Tending the sweet tooth
After the sweet tooth’s G-Spot was hit head on by P.S. Café’s orgasmic 3G treat, it started asking for more, more, more! The dessert maniac was so turned that no amount of counseling (or even Oprah’s intervention) will help. Saccharine shots were in order.
With a good number of sugar shops in Singapore, this was not a problem. There’s a proportionate amount of sweet treat suppliers for every savory restaurant there is, and finding these shops will be of no difficulty. Some you’d chance upon in a food hall, some you can Google, or ushered to by fellow dessert freaks.
My hosts Googie and Veron are food lovers. There was to be no dessert after a hearty burger meal at the ala-NYC diner, it will be at Empire Café for their recommended Sago Gula Melaka.
The Empire Café is on the opposite corner of Seah Street Deli at the Raffles Hotel arcade. It’s a quaint café that mimics the look and ambience of a typical Singapore coffee house of the 1920s, and on the menu are international staples and local favorites. One of which is the popular Malaysian-born dessert of Sago Gula Melaka.
This delightful dessert, made of Gula Melaka (coco sugar), sago pudding and coconut milk, is rich and creamy sweetened with the very distinctive taste of the coco sugar.
With a pouring ingredient to sweeten a dish, desserts like these can easily be over-sweetened. But I like Empire’s preparation (proof is in the clean plate). They must have mastered their proportions in every serving of this dessert. I don’t mind having another serving.
Now for chocolate, the dark variety in particular. For a listing of Singapore’s best chocolate desserts, I Google-d it and Awfully Chocolate popped up. Although I listed down its address, I accidentally found an outlet in the food hall of Raffles City.
Awfully Chocolate wanted to keep their cakes simple and decided to make it in chocolate. So in 1998 they started selling only one cake in their shop- a simple dark chocolate cake between layers of dark chocolate fudge. It is rich in taste, moist and light, and never overly sweet.
Today, (across Southeast Asia) they have a few more dark chocolate creations popping against their all white display cases, including a thicker and richer version of their original All Chocolate Cake but with more bite- the Super Stacked Chocolate Cake (SG$6.50 per 100g), using different kinds of chocolate for the six inner and outer fudge layers. A sin you can always forgive yourself for indulging on again and again.
The other two piles in the case looked desirable, the hand cut Dark Chocolate Truffles (SG$13 per 100g) and the Kahlua Bars, truffles with a touch of coffee liqueur (SG$15 per 100g). They were calling my name.
The summons was heeded. I took a bite and was embraced with love. Well you know the effects of chocolate on us. I savored the dark chocolate fix and look forward to this shop’s ice cream creation.
Saccharine craving sated.
For more travel and lifestyle stories, visit http://jeepneyjinggoy.blogspot.com/ and http://apples-and-lemons.blogspot.com/
For more travel and lifestyle stories, visit http://jeepneyjinggoy.blogspot.com/ and http://apples-and-lemons.blogspot.com/
Published in SunStar newspaper on March 15, 2012.
