Of Silk, figs, and Andre

This past Sunday was our 12th wedding anniversary, which is also known as the silk anniversary. I only found out about this via an internet search when a friend asked which anniversary is the 12th. As it happened, one of the presents that I got for hubby is a silk tie, so it’s totally in sync with the theme!

Two days before our anniversary I received a tip from a chef friend that my local supermarket just got a shipment of super sweet Turkish figs. The next morning I rushed over to said supermarket and bought four packets. I love figs, but only if they’re sweet and actually taste of figs. Often times even when they are ripe they have a watered down non-descript taste that won’t excite anyone. These ones were very sweet, with intense fig flavors.

Hidemi Sugino has a fig tartlet that I have never been able to try, because I somehow always go to Tokyo when figs are most definitely not in season, like in the dead of winter. So naturally the first thing that popped into my head was to make the fig tartlets. As far as Hidemi Sugino recipes go, this is one of the easiest ones, all you have to do is to find good figs. For the first time, I’ll share his recipe on my blog with you guys, because it's not too long to translate. You’ll need to either know or look up some of the basic techniques, since I’m too lazy to type it out, but it should be fairly easy to google and find out. So here it goes.

Tartelette aux figues (makes 12x 7cm tartlets)

Pate sucree:
90g unsalted butter at RT
60g icing sugar
30g whole egg
20g almond powder
150g light flower

crème patissiere:

250g milk

55g caster sugar

¼ vanilla bean

50g egg yolk

12g light flour

12g corn starch


Crème d’amandes
40g unsalted butter at RT
40g icing sugar
40g whole egg
40g almond powder

6 large figs

kirsch

30B syrup (130g sugar +100g water)

crème Chantilly

Apricot jam
Raspberry jam

1. Make pate sucree and chill in fridge

2. Make crème patissiere and chill in fridge (steps 1 & 2 can be done the day before)

3. Roll dough out and fit into tartlet pans, rest in fridge while making crème frangipane

4. Make crème frangipane by whisking together crème d’amandes and crème patissiere

5. Take tartlet shells out of fridge, use another tartlet pan to press dough down, then prick with a fork a few times.

6. Pipe about 25g of crème frangipane into each tartlet pan and let rest in fridge for 30 minutes

7. Meanwhile, slice each fig into 16 slices, removing skin only after you’ve sliced them, one slice at a time. This took me almost an hour, but it results in neater outside edges, so it’s worth it.

8. Arrange slices on a tray and sprinkle granule sugar on it (how much sugar depends on how sweet your figs are), then sprinkle with kirsch. Chill in fridge for 30 min

9. Bake tartlets at 170C for about 15-20 minutes, until crème frangipane is a dark golden brown

10. Remove tartlets from pans and cool.

11. Whip up crème Chantilly to very stiff peak. You’ll need about 20g for each tartlet

12. Mix together 20g of 30B syrup, 10g water and 12g kirsch. Brush onto top of tartlet, let syrup soak in

13. Spread a layer of raspberry jam onto the baked tartlet, then pipe a mound of Chantilly on top.

14. Arrange 8 slices of figs in an overlapping pattern onto each tartlet

15. Heat 50g apricot jam and 10g kirsch in a small saucepan until fluid. Brush onto cut surfaces of figs

16. Top each tartlet with a raspberry and you’re done!


We had some of this for dessert the day before our anniversary and gave some away to friends when hubby went to play tennis with them, but our real celebration was the dinner at chef Andre Chiang’s eponymous restaurant Andre. I liked his cooking when he was helming Jaan at the top of Swissotel, but somehow never got around to trying his own place since he opened it about a year ago.  I made the booking more than a month ago because it is F1 week in Singapore and it never hurts to be prepared.

The front of the restaurant was so inconspicuous that I missed it the first time and had to double back and drive down a short stretch the wrong way to get back. Good thing Sunday night traffic is light in this part of the town. The restaurant has the feel of a house. Off to the side on the first floor is a small sitting area, but we were led to the second floor dining room. The space has the clean modern feel of a French house. One side of the wall has black and white wall papers of a little forest, and sheep clad in suede are used as bag stools.

Hubby chose the wine pairing, as it is too tiring to try to pick out wines that will go with most of the eight-course meal, especially since I don’t drink. I notice most other guests opt for this lazy option as well.

Before we start we were treated to a quartet of palate cleansers: “fish and chips”, “popcorn”, some silvery fish slices on a crisp cracker served with porcini chips and Andre’s signature chicken skin chips.

His eight-course menu is based on his “octophilosophy”, the concept of which is highlighted in the link above, so I shall not repeat it here.










