Bakery/Pastry

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Sweets

EMERGENCY SKILLET COOKIE

“Sometimes a moment wasted
IN COOKIE-DELIVERY…
IS LIFE AND DEATH”

Anxiety… do you know about anxiety?

The type that feels like there’s an expanding hot water balloon pressing against my soft parts. The type that pumps up the pressure on every cubic-inch of air in the space that I gaspingly occupy. A clinching cast-iron ranch over my lungs that tightens, and then tightens… efforts to breathe muzzled by the air-pressure that squeezes, and just squeezes… neglecting the urgency of a piping hot water balloon in my chest that is screeeeeeching desperately to expand, and EXPAND…

… until, as we all know what happens when you force a ballon, that it just “BAP!”. Fluids of boiling emotions mixed with bloody lumps of raw angst, splattering so violently against the four white walls of my confinement. Even the maddeningly slow motion in which they dribble down, by contrast, fuels my raging urge to scream.

All of which, is playing out silently and discreetly behind an expression-less front of a woman, typing calmly in front of her computer.

Anxiety.

I mean I need a cookie like right now.

01.27.2014

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Snacks, Sweets

BA-DA ‘BINGS’

There’s a Chinese saying that goes “A loser in love, a winner in casinos.” It simply means that the good fortune you lack in one aspect in life will be compensated in others.

Well… it’s total bullshit. Just like all Chinese superstitions are.

But having said that, it would leave my current streak of grand slams over an age-old kitchen nemesis – at a time when my every other single happiness in life seems to be throwing themselves under a train – completely unexplained. I mean, lay… layers? Is that you? Have you come back to see me? A predicted failure in my first attempt to replicate an iconic staple in northern China, came not as anticipated but instead, a smashing, success.

Ladies and gents, may I introduce you, the explosively layered… bing.

01.19.2014

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Dairy, Sweets

BLUEBERRY SLAB-MUFFIN FRENCH TOAST

Actually… I was saving this post for another time. Because first of all, something borderline “sweet” and similarly “French-toasty” had already taken the space next door. And secondly, it hasn’t exactly left yet. Yeah, so to avoid the suspicion of repetition, I was going to let this one ferment in my draft-box for a bit until you turn bubbly and matured for it.

However… shit happened.

01.11.2014

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Dairy, Meat, Snacks, Top Posts In 90 Days

A WRONG AND IRRESPONSIBLE SANDWICH

We’ve all heard about this growing up, that the adult life is all about responsibilities. “Pfff, whatever…” I said. I mean what does that even mean, really? As if kids don’t got no responsibility, like I hadn’t already been tying my own shoes, wearing my painful braises, and attending my designated school every morning where I dealt with mean kids on my own like any accountable, dutiful children since seven. Think I did all those for fun? I was doing good for my own greater good. Responsibility. You know? In fact, it seems that my whole life so far has been a reversed testimony for such statement.

As I am slowly coming to terms that my diligent, responsible life had took its last dying breath the moment… I became an adult.

01.05.2014

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Snacks, Vegatables

MULTI-LAYERED SCALLION FLAT BREADS

Do you have things that you tried and tried and tried making, and it. Just. Doesn’t. Work? In the kitchen, I call them my culinary nemesis, and they can be summed up by two words, “chewy” and “layers”. You whisper these words to my ears in the middle of the night…

I pee my pants.

12.06.2013

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Dairy, Sweets, Top Posts In 90 Days

TIRAMISU CHURRO + WARM COFFEE CUSTARD

The problem with me as a recipe ~~dreamer~~ hallucinater during the still-ongoing Thanksgiving carnival is that every year, in utter rudeness, I always feel like leaving the table even before the turkey makes it out of the oven. Evidently from my premature and inappropriate blabbering of the X’mas blend coffee bars in last November while the whole town was still chattering about tweaking pumpkin pies to death, to now this uncooperative side-tracking dessert that doesn’t even rhyme with “ies” and ” akes”, it is obviously true. I have no table-side manners. Now before I leave, pass me the damn stuffings.

11.28.2013

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THANKSGIVING ROUX BREAD

For the innocent sake of running an adequate food-blog, I’ve been slowly sucked down to a rabbit hole passing the disorienting stage of flying pies and falling biscuits, deep down to the world of cultivating gas-farting micro-organism on my kitchen counter (quite deep when you actually think about it). My falling journey has brought to you and myself, things I wouldn’t even think of doing just a little shy of 2 years ago, things like palm sugar brioche, dreamy Hokkaido milk toast, Taiwanese gua bao, Roman Bonci’s pizza, creamy carbonara pizza, clarified butter English muffin, pillow beignets and this rocking potato roll.

If I look into the mirror right now I wouldn’t recognize myself.

11.22.2013

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Sweets, Top Posts In 90 Days

PERFECT… WINTER SCONES

As a reluctant and often times struggling home-baker, I have an unfounded, persistent, borderline sickening obsession with making biscuits and scones. Nobody in the family eats them but me really (it isn’t saying much when you scan through all members in the family). I have to endure the look of lostness and concealed disappointment in Jason’s eyes every time he comes home to the smell of butter and sugar, and yet I put myself through it often (yes everything is about me). They aren’t the most foolproof things to bake either, evidently from the ghost of dead doughs past that still lingers in the apartment. So I don’t know, I guess they just feel so much more earnest than cookies and cakes, a warmer and friendlier thing to break over a conversation or a cup of tea… well, with my imaginary friends at least.

But the truth is until a few days ago, I had not been able to tell them apart in the kitchen.

11.08.2013

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APPLE PERSIMMON PIES

Season-transitioning flu… they just love me so. A tender… suffocating love. So listen here’s what I can do. With my energy level slightly above a wheezing squirrel, I’m gonna save any effort on an elaborate sales pitch with delicious stories for you to try this. This being – fry your damn pies and do it this way. I’m not gonna go there… Instead, I’m just gonna give it to you straight, as in bullet point-style. As in STONE-COLD FACTS. Yeah. Because we all believe in science. Right? So eat this because:

11.05.2013

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SELL OUT

I recently landed in a couple of situations where I had to articulate the idea of my blog, a sales-pitch so to speak. The effort quickly brought brightened realizations to myself that whatever effort I made to explain the original vision or benchmark that I set out for when I started doing this, is now tainted with contradictions. A derailment, so to speak.

10.19.2013

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Dairy

(RE)MODEL BAKERY’S ENGLISH MUFFIN

Oh I don’t feel bad telling you this… I don’t. In just 2 days, I will be packing my bikinis, loading up the sunscreens and dragging my waxed legs across the Pacific to the realm where no toxic fume blackens my lungs and shameless line-cutter haunts my footsteps! Aloha~ HAWAII, here I come! Gimme a hug gimme a hug please! Oooh I can almost taste the air of freedom… where real earth should feel like… where I don’t fantasize plotting the murder of anyone… of every day… of every minute… (Hear that? The dude who spitted next to my feet in the restaurant dies-dies-dies so gruesomely it sounds like an unicorn-pony lullaby…). Where I can be the non-mental me again you see?!! Oh please do it now!! Eject me out of China right now! Cannonball me outta here!

09.27.2013

In All recipes, Bakery/Pastry, Dairy, Sweets

FAKE CHOCOLATE CAKE + REAL BANANA BUTTERCREAM

Last few days were a nightmarish montage of my extended kitchen-agony. Three whole days covered in a choking dust of flour with smudgy grease from a beastly amount of butter and sugary stickiness haunting my finger tips. Electrical outlets being pushed to a near brink of melt-down and an unprepared dishwasher running past its adrenaline threshold into a disoriented state of ecstasy. After three nights of stress-induced binge eating, two stone-tough should muscle groups and one extremely cranked neck which all ended in a final coma that took place in a dark and questionable foot-massage parlor, despite nature’s best effort to stop me, I said I’d make a cake.

09.21.2013

Bakery/Pastry

“Sometimes a moment wasted IN COOKIE-DELIVERY… IS LIFE AND DEATH”

“Sometimes a moment wasted
IN COOKIE-DELIVERY…
IS LIFE AND DEATH”