Independence Day

This day, I got a lot of free iced tea because Wawa was giving them out. I also got a piece of candy   and a cupcake. There were allegedly 1776 cupcakes (that's what the flyer said, but the flyer also predicted the wrong time for the fireworks), but at around 12:30, the loudspeaker announced that there were over 2500. I was near the front of the line because I had gotten there so much earlier. So many people tried to cut into the front of the line, because, of course, they felt entitled, and they didn't want to wait at the back of the line. Fortunately, the people in charge ushered everyone who tried to cut to the back. So I got my cupcake as planned. It was a very plain cupcake, by Termini Bros. I wonder who got to eat the 5 layer cake.

Cupcake & Notes

A few things...
0. Penn has decided that they'll email about food events literally 4 hours before the event occurs. However, because I have my sources, I know about free food events months in advance. Not that it makes much of a difference... so Penn had a "Winterfest" thing wherein they gave out waffles, candy, ice cream, marshmallows, and nuts (run by SPEC). Although I have no right to criticise, they really should consider a better setup. Why bump all the tables next to the walls? Why not have people line up on BOTH SIDES of the table to obtain food? This would - what do you know?! - shorten the line by 50%!!

Got my waffle and ice cream.

1. TJ gave me a cupcake from the dining halls. I'm surprised Penn Dining made desserts that are really pretty-- I mean, look at the squiggly peppermint candy! It tasted like a normal cupcake. But it's pretty.

2. Applesauce tastes like chunky ketchup. I am not kidding. It's sour... it's sweet... it's ketchupy.

3. Another Penn event was Amy Gutmann's "Holiday" study break/party. I didn't bring my camera, which was rather stupid. The place was classic-game themed. Obtained lots of smoked cheese. TJ and I were about half an hour early for it, and I did it at the expense of studying for organic chemistry (haha...terrible class...), although in retrospect, I actually don't think that my grades were negatively affected.

4. We all know that my college house should've won the Power Down Challenge. Since the authorities say that we didn't win, we had a party anyway, and we raffled off a Kindle, scooters, water bottles, rechargeable batteries, and a recycling bin. Twenty pizzas.

5. I'm home. I open the fridge. What I see resembles what I saw when I opened the fridge when I came back at Thanksgiving...

6. JM, GM and I ran to Starbucks and they got the Caramel Apple Spice, which was basically creamy apple cider. I didn't try it though. I got a Green Tea Frappuccino. In the winter? I know right...reminds me of the time JM and I ran to Colaco's Creamery, got ice cream, and walked back home in the snow eating it. I've been wanting to try it for the past year, but I never got around to it...not really sure why. In any case, we walked back in the chilly weather while I was slurping on layers of fat and sugar (no picture of it though) -- it was a beautiful minty green colour, and it tasted like vanilla ice cream. Nothing bittery/tea-like about it. I suppose the colour made up for it though.

Fairy Cakes

As a reward for being less of a whining brat than usual (she's "only" cried twice in the past 12 hours!), I taught my sister how to make fairy cakes. Basic fairy cakes, without creative fillings.

I got a... mini fairy cake recipe here but I modified it tolerate a stick of butter. I ended up with 10 really buttery fairy cakes, though I did make them in egg tart containers so they were slightly bigger than the conventional fairy cake. And, yes, fairy cakes are essentially cupcakes but the phrase "fairy cakes" sounds better.

My sister followed the recipe, weighed out ingredients (with my help), mixed everything (with my help), and went to read when I stuck everything in/out of the oven.

If an 8 year old can do it, you can. Don't ever revert back to those putrid cake mixes!!

To me, the recipe looks like it's for pound cake.

INGREDIENTS FOR 10-12 FAIRY CAKES
120 g butter
120 g caster sugar
2 eggs
vanilla
120 g self raising flour
METHOD

0. Let butter sit outside fridge for a (few) hours.
1. Cream butter and sugar.
2. Beat in eggs and add vanilla.
3. Fold in flour and drop a huge tablespoon into a paper case.
4. Bake at 177 degrees C/350 degrees F in an un-preheated oven, on the second-top shelf, for 22 minutes. I usually use the bottom shelf but today I had potato bread baking down there. The bottom shelf calls for less cooking time, obviously.

