The Sweeter Side

Despite not being a romantic person, I enjoy Valentine's Day. There's pretty bright decorations everywhere and the world encourages you to eat chocolate, cake, sweets, and indulgent foods. It's all about love for me obviously. Another reason why I love Valentine's Day is my memories of handing out sweets and cards to everyone in my class when I was little. I still do a something like that now that I'm older but with cookies and cupcakes. I personally call these cookies, "Heart Cookies of Death", because these took almost 8 hours to make. The recipe is very time consuming and requires a lot of attention to detail. The cookie was delicious, very delicate and buttery. The recipe came from Eugenie Kitchen. Instead of a rainbow heart, I wanted to do Valentine's Day colors instead. I also had left over cake from another project so I made cake pops.

I was bored with my own baking. I wanted a challenge. So when my friend, K, mentioned she had to bake a cake for a friend's birthday I knew my opportunity arrived. She hates baking. And I don't like to bake unless I have someone or someplace to give the treats away to.  I'm  not going to eat it. So I quickly volunteered (myself as tribute, hah) to make the cake for her. I already had a cake in mind. I recently went home and tried a cake that's infamous around my hometown. A Burnt Almond Cake from Peter's Bakery. A Burnt Almond cake is a layers of almond cake, almond pastry cream, and covered in a light almond buttercream. The entire sides of the cake is covered with a delightfully crunchy crumb. The almond flavor is pretty unusual for a cake and it was delicious. The cake is moist and not cloyingly sweet.  I found a copy-cat recipe online immediately. In my version, I added salted caramel macarons dipped in Belgian chocolate for decoration and caramelized almo...

I am obsessed with the Great British Baking Show . I finished the entire first season in a few days. My favorite part is when the bakers would be tasked to make something they've never heard or seen of before. What a great way to really test a person's baking skills! I learned about this cake from my friend from Belgium. He told me about how this cake would be everywhere around the new year. The cake is a puff pastry encased around an almond paste filling. There is usually a small ceramic toy that is placed somewhere in the middle so that whomever gets it in their slice of cake gets to be King for the day. After a little bit of research, I decided to take the easy route and get pre-made puff pastry and fill it with the almond filling. It completely failed because all the fillings burst out of the seams and burnt! The second time was a success. I used a whole almond as a substitute for the ceramic baby King. The King was not crowned from my cake...whoever found the almond ...

My Dad has been craving Honey Walnut Shrimp for a while and put in a special request for me to make it. I think this turned out a lot better than expected. The last time I made this was in high school so I'm pretty pleased I was able to re-create it without the help of a recipe. I did make some alterations though. I added some cayenne pepper to the honey mayonnaise sauce, hoping that the spice would give it more of a dimension other than SWEET MAYO. I also chose not to use iceberg lettuce because I felt that kind of lettuce is generally useless being so bland in taste and color. I also salted the sugar glazed walnuts too. Oh and this was the first time I used coconut oil to fry something. Gorgeous aroma and makes me feel a little less guilty eating it. My dad ate TWO servings. Solid success! Anyone want to come over for dinner now? (: Recipe