Long White Cloud

Located a few minutes away from Hoxton railway station, Long White Cloud is a Kiwi-owned free-range, free-trade café-cum-gallery space which serves up interesting brunch-type meals such as smoked salmon scrambled eggs and french toast with bacon and banana.

It was pretty filled at 11 in the morning, but not enough to gather a queue. The interesting thing about this café is the fact that they display local artworks which are also on sale. When I was there two weeks ago, Kate Ardern's intriguing 'Into The Wild' paintings were up on the walls, most of them already marked as sold.

I got myself a full English breakfast, something I realised that I'd not yet actually had in this country.

It was filling – I think the word 'full' applies to the state of the diner's tummy rather than what's on the plate. The food was alright, the beans felt home-made and authentic though, definitely not Heinz.

What still lingers in my mind is their peanut butter and banana smoothie which is so simple but so good. It wasn't too sweet, and both flavours were balanced beautifully, inspiring me to try blitzing my own sometime soon.

They've got an evening menu as well with the likes of pies, burgers and fish cakes. I'd love to go back there some time in the future (it's in East London, so if I sound slightly dramatic, that's because it is a pretty epic journey. At least to me it is, anyway) to chill in their intimate setting with some French toast and bacon!

Long White Cloud
151 Hackney Road
Hoxton
E2 8JL
tel: 020 7033 4642

Wimbly Lu Chocolate Café

Exciting news of the day: One of the photographs from the previous post on Oreo Snickerdoodle Cookie Cake Bars made it onto foodgawker – at last! Admittedly, it was my fifteenth submission, but only the first successful one at that.

This can be due to the fact that my brother passed on to me his Canon DSLR camera a few days ago, along with two lenses: 50mm and 18-135mm. Proper food photography, here I come! (Hopefully)

So my birthday is on Wednesday. I'm a 9/11 baby, while my friend Janice is a 9/9 kid! It only made sense that two extreme foodies like us went to somewhere reputable for high tea.

We arrived about twenty minutes early to their opening time of 1PM, so we hung around the shophouses for a bit, where there were a few other bakeries and Western eating places, and also a cool-looking wooden table which gave Janice a flash of inspiration:

I know, I should totally go into portrait photography, right?

There's a lovely conservatory-style area at the back of the café, preceded by a dim but cosy seating area facing an open kitchen/bakery and chocolate display cabinet.

It was raining that day, and I actually suspect that they redecorate according to the season or occasion! My evidence: the staff were visibly buzzing around inside before they opened, and they could have been tweaking the decor! Also, I've seen pictures of the café filled with little hearts, all posted in February, as well as other similar pictures with Halloween lanterns. I'd be very impressed if they actually hung those raining clouds to reflect the weather outside! It really added a fantastic touch to Wimbly Lu's intimate and personal setting.

To make sure that we're having a legitimate lunch and not just stuffing our faces with desserts instead of having a proper meal, we ordered a double seafood and cheese toasty ($6) which was so-so.

Me made our next choice from having read other reviews and recommendations – waffle with salted caramel ice cream, plus a topping of maple syrup. ($8.50)

This waffle was pretty much perfect, it really hit that criteria of a crisp exterior and fluffy insides. From what I've heard, every single waffle served is just as perfect! Talk about quality control.

The salted caramel ice cream was delicious – flavourful but not sickeningly sweet. We definitely could have had a bigger scoop. The maple syrup was a good choice of topping as well.

Now I'm no expert on sticky date pudding, as this was my first one ever. I've got to say that it was delightful! Warm, gooey, sweet, and addictive. I only got to taste dates in my last mouthful, though. I'm not sure if sticky date puddings have to taste strongly of dates.

It would have made more sense for the dense, rich pudding to come with pouring cream or ice cream, but it didn't, so we ordered an addition scoop of honey cinnamon ice cream. ($3)

The cinnamon taste was a little stronger than expected, which was a surprise, but a good one – like apple pie in ice cream form! There wasn't much taste of honey, it was probably used mainly to sweeten. The ice cream flavour didn't go that well with the pudding. However, the texture was perfect in my terms. Not too icy, yet not too heavy and gooey – somewhere among that blissful in between. We found ourselves craving more of that honey cinnamon ice cream!

With service charge, the bill came to somewhere around $25 in total for the both of us, which is pretty reasonable for the great atmosphere and food. Wimbly Lu is definitely somewhere I'll return to for a relaxed dessert experience the next time I visit Singapore!

Wimbly Lu
15-2 Jalan Riang
Singapore 358987
Tel: 62891489
www.wimblylu.com

Masters Diner @ Covent Garden

Courtesy of Google

Masters Diner at Covent Garden is almost hidden, practically sharing a storefront with a newsagent and squeezing their doors side-by-side. My friend and I doubled back on the pavement and popped inside before noontime to take away a coffee (hot chocolate, in my case of a set of immature tastebuds) for our walk to Oxford Street before the ballet performance of La Bayadère at the Royal Opera House started.

Interested in the cosiness of the place and the buzzing, alluring kitchen behind the counter, we returned for a post-show lunch, if it can still be called 'lunch' at 4pm.

We were sat down by friendly staff, and picked up our menu from the side of the table, diner-style. The place serves burgers, club sandwiches, ciabatta, breakfast food, jacket potatoes, dessert cakes and pies, coffee, chocolate – the sort of food one would encounter fifty percent of the time in this country among eating places.

I ordered a Covent Garden Club sandwich, which was a toothpick-reinforced double-decker sandwich with regular white (rather flattened) toast, filled with lettuce, melted cheese, beef slices, mushrooms, mustard and mayonnaise. And not to forget the random topping of alfalfa sprouts on the top. I'm not particularly fond of mustard, so I quite regretted getting this sandwich.

The sandwich, which was warm and fresh, fell apart annoyingly easily like any other club sandwich. I rejoice when biting into burgers and sandwiches without accidentally pulling out all the filling with my teeth, so the tougher beef slices did not work well here. The amount of meat and veggies were pretty generous, which my hungry stomach was very grateful for.

I do love mayonnaise, but I had to use the toothpicks to scrape out as much as I could of the yellow, vile, stinging mustard. I remember spending ages staring at the menu and deciding what to get, by scrutinising the contents of each burger/sandwich to find a combination which I really like.

It's pretty phenomenal, what hunger can do to my common-sense.

The mushrooms were plump, juicy and a real treat, but were quite disconnected from the fillings and didn't go that well with the tough beef texture.

Master's Diner is obviously not somewhere you would travel halfway across the country for, but is definitely a life-saver if you're looking for a cheap, reliable eating place which serves a wide variety of hearty meals in the heart of Covent Garden.

Master's Diner
32 Henrietta St
London
WC2E 8NA
020 7240 9266

La Creperie Bretonne Part 3

Click here for part two.

La Creperie Bretonne is becoming a weekend ritual for Emma and I, and this particular weekend, it was a must.

It's zero degrees here in London, and snowing. April begins in a week and here, it is snowing. It's not even good, fresh snow which leaves everything white and fluffy like a scene from 'Home Alone', it just makes puddles everywhere and comes with wind which makes your thighs feel like ice blocks.

I also needed a good lunch because I had a Skype session with my family in the morning which got a little emotional. (If you really needed to know, they were having a post-eldest-sister's-wedding-cum-dad's-birthday-dinner, during which Dad sang two love songs to my mum with my second brother on guitar, all of which I got a live-stream of) I braved the cold as quickly as possible and barged into La Creperie Bretonne with puffy eyes and a runny nose, making sure the first thing I got was a hot chocolate. (£2.10 for an reasonable, average-sized mug)

I got bacon and cheese Ciabatta (£3.something) which was a reasonable size, served with crisps.

This was average, really. The filling just fell short of enough, and the bacon was not mind-blowingly flavourful like bacon is supposed to be. There just wasn't enough goodness in the filling.

It's okay Emma, you tried.

Emma got a 'Mexicana' Panini, which apparently contained 'chic & mozz', but we spent the whole meal wondering whether it was salmon instead of chicken.

 Either way, after trying a little bit of this, we both concurred that the paninis by La Creperie Bretonne are one of the most satisfying things you can ever have. Crispy and fluffy, buttered bread with cheese seeping into it, just like the previous panini from a few weeks ago, with soft, tasty filling. The thing is, the colour, texture and flavour of the meat in the filling was, I swear, something like salmon. Either that, or the texture of the chicken was so soft and tender, with unique flavours. Whatever it was, the filling simply tasted amazing, with a hint of chilli to add a kick into every bite.

L-R: Emma's crêpe and mine. Each design represents our life ambition – Emma's fate is headed towards spaghetti-making, and I have a true flair for assembling scaffolding.

