Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day to you!  It's time to indulge chocolate dipped strawberries!  However, I am not a big fan of chocolate so we'll just eat the strawberries without the chocolate ok?

We celebrated the Valentine's Day a little early this year as my morning routine normally involves rush rush rush during the weekday.  So on Sunday, I made my favorite heart shaped breakfast for the men (hubby & son) in my life.  It's actually very easy, just need to have couple of cookie cutters which I have plenty from my previous cookie making obsession that didn't last very long lol!

Bacon, pineapple, kiwi, bread, and egg in the middle!


Made it with a pressed cookie cutter
For Valentine's Day eve, I made black pepper sauce ribeye steak dinner, completed with asparagus, mashed potato, and homemade TangZhong dinner rolls.  Both hubby and son cleaned their plates!

See how soft and fluffy the TangZhong roll is

Steak with black pepper sauce
This morning, I some how managed to have few minutes, so I quickly made some more heart shaped breakfast for my son.  He sure loves it!

Egg, orange slice, turkey and ham sandwich!

Tonight, we plan to make another heart shaped dinner, maybe I'll post some more pictures tomorrow!  It's nice to be able to go out for candlelight dinner.  However, when you have a kid with bedtime at 7:30, it's really not much you can do.  Since I do enjoy cooking, I guess these will have to do for now.  It's also very rewarding when your kid's face light up after seeing the heart shaped cute breakfast that mommy made just for him!  You can even hand the cookie cutters to the kids and have them help out!  Enjoy your Valentine's Day!

Friday, February 3, 2012

New Year, New Hobby

New year, new hobby, what's my recent obsession?  Crochet and knitting!  Before this recent rediscovery the fun with yarns; the last time I touched a pair knitting needles, I was still in high school!  It's been a long time (Yes, I am old, don't mention it though)!  Since Xmas, I've made 3 scarves, 1 infinite cowl, 1 cupcake coffee cozy, 1 valentine mug cozy.  Too bad, I don't have pictures of all of them.  But here's some that I have!
Infinite cowl
Kid's fun scarf
Valentine Heart Mug Cozy
Valentine Heart Mug Cozy on the mug




 


Thursday, September 29, 2011

White Chocolate Cocoa Pebbles Baseball Treats

I finally have another chance to try making more cookies.  I've been wanting to make more cookies so I can try decorating them and I was so happy when I saw it was my kid's turn to bring snacks to school this Thursday.  I was torn between making Halloween theme cookies and the rice krispie treats.  So I asked my son what he'd like.  He said rick krispie treats.  Here we are with White Chocolate Cocoa Pebbles Baseball Treats.  The original recipe was adapted from Cookies and Cups.  I really like her creative ideas and her wonderful decorated cookies.  I am not as good as she is but I hope at least my kid and her friends would appreciate the snacks that I made for them.  My son even stayed up late because he wanted to help decorating the cookies.  Did I mention that this is my first time making icing, decorating a cookie with piping bag, tips and all that.  It didn't even cross my mind what if I fail piping the stitches.  I am glad it turn out ok even though not perfect.  But at least you can tell these are baseballs right?...I meant...you can right?  Please tell me that you can! 

I used the cocoa pebbles krispie treats recipe that I made the Spiders and Owls.  I tripled the batch to have enough for 25 cookies.  I also found out, if you are running short, you can actually put the scraps together in the mold and pressed it tight.  I got 3 cookies out of scraps.  Since I didn't have any white candy melts, I used white chocolate instead.  To achieve the smooth consistency, I added 1/2 ts veg oil to the melted white chocolate.  I did half batch with and half batch without the oil (the first half batch I didn't think about it).  The 2nd half batch was much easier to coat the cookies as the white chocolate is much smoother. 

White Chocolate Cocoa Pebbles Baseball Treats

Ingredients

25 Cocoa Pebbles Treats cookies
5 oz white chocolate melted (I use Ghirardelli classic white choc chips)
1C Meringue Powder Buttercream icing with red food coloring (I also added 2 drops of lemon extract in the icing, it smells wonderful)

Directions

I made the cocoa pebbles treats, let it cool, cut up, covered with white chocolate.  Then I let these dry over night.  On the 2nd night, I mix the red coloring into meringue powder buttercream and try piping for the first time.  I thin down the icing with 1 TB of water while I was mixing color into it.  It just seems a little bit too thick to me.  It looks more for covering the cake rather than be using in the piping bag.  Then I used the trick that I learned from Karen's cookies by putting icing on a piece of plastic wrap then into the piping bag.  It's a lot easier than fill the piping bag with icing and much easier clean up too.  I piped on the 2 lines first for all cookies then go back and add the stitching details.  It was easier as the first 2 lines were already dry.  I didn't have to worry about mess it up while adding the stitches.  Well, they weren't perfect as Cookies and Cups' but hey it's my first time piping and I think it was OK.

Cocoa Pebbles with white chocolate

Lines added

Finished baseballs

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Megan's first Major League Baseball Game - KC Royals

Hubby won 4 tickets to the KC Royals game Tuesday night.  So we took the whole family includes grandpa and Megan with us to the game.  It was Megan's very first MLB game.  It was a nice evening and a little chill after the Sun went down.  Our seats were by the first base so it was pretty nice.  Megan did really well through out the game.  She finally had enough by 6th inning (way passed her bedtime).  Poor baby just couldn't sleep as it was very loud.  Every time she dozed off, Royals would score or a hit so the fans were cheering like crazy.  Megan woke up and repeat.  We finally decided to leave after 7th inning as Royals led by 4 to 0.  Don had tons of fun too.  He was shouting, clapping, booing at the end.  A great night for the family!