The Backyard Cola-mentos experiment

For my nephew's birthday, my brother, decided to try out the coca-cola - mentos experiment. It works. I was never fast enough to capture the first full spurt so here is the best shot I managed to get after one of my nephews capped the bottle with his hand immediately after the mentos went in.

For those of you who have never seen this before, if you add mentos to carbonated drinks like sprite or coca-cola, the two react to form a fountain. As we were using small bottles, the fountain did not last long but if you use a large 1.5 litre bottle and more mentos sweets, then chances are you will get a result that you can capture more easily on camera.

One wonders how this was discovered. Some chap eating mentos and drinking coke perhaps?

Let them Eat Cake!

I forgot to buy more bread and one Sunday morning awoke to wonderful baking smells and thought it was my neighbour. When I came back from walking my dogs, I realised there was a lovely lemon cake on the kitchen table, still warm and in its baking pan with a beautiful, cracked top. It tasted heavenly with little crunchy bits inside. And that the table was not its usual laden self with a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and another of jam.

My ingenious maid must be a descendent of Marie Antionette. And unlike the hapless poor of that time in France, my kitchen is still well stocked enough for her to rustle up enough eggs, flour, sugar, lemons for a fabulous breakfast cake. Definitely no need to riot.

I should forget to buy bread more often.

A Crumb of Old Singapore

Where I grew up, my mother used to order groceries from a grocery store called Chop Soon Heng in Beauty World. It was a dry goods grocery store which sold canned food, rice in heavy burlap sacks, biscuits in glass jars scooped out and sold by weight. My mother would call every week or more often and they would then deliver to our doorstep. No delivery charge in those days. It saved my mother a lot of heavy carrying.

Recently, I discovered an old provision store in Commonwealth Drive that still sells these old style biscuits by weight. My friends and I were delighted and promptly bought some and munched our way through an entire packet very rapidly. They taste like yummy jam biscuits with apricot jam in the middle.

Nothing like the taste of childhood.