Banana Layer Cake with Passionfruit Cream Cheese Icing

Sorry this post is slightly late and will probably be slightly incoherent and delirious. It was a very busy weekend and I woke up this morning totally sick and gross. Damn you immune system, you were doing so well this year! Anyway this weekend we were celebrating my niece's one month with a traditional Chinese full moon party. It was a pretty small gathering with pretty much just family and I was in charge of the cake.

My brother & sis-in-law requested their favourite cake flavour, banana cake with passionfruit cream cheese icing, a flavour combination we learnt about from Simmone Logue and have loved ever since. The construction of this cake was a nightmare, nothing went to plan for me. But we'll talk about that later. It was worth all the effort because it was for this cute face:

All together now: AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

So anyway, I used the same recipe as last time but I was gonna make it special by baking four layers of cake and using this petal icing technique. I usually stay far away from icing techniques like this that require tidy and precise work. I am not good at either. But the tutorials online make it look so doable that I just had to try it. I learnt very quickly that the cream cheese icing I had made was WAY WAY too runny for it. And it was so runny that my cake semi-collapsed, so I had to make a whole new batch of icing and start over. The macarons I wanted to make in rainbow colours spelling out her name turned out so uneven and ugly but I didn't have time to redo them. BAH.

Like any full moon celebrations there was ang koo kueh from Alice's (tortoise-shaped glutinous rice flour cakes filled with mung bean paste). I love this kueh.

I also helped prepare the red eggs, which are meant to symbolise fertility and harmony.

Lunch was ordered off the Mamak catering menu; a gigantic pile of fried chicken, huge serves of nasi lemak, mee goreng and chicken satay and a HUGE 4 FREAKIN LITRES of teh o ais limau (Malaysian iced tea with lime). I drank a lot of tea and ate a lot of chicken.

We had to wake up little Sarah to cut the cake...

...which made her bawl her eyes out at first, hence the funny face below.

And there's a shot below of the layers inside the cake. Not as wonky as I thought, and super moist and delicious. Yay! I also decorated the cake with gold coin chocolates and some red Lindt chocolate eggs. It's the first time that having the supermarkets selling Easter eggs ridiculously early has actually come in handy! I don't want to talk about the macarons, sometimes you just make a bad batch of macs. Now I need to go make myself some chicken soup.

Banana Layer Cake with Passionfruit Cream Cheese Icing

(based on this recipe, makes a 4-layer 20cm square or round cake)

For the banana cake:

250g softened unsalted butter (salted is fine too)

2&1/4 cups (about 500g) sugar (I used caster/superfine but granulated white sugar is fine too)

4 eggs

2 cups mashed very over-ripe bananas (about 4 bananas)

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

500g (4 cups) plain flour

2 tsp bicarb (baking) soda

1 tsp salt

1&1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/3 tsp ground allspice

1 cup buttermilk (or 1 cup milk + 2 tsp lemon juice)

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F), grease well and line the base of two 20cm square tins with baking paper (or round tins if you prefer a round cake). Cream butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl with an electric mixer on high until pale and fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time until combined then add banana and vanilla and beat until combined. Sift dry ingredients (flour, bicarb, salt, cinnamon, allspice) together in a separate bowl. Add half the dry ingredients and half the buttermilk to them mixture, fold until just combined, then add the remaining dry mixture and buttermilk and repeat. Divide mixture between the tins and bake for 50-60 mins or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean and the cake is golden brown. (If you only have one tin bake one cake after the other) Cool cake in its tin on a wire rack for a few minutes before turning out.

For the passionfruit cream cheese icing:

500g (about 4.5 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

250g (about 9oz) cream cheese, softened

3-5 passionfruit pulp(adjust to taste, you need more if you strain out the seeds)

2 tsp lemon juice (optional)

About 500g (4 cups) icing sugar, sifted, adjust to correct texture

Place  butter and cream cheese in a large mixing bowl and beat on high until smooth and fluffy. Add passionfruit pulp and lemon juice (I strained the seeds out of the passionfruit pulp so I would have a smooth pipable icing but this isn't necessary). Gradually add icing sugar and mix on low until it starts to come together, then mix on high until fluffy. You may need to add more icing sugar to get the ideal consistency, you want the icing to be easy to pipe but to hold its shape. 

