The Sugar Bar

Considering that I blogged about this place two posts ago and here we are again really says something about this place called Strictly Pancakes. It’s good. I think about it a lot. I don’t hafta wait til Shrove Tuesday – or days of staring at eggs, milk, flour and a buttered hot pan willing it to just work by a twitch of a bewitched nose – to have pancakes.

The first pancake café in Singapore. It’s got me hooked. And it’s so legit I nearly cried when I ate my stack of pancakes.

I sat through 3 hours of class today grumpy as shite because I was hungry and deprived of viable options of food. It came to the sorry point that I made a (disturbing) passing comment to a girlfriend of mine, ‘I’m so hungry right now I could sink my teeth into your shoulder blade.’ She was wearing a bareback top. She now thinks I’m weird beyond weird. But that’s fine. We went halves over a plate of pancakes and I think we’re still the coolest pals as gal pals can be. We all find reasons to be amiable with each other in this world, now don’t we? If it involves food, I suppose. Let’s just all try to accept this fact of life and live with each others’ idiosyncrasies.

I’m so glad that pancakes don’t take a million years to whip up so food gets put on your table fairly quick. Three baskets of mysteriously spiced and seasoned chips glide onto the table. Then six cups of iced tap water. A bout of thumb twiddling, of utterly awkward silence and staring at mobile phones willing someone to beep or ring you so as to give you something to do to fill this ridiculously useless and unwelcome period of waiting. ‘Hi I am hungry and waiting for my food and I don’t want to do anything else like talk stupid when I just want to wait for my food.’ Other tables are noisily clanking their knives and forks, cutting up fluffy clouds of pancakes heavily and indecently doused with maple syrup, participating in unimportant sometimes polite chatter between mouthfuls of deliciousness, every bit of movement and noise pisses me off. I am HANGRY. Gimme food!

Then the sound of footsteps, and ka-ching ka-ching. It’s flipping pancake jackpot. I’ve never seen a more beautiful plate of pancakes. Mine don’t even come close, possibly because I never make chocolate pancakes. It’s almost unmentionable in my house. Pancakes must be pancakes, white and fluffy, uncorrupted by what we know as cocoa powder. Oh bugger that. These were glorious. Chocolate sauce, dripping custard, dusting of icing sugar, mini chocolate chips and wet juicy pneumatic and squidgy brandied dark cherries. Hello beautiful, come to Mama! The glorious Blackforest stack. I finally got to have a taste of this notorious babies. But what a shame that Strictly Pancakes had a bad day with their freezer and so, NO ICE CREAM. 20% off though. Yea okay. I’m easy like that.

Across the table, a friend was tucking into Lemon Curd for Nerds which looked suspiciously similar to our Blackforest stack minus a few key ingredients. Chocolate pancakes + lemon curd which resembled, in aesthetics and taste, wet custard but was delicious nonetheless. Would’ve liked the lemon curd to be a little more tart and lemony but figured it might not have worked too well with pancakes that generously rich in chocolate!

I’d love to share what the others ate but I was so busy inhaling my half of the Blackforest (I don’t think I looked up from my plate, okay maybe twice just to check the progress of others around me) I didn’t give two flying fish about getting clicks of their pancakes. But if you wanted to know what they ordered, you can check back to the first post of this café here.

What a great close to the week. The goblin in my stomach is appeased. Until the next food adventures, peace.

TGIF.

At first I got distracted by my own pancakes photos, looking at them I relived the moment. And then I got distracted by the scent of coffee (I’m sat in my school café) and just shortly after I got distracted by some cute guy with big guns trodding on by. So now I’m back (even though I never really left!) and I give you this.

My salvation last Saturday to soothe a hungry soul, and one who missed out sorely on Shrove Tuesday. Yes I confess I was too busy to even slap around some batter and flip a couple of pancakes. I’m embarrassed (that goes without saying) but not so much since it opened up the opportunity for a virgin voyage to Strictly Pancakes. And they were good. Nothing like homemade pancakes but considering these were done fresh 5 minutes after ordering, I’m quite impressed at the soft buttery vanilla-y fluffiness of them pancakes. And their range of assorted butters (garlic & herb I liked much) really made this place for me. It really worked that there were big comfy sofas on the 2nd floor up a narrow creaky flight of stairs, lit by rooftop skylights and completely ruled by a chill-out-shutup-and-eat kind of atmosphere. Nice.

Strictly Pancakes. Strictly pleasure oh my days. And so good for the soul, on a rainy day as this.

Side note: this place does amazing chips. Spiced and well salted. I’m definitely coming back for the chips too which is totally random and so unrelated.

Strictly Pancakes
44A Prinsep Street
S188674

There are some baked classics that have been blogged about so much that I’m sure many can bake them without a recipe, or even attempt to do it with their eyes shut. Something like banana bread or muffins definitely belongs in that category. Nevertheless, I’d like to share this recipe because it’s an extremely fragrant one. And it was delicious too. Only problem? I hadn’t baked enough!

Everyone has their strange quirky little food ews. Mine’s bananas. I dislike eating them, especially if they are raw. I don’t think I was always this way. It wasn’t till somewhere in high school that it occurred to me I wasn’t enjoying eating bananas. The catch 22 of it all was that I did find it pleasant when it was cooked. Visibly sliced onto warm porridge, blended into smoothies or eaten straight after being peeled, it all gave me the heeby jeebies. But when baked into a quickbread, muffin or dried into a chip, bananas become just precious.

Whatever it is, I’m loving these guys. I stumbled upon a recipe at Lovin’ From the Oven for a cinnamon swirled banana bread. It looked pretty good but somehow ended up putting the batter into muffin cups. After an epiphany, I then dunked in 2 tbs of strawberry yoghurt. I’m sure you could use regular plain yoghurt here but I found although strawberry yoghurt didn’t vastly change the flavour or perfume of the bread, it did make these muffins especially pleasant to my sense of smell! Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill but I’m glad I decided to add strawberry yoghurt. It also gave it a slightly denser texture than your regular fluffy muffin, something I quite adore when it involves cooked bananas (differs from person to person depending on preference).

Happy days are days when the smell of baked goods invades every corner of your house. Hit the link above for the recipe via Lovin’ from the Oven blog.