rantings on milk tea.

*A has decided to christen my sister “The Second One”. i am, of course, “Third One”.

hummus ain’t crap

Hummus

Humus” is.

There’s something gleefully insouciant and yet stylish about dips – your bog-standard party fare made chic with pretty bowls dainty shards of cracker or pita. But not for me the rich, cloying mayonnaise or cream cheese dips – give me humble mashed vegetables or beans anytime. Salsa, baba ghanoush, hummus. Although I wouldn’t say no to a nice raita or taramasalata.

It’s a nice lunch or snack, all earthy and creamy (without the dairy), topped with a drizzle of grassy olive oil and brightened with a squeeze of lemon. Less tahini and more lemon would have been perfect.

Hummuscracker

She who makes her own hummus should make her own pita bread, but crackers were faster and just as good, especially when trying to build a card castle.

Gingersnaps

shooting with my new Canon. (did you facepalm?) but look at that la-di-dah teacup. how pretentious. but rather cute, pas vrai?

the gingersnaps are a different story though. they’re Alice Medrich’s gingersnaps, which means it will contain lots of sugar. lots of sweet recipes do, come to think of it. what is it with the majority of Western recipes and their predilection for sugar? this recipe didn’t just have white and brown sugar, it had a 1/4 cup of molasses as well. it’s like diabetes in three bites. one, two, insulin!

Gingersnaps 3

still, these being the sort of cookies that look good no matter how you treat them, and taste very, very good (sugar overload aside), i’ll definitely be making these again, but with half the sugar. besides, there’s no arguing with a ginger trifecta of ground, fresh and crystallised, and the spice orgy of cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. excellent with a pretentious teacup of unsweetened Earl Grey, because that sugar definitely needs tempering with something that isn’t sweet.

(i think my heartbeat is speeding up. )

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