I have a vision for our middle child. As she has talents in baking, cooking and dancing, I told her that she should open a cafe-cum-dance center in future. The ground floor shop lot would ideally be a cafe and the first floor, a dance school. While she manages the cafe and teaches dancing, I’ll be the cashier at the cafe. The cafe would serve as the perfect waiting place for parents after they drop off their kids for dance classes. There’ll be cakes, healthy smoothies, juices, and mains on the menu. I’ve also encouraged her to take up a Degree in Business Management so that she can effectively manage her businesses.
But I doubt that this will come true as she has something else on her mind, which is remotely related to F&B and business. Oh well, we’ll see what God’s plans are for her 😇
Yesterday our teenage baker baked a lemon meringue cake. She has a thing with baking really complicated cakes. Never one who would bake a good old butter cake or a classic banana cake, she’d only choose recipes that involve 101 steps! I’ve told her many times that I crave for a good old plain orange cake or banana cake but she said NO, she would only bake cafe-style cakes! 🙄
The lemon meringue cake involves multiple complicated steps. First is the preparation of the lemon curd. Then the baking of 3 lemon sponge cakes. Next, preparation of the meringue. And finally assembling of the cake and blowtorching the meringue to create a light brown toast color.
A total of 12 eggs and 8 lemons were used. It’s a pretty costly cake!
In the process of prepping the cake, a snafu happened. While she was removing one of the sponge cakes from the oven, she accidentally dropped the cake on the floor! It was a mess but she quickly salvaged the cake and the top part of the cake was smashed on the floor! Luckily OCD me had just mopped the floor and since the floor was clean, the both of us scooped up the cake from the floor and stuffed it into our mouths… and ROTFL while at it 😆 .
She had so much fun blowtorching the meringue on the cake!Picture perfect, cafe-style cake. All self-taught from watching You Tube tutorials. Very lemony and yummy! But I find it a tad sweet, though she reduced the amount of sugar. I told her to reduce more sugar the next time she bakes this cake again.
This video is Sherilyn’s first You Tube dance cover, produced by her dance school. The filming was postponed umpteen times since last year due to the rising Covid cases and only shot 3 weeks ago at Tamarind Square, Putrajaya. She worked really hard to get into the dance group.
If you can’t spot her, she’s the one in cropped blue blazer and tennis skirt. She’s the shortest in the squad (and youngest) and has to wear soles lift pads to give her a slight boost in her height 😆
Our dancer’s next project is another dance competition in 2 weeks and there will be lots of practices with her group mates in the coming days.
My day didn’t start off too smoothly today. I’m utterly disappointed with someone but I shall not talk about the specifics here. The person may be reading this post or someone known to this person may be reading it and this post may get to this particular person somehow. The internet can be agathokakological – it can save and make lives easier and also destroy them. This issue is going to bother me for some time and there’s still no solution to it. Only time and divine intervention can resolve this issue. 😓
After a hiatus of almost two months since the MCO started, Sherilyn’s gym has finally started its first taekwondo class via Zoom today, for a short half an hour. Hopefully lessons can be more regular now to keep this girl occupied with something productive. I’ve paid for her grading fees before the MCO started and it looks like the grading may be conducted via Zoom. Besides taekwondo, her Muay Thai and Kickboxing classes will be cancelled indefinitely until a vaccine for Covid-19 prevention is available in the market, I think, as close contact sports are still prohibited. Even if it’s allowed, I’m not sure if I would risk Sherilyn going to the gym and dance studio.
She pushed her bed to a corner of the bedroom and attended her taekwondo lesson in the room.
The girls made dumplings with their grandma in the afternoon. A good activity to keep them away from their gadgets for a couple of hours. But the aftermath is very messy with powdery floor, table and kitchen tops. The girls helped to clean up and I had a few more rounds of wiping to do. 🥴
Filling of minced meat, julienned cabbage and carrots, sesame seed oil and soy sauce. Sherilyn made a batch of vegan filling composed of shiitake mushrooms and onions.
Dinner: braised organic bitter melon with chicken, stir-fried organic sweet potato leaves and 12345 pork ribs.
The moment that Sherilyn has been waiting for finally arrived at 8pm today. The announcement for the winners of the Star of AISS Talent Award was made and she’s the second runner up! The prize consists of RM500 in cash and a RM6k scholarship to study at Aspiration International School!
With so much uncertainties over the near future caused by La Corona, I don’t think we will accept the partial scholarship. Even after subsidy from the partial scholarship, it’s still a hefty sum to cough out every month for tuition fees. The prize came at the wrong time but Sherilyn is very contented with this achievement. With her tenacity and will power, I am sure she will be able to win something bigger in the near future, perhaps a full scholarship and perhaps even realizing her wildest dreams of studying in a renowned university in Canada.
Friday, 1 May 2020
I didn’t realize that today is Labor’s Day until I woke Alycia up at 7:30 a.m. as usual for her Monday – Friday online classes conducted by her high school teachers and she told me groggily that today is a public holiday. Oh well, it makes no difference whether it’s a public holiday or weekend as every day feels the same, for the past 45 days 😬 In our pre-MCO days, I would be checking my calendar regularly to see when the next public holiday would fall on. I was always chronically sleep deprived and always looked forward to public holidays so that I could catch up on my beauty sleep. I’ve repaid all my sleep debt now and I’m raring to get back to my old norm when school reopens, which is something that no one knows when. But people are speculating that school will reopen in June, for 5th and 6th formers first.
