Breakfast at Leonardo’s Cafe at Carousel Shopping Centre on a Saturday morning. We started with drinks – a iced mocha frappe (AU$5.90) for Jac and a large apple juice (AU$3.80) for me.

Jac’s mocha frappe was very sweet, but cold and refreshing.

Jac ordered a “shark bait” sandwich on multi-grain bread (AU$11.95), which is filled with atlantic smoked salmon strips, cream cheese, lettuce, capers and red onion.

She really enjoyed it – she loves the combo of smoked salmon, capers, red onion and cream cheese. This made me think of the smoked salmon bento I packed for her last year. I’ll have to do that again sometime, when I’ve got my bentojo (bento mojo) back. :)

I had french toast with maple syrup (AU$6.70) and a side order of bacon (AU$2.95).

The bacon looked and tasted a little dry – not enough streaky fat on it!

The french toast had a very strong cinnamon flavour and tasted quite good. It would’ve been nicer the bread was thicker. The bread was just so thin and floppy, not satisfying to really bite into. It was bread sliced for sandwiches, which I always find too thin, even when making “dainty” bento sandwiches. We buy bread sliced for toast and use it for sandwiches as well as for toast. We just like having more to chew, and I think since we generously filled sandwiches, it makes sense to have a good amount of bread to go with the filling.

But I liked the maple syrup served in its own dish, a beautiful dark sticky sweet pool. I could pour as little or as much syrup as I wanted onto my toast and bacon, or I could simply dip the toast or bacon into the syrup. Yes, I dipped my bacon into the syrup.

In this photo, I’ve assembled my last three bites, each with a bit of french toast and bacon, drizzled with the last of the maple syrup. And then I savoured each bite, chewing slowly, enjoying the salty, sweet, savoury flavours.