Citrus Ricotta Cookies

Hello hello again. So my posts have been less frequent than usual... it's been a busy busy April and especially May. But I've been making these citrus/lemon ricotta cookies with a delicious glaze, and everybody has loved them, so I just needed to share. :)

They're based off of Giada De Laurentis' (from the Food Network!) recipe. I'll be honest, I don't usually go to the Food Network recipes for my choice of recipes, but I had found a few food blogs that had made these cookies, and it sounded pretty exciting. I had a package of ricotta cheese for some reason--honestly, I can't remember why, but I decided that I needed to use it up. That, and I'm still working on that constant supply of lemons, haha. Also... it's turning to the spring/summer... who doesn't love the light burst of sunlight in their mouths? :)

These cookies aren't so much crunchy or even soft and chewy... they have a more cake-like texture, which is very interesting. It's still very nommy, though! The batter's pretty easy to work with, and uses up both lemon zest and lemon juice, yay!

Click for more ricotta cookie deliciousness. :D

Tiramisu Birthday Cake (and dancing!)

Hi all. So although there has been lots of baking and cooking the past couple of weeks, there has also been lots of dancing and ridiculousness... my Chinese dance team held a showcase, and I was in 5 of the dances, organizing 4 of them, and whatnot, so I haven't been around the computer that much, and if I was, I was probably doing something related to dance, hehe. But it was amazing and awesome, and it was, in my opinion, a huge success. :)

Photograph courtesy of Eric Eakin.

Photograph courtesy of Eric Eakin.

Photograph courtesy of Eric Eakin.

Photograph courtesy of Eric Eakin.

So last weekend was also my good friend's (and dance buddy!) birthday. (That's her below!)

Photograph courtesy of Eric Eakin.

I was trying to figure out what to make. She likes chocolate and coffee-flavored things. I didn't feel like making a basic layered chocolate cake or just a bunch of cupcakes... it felt too boring for such an awesome occasion. So... what to do? Chocolate... coffee... tiramisu, of course! But with tiramisu, usually you don't just carry it around in a cake box, and it kind of stays in its baking dish until served, and I didn't feel like walking around the streets of San Francisco with a heavy Pyrex glass baking dish. That, and I didn't feel like making ladyfingers from scratch nor going out on a hunt for them (apparently they're annoying to try and find around here... and TJ's only has them seasonally? anyway.). I know, my life is so hard, right?

So, of course. Why not make a tiramisu but in cake format?

I think it turned out fairly wel. It had two cake layers soaked in an espresso syrup. In between, there was a layer of Kahlua-mascarpone-whipped cream with a nice layer of finely chopped dark chocolate, topped with an espresso-Kahlua-mascarpone-whipped cream frosting all over the cake. Ooh, and then I lined the sides with chocolate covered espresso beans.

Aside from the colossal mess of cocoa powder in the kitchen, I'd say it was a pretty big success. Cocoa powder was seriously everywhere. Lesson of the day? Sure, cocoa power levels out a little when you blow on it, but unfortunately, the cocoa powder goes elsewhere, i.e. on top of counter tops, toaster, sink, floor...

Yeah, everywhere.

Either way, the birthday girl had a bottomless mimosas brunch at Lime in San Francisco (it's a crazy place... it's like you're clubbing with food at 11:30 in the morning).

I'd say she was fairly happy with the cake. :)

Thanks for indulging me in my vomit of dance and photographs, and I promise to have some recipes up soon. :)

Hot Cross Buns, one a penny, two a penny

Why hello and happy Good Friday and Happy Easter everybody! (To be fair, I started writing this on Friday...) I'm loving trying to bake something for various holidays and celebrations, because I end up learning about the history of the food and the culture/religion it's tied to.

Hot cross buns!  Hot cross buns! One-a-penny, Two-a-penny, Hot cross buns! So everyone's heard of hot cross buns, but it turns out that most people I know have never actually had them, nor do they know what they are. In fact, most people (including myself) only know the first two lines of the nursery rhyme, haha.

