Anxiety science

social media opinions, Singapulah!

recipe for berry cheesecake muffins (with a vegan option) below

Food news of the week:

A fun berry muffin situation below, with a vegan option for this week’s recipe.

If you grate a single zucchini, mix in 2 eggs, salt and pepper, then fold in enough flour plus a pinch of baking powder to make a gloopy moist pancake batter, you’ve set yourself up for a weekday dinner success. Heat a pan on high with olive oil for a few minutes, then turn it slightly lower to medium, and ladle in your batter. Wait at least a minute or until golden-brown on one side before flipping and doing the same on the other.

I’m obsessed with crème brulée from Le Petit Citron, which cracks wildly everywhere to reveal a treasure trove of heavily vanilla-speckled custard, wetter than most, and I like that. And the banana cake with caramelised edges from Olivier’s Bakery is too soft and moist for its own good.

Olivier’s Bakery moist banana cake!

Science of the week:

This week’s Biomes and Brains newsletter is all about anxiety, which my co-founder at Mibio Nick wrote. Education fundamental to our cause, all our newsletters there are free to read. If you’re keen on understanding how and why anxiety is a problem and how our guts play a role in it, you’ll likely find this not just interesting, but helpful.

Insight of the week:

Unless it’s for business, if there’s one social media platform I’m not crazy about, it’s Tiktok, which I actually used a lot during Covid. It was incredibly fun and funny and addictive, what else was needed during lockdown in a different country? I enjoy social media because it’s informative and fun, but there are two reasons why I don’t support Tiktok specifically:

1. Tiktok has done something ingenious with its algorithm so that you hyperscroll, but as someone in the mental health field, I know this affects brain circuitry in a way that it ups levels of stress and anxiety long term, no matter how funny that video is, because the brain cannot process and prioritize a constant influx of information. The same of course can be said for Instagram, which is why I’m strict with social media consumption generally, as someone quite susceptible to stress and anxiety. However Tiktok is different in the sense that…

2. It’s been evidenced in studies time and time again, and you can check out more bar charts here if you want, that Tiktok (but not American-owned Instagram or Facebook) censors many CCP-sensitive hashtags like the Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwan ownership, Hong Kong, and Uyghur persecution, things which people can otherwise know and learn about. Tiktok news is invisibly controlled by a foreign government, news which young people can see and interpret.

Recipe of the week:

I wrote this recipe when I was vegan years ago (link to a travel post with my ex-fiancé post here, lol), so I included that version here too. It’s funny looking back– I really loved writing that way, and now I don’t want to use more words to say the same thing.

Berry Cheesecake Muffins (makes 12 medium muffins)

*=vegan substitution

Ingredients

For the muffins:

250g (2 cups) plain flour

2 eggs (*3 vegan eggs, made by mixing 3 tbsp ground flaxseed with 6 tbsp water in a small bowl and letting that mixture set aside for the timebeing)

210g (slightly less than a cup) sugar

113g (0.5 cup) melted butter (*vegan butter/ margarine)

1 tsp baking powder

0.5 tsp baking soda

240ml (1 cup) yoghurt or sour cream (*any plant-based yoghurt)

1 tsp vanilla extract

0.5 tsp salt (leave out if you used salted butter)

around 1 cup of fresh or frozen berries (I used frozen since I always have frozen berries stuffed in my freezer)

For the cream cheese filling:

110g cream cheese (*vegan cream cheese)

2.5 tbsp sugar (you can also use the same amount of icing sugar)

Directions

Preheat your oven to 180C. Spray your 12-muffin pan with cooking spray or grease it with some butter, going all over the insides of the pan, including the whole surface on top. This is because the batter will rise and then fall to create the signature muffin top look, so greasing the surface will help you easily get the muffins out. Line your pan with paper liners.

First, in a bowl, make the cream cheese filling by mixing together the cream cheese and sugar. Put this in the fridge while you make the muffin batter. Using a whisk or electrical mixer, whisk the butter and sugar together. Then add the eggs, vanilla, and salt and mix until everything is frothy and well combined. In a separate bowl, briefly mix together the flour, baking powder and baking soda, then tip this into your egg mixture. Lastly, fold in your berries. Make sure your berries are not too big– cut large raspberries or blackberries in half before mixing them in.

Fill each muffin cup halfway with the batter. Then take your cream cheese filling out from the fridge and put teaspoons of this filling into the centre of the muffin tins. Repeat until you’re done with all 12. Finally, fill the muffin cups until the top (or three-quarters full) with the rest of the batter. As a final touch, sprinkle the tops of your muffins with Maldon salt and granulated sugar. Don’t be too liberal though, since the muffins themselves are already rather sweet by themselves.

Bake for 20-22 minutes in your preheated oven. Check with a wooden skewer or knife after 20 minutes– if there are moist crumbs clinging to it, take it out. If the skewer/knife is still obviously wet, leave the muffins in there for another 3-5 minutes. These are best enjoyed warm with some vanilla ice cream or yoghurt, or plain. They can be kept in an airtight container for 3-5 days.

Restaurant of the week:

Finally headed to Singapulah in the heart of London, because it was going to happen sooner or later. A fellow Singaporean and I (hi Aneka!) braved the queue to see if all the talk matched the action, and if it could stand up against other local food hotspots like C&R and Laxsa. I still think the best roti canai can be found at the latter, with great fried carrot cake (my personal fave dish) too.

chilli crab bao (£6)