To assemble cake, slice the two banana cakes if half if you wish to have four layers. Sandwich a layer of icing between the cake layers and crumb coat the outside. You may need to chill the cake and the leftover icing if it is too runny. Spread or pipe remaining icing on the outside of the cake. If you wish you try the petal icing technique I used in the photos, there is a tutorial here but I wouldn't recommend it for a soft icing like this cream cheese one.

Chinese Lantern Macarons with Jackfruit Buttercream

Happy Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year) everyone! I hope everyone who was celebrating with a big dinner last night had a great time and lots of delicious food. I definitely did, we prepared our usual masses of dishes including my favourite, the yee sang (I wrote about it a couple years ago if you have no idea what it is). As an extra treat I decided to make a little Chinese New Year-themed sweet, these Chinese Lantern-shaped Macarons with Jackfruit Buttercream. I have yet to try to master any of the traditional biscuits and sweets that are usually served during Chinese New Year, but I thought it might be fun to do something with my own spin instead.

In case it's not immediately obvious, I was attempting to make my macarons look like the red paper laterns that are usually hung up as decoration during Chinese New Year (something like this) It was pretty easy to pipe the basic shape of the lantern, but originally I had wanted to put a bit more detail on them by using gold glitter sugar, but that just made them look ugly and messy. So I kept them plain, and stole a bunch of little gold strings off my old Christmas ornaments (I knew they would come in handy eventually!), and some little red tassles from some other Chinese New Year decorations. I'm pretty satisfied with the result; they're quite cute and very festive, if a little plain.

I struggled a lot with choosing an appropriate flavour for these macarons. Something orange seemed like the obvious choice but it was little too boring for me. I was tossing up between lychee, mango or jackfruit and finally decided on jackfruit because it was the most unusual and strongest flavoured fruit. I have no idea if jackfruit is a good or bad fruit to serve during CNY (I've only heard that pears are a nono), for all I know I've just given myself 444 years of bad luck. But jackfruits are something that I strongly associate with going back to Malaysia to visit all my relatives, so it seemed appropriate for me. The flavour of the fruit is something that not everyone will like, it has a very strong smell that's nowhere near as pungent as durian but definitely still distinctive. I used the canned jackfruit in sugar syrup which isn't quite as strong smelling/flavoured, and I think it worked beautifully.

I added the jackfruit puree and some of the sugar syrup to my usual Swiss Meringue Buttercream, since it is capable of taking up quite a lot of liquid while still staying thick and creamy. Overnight the flavour matured well and you could really taste the jackfruit in the macaron. If that flavour of filling doesn't appeal to you or you have no idea what the heck a jackfruit is, I mention in the recipe below that you can replace it with lychee or mango. You could completely switch it up and make this pineapple jam as the filling instead. I would have loved to make the jam but I didn't have enough time, or the patience to carve the pineapples :P Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous new year, and sending my love to my parents and all my other relatives overseas. I would love to be in Malaysia right now eating all kinds of yummy things and receiving red packets, it's the last year I'll be able to receive them!

Chinese Lantern Macarons with Jackfruit Buttercream
(makes approximately 10-12 macarons)
100g aged egg whites (you can use fresh eggs too, just make sure they are room temperature. I always use fresh these days, and zap it in the microwave on defrost for 10 seconds)
110g almond meal, at room temperature and well sifted
200g icing sugar
50g caster sugar
Optional: 1 tsp powdered egg whites (available from The Essential Ingredient), helps to stabilise egg whites but is not necessary
To decorate: red and yellow food colouring (powdered or gel), gold string

For the jackfruit buttercream:
2 egg whites
1/2 cup caster (superfine) sugar
150g unsalted butter
1/2 cup canned jackfruit puree (about 3-4 pieces of canned jackfruit) + 1/4-1/3 cup jackfruit sugar syrup from can to taste
Note: if you don't like jackfruit or it is unavailable, you can replace with canned lychee, fresh mango or even durian if you're feeling adventurous
(If you're new to making Swiss meringue buttercream, these wonderful tutorials from two of my favourite bloggers will help)

Line two baking sheets with baking paper. Place icing sugar in food processor and pulse for a minute to remove any lumps. Stir in almond meal and pulse for about 30 seconds to combine. Place in a large mixing bowl and set aside. Using an electric mixer, beat egg whites and egg white powder in a medium mixing bowl until the egg white powder dissolves and it reaches soft peaks. With the mixer on high speed, gradually add sugar and beat until it reaches stiff peaks.

