Last Thursday was Andrew's birthday (also my Dad's 56th). Seb, Daan and I decided to travel to London to celebrate with him. For his present, I was thinking of something One Piece or Pokemon-related, or something from Everton (Liverpool is only about 45mins away by train). Last year we bought him Pokemon t-shirts and One Piece cutlery. But here in Britain it's more difficult to find a Pokemon Centre or a manga museum. We do, however, have the Northern Quarter in Manchester. When Daan and Seb came to visit last December we walked into a comic book store (just like the one in The Big Bang Theory, only bigger), the Forbidden Planet, so I decided to go back there to have a look. There were a lot of manga (in English) and comic books, some Pokemon stuff but they were all tiny figurines, which aren't really that special. Then I walked past the Star Wars aisle, and spotted these very cool lightsaber chopsticks and had that feeling when you know you've found "the one". They came in either red/purple or red/green. I wished they had one in light blue (recalling Sheldon Cooper: "You know the pale blue of Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, before it was digitally remastered?").As for the birthday cake, I wanted to make something new. For Seb's birthday I made that luscious chocolate layer cake from The Primrose Bakery cookbook. This time I used the new Cake Days cookbook from The Hummingbird Bakery. I made, or at least I intended to make, the spiced apple cake with brown sugar meringue frosting. I got up at 6am on Tuesday morning, started making the brownies and cookies, and moved onto the cake. The cake itself is delicious, full of nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger. Grating a couple of Granny Smith apples wasn't fun though, things get a little bit messy. I went to work at midday and came back at around half five to do the frosting. The brown sugar meringue frosting is a Swiss meringue frosting; I first beat the egg whites and soft dark brown sugar over simmering water till they form soft peaks. I was supposed to add small cubes of chilled butter into the meringue, little by little, and that was supposed to stiffen the frosting. However, even before I could add all the butter, the meringue started to curdle. We all know what over-beaten egg whites look like and it's not pretty. It's also irreversible so I had to chuck that bowl of frosting away. I was beginning to run out of ingredients (which is very rare in my kitchen - I always have plenty of eggs, butter, flour and chocolate just in case I suddenly feel like baking), so I ran downstairs to get some more eggs. The frosting failed the second time too. By then I only had about 40 minutes before the cab comes to take me to the train station, so I used the remaining butter to make a simple buttercream icing. I thought vanilla buttercream icing would be too sweet, and a little bit dull. So I chose to add some coffee extract (since Andrew likes coffee so much). I only had enough icing to ice two layers of cakes, and not even enough to sandwich the cakes together. I had to use some raspberry jam I had in the fridge. The spiced apple cake was supposed to be a four-layer cake. When we eventually cut and ate the cake on Andrew's birthday, we were like "hmm...this is weird." It reminded us of that Friends episode when Rachel added beef, sautéed peas and onion to her "English trifle". Obviously, my cooking is nowhere as atrocious (thank goodness) as Rachel's, but the cake was such an odd combination of ingredients. The coffee buttercream icing was too strong that it overshadowed the lovely spices of the cake.
This wasn't the first time I've been disappointed by The Hummingbird Bakery. Last month when I made the red velvet cake, the cake turned out brown even though I had added enough food colouring. And last year for Andrew's birthday (again), I wanted to make the Brooklyn Blackout Cake but the chocolate frosting (the frosting again!) didn't and it ended up having lumps of cornflour syrup, which I had to pick out with a cocktail stick bit by bit. The Hummingbird later published a revised version of the Brooklyn Blackout Cake recipe, which I have yet to test (although why bother? The chocolate layer cake from The Primrose Bakery cookbook is good enough anyway). It's quite frustrating, when things go wrong even though you've followed the recipe to every word. I'd consider myself as a relatively experienced baker (baked my first batch of fairy cakes when I was 13), although I'm still an amateur and nowhere near the level where you can come up with your own recipe, it's very annoying and frustrating when a cake doesn't come out the way it was supposed to be.
Getting together with Daan, Seb, and Andrew was really fun, just like old times, and of course how could we not sing karaoke together? Andrew took us to this tiny Japanese secondhand book store on Brewer Street in SoHo. There were small karaoke rooms at the back of the bookshop. It felt secretive and exclusive. The songs weren't the latest ones but it had all the Japanese classics we had sung at Shidax. We actually went to the same karaoke (same room) two nights in a row. First night was just the four of us, second night was with Andrew's friends from university. But altogether we *only* sang for 5 hours, still not as intense as those 6, 7-hour sessions we have at Shidax in Onohara (9 hours for some people!).
Singing Japanese songs at a karaoke in London felt a bit weird. It was like we were in Osaka again, but we weren't. It wasn't really the same. I know it's quite impossible for all of us to get together and sing at Shidax again. But it was nice that we're all trying our best efforts to see each other as often as possible. These are friends I've spent a wonderful time with, the most talented, funny, loyal and classy, and the people I'll always love from the bottom of my heart, and I really can't imagine a world without them.
We stayed in Kensington, and had the opportunity to walk around the ever-so-beautiful Kensington Gardens. This time I also discovered the amazingness of the Whole Foods Market. It's absolutely a foodie paradise. A very expensive one though, even more so than Waitrose. For the first time I saw an artichoke (it's nowhere to be found in the supermarkets in Manchester, Asda, Sainsbury's, Tesco or Waitrose), but it was almost £4. Apart from sampling chocolates and cheese, and the oh-so-cute sesame street-themed cupcakes, I was in awe of the cheese room. My jaw dropped when I saw it. Once you slide open the heavy glass door, you'd walk into a temperature controlled room smelling of cheese. All four sides of the room were filled with stacks of cheese wheels. Some were quite expensive though, there was a tiny piece of French blue cheese that cost over £5.
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