Wishing family, friends and blog readers, Gong Xi Fa Cai/Keong Hee Huat Cai. May the year of Monkey brings all of us joy, happiness, peace, good health and prosperity

Taiwanese Pineapple Cake/Cookies

I always like this cake. I am not sure why they called it cake as it tasted more like cookies. I bought it a few times from the Asian supermarket and also once at Hong Kong airport but they were not good. The pastry was so dried and the filling doesn’t taste like pineapple at all. I found out that they added winter melon to the filling….mmmmm no wonder it is not good. Anyway, I always wanted to try making these and finally did it a few months ago after buying more moulds from eBay. My friend Alan gave me some too. It cost me quite a bit of money and in order to justify spending so much I should make it more often :)

I used only pineapple for the filling instead of adding winter melon to it. I coarsely grated the pineapple so that I can still feel the bite of the filling. I tasted one once it cools down but the pastry was more on the crunchy and dry side so I let it sit for a day and the pastry turns out soft, rich and very buttery. It was really good. I think it tasted much better than the one I bought. As CNY is just around the corner, maybe you can making this instead of the usual pineapple tarts.

Gong Xi Fatt Chai/Happy Chap Goh Meh

I hope it is not too late to wish everyone Gong Xi Fatt Chai. Well, better late than never right. At least I made it before the Chap Goh Meh. Wish everyone a healthy, happy, prosperous and blessed year of the Ram. As for me I didn’t go back to Malaysia this year so it is a very small celebration with some friends. Here are some pictures I took of us doing the tossing of Yee Sang/Prosperity Toss and some of the food. Hopefully next year I will be home to celebrate it with my family.

 

Prepared these two platters of Yee Sang on the second day of CNY to share it with my Zumba buddies. It was the first time for them to try out our Yee Sang. They love it! Is a labor of love as it took me some time to cut, sliced and chopped :)

Happy tossing

Everyone enjoying the yee sang.

I prepared the above platter for the weekend CNY get together with my best friend. Just a few of us. Don't you just love all the vibrant colors?

Good food good friends, can't ask for more. Happy Chinese New Year everyone!!

Macadamia White Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am never a fan of white chocolate because I find them way too sweet for my liking. I am not sure why I bought a bag of it and it has been sitting in my fridge for the longest time. I finally used some of it to make this batch of cookies. I added some macadamia nuts to it so that I don’t have to put too much of the white chocolate chips. I baked them a bit longer as I prefer crunchier cookies rather than chewy. But if you like chewy cookies just bake it to lightly brown.

On the side note I have not been very active in my blogging now. I am more into FB, Dayre and Instagram. You can follow me at Instagram user name Gertrudewan

Happy Chinese New Year

Wishing family, friends and blog readers, Gong Xi Fa Cai/Keong Hee Huat Cai. May the year of Horse brings all of us joy, happiness, peace, good health and prosperity.

Daisy Cookies/Biskut Dahlia

These cooking made their appearance during festive occasions like Chinese New Year, Aidil Fitri, Diwali or Christmas in Malaysia. This is one of the very first cookies that I’ve learned to bake years ago too. One thing I like about these cookies is they look very pretty especially with the little red cherry on top. They are basically butter cookies that are light and literally melt in your mouth.

There are quite a few variations of Daisy cookies out there. Some use condensed milk, milk powder and custard powder but my recipe used none of those. This is one recipe that I had it for many years. I was too lazy to search for the special daisy mold in my garage so I just use a piping bag with star nozzle to pipe it. It was difficult to do that and I only managed to do a batch and in the end I just shape it with hand. It thinks it still look alright ;)

French Vanilla Pistachio Sables

I am hit by the lazy bugs and I don’t really feel like doing much nowadays. I usually get depressed during this time of the year as I will be thinking of home and family. With everyone posting their CNY gatherings with family and friends on FB make it worst. I wish I can be home with my family. Well, I guess this is what we have to sacrifice being away from home. Well, enough of my depressing feelings and let’s talk about this cookie. I don’t use pistachio much in my baking but I bought it to make Macaroons last year and I still have ¾ packets of the pistachio meal and shelled nuts sitting in my fridge. I decided to make some ‘sable’ out of it. The first time I heard about this cookie was from a French Pastry Chef whom I took bread lesson from. Sables, also known as a French Butter Cookie or Breton Biscuit, are a classic French cookie originating in Normandy France. The name 'Sables' is French for "sand", which refers to the sandy texture of this delicate and crumbly shortbread-like cookie.

 

Happy Chinese New Year!

To my family, friends and blog readers, Gong Xi Fa Cai/Keong Hee Huat Cai. May the year of snake brings all of us joy, happiness, peace, prosperity and good health.

I didn't bake much this year. Just a few types of cookies like Almond Cookies ,Pistachio Sables, Kuih Bangkit, Date Rolls and 2 types of Pineapple Tarts .

Not forgetting some Bak Kua/Pork Jerky too.

