Baileys Irish Cream Tea Cake from The Cookie Museum

This place (8 Raffles Avenue, #01-02/04 Esplanade Mall, tel: 6333 1965) was previously known as the V Tea Room. I've always been curious about them but haven't walked in until today. It all started with just sampling some cookies that they had on sale and while looking around, I decided to try their Baileys Irish Cream tea cake - something that I recall from seeing here some time back. 

This cake sure was pricey. Then again, so was everything else on menu. The fairly generous portion of single serving dessert was a squarish log of dense butter like cake filled with bits of hazelnut, sitting in a pool of espresso/Baileys mixture. The cake was heated up before adding four dollops of cream and upon serving, had a shot of Baileys poured over the top. This was not bad but I guess most of what made it good was the Baileys.

Jaggi's, Kopitiam @ Bras Brasah

Short story was, I was happening by the area a couple of weeks back and by chance saw this stall by Jaggi's in Kopitiam (No. 51 Bras Basah Road, #01-03 Plaza By The Park, S189554). Having liked their food at their main branch at Race Course Road, I wanted to try this one out. As I had suspected, due to the limited area which the store had as a unit in a foodcourt, the variety was much lesser than the main restaurant. That didn't stop me from ordering some of my favorites of their smokey and creamy butter chicken, cheese naan, palek paneer and some chicken tikka.


I was expecting some differences since this foodcourt stall didn't look like it had the space for the facilities as the original place. To my relief, the butter chicken was still good and the cheese naan still as loaded with cheese. Though the cheese didn't quite melt as well. The palek paneer wasn't too bad as well if not for the fact that it wasn't well heated like everything else and there seemed too be too little of those paneer. There was even their usual onion salsa which one could help themselves to. Altogether, it felt like a fast food version of the original Jaggi's with a smaller variety.

I'm still favorably disposed towards them and having such an alternative outlet is good news for me.

Botan revisited

I ordered the kaisen don based on a recommendation and I thought this turned out pretty well. Thanks! Basically this was just a donburi (rice bowl) layered with sake, maguro, ika and generously topped with ikura and ebiko. There was also another white fish which I couldn't quite identify. Apart from some cucumbers and a couple of slices of lemon, that was pretty much it. It felt almost like some sort of chirashi with a lesser variety of sashimi. I thought that the eggs alone brought sufficient flavour to bowl that sesame sauce on the side and grated yam was not necessary at all. I wasn't quite sure what to do with the lemons though.


It didn't take much (or anything at all for that matter) to decide on a couple of orders of their uni gunkans which were good as I recalled from the last visit. Or also the steaming hot umaki tamago. And there I was being quite determined to try something else new while ending up getting the bunch of same stuff all over again. Now this wasn't exactly a bad thing since I found out that some of the accompanying side dishes for their chirashi bento changes so you'll not be getting the same stuff all the time.

Blueberry apple pie and a ginger latte

I found myself in Dome (51 Bishan Street 13, #01-02 Bishan Community Club, tel: 6354 8939) and since I was there, I decided to get something to eat/drink. This place hasn't changed the way they've served coffee in those bronzed looking glass holders for over a decade. Surprisingly, the blueberry apple pie was pretty good. There was sufficient enough tart and chunky apple bits (instead of sliced) and wasn't excessively sweet. I wonder why it's served room temperature. Would have been nicer if this was served warm. Funny thing is, they actually bothered to get this out from the refrigerated display and microwave them into room temperature.

 

The ginger latte - something I've never had before so I ordered it out of novelty. There was definitely some ginger flavour in there, a weak hint of coffee as with many latte and that was pretty much it. Wasn't sharp and flavourful like certain teh halia.

