Here’s the thing about making wedding cakes. Baking and decorating a 9/7/5-inch three-tier is like tackling Mount Everest right there at your kitchen table. But once it’s conquered and displayed at a big venue, it can suddenly shrink into a blink-and-you-miss backside pimple.

Case in point: the cake I made for my cousin Ricky’s wedding last week. The venue was One 15 Marina Club in Sentosa Cove, and it was the first time my cake was to be cut on stage in a grand ballroom.

Ricky’s fiancee Amy said it was a “small” stage so the cake wouldn’t look out of place. And as I was hauling my cakes out the front door to the car, it sure had the heft that befitted the occasion: The thick bottom tier, which itself was made up of two tiers to reach 6 inches in height, was so heavy that I had to stop twice to take breathers.

But once I got to the ballroom, the cakes instantly shrivelled up to look like last week’s muffins. It wasn’t because the stage was huge. It was because there was a cake-cutting table there, and sitting on it, a gargantuan, skyscraping fake cake covered in fake fondant and fake roses. To complete the blinding visual assault, it was topped with an enormous nest made of fake twigs and fake birds.

I asked the banquet manager to remove it so I can place my cake in its place. And he went blank for 5 long seconds.

“Take the fake cake away?” he said, looking at my shrivelled muffin, then looking back at his aviarius masterpiece. What he was really saying was, What? You want me to replace this magnum opus with that zit of a cake??!

“Ya,” I said, defending myself meekly, “I have three tiers.”

“Oh,” he said, and, with a slight frown still attached to his face, removed the jacuzzi-sized foam monstrosity.

I proceeded to assemble my cake. Once completed and placed on the table, it was only one-tenth the size of the ginormous tweeting wonder. If you’ve ever wondered what it felt like for David to face the mighty Goliath, just ask my cake.

But when it was cake-cutting time, at least Amy and Ricky were able to run the knife down a real cake, with real buttercream and real fondant — and not some insipid slit pre-cut into a foam block.

Call me old-fashioned. But when it comes to wedding cakes, nothing beats the real thing — backside pimple or not.

Preparing the flowers for this cake was both fun and deathly terrifying. Over a year ago, I stuck fresh rose petals on L&G’s chocolate ganache wedding cake and they wilted so fast that they looked like wet newspaper bits creeping up a pile of sh**. Needless to say, I’ve been scarred ever since.

But I decided to give fresh flowers another go this time because, in my opinion, they will always look better than sugarpaste flowers. I just needed to take extra care. These gorgeous white ranunculus (my fave flower) were first rinsed and soaked in water to get rid of pesticides. Then, with their ends wrapped in wet towels, they were kept fresh in the fridge overnight.

Amy wanted a Tiffany blue cake and I had just the right brand of colouring for the job: Wilton’s teal. Just a few drops were enough to colour my 3kg of fondant the perfect shade of Tiffany.

The four tiers of cake (two to make up the bottom tier) took an afternoon to bake. They were filled and crumb-coated with Swiss meringue buttercream, flavoured with organic strawberry puree.

To cover the 6-inch tall bottom tier, I had to roll out the biggest piece of fondant in my young career – 20 inches across! Once draped over the cake, I had to work quickly to cut off the excess.

More trims and tucks to make each cake looking perfectly wrapped.

The brown grosgrain ribbons and flowers were attached on-site. I love how this cake turned out, but I think my daughter E is still way cuter.

I admit. When I first learnt I was pregnant earlier this year, I sent a few upward missives that went: “Lord, please give me a son this time round.” My firstborn E is a girl, so out of the purely selfish reason of wanting one of each, I wanted my second to be a boy.

Just think of it. I will have a daughter to dress up and bake pretty cakes with, and husband Z will have a son to skateboard with and do all those smelly things that boys do. And at first, all signs suggested that we would enjoy this idyllic, life-insurance ad configuration.

My aunt, who has a track record of accurately predicting the sex of a foetus by using some mystical formula involving the mother’s age, month of conception, etc, swore it was a boy. We have friends who “just have a feeling” that it was a boy. Even the wonton noodles auntie in my office canteen, with just one glance at my front-tilting bump, was sure of it too.

