>gel-icious

What do restaurateurs and kids have in common? They love playing with jelly.

A top-rated English restaurant, The Fat Duck, features on its single dinner menu no less than a half dozen jelly accompaniments, not counting the bavarois or custard/pudding type dishes. Passion fruit jelly, jelly of quail, almond fluid gel, tea jelly, chocolate jelly, jelly of mead and Sichuan peppercorn...

I also suggest the fragrant and naturally green -unnatural looking!- pandan jelly. It typically makes a delightful dessert called kueh, kue, or kuih - a tapioca, rice or agar-agar based jelly-like pastry with coconut and palm sugar. I look forward to a pandan treat by a pioneering chef.

Nothing beats fresh pandan leaves. Dried leaves won't do it. Instead, use bottled pandan essence (or pandanus extract) sold, possibly, next to almond essence.