Happy New Year from Edinburgh! 🥳🥳🎉🎉🎉

Happy New Year, everyone! May 2022 be your best year yet! 😁😁 Hope you had also enjoyed your holiday – my new year’s resolution definitely needs to be to work off all the food I have eaten over the past weeks! 😂

Edinburgh at night 🌙 (not really… this was before 5 in the afternoon 😅😅)

Delicious seafood lunch in Mussels Inn (one of my favourite seafood spots here! 😋)

The Pakora Bar – popped in for a quick snack!

A nice, warm bowl of ramen is perfect in this chilly weather 🥶

And got treated to a nice dinner in the hotel my mum works at! 😁👍

The Feeling of Being At Home

It’s been a few days since I have been back in Edinburgh – felt like I haven’t been in my family home for so long… but it’s so good to just sit down and be able to relax completely, thinking and worrying about nothing else in life right now! 😂

One of my favourite things to do whilst here (especially in the summer if you have been following my past posts 🤪) is to utilise the big freezer in my mum’s house to make some homemade ice cream. 🍨🍨 (The freezer at my London apartment is tiny and not really cold enough to freeze things.) And I decided to go full on restaurant-like this time 😛, also making a mango millefeuille with wholemeal filo pastry to accompany my mango ice cream! 🥭🥭🥭 (Who doesn’t love mangoes lol?)

Listen to the crunch! 🥰🥰

I don’t usually watch much sports, but for the past week I have been watching the Tokyo Olympics obsessively, staying up at night tuning into all the fixtures! (I am a big Olympics fan! 😝) So glad to see it back on our screen again after the delay from last year. The last Olympics game in Rio was when I moved in to my first flat in London 5 years ago, and it’s crazy to think how much has happened since then. I wonder where I will be when Paris 2024 happens? 🤔

Also all these actions in Japan has made me really wanted to revisit the country again and craving Japanese food lol! 🤤 So, last night I made one of my childhood favourites – Chawanmushi, which is a savoury steamed Japanese egg custard. It was a little messy, but I jam-packed it with a lot of fillings and flavours (because I am greedy with fillings haha! 😬) Even my mum likes it and she is normally VERY critical! 😂

Who else has also been enjoying the games like me? 😁

Create Your Sweet Moments Every Day

After a really long day at work today, I was exhausted beyond belief by the time I got home. Now, I must confess that I am probably not the tidiest person in the entire world. So having put off doing laundry for two weeks now, I finally decided to turn on the washing machine at last. 😅 After stuffing it full, I collapsed on my bed and fell sound asleep with the noises of the washing machine and the TV running in the background.

Just when I thought my evening was going to smoothly run its course, I snored awake when I noticed everything in my apartment was silent and switched off. Thinking it was just another tripped fuse, I wandered half-awakened to the fuse box. That was when I discovered that not just the entire building, but the street I lived on had suddenly experienced a power outage!

Before I had time to even worry about how long it would take for the power to come back on, I realised my phone (the only one thing unaffected) was low on battery and most of my clothes now stuck in the washing machine. And yet, I found the first thing I was actually concerned about was my alarm not coming on tomorrow morning if all my appliances were dead. Thoughts and stress started racing in my head. What if I get in trouble if I wake up late for work tomorrow? Why did I always seem to value my job above everything else? Why couldn’t I stop worrying about things I wasn’t able to control?

Finally, I came to a realisation I should stop stressing myself out and savoured the peace I was finally allowed. I decide to watch MasterChef on my phone, then fell asleep again before I was awakened by the washing machine and lights coming back on two hours later. Since my laundry still needed some time to finish, I decided to go outside meanwhile for a cheeky strawberry sundae in the middle of night. (Excuse the drop of sauce dripped onto the table 😂)

Turn out tonight wasn’t so bad after all. Why don’t we all stop and just make the most of every moments we have in our lives? Sometimes even the bad moments can still turn out to be sweet in the end.

(Clearly jinxed myself with this post ’cause the power is gone yet again 😓 when I was showering…)

Home Is Always Where It Starts

They once said, ‘Click your heels together three times and say ‘There’s no place like home” and you’ll be there’. When I moved away from home, I was hungry for more in life. New job, new friends, new relationships and everything more. Three years in, I feel unhappy and frustrated at my job, whilst those around me go through new changes and challenges. But as I sat here feeling unfulfilled about my life, I always try to remind myself about how far I come. How far away from home I am.

Being in the city has its quirk of seeing many things that remind me of home, but food always come first on my list. My mum and I always have a fondness for angel food cake. This light yolk-less sponge paired with whipped cream and passion fruit curd is quite literally a recipe from the heaven. To paraphrase Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, I say ‘Eat your cake three times and say ‘There’s no place like home” and you’ll be there’.

(Courtesy of Mary Berry’s recipe on BBC Food: https://www.bbc.com/food/recipes/angel_food_cake_with_04002)