udders - a new porn star is born!

I knew that title would capture your attention. But the porn star is not u.d.d.e.r.s. That word just cannot be linked with porn. Even if it is associated with breasts. (If, however, you find udders porn material, well, what can I say? Whatever rocks your bed, I mean boat.)

We've always passed by this U.d.d.e.r.s. but we've never actually tried it. Then Dewi tells me that U.d.d.e.r.s has the best ice-cream in Singapore and insists that I try it. So off we went, in search of the best ice-cream Singapore has to offer.

When we were there, we started to think, "how can we make the ice-cream look as tempting as possible?" You see, Sharon and I are really into porn, food porn that is. And of course we would like to create some porn of our own (food porn ah! naughty you). However, as you can tell, our photography skills are not very up to scratch and our photos are really embarrassing at times.

We then found out to our dismay that just a plain picture of an ice-cream cone is not very exciting at all. Imagine, we already have a lousy camera, lousy photography skills. Now we have a lousy subject!

We put on our thinking hats and started to brainstorm on how to make this ice-cream look inviting. Then I had an epiphany. Why not photograph me eating it? I was positive that this would provide a novel twist on our photographs, if we could capture the raptures of elation that we experienced when we have had something (well, since this is a cheeky post) orgasm-worthy. ;)

Alas, I proved to be very unphotogenic. The photos were complete failures. We decided to change subjects. Why not have Sharon do the honours for us? The result? You won't believe how sexy our photos turned out to be. Check it out. Sharon is an official porn (food porn!) star.

Look at that mint ice-cream melting uncontrollably on her tongue! Look at those colours, the white of her teeth, the pink of her tongue, the red of her plush lips and that mint-green! If we set up a kissing booth to raise funds for charity, we should post this picture. The queue would extend to JB and back. Any interested soul? ;)

On a side-note, the ice-cream tasted like Colgate to me. (notice how the review becomes the peripheral issue?) It was SO minty. Sharon loved it. I think the first lick was fine, but I definitely cannot stomach an entire cone of pure-mint. You might as well give me the leaf itself to munch on. I can guarantee you'll have kiss-worthy breath after this though. (It doesn't take a genius to guess that Sharon had very kissable breath after that right? Still no takers?)

If you like mint, this is the ice-cream to go for.

I love this shot. The pear sorbet is literally glowing, like a beautiful iridescent pale white pearl.

At first 'lick', the sorbet was not very good. The pear taste was much too subtle. But compared to eating toothpaste, well, let's just say the one-eyed's king in the land of the blind. To be fair though, when the sorbet had melted a little, it tasted a lot better. Somehow the pear's sweet tang was a lot more pronounced and so much sharper in semi-liquid form.

The texture of the sorbet was quite good. They had actual diced pear bits in them. These little pear chips were still firm and crunchy and it was very interesting. The granular texture of the sorbet also imitated the beady disposition of the pear nicely.

That said, if you're looking for first-rate, this is definitely not it.

(Sharon sampled the mango and the soursop sorbets too. She says that the suggestion of soursop is even more imperceptible than the pear. She thinks the mango is the best)

I was expecting a lot more from this place, after all, Dewi had said it was better than Island Creamery, The Daily Scoop etc. But it's probably our own fault because U.d.d.e.r.s. is famous for their liquored ice-cream, which we did not try because well, we are members of A.A. and we didn't think it wise to jeopardise our recovery. (of course not. we're just really guai girls who dislike the taste of alcohol. We never get drunk, never get into drunk-escapade-trouble.)

U.d.d.e.r.s. Ice-Cream

Goldhill Centre

155 Thomson Road

p/s- Sharon would like to clarify that she is not really a porn star. She is the next bright star in the financial sector.

MOF の my izakaya

Here's a little japanese language lesson: the character の (pronounced like a forceful 'no') is what is known in English as a possessive adjective, or rather, it transforms the root word into a posessive adjective. Like watashi means Me, I etc and watashi(no) means My.

eg. Watashiwa Sheryl desu = I am Sheryl.

