Diane Gale's Oreo Brownie caught my eyes. It's simple, direct and deliciously good that our colleagues love them.
Square Pan of 9" x 9" sides x 2" height
165g Butter
200g Dark Chocolate Droplets
Pinch of Salt
4 Eggs
165g Light Brown Sugar
3 tablespoons All-Purpose Flour
1 tablespoon Cocoa Powder
Mini Oreos / or Oreos broken into pieces
White Chocolate Chips (Optional)
Melt Butter in a pan over medium heat. Remove and add the chopped chocolate, use a spatula and keep stir until smooth and well combined. Set aside.
Preheat your oven to about 180°C. Prepare your baking pan by lining it with baking paper, or spraying vegetable oil, or lightly buttering the corners.
Whisk the eggs in a large mixing bowl until they triple in volume. Add brown sugar and whisk until incorporated. Whisk the melted chocolate into the eggs quickly until well combined.
Add All-Purpose Flour, Cocoa Powder and fold in until combined. Pour the mix into the baking pan. Scatter the Oreo Cookies over the top of the mixture, pressing some into the batter.
Bake for 30-35 minutes or until the middle is only slightly fudgy and gooey.
Let it cool and store in airtight container. ENJOY!!!!!!
Lesson learnt and honest review:
- Chocolatey and irresistible that you'll pick up a second slice.
- Use the type of chocolate you love, Milk Chocolate, Semi-Sweet Chocolate, Dark Chocolate. If using White Chocolate do not add the Cocoa Powder.
- If you baking a big brownie and slicing up, you can put it back in the oven for 5mins at 150degrees. It will give each brownie a crust.
- If you are planning to give this as a gift to friends you may use small loaf pans. It fills up to 6.
We're on a Northbound road trip today! We had initially planned to go all the way north to Newcastle, but as it turned out that was a bit too ambitious. So instead we did five hours in total of driving covering 300km to the Canoelands for fruit picking followed by a drive northwards to The Entrance, before turning back and heading over to Watson's Bay to catch the sunset before dinner.
The first checkbox on today's agenda was to find an orchard and do some fruit picking. There are dozens of farms all within an hours' drive (or two) from Sydney, many of them with different crop types. Unfortunately as we only visited one orchard we aren't really in a position to give recommendations on which ones are better - you'll have to do your own research on that. We can, however, give you a quick guide as to when each particular crop comes into picking season - so tough luck if you're here in the cold winter months of July-September when nothing is in season.
Anyway we settled for Tangerines at Canoelands Orchard, about a one-and-a-half hours' drive from Coogee. There's a $5 basket rental fee (i.e. entrance fee) and then you're set loose among the fruit trees in the Orchard, free to pluck as many Tangerines as you like. It isn't a fruit buffet, though - after you're done you still need to pay per-kilogram rates for whatever you'd like to take home with you.
While it was quite fun wandering around the orchard hunting for big and ripe fruit - sort of in a go-back-to-your-ancestors'-time-and-forage-for-your-own-food kind of way, to be absolutely honest the actual fruit wasn't that great. Most of what we picked out was either under-ripe or just "meh, okay lah" on the sweetness scale. Probably better to leave it to the experts next time, and just buy our fruit in the markets.
After that's done we head back into the car and continue our road trip North. If you're hoping for grand sweeping vistas and majestic cliffs, you won't quite get it on these roads. Yes there's lots of foliage and the roads have an occasional interesting twist and turn, but by and large the drive is rather uninspiring. Check out the fast-forwarded video below for what we mean (and do disregard the cheesy royalty-free music):
After about an hour-and-a-half we stop to stretch our legs at Terrigal, a quaint little seaside town with a nice, almost-deserted beach, and a row of shops selling food, ice cream and other curios ...
... and a further half hour after that we stop at The Entrance to check out the daily 3.30pm Pelican Feeding!
"Just over twenty years ago, the pelican feeding started by accident when staff from a local fish and chip shop would throw out scraps. It became such a ritual that whenever the staff were late in throwing their scraps out, the pelicans would cross the road and come up to the shop to be fed.
One of the main objectives of the pelican feed is to keep an eye on the pelican's medical conditions as many have hooks and lines tangles up in their gullets, wings and other parts of their body. The feed is a chance for the co-ordinator to assess their well being. It's certainly an amusing show to come and see."
By the time we're back on the road it's already well after 4pm, so we abandon our original target of Newcastle and turn around to head back to Watson's Bay, making it in time to catch the sun setting majestically over the Sydney CBD skyline:
Sunset means dinnertime, and Watson's Bay has a well known seafood joint called Doyle's on the Beach. It's really expensive though so we settle for salt & pepper shrimp and pork belly sliders at Watson Bay Hotel's Beach Club instead. Sipping coffee and eating sweet sticky sliders while watching the sun set - an awesome end to the day.