Then we found out the baby is actually a girl. And, wow, nothing prepared me for the tide of disappointment verging on disapproval that followed when we broke the news. My aunt, looking like she had just bitten into something rotten, told me I should “bok” (gamble) again and hopefully hit jackpot the third time round. When I told the wonton noodles auntie that I actually quite like having another girl, she said, with her back turned towards me: “As long as you’re happy lorhh. It’s okay lorhhhh.”

Everywhere I turned, people above the age of 45 would console me, saying “It’s okay lah. These days, boys and girls are all the same”. But, funny huh? If boys and girls are really the same, you never hear anyone saying this when you’re expecting a boy.

I, for one, have totally embraced and am loving the fact that I’ll be having two girls. First, you save lots of money by recycling the clothes. Second, if our new baby is anything like her older sister, we will have a pair of mild-mannered, well-behaved, neat and tidy kids who will not turn our home into a crime scene on a daily basis.

Third, and on to the real point of this post, I will have twice the opportunity to make the cutest, prettiest cakes all year round.

I mean, check out these adorable cheesecake pops I made as goodie bag takeaways for E’s birthday party two weeks ago. Would a birthday boy have appreciated the heart-shaped sprinkles or the pastel-coloured non-pareils? I don’t think so. When he becomes a teenager, he will look back on the birthday photos and accuse me of instilling in him an unmanly penchant for pink and polka dots.

If I had a son, every special occasion cake I make will have to factor in boy colours and emblems. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think a cake shaped like a blue tractor looks all that appetising. A dinosaur cake? Sure, I can make one. Just don’t make me eat it.

But with two girls, I will have at least two birthday cakes to make a year, festooned with flowers, flounces, ruffles in all manner of lemon-yellows and rosebud pinks. Already, I am having soul-lifting visions of my two girls in cute little aprons, helping me in the kitchen with the whipping, kneading and washing. What absolute bliss.

Having said all this, I’ll wait till I pop in January before I celebrate. Imagine the back-paddling I’ll have to do if the ultrasound scans turn out all wrong.

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CHEESECAKE POPS adapted from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey by Jill O’Connor

(makes 50 golf ball-sized pops)

40 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

2 cups sugar

1/4 cup plain flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

5 eggs (about 250g without shells)

2 egg yolks

2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup heavy cream (at least 35% butterfat)

50 lollipop sticks (Wilton brand, available at Phoon Huat)

1 pound eating chocolate (dark, milk or white)

2 tablespoons shortening

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1. Preheat oven to 160 deg C.

2. Using an electric mixer, beat cream cheese, sugar, flour and salt together until smooth. Add whole eggs and egg yolks one at a time, beating on low speed. Beat in vanilla and cream.

3. Lightly grease a 10-inch or 9-inch cake pan (not springform as the batter will leak) and pour batter into it. Place pan inside a larger roasting pan and fill up the latter with water until it reaches halfway up the sides of the inner cake pan. Bake until cheesecake is firm and golden-brown on top, about 45-50 minutes.

4. Remove cake pan from the water bath and leave to cool to room temperature. Then, refrigerate cheesecake until cold and very firm, about 3 hours.

5. Scrape off the golden-brown crust on top (because it will keep the cheesecake from sticking together in a ball). Then, using a small ice-cream scoop, make golf ball-sized balls and insert a lollipop stick. Freeze the pops until very hard, at least 1 hour.

6. While cheesecake balls are being frozen, prepare the chocolate dip. Place half the amount of chocolate in a bowl (use only half because the chocolate will harden very quickly during dipping, so might as well do in two batches) and microwave on high, taking it out every 15 seconds to stir. If you don’t, chocolate will seize and become grainy. When chocolate is melted and warm, add in shortening (to lower chocolate’s melting point so it won’t melt into a mess when you’re eating it) and mix till smooth.

7. Dip cheesecake balls into the chocolate until evenly covered. You will have to work quickly because the cheesecake’s cold temperature will harden the chocolate very quickly.

8. Then, immediately sprinkle over decorations before chocolate hardens. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

9. Once first batch of chocolate is used up, heat up second batch of chocolate and shortening. Repeat with remaining cheesecake balls.

10. Or, for more adult-looking pops, leave cheesecake unadorned and swirl patterns on the chocolate before they set. Gorgeous! 