Watashino namae (name) wa Sheryl desu = My name is Sheryl.

(ignore the desu and wa, take it that they are punctuation)

Therefore, MOF の my izakaya really means MOF's 'my izakaya.' I'm not really sure whether this means that 'My Izakaya' refers to the restaurant and 'MOF' refers to the group (like Tung Lok group) etc. But that's the only way that makes sense to me. And if so, I guess we can expect MOF to come up with restaurants other than My Izakaya.

An Izakaya is a popular japanese drinking place that also serves food much like a bar that sells bar food in our context. So imagine my surprise when My Izakaya is branded as a cafe/restaurant in Singapore. It's supposed to be a watering hole!

Nonetheless, I am very pleased by My Izakaya. Their menu is admittedly limited but offers quite a few interesting dishes. And, the food served is actually quite good.

Mekajiki (swordfish) sashimi.

This was rather good; firm and fresh. However, it was nothing out of the ordinary.

This is the plum rice sushi. It is pretty darn fantastic, if I may say so. I like tamago a lot but I always think tamago sushi is quite 'bo-hua'. So I usually end up ordering unatama maki (unagi+tamago maki) hoping that it will be good. But it never is. Somehow the combi just does not work for me. And it is difficult to find a tamago that is really spectacular and which hits that oomph spot. Yes, the humble tamago is easy to make but it is not easy to perfect it. I think it says a lot about a chef if he pays attention to this simple dish.

The tamago is in, Shally's words, "eggy like eggo pancakes" (though Shally didn't even try it and Sharon doesn't think that eggo pancakes taste eggy. Sheryl doesn't know what to say.)

But in all honesty, the tamago was quite good. It was very sweet and the firmness was just right, just that it lacked a bit of the eggy oomph.

The main thing about this plum rice tamago is not the tamago but the plum rice. Sharon really liked this because the plum rice is not too sour and is super fragrant. Without even putting it in my mouth, I could already smell the plum fragrance. I kept putting it at my nose and sniffing it. A bit unglam. It was an interesting dish; I think the plum kinda whetted our appetites for more food to come. You know, 'kai wei', which literally means 'to open stomachs'.

I love this dish. This is the salmon mango sushi. I expect Hong Kongers especially to love this. Everything in HK is mango-inspired. EVERYTHING. They put it into every plausible dish. They have mango desserts that are super mango-ey. Like mango pudding with mango bits topped with mango syrup and mango sago. These Hong Kongers are crazy over this fruit.

So anyway, I liked this a lot. I thought that the mango made a normally dull dish very refreshing. I liked the sudden burst of sweetness the mango provided as I put it in my mouth. In particular, the sauce that they drizzled over the sushi was delectable. Sharon reckons that it's a mango-mayo sauce. I have no idea but it went with the sushi and that's all that mattered. The sauce, the mango and the muted salmon flavour.. Very nice.

It is definitely not your traditional sushi and I think purists would probably balk at this but I thought this was very unique. I know that Sushi-Tei has a mango-inspired sushi too but I've never tried it so I can't compare. But I do like the version here. Sweet squishy mango with salmon. MMmmm.

What I did not like though, was how much rice there was. I felt that the proportion of rice to salmon/mango was too great and that took away from that wondrous flavour a little.


We ordered a seafood toji set. The seafood toji was forgettable. The gravy was ok, the prawns were fresh, the scallops overdone. It was aight but nothing to shout about. You can get such standards anywhere.
Our seafood toji set came with chicken katsu. It was nicely fried and you can see the salt/pepper seasoning on the chicken. The chicken was very soft too. Other than that, I think I'll pass on this the next time I come here. I have a feeling their mains are not as good as their side dishes.

