Rocky Roads galore!

Every chocoholics dream come true...rocky roads. It's so easy to make, yet it tastes so good plus it makes you look like a pro! After watching the Great Gatsby and tearing my heart out at the movies (trust me, you will too when you've watched it!), I knew I needed a chocolate fix.

This is what you do, get a foil and wrap your container (this is so you wont need to wash it later), break digestives into careless bits and place at the base of the container. Place roasted hazelnuts and chunks of marshmallows on the digestives. Now, the best part of all...melt dark and white chocolate over saucepan placed over boiling water in a pot and pour into container. Place in fridge and leave to set. Voila..!

The best part is yet to come, sharing the chocolate around during a long case in the hospital! After all, chocolates are best energy boosters and happiness starters. Don't you think?

The best way to enjoy chocolate, with friends no doubt!

Jerangkang Waterfalls

Let me tell you about a little piece of heaven on earth.

In Malaysia, there is a place in the middle of the forest where a cascade of waterfalls exist. You can climb along the side of the falls, and when you get to the upper level, you will see another fall, and it goes up and up and up...it seems like forever.

And when you camp by the falls at night, you can climb to the rocks and lay listening to the powerful sound of the water while staring up admiring millions of bright stars in the darkened skies. They look like diamonds glistening brightly, keeping our secrets, holding all our dreams and our hopes. If you are lucky, you may catch sight of a wishing star. Don't forget to make a wish.

It really is as lovely as it sounds.

And one day if I get lucky, I will show my piece of heaven to you.

  

Double Trouble!

The chocolate rage continues....Rach had another dinner party and this time I found a really simple but exquisite recipe for Chocolate Marquise by none other than the ever famous Gordon Ramsay!

It reads, "for the serious chocoholics only" so I knew I qualified automatically!

The usual suspects when it comes to a chocolate recipe

You need 4 separate bowls.
Bowl 1: melt 300mg of dark chocolate (70% cocoa)
Bowl 2: mix 150gm unsalted butter with 75gm caster sugar and 6 tbsp cocoa powder
Bowl 3: beat six egg yolks and 75gm of caster sugar
Mix bowl 1 and 2 and 3 together slowly, and lastly add 450ml of whipping cream/thickened cream.
As you mix everything, the entire combination will look like chocolate mousse. So that's when you know you are on the right track (trust me, it's tried and tested).

Next smoothen a layer of this chocolate mousse, and top with a layer of after 8's chocolate on a foil pan. Repeat another layer and add a layer of after 8's chocolate until you have up to 3-4 layers of chocolate. Yep, just like a layered cake. Only better!

Cover foil and refrigerate overnight!

The white's in between are the layers of After Eights. Okay I admit, there's some room for improvement in my presentation...

Now this just took a mere 45 minutes to prepare. By Saturday, I found myself restless (yet again) and so decided to try make this flourless chocolate brownie by Nigella. Imagine flourless, a less guilty chocolate experience! Heavenly!

So start with melting 225gm dark chocolate (70% cocoa of course) with about 225 gm unsalted butter of course in a saucepan in low heat. Add 2 tsp of vanilla essense. Beat 3 eggs and add into saucepan. Now add 150gm of ground almonds and 100gm of chopped walnuts. Mix well.

Pour batter into foil and bake in oven for 25-30 mins (until upper crust hardens slightly) at 170 degree Celsius. It will be a little squidgy but that's okay as that's probably from a little excess butter.

Now my favourite part is the hot chocolate sauce. Mix 75gm dark chocolate, 125ml double cream, 2tsp of espresso powder diluted in 2 tbsp of hot water and 1 tbsp of golden syrup into saucepan and melt together under low heat. Voila, that's your hot chocolate sauce for the brownie!

Both desserts were served on Saturday night. Both were (obviously) well received.
That was how I made my Saturday perfect.

And this is the end of my chocolate obsession.

I hear myself snort as I typed the last sentence.

Diary of a Chocoholic

So, I've been moping around with chocolate for 2 months. Frankly, I'm getting a little sick of pure chocolate. I've had everything ranging from Twix, Cadbury to Lindt, Merci, even all the flavours of Toblerone. You name it, my entire "secret" stash is all gone. Okay, I lie. Nearly all gone.

I've decided to try some other variant of chocolate.

So I baked. First time in my life. Moist chocolate cake from scratch. The simplest recipe I could find. However, I struggled a little with the measurements, "ounces", ml, mg, gm, cups. So Daryl's advice was just as long as you can "correctly estimate" the amount. Huh? Easier said than done.

Here's the recipe:
1 and a 1/2 cup of plain flour, 1 cup of sugar, 1 tsp baking soda,1/2 tsp salt, 2 ounces (half a bar) or unsweetened chocolate, 5 tablespoon of butter, 1 cup of buttermilk, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon vanilla extract.

