Since the last post...

I have been watching Monk like crazy. I'm up to Season 8 now, almost the end of the series. After 12 years, will Mr Monk finally catch his wife's murderer? (I know he will. The last two episodes are called Mr Monk and the End.)

In the kitchen, I've been making things like mad. Panna cotta, Chicken and spinach lasagne, Chocolate Mousse, Jam Biscuits, Chocolate Cookies and Norwegian Cinnamon Buns. In the space of a month to boot. I'm grateful to E for eating up everything =P It's such a boost to know that your creations did not fail and is being hungrily devoured.

It's currently the Easter holidays here. For the first time in the 2+ years I've been here I finally realised how quiet the city is during the Easter weekend (Good Friday til Easter Monday). Previously I've always been holed up in IH or busy with other things to go out. But this year, living outside and with no food in the fridge, I had to go out to eat. Well, an empty city and closed restaurants greeted me. Thank goodness for Chinese restaurants. Even the supermarkets were closed!! For some reason, I suddenly wanted to bake the Norwegian Cinnamon Buns on Good Friday, as I was walking home. I knew I had everything I need in the pantry to make the buns, except for BUTTER. All the way home, I was moaning "butter, butter" until an exasperated boyfriend told me to shut up and said he'd walk me to the Indian convenience store to see if it was open and had butter. Well, it was open and had butter, so when he got back from his gaming session that night, there were two trays of cinnamon buns ready to be baked =D

Currently I'm eying the Strawberry Charlotte and Strawberry Mirror Cake recipes. But they're really complicated and time-consuming, so I'll just leave it to a very special occasion before I make it.

I'm into photography lately. To be more specific, Lomography. It's a style of photography whereby the photos look "old-style", for the lack of words. Google it and you'll understand. There are basically two ways to achieve the lomo effect. The first is to just Photoshop your photos. The second is to buy a cheap lomo camera and take the photo. Now when I mean cheap lomo cam, it's really cheap. Cheap to the point that the photographers themselves don't even hesitate to crack open, drill, tape, paint and do other horrific stuff to the camera. Well, I got myself one after some research. And at the same time, got two friends to get it as well =P I'm interested in the "panorama" effects that can be achieved with the camera - a panorama in lomo terms is many pictures taken overlapped to create a huge scenery or panorama. When printed out it's going to be massive. Like 5 feet massive if you want =D

Well anyway, back to my assignments and Monk.

Baby Steps in the Art of Baking

I always wonder why I'm asked whether I DoTA. Is it because they want to find a girl gamer to play with? For that matter, I actually have played DoTA before, back when I was a first year, mixing around with a big bunch of gamers playing Catan and DoTA. It was an insane first year, and I loved it. I've never played DoTA much since then, preferring to concentrate on other activities. I always sucked at DoTA anyway, not being able to react fast enough or concentrate on the main screen and mini map at the same time. So I'm always the "free kill".

Since dropping DoTA my new passion is casual games. Now all of you gamers out there will groan and say that's boring, but hey, that's what rocks my boat. I don't complain about you guys DoTAing every night, you don't complain about me playing point-and-click games, capische?

Now that I have my own kitchen, I'm constantly going through food/baking blogs for recipes. I prefer it when a blogger has tried the recipes before, as they give feedback on the results and such. So I've been browsing through some of my favourite baking blogs and bookmarking whatever that took my fancy. To be honest, I've never baked much before, and whatever recipes I've tried before mostly ended in failure.

Like the cookies that melted into one huge cookie.

Like the cakes that never rose or burnt.

Like the time I used self-raising flour and the tarts ended up tasting funny.

This year, I started off with a banana cake and some chocolate truffles. No pictures, sadly. I baked it on the last Friday in February with the help of a eager-but-inexperienced friend. The banana cake did not rise and the cream cheese icing turned out wrong. The chocolate truffles came out right, but since I decided to forgo the normal "rolling in cocoa powder" and instead decided to coat it with melted chocolate, some turned out to look like shit. Still, it tasted pretty good, and my boyfriend appreciated it (since it's every otaku's dream to receive Valentine chocolate, late as they may be).

After that, I decided to make a cake for a friend's birthday. Now, after the banana cake fiasco, I was quite scared that something wrong would happen, so I tried to follow the recipe as accurately as I could. I decided on a chocolate strawberry cake as the said friend loves strawberries. Now, the recipe called for the chocolate cake to be cut into two and for the middle to be layered with white ganache, whipped cream and strawberries. The ganache tasted funny, I ended up using more whipped cream than the recipe called for. Thank goodness I had 4-5 bottles of cream on hand, and I ended up using 3 bottles to make the cake...goodness.

