Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, or it was 10 minutes ago.


Did some baking for my Family Christmas Dinner, a small contribution on my part. I've baked for Christmas Gatherings before, but that was a long time ago when I haven't really gotten that interested in baking yet, my skills at that time were mediocre at best and if the end product came out looking like a cake, even if it was hard as rocks and tasted like cardboard, I would still deem it a success.





Fast forward a few years later, I've got to admit, I am actually quite proud of how this cupcakes turn out, putting them side by side in a box looked so professional, like I should be heading to a bake sales instead of sharing it with my family, but share with them I did because it's Christmas, the season of giving and it's very rare for me to find so many mouth that are willing to consume the cakes I bake.

Salted Caramel Cupcakes

I had actually made a batch of caramel sauce a few days prior to Christmas, spiked it with a bit of rum because alcohol makes everything taste better, it was pretty good, I kept taking it out of the fridge every once in a while, stuck my fingers into the jar and sucked on my salted caramel coated finger, and I liked to jazz things up by sprinkling a little sea salt on that finger before enveloping the whole thing in my mouth. 

The cake base is chocolate cake, the recipe I got from the bakery, slightly tweaked, taste the same as the the chocolate cake from Awfully Chocolate, which is really good, frosted with Salted Caramel Swiss Meringue Buttercream (SMBC), topped with chopped up sneaker bars, drizzled more salted caramel sauce followed by a healthy sprinkling of sea salt.  There's actually a  caramel core as well but the core was so thin I could hardly pipe any caramel in it so that was a fail.... I was trying my best to make the cupcake as caramel as possible, but it didn't work because I still have half of jar of salted caramel sauce in the fridge and no ice cream to pour it on.... although, I could always shove my finger in and then roll that finger in sea salt.

This was actually my favorite flavor out of the three I made because of the successful batch of caramel sauce that was pretty much drenched onto this cake, but apparently, my family members didn't think so because they kept taking all the other flavors. 

Cookies and Cream Cupcake

Next up is Cookies and Cream cupcakes.


The cake base is malt cake, the recipe is a combination of the one I got from my bakery and from the Cake Book by Cupcake Jemma which I wasn't really a fan of, I mean I like watching her Youtube videos but the recipes in the book just doesn't work for me, at all. One thing I did managed to get from her book are the cupcake flavor combinations though,so that's good I guess, can just adapt her recipes to the my own one, recipes I know that will actually work in this crazy humid country.




Frosted with some Oreo White Chocolate SMBC, drizzled with more crushed up Oreos and topped with half a mini Oreo that's not shown in the picture. I wasn't really a fan of this flavorful, the Oreo buttercream didn't really have a very strong cookies and cream flavor, probably needed more crushed up Oreo, I was quite stingy with the crumbs because I like my cookies and cream buttercream looking white dotted with pieces of Oreo bits in it instead of just being a grey lump.... but grey lump taste yummier.

All the flavors in one box

I didn't take a picture of the red velvet on it's own because it was the first one I frosted, I had to quickly stash it in the freezer afterwards because I was afraid the SMBC would melt, damn weather in Singapore, but I have a picture of the 3 cupcakes together.



The red velvet cupcake recipe is also from the bakery, honestly, the red velvet cake recipe at my bakery calls for a fruit vinegar and that fruit vinegar really brings out the flavorf of the cake, but sadly because I don't have that particular fruit vinegar, I had to settle for cider vinegar instead, which really didn't do much in terms of flavor., had I had the correct vinegar, this cake would have been amazing because back at the bakery, the red velvet cake was probably my favorite flavor to have, it really wasn't an authentic red velvet taste, but it was delicious. All the red velvet connoisseur would probably go ape shit crazy should I go let them taste the cake and tell them it's red velvet.





I thought the cupcakes would be finished by the time the dinner was over, I was expecting my relatives to bring home some left over to have as breakfast the next day, but no one did and I had about 15 cupcakes left at the end of the day, I had made a total of 36 and only slightly more than half was consumed. My relatives had nothing but praises for it, but I guess it wasn't good enough for them to want to bring home and eat the next day.




Despite all that, I had fun baking it, my Mum took the leftover cupcakes and shared it with our neighbors, so I had 3 left for myself and I really enjoyed the salted caramel, but not so much the red velvet, still have the Oreo flavor one left in the fridge that I will probably only eat when I am super hungry.