Melt the chocolate and half the butter together. In another bowl, mix buttermilk, the other part of butter and egg, then add the rest of the unmixed dry items into the bowl and stir. Lastly add the melted chocolate into the bowl as well. Add vanilla essence last. Mix well.
Grease baking pan and bake in toaster oven for 30 mins +/- 10 mins. Cover the top with foil to avoid the top from getting burnt. Check if cake is done by poking the middle part with a knife. Nothing should stick on the knife.

For the icing,
1/2 cup sugar, 4 tbsp cornstarch, 1/8 salt, 1 ounch (1 line) of chocolate, 1/2 cup of hot coffee (whatever you have is fine), 4and 1/2 tsp of butter, 1 tbsp vanilla essence

In a saucepan mix everything except butter and vanilla under low heat until low boil. Then remove from fire and stir in butter and vanilla. It will sort of thicken eventually. Then spread on cake.

 

This was super easy (surprisingly). It only took around 1 hour in total. Thanks to the careful guidance of rach and daryl who were nice enough to not roll their eyes at my unconventional but vigorous mixing technique and my utter loss while trying to make sense of the quantity measurements.

We spent the rest of the beautiful Sunday by the pool. Perfect day!

I then took the rest of the cake to work the next day and of course tried it on another sample - my colleagues of course. Well, needless to say the plate was all clean and cleared up to the last drop of icing! 

Next on, Chocolate Marquise!
That and 10000km of running just to make up for all those chocolate....

The Get-over pill

Lazing by the pool with Daryl and soaking in the sun I suddenly had a thought. Eureka! I had a brilliant idea.

Wouldn't it be amazing if I could create a Get Over pill? Something you take when your heart is broken up and you needed to forget about it, forget about the pain? Just like that.

I predict it would be a best-seller. All you needed was to take this pill, and it would selectively erase part of the memory that induced your heartache. I mean, who hasn't gone through this? If heartbreak is a disease, the entire world would have suffered from it one time or another. I imagine I would be disgustingly rich if I came up with the formula of this pill!

It's like a reboot button, and you could start over. A new beginning.

Then rational Daryl points out that if we keep on eating the pill and conveniently forgot about what happened before, what are the chances that we would go ahead and repeat the same mistakes or reenact the same scenarios over and over again? Hmpff I was stumped, true that. Mere human beings that we are.

I imagine that the whole population would play like a broken record. Going on repeat for years before someone gets into liver failure and dies from overdose of the Get-over pill. Then, I'd be whisked off into jail for causing death of the nation just because I tried alleviating their temporary pain in the first place.

I guess it was so clear. We can't just erase, or we shouldn't delete everything bad that we have experienced. There's always something to be learnt from everything we go through, and everything that happened. Good or bad. That was the whole point of life? (Yes, I am still wondering about this ancient question)  

I reluctantly delete my ambitious plan of creating this tempting miraculous "get-over" pill. I guess I'll just leave it to time to help my fragile ol' heart heal from a recent crack. Time, the age old remedy after all heals all wounds.

That and chocolate. A whole load of it. Never forget that.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something-your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life" -- Steve Jobs

The unexpected Hike

Me and Rach had roped Mariam, Martin and Nirvick to join Mark's famous annual jungle hike. Said to be one of the rather diverse and exciting hike, they were all pretty excited. That is until Mark backed out of the hike at approximately 1130pm the night before and left it up to me and Rach to lead the pack.

A change of plans.

We then decided 2 minutes into the change of plans that we were going to get Martin to lead us to the 8 Immortals hike (because yes, we hate taking the lead). He was rather confused at first as he received texts from both of us with an abrupt change in direction, but being the good sport he is, he agreed.

We conveniently forgot to mention it to the rest.

On the train ride into New territories, we were all on talking about the 8 Immortals, some other people seemed a little confused which then lead me to realize that no one knew exactly where we were going!

Wilson trail 9 (aka the 8 Immortals) was labelled as challenging. I could feel Mariam's deadly look set upon me when realization dawned on her about our direction of hike (this reminds me of Allyanna and her "I am going to kill you" declarations after I convinced her to join us on an "interesting" hike - ie Hard hike; yes, after years of relaying bad news at work, I have perfected the talent of sugar-coating every worse case scenarios possible.)

We started at the Hok Tau reservoirs, and this doesn't feel like you are in Hong Kong at all. It was beautiful, there were butterflies of all sizes and colours inhabiting the area.

The crazy ascent begins soon after. It took about a good hour of strenuous upward climb with no shade cover whatsoever. As the first shade of summer had arrived, we were drenched with sweat by the time we arrived at the top of the ridge.