For my daughter E’s first birthday last year, I came up with the idea of making a mini bundt cake tower. For one whole year since then, I’d had this question niggling at the back of my head: What clever cake can I come up with next year?

In the end, her 2nd birthday came last week and I found myself doing the ultimate loser thing: I copied a design from Martha Stewart. Why? Because this cake is just the cutest darn thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on.

I mean, look at it! It has colourful lollipops stuck all over like little flowers, and even frilly grass creeping up from the sides. Forget about being original, man. This is one copy-cake I wanted to eat.

But mind you, mimicry is an art.

There was a  lot of walking back and forth between kitchen and balcony – where there was direct daylight – before I could colour the buttercream the exact same shade of green as the original.

And I’m a little embarrassed to say that it took quite a few teaspoonfuls of green colouring to achieve it – so much so that I was afraid our guests who ate it would look into their toilet bowls the next morning and wonder if they had overdosed on vegetables.

There was also much fussing over the size and colours of the gummies that were to be skewered with satay sticks and stuck on the cake. I even went out especially to buy the right sized leaf piping tip so that my grass sheaves would look nothing short of perfect.

The verdict? When E’s de facto godmother C first saw the cake, she cried: “It’s just like the real thing!!” And my husband Z, no doubt inspired by the piped-in muzak we always hear in supermarkets, proudly declared to his friends that I am a “cover artiste”.

Me? For someone who has never bought a fake good in her life (never bought a branded good either), I’m totally pleased about my counterfeiting prowess. If I were a city, my name would be Zhen. Shenzhen.

Ever since I started this blog over a year ago, I’ve received lovely comments about how my posts are down-to-earth, unpretentious and self-deprecating.

Well, this is not one of those posts.

Today, I’m going to brag about what an utter genius I am for coming up with this most astounding of butter cakes, the Earl Grey Pound Cake. And get this: I didn’t just follow a recipe from some book that I bought or am reviewing, like I usually do. I pretty much made up this recipe myself.

Okay, so I adapted it from a new cookbook that’s out in the stores. But unlike many sneaky food bloggers out there who adopt published recipes as their own by changing something really small, like the amount of sugar, I changed a lot of this recipe, awright?

Having read Shirley O. Corriher’s BakeWise, I have become so clever that I knew, at one glance, that the stated 1/8 tsp of baking powder is way not enough. So I upped it. I also did away with ingredients A and B, because the cake would be too sweet with them. I also cancelled ingredient C and D because I wanted a finer texture, and I dropped ingredient E because it would overpower the Earl Grey tea flavour.

Please, hold your applause. I’m not done yet.

Last but not least, I increased the butter and cut the sugar so it had the perfect balance that’s super-buttery and not too sweet. And, ta-da, what did I get? A butter cake that is so tender, so moist and fragrant, I believe this is the thing that’s gonna make me my first million.

Call me smug, but I’ve been dreaming about opening a bakery that specialises in all variations of this stupendous butter cake – orange, lemon, green tea, five-spice, you name it – and cake-worshippers from all over the country would descend upon me to beg for a small slice. Like the institutional Lana Cakes shop in Bukit Timah, I would only need to open four days a week to support my two kids through school and my husband through full-time skate-boarding.

And, like Lana bakery (I’ve been allowed inside its bowels before! One of the better privileges of being a food writer), I would have a little air-conditioned room tucked way at the back where I mix my batter and keep my secret ingredient away from view.

Yes, friends, this recipe has a secret ingredient, one that keeps the cake so incredibly moist even after a few days. But I’m not telling. Many of you have asked for recipes in my previous posts, and in the spirit of fraternal goodwill and generosity towards all baker-kind, I have happily obliged. But not this one, folks. This one is mine.

Go ahead. Beg, plead, or appeal to my soft, vulnerable 6-months-pregnant heart for my classified recipe. But I will only have three words for you – Get cher own.

This mamma’s not budging.

I made a two-tier cake for my dad’s 80th birthday last month. But this post isn’t about how much he loved it (which I’m sure he did, even though crusty, conservative Teochew men like him don’t often express their feelings), or how much my relatives loved it, or how my 23-month-old daughter E wolfed down an entire slice all by herself, this being her very first taste of her mother’s baking (we decided that we’ve deprived her the sinful joys of fat and sugar for long enough).

