It’s not every day I bake the biggest, pinkest, gayest cake I’ve ever made. And it’s not for just anyone that I would do that either, but this was a special occasion. My friend Melissa was getting married… in Australia. Why was I making a cake in London? Well, it’s all very complicated… and this is definitely not the wedding cake!

Melissa, known affectionately as McMuffin (cute, right?), lived in London for a year in 2008 and she was my favourite eating buddy. We ate together everywhere humanly imaginable, and she was The One who introduced me to Lantana. Mostly, you would just find us at Hummingbird Bakery in South Kensington, sharing a slice of vanilla cake, red velvet cake and choc fudge brownie. Yep.

This is McMuffin! And our Hummingbird Bakery vanilla cake! And I had long hair! 🙂

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You know what’s pathetic? What’s really pathetic? I’ll tell you what. It’s Friday night and I’m out having dinner with friends. No, that’s not the pathetic part. We have dinner at Cay Tre, before moving onto Candy Cafe for dessert. I have a matcha ice cream smoothie. That’s definitely not the pathetic part.

The pathetic part starts when we’re done with dessert. We’re too full to have another dessert (which was part of the grand plan but alas, our eyes were much greedier than our tummies) so we wander through Soho and look, just look at food that we could be consuming.

Sad, right?

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When someone suggested we have a “sticks” themed pot luck lunch, it piqued my curiosity. Fun with sticks? Sticks? Really? Really. Not that I am opposed to sticks. Growing up in Australia, our BBQ was fired up on an almost weekly basis so meat on sticks featured heavily in my weekly food diary. Not that I actually kept a food diary. But we did have wings on sticks! Anyway, I wasn’t opposed to food on sticks, but I was desperately curious to find out how we’d make it fun.

But really, given the people who were to be my pot luck partners in crime, having an “un-fun” lunch was never on the cards.

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Remember when I said I have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to recalling what stood in the place of a newly opened restaurant? Oh right yeah, that was just two days ago. Anyway, Monday night I’m at Cay Tre’s new Soho restaurant happily eating away when somebody says, “hey, what used to be here?”

Blank.

Like seriously, blank. And aside from the street I live on, Dean Street is probably my most frequented street not in the least because that’s where my groceries come from but also because it is the holy gateway between me and Chinatown. And that’s my second home. Not only did I not notice that Cay Tre was opening right up until the day it actually opened, I have no idea – not one, zero, zilch – what was there before.

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I’ve never been sentimental about restaurants. As much as the fact that I live for food, I don’t care where it comes from, as long as it tastes good. Restaurants come, restaurants go. And more often than not as soon as a new one opens, I struggle to remember what stood in its place mere weeks ago. I mean sheesh, my brain can only retain so much, ok?

But last Friday night, as I arrived for dinner at Bistro du Vin, my heart skipped a beat.

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