The Late-Summer Pentameter

After a year-long hiatus, I've finally managed to convince myself to get my lazy ass back to work and resume blogging on my food blog Carpe Foodum. Procrastination creates wonders and during a brief 30-minute period of daydreaming at my internship, I have come up a series of Asian-inspired iced desserts to experiment with for a line-up of five blog posts to be published in August.

(Arbitrarily?) named The Late-Summer Pentameter, this series is mostly made up of ice-cream-based desserts. I'll be making every single component of the desserts from scratch, including the ice cream. Ingredients (especially cream) are quite expensive (read: ridiculously overpriced) here in Hong Kong, so please forgive me for shamelessly asking for your support. A small HK$25 donation would be very, very helpful to me in running my blog and buying ingredients and utensils for this project.

Perks of supporting my project and blog include tastings and goodie bags filled with homemade snacks, both of which can be tailored to your dietary needs. You will also get a shoutout if you're the type to desire publicity for your philanthropy. I wouldn't mind changing my Facebook cover photo to a picture of your face. If this all sounds good to you, please do lend a hand– hopefully before my ENFP(?) self decides it's too much work and moves onto the next idea (without completing either).

In case you'd like to know what my 30-minute daydream resulted in, here is a tentative list of the desserts I am planning on testing:

Coco Glue: Pandan coconut ice cream, toasted coconut chips, brown kalamae (Thai coconut caramel) chunks rolled in toasted white sesame, black sticky rice kalamae chunks rolled in toasted black sesame, fresh coconut curls, served in a halved coconut shell.

Rupert Holmes' Escape: Pineapple ice cream, pineapple bun top, honey butter cake chunks, honey drizzle.

Sticky Sesame Street: Black sesame mochi ice cream, peanut almond 麥芽糖 brittle, brown butter fortune cookie tuile.

Tofu Flower Power: Tofu ice cream, 紅糖 crumble, caramelised white chocolate magic shell, mochi pieces, simple syrup shard.

The Salty Sandwich: Salted egg yolk ice cream, deep-fried 饅頭, toasted rice krispies, condensed milk drizzle.

× The pics I've included here are of past projects: nutty salted caramel popcorn and dark chocolate ice cream. They're a little mundane and the photography is amateur at best but I'll make up for that in this upcoming series... hopefully.