So what are hot cross buns? They're generally associated with Easter, and more specifically, Good Friday, with the cross symbolizing The Crucifixion. However, it seems that the hot cross bun actually predates Christianity! Their origins lie in pagan traditions of ancient cultures, celebrating the vernal equinox (Eostre), with the cross possibly representing the balance between light and darkness of the equinox, the four quarters of the moon, or the symmetry of the seasons. During early missionary efforts, the Christian church adopted the buns and re-interpreted the icing cross. In 1361, a monk named Father Thomas Rockcliffe began a tradition of giving Hot Cross Buns to the poor of St. Albans on Good Friday.

Now wasn't that an exciting history lesson?

Anyhow, simply put, hot cross buns is a sweet, spiced yeast bun with currants (or raisins) and often candied citrus peel, and has a cross of a sweet dough on top (though many people now just use an icing for the cross).

I adapted the recipe from Wild Yeast Blog, and oh my goodness is it delicious. I didn't have dried currants, or candied lemon/orange peel, so I just made it with raisins and added a little bit of lemon simple syrup I made while candying lemon slices (I'll write about it later, but it's negligible for the recipe). I saw dried currants at a local farmer's market, so I might get those some day and make these again! Click below for recipe.

St. Patrick's Day! Irish Cream Cupcakes

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! :) So I'm really sad I missed Pi Day. :( This past weekend was extremely full of baking (which I'll post about later), people, and dance, so I didn't get a chance to make some pie. :( But at least I thought about it? Happy belated Pi Day everyone! But anyway, back to St. Patrick's day.

I wanted to make something exciting and fun for St. Patrick's day that I would not otherwise make. I thought about making some Irish Soda Bread, but trying to research the most authentic Irish Soda Bread was getting tiring, and it's not really somethign you give out to everyone. But everyone loves cupcakes, right?

What is that beautiful thing, you ask? Irish cream cupcakes with Irish cream mint frosting topped with an Irish cream brownie.

Yep, I walked over to BevMo! in the beautiful weather yesterday, and got myself a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream. I will be honest, I'm not exactly a drinker and I don't really even like the smell of whiskey, but hey, other people seem to like it, so why not. Recipe and more photos behind the cut. :)

Overcoming fear: French Macarons

Why hello again. So during my baking streak last week, I also decided to make macarons. I had a ton of egg whites left over from making the meyer lemon tartlets (is it tartlet or tartelette??) and I told myself that this time around, I was going to make macarons. I said this last time making... something or another. Yeah, that never happened, oops.

French macarons are another one of those things that I've been overly paranoid about baking. I'd say irrationally, but I've read about and seen many pictures of failed macarons. Also, there are billions of long-winded explanations of how to make them for a reason--they're a bit tricky to get everything right.

But look! But look! Mine came out with feet and everything!

Isn't it purtiful? They're macarons with strawberry cream cheese sandwiched in between. Not too shabby for a first time, I'd say. The shell wasn't the smoothest, and only one of three batches came out (I think because the other two batches I used baking pans with sides (like a 9x13 pan) instead of a cookie sheet, because I only had one)... and I think the "good" macarons were a little hollow inside, but uh, oh well? I've only had one macaron once in SF, but I'd say mine's not too shabby at all, not at all. Click below for more macaronage. :)

Meyer Lemon Tartlets

So not only was I obsessed with making all sorts of buns last week, but I also had so many lemons sitting on my dining table... I had gotten a giant bag of lemons and a giant box of meyer lemons (yay Costco), and they had been sitting there for, well, forever, and some of the meyer lemons looked like they were on their way out. So, as much as I love the idea of making lemon-y things, it's actually hard to find lots of good recipes that require a lot of lemon juice. Most things require just the lemon zest, or just a tablespoon or two of lemon juice, and I didn't feel like making lemon curd. For some odd reason, I liked being able to bake the lemon-y innards... maybe because it makes it easier to deliver to other people? Who knows.

Anyhow, I finally after going through so many food blogs and so many pages on Google, I came across this recipe for a meyer lemon tart on the New York Times online, and figured that I'd give it a go. It was adapted from Alan Tangren's recipe, who was a co-pastry chef at Chez Panisse (well known high-end restaurant here in the East Bay). Sounds credible, and most importantly, used 5 or so lemons!

