Bird Nest Birthday Cake

It's quite bizarre being back after an unintentional 6-month hiatus. School got in the way and I almost feel as though food blogging is just a fragment of my past. Today, everyone (specifically my demographic, ugh), takes photos of food with their fancy phones. Blogging isn't that special anymore. People want TL;DR and pictures to glaze their eyes over.

Nevertheless, the food blogging continues because I still believe that I offer a unique personality to this blog.

I got home on Friday for Spring Break, at 11pm, and the first thing my sister requests is that I make her a cake for her birthday party. She wants fairy cakes, but as one cake rather than individual cupcakes. Despite the fact that my sister, at 9, can already make pancakes, cookies, cornbread, and cake, she still asked me to bake and decorate her birthday cake (with a candle bird and nest). It's nice to get requests.

Yesterday afternoon, I used the Victoria Sandwich Cake recipe to make the cake, but since my scale is at school, I'm sure that the measurements were a little off (especially as my cake ended up much shorter than I expected). I also made some buttercream icing for the "grass" which my mum ended up scraping off and throwing away after the party was over (because no one in the family likes buttercream icing).

To sandwich the two layers, I used melted peppermint marshmallows (microwave, 30-40s) and cookie pieces. I cut some strawberry flowers because apparently, it's plausible to have a bird's nest in a meadow. The nest itself was artfully constructed out of 4 pieces of Kit-Kat, and some crushed Oreo. I added 10 blue jelly beans as eggs because my sister is turning 10. I used a fork to make the buttercream icing textured. Finally, I sifted some powdered sugar over everything.

This may be one of the prettiest cakes I've made (I still think my Portal Cake is one of the most authentic-looking ones in the world though) and it tasted pretty good too (I got a compliment from my sister's friend!). I just hope that I can avoid using buttercream icing in the future.

7-Eleven Free Slurpee Day

It's July 11th, which means that it's "Free Slurpee Day" at 7-Eleven. For some reason, 7-Eleven thinks that today is its birthday.

Lies.

On the company website, apart from the "Happy Birthday" sign, there is nothing saying the exact date on which 7-Eleven was established; it only gives the year (1927, or 1999, if you want to be official about the name change). The 7-Eleven actually refers to the hours it used to have - 7am to 11pm. Of course, most 7-Elevens are open 24/7 now, to be super "convenient".

I do like slushies. The only times I've had them in the past were in the form of Slurpees, at various 7-Elevens in Hong Kong (man, 7-Eleven in Hong Kong gives me so many happy memories!). My favourite flavour was the Coke, for sure! Then, a few years ago I just went cold turkey with soda, and although I don't really ever crave slushies, from now on, having them once a year seems pretty nice. Last year, JM and I ran to the local 7-Eleven at around 7pm to get a sample but they had run out. Thus, today ends my 5 or 7 year hiatus on 7-Eleven Slurpees, and slushies in general (I guess the ones I make at home don't count).

After my swim this morning (8:07 am), I went to the 7-Eleven at 38th and Sansom St., and it was pretty empty and all the Slurpee machines were neatly churning out coloured ice. The cashier showed me the "small" cups, 7.11 oz. It's pretty funny because a decade ago (oh my gosh. Has it really been A DECADE?!?!?) at McDonald's in Hong Kong, this size (or 8 oz) was considered the drink size in a Happy Meal, or the "small" drink. Portion sizes have skyrocketed...

I did have my camera but the Slurpee was melting ridiculously fast so I decided I'd just take a picture of the cup since it's pretty neat. The blueberry flavour was still liquid so I ended up with about 1/10 blueberry-sugar-liquid, 4/5 perfect pina colada slush, and 1/10 Coke slush on top. I know I shouldn't drink Coke anymore, especially as I haven't had it in yeeeeeeeeears, but I had a moment of nostalgia, of drinking/eating a Coke Slurpee at the playground in South Horizons in the humid Hong Kong summer afternoon, with KC, LW, and/or my brother.

So, I had to relive that again, except in the morning before breakfast in Philadelphia, alone. The Coke flavoured one was really caramelly. I guess I've forgotten the taste of Coke. The pina colada flavour was pretty awesome. I don't think the blueberry sugar water did much. I guess I'm a really emotional eater.

