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

Fruit Paradise

I'm back in London and getting comfy in my new flat. The last of the freshers party was last night/this morning, yet I'm up early on a Sunday morning with a cup of hot chocolate and some quiet music. I have yet to do any serious cooking/baking, but I do need to get into this new habit of making practical meals for a busy midweek schedule.

One of my last few lunches in Singapore was in Fruits Paradise, a Japanese fruit tart café franchise which I'd been eyeing for a while. They've got all these amazing plastic tarts for display as well as the actual ones in the chilled glass shelves, gleaming like mountains of juicy gemstones.

For a little bit of hot food pre-tart-madness, my friend and I got a katsu curry with ebi shrimp and chicken nuggets, (SG$12.90) (above) which was alright. Funny that they should serve fries as well as rice, though!

Just look at that beauty. Gorgeous layers of light mousse and sponge, as well as mango cream and fresh mangoes and strawberries, lined with shortcrust and flaky pastry! This 'Summer Sunset' (SG$6.80) was delicious, and worth its price for the size, light taste, and definitely its visual appeal.

My friend ordered a choco mont blanc (SG$7.80) which came atop a brownie and chocolate shortcrust base. The mont blanc's chestnut taste was extremely mild, and I wasn't a fan of the pairing with hardcore chocolate components like the brownie base and the chocolate sponge within. Although I'm not much of an expert on mont blanc and have only had it once before, the tart wasn't bad, but an unfortunate hit-and-miss for me.

Because we just couldn't get enough of those tarts, my friend and I got a final mango tart (SG$6.80) to share. This. Was my absolute favourite. It is an amazing tart – there's a light, cream cheese base which worked really well with the sponge, mangoes and cream, plus the fresh mango slices topped it all off perfectly.

The tart pastry also really stood out for me in these tarts, they had a distinctive, golden (can things taste golden? I say they can.) buttery taste which complimented the creamy, fruity tops really well.

I'm definitely paying Fruits Paradise a visit the next time I'm in Singapore, their tarts are just the perfect [edible] centrepiece to any conversation!

Fruit Paradise (there are other branches too)

Ang Mo Kio (AMK) Hub

#02-18

53 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3

569933

Singapore

www.fruitparadise.com.sg

Princess of Wales

The Princess of Wales Pub is located near Primrose Hill, on a bright, wealthy residential street. A little challenging to get to, especially on a hot summer's day with the London Underground acting up on a typical weekend, forcing you to squeeze on replacement bus services with sweat clinging on to everything.

Colourful nearby houses

I decided to pay this particular pub – which is quite out of the way for me – a visit as a result of winning Zomato's weekly Write-For-A-Bite contest. (They did originally offer me £50 off my bill at Bacco's, but there was some complication with the restaurant, so they gave me £30 off The Princess of Wales instead.)

The view from atop Primrose Hill

The pub was quiet upon our arrival at 1.30pm. (The transport delayed us for an hour. Welcome to London!) The sun was shining, and the shutters were wide open. The place is wood-panelled all over, with the bar in the middle, and there's a cosy garden-basement just down the stairs.

English pubs are great for getting, well, English food. My sister ordered some chicken with gravy and a Yorkshire pudding, as it was Sunday, and they had roast specials with a live jazz band playing at 4pm! The chicken was tender, the gravy just-right, and the veggies soft and generous.

Her husband got a prawn salad with beetroot, which was part of the Sunday specials as a main, but it was quite a scarce portion for the price. (approx. £13)

I got grilled sea bass with potatoes, sliced courgette, and smoked mackerel pâté. The sea bass was very impressive – it had a tasty, crispy skin, and soft meat. The mackerel pâté was particularly interesting – smoky, fishy, tasty, but rather oily – and went well with the cool courgette salad.

By the time the jazz band started playing, the pub was filled and buzzed with summer, pint-induced liveliness. Dessert was a scoop of salted caramel-flavoured ice cream atop a nut-filled brownie. The brownie had rather hard edges, but a soft, cake-y inside. The salted caramel ice cream was so good, I was tempted to lick the plate clean.

We ended up with a bill of about £60, but the voucher helped to pay half of that. The Princess of Wales is a great place to chill and have drinks with friends. Sunday brings you more reasons to visit, due to the roast specials and the live jazz band. A walk afterwards on Primrose Hill followed by a nap under a tree – there was no better way to complete this particular summer Sunday.

