Supersupergirl's restaurant reviews

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Traditional cakes that CAN be delicious and modern @ Canaan

This shop has been here for a while, but it was not listed on OpenRice.
I intended to buy some of their Chinese pastries a while ago but never got round to.

I was attracted by their brightly lit shop and the English name was very interesting.
It was called Canaan which is Israelian and they were selling traditional Chinese products!!
I did not know they were selling traditional Chinese cakes until I went closer and saw the samples.
They looked similar to the Chinese wife cakes but with different fillings inside.

The bigger packs are wrapped with wax paper which were quite neat and different to the rough packaging you find at the traditional Chinese places.
It reminds me of a health shop called Holland and Barretts in UK, probably because of the green print on the wrapping paper.
It had a nice label stuck on the front too.

As well as the neat packaging they had lots of different labelled plastic jars with samples.
I was so surprised there were twelve flavours!!!

The flavours were:
Black pepper
Pork floss
Tomato and onion
Passionfruit
Honey and orange
Lemon
Sesame
Peanut
Green bean
Red bean
Green tea and yellow bean
Coffee and yellow bean
They also had a guide with all flavours and recommendations.
The ingredients were listed on the wall with health benefit information.
As well as the health benefits, they claim to use healthy ingredients such as vegetable oil instead of butter or lard.

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Black pepper

You could taste fresh pepper as well as the traditional filling.
It was interesting because it tasted sweet, and you can still taste the pepper.
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Passionfruit

Although it was passionfruit, I could not taste much, the fruit peel was much stronger.
There was other pieces of red and green things that may have been candied peel, but it was not the ingredients label.
The pastry was extremely flakey and the layers can be seen on the photo.
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Overall the customer service was extremely friendly, they were patient to explain about their product and not pushy selling their cakes.
They have another branch at Kwun Tong and these cakes can be made to order in the mini sizes which are really cute and convenient to eat!
The mini sizes are the size of chess pieces in Chinese chess!
For improvements, it would be good if they listed ALL the ingredients on the labelling instead of the general ingredients.
As a potential buyer it is impressive to see all the ingredients, especially candied cherries and fruit peel.
I think I found some bonus cherries in the passionfruit one, and when I took another bite, there was some candied peel that was green.

Tom Yum Kung flavoured cold ramen @ Ajisen

This new ramen dish looked really delicious on the product shot (top corner of my picture).
The noodles looked thickly covered in sauce and dark in colour.

However when they were served, I realised they were the usual cold ramen topped with watery sauce.
The ramen was topped with lots of thinly sliced cucumber, prawns sliced in half through the middle and a few pieces of crab.
The noodle itself was too hard and the tom yum soup was just liquid and slid of the ramen.
The soup tasted strong of lemongrass and chili but because it was so watery it did not stay on the ramen and the noodles were tasteless and hard.

Black truffle ramen @ Yukitei

Since my last visit, there has been an improvement which was quite foreseeable.
The dining area used to be in an open area.
In the winter it would be OK, but in the summer it is quite unbearable.

As well as the open area outside, you can now dine inside where it used to be part of the kitchen.

I got the Ramen with black truffle, a new item on the menu.

Usually I prefer my noodles al-dente, but these are not the same noodles as Butao/Ippudo/HideChan.
I chose the noodles to be served softer.
For these type of noodles, I like them soft so that the soup sticks on the noodles and I can taste the soup and noodles at the same time.

When the noodles came, you could see grounded truffle and truffle oil on top of the noodles.
I put some truffle on the egg and it tasted really nice.
As well as the truffle, there were grilled Japanese mushrooms.
It was good the mushrooms were grilled because it brought out the nice mushroom aroma.
Overall I felt there was a major improvement since my last visit.
The noodles here are similar to the noodles at 魔麵 and Daruma in terms of the thick soup base and the type of noodles.
Daruma Ramen House's soup base is not as slimey and gelatinous as Yukitei. The soup here is much the same as 魔麵.

Salmon quiche loaded with salmon @ Pacific Coffee

This is one of the standard items I usually get at Pacific Coffee.
The quiches are quite decent, at least they taste like the ones in the UK.

They have three flavours: bacon and onion, spinach and mushroom, and Salmon.

My favourites are spinach with mushroom and the Salmon.

The Salmon quiche is a seasonable item.

Sometimes it can be very salty, and the one I had this time had so much Salmon in it.
There was about 70% of Salmon in ratio to the quiche.

If you do not like fish, the the spinach one is good too, but it has lots of black pepper.

Blueberry danish @ BreadTalk

In general the pastries at BreadTalk are really good.

This particular blueberry danish is always sold out.

The shape of this danish is like a bowl, in the centre there is custard cream, and on top it is topped with blueberry jam with lots of real blueberries.

I like to eat the edges of the pastry first with the blueberries then moving to the centre with custard cream and some blueberry jam.