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The 10 best sweet treats in Singapore
Award-winning baker Dan Lepard reveals the best of Singapore's many pastry shops and cake stalls, where you can indulge in everything from delicious Chinese custard tarts to delicate French macarons



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Wives' Delight cakes ... Loong Fatt Eating house has been making them the same way since the 70s. Photograph: Dan Lepard

Every time I walk out of Changi airport's air-conditioning into the humid outdoors, there's a sweet and slightly fermented aroma that hits me on the first breath. A dozen visits to Singapore and I'm still startled by it. Within the hour, I barely notice it. But later, if I'm walking past a tiny bakery in Chinatown, like the ones that sell egg custard tarts on Sago Street, the combined effect of the sugary toasted aroma from the baking and that aromatic Singapore air can be overwhelming. So much so that it instantly triggers my carb craving and I'm immediately queuing to buy a cake.
There are sweet things to buy almost everywhere – in a run of shops on the street, in the basements of shopping malls and the hawker stalls – and they encompass most of the cultures in Singapore. Predominantly, you'll see Chinese, Malay, British and Indian bakeries or cake stalls. More recently, French trained or influenced pastry chefs are affecting the look and flavour of some of the local recipes.
The sheer number of bakeries and cake shops in Singapore can partly be explained by the significance of sweet gifts in local life. Where we in Europe might offer alcohol as a gift to our hosts, in Asia cakes and sweets are often given. For a Singaporean without time or space to bake at home, cake shops provide a solution to an etiquette dilemma.
Home-style recipes dominate much of what's available. Once, the ingredients used to make these cakes and sweets were expensive, so a recipe that combined sugar, butter or oils, spices, and refined flours and grains were made infrequently at home unless you were wealthy. Today's intensive agriculture and relative wealth have made the ingredients much more affordable – but what has vanished is the time to cook and bake them. So many of the shops have stepped in and offer something similar to what would have been baked at home. Here are some of my favourites:
1. Xi Di Li for sweet breakfast doughnuts

This stall faces on to Sims Avenue, and covers no more than a few square metres, yet somehow they mix, fry and serve up delicious cakes in this tiny space. Go in the morning, around 10am, and the first of the day's sweet morning buns, called Ma Jian, will be hot from the fat and ready to eat. They taste like slightly sweet, firm and chewy doughnuts, deftly shaped into something looking like two oblong madeleines joined at the waist and sprinkled with sesame seeds before being plunged into the fryer. At 70 cents (about 31p), they're a bargain for breakfast.
• Xi Di Li, on Sims Avenue between Lorong 27 and 25a Geylang
2. Thye Moh Chan Cake House for peanut brittle

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Photograph: Dan Lepard In a slightly rough and vaguely alarming ramshackle setting, this sweet shop makes really good peanut brittle, a very traditional Chinese sweet. The morning I went everyone was wrapping gift boxes of brittle for the weekend. Very little English spoken, so pick and hand sign for the amount you want.
• Thye Moh Chan Cake House, 53 Lorong 27 Geylang
3. Hock Khong for coconut buns

This large, cool open dim sum tea house is very basic, with red plastic garden chairs, ceiling fans and formica tables, and the kitchen area appears to be dotted among the seating. Come 10 in the morning they start to serve soft coconut yeast buns and sweet red bean puffs. Go up to the counter, choose what you want then go to a table and the staff will bring it to you.
• Hock Khong, cnr Lorong 27 Geylang and Sims Avenue
4. Loong Fatt Eating House for Wife's Delight

My friend Jiong took me to this large old cafe that has been making these cakes since the 1970s. A vast open kitchen is set back 10 metres from the seating space at the front of the shop, strewn with odd tables and chairs, while a line of customers snakes down the middle. The cakes, Tau Sar Piah, are a bit like an Eccles cake would be if it were cooked on a griddle, and the flaky pastry used is curious. It's made by taking two walnut-sized balls of dough, one loaded with lard and the other plain, then they're patted together, rolled up, patted and rolled again to make a bespoke puff pastry to cover each cake. A sweet paste of cooked winter melon and sesame is spooned inside and the dough wrapped around it à la Eccles. Baked in a blazing hot plate and flipped once to scorch both sides, the cakes are served piping hot.
• Loong Fatt Eating House, 639 Balestier Road
5. Kim Choo Kueh Chang for Peranakan sweets

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Pea flower cake. Photograph: Dan Lepard Do ask about the sweets and cakes in this family shop, bakery and museum as some of the staff speak excellent English and know the history in detail. The first floor is home to a small museum and restaurant accessed via a narrow staircase to the left of the store, while the ground floor shop feels like an apothecary with biscuits and pastries in tall screwtop jars. Look out for the soft rice cakes swirled with blue, a Peranakan wedding sweet called Pulut Tai Tai. Though it looks as vivid as a dye from a bottle, it's actually the extract from a native blue pea flower. Their version of a chocolate muffin, made with a complicated overnight cornstarch ferment is gluten-free and soft textured with a rich, deep chocolate flavour.
Kim Choo Kueh Chang, 109 East Coast Road.
6. Regent Hotel for yuzu soufflé

The ground foyer of the Regent Hotel is quiet and utterly calming, so even if you're tight for cash this is a very pleasant and refreshing oasis to visit. The Regent Hotel's pastry chef, Phillip Lee, adds to the vast banquet on offer with a delicate soufflé that combines the sharp mandarin flavour of the Japanese yuzu fruit folded through a rich custard. Lee often takes traditional Chinese flavours, like the ingredients from a Chen Teng soup – dried longan, pandan leaves and rock sugar – and uses them to flavour an afternoon tea cake, or turns black sesame or red bean paste into delicate French macarons. Inventive and remarkable baking.
The Regent Hotel, 1 Cuscaden Road
7. Mandarin Oriental for classic French patisserie

Patisserie in Singapore is vastly better than in London, and young pastry chef Ruben Jan Adrian, fresh from Pierre Marcolini's chocolaterie in Brussels and the kitchens of Pierre Hermé in Paris, is one of the chefs making this happen. Last Christmas he had the most beautiful spiced stollen on sale and a curious and excellent pannetone studded with crimson-stained sugared almonds. This Easter he had hot cross buns and handmade Valrhona chocolate eggs. If you take a seat in the fourth-floor Axis bar, you can watch the stonking great build for the Marina Bay Sands casino complex: think Meccano construction on an epic scale. Sitting in cool bliss with a stand of delicate tea cakes, tarts and a pot of tea, you can become a tranquil James Bond gazing at Casino Royale being built.
The Mandarin Oriental, 5 Raffles Avenue, Marina Square
9. Puteri Mas for durian puffs and jackfruit muffins

The best place to buy durian cream puffs is at Puteri Mas, situated in one of the restored colonial buildings in Joo Chiat Road, an area that is calm during the day and a bit more racy at night. The shop is nothing special, fluorescent lit with almost no seating. But these puffs will challenge your taste buds. I quite like durian, the armadillo-skinned fruit with a weird rotted aroma, on its own or in ice cream. But these cream puffs filled with durian pulp, though undoubtedly fine, I find too hard to swallow. Whereas the jackfruit muffins they sell here, with a deep golden yellow crumb and flavoured additionally with freshly grated coconut, can be eaten without effort.
Puteri Mas, 475 Joo Chiat Road
10. Leung Sang Hong Kong Pastries for custard tarts in Chinatown

There's some debate about the best sweet egg custard tarts in Chinatown. Leung Sang tends to feature often in the top list, and their thick crisp pastry is lovely, not too oily, and the filling gently puffed. But if you walk around the corner, maybe two or three shops back into Chinatown, there are a few pastry shops that make tarts where the filling is more dense, with a creamy texture. Sago Street and the area immediately around it is great for takeaway food, and there are tables out the front of many shops to eat at.
• Leung Sang Hong Kong Pastries, 18 Sago Street



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Truly Asia?

