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Last day of uni (Black Star Pastry + Grill'd)

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Last Friday was our last day back at uni, it was kinda sad but more exciting at the same time! We had made plans to celebrate afterwards at Newtown.  I've seen so many people raving about the Strawberry Watermelon cake at Black Star Pastry so that's we decided to settle for dessert. We finished uni at 4, got a little speech from our lovely coordinator, took a year group photo and set off on the walk to Newtown. It was kind of early for dinner so we decided to have dessert first. We got to Black Star Pastry at 5:01 and were devastated to see it had already closed! We were late by a minute (they close at 5). Despite our efforts of knocking on the door, the staff inside did not open up to apologize. But while looking at the door we realised there was another pop-up store at Town Hall. We had to decide whether we would chase it or leave it, and we chose to do the former, for obvious reasons! We desperately wanted that cake! We went to Town Hall and took a while to f
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International Congress of Behavioural Medicine | Melbourne

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My flight faced major delays due to severe thunderstorms in Sydney. We had to wait for over two hours, most of which were on the plane so it was incredibly exhausting. Thankfully, the weather in Melbourne was much better. It was pretty cold and windy, it felt nice to get out of the scorching heat :) Leaving behind a stormy Sydney After reuniting with the bestie, we went out for dinner to a local Malaysian restaurant close to our home. Sweet and sour prawns with rice  Nasi Lemak Pineapple fried rice and seafood stir-fry I had one whole day to myself before the conference began on Wednesday, and we wanted to make the most out of this.  Oh, hello there, new friend! We had breakfast at Myuna Farm which was a few mins from our house. I loved their veggie focacia.  Brekkie at Myuna Farm  Veggie focacia ($9) Sweet treats at Myuna Farm Next stop was archery, my bestie has been an archer for sometime now, and we have been wanting t
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(Un) Organised October

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This month has gone by way too quick! (Okay, I know I said that last month too but this month went even quicker) It started off with me madly writing my results, then doing discussion. Discussion took me about a week :/ I was rushing to finish my draft because I had to send it to my supervisor and leave enough time for feedback. I allowed myself two weeks time (which I thought was too much, at the time!) But I was so glad I did this later because it can take a couple of days to get feedback as supervisors are too busy to read it in one go. Anyway, now let me move onto the other fun things I did. Starting off with the most important highlight of the month: I WENT TO CENTRAL PERK!!!! I was so bogged down with writing, I almost didn't realise it was finishing and made it in the last weekday after handing in my draft. I had to wait for about an hour but I would say the wait was worth it because I'm such a 'friends' obsessed freak. Getting my butt on that cou
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Black Star Pastry (Strawberry Watermelon Cake)

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Some of you might know about the desperate attempt I made last year for the Strawberry Watermelon Cake (see previous post at  Black Star Pastry ).  Yesterday I had the privilege of tasting this cake at a party. I got super excited as I’ve been wanting to try this for almost a year now. I was so tempted to just skip the mains but I patiently waited for dessert time and made sure I left space for the cake :P In the meantime, I went to take a close look at the cake (could not resist, for obvious reasons) and I was amazed at how magical it looked. It was constructed beautifully starting with a layer of almond  dacquoise followed by cream, then a slice of watermelon with cream,   almond  dacquoise and cream again. Finally, it was topped with strawberries, pistachios and dried rose petals. It was a quite a delicious cake but unfortunately, it did not meet the expectations I had. I liked certain elements, such as the lightness of the cream layers, fresh watermelon and the
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Jittery January

Hope everyone is having a good year so far? I cannot believe the first month is over already! Unfortunately I don't have any food pictures to share this month because I haven't cooked much at all. Even when I did, it was something that I had no time to take a photo of. My mind is preoccupied with something else, and it has been really difficult to get things done. To be honest, this month has been a hell of a month for me. It was stressful, exciting, crazy, painful  depressing...(the list goes on). There were times when I was very close to giving up. I don't think I have felt the range of emotions I experienced this month in any other time in my life. I can't really explain how overwhelming it was, without bringing in the context (will reveal soon).  
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Kensington Street, Chippendale (Lower Mekong + Koi Dessert Bar)

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We explored a very special secret place this weekend. I say 'secret' because it is relatively new and it's not easy to find unless you know about it as it's tucked away right next to Central Park. I recently heard about this place from a friend and coincidentally, one of my other friend's planned our group dinner there. It is the cutest lane ever, full of modern Asian vibes. We dined at a Vietnamese restaurant called Lower Mekong. Their food is seriously amazing. All of their dishes sounded so good on the menu, we had trouble deciding what to eat. Vietnamese Noodle salad ($14) Vietnamese pancakes (bottom) I ordered the Vietnamese noodle salad and I absolutely loved it! There aren't many restaurants where you get a good veggie serve in a meal and this is where dish was an exception. It was wholesome and satisfying. It is the kind of light meal you'd eat at home. I also tried the spring rolls for entree and enjoyed it. My friend's
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Marvellous May

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This was probably my best month this year because I had my first ever conference/ mini holiday. But it didn't start off that great, I had to learn how to use a software called Stata for statistical analysis. I struggled a lot in the beginning because I had no idea how to set up the data or what code to use. (Stata has a command interface). It took me a really long time to figure out what I needed to do. I went through a long process of trial and error and seeking help when I got stuck.  The first part of the analysis didn't take as long but the rest of it took me longer than I expected. I had set myself a deadline to finish it before I leave for the conference (but failed). However, the good news is, it finally worked in the end! I felt super accomplished after getting all my outputs. I think I'm slowly learning to be persistent! I thought I would be ready to write up after this but turns out, I still have to do another quality and tool validity assessme
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Mad March

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Wow, I honestly can't believe we've hit the first week of April. I've gotten quite behind with blogging (as you can tell from my late March post). It has been a somewhat crazy but productive month for me. The good news is that I have finally managed to submit my research paper from last year. It was really nice to get it out of the way because now I can focus on my PhD (until I hear back from the reviewers again, at least!)  With my current research, I'm progressing quite slowly (systematic reviews take a long time unfortunately). I'm up to reading my bunch of full texts. I tried to be slightly more environmentally friendly with this SLR and minimizing the number of papers I print. It becomes hard after staring at the screen for a while so I ended up printing approximately half of my full texts. That's probably all the main updates, study wise. Here are all my March eats :)   One pan lemon herb salmon and zucchini Zucchini and lentil pasta
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Loss and grief- the sister I never met

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As you can tell from the title, this is not my usual cooking or dining shenanigans story. This is actually quite sensitive so only read if you're okay with a mushy topic like this. Today, I had the privilege to attend a talk at my work where a lady spoke about the loss of her newborn baby. She was absolutely amazing, I'm not one that usually gets emotional hearing other people talk about their losses but I did get teary in this one towards the end. It only took me a few seconds to work out why, it was because it triggered something else. But first, I want to share the lady's story before I tell you mine. The lady spoke about her baby who died two days after he was born because of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. This basically means, for some reason her baby had stopped receiving oxygen a week prior to her labour. He was in NICU after he was born but he had never opened his eyes, he had no brain function. She spoke about all these memories she made with her baby w
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