Life with Bees

I'd been looking forward to this weekend for a long time. Not only did I get four days off (random rec leave) but it was Simex's first full weekend after a month of working six-day weeks. And given his recent entry into the Cannot Live Without Roti Canai club, the three of us made a day trip to Sydney to visit Mamak on Goulburn St and to load up on Malaysian sweets and food.


Thanks to Maeve O'Meara and Joanna Saville's Food Safari on SBS, I'd also discovered Makan at Alice's in Thornleigh which sold Malaysian sweets (known as kuih). So I rang up and pre-ordered three boxes of my favourite kuih. We had a box of kuih talam with a deep green bottom of sweet pea and pandan and a layer of coconut cream on top. We also had kuih lapis, a Malaysian staple, with its bright stripes of pink, red and green. The last box had a baked tapioca cake with a light crust.

We drove down in the afternoon, squabbled our way through the northern suburbs ("I thought you were navigating!") and eventually got to Makan at Alice's. It's on Bellevue Road - turn off Pennant Hills Road. After picking up the sweets, we headed back into the city on the M2. TK was very excited about driving over the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the first time. With Si and me shouting out lane changes and checking blind spots, we slowly began merging towards the harbour bridge and the city lights of Sydney. "Hm, we seem to be all banking and IT,'' TK remarked, looking up at the glittering towers that loomed over the bridge.

"What?" asked Si. And as TK started to explain how the big signs on the office towers sometimes indicated the state of Sydney's economy, the lane for the harbour bridge flashed by and we had disappeared into the maw of the cross city tunnel, accompanied only by a shriek of protest from TK.

After doing a comprehensive tour of Oxford Street, we found our way back to the city and finally got to Mamak. It was 6.15pm and there was already a sizable queue out the front. We got a table at the back of the restaurant, argued again over the menu and ordered tons of food. In one mild frenzy we got through three or four roti, beef murtabak, lamb curry, chicken satay, rice, spinach with chilli and shrimp paste, iced rose syrup and beans, and iced coconut with little green sweetpea worms. Along with much of the drinks menu (including a mixed tea-and-coffee drink), it came to about $98 for the three of us. There was no room for a trip to George St to visit the 85 Degree Bakery.

So we did a quick dash through the rain to go on the Darling Harbour ferris wheel and tooled through the Asian grocery in World Square. By the time we got back to Canberra it was nearly 1am - but it was well worth the trip.

We recovered the next day by lying on the couch watching the National Spelling Bee on ESPN and eating the Malaysian cakes and some of our stash from the Asian grocery. This included:


Every Burger biscuits which, quite frankly, looked just like on the packet. They were a sesame biscuit sandwiched with milk chocolate.


And then there were the strange flavours of KitKat:


Muscat of Alexandria was brightly fake grape-flavoured white chocolate while Sweet Potato was just that, creamy and slightly earthy. It was followed by the best almonds in the world.

Sadly, they were not more delicious than we could tell. But thankfully there was also no ''aftertaste without end'', which would have interfered with the beef goulash and buttery mashed potato TK made for dinner.