No, this post is about the miracle of how I even managed to make the cake in the first place.

You’ve been fooled if you think that I stopped baking over the past five months because I’m pregnant and that my apartment was under renovation. Friends, there was actually a more sinister, diabolical force at work – my husband Z.

Let me put it this way. I am married to a man who has turned my pregnancy into an oppressive in-house military camp. Much like how life in the army barracks is governed by an inexplicable set of rules that makes sense only to the sergeant who created them, so is my life ever since Z knocked me up.

Here is Z the Pregnancy Nazi’s edict:

I cannot eat instant noodles or canned soup. Zero nutrition.

I cannot eat sausages. You don’t know what goes into them.

I cannot stand near the microwave oven, let alone eat anything that has been microwaved. He gave me the reason but it was so deep it slid right over my head.

I cannot carry my 11-kg daughter. Too taxing.

I cannot reach my arms up to take anything that is taller than me. I could overstretch.

I must flee at the slightest whiff of cigarette smoke, paint, detergent or fumigation (but strangely, his noxious farts are okay).

I cannot shower in the bathtub. I could slip and fall.

Every other day, he will check if I have been faithfully taking my dietary supplements. Every time I eat an apple, or any produce that may have come in contact with pesticides, he asks sternly: “Did you wash it?”

A few weeks ago, in a haze of renovation fever, I returned to my apartment with our maid so she could glue on a piece of laminate in the kitchen. I only supervised; I didn’t do any of the work. But when Z found out that I was actually within sniffing distance of glue for 15 minutes, he refused to talk to me for one full day.

So go ahead, ask me if I’ve been baking. And I’ll roll my eyes and tell you: “And incur the wrath of Lord Z?” No, I have not been baking. Because I don’t want to whisk an egg and have him scold me for potentially breaking my hip, thereby making childbirth more difficult. I have not been baking. Because I don’t want to sift flour only to have him accuse me of triggering premature labour.

But I had a rare reprieve last month as my dad’s birthday approached. He was turning 80, a grand, celebratory milestone by any standard, and I wanted to bake him a cake, something I had never done before. It was a proposition that even Z, a complete softie when it comes to parents and family, could not turn down.

So I baked the butter cakes in my spanking new 90-cm Ariston oven back in my apartment (more about my wonder oven in another post), then completed the frosting (whipped cream with mascarpone cheese) and decorations (strawberries, raspberries and blueberries) at my parents’, where a party for 30 relatives was to be held.

The cake was a hit. Dad’s four grandchildren helped him blow out the candles, and a photo of that moment now serves as wallpaper in his iPod, our birthday gift to him. I’m just glad that Z the Nazi didn’t deny me the pride I now feel for making the cake. Because if he did, I would summon some of this watermelon belly and heavy-artillery papaya boobs to unleash some major Allied forces on him. Ker-pow!

When I watch TV these days, I am confronted with a slew of urgent, sobering questions: ‘When will the economy pick up?’, ‘Why so many natural disasters?’, ‘Can climate change be stopped?’.

But perhaps the most disturbing of all, ‘Why the heck is Bobby Chinn hosting a TV show?’

Every time I see his trailer on Discovery Channel, I ask myself: What have we, the TV viewers in Asia, done to deserve such a narcissistic, uncharismatic, and thoroughly insufferable brat thrust upon our consciousness?

Nigella Lawson shows you how you can eat a horse and still be drop-dead gorgeous. Jamie Oliver makes you want to cook. Ian Wright makes you laugh. Anthony Bourdain shows you how to travel the world with a deadpan swagger.

But Bobby Chinn? The only qualification he brings to the lifestyle TV landscape is that he has a pulse and a full head of hair. (I can’t even bear to put his face on my blog, therefore the above picture).

First of all, as a clear case of ill judgment by Discovery Channel, it has decided to put its name behind a show that has zero culinary or entertainment value. In Chinn’s first series, World Cafe Asia, he goes around Asia in search of street food. But do we really want to watch yet another angmoh demonstrate to us the wonders of food that we ourselves had grown up on? You could excuse Kylie Kwong (who cooks just about everything with gin-jah and Shaoxing wine “for depth of flay-vah and charac-tar“) for doing the same, because her faux-Chinese recipes are aimed at Western audiences who don’t know any better. But I was flabbergasted to learn that Chinn’s shows aren’t even aired in the West - they were made for Asia. To me, it’s the equivalent of going to Bologna and showing the people there how to cook spaghetti bolognaise. 

