About

Oh hey there, thanks for stopping by!

I'm an: 18 year old girl named Irene living in Sydney. I was born in Jakarta, Indonesia but I'm Chinese by origin and migrated to Australia when I was 6. So now I'm just your average Austra-indo-chinese, studying hard in uni to become a nutritionist in 5 years.

This is me going cheeeese.

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Favourite ingredients: strawberries, pistachios, avocados, cinnamon, lemon, watermelon, white chocolate, taro, green tea. (you will make me a very happy child indeed if you feed me anything with these said ingredients)

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What got me into cooking: I was always a keen onlooker when my mum used to make homemade birthday cakes for each family member and ever since I was around 5, I would always be in charge of mixing the cake batter with the hand mixer. For a 5 year old, you could imagine that mixer was pretty damn heavy for my little chubby hands so even though I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the ingredients blend and cool streaks left by the mixer, I would also turn into a typical impatient child asking "Is it done yet?" every minute or so and the answer was also "No!", followed by my mum taking over the mixing process.

Then as I got older, I enjoyed the simple things like making pancakes using the bought bottle of pancake mix, store-brought cake mixes but the results were always pretty bleh, in other words average... So then I ventured on to more exciting things, started looking for recipes online, or tried out some desserts from mum's recipe collection. Some of my dearest early successes were basic sultana scones, quiches and tiramisu.

I would also tread upon amazing blogs which totally blew me away as I realised there are so many other people out there, even my age (and younger!) who share the same passion as me! Then of course, the sudden influx of reality cooking shows like Masterchef definitely got me completely absorbed into the food spiral and there was just no way out. Though I must admit, it's irritating that cooking now is getting too commercialised and those cooking shows have more drama than cooking in them! 

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Why I started the blog: I wanted to have a place where I could store all my recipes and pictures, document my successes and failures in cooking and also share them with other keen foodies out there because there's not a big number of friends that I have who are into baking as I am. Having all your pictures on the web for anyone to see also motivates me to improve on my own photography skills. Other than that, it's mainly also because of the other food bloggers out there who have really inspired me so much as to convert me from a lurker/reader to this amateur food blogger I am now. 

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Random Facts: 

• I don't particularly like the skin of apples, and would refuse to eat them without peeling it off first but I'm okay with pears and peaches
• I really like the colour mint, peach and cobalt blue
• I secretly wish that I could live in a cool Scandinavian studio/apartment and have it all to myself
• My friends think it's cool that I can speak English, Chinese, Indonesian, French and Japanese. But just between you and me, honestly, I think the only language I can speak really really fluently are English and maybe Indonesian. 
• I can clap with one hand, I would show you one day if we get to meet
• I can't stand sitting on the same bench as someone who shake their knees
• I'm not a fan of hot drinks, and yes I don't care if it's winter, I want my iced chocolate

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Wishes: I would so so love to become a part time food photographer/stylist with a main job of nutritionist and be so ridiculously good at making food appealing in front of the camera, like so many of the bloggers in my blog roll. My dream full time job would be a nutritionist. And in the future, when I have my own house, I would make sure I've got a spacious kitchen and have a massive collection of tableware that I could use in my food photo sessions. And of course, somewhere in the house, I dream of a 'studio' with heaps of windows for natural light where I would have these different coloured/textured boards/woods/backgrounds ready at my disposal. 

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If you have any questions, criticisms, advice, etc etc don't hesitate to shoot me a message through to: aswoonfulofsugar@gmail.com

-Irene