Strawberry shortcake cupcakes

I received a mail from Celia asking if i could do some cupcakes for her. The theme she had in mind was Strawberry Shortcake! It was for her friend Elaine who was celebrating her birthday and who is crazy about Strawberry Shortcake and Strawberry Shortcake’s cat.

So Celia asked if i could do some cupcakes in a Strawberry Shortcake theme with 2 cupcakes having a Strawberry Shortcake figurine topper and Strawberry Shortcake’s cat as another topper. The rest of the cupcakes were decorated simply with some fondant strawberries, and Strawberry Shortcake’s hat.  I loved the colour combination of these cupcakes as they really popped don’t you think?

Celia later told me that her friend loved the cupcakes and couldn’t bear to eat them cos they looked so cute. She even sent me some pictures of the birthday girl with her cupcakes Thanks Celia!

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Simple chocolate cake for Jana

Jana had previously ordered a family cake from me to celebrate her daughter’s 1st month and she’s now back to order another cake from me as she loved the previous cake i made for her.

This time round Jana asked if i could just do a plain chocolate cake for her without any of the fondant figurines or characters since she had a craving for the cake itself I agreed and decided to fancy up the cake with some strawberries and dual coloured chocolate shavings at the side of the cake.

I had a little trouble initially getting the chocolate shavings to stick on the side of the cake but i finally did get them to where i wanted them and to top the whole cake off, i piped on a little swirl of chocolate buttercream on the top of the cake and topped it off with a slice of strawberry. I loved how the cake turned out and how it looked both sinfully yummy and simplistically pretty both at the same time

Hopefully Jana liked the cake with the strawberries and chocolate shavings.. yummy

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Food for Chinese New Year Reunion Dinner

Had my Chinese New Year reunion dinner recently and in my family it’s quite a huge affair with basically my extended family coming together for dinner. As my mom is the eldest of her brothers and sisters, the reunion dinner is usually held at my mom’s place with my aunts, uncles and cousins all coming over to have the reunion dinner.

 My mom usually cooks up a storm for the dinner and includes all the yummy chinese new year foods like “chap choi” which is a vegetable dish, as well as other traditional dishes like steamed mushrooms with oysters, sea cucumber and “fat choi” which I’ve always termed hair since I find it looks like it :p sounds gross but I love eating it

Anyway, decided to make some non-traditional dishes at home and contribute it to our reunion dinner. Thinking of what to make, I finally decided on making individual chicken pies, mashed potatoes to go with my mom’s beef goulash and lastly for dessert I decided to make a no bake strawberry cheesecake.

I had finished making the cheesecake, and mashed potatoes, and was half way through with my chicken pie before I realised that I had forgotten to take photos of the process! Arrgghh… so unfortunately I only have a few photos of my chicken pie to show you :p Here’s a close up view… yummy don’t you think

However, you can see pictures and process to my strawberry cheesecake in a previous post here

I started out making the chicken pie by chopping up all the ingredients for the chicken pie filling which included potatoes, onions, chicken and mushrooms. The worst was the onions.. cutting it up made me keep crying and as there wasn’t much of a wind that day, the noxious onion fumes just wouldn’t blow away which just made the tearing all the more worse. At the end of chopping up the onions my eyes were all red and just wouldn’t stop leaking. I had to wait for a while before I could go back into the kitchen to finish up chopping up all the rest of the ingredients. Once everything was chopped up, I then put everything in a big pot and began to cook all the ingredients. Of course to make it creamy, I used a shortcut and added Cambell’s Mushroom soup to the ingredients… at the end of everything, this is what the filling looked like. Of course no chicken pie filling would be complete without the mixed vegetables

To save myself some time I decided not to make the puff pastry myself but to just buy ready made puff pastry from the supermarket. After thawing it out I then rolled out the pastry and using round cutters, proceeded to cut up the pastry before molding the pastry into the pie cups… these were what the pies looked like before baking..

After putting it in the oven at 180 degrees for 35 minutes, these were what the finished product looks like…

The chicken pie was quite a hit at the dinner although I do need to work on being more consistent in adding the filling for the chicken pie.. haha… think there was some with more pastry than filling although I’ve always loved the chicken pie pastry.. haha…. Anyway, I made too much filling and still have some left over which I’ve put in the fridge. I think I’ll either do another batch of chicken pies or maybe make some baked rice with the filling… yummy…

Well.. that’s it from me… getting a little hungry from talking about all that food.. hehe.. luckily I made some extra bottles of pineapple tarts and almond cookies for myself this Chinese New Year.. think I’m going to go snack on them now hee hee…

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Yummy no bake strawberry cheesecake

I had a sudden craving for strawberry cheesecake the other day and finally decided to try my hand at doing one… Per the recipes I’ve come across, cheesecakes usually fall into 2 categories… baked or no bake cheesecakes… I have to admit I took the easy way out and decided on a no bake cheesecake recipe :p

After pestering my hubby to bring me to the nearest Cold Storage to get all the necessary ingredients and the juiciest strawberries I could find, I finally got home and started to whip up my first ever cheesecake

After half an hour of mashing, mixing and refrigerating, I finally got to the fun part of decorating my cheesecake using the big fat juicy strawberries.. hehe.. of course along some of the strawberries ended up in my mouth.. what could I say, they were just tooo juicy to resist…

Once I had squeezed as many of the strawberries as I could on the top of the cheesecake, I then started to spoon on the strawberry jelly over the top of everything.. and then back into the fridge it had to go to set overnight.

To be frank.. throughout the whole process, I believe I actually spent more time waiting for the cheesecake to set than anything else.. and I’m not exactly a patient person.. so I did actually not refrigerate the cheesecake as long as was required, so while I was in the midst of spooning on the jelly layer, some of the cheesecake base actually ended up floating up… arrggghhhh… but overall for a first attempt I think it didn’t turn out all that bad don’t you think so?

That’s my finished strawberry cheesecake… which after the photos my hubby straight away dug into… I guess it was quite a success considering that he finished the whole cake off within 24 hours!!

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