Then, there are his recipes. I’ve never been to his modern Vietnamese restaurant in Hanoi, but from watching one episode of his latest series, Bobby Chinn Cooks Asia, I’m not expecting to hear angels sing if I eat his food. His recipes are neither inventive, enticing nor authentic. Methinks that he is only using the ‘fusion cuisine’ card to get away with slapping together incongruous ingredients and calling it ‘new’.

Still, it is not all grave that his show has poor content and that he is a terrible cook. What’s really unpardonable is that Chinn just seems so obnoxious as a person. In an old episode shot in a Thai wet market, he points to an old plastic container used at a fish stall then says to the fish-seller (who obviously didn’t understand English and was defenceless): “You know we use that for toilets in the States?” In a more recent episode shot in India, he is standing by a chef who was cooking a popular dish. As she poured some oil into the wok, he asks a question that could spark an international incident: “Why do you guys use so much oil?”

Somebody burn his effigy in front of a US embassy already!

In my previous incarnation as a newspaper writer, I interviewed some of the best food/travel hosts on Discovery and found that they all had one thing in common: They have a solid, unwavering respect for people from different cultures and walks of life.

I once made the mistake of asking Ian Wright if bushwomen in Africa had ever proposed to him. “Bushwomen?” he gasped, sounding quite alarmed, and continued to answer my question using a more respectable term for women from primitive cultures. Even Anthony Bourdain, with his famous bad-boy gruffness reeking from his intimidating 1.9m frame, was remarkably polite and thoughtful in person. In one episode of his show shot in Vietnam, he was so formal and genuine in his thanks to his Vietnamese hosts that he risked looking totally uncool.

So the bottom line is, if you want to be a good lifestyle TV host, you gotta love people.

Bobby Chinn doesn’t appear to love people. Instead, he stamps his condescending, unfunny frat-boy witticisms all over them as he scratches his way to celebrity chefdom. 

He just wants to be famous. And I just want to punch his face in.

As it is with many foodies, Discovery’s Travel & Living is the centre of my universe.

It’s pretty much the only channel I watch, and I only hop out of it for cursory glimpses of the outside world during commercial breaks (or when that nauseating Bobby Chinn comes on).

Recently, I kept seeing this trailer for a new show called Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory, which looks like a cheap cooking programme fronted by this sweaty, straggly-haired Brit on how to make different types of chocolate desserts.

But just 10 minutes into watching the first episode last Sunday, I turned to my husband Z (who works at Discovery) and firmly chastised him: “Your trailer people did a very lousy job of selling this show.”

Because, instead of some throwaway food programme about chocolate , Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory turned out to be equal-parts documentary, tension-filled reality TV, and delicious cookshow shot to the same degree of gorgeousness as Jamie At Home.

It tells the story of Willie Harcourt-Cooze, a chocolate-obsessed bohemian who sells his house in England in order to buy a plantation in Venezuela to grow his own cacao beans and make his own brand of chocolate (“the best chocolate in the world”). So he transplants his young family to the grimy plantations of Venezuela, and spends 12 (12!) years cultivating his crop.

Thrown into the main narrative are yummy vignettes of Willie cooking a mind-boggling array of dishes using his very own 100% cacao — roasted pepper gazpacho, mushroom risotto, stewed fish in coconut milk, apricot injected roast pig, and a chocolate cake that promises to buckle any woman at the knees.

But his journey from plantation to the glitzy food halls of Selfridges is fraught with peril. In Venezuela, he has to contend with capricious weather, weird insect infestations, poor crop yields and a troop of workers waiting to be paid. Back home in Devonshire, he has three young children to feed, a worried wife to placate, barely enough money to keep the heaters running, and a constant stream of creditors beating down his door. This show is absolutely riveting.

I came out of it with this big question: Is there anything that I’m so passionate about that I’d sell my house for and live on mere subsistence for 12 years to fulfill a dream?

