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The Emporium

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This cafe has a great welcoming atmosphere with options to dine in or outside. We went on a weekday so it wasn't that busy. I wasn't that hungry so I ordered a side. It was filled with Dutch, purple and orange carrots with Harissa dressing. It was great in the beginning but after a while, it got boring. It would've been better if they had one or two other veggies (rather than just carrots). Roasted Dutch carrots, cashew dukkah, harissa dressing $9 Chocolate cremeux, honeycomb ice cream, chocolate soil, dulce de leche, espresso gel $16 The dessert however, was delicious. It had lots of crunch, texture and flavour. There was lots of bits and pieces like bread, chocolate, ice cream etc. The amount was good in terms of portion control. Yes, I know the photo doesn't look as appealing as the lighting was poor but it looked way much better in person.
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Last day of uni (Black Star Pastry + Grill'd)

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Last Friday was our last day back at uni, it was kinda sad but more exciting at the same time! We had made plans to celebrate afterwards at Newtown.  I've seen so many people raving about the Strawberry Watermelon cake at Black Star Pastry so that's we decided to settle for dessert. We finished uni at 4, got a little speech from our lovely coordinator, took a year group photo and set off on the walk to Newtown. It was kind of early for dinner so we decided to have dessert first. We got to Black Star Pastry at 5:01 and were devastated to see it had already closed! We were late by a minute (they close at 5). Despite our efforts of knocking on the door, the staff inside did not open up to apologize. But while looking at the door we realised there was another pop-up store at Town Hall. We had to decide whether we would chase it or leave it, and we chose to do the former, for obvious reasons! We desperately wanted that cake! We went to Town Hall and took a while to f...
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Our Wedding Day

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Engagement + wedding band : I did not have any specific requirements, except I wanted something in yellow gold and a solitaire. Mashayek went with Australian Diamond Brokers and revealed very little as he wanted to keep it as a surprise. I absolutely adored both rings and how beautiful it turned out.  Wedding planning Planning duration : four months Our approach : we set ourselves a very tight goal and we found ourselves on go-go mode the whole time. The upside was that we did not dwell on one task for too long. We picked a job, assigned responsibility, completed the work and moved on to the next one. However, this also meant that many of the tasks were rushed and we did not have time to do it as well as I would’ve liked. Vision : my own first priority was finding photographers who would understand our culture and would be able to follow with our style. Photography is very close to my heart and I looked into this right from the beginning. I wan...
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Daddy's birthday 2015 | Buttery fruit cake

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Happy birthday daddy! This perfectly describes how he continues to inspire me! And he always is!  In the past, I always used to purchase cakes because I did not trust my baking skills enough to be able to pull off a fancy cake for a special occasion. But this year, I've been a bit of an experimental baker so I thought I'd give it a go.  I asked him what he wanted for his birthday. Initially, he said plain cake again (probably because he did not want to trouble me during my final days of thesis writing). After I pressed further, he gave me buttery fruit cake as an answer.  I was happy with this because I had never baked one so it'd be fun to do one. I started my recipe hunt. Most traditional recipes use alcohol but because I don't drink, I had to look harder to find one that didn't so I could eat it too :D Eventually I found this. I've followed this recipe pretty closely with some little changes.  Normally I would not use ...
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Parramatta Lanes

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I heard a lot about Parra Lanes last year so I thought I'd make a time to see out this year. At first, we had a lot of trouble finding out where we needed to go. I've heard Parra Lane gets spread across over multiple stations to distribute the crowd. However, the problem was that the places aren't always easy to find. After walking around for some time, we managed to get hold of a map from a security staff. My main reason for coming was to try some knafeh; I've heard so much about this dessert from people who came last year. But we realised this particular shop was furthest out from our location. First stop was Koi Dessert Bar but there as a long line. While waiting in line, I decided to try the strawberry watermelon gelato from N2. I've always been a huge admirer of the strawberry watermelon cake from Black Star Pastry . I thought it'd be an interesting combo to have it in a gelato form. It surely was, I quite liked the gelato cake, it had a very stron...
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High tea - planning