On a Gaming note.



One of my online friends recently got me a game off Steam, Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition. I was actually contemplating to get it because it sounded a lot like Monster Hunter, but after realizing I didn't really have a lot of fun with Monster Hunter, I decided to save my money and get DmC instead.




It was a good thing that I didn't buy the game though because that shit is hard. I've barely played for 2 hours and I've been killed so many times it's ridiculous, half the time it's by the skeleton mobs that aren't even supposed to be that hard to kill.


Total play time is slightly more than 2 hours, it's just very hard to enjoy a game that forces you to repeat the game every single time you die, mobs come back to live and your experience drops back down to zero if you don't spend it before you die, this game is brutal and I'm too much of a casual gamer to find this kind of torture remotely enjoyable.  When a game presents me with an option to choose a difficulty setting, I always go for the most insulting ones like Pussy mode, there's a difficultly setting lower than Pussy mode that sounds even more insulting? Alright, I will choose that one. I don't always go for normal settings unless I have completed the game once and find the game play to be very enjoyable like Dishonored and Heavenly Sword, actually I don't think I'VE played anything but easy on Dishonored, but I did play it twice to get a different ending and that's about as uncasual as I get.



I think for someone to be able to enjoy Dark Souls, they must be invested in the game and I'm obviously not invested in that game, the closest genre I've played to Dark Souls and enjoyed is Monster Hunter, and that game already made me want throw my PSP on my bed in rage so many times, I have my nerd rage under control... I will only throw my PSP on soft things, the floor and someone's face is a big no no.




Might uninstall the game pretty soon, at this point it's just taking up memory space on my laptop because I'm hardly playing it, I appreciate the Christmas present from my online friend but not this kind of game, I was actually contemplating whether or not to get this game in the past, but decided not to for good reason and now having own a copy of the game and actually played it for 117 minutes has just reinforced that decision I made so many months ago.

Assassin's Creed U Nit to patch that shit up.

After completing Dragon Age Inquisition, I decided to download my free copy of Assassin's Creed Unity I got from purchasing my laptop a few weeks ago.





The entire game was roughly 40 GB and roughly took me about 6 to 7 hours to complete the download, good thing I was downloading it whilst I was working at my Dad's office, so really even if it did complete the download any sooner, I still wouldn't be able to play it until I actually got home.



So the actual game itself is actually really fun but the technical glitches and the horrible controls this game suffers from caused me so much frustration.



When I'm playing a stealth game, timing and precision is very important, when I see the bad guy turns his back, I know I only have maybe 2 to 3 seconds to get up from the spot I was hiding, sneak up to his back and hit the assassinate button before he actually turns back, notices me and alerts every other enemy in the area to help him out, problem is because of the framerate and stuttering issue this game offers me, that 2 -3 seconds I have to get out of my cover and sneak behind him gets replace with a stuttering framerate, in which case by the time the game's framerate already gets back to normal, I have already been noticed and surrounded by 5 enemies, each taking turns to cut me down and if it isn't the framerate and stuttering issue, it's the damn controls, so instead of getting out of the cover from behind the chair I was hiding, my character ends up climbing ON TOP of the chair and just squats there like a dog, and when I try to get him off the chair, instead of slowing getting down, he jumps across the room right into where the enemy is and I just go "Dafaq?" out loud. The framerate issues gets even worst online, good thing there's no chat or voice system, otherwise I would've probably been scolded by all the other players playing this game in their parent's basement.





I tried to recommend this game to a friend of mine because I wanted to play Co-op with him, told him it was glitchy but did not go too much into detail about it, I have a weird relationship with this game because even though I get really frustrated when I am playing it, every time I quit the game, a few hours later I will want to get back right in and continue playing it, so when I was recommending this game to my friend, I was in the state of "I wanna get back in to play".... and after he did his research on the game and I had just completed a round of Co-op, we chatted again and he decided he wasn't interested in the game anymore because it was buggy and incomplete and at that time, because I had just completed a round of very buggy co-op, I was feeling really frustrated with the game so I just started ranting about how bad it was to him and blah blah blah, which of course made me sound like a hypocrite, and I guess he got a bit pissed that I was introducing such a buggy game to him because he started typing in caps, questioned my motives for recommending him that game and stopped replying afterwards.