After dinner we head back to Coogee for an early night as five hours of driving does get a bit tiring. Plus we hadn't fully recovered from the lack of sleep on the overnight flight from Singapore.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series coming up soon!
As you might already know, Singapore Airlines is actually a conglomerate (of sorts) of four different airlines - Singapore Airlines, Silk Air (the regional arm), Scoot (long haul low cost carrier) and a substantial shareholding in Tiger Airways Singapore (short haul low cost carrier). Up until recently however you could only spend KrisFlyer miles for flights on the two main carriers.
Well, a while ago Singapore Airlines announced that they would soon extend KrisFlyer miles spending to the two LCC's, and now that the redemption rates are out for cash-equivalent vouchers, the question is should you redeem your miles on Scoot or TigerAir vouchers?
The short answer is no. With these voucher redemptions, you're geting 0.9 cents per KF mile of value. While you might be tempted to think that's still better than nothing, KrisFlyer miles can be worth a lot more on paper when used for flight redemptions on the two main carriers.
For example, a return flight to Bali costs $210.00 in fare + $152.60 in taxes and surcharges:
With a KrisFlyer miles flight redemption, you need 12,750 miles + $152.60 in taxes and surcharges. This represents 1.6 cents per KF mile of value.
This is just one simple example for a short, two-and-a-half hour flight. In general, award flight values go up as you fly longer distances and/or step upwards in booking class (i.e. premium economy, business, first class). In fact, long haul first class redemptions come close to hitting 9 cents per KF mile.
Now, one caveat here. The "Value per KF mile" figures are all paper/theoretical values. You will need to adjust them for your own personal view of what each particular flight is worth. For example, you can fly to Sydney on Scoot for $509, or on Singapore Airlines for $843. Are the extra perks on the Singapore Airlines flight worth the 60% increase in airfare? In other words, if you are planning to book a Scoot flight, how much extra would you pay to fly Singapore Airlines instead?
Finally, if you only have a minimal amount of KrisFlyer miles and don't accrue them regularly (whether via flights or credit cards), then it may make sense to use up whatever miles you have on some Jetstar/Scoot vouchers to at least get some value out of them.
Let us know in the comments if this write-up was useful for you, and if you'd be interested in reading a longer blogpost on the best sweet spots for KrisFlyer miles redemptions. Happy flying!
Today we head across the Causeway to the city of Johor Bahru for a quick dinner review at One63 European Bistro & Bar! If you're one of the tens of thousands of Singaporeans who occasionally take a bus across the bridge for some shopping, food, massage, etc, you might be interested too - This restaurant is just 400-500m walk from Komtar JB. It's in the row of shophouses on Jalan Trus/Jalan Ngee Heng, directly opposite the Doubletree by Hilton JB hotel.
One63 is helmed by Chef Kelvin who has previously done stints with three Michelin-starred restaurants in France, but strangely has a heavily Italian-weighted European menu. The meal starts off with a somewhat oddly-shaped and flavoured bread, which if we're honest wasn't very good.
The Cream of Mushroom Soup for RM 10 was delicious and value for money, though, with a good proportion of mushroom to cream in the flavour profile. We thought that the texture was spot on, too - not too creamy or starchy, and not too chunky.
For mains I had the Seafood Risotto - a proper arborio rice'd one with seafood, saffron, white wine and parmigiano cheese - for RM 36. The risotto was pretty good - not too starchy not too soupy. It came with a generous amount of shrimp, mussels, squid and scallops. We suspect that some of the items may have been frozen and not fresh, though, as there was a hint of fishiness in some spoonfuls of the rice.
The darling tried the Braised Lamb Shank with eggplant salad, potato wedges and garden vegetables (RM 37). Lamb was braised til tender, and very tasty. Vegetables and the supermarket-bag potato wedges were par for the course I suppose.
We were a bit disappointed that only the two least-enticing options off the dessert menu were available - crepes and Panna Cotta (RM 16.30). As you know, panna cotta is an Italian dessert generally made of thick cream, egg white and honey, and which generally isn't served in a small glass vial. Nevertheless I quite liked both the cream and the passion fruit glaze on the top, but the darling thought it was overpoweringly sour.
At a final bill of RM 132 (SGD 60) for two people, we thought the food was overall fairly good. Ambience in the restaurant was decent, if a tad bit noisy thanks to the lack of any sound-absorbing materials, and service was pretty standard "Malaysian-mid-range-restaurant" - that is to say the wait staff were competent but not particularly friendly nor knowledgeable about the menu.
One63 is open for lunch and dinner 7 days a week. If you're in JB for the day, I'd say it is totally worth the short walk for a meal if you're tired of all the fast food options available in City Square or Komtar. No pork served.
