Sweet and Sugarfree by Karen E. Barkie

I love this book's healthy concept. It keeps its promise - you won't see any sugar in the ingredients and even honey is singled out as a bad guy.

I have yet to try out the recipes though, since I don't have an oven. A pastry chef, which is where I feel the heartstrings tugging, without an oven is like an F1 racer without his car. If the recipes turn out well, I'm going to serve the pastries in the cafe I'm dreaming up.

Pretty

Here's something I'm really proud of - the Pavlova I made in baking class for meringues day. It was one of the prettiest things I'd ever made. I gave it to my pal Elka, a ballerina and arts writer, who I'm sure would appreciate the connection between the cake and the famed danseuse.

Because chefs can do things their way...

Somewhere inside the hot kitchen:

Pumpkin shooters and cop-outs

Two days into my internship, I get a taste of my first big function - cocktails for about 600 guests. I was supposed to assemble pork wantons - spoon kung pao sauce onto the fried triangle of pork, then sprinkle crushed peanuts on top - but got assigned to the pumpkin shooters instead.

That task involved pouring pumpkin soup into a shot glass and decorating it with a drop of yogurt and a papadum sliver. Easy, you say? Fair enough, but the challenge lay in timing assembly and send-outs so that the soup would still be warm by the time it reached the guests. I made two miscues before getting it right. There were heating lamps to keep some of the food warm, but to me this was a cop-out. Sure, they kept the shooters warm, but if you kept soup out long enough, an unattractive film forms on top. The papadums too, which remind me of Indian cornflakes, would become soggy from sitting in the soup too long and would often sink to the bottom. They would have to be fished out and replaced with a new one.

Cutting is a dance...

I spent most of today at the garde manger station slicing things. I still feel unhappy about my knife skills. My cuts look like they were made by someone who'd never gone to cooking school. For someone who cares about doing things the proper way, this is quite a self-esteem deflater.

Anyway, we were talking about dancing, right? In spite of my lack of knife skills, I found the wherewithal to enjoy the groovy house music being piped about the dining area, and remarked to myself how vibrant and energetic the place is. It's nice slicing things with peppy music in the background.