<title>Print Article: World's top 10 iconic meals</title><style type="text/css"> h1 {font-size:24px} p {font-size:14px} p.details {font-size:12px} div.centerWrap {text-align:center} #adSpotIsland {width:300px;float:right;text-align:center} </style><script type="text/javascript" src="http://resources.brisbanetimes.com.au/brisbanetimes/2007-11/js/fd.mt.brisbanetimes.com.au.js"></script><script id="ie_domready" defer="defer" src="javascript:void(0)"></script>World's top 10 iconic meals

May 28, 2010 - 2:47PM

Eating can be the best part of traveling, and travel authority Lonely Planet has come up with a list of the top 10 cities across the globe to enjoy iconic dishes.

1. TAPAS IN BARCELONA, SPAIN

Patatas bravas (potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce), calamares fritos (fried squid), boquerones (anchovies), croquetas de jamon (ham croquettes), chorizo (pork sausage), pimientos asados (roasted peppers), albondigas (meatballs) and berenjenas gratinadas (cheese-baked aubergine) are just some mouth-watering examples of the Spanish snacks known as tapas. The vivacious Catalonian capital of Barcelona excels in the creation of tapas, particularly along La Rambla late in the evening when residents and tourists alike slowly graze their way south from Placa de Catalunya. Leave the cutlery on the table and claim the tapas with a toothpick or your fingers.

2. PASTA IN NAPLES, ITALY

Food historians still debate whether Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy by importing it from China in the 13th century, or whether the Etruscans had already embraced it long beforehand. But it's generally agreed that by the 18th century Naples had turned the mixing of flour and water into a bona fide industry and was the world's pasta capital. As an encore, Naples also arranged a blind date between pasta and squashed tomatoes, and romance blossomed. So the next time you're wandering the crumbling streets of Naples' historic center, make a beeline for the nearest trattoria and tuck into some pasta napolitana.

3. DONER KEBAB IN ISTANBUL, TURKEY

The traditional doner kebab consists of a plate of grilled mutton on a bed of buttered rice, and many of Turkey's restaurants still serve it this way. Far more prominent nowadays, though, is its fast-food cousin, which takes the form of a pita-bread sandwich containing marinated meat that has been sliced from a rotating spit and bundled together with salad and a yoghurt-based sauce. It's de rigueur in Istanbul to equip yourself with a weighty doner and then wander around Sultanahmet or along the Bosphorus.

4. STEAMED DUMPLINGS IN SHANGHAI, CHINA

Shanghai dumplings have to be tasted to be believed and they are one of the items most fought over during dim-sum feasts. These delicious morsels seem like ordinary dough balls until you discover that they are filled with a hot broth flavored with ground pork, crab meat or vegetables. This little surprise is achieved by filling the dumplings with a hardened gelatin that liquefies when the bun is steamed. To avoid scalding your gums with hot soup, do not crunch the dumpling between your teeth but instead nibble it until the liquid seeps out.

5. FEIJOADA IN RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

Taste buds stage their own carnival in honor of Brazil's national lunch, feijoada, a dark and spicy stew built upon a foundation of black beans and pork. Be aware that the feijoada prepared for mass consumption in Rio's restaurants usually just contains pared-down pieces of pig flesh, but it may also contain less familiar porcine treats such as ears, tongues and those cute curly tails. Also note that this hearty recipe is a challenge for any stomach to digest, so plan on hitting a couch rather than the waters off Ipanema after eating it.

6. GUMBO IN NEW ORLEANS, USA

Scooping out a steaming pot of gumbo is as central to life in New Orleans as listening to jazz, zydeco or swamp blues, or chomping on those sugary pastries called beignets. This Louisiana favorite is essentially a hearty broth of seafood or smoked meats, thickened with okra or a wheat-and-fat mixture called roux, which is then splashed over a mountain of rice. But New Orleans serves up countless variations of the basic gumbo recipe, from classic Creole style to pungent Cajun.