So I dunno?

I have actually completed the game's main story line, a new patch was just released so I guess I am now going to pop back in and see if the game has improved or am I gonna quit the game in frustration.

Update.


The game still runs like shit. Even that GIF has a smoother frame rate than what I am getting in the game.  (The game actually runs fine now, turns out I had forgotten to plug in my charger before and the laptop was just running on it's battery, the patch actually works, now the game runs a lot smoother, still not at the framerate I was hoping for it to run at, but definitely a huge improvement from last time.)When I got my new laptop, I was expecting to get at least 60FPS on all the games I was playing, be it Dragon Age Inquisition, TERA or Maple Story, so to have Assassin's Creed running at below 30 FPS on my new $2000 laptop is like getting a freshly baked cookie from a bakery only to have someone walk past, pull down their pants and take a shit all over it, that analogy sounds odd, that's because I just baked a batch of cookies and they are fucking awesome.

Thick and Chewy Milk Chocolate Chip , Hazelnut and Pecan Cookies
It might not look very good but this is probably one of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.

One good thing I have learned from working at the bakery is now I know how to tweak certain recipes, so these cookies don't spread out so quickly in the oven, look at how thick it is,  that's the kind of cookies I like, really high and chewy and filled with milk chocolate chips, and it isn't Crisco that was used to replace with butter because those sticks of vegetable shortening taste and smell disgusting.



When people say "and the secret ingredient is butter flavored crisco, this taste just like real butter"... I think they are fucking nuts because it taste nothing at all like butter, that's like saying shit taste like chocolate because it has been coated with a layer of cocoa powder and chocolate essence. What the fuck?



Anyways, this cookie is super awesome because not only is it packed with a shit load of milk chocolate chip, pecan nuts and like maybe 10 leftover hazelnuts I had leftover from making a hazelnut brownie, but it's super chunky and the texture is perfect, I have tried other "Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie" recipes online before, those were lies because those cookies came out either spreading like no one's business or it's very cakey, which has happened to me many times and I always considered them a success because a cakey cookie is better than flat ones.

Updates on life.

1.  New Laptop (Gaming Rig)

Purchased a gaming laptop from the IT Fair about 2 weeks ago. This is my very first gaming PC, my previous Asus was a budget laptop, the one before that was a very problematic Acer, that despite being a supposed "high end" computer was really just "high maintenance".



My Asus only failed on me once in the three years I owned it, send it to Sim Lim Square to fix it, one of the more reputable stores, I have learned do my research very thoroughly before stepping into a shop at Sim Lim Sqaure, and it never really gave me any more issues afterwards,  the Acer on the other hand failed me so many times I've lost count the number of times I've had to re install my Windows OS and all the software because the model was known to have hardware issues... to think they did nothing about it and just release it to sell to the public.




The new laptop I've bought is built by a local company called Aftershock and so far, it's been living up to it's name as a gaming rig, bought Dragon Age Inquisition within the week after I bought my laptop and it runs pretty smoothly on High settings, but it does start to get a bit choppy on Ultra settings, not that I can see any graphical improvements from High to Ultra,  I've never played any game released in the past year on high settings with my Asus before, medium at best, so being able to actually run a newly released game on High is very impressive to me.

Tapped that

I've really been having a lot of fun playing Dragon Age Inquisition, exploring the lands, fighting monsters, hooking up with a gay mage that looks like Freddie Mercury and passing judgement on criminals, I'm a gracious ruler it seems because I have yet to pass the death sentence on anyone.

Aiming to be tapped by that

Playing straight is boring, so why not become a promiscuous gay guy instead. I might break up with the Freddie Mercury mage and hook up with the Iron Bull instead.




Was also given a free copy of Assassin's Creed Unity when I made the laptop purchased, entire game was 40GB, took me a good 5 hours to download the whole game, but I'm not going to be touching that game yet until I am done with Inquisition. I always had a bad habit of not completing games in the past, not anymore.




I'm really enjoying playing games at a steady 50 frames per second, it's refreshing to not get a headache every time an explosion happens in the game and mt frame rate drops below playable level when playing the game suddenly feels like loading an image on the internet using a 56k modem.