5. The top of the cakes should be cooked and a fork stuck into cake should come out with no crumbs or goop. (The fork test always prevails!!) The cakes may look a bit soft and gooey when you take them out, but once they cool, they harden a little but still remain moist (due to the butter).

Usually I'd be done now, but my sister wanted to put icing on four fairy cakes so she made the despicable butter-sugar mixture (with my help).

I made 1/4 of the icing recipe listed here, which was enough to liberally ice 5 fairy cakes.

So, my sister loved the cake. Obviously.

Penn "Chocolate" Festival

"Next semester, I will be more involved in social groups at school."

That's what I said last semester when I realised that I was pretty much in two clubs.

Then I realised that if I joined another two, I'd have no time to do my homework, study, go to the lab, run, and eat food.

This is in addition to the fact that I'm already managing my time better than I was last semester.

So, I didn't join any extra clubs, but I do get emails from the Penn Gastronomy Club (which I should officially join, actually). Recently, I got an email about the Penn Chocolate Festival, and there were going to be "some of the city's best chocolatiers" and free samples present!

At the Hall of Flags in Houston Hall, the Penn Chocolate Festival took flight. Breezy. Short. Among the tumbleweed. It was too timid to be anything like other food events (e.g. Campus "Free" For All), which was good because it meant that each member of the audience had extremely personalised attention from the vendors, which included just two chocolatiers (Really).

Despite obtaining a lot of information from the vendors, I didn't get many samples, which was a bit of a let-down considering the blatant advertising in the email. Then again, the email claimed that there were going to be many chocolate vendors, which wasn't the case.

The sweet, thick and creamy tea (which didn't taste much like tea) with mini tapioca balls in the above image came from Boba Brothers. I loved the fact that the tapioca balls are tiny! (~2mm in diameter; it makes them drinkable via a standard straw, and it is quite a twist). Actually, I wonder how bubble tea would be like with various sized tapioca balls in the tea...

Although the liquid was super sweet, clean/not artificially-flavoured-ish, there was no "chocolate" in it at all.

My second stop was John&Kira's chocolate. The fact that they use local ingredients and have beautiful packaging and are a home business (I talked to Kira) means that their prices are jacked up, of course. For $6.50, I can get Chipotle, instead of a bar of chocolate. However, John&Kira's also have everything that Chipotle, and Godiva, and Lindt don't have; they own the company, they can allow me to make my own flavour, and they use ingredients from around here. The mint in the mint chocolate came from University City's Urban Garden! I have no idea where that is, but it's within a 3 mile radius, probably. According to the brochure, the honey comes from Millerton PA, while the berries come from Meadow Gap PA. I'm not sure why they're advertising that the coffee whiskey comes from Mexico or that the bergamot comes from Sri-Lanka, because those aren't "local", but perhaps the overall message is that these ingredients come from known sources, and we're supposed associate that with fair labour or something.

My first impression was that the ladybugs and the bees were super shiny. They were as shiny as marbles, although more pearlescent. Apparently, there is a really high cocoa butter content in them, since the're some sort of caramel (bees) or ganache (ladybug).

Kira gave me a pretty big sample of dark mint chocolate to taste. The mint was definitely true mint; it isn't the sweet stuff that I'm accustomed to in commercial mint ice cream or mint chocolate; it was legitimate mint-right-off-the-plant. Although I do like the peppermint/conventional mint better, this one was light and delicious too. The chocolate part was... normal, I would say.

I then went to the table promoting Sazon restaurant. The guy who was at the table was a real businessman; he talked non-stop about how his chocolate was real, untempered, pure, made straight from crushed beans from Venezuela (the "original/pure/clean/unadulterated" location of cacao, apparently). He explaining his experimentation with making truffles in his kitchen, and he talked about testing all his truffles on his friends. At one point, he gave someone in the audience a whole truffle. He didn't give any truffles to me though, even though I talked to him for a good 10 minutes about his truffles and cocoa. He walked me through the truffles; coconut ones, jalapeno ones, rum infused ones, berry-filled - "I don't care about rule of 3 flavours - you know, of chocolate, and two others. I just dump them all in together and you can taste them all!", he proclaimed. He pointed out that the ones in the middle compartment were vegan, and the coconut covered ones on the right were raw and made with a ton of coconut butter. "Nothing goes above 105 degrees. I just use a blender and a thermometer; my raw vegan friend is really anal about this," he boasts. Then, he listed the ingredients in these vegan truffles, and I kinda blanked out until him mentioned the word honey.