The result? Full of deliciousness... tasty shortbread crust that didn't shrink too much, and a delicious lemon-curd-like filling that was baked with the tart. It requires so many eggs and so much butter, but, well, it's worth it.

This is such a yellow dish. Yellow is such a bright and happy color...! All the ingredients and the final product are full of yellow. I don't usually like yellow, but for some reason, yellow food always looks so deliciously happy.

Yes, it uses a ridiculous amount of egg yolks, but also so much lemon!

Dou Sha Bao (Red Bean Buns)

So last week I had a hankering for delicious Chinese buns. The dough for steamed buns are so delectably fluffy, especially when steaming hot. I had been searching for a good recipe for Chinese bread doughs in general. There are many variations out there, many calling for low gluten flour, some calling for bread flour, and some just using the bag of "bao mix" that you can buy at the Asian supermarket. Finally, I came across one that seemed to have good results: a nice chewy skin from steaming, and a light, white, fluffy inside.

This dough can actually be used to make all sorts of steamed buns... filled with sweet fillings such as lotus seed paste, red bean paste, black sesame paste, or even rolled into a more savory scallion bun, or stuffed with pork filling to make sheng jian bao (pan-fried buns) or BBQ pork to make tsa sao bao (also known as char shiu bao). It can even be made into plain rolls. Yummy. For the first go-around, I decided to fill it with sweet red bean paste. :) I even went and got myself a bamboo steamer! :D It was awesomely exciting. Click for the recipe!

Chocolate Truffles

So the other half of February 14th is, of course, Valentine's Day. For those of you who don't really know me, I'm kind of weird. So, on Valentine's Day, when the world is full of pink and everyone is covered head to toe with red and pink, I don my all-black attire and studded and spiked bracelets and chokers. I even top it off with (sometimes heavy) black eyeliner (and black lipstick if I'm feeling daring that year).

(Valentine's Day 3 years ago)

Something like that. Oh yeah. Still, this year, since Chinese New Years fell on the same day, I had to wear a little bit of red (you can see the necklace in the first picture in my previous post!) and I opted out on the heavy eye makeup. Anyhow, I'm sure you care about all the random trivia about me and my habits. So, of course, Valentine's Day means chocolate and sharing love. So, I decided to share my love via chocolate truffles... 4 different types of chocolate truffles!

Chocolate truffles aren't that hard to make ingredient and technique-wise... it just takes a little bit of time and messiness. They're so worth it, though. It's the same technique to make a chocolate ganache (or whipped ganache) for frosting a cake. :)

Of course, since it's mostly chocolate, the type of chocolate that you use is very important. If you use a dark, smooth chocolate, you will end up with a very smooth truffle. If you use some mediocre chocolate, you will end up with mediocre truffles. So I splurged a little for the people around me to make some darn good chocolate. Click below for recipe and ideas for truffle flavors!

Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day!

Xing nian kuai le! Gong xi fa cai. (i.e. Have a prosperous new year.) Oh yeah, and Valentine's Day. And President's Day! ...And happy Mardi Gras today. Goodness gracious it's a bunch of things to celebrate about recently!

Of course, that means there has been lots of baking/cooking and handing out of delicious goodies. There have been various dark chocolate truffles, Chinese almond cookies, and red bean nian gao (sticky rice cake)!

So February 14th was not only Valentine's Day, but it was also Chinese/Lunar New Years! It's now the year of the Tiger... it's my year! This meant only one thing: hot pot!

Photograph courtesy of Avi

What is 火鍋 (i.e. hot pot), you ask? Clearly, as you can see from the photograph, it is loads of fun. (And no, I wasn't the only girl there!) Click below to see more of what hot pot is and for Chinese Almond Cookies and Red Bean Nian Gao (stick rice cake)! :)

Lemon Bars

Oh my goodness! Blogger just deleted my entire post, and I'm annoyed. Okay, let's try this again.