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Last Sunday, two of my good friends and I held a fundraising high tea party. We started planning for this way back in July. During our first meeting, we had a brief discussion over what organisation we should fundraise for. We were thinking of doing Cancer Council because the proposed date we had for high tea would be around Daffodil day. But in the end, we decided to go for one close to women. We picked National Breast Cancer Foundation because all of us had a personal experience knowing someone who has suffered or died from breast cancer. Food Next thing we had to decide was the menu, we each discussed items that we could contribute. We wrote ourselves a shopping list and a brief plan of when to bake what. We had our high tea on a Sunday afternoon so we planned that we would do shopping on the Monday, start baking from Thursday. We wanted to allow ourselves plenty of time because we were going to try some experimental desserts and we knew that these would take time...
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Active April

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Gosh, I honestly don’t know where the month has gone! Yes, I know you’re going to say that I say that literally every month. But I suppose time does fly quicker as you are getting older. Speaking of which, I turned 24 this month. My dad insisted on celebrating, but I think I am just getting to the age where I prefer to keep my birthday a quiet business and hide away. I got spoilt with some great presents and cake, of course! I had a lot of cake this month. I have had a few moments of hibernation this month, it does help with my internal struggle sometimes which is still ongoing, but I’m trying to deal with it in a different way (some of you would probably know about this from my previous monthly blogs ). In terms of work, I have been juggling endless things this month. The student projects have been quite time-consuming, particularly because I needed to obtain ethics approval for one of them which needed a lot of work. The good news is that we were recently approved and currently r...
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Manageable March

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I started this month feeling overwhelmed and out of control, both emotionally and physically (playing the catch-up game with my workload). As I have said, I have had a lot going in my life in the past couple of months. While the majority of it has left a very positive influence in my life, there are some areas of it where negativity continues to tingle. I have told myself I will focus on the sunny side of it, work around this to normalise it as much as possible. The good news is that I have succeeded; I have managed to focus my shift back to work, and it has been working so far. However, there are occasions when my mind starts drifting away into the other land. But happy to say, I have been pretty productive this month, managed to get through ethics applications, two paper revisions (almost) and a few other things. In other news, I have finally started working on our wedding day blog. It took me a while to start because I wanted to wait until my ‘mental load’ reduced a little. We h...
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Amazing April

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I'm behind with the blogging again, finding it so hard to keep up with how fast the time is flying! April was a pretty good month for me, I had my birthday and graduation this month so I got spoilt with lots of presents and food! In terms of work, I'm progressing at a moderate pace. I reckon I could be faster if I didn't have so many meetings to attend. I've joined a committee recently so there are additional meetings/events and few extra jobs to do. So I really need to make sure I'm productive with the time I have. With my systematic review, I have finished extracting all the papers. I'm up to doing quality assessments now. We did Cochrane which I was already familiar with from last year. But there's also a new one called GRADE. From what I've heard, it's a complex tool to use so I think I'll need to allow myself some time to learn this. The other thing I learnt this month was NVivo. I did an short online course on this software. It's usef...
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Trattoria La Vigna

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Today was my first time at Camden which is in South West of Sydney (past Campbelltown), we saw some farms and country scenic views on our way. The atmosphere of this restaurant was lovely. The restaurant has an overlooking vineyard. I knew it was going to be a special, memorable lunch already :) I haven’t made pasta in the last few weeks, so I was pretty excited to try some authentic Italian food. We were welcomed by a friendly staff with a very strong Italian accent, almost made us feel like we were in Italy! The garlic prawns we tried for entrée were delicious, and prawns were cooked well. It was nice to have some tomatoes in there (the only vegetable in our meal). The olive oil was great for dipping the bread. Gamberi all ‘aglio- Garlic Prawns ($20) However, I was slightly disappointed with the mains. The gnocchi I tried was swimming in a plate of creamy pesto. Don’t get me wrong; I love basil pesto. But there was just too much of it. It kind of makes reminded m...
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