Sigh, no. Not even the pursuit of the world’s most divine strawberry shortcake. I’m the sort who can only sleep at night when I know there’s a nice pile of savings in my bank account, fat enough to cushion me against sudden unemployment or a Morakot-sized typhoon.

Which explains why I’m no headlining star of a totally awesome TV show. Damn.

Look who’s baaaaaaaaaack…

I’ve gone AWOL for a very long three months but it’s not without good reason, folks.

1. I was renovating! Yup. Changed the floors, hacked a wall, relined a bathroom, overhauled my entire kitchen and installed a brand spankin’ new oven which is bigger and meaner! But…

2. I lost my camera. So I can’t take photos of my lean-and-mean oven to show y’all yet. But soon.

3. Last but not least, I have not been blogging because, haha, I have a bun baking in my other oven! Details of that coming up soon, but suffice it to say that I am all pickled and sng-buayed out

Not sure when I’m gonna resume writing. But since there’s maintenance works coming up at my apartment block and the maid is going home for a month, I’m gonna stay put at my parents’ for at least two more months. Which means no baking. By October, though, I’ll be back with a vengeance. See ya then.

This is what I’ve learnt from making the cake for my cousin Ambrose’s wedding last month. No matter what you wear or how stylishly you’re turned out, a wedding cake maker will only emerge from the occasion looking like a drenched chicken.

This is what happened.

Ambrose and his adorable wife, Wendy, had wanted a really pretty, romantic cake similar to the one I did for C&A. I threw them a few ideas and was thrilled when they picked this one — a confetti of small flowers scattered down three tiers — because I’ve been dying to make this design for a long time.

But when the wedding day arrived, I found myself feeling really nervous, because:

1. It’s the first time that all of my family and relatives – including my dad and brothers – saw me making an actual wedding cake. They’ve heard about my bizarre hobby for some time now. But they finally clapped eyes on one such creation — the reason I’ve been neglecting my child and getting my husband to do takeaways this past year.

2. A lot of the finishing touches had to be done on-site. The tiers can’t be fully adorned with the flowers until they’re at the venue or they’ll be damaged when they’re stacked up.

3. Finally, this design requires the ultimate in creative artistry — how to make like the flowers were scattered naturally? Like the wind did it?

This cake would take a lot of work so I started early in the week. I took one day to bake the chocolate cake layers, and another day to make the pastillage flowers using seven different cutters. But the flowers took a shorter time than I’d expected. After hunching over my dining table for just three hours, I had at least 300 blossoms ready to go. I even had time to watch TV and fix dinner.

The day before the wedding, I realised why the flowers took such a short time to do — I didn’t make enough, fool! The 300 blossoms weren’t even enough to fill up the top tier! And it was already evening time!

Gripped by panic, I yelled at my husband Z that disaster has struck. “N’eh mind, I help,” replied my hero. Promptly, he sat down and started rolling out the pastillage and pressing the cutters. But he’s not doing it right. The flowers came up looking like bug excrement. This is a mountain-biker who conquers slopes and dirty terrain at the speed of lightning — five flowers a minute is not his thing.

So he gave up and asked Tinah, my dad’s maid who was babysitting En En for the day, to take over. So she pressed the baby to him, sat down and started cutting. She was doing a great, great job, but after 10 minutes, she suddenly looked up and said: “Miss, I have to go home.” It was 7pm and Cinderella had to go home to cook dinner for my dad.

So I was back to being a one-woman factory. Oh, but I adapted fast. Fuelled by desperation, I was cutting out them flowers as if I had a robotic arm. After about an hour, my table was strewn with delicate little flowers, which all started to dry up nicely.

The next day, I arrived at the venue, Au Petit Salut in Dempsey, and got straight to work at the dining hall. The top two tiers were already covered with flowers, so I only needed to patch up the seams for that natural, wind-swept look.

Butofcos, trouble would strike again. My carefully laid pink fondant started to drag downwards and bulge at the bottom. Serves me right for filling the cakes with white chocolate mousse. It was probably too soft and got soaked into the cakes; the cakes lost their height so the fondant dragged. Next time, just be like everyone else and use buttercream, fool!

