Oscar Wilde once said, “The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world”. I reckon the same goes for brunches. After all, many famous people are known to have been late risers – for instance, Hitler was known to conduct very important meetings from his tub as he took his late morning bath… Ok, bad example. Moving on.
Combining ‘temporary’ and ‘emporium’, Temporium is a not-so-new pop-up store along Dunlop Street that opened in the first week of September, and sees itself running til the end of February 2014. 4 units divided into a store, gallery and diner, Temporium has quite a number of big names behind it. The property is owned by Breezeway, while the concept, interior and general management is by Tofu; and the diner is a collaboration between Wild Rocket, Papa Palheta and Weekend Worker.
Whenever Christmas comes round, it signals the start of mum’s American Cheesecake baking season. Her record was set in the early 2000s when 47 cheesecakes were made and sent out our doors over a period of 3 weeks leading up to Christmas. The whole house just smelled of cheesecake… constantly. So safe to say, everyone in the family is a sucker for the dessert.
It wasn’t until two years ago that La Mother dearest found it necessary to learn how to cook – which was rather odd I suppose, given what a fantastic cook my maternal grandmother is, and how my mum was raised in a very typical Kampung environment in Muar, i.e. great Peranakan and Malaysian food. Prior to her learning how to cook however, she did learn how to bake an exceptionally good molten chocolate babycake (aka chocolate fondant) – in part to save us from the teasing at school that our mum couldn’t cook; classmates can be a most unforgiving lot. “Hey, my mum bakes a great chocolate fondant ok? Bet you don’t even know what that is, so b****r off.” Pardon me.
I will admit that I am not much of a cook when it comes to the savoury, but if it is one thing I can do without demolishing the kitchen, it’s baking. I’m not entirely sure where my love for baking stems from, but my family and friends don’t seem to care much for the reason as long as I continue providing them with their favourite desserts. One such dessert would be my Chocolate Raspberry Tart.
There are few events that make it to the household calendar, but when they do, they’re often labeled by default as ‘extremely important – forget if you dare’; and this includes La Mother’s birthday. Having a mother with high expectations and exquisite tastes can be very intimidating, and it fell on me to deal with the arrangements after losing a battle of rock paper scissors with the father.
So this is to be my first official post for Chubby Hubby, and I admit that I kind of feel like a 5-year-old child with a new toy that says “For 6 years and above only”. It is an undeniably daunting task to write about something that you feel really strongly about and want to share with others, without wetting yourself from the paranoia of “what if they don’t like it??”
But although I’m no expert, I think I’ve had enough experiences to at least know a thing or two about food and travelling. Besides, if I ‘accidentally’ send you to some undesirable location, I think I’d have both Aun and Charmaine hunting me down to physically cause me damage… and as a person with short legs, I would really rather not have to run.