What if, way back when, 7-Eleven had opened from 11am to 11pm? Would the drink sizes on the 11th of November be 11.11 oz? Would they save more money, because fewer people would be inclined to trudge out and obtain an ice-cold drink in November?

Ummm Failed Brownies?

It's my friend's birthday today and I decided to make a Domo brownie cake for him. I copied this recipe from Allrecipes.com and it failed. 30 minutes into baking, the edges were kinda crusty and the centre was still gooey.

Not "ooo fudgy brownie!" gooey. I mean, uncooked gooey.

It's now 33 minutes into baking and I'm sitting here wondering what to do, because now it looks like a volcano erupted. The surface of the brownie looks like a natural disaster. To be politically incorrect, it looks like Katrina visited my oven.

*goes to check cake with a fork*

And the cake just sunk lower. I didn't think that was possible.

The worst part is that I actually have to be somewhere in 15 minutes so I can't keep poking at the cake.

Later...

I got back from visiting my high school guidance counselor at noon, and I checked the cake. I had left it in the oven (turned off) in the hopes that the remaining heat would somehow cook the cake...for an hour. Generally, I trust leaving slightly undercooked food in the oven while the oven cools down. Bad habit, I know. The edges were crispy and rock hard and the center was...dense.

This is terribly photo-phobic.

So I cut off the edges. They were very crispy and shiny.

Looks better already! (Who am I kidding?)

So I added a lot of melted chocolate over the top since I don't have chocolate icing, and I made a mouth for Domo. The Smarties candy are there because the chocolate and the pink (should be red) icing kept mixing. I know Domo has black eyes, but I figured I should use a light colour because you can't see black clearly on dark brown. I also didn't know what I'd use for the eyes; I guess some chocolate would've been a good idea but I had used up the chocolate making the cover-up for the brownie earthquake.

Initially, I was going to go over the red/pink icing with white icing, but the red/pink icing refused to harden/dry. I think it's because I used too much milk and what I ended up with turned out to be a glaze rather than icing. So, I had to somehow get 8 triangular teeth to show up on top of Domo's mouth. What to do?! More Smarties? Almonds? White chocolate (which I don't have)? I ended up using tortilla chips, and breaking tortilla chips into perfectly triangular shapes proved too difficult so I just searched the middle/bottom of the bag for preformed mini triangles. I know tortilla chips aren't white, but I guess this will have to do. In bad lighting, this actually looks like Domo!

New Year Party!

First post of 2011! I will now post about my "birthday party" on the 31st of December 2010. It's actually not my birthday on the last day of the year [but I do know someone who is born on that day!], but the idea was that I meet up with my friends from high school and celebrate my birthday which is around this time of year. The funny thing is that my mum actually let my friends stay overnight. The sad part is that 80% of the people I invited couldn't come due to another party or travelling. So, my brother invited his friends [and they took the TV to play games], and my mum invited her friends, so we ended up with a group of around 20 people. I also made a birthday cake, since I didn't want to buy a cake that had icky stuff in it. The cake I made included whole wheat flour and balsamic vinegar.

This layer of cake actually turned out alright [I was using a brownie recipe, so it's a bit flat and dense], but the first two layers were way too thin; when they were piled together they looked shorter than a pie. Or a fruit tart.

Orange glaze - 3 tablespoons of orange juice, 1 tablespoon of milk, and 1 cup of sugar! The glaze only had a hint of orange when it was dry, though.

See how flat the first batch came out?

A very coarsely-ground recipe for this cake [if you want 1-2cm-thick brownies that fit two 9.5 inch pans]

Ingredients:

2 cups of whole wheat flour

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of milk

1 cup of oil

1 cup of cocoa powder

3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar

1.5 tsp baking soda [want it poofier? add 1-2tsp baking soda]

some salt

Method: Mix and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees F. Add more time if you want to.

First layer=blackberry jam

Second layer=marshmallows [Should've gotten marshmallow fluff, which doesn't have gelatin, but I didn't realise that I was going to be making a four-layer cake].

Third layer=peanut butter icing!