7. COUSCOUS IN CASABLANCA, MOROCCO

The minute you arrive in Casablanca, make straight for Boulevard de la Corniche down on the waterfront, pick an appealing cafe or restaurant and order a cup of mint tea and a plate of Morocco's staple food, couscous. The couscous grain is made from semolina (ground durum wheat) and is ideally prepared by being repeatedly steamed in a special pot called a couscoussier. It's then topped with a spicy stew containing either vegetables or a mixture of veggies and meat such as chicken, lamb and fish.

8. NASI GORENG IN PENANG, MALAYSIA

Visitors to Malaysia inevitably find themselves ordering the delightfully simple nasi goreng. Literally meaning 'fried rice' and also enjoyed across Indonesia and Singapore, this dish is prepared by stir-frying rice with chicken or seafood, vegetables, eggs and a sweetish soy sauce. Nasi goreng is available practically anywhere in Malaysia that serves food but is best sampled within the wonderfully crowded hawker centers that dot the island of Penang. The diverse Malay, Chinese, Indian and Baba-Nonya cooking styles conspire to give an otherwise humble dish some special flavors.

9. CURRY IN MUMBAI, INDIA

Curries are a pan-Asian phenomenon, being cooked almost everywhere between the Punjab and Japan. But the birthplace of curry is India, and you haven't really tasted one until you've come to Mumbai in the state of Maharashtra and delighted your palate with one of the local concoctions. A Mumbai curry typically contains seafood and coconut blended with a masala (mixture of spices). Standard spices include turmeric, coriander, ginger and red chilli.

10. HOT DOG IN NEW YORK CITY, USA

So what if NYC has one of the greatest varieties of dining options in the world? Everyone knows the only truly meaningful foodie ritual here is to head to a busy inner-city intersection, find a shabby metal cart topped by colorful a umbrella, and order a dog with ketchup, mustard, onions and either sauerkraut, relish or chilli sauce. For a bit more of a challenge, head to Nathan's on Coney Island on 4 July and enter the famous hot-dog-eating contest: the record is 53.5 dogs in 12 minutes.
Reuters
 

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Singapore's street food proves delicious, exotic and sanitary

By DEE DePASS, Star Tribune
August 7, 2010


I had guessed that my tour group of journalists would be wined and dined at stuffy, white-linen restaurants courtesy of government aides bent on showcasing Singapore's big buck, high-brow cuisine. Wrong.
What we got instead was so much better. Local food stalls, nestled dives and outdoor markets catered scrumptious ethnic dishes, exotic fruits, bizarre food combinations and the authentic ambience of the streets.
As we walked about the city on this sun-drenched island of 5 million people, we stumbled upon a crowded flea market where vendors peddled T-shirts, shoes and cotton dresses at tempting prices. But I spied an even better Singaporean gem across the street: a hawker center, one of the many government-inspected, open-air food courts that offer locals and tourists alike cheap, traditional ethnic dishes.
Inside the center, the scent of Malaysian fish ball satays, Indian curried beef, Chinese boiled and chopped chicken and noodle soups swirled through the food court as freely as the many languages of its vendors and customers. Cooks in ridiculously small kitchens fried, whipped and boiled veritable feasts for dirt-cheap prices. Bright colorful pictures of each dish blazed from awnings above.
Unsure where to start, we joined the longest line, and pointed to a picture of a $2.20 ($ 1.60 U.S.) plate of fried "carrot cake," a traditional Malay radish dish that looked like scrambled eggs, without a single carrot in sight.
In minutes, the cook chopped, tossed and fried up a large steaming plate of goodness. We found a free table and dug in with chopsticks to the savory dish of soft white radishes, egg and rice flour spiced with coriander and garlic. We eyed each other with heads bobbing in pleasure.

We visited another vendor who spooned Chinese fish noodle-soup into a large bowl, topping it with scallions, mild chilies and needle mushrooms. The neatness and cleanliness of the stalls was as admirable as the tasty $2 soup. When SARS threatened to become a global epidemic in 2003, Singapore's strict, rule-laden government redoubled its hygiene efforts, so risk of food poisoning is scant.
I've had two overseas vacations marred by street food misadventures, so I rarely opt for such fare, But this trip proved a safe and delicious exception.

