of family heirlooms and miniatures

we all know life throws curveballs at you from time to time, to test your mettle, or your worth- or whatever really. but i guess curveballs then need decisions, and decisions taken or followed, need time to be readjusted to. summer this year was my curveball, by my decision, marking a new turning point in my life. and though it will be very bittersweet, i can say now (that summer and autumn has came and gone) that its going to be okay.

I will stick by the decision i made, i will probably waver in my (new) love interests, but i will remain forever faithful to my one and only real love- baking.

Over summer, i made a myraid of cakes and cookies- with my most successful being the Devil's Food Cake that i made for my grandma's birthday. but due to the non-presence of a really-good-digital-camera till september, i didn't take any photos of that.

With more indecision and tango-ing in my life, i decided to take two steps back to enter into a world where i could be alone, a world where i escape to. As irritatingly corny this sounds, baking was perhaps my one and only outlet. And so, i grew increasingly fixated on a generation-passed down cheesecake recipe. yumm.

The picture above was first attempt, and might i say it really was an easy cake! Being a family heirloom and all, it wouldn't be nice at all (to say the least) for me to announce it out. But tweaking the methods of preparation, tweaking the ingredients, and the discovery of a blender in my house (seriously, i had no idea we had one) that put the 'cheesecake workout' of the mortar&grinder-meets-digestives away (yay), was great fun. And the results were even better! I also love how people ooh-and-ahh at the marbled effect, and I love it even more when I see their disbelief when I tell them how simple it is to achieve that effect :)





















my summer being one train-wreck after another really needed something else to make it worthwhile. so lemons. i've mentioned before, and i'll mention it again. lemons really do make the world go round. their tart, tangy lilt on the tongue just never fails to make me happy. And together with the marshmallow-textured meringues just equates to delish heaven.

Unfortunately, i'm the only one in the family who really likes lemon. And because i live in Singapore, where half of the people really look anorexic (i'm not saying this because i'm bigger than the norm), i made them miniature. This way, it'll be perfect for both fussy categories - not too much lemon and not too much calories.