The first course is Pure, which was scallop ravioli, chives& dill flower in purple cauliflower consume. Very little seasoning was used and the fragrance of the dill flowers ties everything together nicely.

Next came Salt: French oyster wrapped in Japanese seaweed, served granny smith foam. The dish was decorated with tiny cubes of cucumbers and apples. No salt was added, only the saltiness from the oyster provided seasoning.

 

The third course was Artisan - Kyoto eggplant topped with caviar, served with a savory crème Anglaise sauce sprinkled with hazelnut shavings and fried burdock roots (gobou). The savory crème Anglaise was a nice twist and the fried gobou brought a nice contrast to an otherwise creamy dish. To top it all off, the dish on which this course was served is designed by chef Andre.

The next course is named South and pays homage to chef Andre’s time spent in the south of France, close to the Mediterranean . It consists of flounder with tomato & white peaches, and tomato sorbet in one dish. Uni risotto and blue crab foam in a second dish. The risotto was probably one of the best I’ve ever tasted, done to perfection with just the right amount of bite to it and is perfectly flavoured with the uni sauce.

Texture came next and is squid "arborio rice" with charcoal rice crackers. The “rice” is actually squid and tasted much better than my chicken substitute. I usually don’t like squid because of the chewy texture, but here the texture is completely changed, and I find myself wishing I had stuck to the original dish.

The sixth course is Unique, and here the unique ingredient is French artichoke. The dish was stuffed baby barracuda, French artichoke and artichoke foam. To be perfectly honest I felt that the artichoke was rather tasteless on its own, however the sauce was so robust and the stuffed baby barracuda so tender that they saved the dish. I just felt that to be THE unique ingredient in the “unique” course, the artichoke should’ve taken a more front row seat.

The next course was “memory” and it was a dish that Andre has always kept on his menu, with different variations. Tonight it’s a baked foie gras jelly with black truffle glaze. The “jelly” contains egg white and has the silky consistency of a well-executed chawanmushi, and the black truffle glaze was so fragrant that even later, when the next table had the dish we could smell it. Although hubby thought it was a great dish and I loved it too at first, ultimately I felt that either the portion was too big, or it needed an accompaniment to cut down on the richness, like a champagne jelly or something similar.

Our final course was “terroir”, although in our case it’s something from the sky: French pigeon with pigeon jus, pea purée & potato gnocchi. I was still recovering from the last dish and found the pigeon a little too gamey for my taste, although to be honest it was a perfectly cooked pigeon, with just a hint of pinkness in the centre, so Hubby was more than happy to finish my portion for me.

Before dessert, we cleansed our palate with mini marshmallow, strawberry granita & yogurt jelly in a cute little pot. Dessert was chocolate sponge, which really looked like a piece of sponge; soft chocolate sphere filled with warm chocolate ganache, and burned butter ice cream. I’ve always found restaurant desserts boring and this was no exception. I think it was my least favourite course of the entire evening, but I guess nobody is perfect.

When my latte came the waitress apologetically said something about “please be careful, the cup is designed by chef Andre and the shape is a little strange” and indeed it was. The cup was more of an irregular rectangle rather than a round, and hubby immediately commented that he could’ve made one just like that. It wasn’t until I picked it up that I realized the bottom was not flat. Good thing I didn’t try to set it down on the table!

We rounded off our meal with some French figs, popcorns that “pop” in your mouth, passion fruit marshmallow and honey hazelnut Madeline. All in all, it was a very memorable meal. I’ve heard mixed reviews about Andre but we felt this was the most exciting meal we’ve had in Singapore in years. I think chef Andre is a creative genius and is really setting new standards for all restaurants in our little dot on the map. So hats off to him!

How to Convert Your Friends into Twilight Fans

Like I said, I’ve turned into a Twilight fan. For three weeks after I came back from New York, I lived and breathed the Twilight saga, reading the books over and over again, watching the DVD, listening to the soundtracks, and searching any Twilight related video clips on YouTube. Yeah, I know, it’s all a little bit obsessive. The worst part though, is that I don’t have many friends who’ve read Twilight, it being a teen novel and all, which made it hard to share my obsession. So, what’s a girl to do, but to try to convert all her friends into fans, just like her? And what better way to do it than to throw a Twilight-themed girls’ night complete with a screening of the movie?

Here’s what you do:

Step 1: send invitation to all your girlfriends regardless of whether they’ve read Twilight or not. After all, the goal is to have as many of your friends as possible with whom you can discuss and obsess over Twilight together, so new blood (no pun intended) is crucial.

