I love it whenever I get to do something new (albeit unusual) for special occasions.
It doesn't have to be elaborate or fantastic or be an outstanding, over the top experience.
It just needs to be a tad different.
And it just needs to be with company whom I love, and enjoy.
One of the things we did for my birthday last year was to go to Bedok.
Don't laugh.
It might not be very much of a big deal to some of us, but I've never been to Bedok for a celebration before, and certainly not at the coffee shop right next to Sheng Siong.
It didn't matter to me that it was a coffee shop because, oy, coffee shops these days are boomz.
All I cared about was the food, which on that Saturday afternoon, was good.
There're a couple of stalls at this coffee shops which I've been wanting to try from but sometimes one has to make a choice between dim sum and fried rice, and today dim sum won.
We had ourselves a plate of cheong fun.
No, wait, we had two plates- one of prawn, one of char siew- and in both plates the rice rolls were equally silky and smooth.
I would have loved the skin of the rice rolls for its thickness and smoothness alone, but each piece was in fact rather huge and chonky, with prawns big and juicy, and char siew bits brimming over from within.
Not just that, the sauce- I don't know how it's mixed- was light, tasty, and added that hint of flavor to the cheong fun without overwhelming it like the familiar-looking thick, sweet, black ones do.
It wasn't just the cheong fun that we'd ordered for lunch this afternoon.
There was the salted egg custard pau, and a basket of siew mais too.
The paus were so filling, I tell you.
Either it were the lava-like texture of the salted egg custard flowing out from the bright yellow paus, or it were the spongy flour of the paus themselves.
The siew mais too didn't disappoint.
At first glance I might have thought that they were the regular kind, no big deal of a chew or a flavor, but they weren't. You could taste the (pork) in them, and made for a great nibble altogether.
I had assumed that dim sum was all that would make for our lunch this afternoon, but no, there was another order of wanton soup- and this, from Tai Wah Pork Noodle- one of the popular franchise stalls that seem to be expanding at coffee shops and hawker centers all around our island these days.
I know there'll be some people who won't see this bowl of soup as anything special (we all have different opinions, no doubt) but I happily slurped up the flavor of the soup as much as I relished the thin, delicate skin of the wanton wrapped around a soft, skillfully boiled ball of meat.
Maybe what I appreciated most about the soup were the bak chor (minced meat) floating about on the surface, and its bits of fried lard at the bottom of the bowl.
Certainly you can be sure that I'll be going back to this very same coffee shop for the soup, the bak chor mee, the dim sum, and even the fried rice and the chap cai png.
Lunch at the coffee shop wasn't all that was to be had this afternoon, however.
There was still dessert.
Which we decided to make it a drink and a cake at Paris Baguette across at Bedok Mall.
At another time I might have had one of their coffee lattes- because, generally, well, that's how I roll- but matcha lattes at this Korean-based confectionary cafe hold a fair bit of nostalgia for me, and so we went along with a mug of nice, warm matcha latte, and a slice of chocolate cake which they call the Double Choco Fudge Cake.
Let's just say that despite trying to be really, really slow, somehow, between the both of us, we actually finished up both the latte, and the thick, delish chocolate cake in no time.