Hi everyone! For those of you living in the Bay Area, I hope you're enjoying this storm that has hit the West Coast, because I am. The torrential downpour. The lightning. The thunder. I'm loving it. Currently, my patio door is opened, making it ridiculously cold in my apartment, but I can clearly hear the rain falling on the ground with the thunder rolling by and it's totally worth it. It sends shivers up my spine and I can't help but smile.

For those of you that hate this wet, dark, weary and dreary weather, I've decided to post about a little ray of sunshine: lemon bars!

Aren't they so bright and scrumptious looking? It's like a little reminder of summer. Or something like that. Anyhow, a fellow friend gave me a bag of lemons from his backyard and I promised that I would use them for evil good. However, I just kind of stared at them for a week, not sure of what I should do with them and no real inspiration hit. Finally, I settled on lemon bars. Lemon bars are one of those things I avoided for a while because I was irrationally afraid of anything curd-like or custard-like (but the creme brulees proved that I was just being ridiculous!). So, after what was over a week, I started to flip through all my bookmarks of various baking blogs and leafed through my various cookbooks to try and figure out what might seem like a good lemon bar recipe. What if it was too tart? What if it was too sweet? What if what if what if? Ridiculous, right? I also wanted to find something that had a good ratio of lemon goodness to shortbread crust (i.e. lots of lemon-y goodness). Something that would also hold together on its own without looking like it was about to melt off the cooling rack. So, in the end, I adapted from Bakerella's recipe.

Let's see what these little lemons can do!

Vanilla Bean Creme Brulee

Look, look, a post! Here is the promised creme brulee recipe. I love cracking the layer of caramel on top... :)

For Christmas, my roommate gave me a kitchen torch (I know, Edith + fire? Sounds like a disastrous combination, I know. It's okay, you're probably right. But I'm still okay for now!) and his parents gave me some beautiful creme brulee ramekins. So I'm not much up for the multi-tasking baking dishes for the most part, and the deeper ramekins that most people use are nice, but these are just beautiful.

And, honestly, my favorite part of the creme brulee is usually the burnt sugar on top, so these shallow ramekins give just the perfect portion of burnt sugar to custard. It was seriously nommy.

Creme brulee (with its respective accents that I don't know how to do in Blogger) means "burnt cream" in French. It is a dish that is comprised of a rich custard bottom layer and a top layer of caramel. There are so many various recipes out there, each with their own ratio of egg yolks to various types of cream/milk to amount of sugar. Having never really made custard (I tend to avoid it... my fear of tempering anything makes me avoid certain recipes... but I'm working on that!), I wasn't sure which recipe sounded the best. Also, many of the recipes came with fancy flavors like lavender or ginger or chocolate, and I just wanted a simple vanilla creme brulee. However, I knew that I didn't want something too sweet and tasting too much like egg yolks. So, after reading about 15 different creme brulee recipes, I decided to combine a few of them and make my own vanilla bean creme brulee recipe. (Don't ask me which recipes I combined... there was like, a combination of 3... so it's kind of my own recipe, right?)

It was delicious. I generally don't actually really like creamy things, especially custard, but I loved the flavor in this, and I think the people that ate it liked it too. :) Click below for more pictures and recipe!

Cupcakes and cakes, oh my!

Hi all! Okay, okay, I'm still alive, I promise. I'm sorry for being so MIA this month... thanks and apologies to those who have been continuously checking without anything exciting and new to see.

Honestly, it's been a kind of a dragging much in terms of productivity. This whole job search thing is extremely frustrating and I'm getting sick of typing up cover letters. So I have kind of avoided anything that involved typing a copious amount of typing and thinking. I feel guilty because I've been wanting to write a few posts about food and politics, but I just can't seem to bring myself to do it. Eventually, eventually.

But enough whining, it's still been a good month regardless. I've made some awesome friends, I'm actually getting out and being social, how exciting is that? I had a chance to watch my fellow dance girls perform once already!







Aren't they beautiful? It's an epic dance, "Ode to the Plum Blossom," and it was an awesome performance. :)

So the past month has involved a decent amount of baking, including a cake for an order, a vegan cake for a fellow vegan friend, and 5 dozen cupcakes for a young girl's birthday!