And... the cake! I have more pictures but I'm not uploading those because I do not want people to know my real name.

[The best] Sprinkles [in the world]! They're just like the ones from Australia - the Hundreds and Thousands that my mum used to put on honey bananas [except that these are only pink, green, and white, instead of rainbow-coloured].

So there were other foods, and I took pictures of them too, but this is one that I want to commemorate. This was brought by HM's family, and HM is my sister's friend. It's primarily composed of glutinous rice spotted with quartered jujubes [red dates]. Enclosed in the chewy, sticky layers is a mound of warm red bean paste. Curly swirls of orange and lime rind gently garnish the outside of the hemispherical [or parabolic... Actually, perhaps more parabolic, since bowls are generally more parabolically shaped] dessert.

Everyone said that the cake was nice, but they could've just been saying that because they knew that I had baked it. Apparently, one of the kids had been eyeing it for a long time before my mum realised that the kid wanted cake. The kid's mum told me that it tasted "fresh" and "rich", which are nice compliments! Another comment includes the "It's good". My sister, who had helped me with it, of course was scarfing down cake and burping out compliments.

We later watched some Harry Potter upstairs because my brother and his friends were still playing games on the TV downstairs, and then we watched the ball drop, which was seriously anti-climatic [as it is, every year].

We finished Harry Potter, and BV and I watched some Snoopy [yes, Snoopy and Harry Potter are awesome!]. It was a great birthday-partyesque-dinner-type-thing.

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]

JM's Birthday

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JM!
The problem with getting home late from parties is that I don't have time to update, so I hope that you all can imagine that today is the 12th, and not the 13th.
I didn't actually take many pictures because I spent most of the time playing frisbee and watching Up and Little Miss Sunshine. For some reason, a bunch of the other girls thought that the 15-yr old guy who doesn't talk is really "hot", yet I doubt that they'd want a boyfriend who wouldn't speak and was a misanthrope. ANYWAY.
The funny thing is that pretty much everyone ate the cookies and the chips, but only a few grapes were consumed throughout the whole party. It was pretty upsetting, actually. Anyway.
We should've just cut the pita bread [well, it was "flatbread" since it lacked the pita pockets] into 8s. We actually spent a while debating the shapes into which we could segment the pita rounds... and this appeared to be a very... er, "varied" plate of shapes.

Somehow, JM's mum cut the pineapple into that amazing masterpiece. Very interesting.

A's Birthday.

[Note: it is technically 2:27PM on Saturday, but this is what I would've written if I had time on Wednesday. Track takes up my life:( I guess.]
A turned 18 today, and I made her mango-raisin muffins. Yes, muffins, not cupcakes. A.k.a., no butter!! Well, they were really... liquidy, so I wasn't sure whether it was the correct consistency, but after they baked, they were REALLY moist and dense and great. If they had been chocolate, I'm sure it would've been a pudding-cake. Seriously.
One of the "secret" ingredients was BALSAMIC VINEGAR!! Two tablespoons of it, actually.
:) Weird? Yes. But nevertheless cool, and it kept reacting with the baking soda, which I guess definitely did something to the cake-ness of it.
Acetic acid + Na(Co3)2 --> H2O + Co2 + Na+ +C2H3O2-, which, when spectators are removed,
H+ + [Co3]-2 --> H20 + Co2.

I couldn't figure out how to stack 18 cupcakes into the container without smearing the "glaze" at the top. The glaze was made with MikeNIkes and orange juice. Microwaved and mixed. I was going to use green, but then I realised that it'd probably look like slime... so I used yellow, for lemon, and pink, for strawberry [the cherry ones actually look a lot like strawberry MikeNIkes, so I spent a bit off time separating them. The strawberry ones are a bit pinker]. Anyway, my mum finally suggested I use a paper plate... so I did. :) And I wrote a note on it too.

After track, she gave some out and HF said that I should make them for sports awards. I don't really know if she meant it though, because sometimes I can't tell if people are being genuine/fake.

One thing that kinda irked me was that as soon as EC saw it, she said, "Ohhh cupcakes!! Did [HF] make them?", which is kinda... uncool, because I am A's friend; HF and her are just acquaintances. Why would she make A muffins? Not cool.