Add meringue to your dry mixture and mix, quickly at first to break down the bubbles in the egg white (you really want to beat all the large bubbles out of the mixture, be rough!), then mix carefully as the dry mixture becomes incorporated and it starts to become shiny again. As it just comes together, place about 1/4 of the mixture in a separate bowl. Add yellow food colouring to the smaller amount and red colouring to the other and continue mixing until it is the right consistency. Take care not to overmix, the mixture should flow like lava and a streak of mixture spread over the surface of the rest of the mixture should disappear after about 30 seconds. Place red and yellow mixture in separate piping bags, the red with a wider 1cm tip and the yellow with a much narrower tip (see photo). Pipe fat oval shapes with the red mixture, and then carefully pipe smalls strips of yellow on the top and bottom of the ovals. Tap baking sheets carefully and firmly on the benchtop to remove any large bubbles.

Leave to dry for at least half an hour to an hour, so that when you press the surface of one gently it does not break. This will help prevent any cracking and help the feet to form on the macs. Preheat your oven to 140-150°C (285-300°F), depending on your oven. Place on top of an overturned roasting tray or another baking sheet if your sheets are not professional grade, for better heat distribution. Bake for 15-20 minutes, depending on the size of your shells. Carefully test if the base of the shell is ready by gently lifting one and if it's still soft and sticking to the baking paper, then it needs to bake for a few minutes longer. Remove from the oven and cool on the tray for a few minutes, then gently remove from the sheet and place on a wire rack to cool completely.

Prepare the buttercream; whisk together egg white and sugar in a large heatproof bowl. Clip a candy thermometer to side of bowl. Set bowl over a pan of simmering water, and whisk until mixture reaches 70°C (160°F) and sugar has dissolved, about 5 minutes.

With a mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat egg white mixture on high speed until cooled and thick, about 5 minutes. Reduce speed to medium, and add butter, 1 tablespoon at a time, beating until incorporated after each addition. If mixture is runny at this point, refrigerate for 10 minutes and then continue beating until it starts to hold its shape (this can take a while). Mix in jackfruit puree and then gradually add the jackfruit sugar syrup from the can depending on how strong you want it, taste testing as you go. Spoon or pipe buttercream on to macaron shells, sandwiching them together and adding a gold string sticking out of the top of each one if you wish. Refrigerate overnight in an airtight container to allow the flavours to mature, serve at room temperature.

Mango Pudding

Fresh mango. It's one of the best things about summer. It's weird that I don't love summer and I prefer cooler weather. I spent most of my life next to rainforests and deserts. But I hate it when it gets ridiculously hot. I hate humidity. I hate catching stuffy trains with no air-conditioning and having my legs stick to the plastic seats. I hate trying to fall asleep when it's too hot. But summer means that mangoes are in season. Mangoes are one of my favourite fruits.

So I thought I would share this super easy recipe for making mango pudding. My brother mentioned it to me after seeing it on Food Safari not too long ago, it caught his interest because the recipe used melted mango ice cream to make the pudding. It's a ridiculously easy recipe, it almost feels like cheating. I found my pudding turned out a little too creamy because I used Weis Mango & Cream ice cream, I think that next time I will make it using a mango sorbet and perhaps a little bit of vanilla ice cream. But it's smooth and creamy with lots of chunks of fresh mango through it. It's one reason to look forward to summer this year.

