Graham Cracker Houses Studded with Sugar

Is it bird or a plane?! It's... both. It's in the bird's eye [or plane] point of view! So, the question is, is it a tree or a house? It looks like a Christmas tree, sure, but it's actually...

GRAHAM CRACKER HOUSE! Whoot! I don't really eat graham crackers [ever since I found out there's PHO in them... I don't like trans fat], and I don't eat premade icing either [PHO], but it was sure fun creating houses! I decided to make a triangular one because... well, everyone elses' houses' angles added up to 360 degrees. Or two pi [aw, I can't make a pie joke here!], so I decided I just wanted one pi.

It looks like a monster... note the eyes, the wrapper nose, and the tongue/path thingy. "Why the long face?" Haha...

AK had a graham cracker house party, so that's why there are all these houses [and one igloo!]. AK's house looks like a summer outhouse! :D

The ingredients included: graham crackers, brown or white icing, M&Ms, York peppermint pieces, gummy worms [well. Those got eaten...], gummy bears, marshmallows, yucky gumdrops, dots, fat jelly beans, Skittles and Rolos.

I need to make some gingerbread... Well, that'll be something I'll do on the 26th.

None of this food is healthy. Maybe there are vegetable/fruit/whole grain houses, out there, for Christmas, but the kids would overwhelmingly prefer sugar-sprinkled houses, right? It's the activity to do, even for people who don't actually believe in Christmas. It's become a holiday that's commercialized, and I'm not sure why I'm partaking in this commercialism. And this weight gain...

December Birthday Parties!

Every month, my dorm house has a celebration for birthdays. This month's party was the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas, with a lot of food. There were M&M pancakes, carrot cake, lemon bars, chocolate cake, chocolate mousse [simply amazing!] and potato latkes.

Here is a terrible photo of the chocolate cake, carrot cake, lemon bar, and a peek of the peak of chocolate mousse. I completely forgot to take pictures of the latkes, but they were really thinly grated pieces of potato [think cheddar-cheese-sized pieces], fried in hot oil until orangy brown. For some reason, they tasted fishy to me, so I stayed away from them. I don't think that there was any fish in it, though.

The M&M pancakes made the pancakes really blue. Although it's not shown well on the camera, the pancakes were literally sky-blue coloured. They were delicious, though, and at some point, CG made a square pancake. I didn't take a picture of it, though, but MF did. So, I'm not going to upload it because it isn't my picture. However, I can say that it was a square pancake, perhaps 30cm x 30cm, with a smiley face dented into it.

Then I went to Double Dinner Friday, which was completely amazing but I didn't bring my camera, so next time I'll take pictures of the food [but really, it's all packaged carbohydrate material]

Chocolate [Ear Candy?]

When I was younger, the phrase "eye candy" made me think of this. Evidently, it's supposed to mean something else but I think that it's an ugly phrase. Just my 2c. Anyway, I figured that this is literally ear candy [please, continue laughing. I enjoy hearing people laugh at my ... puns]:

My friend SVC from HK got them for me for my birthday last year although it arrived in the mail a few months later than expected... Either way, it's so cute :D I wasn't going to use them since I had really amazing headphones already. Unfortunately, last week the right bud's wire seemed to have gotten disconnected... so only the left earbud transmit sound now. I guess it was expected since I've had them since January 2008, and they've been smooshed by my track stuff, my school stuff, heavy books, my laptop, dropped on the floor... etc. This, however, signifies the fact that I am a consumer. I consume. I honestly don't have to use these new headphones; my old ones still half WORK; they're tolerable. This just shows that I've become materialistic.

Another piece of evidence to support my materialistic tendencies has to be this. My dad went to Switzerland and he bought a lot of chocolate. I didn't even know he was going to buy chocolate actually... Usually he gets utensils. I'm not kidding. If you look in our cabinet, you will see at least 5 plates from different countries, 17 international vessels [including shot glasses and mugs...], 9 small spoons... I really wonder why we get this stuff every time we/my dad goes to another place. Oh yeah, right, we're materialistic.

So anyway, I've never had Godiva chocolate before so I decided to bring a box with me back from home after "fall break" [autumn holidays]. I decided to bring half white chocolate and half dark chocolate, since I like both depending on my mood [but milk chocolate doesn't interest me much].

I did eat some so far and I guess I'll blog about each one later, but again, this demonstrates my inclination to CONSUME. Do I sound like I'm writing an essay? I had an in-class midterm essay yesterday, which is why my diction is so formal. The lack of time was mortifying.

D.C. in a Nutshell

Damn awesome, except that it's, uh, a QuakerFoods ad for oatmeal, in the metro station.
Chipotle in Chinatown in D.C. I didn't think that this was possible. But it is!! Yay hope!
Giant plastic icecreams on the way to the metro station. The family sitting outside was watching me with scorn. They probably thought I was the stereotypical tourist with camera who doesn't speak English. Well, they're WRONG!
Space/Air Museum. They're actually M&Ms. However, there is probably some copyright/royalty issue with using the phrase "Mars M&Ms".
Air/Space Museum, plastic aeroplane food way back when gas appeared "unlimited". Looks very tasty.
Some vegetable pizza. The crust... reminded me of this pizza from Pizza Hut in Australia. Or, it could've been Pizza Box, in Hong Kong. I'm not quite sure, but it was that thick, doughy and dry kinda crust. The best ever!!
Swiss Roll at breakfast time from their Asian food market. In the end we ended up trying the green tea, orange, coffee, and strawberry flavoured ones. They all tasted exactly the same, except that the strawberry one had a little zing to it. Apart from the colour, they could've all passed off for "Original!" flavour [whatever "Original!" means in company terms]. Later I found out that there was propylene glycol inside the cake. Which irked me. Yay antifreeze ingredients...
Green bean soup, with sugar and TAPIOCA. Genius! Gotta try that soon.
My parent's friend made dumplings. Egg and Chinese chives... BEST. DUMPLINGS. EVER!
I will post about La Tasca tomorrow.

Bread'n'Backerr.

Hey. I'm back. From AP exams and mental instability [studying]. I had 5 AP exams. which was utterly terrible. Especially as I've been obsessed with the Harry Potter series in the past few months... I wish that I could get a memory charm on all my Harry Potter memories... so that I wouldn't CRAVE magic. I think I've read each book at least 7 times. haha.... 7 is such a special number...

Anyway, I was done yesterday, so I went to Shoprite for the first time in ages and I got some Greek Yoghurt, and cocoa powder, among other stuff that I will consume in the future. After dinner, I made some gingerbread with my sister, using this recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Gingerbread-Biscotti/Detail.aspx This has to be my favourite recipe site because you can narrow stuff down to ingredients you want/don't want, there are reviews, and there are PICTURES!! [So I suppose you've realised that I don't care for cooks.com]. Anyway, I gingerly tweaked it a bit...

You shall require:
0.25 cup oil. I used olive oil.
0.5 cup sugar. White sugar.
0.4 cup honey. My honey happened to separate into the liquidy part and the solidy-liquidy part. I used the solidy-liquidy part at the bottom, because it looked more treacly.
3 eggs.
2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar. I dunno why, it just seems to work in whatever I bake.
3.2 cups of flour. I think. It could've been 2.2 cups, which would explain why my dough wasn't stiff.
leftover baking powder. I don't know how much I used.
2 big tablespoons of ginger powder. I think I should've added one more, but at the moment it tastes gingery enough.
tiny bit of salt.