The Princess of Wales

22 Chalcot Road

London NW1 8LL

0207 722 0354

Bon voyage

I departed to Heathrow on the one day when London hid its rare, persevering sun and threw out a layer of grey, indifferent clouds, as if it had decided to say farewell by serving a taster of what I'd get when I come back in September. (Hopefully not.)

Terminal 3 of London Heathrow Airport's departure hall is pretty much an actual hall, huge and oblong, lined with shops like Starbucks, Boots, WHSmith, YO! Sushi, duty free, etc.

Breakfast for me was a Ham & Egg Salad sandwich from Boots (£2) which was so-so. I mainly tasted peppered egg, but it filled me up nevertheless.

It's been a year, but I still don't understand why the English don't mind cold sandwiches. In fact, they probably eat more cold sandwiches than warm ones, because they can be taken straight from the fridge in any supermarket or a pharmacy with snacks. Warm sandwiches are so much nicer – there's more taste, and the meat tastes like meat, instead of cool rubber.

Yes, this is a breakfast menu from Singapore Airlines. Having forgotten to take a picture of the menu, I contacted Singapore Airlines, and they kindly scanned me a copy of the menu from that particular flight within a few days, even though they've probably got better things to do!

I got the Tandoori Salmon served with raita, vegetable curry and Kashmiri pilaf – it was a good choice! The Tandoori salmon was cooked well and tasted great, with fragrant, fluffy pilaf rice, and a decent vegetable curry. The bread roll that came with it was as soft as a pillow, and light-tasting, it was pretty much perfect!

This mango chutney tart served atop salad intrigued me. It looks a little dodgy, but it tasted very interesting! Under the chutney is ground chicken tikka, and the flavours all went together wonderfully in the firm pastry.

Pad Thai for breakfast sounds outrageous to some people, but noodles for breakfast happens sometimes in Southeast Asia. These noodles were average, they didn't reeeally taste like Pad Thai, but reguler fried broad noodles with seafood, egg and veggies. The bread roll was ten times tougher than the one served during dinner. *insert pout face here* There was also a random butter cake at the side, along with raspberry yoghurt and fruits... there was a lot on that breakfast plate!

Now that I'm in Singapore, I'll be attending the best culinary school in the world, held exclusively and privately in my home kitchen, led by Chef Mummy. Progress and updates will be slow, because I've got many other things to do during my time here. I'll also be visiting eating places that I've heard about and always wanted to try!

However, don't ignore my blog for this month just because you're in London! Singapore has a brilliant food culture which I will be exploring from a whole new perspective, having experienced many other international foods in London.

Sushino En

I'm a major Japanese food fan, so I could easily appreciate both fast-food joints like Singapore's Yoshinoya, London's Wasabi, or fancy top-notch Sushisamba in Heron Tower, with main courses all above £10 which I can only dream of.

My sister brought me to a little gem in Whitechapel called Sushino EN, a humble Japanese restaurant with a great multi-level interior, complete with a faux-sit-on-the-floor set of tables on one side of the restaurant. There were very few diners during this off-peak time, so the soundtrack of our meal was the sounds of what seemed like a yoga/meditation album.

The prices are above average, with my bowl of  Sake Teriyaki (grilled salmon on rice) costing £8.95. The salmon with its sauce was superb, and the rice was fluffy and yummy.

My sister ordered a Chirashizushi at £14.90 which came with pickles, salad and ebi tempura. The rice was authentic and tasty with a great vinegar blend, topped with a variety of sashimi, which contributed to the eye-twitching price – the bowl was pretty small, even though the meal did come with little sides of salad and tempura.

The service also greatly sets Sushino EN apart from other Asian restaurants. coughchinatownshitservicecough The waiting staff and restaurant manager constantly returned to our table to ask us how the food was, and whether we needed anything else.

If you're in the Whitechapel area with a few bucks to spend, Sushino EN is a great place to sit down and enjoy lovely Japanese food and service, the latter probably very Japanese as well.

Sushino EN
2 White Church Lane
London, E1 7QR
Tel: 020 3645 6734
www.sushinoen.com

Greggs

I didn't have a good impression of Greggs right from the start.

