Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Ichigo Shortcake!

This year has been full of events for me, and the most memorable (and biggest achievement) would be the start of my blog Ichigo Shortcake. Although I only began doing this around 2-3 months ago, I already feel like I can do this for a long time to come. Of course, I can also see the amount of effort required to see it through and if I truly want the blog to be popular, I have to do a lot better than I have so far. So, my resolution for next year is to start cooking and baking and hopefully create a set of my own unique recipes that can be loved by all my readers. At the same time, I will be continuing my food saga around Melbourne and abroad as well as a number of my travel stories.

I will also hopefully be travelling to China and Japan early next year so please tune in for updates about that.

Have a very Merry Christmas and a safe and happy New Year to all of my readers! Hope the new year will bring prosperity and plenty of eating :)

Below is a Christmas cake made by one of my friends racheese. She's a pro baker and I love her cupcakes as well. Visit her site at http://racheese.deviantart.com/. Wish I'm as talented as her!

Thank you so much for reading my blog and for all your support!

Macro photos, take 1 - flowers and bees

I recently bought a Canon 100mm f2.8L macro lens and have been dying to try it out. The following are a few of the ones I took in Yuye's garden - can you believe there's no other flowers? I was so excited the day I got the lens that I ran outside to find bugs and flowers but, there were none! I couldn't even find ants! I had to settle for this flower (which really belongs to the next door neighbours) and a few days later, I found bees near one of his trees. Let me know what you all think and maybe give me some pointers. :)

www.ichigoshortcake.com

Hi readers! Ichigo Shortcake has moved to her own domain! I'm SoOoo excited! I've been wanting my own domain for a while now and finally, I've done it. Please change your bookmark to http://www.ichigoshortcake.com, to make things easier. However, my old url at http://ichigoshortcake.blogspot.com is still there and will still work since all I did was forward the domain :P (I'm taking the lazy way out this time).

I'm also planning to change the layout a bit (it might take a bit of time since I'm very bad at graphics and web design) as well as bringing in new content such as recipes and travel stories so stay tuned!

Thanks for stopping by and enjoy your stay! :)

Akika

Food for thought & GAS Hair Studio Cafe

A recent visit to a restaurant sparked a thought that I wanted to share with all of you (rather, I'm posting this more for my own sake because probably not many people will be reading this).

It's common knowledge that there has been an outbreak of food blogs in recent years, giving birth to many self-proclaimed 'foodies' and wannabe food critics (like myself). But it is also true that anything and everything we post (food reviews especially) are individual experiences and are bound by personal taste/preference, special occurrences on the day as well as many other elements combined. Everything you read should be taken with a grain of salt, especially the extremely positive or negative comments and places that have mixed reviews. Be your own judge and actually visit some of those restaurants rather than just taking the word of some stranger on the internet.

Hello internet...take 2

It's been almost a year since I last posted. I was totally right about being too lazy to update this blog...

However! I've finally worked up some motivation to keep posting...yes...that's right!! I recently just purchased a new DSLR! *excited grin*. It's one of Canon's latest technologies - Canon 550D with an 18-200mm lens. This purchase just increased my photo collection by a fold at the expense of a slightly unhappy wallet. I foresee that my wallet will become unhappier as time goes on...since a macro lens is a must have for any serious photographer, among many other goodies. :3

With this said, I will definitely be posting up my recent adventures and also plan to slowly backdate all of my past ones (hopefully I'm not lying this time, fingers crossed).