What to do:
1. Mix oil, sugar, honey, egg, vinegar.
2. Mix flour, salt, baking powder, ginger.
3.Bake in preheated oven for 25 minutes. Remove from oven, and set aside to cool.
4. Mix dry stuff into wet stuff 3 large tbsp at a time. Use figure 8s.
5. Spread into two slabs of approximately equal length and width and height [aka volume] and decorate with whatever you want [my sister wanted pixie stix and chocolate].
6. Bake for 17 minutes at 375F on the near-bottom rack [I hate it when recipes don't tell me what rack I'm supposed to use]. Then, get all nervous and add another 3 minutes.
7. Leave pan in the oven [which is off] for 5 minutes.
8. Stick a fork in the middle off the slab. If it comes out clean'n shiny, you're done. Get those mitts on. The edges, by now, are probably dark brown, but the middle is yellowy gold.
9. Cut into whatever shapes you wanna. Biscotti shape kinda killed it for me so I just did squares.
10. Eat. I didn't stick these on the cooling rack and they were fine.

If I had baked it for a little more, it would've been biscotti-ish. I don't like biscotti, but my mum loves it... It's weird coloured because my sister insisted on putting coloured sugar over it.

So much for them being the same volume...

The dough was the most delicious raw cookie dough I have ever had. Ever.

Veggie Crunchers.

I really would rather call them "Veggie Chips", but there's probably some copyright issue with FritoLay or something, or someone did a [as typical] bad translation from Chinese to English. Anyway, these... chips are extremely crunchy!!! There is a weird sweet and salty taste, because, as you can probably tell, SWEET potato is sweet. Thus, sweet potato chips covered in [ostensibly,] "sea salt" just tastes kinda weird. Not "bad", exactly [as in, not like mint chocolate + fat free plain yoghurt, which is the WORST COMBINATION OF FOOD IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE!!], but just not satisfying. Also, though they aren't fried, they still contain 6g fat per 28 g serving. Sure, it's better than Doritos [8g per 28g serving], but I think I'd rather eat the vegetables raw.

In order: Sweet potato [brown skin], carrot, taro, green bean [THE BEST PART!], purple thing... I don't think that it's taro, but it probably is, but it's too dark..., squash - a.k.a. pumpkin [green skin]. Now, a 3D view!:

Sittin' on my chair. I'll definitely buy a pack of green bean chips in the future, but I probably won't be buying these again. They're not super. [Well, my mum bought them.]

On another note, today in Calc we had an M&M lab, in which we had a graph of f(x)=xx+1, and we found its integral by putting M&Ms in the area between [0,3] and between f(x) and the x-axis. I put them in order of colour... turns out I had a lot of green, a lot of blue, barely any red.. some orange and yellow and brown. I didn't take a picture because I'm not allowed to use my phone [though if I had brought it, I'm sure I would've been allowed to...]. It was pretty chill.
SMILE GUYS!

M&M Premiums

I know it's been two months since Christmas, but [or, well, "Holiday", for Flying Spaghetti Monster believers a.k.a. me] but I still have some M&M Premiums left... approximately 1/5 of the bag is sitting in a plastic bag in my room, next to my desk. I decided to review this since I didn't eat anything remotely interesting today [but last night was the first time in my life in which I consumed a sourdough baguette. Actually, it was "Italian Bread", but I see it as a baguette because it was baguette shaped, and baguettey-textured]. Also, it's currently snowing outside. I'm hoping for a snow day tomorrow.

Anyway, these are so... "gourmet" in the sense that they make me feel like I'm not supposed to eat them. It's as though they're for display, not for consumption and digestion. Don't their shiny shells make them look.. ornamental? Seriously, the glaze-y shell is so. Pretty. Resplendent. It looks like someone threw glitter dust over it... And the different colours, ranging from a deep green to a beautiful pale mint green... has a chilling effect on me ["haha"; mint = cool = chilly]. I can stare at them for the whole day, the way I stare at falling snow.

Speaking of staring, I kinda had a bad day today.

Anyway, I really like these because the inside mint part isn't too minty, and nor is it ridiculously sweet like Peppermint Patties. The rather thick dark chocolate layer complements the mint, and the whole thing does not leave a clingy aftertaste. It's kind of like eating a mint-chocolate-ice-cube.