New fruit for the basket

After our hawker stall meal, we returned to the street where the pungent odor of durian fruit draped the hot sticky air of this equatorial city like a blanket. To me, durian, a spiky, prehistoric looking fruit, smells like cantaloupe encased in funky socks. I wasn't surprised to learn that it is barred from buses and trains.
Regardless, it is adored by locals who swarm the fruit stands that line many streets of downtown Singapore. Trip leader Marilyn Li, who grew up in Hong Kong, adores durian and bought some from a sidewalk vendor who invited us to sit and eat at his adjacent tables and chairs. Three Indian women awaited their order. The merchant sailed over with a machete, giving three swift whacks to their football-shaped fruit to expose wet-looking yam-like sacs inside.
Marilyn dug into the orange innards, offered me a piece and swore it tasted nothing like it smelled. I tried it, but it did taste like it smelled: tart and horrid.
I tossed my piece into the woven refuse basket on the curb -- being careful not to miss since littering carries a $1,000 fine -- and bought a bag of hairy red rambutan fruit. I peeled and munched and the sweet, chewy plum-sized delight soothed my insulted tongue.
Except for the durian, the fruit served in Singapore is divine. Nearly every piece is imported into this space-craved country, but it's still plentiful, cheap and fresh. To my delight, my hotel room came with a large plate of mangoes, star fruit, crisp and honey-flavored pears, and a sweet, seedy dragon fruit that looks like a red and green artichoke with overgrown petals. Those sweet crunchy bites proved the perfect end-of-the day treat after sightseeing.

My trip to Singapore included a lovely boat tour through the cafe-lined Singapore River in the financial district. But we made no stops for food. Instead, Abdullah Bin Abdul Rahim, our city guide, waited for the ride to end and headed for the Muslim section of the city, which is simply known as Arab Street.
After visiting the gold-domed Sultan Mosque, we dodged traffic to cross the street and marched to the second floor of the Singapore Zam Zam Restaurant. It felt like we'd entered another country. The large dining hall was filled with young families and women in head scarves speaking Malay, the language of Singapore's indigenous people, now just 15 percent of the population.
Abdullah quickly ushered us into plastic chairs, took our orders and brought cans of fruit juices while the sole proprietor dashed off to cook our meal. Hot and hungry, I focused on the large wall menu with enticing pictures of Nasi Biryani, a traditional Muslim dish that pairs saffron basmati rice with a choice of chicken, lamb, cuddlefish or vegetables. I chose the chicken with a side of boiled shrimp and giggled when the proprietor returned with heaping trays of food. My shrimp were the size of bananas.
We found hidden joys like this all over the island. Our best snacks were the $2 shrimp dumplings and $3 "Laksa" coconut soup at the cantinas inside the new Sentosa Casino just 40 minutes from downtown. The Bintan ferry terminal in southeast Singapore harbored the best rice noodle soup I'd ever had.
For our last dinner, we went to the premier hawker stall on the island, the Newton Food Centre. It was nearly 9 p.m. but the place was packed. Our guides deftly ordered and plied us with hard-to-get paper napkins (Singaporeans bring their own hankies) for a wonderful and messy feast of Singapore Chilean crab: massive red crabs bathed in an egg and chili gravy that, to my relief, was yummy, not spicy.
A dozen other dishes soon arrived: stingray fillets slathered in a painfully hot chili paste, delicate sautéed spinach, fried egg with oysters, strips of octopus, fried carrot cake, chopped chicken, Indian lamb satays, Chinese rice balls wrapped in grape leaves, and knotted wheat buns for dipping. Including bottles of Tiger Beer and Coca Colas, the seven of us ate like royalty for about $75 U.S.

The exotic meal was as delicious as it was cheap. I would leave Singapore a happy and well-fed American tourist. And I never once needed Pepto-Bismol or a linen napkin.
Dee DePass • 612-673-7725


© 2010 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
 
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