Saturday, 2 May 2020
My car is still stuck at the car repair shop and I am worried about her. The car is parked outside the workshop and exposed to all elements. She’s always sheltered in our condo car park and have never been exposed for so many days in the outdoors. I hope to have her back by Monday next week.
During this MCO, there seems to be a reversal of role between Sherilyn and me. I’m like the daughter telling her what to bake and cook and she’ll settle the rest 😆 As she has all the time in the world now, she does all the baking and experiments at home blithely. I would be happy to bake and cook too if there’s someone to pay and buy all the ingredients and clean up the mess for me after I’m done playing masak-masak. I do miss the 10 years when we had a live-in maid to help out. Those were the years that I cooked and baked bread the most as I had a good helper to help me in the aftermath. Now, whatever I crave to eat, I have to consider the aftermath first.
Today Sherilyn made lemonade and a tantalizing zesty yummy lemon curd (Malaysians would call it Lemon Kaya). We have an excess of lemons in the fridge as hubs didn’t know that we still have lemons and bought another bag! The lemon curd is so yummy that I’ve asked our baking queen to make more next week 😋
The beautiful yellow hue comes from a little turmeric powder, besides lemon zest.
Today Sherilyn finally revealed the video that she’s been working so hard on for the past 3 days. It’s a talent video that she submitted to Aspirations International School for an online talent competition. She was recently chosen as the top 10 finalists and this video is for the finals. If she’s the winner, she gets a RM1k cash prize plus a scholarship to study in this school. So yeah, we appreciate your time and help to vote her 😘.
Sherilyn made the music for the video using piano, guitar, glass wines, sound of knifes clanking and a combo of computer generated musical instruments. She has no formal lessons on piano or video-making skill but managed to churn out a beautiful video. She learnt this piano piece in 3 days just for this submission.
How to vote:
You can view her video on these 3 platforms, which you also have to vote for her on the same 3 platforms:
Our dancing queen’s haul in the Get The Beat (GTB) Asia dance competition held on Sunday, 25 August 2019 was champion, 2nd and 5th placing in the student’s choreography, jazz and solo contemporary (under 14 category).
With this, she’s now qualified for the world finals to be held in Bangkok from 18 – 22 December 2019. But her dad and I don’t think that she’ll be going as we want her to focus in her studies. Lately she’s been spending too much time partaking in all sorts of competitions and dancing. We’re extremely proud of her prowess and burning passion in dancing but we feel that studies should be above dancing.
Even the day before the competition, Sherilyn had to be in school at 7 a.m. to perform in a Chinese cultural dance in a Merdeka Day celebration. She’s spent every night practising at the gym till 10 p.m. for the GTB competition and during the weekends and holidays, her team mates from school came over to practise the Chinese dance.
Would you believe it if I told you that our dancing queen choreographed for her school’s Chinese cultural dance? Sherilyn stopped going to the dance studio for lessons several months ago as I think she needs a dance teacher who can teach her more advanced techniques and help her to raise her game.
Enjoy the photos…
My dancing queen has definitely come a long way from a 3+ year old chubby cheeked girl who started attending ballet classes to a determined 14-year old who choreographs her own dance ❤️
My dancing queen and I spent the entire day at the dance competition on our Sunday yesterday.
On the day of my dancing queen’s first solo dance competition, she started to have the sniffles. So did I. We both got bitten by Cass’ bugs which she picked up from school last week. Bummer! But she put up a great performance despite having pain on her back and a dribbling wet nose. Competition was very stiff. The competitors from Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia were SO SO good! So good that I felt nervous. I’d give them a 10/10 for performance, make-up and costume. Those contestants danced like they were parts of the scenes from The Next Step. The 14 year olds and above are mostly international competitors who look like pro dancers. Whereas my dancing queen has only just resumed dance lessons 2 months ago after a 1.5-year hiatus to prepare for her UPSR exam. Anyway, we were clear from the very start that she joined the Get The Beat (GTB) dance competition not to win but to gain exposure. So I did not put any pressure on her and myself for any winning (1,2, 3 placing). I just prayed hard that she would not injure herself anymore as a few days before the competition, Sherilyn discovered two lumpy bruises – one at the back of her neck and one near her spine. Her dad brought her to the physiotherapist and the neck bruise subsided but the one near her spine has to be checked out by an orthopaedic 😰 for possible fluid aspiration.
Anyway, despite all the setbacks, my dancing queen got 3rd placing in the Student Under 14 Choreography event and 4th placing in the Jazz Solo Under 14 event. This earned her the Golden Ticket to the GTB Finals in Singapore in November 2018. The event starts on 26 Nov 2018 and lasts for a few days. But in light of her current back injury, she will be pulling out from the finals. Right now, we have to get an appointment for Sherilyn to see an orthopaedic and treat her back.
All competitive sports come with the perils, sacrifices and pain. Not to mention money.
Enjoy the pix!
Taking a break and eating sushi for lunch after the first event.
Doing stretches and practice before the second event.
Gulping down a packet of Izumio hydrogenated water to recharge her batteries after her second event.
Dancing Queen’s Golden Ticket to the GTB Finals held in Singapore in November 2018.
Can you spot my dancing queen?
She’s behind one of the Caucasian girls on the far right.
Too bad Sherilyn suffered an injury on her back and has to give the Finals a miss. Given time, more practice and maturity, I am very sure my Dancing Queen will one day be back at GTB for another competition to clinch the First placing in her category.
Here’s a video of our dancing queen doing a routine practice of the jazz piece at the dance studio:
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