Breakfast, plus Lunch, and more for Dinner

The waiting line was considered short and manageable when it "only" got to 15 people deep on a Saturday morning – that’s how popular our friend Gregoire’s bakery bakehouse has quickly become since it opened late last year. All of a sudden everyone is now craving for freshly baked pastries and bread and swamped the place. It’s not uncommon to see long line all day long 6 days a week with eager customers trying to score one of the goodies out of the oven.

Breakfast at Blue Bar

As much as locals were obsessed with all-you-can-eat meals offered in many places around town, it seems like no one really paid attention to the breakfast buffets, as offered in most hotels, for a meal which some may argue as "the most important one of the day". Guess that's just something I would never understand, as I do enjoy hotel breakfasts, especially when I am traveling.

Cooking at home: Christmas stollen

Well, it is probably too late for this recipe to be any useful for this Christmas season, but I found this quite easy to make and could probably turn this into a normal bread or fruit cake by cutting down on sugar content. Not a lot of kneading required and so didn't leave my kitchen counter-top with gluey, messy leftover dough to clean up.

I was inspired by my friend Wilson in his recent article in the WOM Guide featuring our chef friend Gregoire (of the Four Seasons Hong Kong) for a cooking demonstration of this traditional German Christmas bread - it's similar to the Italian Panettone or English Christmas pudding as they all involve raisins and some kind of winter spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves etc), but I love the firmer texture and less sweet taste of a Stollen, far better than the other Christmas pastries.

Anyway, unfortunately Wilson's article didn't include a recipe nor ingredient list, so I went around found a couple easier ones on Google which I used as reference, and basically just improvised along the way to suit my own taste and preference. It yielded a big loaf good enough to serve 6-8 people.