Guess which is mine?

Despite not looking fancy at all, the birthday girl was happy. Guess half a kilo of strawberry goodness will do that to you =) I even got complimented on the taste. Apparently it was better than the sticky-date pudding one of the other girls at the table had the night before.

Flushed with success, I decided to make a chocolate molten cake for dessert the next day. I had invited my boyfriend for dinner - just chicken soup with rice - and I decided to finish with something fancy. Now, the recipe called for 10 minutes of baking (overbaking will cause it to just be a chocolate pudding cake, not molten), the last time I did that, it ended up becoming said pudding. I changed the settings on the oven, and this time... one of the cakes turned out right, another turned out to be pudding. The reason was because I poured more batter into one ramekin, so the cake in that ramekin was only partially cooked, and the other was mostly cooked, resulting in a pudding.

As I knocked the cakes out onto dessert plates to be served with boysenberry ice-cream, my inquisitive boyfriend was standing there. The first cake popped out and immediately molten chocolate oozed out of the cake. The second smaller and more cooked cake came out dry.

"Ok, that's mine." He pointed to the cake resting in the pool of chocolate.

"Of course it's.... Hey!"

That's how it's supposed to look like. I failed.

I think now I get the meaning that cooking is easy. So far I've survived one month plus of my own cooking whahaha (haven't died or poisoned yet). And in the process, I've cooked noodles in black sauce, steamed chicken pak cham kai and steamed pork with salted fish FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME!! The only reason I can do it is because it's all simple dishes, and it's cooked a lot in my house so I've absorbed the recipe by osmosis haha.

It's almost the end of the 6th week in my summer course, and next week is already the exams. There's no swot vac, you're expected to study fully the entire 6 weeks. What do you expect when you're just doing 2 subjects in 6 weeks. Sadly Chinese New Year is just before my exams, so I can't celebrate :( Valentine's Day is also on the same day as Chinese New Year this year!!! But who cares, I can't celebrate both. That's what happens when you're far from home. So much for anticipating my first Valentine's.... *sob*

So far I never update this blog because I rarely do interesting stuff lor.. I'm the "stay-at-home-and-rot" type. Whenever I get invitations to go out, I usually decline those by guys 50% of the time. The reason is because I feel more comfortable around girls~ Who else can you be a girl around than another girl? With guys, they only talk about games and technology.

Okay anyway, back to study... hopefully after the exams I'll actually end up doing something fun...

I'm writing this in a fit of boredom. Here I am, in Melbourne at 2.45am. I really should be doing my assignment, unfortunately, I do not have the necessary program needed to compile the data into statistics. I've just finished boiling some barley water and it tastes good - not bad for someone trying it out for the first time.

My December holiday in Malaysia was great thanks to my family and friends. Jia Yi, who managed to squeeze some time in her busy schedule to see me and who very sweetly put up with my complaining. She also brought me a gift from Bangkok! Thanks girl! Steph, who accompanied me shopping and took me out for New Years. It was the best New Year I have ever celebrated, thanks to her and Ross. It was also great meeting up with my cousin and having a girly chat. There are things that I can talk to her about that I find hard to tell other people, and talking to her makes me feel better and freer. From her accounts her boyfriend is a very sweet and devoted guy; I'm really happy for her. He sounds way better than mine, but I'm not complaining. E is sweet in his own way too =)

It now hits me why long distance relationships break up so easily. I miss him so much even though it's only been a month and a bit. Another two months to go before I can see him again. It's frustrating, but at the very least we can talk to each other everyday, and not wait weeks for snail mail.

Since I've moved out of residential college, I now have to cook for myself. It gets tiring after awhile, and since I have a habit of cooking enough at a time for 2-3 meals, I end up eating the same food a lot. It gets boring after awhile. I want to experiment and cook new stuff, but cooking for one is hard. Cooking anything that's more advanced than just simple will result in too much leftovers. And really, is it worth making something like dumplings if you just want 3-4 pieces? I think not. It would be easy to just buy it, IF I wasn't currently allergic to seafood and trying to abstain from eating red meat. It's chicken all the way, baby. I want to see how long I can avoid eating pork in Porkland.

I really should try fried rice next.