Prawns Wrapped in Taro Paste

This is another prawn dish that is nice to serve for Chinese New Year. I made this dish a few years ago but never posted it in my blog. I am recreating it again so I could post it here for my record. This dish will be ideal as an appetizer too. The taro which is crispy on the outside and soft on the inside compliments well with the succulent prawn within.

Ingredients:

15-18 large prawns – shell,deveined and leave the tail intake
2 tbsp flour

Almond Cookies

This year I decided to bake almond cookies instead of the regular peanut cookies after seeing Bee Bee of Honey Bee Sweets posted a pictures of her cookie on FB. Since I still have a packet of almond meal given by Oh Nuts in the fridge I like to use it up before ordering some new packets. The cookies turn out like how Bee Bee describes it. Buttery and melts in your mouth. Carlos love it a lot and I have to hide it away from him if not it will be all be gone before CNY.

Creamy Butter Prawns/Nai Yau Har

My mom cooked a lot of traditional dishes for our Chinese New Year reunion dinner and one of them is this prawn dish. She once saw a chef on TV demonstrating a prawn dish using evaporated milk and she cook it for us. We like it a lot but I tweak recipe a bit by adding additional ingredients to it. Many Chinese families like to cook prawns/shrimps, as a prawn in Cantonese is ‘Ha’ which in English means ‘laughter’ and that associate with the idea of happiness and joy all year round. Being Chinese, all the dishes serve during the festive season need to have auspicious name or meaning to it. This is my version of mom’s dish. Finger licking good!!

 

Date Rolls

I have a lot of dates left from my Christmas baking and I wanted to use it all up for my Chinese New Year baking. I can’t keep the dates for too long as it tends to get dry real fast so I decided to blend it all up in a food processor and used it as the filling of these rolls. It turns out really good and it will be on the bake list for my next Christmas baking.

 

Ingredients for the filling:

600 gram dates – I used Medjool dates
¼ cup sesame seeds – toasted
3 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp soft butter
½ tsp cinnamon powder
1 tbsp orange zest
3 tbsp orange juice

 

Lemon Polenta Cookies

These are crunchy, lemony, and buttery cookies. The polenta in these cookies puts them on the crunchy side rather than soft and chewy. Normally I will just shape these rounds but this time I did something different using piping bag. The polenta absorbed the moisture from the mixture pretty fast and toward the end I find it a little bit difficult to pipe. If this happens just add a bit of milk to soften up the mixture up again.

Dong Po Pork/Dong Po Rou

Non-Halal

My laptop has been giving quite a bit of problems lately. It’s a relatively new machine and hopefully Carlos is able to fix it this weekend. Before he does that I better put up a post or two but if you see no posting here that means I don’t have access to my laptop.

This dish has been on my to –do list for the longest time since I've seen it at Wendy’s blog and I finally made it when Diana came home to celebrate Thanksgiving last year. Yeah I made this dish a few months ago only get to post it now. I wish the meat was a bit leaner as we are not a fan of fatty pork. Nevertheless we totally enjoyed it (we removed some of the fats) especially when we ate it with homemade Mantau . And the gravy goes really well with rice too. I am going to cook this again and this time using a leaner cut of meat.

Pineapple Rolls

I know I bit late in making these as CNY was long gone. I actually made these 3 weeks ago as I don’t have the time to make it for CNY. We were moving from PA to CA during that time so I don't have time to bake anything. Instead of the using enclosed or cut out pineapple tarts I made them into rolls. This time I used the recipe from Jun of Indochine Kitchen with very minor changes and I like it a lot. I made 1 ½ recipe as a recipe don’t yield too many pieces. I re-post the recipe here so I can refer to it whenever I want to make this again. You can go to her website and check out the step by step on how to do this.

Happy New Year/Gong Xi Fatt Chai

To my dear family, friends and blog readers,

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of you A Happy and Prosperous Chinese New Year. May the year of Dragon bring all of you good health, wealth, happiness, peace and joy!!

Yee Sang and CNY Dinner 2011

This year CNY falls on a weekday so it is just like any other working day here in the US. Diana can’t be home until Friday so we decided to have our dinner only on Saturday, the 3rd day of CNY. I prepared the usual CNY dishes like Yee Sang (Asian Salad), Ngor hiang (5 spice meat rolls), Siew Yoke (roast pork) Hong Bak (siew pork in black soy sauce), sweet and sour chicken, Butter prawns and a mix vegetable dish. It took me nearly the whole just to prepared and cook these dishes. By the time it was done I was dead tired ha ha... but most important we enjoyed the meal and so was our guest.

This is the first time I prepared Yee Sang and it turn out really well. I even made this dish for our Malaysian get together the very next day and it was well received by everyone. I am happy with that.

Peanut Cookies and Happy Chinese New Year 2011

This is the last cookie I baked for CNY. This is by far Carlos and my sister Elizabeth most favorite CNY cookie. I will post the recipe here later.

Here I would like to wish my family, friends and all my blog readers Gong Xi Fa Cai. May the year of Rabbit brings you good health, happiness and prosperity.