Honey. From bees.

I'm not vegan, but vegans do not eat honey.

Naturally, I responded, "Hey wait! Vegans don't eat honey!"

The guy (I'm sorry I do not know his name but on the website, he's the Chocolate Alchemist) looked at me in this really exasperated way (and perhaps with a hint of scorn - he's not a vegetarian or vegan), and said "Well, it's just some honey; we don't know if agave is a good idea because it might have corn syrup or other things added, and honey is pure. And, our honey is local. Besides, you know that there are different definitions of vegan and a lot of vegans eat honey."

He didn't say those exact words, but that was his position on the issue. Call me biased, amnesiatic, or downright silly, but if there is honey in those truffles, those truffles are NOT vegan. His (sorta pompous) attitude, coupled with the fact that he selectively gave out truffles for sampling, meant that I didn't have a good impression of his business. I know he's allowed to boast about his truffles and his super-awesome hot chocolate since they do taste delicious (the hot chocolates did, at least), but I felt like he was stepping the line by sticking honey in a "vegan" treat.

So, the hot chocolates were amazing. I tried the Clasico and the Cuaimia. The Clasico was thick hot chocolate that had no watery taste at all; it was literally like drinking flavourful, textured, melted chocolate. The Cuaimia had a hint of chili (although not too much; I think I would prefer more) and was less chocolatey. Neither had sugar, yet they were so flavourful that sugar wasn't needed to counteract the bitter taste of the ground cocoa (not that it tasted that bitter, in comparison to cocoa powder).

Another local vendor was the Kitchen at Penn. They gave out banana pudding, brownie, and and a plastic cup. No spoon. The food tasted ordinary, but I suppose that's the point, because the Kitchen at Penn is supposed to emulate homemade food for college students missing home.

Although the next few pictures depict vacuous, gilded and bland cupcakes, I'm still posting them because they are indeed prettily decorated. Buttercream Cupcakes (a cupcake truck, not to be confused with Call Me Cupcake, another cupcake truck) offers sundry cupcakes, including the best-seller, red velvet.

I tried 1/4 of a chocolate cupcake with peanut butter icing and purple sugar. The peanut butter icing tasted legitimately like peanut butter smothered in cream and sugar. The cake was kinda dry actually.

So wait a minute, two legit chocolatiers out of 5, at a "chocolate" festival?

Campus Food...What? Be a Scavenger...

A few weeks ago, there was this terribly organised event called "CampusFood Free for All". The theory was that there would be tons of restaurant food from catering services affiliated with CampusFood, and all this food would go to us frosh, along with nice glass mugs.

This failed in many many many aspects.

1. Squishing 1000s of people, including not frosh, into a small room (fire hazard=more than 200 people) evidently doesn't make sense.

2. Having people stand in line outside this room doesn't work, especially since nearly everyone cuts lines. This really irked me...but I suppose I should've expected it; after all, humans are greedy, jealous, and selfish. It's human nature. So, it was basically a blob of a line, and MA, who arrived maybe half an hour after me and TJ somehow ended up getting a mug an hour before we did.

3. Insomnia Cookies is on the floor below the room. Somehow, they only provided us with 3 boxes of cookies, which ended up going to people standing behind us.

4. Cream and Sugar didn't turn up.

5. Oh, you know what DID turn up? Pizza and sammiches. But it's not a Frosh Free for All! No no no, it's take-half-a-slice-of-pizza and a-small-chunk-of-a-cured-pig-flesh-sammich and don't-take-more! For some reason, they didn't expect this many frosh to turn up [hello? 2,500 frosh!! + all the other undergrads and grads...]

So it was a terrible waste of an hour although I did get a mug out of it. So then TJ and I went to Hill for actual dinner [At the "Free For All", we saw the first few people walking out with 3+ slices of pizza. We ended up each getting half a slice of pizza. So...]

At Hill, there was sushi! Although the rice tasted correctly seasoned with the vinegar, the rice was either overcooked [congee-texture], or undercooked [hard]. It was a nice change, although the server only gave everyone two pieces :(

There was also a cupcake with icky pink icing, no doubt because they want to use up all the leftover red food colouring from Commercialization Day. I've never seen Hill with cupcakes before, but I have to say that the cupcakes are bland, dry, and boring. Actually, I don't really think I tremendously like the baked goods at Penn Dining because the cookies are always hard and never moist/soft, and the cakes are as I have described. The pies are generally fantastic though and the mini doughnuts are quite nice because they have this flavour that reminds me of doughnuts that I used to eat in Australia and HK.

Food Landscapes Calendar!

TS gave me a Food Landscapes Calendar for my birthday [no, today is not my birthday].

I have seen some food landscapes before; this specific calendar art was made by Carl Warner. I highly respect the creativity of using food to make art. I once painted a cup of coffee and included real ground coffee in it [and it smelled good, momentarily!].

I like the reciprocating relationship in which food can become landscapes/photographs/art, and art can become food [food items made out of yarn, crocheting, pencil and eraser, etc.] The landscapes are really pretty and are interesting to look at after a weary day of looking at other items in biology.

Every time I look at the January landscape, I see something new. Today I saw the hot air balloons.

Now, food is permeating pop culture. Think about it. At Hot Topic, they have pizza and potato chip cloth bags that you put your change in. There also is a huge influx of food-shaped erasers. There are tons of jewelry out there that depict food; I have cupcake earrings and pasta [farfalle] earrings.

Food is becoming a serious topic.

Today! - Fall Fest

I'm finally updating about something that happened today. I still have heaps to write about concerning the past two weeks, but for today, I will blabber on about the blubber today. And yes, that is the line for Coup de Taco about an hour and a half into Fall fest.

Fall fest is overrated. I'm not kidding. Sure, you get free stuff, but the cool stuff actually costs money. The first 750-1000 people get a taco and cupcake for free, but that's if you stand in line.

For at least half an hour.

With a wristband, that you had to stand in line to obtain, as well.

Luckily, I had gone to the library from 12-2, so I was basically right inside the door [outside the door? I wasn't "outside" the door, though, since Fall fest was OUTSIDE the library. Anyway. I was right next to Fall fest], so I went, stood in line for a few minutes, realised I needed a wrist band, then went allllllll the way to the LOVE statue to get a wrist band, and jumped back in line. By this time, the line for Coup de Taco had doubled, although it wasn't as bad as it was 10 minutes later, where it had quadrupled. Oh exponential equations...

[Indoor photography pales - I mean, yellows - in comparison to sunlight photography]

I'm not actually sure why I bothered to stand in line for half an hour [ish?]. I do have a meal plan that guarantees that I get food and don't starve. I also have many kilos of adipose tissue that can sustain me for a while. However, I suppose it was just the fact that I didn't want to outline more for Comparative Med. Anyway, halfway through, two guys who were behind me in line were contemplating getting out of line, and then I told them that they didn't have wristbands... and I asked if they wanted mine. They said no, and went to get wristbands, and came back. Later, two girls [their friends?] dropped by, and they decided to beat the system by just cutting to the front. This meant they cut off ... at least thirty of us. Okay, maybe twenty. Which is still plenty [that wasn't meant to rhyme]. Pretty douche-bag thing to do, in my opinion, especially as there were another zillion people standing behind us [quadrupled, remember?] waiting patiently. The guys behind me, however, said "oh, we got honour... we're not going to cut", which is nice to know.

Anyway. I finally got a vegetarian taco.

Then I went to get a cupcake from Call Me Cupcakes, which was extremely fast since all the dude had to do was hand out a cupcake. No toasting or cooking needed.

I'll review the cupcake first because it sucked.

It's just a generic, bland, un-moist, unflavourful, NONchocolately, dry, small-air-holes, cupcake-shaped cupcake. It did not taste chocolatey, which is always an issue for me, especially when something is labelled CHOCOLATE. I tried to be unbiased about the icing. It was too fatty and oily for my liking. It was also quite tasteless [no chocolatey flavour, at all. It was just chocolate coloured]. Oh, it's pretty alright, but most cupcakes these days ARE pretty.

The taco, however, was quite amazing. It was crunchy, due to sliced tortilla chips INSIDE the taco!! The outer shell was a soft flour tortilla. I'm actually confused as to the difference between a burrito and a taco. Apart from the fact that the taco is open, I can't really see a difference. I guess it's like asking what's the difference between a sandwich and an open-top sandwich. Anyway, about the tortilla strips - I was amazed at this piece of ingenuity. It actually reminds me of the time I had a tortilla chip sandwich. It was amazing, too, although this surely beats it. The Cuban rice and beans were full of chunky flavour; the salsa companion was spicy, but not overwhelming. The cheesy-sour-creamy-cilantro thingy was actually pretty good, because I couldn't really taste the cilantro [I don't particularly like cilantro, so it's a plus for me, but maybe a minus for other people].

I also got an apple from the Penn Environmental Group, although it was just a generic fat GMO apple. The International Students Association [I think that was the group name?] gave out some candy and stuff too, so that was cool. Apart from that, I ended up falling asleep at the library again.

[Note the boxes of cupcakes at the back of the truck. I could've totally taken a box of them.]

I did, however, have a delicious Greek salad with a lot of creamy feta cheese this evening, which reminded me of AK. I miss her.

Vegan Whoopie Pie!

So at one of those late night events there was a Vegetarian society meeting thingy and there were these cakes and stuff and a "make-your-own" whoopie pie table. I have never had a legitimate whoopie pie before. Honestly... is the stuff inside supposed to be marshmallow fluff? Cream? Whipped cream? PHOs? Meringue?...

These cupcakes were amazing though... especially as they were vegan.

This is a vat of peanut butter whoopie pie filling. It was actually tasty. Notice the marker nearby... just for size comparison. It was a HUGE vat of... sugary fat.

The pillow-sized vats of plain whoopie pie filling and cookies and cream [and I didn't think that more cream was possible] whoopie pie filling. Huge vat of gooey creamy white stuff... ring a bell? Get this in a bank? [Okay, that was a terrible joke. Or, reference. So, I'm not going to underline it.]

Since I am a neophyte at making whoopie pies, I put way too much creamy stuff on the chocolate cookie-cake thingy [which was really dry and bland. And baking-soda-y. I didn't like it.] It was way too oily. The cupcake below, on the other hand, was ridiculously moist and delicious. I didn't consume any of the other stuff [pumpkin, and vanilla, I believe.] since I, for once, didn't feel hungry.

PennFest! 3 Sept

Pennfest is this event in which retailers try to sell their products to unsuspecting frosh. Since I'm not really advertising the companies that I don't love, I'm just going to refer to them as "this company". This company gave out free cups with a ping pong ball nestled inside. I honestly spent a whole week pondering why they would give us a ping pong ball... and yesterday evening, as TL, JX and I walked back from dinner, it finally hit me. The ping pong ball and the cup was for beer pong. DUH!

Way to advertise alcohol to us...

Cupcakes from Insomnia Cookies... didn't take them.

Anyway, Pennfest had a lot of companies selling dorm stuff, selling "online-food-ordering" services, and plenty of "ohh get a discount if you come to our store!" I ended up consuming a taco from Chipotle, an amazing coconut pecan cookie from Insomnia Cookies [very famous on college campuses, apparently] and some mango water ice. There was also popcorn and candy floss but I wasn't actually that hungry. In all honesty, I think my hypothyroidism is kicking in [Yeah, apparently my hyperthyroidism has been lowered way too much, so I have to cut the meds again]

All my pictures are blurry because it was 11pm and I was walking around while taking pictures. This is actually a huge problem; I can't take a picture without getting ominous stares from strangers.