Step 2: get your friend who owns a cooking school to send her chef to cook the “bloody” feast for you. Who can resist a gourmet meal cooked by a handsome chef? So he’s no Edward Cullen, but in real life we have to make do.

Step 3: fill your place with as much greeneries as you can so it resembles Forks, the little town the book is set in that’s perpetually green and luscious.








Step 4: conjure up the idea to make a cake that look like Edward’s meadow and reincarnate Edward and Bella in fondant, despite the fact that you’ve never made any human figurines out of fondant before and that fondant literally melts in Singapore’s heat and humidity. To quote Edward, “Mind over matters.”












Step 5: play the soundtrack and Debussy piano music to set the mood.

Step 6: details, details, details. This includes the red apple, which is on the book cover, and represent the forbidden fruit; flowers that smell good and aroma candles to simulate Bella’s floral scent; drinks that look like blood, such as sangria and watermelon juice; and last but not the least, dress up in your vampire chic best! You want to make Alice proud.












Step 7: channel Siobhan’s ability so you can will it to rain after three straight weeks of sunshine and scorching heat. It wouldn’t be Forks if it weren’t wet and gloomy!

Et Voila! You have yourself a bloody good time with friends and virtually all of them are now converts. The next time you throw a New Moon party, nobody will be going, “Aren’t vampires supposed to kill people?”

Search of the Perfect Almond Croissant

I’m a breakfast person. I like long leisurely breakfasts, either at home or at a roadside café, with a good cup of cappuccino. On weekdays I eat alone, because Jason leaves work at the ungodly hour of 7:30am and no amount of love can get this sleepyhead out of bed at that hour to have breakfast with dear hubby. Plus, unlike me, Jason is NOT a breakfast person. So weekday breakfasts are simple: a bowl of cereal with fresh summer berries, or a couple of slices of toasted artisan bread generously slathered with salted butter and a good jam. I’m still working my way through the jams I bought at the markets in Provence last summer and savoring every bit of it. Although I enjoy having my simple weekday breakfasts in front of the computer, I make it a point to sit down to have at least one proper breakfast every weekend. With three dogs by my feet, hubby sitting across the table from me, I don’t know a better way to spend a Sunday morning, which brings me to, my all time favorite breakfast food: almond croissant.

I first discovered almond croissant years ago in Paris, under the Eiffel tower. As far as the ways to discover a ubiquitous Parisian pastry item, is there any better location than a neighborhood café a few blocks away from the symbol of Paris? Before my encounter with the almond croissant, a nice flaky on the outside chewy on the inside regular croissant had always been my favorite. That day, however, among all the tempting pastries lined up behind the glass counter, my eyes were drawn to an “ugly mutant” croissant. You can sort of still make out the shape of a croissant but it had a bug-like shell, and almond slices sprinkled on top. I pointed to that, stuck out my index finger and said “S'il vous plait.” Minutes later, I was biting into the most luxurious breakfast pastry you could ever dream of. Granted, it was my first trip to Paris and I hadn’t embarked on my Le Cordon Bleu journey yet so you could say I was a lot more easily impressed then, but still, I think honest good food is honest good food no matter how discerning ones’ palate is. I had an almond croissant every chance I got for the rest of our stay in Paris and loved every one of them.

Back in Tokyo, I scoured every bakery in my neighborhood and found only one place that sold an interpretation of almond croissant. It was Yoku Moku, an iconic bakery on Omotesando that is famous for their petit cigare (a rolled up crepe-like cookie) of myriad flavors. The petit cigares can be found in the basement of most major department stores but the freshly baked cakes are only available at the Yoku Moku café on Omotesando. What a lot of people didn’t know was that in the morning, they put out baskets full of freshly baked pastries and among them I found a giant glazed croissant which they named almond croissant. It was vastly different from the ones I had in Paris, a more glamorous version if you would, and it was HUGE. It took Jason and I a lot of effort to chow down just that and two cups of coffee. It was also hard to come by. Over the years I was only able to buy it twice. It was always sold out, even when you go right at store opening. I suspect on some days they don’t make them.

Flash forward a couple of years and we’ve left Tokyo, escaped the humidity and air pollution of Hong Kong and ended up in Singapore again. Singapore, being humid, presents a lot of challenges to bakeries. Crusts on bread turn soggy almost the instant they hit the shelf and it’s virtually impossible to get a decent flaky croissant unless you bake it yourself. You would think that after so many years the almond croissant is but a distant memory, but not so, because we again had some amazing ones in a Parisian bakery called Boulangerie de Papa that supposedly had the best croissants in all of Paris. My passion was re-kindled and I was again on a quest to find the best almond croissant outside of Paris. And found it I did, in the most unlikely place.

