CAKE!

Despite having been baking almost everyday at the bakery, I do still enjoy baking at home, the equipment I have at my disposal are definitely worse, the conditions are pretty much always against me and the space is borderline claustrophobic compared to the bakery.

But there's a difference between baking at home and baking at the bakery, and that is that the former actually allows me to reap the seeds I have sowed, the whole reason why I bake in the first place is because I love eating cake, fucking love cake, speaking of which, I went to PasarBella last Saturday, finally, after being opened for so long, and I came across this little shop tucked away at the corner selling all these really rustic looking cakes, my favorite kind of cakes, cake that actually look like cake... not those pretentious looking ones that looks good but taste like crap. 

So I bought one because it looked way too delicious to be given a miss, the Russian lady at the counter didn't look very friendly though, she looked like she wanted me to piss off, it's like in her mind, she's thinking....

"Fuck off kid, it's only 12 pm, we still have 8 more hours before closing, I don't want to sell the last slice to you because I have had it baking another batch."

That's what I think when I see customers walking into the restaurant I was working at before after lunch hour and before dinner time, because you know they are going to want to order fucking desserts and I am in no mood to bake after having to deal with 2 hours of non-stop baking during the lunch crowd.

Anyways, I bought what I thought looked the most appetizing... 

It's HUGE, and it's $12. I don't even know the name because it's a Russian cake. It's the same as me trying to remember Chinese name, I am not going to be able to remember a person who only have a Chinese name, unless your name is Xiao Ming, I am probably only going to remember your face like 5 years down the road.

Prior to that, I actually went to buy Twelve Cupcakes, wanted to see how it would fare against the one I make at the bakery, it's been a while since I have eaten their cupcakes, needless to say, after getting that ginormous cake, getting 3 cupcakes suddenly felt like a waste of money. I just chucked the cupcakes in the fridge and proceeded to gobble the Russian cake... when I did get back to the cupcakes though, I was too impatient and just ate it when it was still hard, so I couldn't come to any conclusion as to which cupcake was better, Twelve Cupcakes or the one sold by my bakery, although I'm sure my bakery one will win hands down, I mean we have a real pastry chef with years of experience coming up with the recipes... That's all I am going to say.

Buttercream (or Whipped Cream I'm not really sure), Chocolate Cake, Caramel Sauce with Caramelised Walnuts, repeat 3 times. The last time I actually had a mouthgasm was when I ate the Red Velvet from Lady M. It was AWESOME! But got a bit sick of it after a while because it was so big, couldn't finish it all at one go, which has never happened to me before with sliced cake, but I had to store this away to consume later because that was how big it was and how jelat it got.

It really tasted like IKEA Daim Cake.... but supersized, in fact I think it's the same kind of cake, except instead of Daim candy, it's caramelized walnuts.... with the skin and everything, because I had a few mouthful of bitterness, I had initially thought, in my paranoid mind, that the mixer they were using was rusty and the metal from the beater blade they had used to make the cake batter was slowly chipping off and mixing itself with the cake batter. It wasn't though, it was the walnut skins, they didn't peel them I guess, or maybe it's really chipped off metal from the beater blades.

I actually did some research when I bought the cake and realize the shop used to sell them to $10... and after more research, realized it was originally priced at $8. What the fuck, I didn't know cakes also went through inflation. It was a good cake nonetheless, the only gripe I have, apart from the rising price tag, would be the their choice of chocolate curls, from the moment I bit into one, I knew it was lousy chocolate, my taste bud has grown since entering the F&B industry... even if it was only for a year. Your whole cake taste awesome, why cut cost and get some shitty chocolate curls to bring down the whole thing.

A few weeks back, I came across a bottle of cookie butter at Cocoa Tree at Raffles Place.

I've tried it once at the bakery when the supplier brought one sample bottle for us to try, different brand but same taste, and it was really good so I decided to get a bottle.

One small bottle cost $9. My sister bought it for me and in return, I had to help her bake some brownies, and baked brownies I did. I took the recipe from the bakery and added the cookie butter, also made a biscuit base.

It looked really good, but sadly, the cookie butter's taste wasn't as strong as regular peanut butter, so the whole thing lacked flavor and was just very dry tasting, eating it kinda makes your tongue feels dry because of the biscuit base and the cookie butter spread, it wasn't necessarily a bad combination, but it was just way below my expectations.

So I just smothered a shit load of cookie butter spread on the top and it did taste closer to my expectations , but that was a lot of cookie butter spread to achieve that taste, and for $9 a bottle, slapping that large amount on a small piece of brownie was just not worth it. Wanted to post the brownie pictures on Instagram, but for some reason, brownies just aren't as popular as cupcakes when it comes to receiving likes from other people, that's why the brownie pics look better than the Russian cake pictures.