2. Driving Updates.

Went for my driving lesson 2 days ago and I was almost late for my practical lesson, reached the school literally 5 minutes before my lesson started, quickly went to scan my IC and got my ticket and just my luck, I got the very instructor I complained about in my last blog post.



The very same impatient instructor who was more concerned with what he was having for lunch and what was happening on his iPad than teaching his own student. Normally when I am in the car with my instructor, I will try and ask questions during the lesson to keep the conversation going, wouldn't want to spend 100 minutes in complete silence, but when I saw this instructor's standing next to the car I was assigned to, my shoulders just dropped and my flustered "fuck I am going to be late" face just went blank because I couldn't believe my luck, out of the dozens of of instructors I could have gotten, I got him, again, was it because I was late, that's why I was assigned to him, did all the nice and friendly instructors get taken up ? Is he going to be on my list of permanent instructors because that is going to be fucked up.



So I walked up to him, showed him my IC and whatever else I had to show him, zero enthusiasm on my part and on his, got into the car and off we went to the public road, I couldn't be bothered to start any conversation with him whatsoever or ask him any question I had, I would rather embrace the long awkward silence in the car then to have to deal with him. I made sure to drive really slowly though because the last time, he kept complaining I drove too fast, so I kept my speed at 40km/h, which was extremely slow, he later told me I was driving too slow, which I agreed but I just maintained that speed because fuck all the other road drivers who are going to be late for their appointments. I'm kidding, I'm not a road hogger, I hope.



We drove around for 100 minutes, keeping the talking to a minimum, he kept asking me to "check your blind spot" every time I made a turn, at first I didn't know what was the point so I just turned my head before I did either a left turn or right turn like an idiot, many times way too early and I think the instructor also found it a bit ridiculous that I was checking my blind spot like a good 10 meters before the turn, I of course later came to understand what I was actually looking out for and did it properly.



He also kept asking me to do that during our previous lesson, I didn't know what he was going on about until the lesson 2 days ago because I'm slow like that and I didn't want to ask him any questions because he's not the "patient and friendly instructor" the car says he is.


It was a long lesson but he was less impatient then the last time so that was good, I think maybe it's because he already had his lunch so he's less cranky and I'm not driving at a speed that would endanger his life, so that might have calmed him down a bit, the last lesson he kept on grabbing my steering wheel very suddenly because he wasn't confident I was steering the car enough, which kept freaking me out, one time he actually accidentally scratched my hands when he was doing that, didn't even bother to apologize, I guess it's because I should be the sorry for one trying to crash us into the lorry that I wasn't going to crash into.


I'm hoping the next lesson will be a more friendly instructor, I haven't had a chatty instructor for a while now.



3. McDonalds Frappe



I've been having a lot of McCafe Frappe lately, in fact I have been having so much that my Devotee Card is soon going to enable me to get a free drink from them.


Every time I buy a drink, I get a stamp on the card, now I'm just one stamp away from a free drink. Maybe 4 isn't a lot but it's enough for McDonald's to be close enough to offer me a drink on the house.



Been getting their Double Chocolate Frappe and Red Velvet Frappe, those are really yummy, accidentally bought a Mocha Chip once, reminded me why I don't like Starbucks Frappes.



The drinks are always great, but I have one issue and that's with the baristas, the ones at Clementi Mall to be more specific. I was always served by two Malays girls and if I hadn't checked their name tag, I would have assumed they were the same person because firstly, they both were wearing hijabs, and secondly and most importantly, they never ever smile at all, every time I order a drink from either one of them, they just look annoyed, like fuck me for ordering a drink and forcing them to have to do their job.



If you are going to be working at the counter and dealing with customers, at least try to put on a pleasant expression, if you are unable to do that, than work at the back of the kitchen so the customers won't think they have offended you for making you do your job. I understand it can be very annoying when you have to prepare the same menu item twenty or thirty times a day, I have been there, but for fuck sake, I was the only customer at the McCafe counter, it's not like after me, you have to prepare another 12 red velvet frappe and 5 green tea ice blended for the long non-existent line of customers behind me.




F&B outlets should really consider whether a person who's applying for any position that has to face a customer has a resting bitch face or are just generally very bitter about life and shows it on their face is a proper candidate because that face is going to affect how the customer feels when making an order.