Click the jump for more cakes and cupcakes!

Photography, pound cake, and so much catching up

So for any of you living in California, or more specifically, the Bay Area... seriously, what's with the weather? Pouring rains, ridiculous humidity and mid-70s the next day, and "afternoon showers" that flood streets and burst pipes in the 5 hours it rains. Seriously? However, it has led to some great opportunities for photography and playing around with my camera.



The nights in the past few weeks have been amazingly clear, and the previous photograph and the next ones are a result from playing around with my shutter speed.

Look at how amazingly still that water is! This is the bay... all summer it was ridiculously windy, and it was definitely a lot colder at night back in July and August. Again, I'm not the biggest fan of scenic/still photography, but it's still fun to capture the weather and light is always fun to play around with... like when the sky opens up on the Bay with San Francisco in the background.



The sunset on Monday night after the afternoon "showers" was gorgeous. I was waiting at the bus stop on the way to an Owl City concert in the city, and the sunset was just so gorgeous that I couldn't resist.





But enough pictures of the bay (I promise there won't be too many anymore... I mean, you can only have so many pictures of the same place before you get sick of seeing yet another pretty sunset or "Jesus beams."). I have a backlog of photos of the food that I baked 2 weeks ago, and I totally forgot about the cranberry cream cheese pound cake that I baked for the tea party!



So, for some carrot cake, celebration challah, and cranberry cream cheese pound cake, click below! I apologize for the half-photographed steps, but I was in a constant rush making all of these. (Recipe for pound cake below as well!)

Moon cakes (and Blogger finally has jump breaks!)

So a couple of nights ago (Saturday, October 3rd, to be exact), was the Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhong Qiu Jie). It's an excuse to eat delicious moon cakes! Just kidding. (But it's definitely a bonus!) The Mid-Autumn Festival is on the 15th day of the eighth month of the Chinese calendar, which generally falls on a day late September/early October, when the moon is all it fullest and roundest.

Hopefully some of you had a chance to enjoy the full moon... I did! I walked down the pier near my apartment, and had fun playing with my camera and my lenses in the sunset and watching the full moon rise.


Photograph courtesy of Mike Ross.



The Mid-Autumn Festival is usually celebrated by eating pomelo, observing the beautiful moon, eating mooncakes, lighting lanterns, and, of course, vibrant celebration! I kind of did two of the above? I saw the full moon rise, made mooncakes, and performed with my Chinese dance group (for Homecoming at Cal, but it still counts, kind of?).


Photography courtesy of Mike Ross.

As with every Chinese celebration, this one comes with its on myth/folk tale. Of course, there are many various versions of the story of the moon, but the one I'm most familiar with is the one that I used to read as a child--the public library near where I grew up had this fantastic selection of Chinese-English children's books which recounted lively stories of the Monkey King, or told how things like the moon or the parrot-shaped rock came to be in Taiwan, or why we celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival or the Dragon Boat Festival, or even told us tales warning us of our own laziness and selfishness.



Oh! Oh! So. Blogger finally added an entry cut jump breaks! Huzzah! So, finally, I'll stop hogging all your internets when you're trying to load up this silly page. So, for more about the Moon Festival and beautiful pictures of said mooncakes, click below!

Camping and Flourless Cakes

Hi all! So I was hoping to update more than just once a week, but the past week has been ridiculously crazy, some of which involved doing this whole hiking up Half Dome thing. It was awesome.



Yes, that's the top of Half Dome. That pose is a lot harder in hiking boots and on top of an uneven rock. :| Oh well.

Don't want to say too much, because hopefully I'll update my travel blog some day... some day... (As I said earlier--I'm notorious for not updating these things, but I'm trying!) The night before we summit Half Dome, we car camped at Upper Pines Campground in Yosemite Valley (by the way, I've decided I despise car camping, and I hate RVs even more... backpacking is definitely the way to go!). At least with car camping, you can go a little more gourmet with food. We opted not to really focus too much on the fine foods:



We just prepared one-bowl foods and just dug in... I mean, who really wants to wash more bowls than necessary, especially while camping? Not me. But we just made sure we had a more or less balanced meal... protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables/fruits/fiber... all in all, it wasn't too horrible.