The first time I heard about it was when I chanced upon an article on the Daily Mail, in which a Greggs employee acts like a gassed eight-year old and decides to badmouth artisan bread-maker, Paul Hollywood, for doing the plaited loaves all wrong and speaking like an Enid Blyton narrator. Accompanying the article was this picture of a Greggs shopfront:

I am not a big fan of the storefront. It looks more like a bookstore than a bakery to me.

The other thing is, you can't insult Paul Hollywood, you simply can't.

Just look at all that adorable-ness.

Bam. No one can make bread-making look more epic than the Hollywood.

The whole thing was probably a publicity stunt by Greggs, but nevertheless I chose Greggs, out of curiosity, as a lunch option while shopping in Hounslow.

The café section was preceded by a bakery section. I think. There were about two shelves, which contained doughnuts, muffins, and loaves which looked very neat and identical.

Moving on to the café section, they had yogurts, salads, pasties, cakes, Danish pastries, croques, sandwiches, pasta, coffee, and other quintessential café food items. The prices were really appealing, with pasties costing about £1.50 and a bowl of pasta for £2.99. 

A steak bake pasty and an iced apple cream Danish cost me exactly £3.

The steak bake was puff pastry filled with beef stew. I loved the warm, creamy and hearty taste of the beef stew, which were quite generous chunks.

Emma, my food buddy for the day, tried some of my dessert. After the meal, I commented, "I do wish that there was more apple in it, though."

She replied, "It was supposed to have apple in it?"

The Danish pastry sandwiched a thin layer of apple and sauce under a thick poof of whipped cream, storybook style. The apple's taste was drowned out under the cream which was a bit much, and I could only occasionally feel its gooey texture.

Greggs is a good option for a cheap café lunch, with tasty-looking pastries and a few other limited options for savoury items, which includes customisable sandwiches (Emma: "The lady took forever to make my sandwich, and look, all my onions are falling out.") and fish fingers. Not somewhere to return to day-after-day, but alright when on a budget and for convenience's sake. Their next step will be to redesign their banner and stop being so cocky and dissing my Hollywood.

Greggs (Hounslow)

181 High Street

Middlesex

TW3 1BL

Tel: 0208 577 2890

IKEA

I had never realized how much strategic planning goes into the layout of every IKEA megastore. When I was younger, my route simply headed straight up the escalators and into the ballpit-playground for about two hours, making friends and enemies within the mass of multi-coloured spheres, before coming out into reality and heading home in a car full of large cardboard boxes and plastic things.

The food bit didn't seem relevant to me until I sat down in the IKEA Resturant one day with my mum and had some poached salmon slathered with what I know now as hollandaise sauce, and it absolutely blew my mind and made me fall in love with salmon fillets. My mum also started to buy a seemingly never-ending supply of Swedish meatballs, as well as lingönberry jam and that creamy, brown, magical gravy. She'd pop them in the oven and I'd have about fifteen of them for dinner, with fries and hot gravy. Mmm.

About two weeks ago, my friend, Esther, and I, shared a few plates of food picked out from the various 'stations' in Wembley's IKEA restaurant which vaguely resembles an Oliver Twist-esque food queue, with the generic grey trays and all. However, the place had a lovely, large and homely interior with golden wood, and simple but chic lighting.

Esther is a queen.

Ten meatballs were £3.89, and they came with gravy, a free flow of jam, as well as mashed potatoes and steamed carrots. Some other customers had fries with their meatballs, but I'm guessing that they came with the larger quantities. The meatballs were bouncy and tasty -- flawless, and never failing to impress.

The salad bar had a small variety of beans, leafy greens, beetroot, giant couscous,coleslaw and cucumber. For a the size of a soup bowl, it was somewhere between £2-3. (There was a fixed price but I can't remember it now.)

The salmon and spinach lasagne was a generous portion, and tasted so good. Warm, browned lasagne layers encompassing fluffy salmon bits and fragrant spinach -- it was quite filling as well!

There is also a free flow of coffee, which one has to pay (If I remember correctly, it was about 95p per cup or something like that) for per possession of mug, unless you have IKEA FAMILY membership -- then you get free coffee on weekdays!



And of course, who can resist their desserts?

No, salad leaf, you are healthy, get out of the picture.



Filled with whipped cream and held by a yummy shortcrust pastry, this strawberry tart was simply heaven.