Emma and I ordered a single chocolate crêpe (£3.50 or something like that) to share, but the waitress kindly served the crepe to us, divided and decorated separately.

I much preferred the maple syrup crêpe which I got in the previous visit. The chocolate drizzle and filling tasted cheap, and didn't have enough cocoa fragrance. However, the crêpe was warm and yummy, freshly made on the spot, glass wiper crêpe spreader and all.

At one point, we both found ourselves nodding along to a song which was playing in the cafe, and Emma whipped out this really nifty iPhone app called Soundhound, which instantly recognises the music which is playing. The music wasn't even that loud, but the app could miraculously pick it up. (To be fair, the cafe was quite empty.) The song was 'Latch' by Disclosure. I downloaded the app there and then, and tried it on the next song – the app quickly told me that it was 'Release Me' by Agnes. I felt like time-travelling caveman who had just realised that he could press a button to get light.

La Creperie Bretonne

113 The Broadway
St Margarets

United Kingdom

Pho

Pho is a Vietnamese street-food franchise here in London, and if you perform a quick Google image search, the only thing you see are bowls of beef noodle soup, which is said to be their speciality.

The one I went to last weekend is situated in 'The Balcony' – a very glamorous food court with a wide variety of international cuisine – of Westfield's Shepherd's Bush.

I got a "Pho Xao Thit Ga" (£7.75) which are flat wok-fried noodles with peanuts, bean sprouts and greens, and pretty fierce chilli for England's standards. My noodles were meant to contain chicken and shrimp, but somehow they got lots of chicken into my noodles and no shrimp at all. Heck, I was hungry and didn't bother to request a change. (edit: There's an extra "Tom" suffix after the name of the dish if I wanted mine with prawns, which my sister probably missed out when ordering. Okay.)

The noodles were very tasty, and the ingredients were generous. The spiciness level was definitely above that of the average apprehensive-when-it-comes-to-spicy-Asian-food English person, but it was manageable for myself – my spiciness-tolerance-level isn't that high either.

My sister got the famed beef noodles. (edit: there are about 8 types of beef noodles on the menu and I don't know which one she got) I have no idea why the dish is the star of the menu, it really was nothing much. The beef balls were pretty good, but the soup was average. Maybe it's because I've had better ones from Southeast Asia itself, and that the dish is a rare treat in this part of the world?

I've never had much Vietnamese food anyway, but I'm going to start paying more attention to it. The contrasts of flavours in Vietnamese cuisine is slightly sharper than, although similar to, Thai food, which is quite delightful to the taste buds.

Pho
Ariel Way
London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham
London W12
07824 662320

La Creperie Bretonne Part 2

Click here for part one.

I didn't take a picture of the crêpe which I had for lunch, because I gobbled it up in what felt like three seconds.

This was my second time in La Creperie Bretonne, the humble café situated next to the St Margarets Railway Station. I'm with Emma this time, who also happens to be the lucky recipient of my best Drawsomething attempt ever:

I can't believe I didn't take a picture of my crêpe pancake, but you should have seen it. It was big and drizzled with light-coloured maple syrup and powdered sugar, with a light, spongy texture despite its thinness. Emma thought it was rather sweet, but I really enjoyed it.

Emma had a Chicken and Mushroom Panini, which was cut into quarters and served with potato chips.

It was so. Good.

The white bread was grilled to perfection – crispy (but not too crispy) on the outside, with dark grill-lines, and the chicken and mushrooms were simple but tasty, and there may have been some cheese in it which caused a real melt-in-your-mouth effect.

It's hard to resist dessert in a café with a display cabinet. I chose some sort of honey layered sponge cake, while Emma got a classic Billionaire Shortbread Slice.

The cake wasn't made by the café, as there was a label with a brand name in the display cabinet which started with an "M", but I simply can't remember what it was. (Update 11/16/13: This is called Medovik, and is a Russian Honey layered cake.) Anyway, this was one of the fluffiest cakes I've ever had. The fork squeezes the cake about three quarters of the way down before anything is cut. The cake is moist and delightfully fragrant, and the icing on the top creates a nice...

I never know what the word for it is. It isn't a crunch, but you can still hear something when you bite into icing.

... er, texture. 

A Millionaire Shortbread Slice can almost never go wrong. For those who are unfamiliar with this British/Australian triple-threat, it is basically a layer of shortbread, soft caramel and chocolate, all combined into a calorific slice of death. The texture of the layers go brilliantly with each other, with slightly crunchy chocolate, smooth caramel and soft, crumbly shortbread. It is decadent.