We went on a holiday to Angkor Wat early this year and stayed in Hotel de la Paix for a few nights. Despite initial reservations about the hotel’s location right in the center of Siem Reap town, it turned out to be a tranquil sanctuary with tastefully decorated rooms and friendly staff.The best surprise, however, was the almond croissants at the breakfast buffet. I had one everyday of our stay there and bought everyone they had in the bakery the day we came back to Singapore. Sadly though, the curse of the Singapore humidity lived on. The nice crispy almond slices, along with the crunchy crust of almond paste turned soft when we brought them back home. Nonetheless, I was still happy, for Cambodia is a helluva lot closer than Paris. I was already making plans to revisit Hotel de la Paix, just so I could eat their almond croissants.

Why don’t I just make them myself, you ask? Believe me you, that thought crosses my mind every time I obsess about almond croissants, and my pastry course at Le Cordon Bleu did cover it in one of the demo sessions. Problem is, even in Tokyo, the land of DIY pastry, I was unable to find almond syrup, an indispensable ingredient in making the almond croissant, and substituting it with anything else, thereby compromising the authenticity was, to me, unthinkable.
So I sustain myself on memories of almond croissants I’ve had, the most recent ones being from Bouchon in Napa Valley and Tartine from San Francisco.

Then one day, the pastry goddess smiled upon me and told me to go into Hediard, which is just down the street from where I live but is so easy to miss that I’ve only been inside a handful of times. She told me to go all the way to the narrow hallway in the back of the store and there on the shelf, I saw, a bottle of almond syrup!

Did I run home with my precious bottle of almond syrup and make almond croissants right away? Of course not! I dug out the recipe and studied it and decided that I should start with the best croissant, which in Singapore, means frozen ones from Classic Fine Foods and baked to perfection in my own kitchen right before eating. Since almond croissants are traditionally made with day-old croissants (yes, it’s actually an ingenious way to recycle leftovers), I’d bake a few extras, eat some on day 1 and make the leftovers into almond croissants on day 2. Simple, right? Not so. It was months before I could find a weekend where we’d be eating breakfast home on Saturday (freshly baked flaky croissants) and have time on Sunday to transform the leftovers into almond croissants. You see when you’ve waited for so long to do something, you just want everything to be perfect.

The day finally came last weekend. It was Singapore’s National Day on Saturday and we were watching the Olympics at home on Sunday. So we had piping hot flaky croissants on Saturday and I made my first mini batch of almond croissants on Sunday. They had a glorious crunchy crust of sweet almond cream studded with crispy almond slices. Inside the croissant is a sweet filling of the same almond cream but it’s soft, which, combined with the subtle hint of orange blossom from the almond syrup, made it taste like something entirely different. It was perfect! Ok, maybe not perfect because I think I put too much almond cream on top so the almond slices slid off when the cream melted in the oven. But the point is, they tasted exactly the way I remembered, and now I can have them whenever I want. Is this the way to end an obsession or what!


Recipe (for six):

Six day-old croissants (the best you can find)

100g unsalted butter, softened
100g icing sugar
100g almond powder
10g flour
2 medium eggs
10g rum
almond syrup
almond slices
icing sugar

1. Sift together flour, icing sugar and almond powder
2. Whisk together butter and eggs, then whisk in flour mixture
3. Whisk in rum – this is almond cream
4. Slice croissants down in the middle without slicing through
5. Soak cut surface in almond syrup
6. Pipe some almond cream into center of croissant, close up croissant and pipe more on top
7. Sprinkle almond slices on top
8. Bake at 180C/350F for 15 minutes or until golden brown
9. Sprinkle with more icing sugar if you want.
10. Cool on rack and eat when it’s cooled but before the sugary almond crust gets soggy

Eat Your Type

Our waiter greeted us with “Hello, my name is Mike, and my blood type is O. What’s your blood type?” Yip, our waiter. I was at a restaurant, not a blood bank.

Lynette and I and a couple of other ladies started this lunch thing last year. We don’t meet regularly and it’s not always the same group because people are out of town all the time, but whoever can make it will go and we usually try to eat at new places or where we know the chef.

This time the venue is the newly opened My Blood Type restaurant at the Golden Shoe Building in the financial district. Bertrand, the executive chef is a fellow teacher at Palate Sensations and has worked in various hotels and restaurants. In fact we have been waiting for the restaurant to open ever since he told us that he was working on the menu at the end of last year. The menu comes divided according to blood types, and then there is one called “friendly” suited to all blood types. They do not use artificial flavors, refined sugar, saturated fat or processed food in their cooking so you can eat to your heart’s content without feeling guilty.

