Just Some Pics

Here are some things that made me scratch my head and wonder...

Went on holiday and saw this.
Notice the location of the bath tub 
and the shower head. Did the
contractor need glasses?

Perhaps the wind was too strong for
these metal dividers? Most of them lean
like this in the entire area (somewhere in Cheras)

And here are some things that brought a smile...

Knowing that I'm an Angry Bird fan, my friend
bought me these paper cups for baking cupcakes!

Another friend visited Korea during Christmas
and she helped me buy these
Skinfood skincare products at less than
half the retail price in Malaysia :)

She even brought back lots of samples.
(big big smiles)

First Attempt at Rainbow Cake

I decided to try baking a rainbow cake for hubby's birthday. The idea came from some photos I saw in Facebook, so I looked up YouTube for the proper way to make it.

I used a normal butter cake recipe as my sponge cakes usually don't turn out too well. Bless my Science teacher in school for drilling into our brains the correct order of the colours of the rainbow - this is how I remember it:

Roy G. Biv...just pretend it's some guy's name, and there we have...

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet!

Prepare the cake batter and pour into 7 paper cups,
each cup with the same amount of batter.
Add colouring.

Pour the first colour (I couldn't get it to turn red
no matter how much red colouring I used,
so pink was the next best option)
into a cake tin lined with non-stick baking sheet. There's nothing worse than
a beautiful cake stuck in the pan after baking!

Pour the next colour in the middle of the first colour.
Lift the pan about 5cm from the table
and let it drop so that the colour will spread evenly.

Repeat with the rest of the colours.
Bake.

This is how it looked like when taken out
of the oven.

I realised that I should have added a smaller amount
of batter for the last colour to get a more balanced layer.

There were lots of 'ooh' and 'aah' when the cake was cut and lots of photos snapped before the cake got eaten :)

This was a simple and quick way to make a rainbow cake. Next time I'll try the more time-consuming one...baking one layer at a time and assembling it (gasp):

Kicking Back In Kuantan

Had a 3 day-2 night break in Kuantan during the Christmas week. With the monsoon season in full swing and pictures of floods in the news we were at first a bit hesitant about going, but we had already made bookings for the accommodation and decided to just go ahead. After all, God had been kind in blessing us with good weather up in  Penang a few weeks before, so we trusted that He would be more than able to grant us good weather for this trip as well.

And so He did.

Kuantan town was flooded the day before we arrived but throughout the 3 days we had good weather except for some slight drizzle. Then the rains started again as we were leaving Kuantan town to head back to KL. God is good :)

Puddles everywhere when we arrived.

Bright sunshine and dry ground the next day :)

As is our current trend during family vacations, we went scouting out the shopping malls. The Berjaya Megamall was a bit disappointing. It used to be bustling with activity the last time we went about 2 years ago, but now many of the shoplots are unoccupied. The East Coast Mall is a whole lot better and we managed to get some really good bargains at the Brands Outlet shop. My daughter, SweetTeen, was thrilled to get her hands on her favourite RotiBoy buns as well.

On the first night we had dinner at Pak Su Seafood Restaurant which we had  visited a few times before on previous trips. The restaurant used to be very crowded but this time there were only a few tables of customers. The bill came up to around RM200 for the 7 of us (we usually travel with my parents-in-law and hubby's sis). On the second night we decided to try this restaurant that we had noticed while we were having breakfast, the Alor Akar Seafood Restaurant. This place was very crowded, the food was good and most of all the price was so unbelievable at around RM90...and it was the same number of dishes as the night before!

Steamed fish in sweet and spicy sauce.

Large and juicy 'lala' stir-fried with ginger.

We visited our favourite park at Taman Gelora and walked along the beach at Teluk Chempedak. I posted some pictures in Facebook and my sis-in-law commented that she didn't know Kuantan was so beautiful...it looked like we were in Australia or somewhere overseas!

Gelora Park

Teluk Chempedak beach

One thing I always remember about Kuantan is the incredibly large road signs which I wish we could have in KL as well. I can even read them from afar without putting on my glasses...well almost, since I'm very short-sighted!

See how the road sign is almost as long
as a MYvi?