So not only did I have to stick on, like, 1 million flowers, I also had to keep snipping at the surplus fondant that kept creeping downwards. I could feel sweat flooding my armpits, my hairdo collapsing and my mascara melting. To add to the chaos, my relatives started arriving (on time! Who arrives at weddings on time?!) and plying me with questions like, “You made this? When? How? Can you eat it? What’s it made of? Where’s your baby? Where’s your husband? Where are you sitting?” Notice, that not one person said the cake looked nice. So my sweat glands reacted in accordance.

Then, like a flash flood, the entire wedding party arrived and filled up the dining hall. I wasn’t even near done so I wheeled the cake into some dark corner near the kitchen so I could work in peace. By the time I finally completed the cake, I had lost my fight against moisture. I found myself occasionally clapping my knees because, you know, I was also sweating where the sun don’t shine.

Thankfully, W&A decided to cut the cake before lunch was served.  I almost wanted to punch the air in jubilation when they sank in the knife — because even if it toppled, the fondant slid off and the flowers exploded — it can’t hurt me now.

But the best thing about this experience was Wendy’s reaction when she first saw the cake. My gorgeously bubbly cousin-in-law, who is from Hong Kong, exclaimed: “Ngor hou jung yee er!” (I really like it!). And instantly, it was as if the wet patches around my armpits got put under the instant-handdryer. That reaction alone, my friends, is worth being a drenched chicken for. Welcome to the family!

Dear all, since the last time I wrote about cake decorating, my piping skills still suck so bad it could frighten small children. But! *cymbal clash!* I have found a solution to my dismal handicap. And it’s really quite simple.

Don’t know how to pipe? Don’t pipe!

There are other types of cakes in this world that don’t need buttercream rosettes to look good. And, as in the case of this cake, they can even taste better.

Tired of Western cookbooks that don’t work, I’ve been turning to Asian titles for a change. One of the first cookbooks that landed on my desk when I was a food writer was Asian High Tea Favourites by Malaysian author Betty Saw. I remember making her Chocolate Crinkle cookies that came out smelling and tasting like Famous Amos (no joke). So surely her cakes wouldn’t be too far off.

Mysteriously named Surprise Cake, this cake is basically butter cake covered with a moan-inducing topping of minced pineapple, dessicated coconut and crushed cornflakes. Yeah yeah, so it uses canned pineapple, which is loaded with sugar, preservatives and other life-threatening stuff. But I love how it’s so Malaysian/Singaporean/Thai. I mean, South-east Asia is serious about their fake fruit. I can’t think of another region in the world (oh, okay, there’s also China) that has entire industries that peel, deseed, sweeten and basically falsify fruits like longans and lychees to resemble flawless fishballs.

(I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, the best thing about Chinese wedding banquets was dessert – I’d wolf down the canned longans in double-quick time and leave the pukey almond jelly untouched.)

Consider the mutated marvel called stuffed rambutans. How on earth do they remove the seed and present the flesh as if the seed never happened? As if such technical wizardry isn’t impressive enough, they then proceed to stuff them with delicious chunks of pineapple. I love!

So anyway. When you bite into this cake, there is the expected moistness and softness of the butter cake. But then, there’s also a crunch of cornflakes here, and bits of coconut and pineapple there. If pina coladas are to be reborn as cake, this is it.

PINEAPPLE AND COCONUT CRUNCH CAKE (Adapted from Betty Saw’s Asian High Tea Favourites)

You’d need a 9-inch butter cake (you could use any butter cake recipe, such as this one)

For crunch topping, you’d need:

120g butter

115g brown sugar

30g cornflakes, crushed

1 can (565g) canned pineapple, chopped

30g dessicated coconut

1. Prepare the butter cake and pour batter into a 9-inch cake pan.

2. To make topping, cream butter and sugar until mixture is light and fluffly. Then stir in cornflakes, pineapple and coconut.

3. You’d need two spoons for this. Scoop up one spoonful of topping, then, with the second spoon, press it down so it forms a flattened segment. Carefully place the segment on top of the cake batter. Repeat until all of the cake surface is covered. (You can’t just dump all of the topping on the cake and spread it out with a butter knife cos the topping is heavy and will sink. The topping is also not easily spreadable, which is why you have to flatten it and patch up bit by bit.)

4. Then bake the cake and topping together in a preheated oven at 175 deg C, for about 50 minutes.