Step 1: Enter Butterfly Desserts on a quiet weekday night (we enter with a Eunice and leave afterwards to try Menya Hanabi for the very first time).
Step 2: Eat. Eat a lot.
Step 3: Delay writing, not because it’s hard to write, but because it’s hard to know which and what to write first. Your weekends are booked in advance for eating and drinking and more eating and somewhere in between you’re faintly aware of the burgeoning backlog of reviews to-be-posted. Plus birthdays. And weddings. Weekday nights are for purging and editing photos, filtering down the ones that make it and throwing them on to Google Drive, then carrying them over into skeletal blog posts that grow by a word a week.
Step 4: The dessert cafe * is a dining room. See above. Step inside. Shades of the smokehouse at Fraser’s, this. I vaguely recall the soundtrack being quite pleasant, though I can’t honestly remember what was playing. Elevator-jazz (apologies to Seb)? Perhaps.
*Taxonomical purists will undoubtedly grapple with the rapidly-changing classifications emerging in KL’s adolescent food scene. Is Butterfly a dessert cafe? A dessert bar? A generic dessert-place? Each term lends a different framing device for which to judge the products through.
Step 5: Procrastinate. Nurture hobbies. Listen to more music. Start buying notebooks and fountain pens while you wait for the year to end so you can begin properly planning for the new year. Wonder how you made such an incredibly awful beginning – and likely end – to your career. Rewatch Synecdoche New York and Vivre Sa Vie. Struggle to fall asleep after late-night coffee. Wake up to another Monday.
Step 6: Write:
Here comes the orange mango trifle (RM25). How is the orange mango trifle? I scoop in. The spoon slides smoothly in, stutters against solid chunks, then reaches the bottom. I bring it back up, through the layers of orange and mango mousse, occasionally hitting the fresh mango sliced up and interspersed throughout.
Taste-wise? It’s bright, punchy, moist. And anyway mango is always good, isn’t it? Lovely layers of flavour and texture are complemented by the natural sweetness of the mango. The orange does get a bit tart towards the end though. It’s a balancing act that stays almost perfectly poised most of the way through, only sliding away into tartness as we draw closer to the bottom of the jar.
RM25 also gets us a Chocolate Banana. See that crispity chocolate dome on the left? We smash it open with a few strong taps of the spoon. Then we dig into its innards – chocolate ganache, caramel chocolate chantilly, and bits of banana. It’s a dark sort of richness amidst the creamy interior. Word of warning though: when we tried it, the sponge could do with a bit more fluff (or general moistness). There are globules of strawberry jam on the plate, sure, but they serve more of an aesthetic purpose than a moisturising one.
Also, surely this shouldn’t be called a cafe? Shouldn’t the main focus of a cafe be, well, coffee? I suppose that strikes out dessert cafe as an appropriate description of Butterfly.
Step 7: End with the Deconstructed Strawberry Opera. It looks great. Just look at it! It looks great. And good lord are there a lot of ingredients that went into this. Pardon us while we rattle off the list: almond joconde, sponge cake, almond wafer crisp, strawberry cream, strawberry-coated almond, strawberry jelly, dark chocolate ganache, meringue cookies, chantilly cream and strawberry syrup.
Surprisingly, it isn’t quite as tasty as its less visually striking compatriots. Is it the sponge? I think it’s the sponge. It needs, again, more fluff. More airiness, lightness, moistness. Maybe this is how the opera is supposed to be like. You tell me, Handel. Personal preference, perhaps, but I’m very partial to the sort of creamy softness you get with the matcha swiss roll at Henri Charpentier. Dense desserts have never quite been my thing.
Step 7: You can find Butterfly Desserts in Sri Petaling – it’s open from 2 to 10pm daily except on Wednesdays, when it’s closed. It’s over at Unit 3-1, Jalan Radin Bagus 6. They can be reached at 03-9054 0289.