Mango Pudding
(recipe from Food Safari)
1 cup water
6 tsp powdered gelatine
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 litre soft mango ice cream
75ml evaporated milk
1 cup crushed ice
1 large mango, peeled seeded and diced

Remove ice cream an hour before starting to allow it to soften. Place water in a small saucepan and bring to the boil on medium heat. Mix sugar and gelatine together and then gradually stir into the boiling water. Stir over medium heat until thick and syrupy - 5 to 10 minutes. Slowly pour into a large heatproof mixing bowl. Add mango ice cream and stir until smooth, then add evaporated milk, crushed ice and diced mango pieces and stir together.

Pour mixture into individual serving glasses or bowls. Chill in the refrigerator until set, at least two hours.

Winsure Barbeque Restaurant, Chatswood

I'm very sorry it's been slow going around here. It's definitely not due to lack of interest in my blog, my laptop died rather spectacularly the other day and it took all of my recent photos for my upcoming blog posts with it. So all I can give you for the moment is what I have left on my camera, which isn't much since I did a dump onto my laptop just before it died. The most painful is that I lost all my daring bakers' challenge photos *sob* so it looks like I will have to redo it. Again. SOB. Anyway, forget about my bad luck with technology and let's work with what we have. We ended up at Winsure for a lazy late lunch, after some healthy retail therapy. It's a great place to drop by for a casual meal since it's so cheap and the food is quick and pretty tasty.

Roast pork and Chinese sausage ($15.80)

The only thing that bothers me is that the serving sizes are inconsistent everytime we come, so I'm never sure how much I should order. Today they're average, so we ended up ordering just the right amount. We always get a plate of their Chinese sausage because it is so deliciously naughty. Fatty slices of meat filled with flavour, these aren't the same as the chinese dried sausage (lap cheong) but they pack about the same amount of flavour in the juicy meat. The roast pork is super fatty with a super crunchy layer of crackling on top, it's neeearly burnt but you can't taste it.

Plain congee ($3.00)

Instead of ordering steamed rice to accompany our meat, we get a big bowl of rice porridge. This is officially my new favourite combination - Chinese bbq meat + congee = comfort in a bowl. The steaming bowl of congee is the perfect match for the fatty meat with no sauce, it adds moisture and tempers the grease level. There's something very Chinese and very homely about it.

E-Fu Noodles - Dry Fried Yee Meen ($9.80)

A big bowl of yee meen is something we always get here, but today it's rather empty looking, lacking the usually generous serve of vegetables and sauce. It's still satisfying though, with the chewy egg noodles and chinese mushrooms. Anyway, it's just one of those places that is perfect when you can't decide what you want to eat and you want it to be quick, cheap and unfussy.

Be patient, it may take a while before I get my blog back on its feet now that I am laptopless, but I will definitely be back soon!

Winsure Barbeque Restaurant
302 Victoria Ave,
Chatswood NSW 2067,
(02) 9411 2988

Simple Dinners - Neil Perry's Soy Sauce Chicken

This dish is Number 1 on my list of easy dinners to whip up. It's SO easy, so yummy and will last you several days and you can use the leftovers to make all sorts of yummy things. Here's the deal; you buy a whole chicken and whatever vegetables you want to serve with it and then you basically throw the chicken in a pot of sauce and forget about it. And somehow you end up with a delicious meal. Sounds too good to be true? Here it is.

Neil Perry's Soy Sauce Chicken
(from Simply Asian by Neil Perry)

1 free-range chicken (approx 1.4 kg)
1 cup light soy sauce
1 cup shao xing wine
1 cup sugar
5 whole star anise

Bring a large pot of water to the boil and then turn off the heat. After 5 minutes, plunge the chicken, breast side down, into the pot and leave for 1 minute. Remove the chicken and discard the water. Rinse the chicken in cold water and dry with kitchen paper. (I usually am too lazy and skip this step to save time. It doesn't seem to affect the dish toooo much)

In a pot that will fit the chicken snugly, combine the soy, shao xing, star anise, sugar and 2 cups water. Bring to the boil and cook for 5 minutes , then add the chicken, breast side down and simmer for 30 minutes (if I skipped the first step then I do this with the lid on for the first 10 minutes).

Remove from the heat then turn the chicken over, put a lid on the pot and leave to stand for 30 minutes. Do not remove the lid during this time or the chicken will not finish cooking properly.

