Another Baking Session o(^V^)o

Another baking fun time with Li. She had specially taught me how to bake pineapple tarts which she usually only bakes them during the Chinese Lunar New Year. In addition, we also decided to bake cookies and muffins again as we felt that we did not get the right textures and colors previously.

Cooking the pineapple paste fillings can be tedious so we bought the ready-made paste from Phoon Huat. However, Li told me that the ready-made paste is usually very sweet and she would buy fresh pineapples, grate and add into the paste to less sweeten it. Anyway, it is still the best to cook your own pineapple paste fillings so that you can control the sweetness and flavor. Hmm, it will take take hours for me to prepare the paste.

Thereafter, we rolled the paste into small balls for the open-faced pineapple tarts and oval shapes for the closed ones.

Li prefers the closed filling pineapples and I like the open-faced ones. Looks nicer (^.^) So I was assigned to mold the tarts base. Well, it was indeed a challenging task as I thought it was easy since I had the mold. But stamping the dough out from the mold was not easy leh! I had to re-do as I did not get the perfect shapes ~ either too thick or too thin; or the edges came out with extra dough or torn as I pressed too hard ~ (T___T)

The closed filling pineapple tarts were much easier to do. Li actually weighed each tart dough to get a consistent shape and right proportion.

Woohoo ~ my 1st time baking pineapple tarts ~ not too bad lah ^0^ except the pineapple fillings were too much ~ haha!

Wow ~ the shapes were quite the same ~ for those were not so, they were actually done by me hehe ^0^!

We must praise ourselves for baking these coffee chocolate chips cookies ~ we managed to get the correct cookies texture ~ crispy and tasted yummy! Of course, the cookies cutter was nice too ~ Hearty shapes ^.~

Another successful bake was the blueberries muffins ~ moist texture-neither soggy nor too dry ^.~ not over burnt on the surface ~ nice golden brown 0^.^0 We are going to use the same recipe and do with other flavors such as banana walnut, carrot, pumpkin, orange and many more.

Surprisingly, we took quite a short time to finish baking all the above recipes and all turned out beautifully good and tasty. Successful baking ~ it completely made my day H-A-P-P-Y ~

Italiannies Pasta Pizza & Vino

It was another birthday celebration for a friend and colleague and we had arranged a dinner at Italiannies which located at the previous Singapore Power Building. Now it has undergone into a dining and retail property as TripleOne Somerset.

The restaurant has a nice and relax ambient. The interior design are mostly in wood and gives a homely feeling and very country style. It will also be a good place to chill out and have some wine or beer after a day of hard work ^.~

To start off with our dinner, we ordered a bottle of white wine which the waitress recommended. The taste of the wine was smooth and flavorful.

Sicilian Chicken Salad ~ Diced chicken breasts, mangoes, red grapes and pine nuts, tossed in Lemon-dijon dressing on crispy romaine lettuce.

Grilled Salmon Spinach Salad ~ Marinated salmon with fresh spinach, arugula, tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions,roasted peppers, green olives, Parmesan and sun-dried tomato vinaigrette.

Their Salads are fresh and delicious. Beside the wine, another good start to stimulate our appetizer.

Spinach Artichoke Formaggio ~ This sauce dip is absolutely yummy and very cheesy.
Goes well with the bread.

Clams Lombardi ~ Simmered in white wine, olive oil, oregano, garlic and parsley
The sauce was not too bad but the clams are small, little meat and not very tangy.

Pepperoni Pizza ~ Pepperoni, mozzarella cheese and shaved onions.

HAM & MUSHROOMS PIZZA ~ Ham, tomato, mozzarella cheese and mixed mushrooms.

Fettuccine pasta with fresh button mushrooms and smoked bacon in a Parmesan cream sauce. This pasta was just too much for us and we did not finish all up.

ROASTED CHICKEN ITALIANNIES ~ Spicy roasted chicken with peppers and rosemary potatoes in a tangy pan-gravy wine sauce. This is one of the restaurant specialties.

The chicken meat was soft and tender. The gravy was tasty and peppery. The potatoes were a little hard so we dipped with the sauce to eat.

Personally, I liked this dish as it had a strong flavor which suited my taste bud and moreover, i was craving for a savory dish. ^0^

AUSTRALIAN GRILLED LAMB CHOP IN HONEY ONION SAUCE ~Australian marinated lamb chop served with onion and honey sauce.

This dish was disappointing :( as my friend had the first bite and it tasted bitter and charred. The honey sauce was not handled properly and burnt. You could see from the photo that it was blacken on the surface. We feedback to the waitress and she felt apologetic and gave us replacement of another dish. But we decided not as we were quite full. So they cancelled this dish in our bill.

As for dessert, we skipped away and headed to Sauce @ the Esplanade Park for chat & drinks :P

My strawberry Mojito Cocktail ^.~

I love this snack ~ Luncheon Meat Chips
Thinly sliced and fried till crispy and dipped with chilli sauce.
Oh that cheesy sauce was for our nacho chips :)


It was a fun and enjoyable Friday nite.
Happy Birthday AWB and Linda!

Cheers!