Their quality-control is really good as well. Every tart looks the same, and just by looking, you can tell that each one tastes absolutely yummy. I guess it is due to the fact that we are talking about IKEA, and they probably handle their food like their generic, please-all furniture.

The almond cake with chocolate and butterscotch pieces (£1.75) was too good-looking to resist. The layered, nutty sponge cake has a lovely caramel-like flavour, and when topped with butterscotch, whipped cream and chocolate, there is a rich blissfulness which is not overpowering due to the presence of the almond sponge layers. 

There is a lot of apple in this Swedish Apple Cake (£1.45), which is great. At a glance, one would think that the apple in encased in shortcrust pastry, similar to the likes of an apple pie, but upon closer inspection, the 'pastry' is actually a firm cake, which I guess is what makes it Swedish. Customers are promised vanilla sauce, but I guess they ran out, because we got a blob of whipped cream instead. I would have preferred the cake warm, rather than cold from being stored on the chilled shelves. It's alright, but I'm not a huge fan of this one.

The Chocolate Truffle Cake (95p) was what you'd expect from a truffle – rich, dense, and chocolatey. It might be a bit too rich for an entire bar, but it was alright when served with whipped cream and shared with a friend.

This pretty much sums up our IKEA trip.

After the long and tedious journey through the land of beds, tables, plates, potted plants, toys, and the final showdown of the ceiling-high shelves of brown boxes, we made it to the cashier, which felt as good as reaching the finish-line of a marathon track. All I checked out was a bottle of Dryck Bubbel Apple & Lingön, which is a sparkling drink made of apple juice and Lingönberries. (£1.89) It is a sweet and satisfying drink, and both flavours compliment each other well –neither overpowers the other.

My bottle is green, though.

Like a drink stall for the said marathon track, there is a bistro just beyond the cashiers which sells hot dogs for 60p along with soft drinks, soft-serve ice cream cones, cinnamon buns and doughnuts. Perfect for the exhausted shopper. Sneaky.

Next to the bistro is the Swedish Food Market, which sells Swedish food (no shit, Sherlock.), some featured in the IKEA restaurant earlier on, such as the apple cake and the almond-layered cake thing. Of course, there are frozen meatballs, packets of gravy mix, jars of lingönberry jam, and packets of vanilla sauce mix for the cakes. Other popular Swedish items such as herring roe, cod roe, salmon, and oat biscuits (I sampled some of these – really really nice.) were aplenty on the shelves.

Like Choccie Dodgers, Kakor Choklad (50p!) is a sandwich biscuit filled with chocolate ganache, with a portion of it peeking out through a heart-shaped hole in the top biscuit, which is a plain butter biscuit, while the bottom one is a chocolate biscuit.

Wow. The chocolate filling really is something. It is thick, creamy, and has a fragrant chocolate taste, without the sweet, milky, artificial THIS-IS-CHOCOLATE-DO-YOU-HEAR-ME flavouring you sometimes get in other cookies. 

See that map on my screen? I'm planning world domination at the moment.

Also sold at a great price of 50p, Kex Äpple looked interesting to me. I bought it thinking that it would contain an apple-flavoured filling, but the biscuit sandwich was filled with vanilla-flavoured filling, while an apple-flavoured candy occupies the heart-shaped hole. What?

Okay, the filling was good and the biscuits had a good, firm texture without being too crumbly.

The candy did have a lovely apple taste, but that little centre is the only instance during which you have any apple taste at all – the rest of the biscuit is a normal vanilla sandwich cookie. The apple taste didn't even spread. Furthermore, that candy was hard. Not hard like rock-hard, but more gooey-hard, like a licorice stick. Determined to prolong the lifespan of the apple flavour to last throughout the entire biscuit, I bit into half of the candy bit and had to wait a good 4 seconds wiggling the biscuit about, trying to rip apart that damned heart. IKEA could have been much smarter with this biscuit.

I can't wait to go back to IKEA to try the rest of their budget-priced foods!

IKEA - Wembley

2 Drury Way

North Circular Road

London

NW10 0TH

0845 355 1141

Opening hours:

Monday to Friday	10:00 am – 10:00 pm
Saturday	9:00 am – 10:00 pm
Sunday	11:00 am – 5:00 pm

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