Remove the chicken from the broth. Use a spoon to scoop some oil or scum that might be floating over the top of the broth. (My mum has a nifty meshed scooper designed just for this job) Chop the chicken chinese style and reassemble on a serving platter. Serve with vegetables (I like serving with steamed brocolli) and the cooking broth with steamed rice, or simply with Szechaun salt and pepper.

No matter how many times I have learnt to chop a chicken, I always end up hacking into it and it looks like a shredded, mangled mess. So apologies for the messy presentation. But it was still wonderfully succulent and the sauce is so delectable. It has that great balance of sweet, salty and sour with the depth of flavour and fantastic aroma from the star anise.

The best bit is that you are usually left over with so much sauce that you can use it even when you've eaten up all the chicken. I use the sauce as a marinade for steaks and other meat dishes, and also use the sauce and any leftover meat and veges to make the most delicious fried rice. You get seriously good value out of this recipe!

Simple Dinners - Soba with Chinese Mushrooms

I am weird when it comes to cooking vs. baking. I will put any amount of time, effort and money into whatever recipe I am following for baking, but I get incredibly lazy when I cook my dinner. Which seems ridiculous when I think about it, they should provide the same amount of satisfaction really. I blame my sweet tooth.

So easy dinners really appeal to me, especially ones that I can throw together with whatever I have in my fridge. I like to make my dinners healthy and full of veges, it gives me an excuse to squeeze in a yummy dessert afterwards every now and then ;) I looove chinese mushrooms, and cooking them this way makes them really versatile, we even layer these mushrooms into a sushi rice box with finely sliced cucumber, radish, egg, salmon and seaweed.

Soba with Chinese Mushrooms
5 large dried Chinese Mushrooms
1 carrot, sliced
Mirin
Soy sauce with dashi (the pre-mixed stuff they use for soba sauce, but regular soy sauce will also do)
Sugar

Soak dried mushrooms in cold water for several hours until they are plump and moist. Drain mushrooms. Add equal parts mirin and soy sauce in a small saucepan (I think I put about 1/4 cup of each) with the soaked mushrooms. Add water to saucepan so mushrooms are covered by the liquid. Boil on medium high heat for about half an hour, stirring regularly. Remove mushrooms from sauce with a fork and carefully cut off the woody stems. Thinly slice mushrooms and return to the sauce. Add carrots and also add sugar to taste, you should not need much sugar. Simmer on medium heat until carrots are tender and sauce is slightly thicker.

Cook soba in rapidly boiling water for 4 minutes. Rinse under cold running water and drain. Serve with mushrooms, carrots and sauce.

This was a pretty light meal and A demanded some sort of meat, so I dragged some good old faithful pork mince out of the freezer. I get more like my Mum every day, she always has smalls portions of pork mince in freezer bags. I defrosted it and marinated it in Xiao-Shing wine, a bit of light soy, white pepper and sesame oil. Then I placed it on top of some chopped silken tofu and bok choy and steamed it all together. So easy and not too naughty! As a result, our dinner was a confused mix of Japanese and Chinese, but it was tasty and not bad for something thrown together from the remnants of my fridge.

Savoury Steamed Pumpkin Cake

I recently acquired a small collection of my Mum's favourite recipes and cookbooks. This is incredibly important to me because my Mum, like most people's Mums, is the best cook I know and I desperately want to learn to cook like her. A lot of her recipes are on scraps of paper, with measurements in ounces and some were only lists of ingredients with no instructions. I have made it my mission while she is here to spend some time watching her prepare some of her recipes.

(I also have to remind myself to buy a recipe book to keep all my favourite recipes because my fridge magnet is struggling with the load of recipes it has to hold up on my fridge door.)

One great recipe is her steamed pumpkin cake made with rice flour. It's similar to the steamed taro cake and white radish cake that you can get at yum cha, but I think that the pumpkin is the winner.

Steamed Savoury Pumpkin Rice Cake
4 tbsp oil
6 garlic cloves, chopped
6 shallots, chopped
60g dried prawns, soaked and chopped
2 pairs Chinese sausages, diced
200g pork mince, 6 tbsp oil
600g pumpkin, shredded
1 tbsp chicken stock powder

Batter:(mixed)

300g rice flour
60g tapioca flour
4 cups water
1 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper

Heat up the oil, fry the chopped garlic and shallots until fragrant. Add dried prawns and stir-fry until fragrant. Add the chinese sausage, minced meat and stir-fry until fragrant.

