SPRMRKT, Franken-Monkey and Rabbit from Aranzi Aronzo’s The Cute Book, Cake

The prevailing holiday mood meant people were taking it easy on Friday. Since i wouldn’t be able to dally at Ocean Curry Fish Head while waiting for someone to run her banking errands, ended up next door at SPRMRKT (2 McCallum Street. facebook. No relation to the Amsterdam outfit).

Opened three weeks ago by a pair of siblings, the emphasis was on fresh (and therefore dearer) food. There was also a retail section for fruits, some veg, and homeware. The flat white from Smitten Coffee’s Thumper Blend was at times excellent – hot chocolate in a mug, and as personal preferences go, more favourable to me than what i’ve gotten onsite. Good texture in the carrot cake thanks to obvious bits of shredded carrot and nuts, and the citrus zest in the cream cheese was quite refreshing. Several people liked the peanut cookies.

Back in the office, the girls were cooing over the kawaii-ness of Aranzi Aronzo‘s The Cute Book. I had a go for a lark and the unanimous conclusion was that not only would i never come near the likes of Ashley Isham, Kevin Seah, Edwin Neo of Ed et al, Jeremiah Ang of The J Myers Company, that OberBlünck bespoke jeans guy, or Woffles Wu for that matter, if i were old and decrepit and selling these franken-dolls for food, even sweet charity might turn heel and run like the hounds of hell were after her.

(Old Monkey done by an expert, the Franken-creatures by Why-Can’t-We-Just-Use-A-Hot-Glue-Gun)

But altogether nice for a chill and chat.

And later on, we were biscuitted and caked-out by, inter alia, very lovely Anzac biscuits from Sarnies, dark chocolate mousse from Grin Affair, tiramisu and banana toffee tart from Da Paolo (after which there was yet another round of desserts after bumping into more friends).

This world is a brilliant place to live in with so much to see and do and enjoy, but still later on, listening to Richard Coekin on 2 Corinthians 5:9 – 6:2 (Motives for Gospel Ministry), i was reminded that when i became a Christian, my priorities changed and it became my purpose to please not myself but God. In the letter to the Corinthians, Paul defends his ministry against the accusations of the false apostles and in so doing states the motives for ministry and unpacks the meaning of pleasing the Lord:

• fear of the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:10ff) – when Christ returns, we must all stand before the judgement seat of Christ who will judge everything we have done and spoken and thought. If we have trusted in him, we have no reason to fear his condemnation because he has taken that condemnation when he died on the cross for us. But precisely because we have been saved from all this, we ought to know that God will have a reckoning for all we have done in this world. Jesus tells two parables of the talents – in one, when the servants were at first given different amounts of talents, the same reward was given in the end; in the other, the servants were rewarded according to what they had done with what they had been given. So we are encouraged to make the most of what we have been given to do what we can to please him. But more than that, there is a great seriousness in facing Christ’s judgement – it lasts for all eternity and a disappointing review but the person who matters most in the universe can never be changed. How much more frightening it will be for people who are still unforgiven. Therefore, just as it would be unspeakably cruel and inhumane to walk past a house engulfed by flames without warning its sleeping occupants, so it would be unconscionable not to persuade people to be saved from hell;

• love of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:14-15) – the immense love that caused God the Son to come to earth to live the life we could never life, and to die the death that we should have died, as a sinner and a criminal, as our substitute and our representative. So when Christ died on the cross, we died together with him. We know we are now acceptable to God because we were raised with Christ. Therefore, we can no longer live for ourselves but for him;
• responsibility for the message of the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:19-20) – God entrusted the impossibly important message of peace and reconciliation to the apostles which the apostles passed on to us. As ambassadors of God, they were not not at liberty to change the message, and neither are we, just to make it more popular or palatable to others. And we are not at liberty to keep the message to ourselves, that would be stealing; we must pass it to others;
• this is the day of salvation – this is the time to alive, not the days of the prophets of old. This is the period that the prophets of the Old Testament foretold and looked forward to, the last days before the judgement of Christ. These are days of opportunity and urgency.

Sarnies (facebook)
136 Telok Ayer Street

Grin Affair (facebook)
3 Everton Park

*SPRMRKT
One Monday’s Menu