La Crêperie Bretonne hasn't disappointed me yet, and I can't wait for my next visit. 

La Creperie Bretonne

113 The Broadway
St Margarets

United Kingdom

Click here for part three!

St Margarets was all slushy and raining during a Saturday in January. I had just finished a rehearsal at school, and was looking for lunch.

I ended up joining my friends at a little café in St Margarets, just next to the station, called 'La Creperie Bretonne'. Apparently there's a famous eating place in Paris which bears the same name, and the one in St Margarets is un-Google-able.

The rain was annoying and I wanted to get indoors – this café welcomed me with its lit-up display counter containing cakes, muffins, rolls and croques, as well as a long menu full of reasonably-priced food and drink behind the counter.

One of the things I love about London is the cafés and patisseries, which are just everywhere. Even if you've just had lunch, you could pop into a café for some hot chocolate or coffee, or salivate on the shop windows of patisseries. It is comforting to know that there is food everywhere, available in a chill and comfy atmosphere.

The guy told me that this was a nougat, but [again] I can't seem to find a nougat like this on Google. It's basically some sort of danish pastry with cinnamon and almond, with glaze. It filled me up okay for a lunch meal, and was satisfying.

The hot chocolate was just great. It was sweet, warm, chocolate-y and really value for money. The small size already came in a pretty big cup, unlike in Café Nero's overpriced, tiny, little shot-mug.

Us three friends split a double chocolate muffin into three for dessert, and it was a really good muffin – hot, chocolate-y and fragrant.

As the name suggests, the café also does crêpes which I am eager to try. I will go back to La Creperie Bretonne during my next chance to try out more of their stuff!

La Creperie Bretonne

113 The Broadway
St Margarets

United Kingdom

Click here for part two.

Cinnabon

It was a sunny day in Piccadilly Circus and I had the mentality of screw-it-you're-in-london-it's-saturday-so-treat-yourself-to-something-good as I walked past Cinnabon.

Source because the cinnabons were calling me and I had to go in

The rustic, sweet cinnamon fragrance overwhelms you as soon as you step inside. 

There's a fast-moving queue in the little shop, and as you wait, you can't help but lift your heels up to get a better view of the plump, glazed buns huddled together in their pans.

They've got a Cinnabon classic roll, which is a warm and soft dough rolled with cinnamon syrup and glazed with loads of cream cheese frosting, all about the size of Hercules' fist, and also our server's favourite. They also have a mini-version of it called a Minibon, and a Chocobon which does not contain cinnamon, but is filled with chocolate, and drizzled with chocolate. The attention-seeker of the lot is the Caramel Pecanbon, which has added crushed pecan nuts and caramel to the classic version. The price of a Cinnabon classic roll is £2.99, which is definitely worth it for such a big and yummy cinnamon roll.

My friends and I illegally opened our box of 4 in a nearby café, attracting curious glances from around. (There were tables in the Cinnabon shop, but the shop is tiny and often at full capacity) These Cinnabons are messy business. Although we were provided with forks, they threatened to snap when we tried to saw through the pliant dough, so we gave up and put them in napkins to pick them up with. You're not faced with a particularly pretty sight as you gingerly use two fingers to tweeze the Cinnabon, lift it up, and pause as the brown cinnamon syrup drips from underneath the bun.

I thoroughly enjoyed my Caramel Pecanbon. It was sweet, warm, chewy and nutty, and left me licking the frosting and cinnamon off my fingers. However, you definitely wouldn't ask for seconds. My friends couldn't finish their Cinnabons. For people who aren't too keen on sugary things and desserts (i.e not yours truly), it is rather sickly and over-rich with sugar. For dessert-lovers, a Cinnabon is a trip to heaven. The Caramel Pecanbon is delectable, highly recommended!

Tips:

• Get the Minibons, or share a Cinnabon with someone. It's hard go solo on a single Cinnabon.

• Bring some wet-wipes with you, sticky fingers guaranteed.

• Go with a group of friends – you can get boxes of 4 or 6, which makes the price of each Cinnabon cheaper.

Cinnabon 7-14 Coventry St  London W1D 7DH 020 7287 9274

www.cinnabon.com

Student budget lunches

I can never restrain myself from taking bites from my food before I reach the doorstep.