Mix in pumpkin, chicken stock and batter. Stir until thick. Taste. (Hahahaha I love these instructions!) Pour into a 22cm square tray and steam for 45 minutes with high heat until cooked. Remove, leave to cool and cut into serving pieces. It can also be fried with a little oil until golden brown on both sides before serving.

This pumpkin cake is extremely moreish. Mum serves it with freshly chopped spring onions, red chillis and thinly sliced deep fried spring onions sprinkled on top. It is absolute gold with any good chilli sauce. If you aren't lucky enough to have some good homemade sauce, Lingham's chilli sauce is a good substitute.

Kuala Lumpur Part 8

Ying Ker Lou @ The Curve

I was in the mood for a lighter meal one night and Hakka food at Ying Ker Lou was the first place that was suggested. The Curve is home to a bustling street full of restaurants and cafes that come alive at night. I love love love the Malaysian shopping centres at night, it is such a novelty to me. With the abundance of fairy lights and shopping after dinner, who wouldn't love it?

Jasmin tea

The tea here is served in these gorgeous metal pots that seem to enhance the flavour. I love my Chinese tea and this one is wonderfully fragrant (or 'heong' as my Mum would put it).

My favourite dish is the steamed bean curd with pork mince. It's such a simple, clean dish but oh so tasty. The pork is so moist. The sauce is rich with flavour without being too oily or starchy, unlike similar style dishes that I sometimes order at Hong Kong style restaurants in Sydney. I have been desperately trying to recreate this dish at home.

Vegetable hotpot and stuffed bittergourd

The vegetable hotpot is similar to the steamed beancurd but with a slightly lighter sauce and a ton of different vegetables. I don't get to try the stuffed bittermelon, to my dismay it is filled with chestnuts and the others tell me that it is excellent. But why not fill it with pork instead?

Drunken chicken soup

The final dish was a big bowl of drunken chicken soup. The portion sizes at Ying Ker Lou were generous, but we had no trouble finishing anything. The soup was greedily lapped up by everyone at the table, incredibly rich in flavour with a strong hit of ginger and plenty of black fungus. While it wasn't the cheapest of eats around, it was a satisfying meal in a charming area.

Kuala Lumpur Part 6

The Seafood Parade

I can never stop marvelling at the price of the enormous, extravagant seafood feasts you can have in Malaysia. The food is just SO cheap, I am pretty sure that some of them cost as much as my fried chicken dinner in Epping last night. So I could not complain one teensy tiny bit that for my last five nights, and for many other nights during my visit, we were treated to ginormous seafood dinners with various family members.

1. King Crab

Steamed fish, stir fried veges, butter crab with mantou

Dad's side of the family love King Crab, so we come together for a birthday celebration. This is the first time I've gotten to try the butter crab. King Crab serves a variety of sauces with their crabs, and this particular sauce is a creamy butter sauce. The sauce is a mixture of butter, condensed milk, bird's eye chillis and curry leaves. It's wonderfully rich and every trace of the sauce is greedily mopped up with the freshly fried mantou bread. King Crab really know their mantou, it's always perfectly crisp and warm. We try a variety of other meat, vegetable and seafood dinners but none of them come to mind easily so they were not spectacular, but not terrible either.

2. King Crab Take 2
We return to King Crab right at the end of our holiday for the purpose of having some Singapore Style Chilli Crab. Because of some family issues, our planned trip to Singapore was cancelled and I had not had a chance to fulfill my promise to A's Dad that I would stuff A full of chilli crab (it was his Dad's absolute favourite dish when he visited Singapore years ago). This time I have full reign over the menu since it is just a small group of us.

King noodles, sweet and sour fish and kangkung belacan

I insist on ordering the king noodles, which I adored on my last trip. When the noodles come out it all makes sense, it is laden with crispy pork fat. Every dish from Malaysia that engraved itself in my memory from my last short trip seems to have been pork fatted to the max! Mum gets the fried fish for herself since she is skipping the crab. The kangkung was a disappointment, it was very oily that night, even though it was fragrant and spicy, the whole thing just oozed and dripped with the leftover oil.