The menu for type B (my blood type) was long on starters and desserts but short on main for some reason, so I opted for two starters. My first starter was lightly seared yellow fin tuna on a bed of salad greens served with citrus dressing. The taste was light and refreshing and healthy food doesn’t get any better than this. My next starter was a little unusual. Normally people want their food to be savory, no? Well, the ricotta cake was slightly sweet, and lemony. It was still very nice but I was just not expecting anything sweet before dessert.








The food my lunch companions ordered are a very nice shrimp and mango salad wrapped in grilled paper-thin zucchini slices; a slightly garlicky pasta; and a very juicy and flavorful grilled rack of lamb. I was told Bertrand used to man the grill station when he worked at Flutes at the Fort so grilling is obviously his forte.
To finish off lunch we picked three desserts to share: peach tart (which was recommended to us by the owner), jasmine tea jelly with lime sorbet, and chocolate covered pandan chiffon cake. The peach tart took us by surprise because we didn’t want to order it initially, thinking how good could a peach tart be? Well, it was pretty amazing. Instead of almond or crème patisserie, which is usually what comes in a tart, it was filled with a peach compote made on site. To top it off, little balls of peach flesh was poached and lightly caramelized with a torch. From taste to presentation it was perfect. The tea jelly had a very mellow jasmine taste but all our taste buds were woken up by the tangy lime sorbet. It’s the perfect ending if you had eaten something heavy, such as lamb or a creamy pasta. We were a little disappointed by the pandan chiffon cake, however. Since the restaurant only uses spelt flour, the “chiffon” cake didn’t rise the way chiffon cakes are supposed to rise and the delicate pandan flavor was overpowered by the thick chocolate covering. On the other hand, the dessert that another group of friends that I happened to run into at the restaurant was excellent, according to them. I think it was the raspberry short cake parfait?
Minor hiccups aside, I was pleasantly surprised by how good the food was at a so-called health restaurant. When it comes to food I usually believe that if it’s healthy it can’t taste too good, but I have to say I am changing my mind on that. Just a little though, because you won’t see me baking without butter or eggs any time soon.

Have you Lo-hei’d this year?

Last Saturday, we went with Lynettte and a group of friends to the lovely Sichuan Do Hua restaurant for a Chinese New Year celebration dinner. But, wasn’t CNY last week? Yes, and no, because traditionally CNY is celebrated for fifteen whole days, ending with the lantern festival on the fifteenth day. So we were well within the celebratory period.

Lynette had outdone herself by booking the most beautiful private room in the restaurant and before we even finished wooing and aaahing, two waiters served us tea kung-fu style. Now that’s service with panache!

One must-have Chinese New Year dish in Singapore is Yu Sheng, which means raw fish literally. It is actually a salad with sashimi and various other ingredients, all carrying auspicious meanings. The way to eat it is called Lo Hei, which is Cantonese for “lifting up.” The restaurants usually prepare long chopsticks (about a foot long) so everybody can stand up around the table and use the chopsticks to toss, or throw the salad in the air, depending on how you look at it. Some say that the higher you toss, the more luck and prosperity the new year will bring. Even though we have lived in Singapore before I had never taken part in Lo Hei or eating Yu Sheng until then. In fact, only a handful of people in our group have had it before so the novelty factor caused us all to giggle like little kids while enthusiastically scattering salad greens and precious abalones all over the table. We only stopped when someone pointed out that if we carried on like that there’d be nothing to eat.
According to our Yu Sheng expert (a Singaporean and two Italians who have eaten it before), Si Chuan Do Hua’s version is a little different. They included abalone and a crispy fish skin, and also used a very nice plume sauce for the dressing. I loved it so much I had two heaping servings and would’ve had more if there was any left.
Besides the Yu Sheng we also had the following dishes: eight treasure seafood soup sans sharks fin, steamed red grouper, braised prawn in spinach sauce, DongPo pork, scallops in potato basket, fried noodles, and a dessert of longan and red date soup.

Everything was delicious, although I was puzzled as to why there weren’t any spicy dishes since the chef is from Si Chuan, home of Ma Po tofu, until Lynette reminded us that she was the one who picked the menu, hee!



At the end of the dinner we were served fortune cookies! I was tickled to see those because I didn’t think anyone else used them except Chinese restaurants in the US. When I opened my cookie, I found a fortune that said I had won a $50 dining voucher. But the best part was, I had two fortunes in the cookie, which means I won two vouchers. Now if that’s not an auspicious sign for the new year, I don’t know what is.