Breathtaking. The hard trails always are. All the pain forgotten. All we could see were Hong Kong's most dramatically beautiful range of hills. We were at the edge of the escarpment of Ping Fung Shan.

Kinga taking the lead

My favourite rumpled green blanket of hills

View of Tolo Harbour and Plover cove

Marching through the 8 immortals

It took a mighty long time before we got to the actual Eight Immortals Range made up of 8 succession of humps, each peaks named after a character  of Chinese Mythology. We were stunned, as we had been walking (climbing, crawling, trudging, huffing & puffing) a good 4 hours and thought that we were already on it the whole time! Martin, who of course knew the entire trail by heart was probably leaving the best news for last...of course, there was no turning back by that time anyway as we were deep on the range.

From the last of the immortals Sin Ku Fung, it was another hour of steep slippery descent to Tai Mei Tuk. We literally ran to the restaurant for food. The entire trail took 5 hours of a 10km hike. I slept 10 hours straight after that.

This is to date one of the most beautiful hike I have been on.

When I thought Hong Kong could surprise me no more, I am entranced.

Hong Kong trail Conquered

On a gorgeous Sunday morning, 7 very high-spirited individual decided to conquer Hong Kong trail 5,6,7 &8 with a grand total of 25km. The trail started in front of Parkview Apartments at the Wong Nai Chung gap road.

Trail 5 climbs through Mt Butler and passes Quarry bay where we saw multiple abandoned cars, even 1 that was toppled over. Probably a body dumping site. Someone should look it up. Trail 6 passes through scenic Tai Tam reservoir and was a very easy walk down way.

2 hours down and 2 dropped out after trail 6. 5 left and we walked through trail 7 which was literally a walk by a large drain...the whole bloody way.

It wasn't scenic at all and it was such a long walk that I was given a chance to contemplate my life aspirations of taking up a job as a cashier. Some day. I kid you not. Tristan thinks I should get this out of my system, it's that bar code thing that never ceases to amaze me. However, Dan brought up a very worrying trend of self check-out machines that I have seen all over London as well. We figured that there may be less job opportunities in the future as machines pave their way to replacing human manpower. Again.

At the end of trail 7, 1 dropped out and then there were 4. By now, our legs were aching but we were just starting the famous Dragon's Back trail. This is one of my favourite trails, as it never fails to impress. There were people paragliding down the mountain. One day, I will be one of those.

After 6 hours of walking we arrived at Big Wave Bay near Shek O. Tired but just glad that we have conquered the entire Hong Kong trail before I leave Hong Kong. We celebrated with some much appreciated Thai lunch.

My legs ached the whole of next day and unfortunately I was on call. Lets just say that it was worth all the pain.

After all, as we all know, "no pain, no gain".

Dessert is as easy as 1-2-3

In the spirit of refining my Art of procrastination from completing my thesis, I have started on cooking. After retiring from the kitchen for 2 years, what better way to start than dessert! So when Rach decided to host a dinner, I voluntarily offered to make panna cotta.

Boy, was I surprised at how easy it was.

Friday - Creme Caramel.
This one was a trial. My target guinea pigs were who else other than my colleagues who were mostly guys (ie low expectations, eats anything). I started with getting an express packet. It took like 20 minutes and everything was in the container. And then I saw the burnt bottom of the pan. What a great start...

The guys were obviously a lil' hesitant when I offered my item. I guess I shouldn't be surprised as I am the least expected to even know how to boil rice...It was quite funny to see their frightened eyes when as they hesitantly and a little reluctantly reached for the dessert.

Luckily no one got sick the next day (I checked) and everyone said it was nicer than expected. (Yes, that was how low their expectations were)

Sat - Panna cotta from scratch
So I cooked some thick cream, fresh milk, vanilla essence (the search for vanilla bean was in vain...), sugar, a little water and gelatin powder. A little stirring and voila! It was ready for chilling. For the topping I roasted cut strawberries with sugar and some lemon juice for about 20 minutes in the oven. I was so nervous as I hadn't really managed to taste it before serving (big mistake there!).

It was edible. It was actually good! I may have hope yet!

With my newfound confidence and all the leftover cream, eggs and vanilla essence, I ended the weekend by making creme brulee for my very nice, very agreeable colleagues. This time, they were much more excited to dig through the dish unlike the last time where I had to use my pitiful eyes and literally beg to convince them!

The highlight of the day was sneaking the blowtorch from the dental treatment room to burn the sugar and brown the top of the creme brulee. At last I've put my work items into good use!

One day if I don't make it in maxillofacial,...you'll know where to find me!

Now, back to writing up my thesis.