Chilli crab with mantou

The chilli crab is probably not the best you can find but it is always enjoyable. The spicy tomato and egg sauce is mouth watering and all you can hear from our table for the first 20 minutes is the quiet slurping and sucking of sauce off the shells of the crab. I always selfishly grab my favourite part of the crab, the head and scrape all the tastiest morsels out of this section. The meat is wonderfully fresh.

3. Eric Deli Paradise

Steamed fish in spicy clear soup

We choose this dinner location hastily, in an attempt to find somewhere that is close to home since Dad is not feeling 100%. I came here on my last trip and enjoyed fresh steamed fish and crispy fried pigeon. The pigeon has been taken of the menu, rather disturbingly because the bird has been banned because it came from China. It's definitely not the best of our seafood dinners, my cousin's nose is wrinkled up in disapproval from the time the decision is made to go here until the time the enormously expensive bill is delivered by the smarmy idiot of a waiter. We also figure out later in the evening that they overcharged us for one of the dishes. The food is okay but none of us were particularly hungry so we ended up with way to much food and it felt like a waste.

Crispy skin chicken

The chicken is well-cooked, with a super crispy skin but this is the offending dish which we are charged for a full serve when we only receive a half serve. We order some prawns that are cooked in a creamy curry sauce just so that I can try out their mantou. It is served steamed and deep fried with a small dish of condensed milk in the middle. I cannot stop eating the mantou and eat more of it with the sweetened condensed milk than the actual prawn dish.

Curry prawns and mantou!

4. Lala Chong Seafood Restaurant

Lala chong. Lala chong. Lala chong. This is something I keep randomly hearing from my parents mouth's every now and then. It is their favourite place to bring a big group of family for a celebration dinner, because my parents are the ultimate cheapskates and this is the ultimate value for money seafood dinner.

Salted egg yolk crab, steamed vegetables with garlic, fried paku with tuna and chilli, siong tong lala (fresh lala cooked in a soup with garlic and cili padi) and butter prawns fried with black beans

I've gotta say, this was a fantastic meal. Totally worth the drive out past the old Subang Airport to the middle of nowhere. The crabs fried with salted egg is requested by my Malay cousins and it is so much better than the version I tried at king crab but the crab meat is not very fresh, almost mushy. The paku vegetables fried with tuna was a surprising hit, it turned out to be a great combination. And my god. The LALA. I DIE.

Assam fish and honey fried baby squid

...now that I have gotten my Rachel Zoe moment out of the way, the siong tong lala was just so damn good. The soup was multi-dimensional, that's the only way I can think to describe it, an explosion of flavour in your mouth packed with garlic, ginger and chilli . I drink it up greedily. The assam fish is great, and comes with heaps of vegetables in the sauce. I love the crispy pieces of deep fried honey squid. The tiny little baby tentacles of the squid are super crunchy with their sweet honey batter. Love it.

5. Port Klang

Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of this restaurant, which is a real pity. It is one of the huge restaurants that competes along this waterfront strip. A narrow, dark bridge on stilts leads you to the open restaurants which has a specular view of the water. And the water is conveniently close to your table, so you can happily fling your empty crab shells over your shoulder into the water.

Marmite chicken, two types of fried noodles, siong tong fish, praying mantis fried prawns and steamed veges

Every single dish is fantastic. I am in heaven. The siong tong with anything is fast becoming one of my favourite dishes. I can't resist that spicy soup. The funny looking pink fish is flattened out with its eyes bugging out rather comically. The marmite chicken is sticky and delicious. We get two types of crabs - singapore style chilli and the pepper crab. The chilli crab is a million times better than the king crab version - extremely tomatoey and dense with chilli padi. The pepper crab is very strong, almost eye wateringly peppered. I'm not sure I am a fan of it but I still love my crab. A insists on taking a photo of the table at the end of our meal to show his family - I guess it's a bit of the culture shock hehe.

The aftermath