Crazy Month!

its been a very busy month for us, well, me mostly since CH is always busy (or seem to be). I decided to take up some short course, little did I know what I'm in for.

It all started out with this:

Few months back, I tried to bake a blackforest cake for someone's birthday, not too bad, but the process was tedious for a rookie like me. Baking the cake was easy, then it comes to icing the cake - I bought ready-made whipped cream, which was a mistake - too stiff, and I had no prior experience with cake icing. No matter how much I scrape and spread there are bumps everywhere! I gave up, decided to cover the blemishes up with something.

So this course came along, and I thought, I should take it since its a good skill to have - I do envision myself becoming a lady boss in a cafe shop. I DO have dreams you know? So without much ado I took the course up, which consists of 4 sessions, once per week, 3 hours per session.

I realized I don't have the necessary tools, and I bought these:

Every week was very hectic for me. I have to prepare a cake and ice it before the class. Then we would do our decorations on the cake. All the preparation actually took days, as I had to bake the cake, frost it, freeze it overnight, then covered with 2nd layer of frost. And I had to make the icing, and flowers too.

My pre-mixed icing for the class:

It was so tiring. Though I enjoyed every minute of the lesson, I'm really glad it's over.

I didn't think the icing was tasty (too sweet) and my decoration skills were, er, basic, so I decided to practice on my cake board instead. So every week, I baked something to the class, did nothing to it, and brought it back. Both CH and I got to savor them. Yum!

For the last lesson, I decided to make something more challenging, and tasty. So I made a yellow butter cake, with chocolate frosting from my favorite chocolate brand.

Boy it was so good! It was a 8" cake, a bit too much for us, but CH thought he should be able to finish them. Wow.








We used the leftover chocolate as a fondue for fruits and cookies. It was finished in no time!
















My not-so-perfect decoration - I'm working on it, as the teacher says, it takes lots of practice to become pro at it. I'll be working on it! Promise!

Meanwhile, the cake is calling me from the fridge. *Drooling*

Update May4: I used this recipe for the cake, and this for the cream, which I adjusted the ingredient amount as I was using 8" pan:

100g semi-sweet chocolate (I used my favourite brand Ghiradelli bar!)

1/4 Cup Chocolate powder (I used Hershey's)

1/2 Cup milk

1/3 Cup butter, cut into pieces

1 3/4 Cup powdered sugar

1tsp Vanilla essence

Duk Li Dim Sum

there are a few good Dim Sum restaurants in Seattle Chinatown, and one of our favorites is Duk Li Dim Sum. Its a small eating place with some of the foods (like spring rolls, ham jim peng) displayed at the counter. What we like about this place is they're fast, food is tasty and cheap, and well, we felt more at home here.


Anyways, we decided to have Dim Sum here yesterday. The main communication language is Cantonese, which we weren't good at, but we survived with mixed Cantonese and Chinese. :D Once we settled down, the waitress wasted no time in serving us with a hot pot of tea, gave us the menu and a pencil to write down our orders. In no time, our food was readily served.

Fried Glutinous Rice (炒糯米饭)	Siew Mai (烧卖)
Congee (皮蛋瘦肉粥)	Shrimp Rice Roll (虾肠卷)
Egg Tarts (蛋塔)

Don't you just love those innocent-looking egg tarts? I greedily devoured them within seconds! *Yummy*

Duk Li Dim Sum
Neighborhood: International District
664 S Weller Street
(at S Maynard Ave)

We're back!

How do you like the new look of our blog? I'm trying out Blogger.com's new feature (which is still in draft) that provides more templates and allows more ways to customize our blogs. Great improvement, but I'd love to have a menu bar just right below the blog title to include miscellaneous links. But anyway, mai hiam buay pai (not bad if you're not picky) isn't this a good change? And refreshing too I'd say!

Wow, we've been away for so long! I'm surprised it was April already! Geez! What have we been up to? Well, we had 2 groups of families/friends who visited us (boy were we so glad), and then we went back to Singapore to celebrate the Chinese New Year (very important event for us), then we came back, and I caught the flu, which was really terrible cos it took me 3 weeks to recover! And then, I was busy looking for things to do here, especially volunteer stuffs, and here we are!

Any case, enough of my ramblings. Spring is here, though weather had been rainy lately, but Spring IS here. People and flowers are starting to liven up. So are we! Gear up guys, we'll resume our blogging pretty soon! Till then, have a great time out there!

Meet our lovely couple, Mr and Mrs Gingerbread! (Special gift from our dear friend, thank you!)


And here's our Kalanchoe bearing buds: