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Family Pineapple Tart Tradition: A Childhood Memory Baked into New Year's
I have this childhood memory of my ahyi, amongst the great fondness I have for kitchen bonding. Before each new year, the blue-tiled counter would brim with all kinds of ingredients and bubbling pots. She would enclose each ball of jam with a circle of dough and it would be my job to use the little metal scissors to snip the quills of the hedgehog before pinching a nose and adding little clove eyes. Then they would all be egg-washed in rows, baked and rested in clear tins to be given away
Macarons Time
I’m not sure what’s worse, the 7-year old who declares in the minutiae of the start of school weekend, early-dropoff-fatigue, shoes-are-outgrown, need-art-supplies, sports-trials, that he should make macarons, or the 4-year old who wakes up and bursts into your room at midnight singing “time for Cuddles!”
But he did and they turned out pretty good!
Achievement Unlocked - Mohinga
Achievement Unlocked! Mohinga!
Tarte Au Citron
Saluting all the women in my life, the aunties, the grandmothers and especially the mothers-to-be, for the personal sacrifices they have already made to breathe life into their children.
I was craving a tarte au citron in the style of key lime pie, and still had a tub of cinnamon graham crackers that I couldn’t resist the last time I was in Trader Joe’s.
Shanghai Mooncakes
This slightly melancholic mid-autumn poem is on the surface, lamenting a million-mile distance from one’s lover and the solace of gazing at the same moon, but actually it’s a very clever metaphorical reflection on how life itself, and by extension the history of mankind is an ancient and unchangeable series of coming together and apart, happiness and sadness waning and waxing like the shadows and imperfect wholeness of the moon.
Backyard Fresh Veggies
Lunchbreak lobang: I have new doozies, I’ve just been too snowed under. Many years ago at school, I was assigned as a secret santa for a girl in the younger class. One thing that impressed me was that she was quiet, polite and gentle but every note I received from her was timely, thoughtful and neat, it was like she was incapable of colouring or scissoring a line crookedly.
Homemade Childrens’ Nasi Lemak
Kid-friendly nasi lemak for dinner! Showed the boys how to squeeze the blue colour out of the blue pea flower.
Browned Butter Prune and Pecan Cinnamon Croissant Buns
Thank you for your kind wishes! This was my birthday bake- browned butter prune and pecan cinnamon croissant buns. They were very good.
People always ask, how do you have time to bake, which I find an odd question. I stress-bake and I make time for it.
Kyushu is the best roadtrip, a dramatic wide open low-density country with colours and cragginess reminiscent of the US. We took the train past the Mazda factory to Fukuoka and drove through Beppu, with its steaming hillside sulphuric aquifers, pausing in the charming Diagon Alley-like gourmand town of Yafuin and the narrow and expensive ryokan-strewn cobblestones of Kurakawa Onsen;