Hopelessly devoted to ONJ Currently touring Asia, singer will be in Colombo this week to perform at the Musaeus College auditorium on April 4 and 5. Here from her tour is an account of how she rocked audiences in Singapore.
‘Pirate’s Fantasy’, the world’s most expensive cake was unveiled at Heritance Ahungalla on March 26 to a distinguished audience that included cricketers from Sri Lanka and the visiting England team.
The $35 million sapphire studded cake, which the hotel hopes will be a serious contender for the ‘ World's most expensive cake’ title this year was created by the hotel’s celebrity chef Dimuthu Kumarasinghe. The ten-layered ‘Pirate's Fantasy’ comes studded with jewels and different flavours meant to symbolise the hotel's beach front property on the coastal fishing village of Ahungalla.
Chef Kumarasinghe, or Chef DK as he is popularly known, is a celebrity in his own right, having won five individual gold medals at the Culinary Olympics in Germany and four golds at the Culinary World Cup in Luxembourg.
‘This signature jewel- studded cake, that symbolises the sea, will be anyone's fantasy. We are incredibly proud of Chef's achieve- ments,’ said Refhan Razeen, General Manager, Heritance Ahungalla. Heritance Ahungalla is one of the Aitken Spence Group's premier hotels.
Chef DK has packed each cake layer with exotic ingredients like cinnamon, zucchini, purple yam, coconut chips, pistachio, rosemary, almond cookies, white chocolate, coconut meringue, baked cheese, sweet wine berry, pineapple, walnut, pumpkin and lemon. For decoration, he has dipped into a treasure trove of necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, pendants, tie pins, cuff links, nose and toe rings.
He ends his sugar craft, by studding the cake with ten different sapphires, crowning the top with the most expensive and the rarest one, a "Padmaraja" or the 'King Sapphire".
Sri Lankan skipper Mahela Jayawardene, former skippers Kumar Sangakkara and Tillakaratne Dilshan and England cricketers Tim Bresnan, Ravi Bopara and Steven Flinn, watched in anticipation as the cake was unveiled atop a brass cannon.
The Australian pop icon performed at the Esplanade Theatre Tuesday night to a roomful of adoring fans and, well, was just perfect in almost every sense of the word.
Her show began with the ballad, Pearls On A Chain, but Newton-john soon kicked the show into high gear with A Little More Love, followed by a trio of songs from the movie, Xanadu: Magic, Suddenly and the title track. Despite sounding slightly raspy when she spoke, her voice was immaculate during her vocal performances. Pristine, even. When she sang her cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene - during a seg- ment where she visited all her early country songs - she hit notes that were seemingly impossible; notes that soared up into the stratosphere. And when she performed Send In The Clowns, accompanied by just the piano, every word dripped with emotion.
But Newton-john was here to have fun, and she wanted her audience to do so, too. She started the song Physical in a midtempo fashion, much like what she did the last time she was here, before telling the band to stop. "Do you want to hear that like how it was originally done?" she asked to delightful screams, as the band kicked into the fastpaced version of the song. And she got the crowd to join in a jaunty sing-a-long of Country Road.
The seven-piece band expertly hit every chord and played every melody with spot-on accuracy. But it was Newton-john's show, and she knew it. Newton-john did a whole segment featuring music from the movie Grease, kicking off with You're The One That I Want. "Too bad that didn't go down well," she joked, after the crowd got to its feet at the song's end. She then went on about how Grease changed her life, and how people have always asked her what it was like to star in the show and kiss John Travolta. "Of course, I say it was a drag," she laughed, before continuing with Hopelessly Devoted To You, Summer Nights and We Go Together.
If the audience thought that was the climax of the show, they were mistaken. It came right at the end, as climaxes do, with a meltyour-heart rendition of I Honestly Love You.
(Courtesy http://www.todayon
line.com)