We had a imo dessert. It came with a card, this is what it said. "The imo series is a marriage between hot and cold desserts. While sweet potato is hot the Hokkaido milk base soft serve ice cream is icy cold. The best way to eat our japanese sweet potato series is to spoon a bit of everything and then eat them together. MOF uses premium Grade A Jap sweet potatoes imported from Japan. It is so sweet we do not add in sugar to it!"

It was goooood. The imo set we ordered came with the soft serve ice-cream, red bean paste, deep fried sweet potato and deep fried yam. It was so good. The ice-cream was reminiscent of McDonald's cone ice-cream. In fact, the one at McDonald's was stronger-tasting; sweeter with more vanilla kick. I quite liked the red bean but Sharon thought it tasted like chinese red bean soup and not japanese an pan. We liked the yam and the sweet potato A LOT but (despite the shortcomings of the red bean paste and the ice-cream) I'm sure it was the combination of everything that created that magic and left us spell-bound.
The sweet potato was mashed but not too finely, so that you can still savour the odd lumps of sweet potato. And the sweet potato was really sweet and full-bodied. It's one of the better Japanese sweet potatoes I have had. It's fried to a nice crisp golden and the crispness and the half-mashed/half-lump creation was quite a marvellous marriage. It was also pretty to look at, like a golden pillow.

The yam is outstanding. It had a very strong yam taste to it. Normal yam desserts out there are quite bland and dull, with merely a whiff of the yam taste. This was not one such dessert. The yam taste was very 'full-on' and potent. It wasn't very sweet, I don't think they added sugar or anything to it, it was just very yam-mish! It did not taste like orh-nee because it was unadulterated by sugar/coconut milk or anything. Just straight up pure yam. It wasn't very smooth and had the same lumpy consistency that made it all the more authentic. Very hard to come by indeed.

The yam is not the "star dish", the sweet potato is supposed to be the selling point. But the yam stole the limelight from the sweet potato in our opinions. This is because good yam stuff are just so hard to come by. And this yam flavour really shone through, even when we ate it with the ice-cream and red bean sauce and all that. The batter was somehow "chewier" according to Sharon.

We liked this dessert so much we ordered it again, this time with black sesame. (No photo) It was even better. The black sesame was very authentic and very pang. We liked this imo series so much we were craving it the next day.

MOF の My Izakaya

Marina Square (Cafe & Restaurant)

6 Raffles Boulevard

#02-128E Center Stage

S(039594)

royal copenhagen

We finally got down to going to Royal Copenhagen after talking about it for so long. When we arrived, we were pleasantly surprised by the dazzling array of cakes and pastries. Even a non-dessert person like me was excited. I am still excited.

Come on, don't you want to lick the screen? Check out that chocolate in the extreme right corner! I want to stick my thumb in it like Little Jack Horner..

We were here to check out the famous Royal Copenhagen scones. I used to hear Sharon go on and on about how wonderful these are. And boy do they look good. I was bumbling with excitement.

I was quite disappointed. The texture of the scone was very nice. It's nice, warm and dense.

But the taste left much to be desired. It was simply not fragrant. That buttery aroma and taste was sorely absent. It would have been so much nicer if they had used more (quality) butter; so that the scone crumbles beautifully and melts irresistably in your mouth. I don't mean, crumble as in disintegrate when you hold it.

I imagine the perfect scone to be somewhat resistant to pressure so that it does not end up in crushed crumbs the moment you hold it, but not so hard that you need to gnaw your way through it. The ideal scone holds up to pressure in your hand, succumbs suitably to a good bite and then the edges crumble, melt, dissolve, leavin good-sized (notice I didn't say tiny), near-crunchy morsels of buttery perfection. Oh sweet heavens.

You know, I can just imagine the way it should have been and it already makes me mad that the famous Royal Copenhagen scones are so ridiculously far off.