I mean, who can deny this beautiful pot full of whole wheat rotelli pasta with marinara sauce?



At least we don't have to chow down on pine cones, right? Although, this little dude seems to be enjoying it a whole lot.



Well, fat squirrels aside, back to the whole baking thing! I received a food processor that I ordered in the mail last Tuesday night... so of course, I just had to use it! That, and it was Ezra's birthday (the guy who helped push for the generous gift certificate at my old work place!) on Thursday, so who needs more of a reason to try out this lovely flourless chocolate hazelnut cake??

I was running low on ingredients, but I found a bar of good dark chocolate, and bought some whole hazelnuts from Trader Joe's.

First, I prepared all the ingredients--separated the eggs, measured out the chocolate, the brown sugar, the butter, the cocoa powder, and the water. I even toasted my own hazelnuts!



Then, I ground the hazelnuts in my spanking new food processor!



To do this, take the toasted hazelnuts, and add a few tablespoons of sugar per cup of nuts in order for the sugar to absorb the fats released, so you don't end up making hazelnut paste (which could be good, but probably for something else). Just don't be like me, and think that you put in all the sugar when you really didn't, because I realized I forgot about half the sugar until after I folded in the egg whites...

And yes... hand-beaten egg-whites!



What a very tiring process... my right arm was definitely about to fall off, especially after the first dance class after a whole month of nothingness. But look... still peaks, yay!

Another thing that made me so excited was to use my fair trade cocoa powder!



I used Green & Black's organic fair trade cocoa powder! If you don't know what fair trade is, look it up. I just received Black Gold, an awesome documentary about the coffee industry and how fair trade works. I originally saw it in my global poverty class, and hope to make everyone I know watch it. ...I'll be sure to discuss it along with so many other food issues some other time.

Anyhow, so after mixing everything together and folding the laboriously hand-whipped egg whites and pouring it into one prepared 6" cake pan and one prepared 3" sprinform cake pan, I realized that I had about 3/4 of the brown sugar left that I had forgotten to mix in.

Well crap.

What I did was mix in the brown sugar with what was left of the batter (about 1/3 cup?) to incorporate it, pour the batter from the cake pans back in, and fold the two batter together. That way, you won't over-mix the batter even more than necessary, flatten all the egg white bubbles that you so tiringly created, and come out with a hockey puck for a cake.

It still turned out delicious.

And more or less pretty... the final cake had a piece that fell off.



I wanted to make a layer of dark chocolate chocolate ganache to pour over the top to set, partially because it would hide the ugliness of the cake, and because chocolate ganache is oh so tasty. Unfortunately, I was out of heavy cream, and basically had no time to run/bike to the store and get some. So, I improvised, and just melted some left-over chocolate from making the cake with butter, and made a drizzle pattern over it. Then, I topped the cake off with some candied rose petals and candied mint leaves that my roommate had bought me a while bag because I was eying them at The Pasta Shop in some ritzy place in Berkeley. They didn't quite go with the cake, and I would have preferred to do a really dark chocolate and a white chocolate drizzle pattern... that would have been fun, but I was already running late, and I had a lecture I wanted to go to, and I wanted to add some color to the otherwise monochromatic cake, so the candied floral would have to do. ...In the end, I think it turned out. (If I were smart, I would have put the candied petals and leaf where the hole was but no... I'm not that smart.) In the end, I ended up with one 6" cake, and two 3" cakes. ...They were all well-received. :D

A final close-up.



So I made this cake bright and early in the morning... so it was ridiculously rushed. BUT, at least I was able to use natural lighting for my pictures, buahaha!

Anyhow, the past week also involved another Anadama bread that a wonderful fellow friend ordered, but that's about it. Last night, I made a Turkey Zucchini "Lasagna," which turned out okay, but definitely something I want to play with more. I'll write about it later. For now, I should probably step away from the computer and tend to my poor, ache-y muscles.