Balboni Ristorante: A piece of Italian in the heart of Jakarta

For one and some reasons, I rarely attend a food tasting. However, when Balboni invited me to theirs, I find the invitation too hard to resist. I always love Balboni. Their Italian food and stunning ambiance had got me hooked since my first visit (read here). When I received the invitation, just like that, the mental image of their scrumptious Deviled chicken pizza popped up and that's the story behind of how I got my fine Saturday lunch.

Talaga Sampireun Ancol

I love staying at Jakarta. For me, the city has almost everything I need but sometimes I do miss a change of scenery. As much as I love the metropolitan life, there are times when I wanted to be away from the city. Most of the times, I like to go to Bandung as even though the city has almost as traffic as here, well the traffic there mostly caused by Jakarta's people. LOL. Anyway, as I said, I love driving to Bandung for a short getaway as they have many diners with great greenery views. Some views to relax your mind for a while, and by you, I mean me.

Starbucks Autumn 2012 Media & Food Enthusiasts Gathering

Yesterday, several bloggers and I were invited to Starbucks' media & food enthusiasts gathering at Kota Kasablanka. As always, Starbucks comes with selections of their seasonal F&B and this time the gathering was held to introduce their Autumn's food & beverage. We were spoiled with kept on coming bread and cakes selections, not to mention their newest soon to launch Autumn blend coffee and Sea salt caramel mocha. 

Introducing Starbucks Blonde Roast

Several days ago, I was invited by Starbucks Indonesia to attend "New Starbucks Roast Spectrum" held at fX Sudirman. Lately I have been getting several food tasting invitations, but I never had the chance to go due to some reasons, so this was the first food tasting I managed to go. Yay! 

Starbucks introduced their newest blonde roast which was a smooth lighter type of coffee. In the event, they explained to us that the reason they created blonde roast was to satisfy customers who are looking for a lighter not too strong coffee. There were two variants for the blonde roast which are: 

Veranda Blend

Combination of chocolate & peanuts from Latin America that is best pairing with food containing milk chocolate and peanuts.

Willow Blend

This coffee is from Latin America & East Africa with citrus flavor, creating a very light beverage type which is best pairing with food with citrus flavor. 

I am not a coffee expert as I don't drink coffee, but I did taste a small cup of Veranda blend and it was lighter than the one I sipped while ago from my mom's coffee cup. At the same occasion, Starbucks also introducing their four new variants of spring foods. 

VIA Red Velvet Cake Roll (25k)

I think it was a good idea for Starbucks to create their own Red Velvet along with so many red velvets in town. What makes theirs different was that they added VIA coffee inside the roll cake. 

For my personal flavor, I didn't really like the coffee taste in the cake as to me the coffee taste was too strong that it dominated the red velvet flavor. 

Fillo Chocolate Raisin Pastry (27,5k)

This one was my favorite. The combination between the chocolate with almond, vanilla, butter and raisin covered in the crispy crunchy fillo pastry was to die for. I really enjoy my every single bite.

Chocolate Raspberry Danish (22,5k)

The danish was a very crisp pastry covered in sugar glazed with combination of chocolate and raspberry  in the center. It was a little bit too sweet for my taste.

Toffee Almond Bars (21k)

This one was also my favorite. The crunchiness of almond, white and dark chocolate was just simply delicious. It had toffee taste so it was not too sweet. I like! 

Aside from the blonde roast, Starbucks also had two new beverages to offer for this spring which was Cocoa cappuccino and Caramel cream coffee jelly frappucino. They didn't served the cocoa cappucinno on the food tasting as cappucinno was best to drink while hot due to the foam, but I got to taste the caramel cream coffee jelly frappucino and it was good. At first I thought it will be too dairy as it was mixed of milk, ice and caramel syrup with whipped cream, caramel sauce and coffee jelly, but turns out the milk was not over powering, I actually like this one. 

Overall, I had a pleasant afternoon. It was a new experience for me accompanied with delicious pastry and smell of coffees. Not only they didn't let us go back on empty stomach, Starbucks also didn't let us go back empty handed, we were each given a lucky bag with one tumblr and Dark Sumatra roast coffee inside, and I answered right on a question games so I got an extra cute mug. ;) 

Thank you Starbucks for having me, it was fun. :)