The jam was shockingly horrid. It tasted artificial and treacly. I rather they give me fairprice jam. Sharon explained that the jam used to be a lot better but they're probably trying to cut costs. The butter was not fragrant (again). 'Disappointment' is not even the word to be used here. Try 'aghast'.

We also ordered the Honey Date pudding because it sounded too good to miss out on. A Scandinavian dessert served with fresh fruits, homemade butterscotch sauce and fresh cream. Now, this was a different story altogether. I liked this one, and not just because it looks like something only found in paradise. I want to fly to Scandinavia right here right now.

To be honest, it was a bit dry. But the taste was oh-so-scrumptious! The honey and the butterscotch were delightful. In so many desserts, you taste the faint sweetness of the honey but you can't really taste the honey. In this one, you can literally smell the honey, savour the distinct honey taste, all while enjoying that marvellous butterscotch goodness too! Oh..top this power combination with cream as light as air.. You have got me going once, going twice, sold.

I really quite like the taste of this treasure. I like it so much I polished it off, and I'm not usually the one who finishes dessert. It's a pity its really quite dry. If they could improve on that, this would be a formidable dessert.

Sharon tells me that Marmalade Pantry has better sticky date pudding but I've never tried that one, but I will soon and let you know if it really is better.

Royal Copenhagen Tea Lounge and Restaurant
Takashimaya Singapore Department Store
391 Orchard Road
Level 2
Singapore 238873

canele - food porn ahead

Today is give-Les-Amis-money day. After a crazy expensive dinner at Canteen, we proceeded to Canele for their desserts. I think I still prefer the Robertson Quay branch but this was good too. Warning, foodporn alert!

No, we didn't have this, but this is my favourite cake. MMM..

The lighting was perfect tonight. All the photos required no touching up at all because they are so so so pretty. (not that we do a lot of touching up normally)

This is the Asiana, lychee mousse, yuzu jelly, almond crumble, lychee and raspberry. This is extremely sweet, nectarine-sweet. You can actually see the pretty layers all pieced together to form a splendid array of colours.

The almond taste is quite faint, but strong enough that you get a whiff of the almond with each morsel. This is nice, because I usually find almonds very overpowering. The yuzu jelly was very tart and contrasted nicely with the velvety, saccharine quality of the lychee mousse. The mousse was extremely sweet, extremely intense. This was nice only when eaten with the other layers. If you eat the mousse by itself, it is too sweet. Thank goodness the yuzu jelly and the almond crumble neutralised the candied mousse.

This is very nice, but I can't eat too much of it. It's so sweet I got sick of it after a while.

The macha - greentea mascapone mousse, chestnut cremuex, greantea biscuit, almond crumble.

Now, this is a must-have for green-tea lovers. The green tea flavour shines through the dessert. The mouse is fantastic. My first mouthful was just ecstastical. The mouse was so silky-smooth and literally dissolved in my mouth, that luscious green tea flavour spreading out over my tastebuds. Oh that mellow aroma, that understated sweetness.. I almost wanted to stand up and shout. But no, because I was honestly a bit awe-struck. I kept quiet for a second or two, looked up at Sharon and said plainly with a thumbs-up, "this is damn good man."

Again, you can see the gorgeous layers. I liked that this dessert was not cloying at all and very very light. The chestnut taste was subtly imbued, the crumble and biscuit brought differing and contrasting textures to the mouse. This was excellent.

The only thing is that after the Asiana, this dessert tasted really bland. After another bite of the Asiana, I couldn't taste the green tea again till I cleared my palate with a douse of water first.

What a pleasing macha dessert. Shally LOVES macha. Now you see, now you don't! This baby will be gone in a jiffy in front of Shally.

Canele is really my favourite dessert place. I've heard some bad stuff about it, but I don't get it. It's excellent, really. Very refined, top-notch, superb desserts in my view. But my favourite branch will still be the one at Robertson Quay.

Canelé Pâtisserie Chocolaterie
1 Scotts Road
#01-01A,
Shaw Centre
Singapore 228208