This is what my desk looks like when I have an uneventful Saturday afternoon and I choose the practical option for lunch, while Tesco express (one of the major supermarkets) is a 5-minute walk away and so is Express Coffee

I guess this is the start of recovery from the week of indulgence in which I told myself, "Hey, since I have a half-term break in London, I should try getting as many good lunches in while I can."

Thank you Google Street View. But nowadays the scaffolding is gone and the kiosk is beige.

On an unrelated note, I walked past a man outside Express Coffee who asked for the time and afterward told me that I smelled lovely. He seemed to be a pretty nice man but I got worried for his olfactory senses because I had just finished a three hour long dance rehearsal at school and I'm sure I didn't smell anything like flowers.

Anyway, when I found out this shop had about ten jars of Byron Bay cookies, I instantly appointed myself as a regular. The first time I had Byron Bay cookies, I was on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney and they handed out these Triple Choc Fudge cookies. My friend had motion sickness, (the pilot for that flight was particularly bad) so I gladly took her cookie after savoring my own.

This time, I got a Butterscotch & Pecan as well as a White Choc Chunk & Macadamia Nut. (£1.35 each) Funnily enough, I cannot find the former flavor on any of Byron Bay's websites or related Google searches.

Look at those big fat pecans

Whitey goodness

For the first, the pecan nuts were generous but the butterscotch taste took a while for my taste buds to discover. The white chunks and macadamia were well placed.

Okay this review sounds pretty dry because... the cookies were sort of like that. I hate to say it because I hate to believe it, but although they had the thickness of shortbread, they were crumbly and rather dry for my liking. Maybe it's because winter's coming and the jars aren't well-made, (as compared to the sealed plastic wrapping of the servings on the plane) or maybe it's a personal preference. Or maybe because I've been having a Ben's Cookies (stay tuned for its own review) spree this week. Either way, I do wish the cookies had slightly more buttery goodness which would further enhance its taste as well.

All hope is not lost. A few weeks ago I had the Lemon and White Chocolate Chunk Cheesecake flavored cookie. That was just so yummy. I usually avoid lemon in desserts and baked goods, but I gave in to the cheesecake. The combination of the two was harmonious – the lemon light and tangy, and the cheesecake bits sweet and satisfying.

I'm definitely not going to stop trying these cookies. Their bestseller is apparently "Dotty," which is "a rich, golden cookie that is packed with premium creamy European milk chocolate and then smothered in colourful ‘choc drops,’ " and they have a Strawberries & Clotted Cream flavour which I'm definitely getting. 

Express Coffee (but my receipt says 'The Little Pavilion')
167 St Margarets Road
St Margarets TW1 1RD
http://www.byronbaycookies.co.uk/

£1.59 (u.p £1.75)

My desk was messy and so were my taste buds as I stole bites from my cookies and sandwiches alternately while I typed out my homework.

I wonder if the sandwiches were placed tactically from not-so-nice to nicest, because that is the order I found myself eating them in. On the far left of the picture above we have the Branston pickle-spread with two slices of cheese. At this point I have to tell you that I can't differentiate one type of cheese from another unless they have a different consistency, such as grated parmesan, melted mozzarella, or white feta cubes. Anyway, I'm sure someone else might enjoy the sandwich with the pickles, but for me, the pickle spread had a salty-sweetness which clashed with the natural saltiness of the cheese slice.

In the middle we have raw tomatoes with some sort of cheese (cheddar...? #wildguess) and there's probably mayonnaise in it but I'm not too sure. I kind of detest (who ever "kind of detest"s? I do.) raw tomatoes so I pretty much suffered on this sandwich. However, when I managed to get rid of the last tomato, the remaining cheese with a hint of tomatoey taste was actually quite good. The last sandwich is a blob of cheese and onion bits, which was my favourite of the three, as there was a consistent mushiness which I quite liked, along with the savoury goodness of cheese and onions.

You might be thinking, "Who the hell reviews supermarket sandwiches?" Well I think it's pretty relevant to formally review an everyday food product such as the Tesco sandwich. I often find myself stuck infront of the refrigerated shelves at Tesco Express for ten minutes trying to decide between the fishy-sounding 'Seafood Cocktail' (see what I did there?) and the safe but boring ham and cheese. It's pretty helpful to know the kinds of sandwiches one should stick to or avoid, isn't it?

Or maybe I'm the only sad, broke student who resorts to Tesco sandwiches for lunch on a Saturday.

Tesco Express 129 Saint Margaret's Road Twickenham, Greater London TW1 1RG Tel: 0845 026 9348 __________