potatoos | Entries tagged with food

After the pineapple upside down cake, I suddenly have this urge to make full use of my in-built oven. I guess it stems from my not having an oven for over 20 years and then *poof!* a working (and pretty decent) oven suddenly appears in the new apartment. I've been dreaming of making full use of it every Friday afternoon (or morning if I've no class) - desserts, savory foods, even baked meals! ^-^

Anyway, ambitions aside, I spent my Friday afternoon making umeshu chocolate truffles. I'm not sure if I got it right, but it seems like truffles are made from chocolate ganache (or so the few sites that I've visited said so). So I 'shaved' my bar of chocolate, add in simmered heavy whipping cream flavored with CHOYA natural non-sugared shiso to make my ganache. Then I stored it in the fridge, intending to roll truffles ball-balls out of the bowl of ganache ~2hrs after cooling.

...But I slept (T-T). So I didn't manage to bring any chocolate truffles for J whom I met for dinner. Went home to complete my chocolate truffles after dinner, and no, I didn't shape them into round ball-balls. Mostly because I don't think I want to be in too much contact with the truffles (People are going to eat it!)

Though not the shape I wanted, I think they turned out pretty decent. Definitely more umeshu should be added, since I taste only chocolate. To quote Ah ma, 没有层次感 (T-T):

Current Mood: Whee~:D
Current Location: Home @ SG

Made a pineapple upside down cake on Friday afternoon for the gathering Shiin organised for us Umich people.

Ah yen probably won't approve because it's not from scratch, and well, a pre-mix can never go wrong. That said, I forgot how to make caramel, if that's something I tried making from scratch. ( ^^ )" But then, I'll find the taste decent if I have a sweeter tooth.

Gathering was fun though - lots of food, lots of drinks and 2 rounds of King's Cup. I stuck onto water for the night (other than a small amount of white wine) because I had nursing attachment the following day from morning to late afternoon!

Nursing attachment shall be another post another time, but to summarise it: (1) Great experience learning about the nurses' duties; (2) Even greater respect for the nurses than ever

And it's time to sleep~

Current Mood: :)
Current Location: Home, SG

After the OSCE, it's really time for us to encourage and motivate each other to work even harder. Afterall, we don't want just "P = M.D.", but to become the best that we can be, so that we can serve the community to the best of our abilities. ( ^_^ )

Personally for me, I think having tea with Pooh would be the best thing for all of us to relax - with honey tea, carrot cake, ...But, 100 Acre Woods is kind of far away from where we are. 'Hm...I'll see what I can do.' I was pleasantly surprised when Eeyore reassured me.

And so he went online to send out a few emails

...'Yaaa~' And the poor baby donkey was tired out by the end of sending out all those mails. But he was smiling widely :D

And you know what? Since we can't go to 100 Acre Woods, Pooh came and had tea with us instead! Uwaaa~ Thank you dear Eeyore! ♥

I've never tried making cut-out cookies before (I think), so I hope they taste OK! Recipe adapted from Happy Home Baking ( *^__^)\ And I really do hope that my teammates will become more motivated for the '2nd trimester' of this module! 頑張って〜 o( ^__^)/

Cookies, anyone?

Current Mood: (^____^)
Current Location: Home @ SG

Went to Daiso at Vivocity a couple of weeks back with Xin. With every priced at SGD2, it's nearly impossible to walk out of the shop empty-handed. Even though it's true that one can get Hainanese chicken rice, or 2 buns, or Mee Pok, etc (just to name a few of the endless things one can get) for SGD 2 as well, I personally prefer to spend that money on air-drying clay, or huge folders to store my stuff, or air-tight containers... Anyway, I ended up buying a packet of air-drying wood powder clay and John the penguin - the wood powder clay failed terribly as handphone charms, but they were pretty good for creating Baka-tono Arashi (potatoos.livejournal.com/39709.html), and John is still hanging on my DS lite. Xin also bought a couple of things, but the item I remembered was the Japanese cake recipe book that she bought.

Now here's the thing: Neither of us knew enough Japanese to survive. But Xin definitely knows more Japanese than I do, because she has taken it as an MOE 3rd language (and then claims that she has forgotten almost everything :P), while I've only taken it for 2 semesters in U of M. So...book in Japanese = we have to do something about it. And thus, one of my holiday projects by Xin is to choose one recipe and translate it. Sounds fun, so I said OK. Haha, turns out I was wrong...

...Translating is probably fun only when you know enough Japanese, which I obviously do not. Add that to not knowing enough kanji to be able to pronounce most kanji in the recipe. But since most kanji are technically traditional Chinese characters, I was able to get the gist of their meaning or find out what they meant from jisho.org. However, there are those which are not traditional Chinese characters. It took me some time to find a suitable DS lite Japanese-English dictionary to do the job. So, it's a whole lot of time spent in finding out the meaning, understanding it as accurately as I could, writing it down in pretty understandable English, and trying to make sure nothing sounds awkward. Now I know how hard it is for the translators to translate a whole Arashi vid, or lyrics, or their radio programmes! And I must say, I admire these people even more than ever!

On hindsight, I think that the process is quite fun! Sometimes the direct translation sounds really funny, and I would find myself chuckling at it. But I probably wouldn't be doing this again anytime soon, maybe until I've finished more Japanese classes (which I'm still checking to see if the course at Kallang CC is suitable or not...). I can't wait till I can understand Nino's solos... (^-^)

Peach Cake recipe: