Looks okay right? Like an almond torte sandwiched with banana and chocolate cream covered in chocolate icing.

WRONG!!

Butter cakes I can handle. Cheesecakes no problem. But sponge cakes!! First I over mixed. Cake turned out fine-textured but dense. Never mind, can still use as base for cheescake. But I em kam yuen (not satisfied), so I did another one. This time I under mixed. Cake turned out crumbly and dry, even had little pockets of flour! But it is such a waste to throw away, so I made it into a Chocolate Banana Cake. And discovered my new favourite icing – Chocolate Ganache. Easiest icing to make in the world. Just heat up equal amounts of chocolate and cream. Add a little knob of butter. No whipping. No creaming. Just stir languidly until the chocolate and cream are amalgamated. Easy to spread. Hardens like a dream. (for some reason, those two sentences together don’t sound decent..) And because I just discovered my kitchen tap is capable of really hot water on demand (whenever I remember to switch it on), my cutting skills have improved tremendously!

Just run the knife under the hot tap before each cut. Guaranteed to look as neat as neat can be. And the combination of sweet banana and creamy dark chocolate just managed to make everyone forget about the dryness of cake…

Oh well, my sponge cakes were a disaster. Luckily prawns don’t require a light hand.

Half a kilo of beheaded crustaceans drizzled with a some olive oil, freshly grinded black pepper, a smattering of sea salt, a generous dollop of HP sauce, some squeezes of a lemon and top it off with a few blobs of butter. Flash it under a hot grill for about 10 minutes and you have succulent grilled prawns swimming in a buttery lemony tangy sauce. Get ready some crusty bread, line the table with newspaper to collect the shells and feast away!

When you are on foreign soil, you have a tendency to think fondly of the simple food which you can get cheaply and easily from the nearest neighbourhood stall. When you can’t find anything that comes close to what you yearn for. When every official function has that dish on their menu but you don’t get even a whiff of it because everyone else has cravings for it. When you read some flogger waxing lyrical about the heady lemongrass aroma that comes wafting from that plate of SATAY!!!

What’s a girl to do but to make her own – big fat pieces of thigh meat with little bits of fats for added juiciness, lots of fresh crunchy cucumber and onions, and best of all, I can have as many as I like without having to count the number of sticks I have consumed!

Recipe courtesy of RasaMalaysia. Only thing, next time I will make it slightly charred and the peanut sauce too. And maybe some nasi himpit to with it too.

Please, please don’t make me yearn for ipoh sar hor fun, CCF, chee yoke fun, fried balitong, hokkien mee or char kway teow with extra see ham… (don’t think, DON’T THINK!!)