My First Loaf

My friends know that I am into cakes and cookies. The bread baker at home is really Moobe. This is my virgin attempt, using a recipe found in a blog called A Year in Bread. All in all, it took 4.5 hours (from the word go to the finished product) but it's well worth it. I could have left it for a little longer on the final proofing as it's not as light as I wished but nonetheless, it's nice. I halved the recipe, and used 5g of dry yeast with a couple spoons of warm water to get the yeast going. I'd use a little less yeast next time. Oh a little less salt will be good too.

I think I will mix in herbs the next time. Here's the ingredients that I used (approximately half of what the original recipe called for):

283g plain flour
14g sugar
5g dry yeast (mixed with 2 tbl sp warm water)
15g butter (melted)
454g milk (room temperature, though it called for warm milk in the recipe)
412g bread flour

for the method, do refer to the original blog post. The writer had step-by-step instructions, right down to the nitty gritty. Very useful indeed!

Eyeballs anyone?

Halloween potluck at Ayako's called for a 'scary but edible' dish. What's scarier than bloody eyeballs?


It's simply red jelly (we've put in cut-up strawberries) wrapped in a snowskin (see recipe from my mooncake) and then streaked with food colouring for effect. The 'pupil' is the snowskin mixed with a bit of cocoa powder. I'll probably make it in other shapes for other occassions haha!

New Thangka added

A beautiful Thangka made of leather and bronze pieces. It's about 200 years old and has been sitting in storage at the owner's home for too long :)

So M's helped clean it up, loaned a part of our wall to W T so the Thangka can be admired the way it should :)

One Pot Wonder

A 1 pot dinner for Sunday that costs less than $20 (and enough for 2 meals!) See the crab shell on the top? (oops, forgot to turn it over... hahhaa!)

中秋晚餐

中秋佳节吃点特别的。。。也不是什么特别的，就只是平时甚少弄的焗猪扒饭。

Snowskin Mooncake - Part 2

Ambitious me had wanted to make some cocoa snowskin mooncakes. Running short of lotus paste, I decided to shelf that as I don't know how it will go with the white lotus paste. Instead, we made the normal snowskin with white lotus paste filled with either Chinese chestnut or sunflower seeds. Used about 3 batches of the recipe that I put up last month to make 44 pieces of mini mooncakes. I'll use the Garfield mold the next time :) but first, I need to get more lotus paste.

Home Improvement - Ceiling lights

Whoa! It's been almost 2 months since I last updated here. Not much has been happening around the house (save for the usual father-son squabbles :P ).

Yesterday, Mr. Handyman decided to cover up the ceiling bulbs with a cute little lantern that we bought from Daiso. It makes the bulb less glaring, more comfortable to the eyes.