Swaadhisht, Chander Road

I was admittedly drawn to this place while walking behind the lanes of Race Course Road (47 Chander Road, tel : 6392 0513) because I saw that there was goat briyani on the menu. The manager of the restaurant had stepped out to explain the differences between the regular mutton briyani which he mentions to use mostly Australian lamb and the goat variety which uses, well....goats from Malaysia which he also added was more expensive. I was sold right at the start since I wanted to try it.

We started off snacking on some onion pakora which were freshly fried while waiting for the rest of the food to arrive. These were pretty tasty and there were garlic chips among the pieces of battered onion. There was also a horrible corn soup with pitiful bits of canned mushrooms. I wouldn't have ordered them if not for being misled by the pictures on the menu. I didn't think that anything that had ingredients could taste so bland.


The malabar goat bryani which was $16 a portion didn't look very impressive. Or for that matter, the portions weren't very large neither. There are actually two versions of the goat bryani that were offered. The other one which is a Thallasseri version used a shorter grained rice from Kerala while this one used basmati. The flavour from the meat had also seeped into the rice from the cooking. I thought it tasted pretty much like any mutton briyani and wasn't particularly more robust as claimed. While it was pretty decent, I wasn't close to being wowed by it. I liked the raita though. Was delicious with the rice.


There was a need to supplement the dinner with something else on the side so here's a butter chicken which was loaded with chopped onions. This wasn't how I had expected the butter chicken to look like. But it was not bad at all. It had a bit of heat and was enhanced by those onions. I've yet to come across another rendition of this dish that has the same smoky aroma in the chicken like Jaggi's does.


Their gobi manchurian was not bad as well. Beside the surprisingly firm cauliflowers in batter, there were more chopped onions! Unfortunately, there was also little bit of ginger in there too. The rendition here deserves mention because of those firm and crunchy cauliflowers. Most versions of this dish has limp ones.


The restaurant gave us a complimentary after dinner sweet that seemed to be made of barley. I detected coconut and brown sugar in them along with cardamon amongst other spices.

Spamcakes and pesto gnocchi

This was a kind of a lovechild of a thought. And that thought was 'I've got so much left over bread ends and edges from making sandwiches for 50. I don't want to waste them.'. And thus the idea of these spamcakes were born. I had imagined this to be a fairly easy task, but the making of the bread bits took me a little more than 2 hours of the morning and by the time the cooking was done, it was past the usual lunch hour.

• 2 cans of Spam, mashed
  
• 6 eggs, beaten
  
• 1/4 block of butter
• 2 small onions, diced
• diced bread (I think breadcrumbs don't work)
• some coarse grain pepper
  

Allow the butter to soften or melt them in the microwave. Add them into the eggs and whisk a little. Pour in the diced bread, spam and diced onions.

The bread will start soaking up the egg mixture. So what you do next is to use your hands and knead everything together. You can add in the pepper at this point. Massage them until you feel that they are well mixed, then start shaping them in to little patties. Fry them in low heat over the pan with little or no oil.

The only thing I thought could have been better was that I might have fried the diced onions a little before mixing them into the rest of the ingredients. The low flame pan fry didn't quite brown the onions. The resultant taste was a bready spam like fritter with the texture of hash browns.

I'm sure there are numerous ways of doing these gnocchis out there. Here's how I did mine. The ingredients are relatively simple and none of them are actually made by myself. With the exception of some lovingly hand diced tomatoes.

• box of gnocchi (estimate base on your needs, this is 50 gnocchis)
• pesto (jarred, bought from Carrefour)
• olive pate (also jarred, also bought from Carrefour)
• some parmesan cheese
• 1 diced tomato
  

Put the gnocchis in a pot of boiling water that has a little salt. They cook fast so don't leave them alone for too long. Approximately 2 minutes does the job. Meanwhile, spoon out the pesto and mix with 1 small heapful teaspoon of the olive pate. Mix and heat slightly. You can also dice the tomato at this point.

Drain out the gnocchis into a bowl and pour the pesto mixture in to toss gently with the diced tomatoes. Add shaven parmesan. Eat.