There are adorable heart-shaped cakes and red, white and pink iced treats everywhere this week, I wish it was Valentine’s year round! I love the look of these individual heart-shaped cakes at Michels (I think one is red velvet mud cake and the other is chocolate mousse cake).
Also loving the Valentine’s section on Martha Stewart. There are at least 250 recipes for heart-shaped cookies, heart-shaped eclairs, marshmallows and so on. Pix below from Martha Stewart website!
Tried these last year: Rilakkuma-themed, pudding-flavoured churros biscuits. (I would have been happy enough with pudding-flavoured biscuits or churros-flavoured biscuits but, hey!)
They tasted like maple syrup and vanilla and custard pudding and doughnut, and they looked like mini churros doughnuts. The texture was OK but they weren’t crispy, they were kinda soft.
They are still available in Japan, I just saw them in “hotcake” flavour in this girl’s blog.
Recently discovered Patagonia icecream cafe in Coogee, which has some great flavours, such as Bubbly, a fairy-floss pink bubblegum flavour that tastes like bubblegum-meets-marshmallow, and KitKat, vanilla icecream with caramel and crunchy kitkat pieces swirled through. My photo shoot of these scoops didn’t go quite as planned, as by the time I got to the beach with the icecream it was all melty-melty, and not at all like the super pretty scoops that I had received in the store! Icecream photography is a tricky business! Anyway the shop is at 231 Coogee Bay Road, about 100 metres from the beach.
While on this topic, here are some lovely icecream shots from Japan thanks to my BF Benzo, who just got back from snowboarding over there! Thanks Ben for taking all these shots of super cute icecreams!!
The third one is Hotcake Sandwich icecream, the last one is Melon Pan (melon bread roll) icecream.
Royal Milk Tea is a ready-made milky tea drink that’s so popular in Japan. It tastes like tea with milk but it’s very sweet and a bit spicy, like chai. I loved buying it chilled in bottles from vending machines. When my friend Asha came to Japan she developed such an addiction to it that she ended up taking a few 2-litre bottles home with her.
I love the British theme of this KitKat, and the little Royal Guards marching along the pack.
And around the back!
Union Jack colours. The stationery in the background is Cath Kidston.
The actual KitKat is milk tea white chocolate and milk tea filling. The flavour is very subtle.
Thank you James for sending this to me from Japan!!
Here’s Royal Milk Tea in a winter vending machine (all the drinks are heated). Royal Milk Tea is also a popular flavour in Japan for Haagen-Dazs ice-cream!
Anyone planning a foodie trip to Paris should check out this book, one of the prettiest and yummiest city guides I’ve ever seen! It’s a guide to the best patisseries of Paris, and even tho it’s in Japanese, the names and addresses are all in basic French, and the book is mainly pictures.
You can buy it online here for 1800 yen, or it’s at Kinokuniya near the Craft section for about $40. I’m so happy to find the online ordering site (in English) for this Japanese publisher, because they make the coolest books, including one on Copenhagen apartments, one on Parisian studios, one on Stockholm kitchens, and heaps more!!
