These mini cream puffs are great to invite friends visiting our home. They look so cute and can be eaten whole at a time They are made with choux pastry, filled with cream and some berries. I used whipped cream as this is what I often have in my fridge.

Drizzling the puffs with some melted chocolate made them more flavorful to eat.

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This creme brulee is made in the same way as I made raspberry creme brulee last time. Just that I replaced raspberries with blueberries.

I don’t really like the natural taste of fresh blueberries, however, being in desserts or cakes, their taste changes and I love the new taste a lot.  

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This is the first time I cooked and tasted this kind of cocktail. I am still not sure why this dish is called "cocktail", but finding that the dish seems to be refreshing, I thought: it’s quite simple, why not make a try?

There’s no way I got dissappointed at this dish. It was really great to serve as an appertizer. The colors of the whole cocktail cup were eye-catching with the red and green in harmony with the fine color of the "dressing" or "cocktail sauce"? It had a tangy taste that impressed me right at the first bite. It’s better that you use live prawns (now in Vietnam, I can easily buy live prawns right at wet markets) as they are fresher and the texture is firmer. 

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It’s my fiance’s brother’s birthday. So I made this birthday cake to complete a warm family party at his house with his grandparents and parents. 

I was thinking of what cake I should make as this was not for the kids or childrens, but for all adults to enjoy it, and more importantly it was for old generations. The cake should be neither too fat or too sweet, and should be soft, moist. 

In the end, I decided to make this cake, though it was quite troublesome for me as I had to make the chocolate syrup myself, and I had only one round pan, so I had to make the cake batter  twice and baked the cake twice. 

I was also responsible for cooking all the dishes for the dinner party, and I had only around 6 hours to do everything. Fortunately, my fiance helped me a lot in the kitchen, as he is always willing to. 

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It’s my first time making and eating pavlova. I got the recipe from Joy of Baking. Generally speaking, I liked the new experience of making a new kind of cake with egg whites, seeing how a crisp crust is formed outside to keep the soft mashmallow layer inside. I am always inspired by trying new things. 

However, though I reduced sugar amount by one third, the cake was still very sweet to my liking. But I was afraid to reduce more sugar as I scared that the cake would not keep shape and right texture. It was the first trial, so I didn’t prefer to make many changes. Joy of baking is a relaiable source of recipes to me, so I often make changes to sugar and cream amount only. 

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Today is one of my friends’ birthday. We had a very funny party last weekend with some other friends to celebrate her birthday. And a week before that, her husband asked me to make a birthday cake as a surprise for her. 

I was thinking about what kind of cake I would use for this birthday cake. I thought that chiffon cake would be a good choice since the cake is very light, tender and the texture of a chiffon cake often makes people amazed and get excited. I have made an orange chiffon cake before using cake flour. This time I wanted to test another recipe with all-purpose flour to see if I still could handle it. So, after searching, I found a recipe for lemon chiffon from Taste of Home magazine that uses all-purpose flour. 

I haven’t had many occasions to make birthday cakes (this is my first time) and to practise decoring the cake with frosting. Thus, I have few experience with different kinds of cake icing and the decoration tools. It was also a risk to try the new recipe for the first time. Luckily, things turned out smoothy and I was very glad with the final product.

The recipe was suitable for one 10” tube pan, but I had only one 8” tube pan, which I used to make my tiny orange chiffon. So I wanted to try the chiffon cake with normal round springform pan to test the quality and the difference. So I still made with a full recipe and divided the batter into two pans and baking them together. The chiffon cake with the tube pan was perfect, whereas the cake with the springform didn’t rise to such perfect degree since the center of the cake was heavy without a tub for the batter to "lean" on for rising. So I got my answer. 

Therefore, I used the cake baked with tube pan to decorate this birthday cake. I cut the cake into two layers, and made lemon curd as the filling between them. I filled the central "hole" with strawberries dipped in dark chocolate, which made my friends surprised too. For the frosting, I only used whipping cream with icing sugar. I didn’t want the frosting to be too sweet, so I just add enough icing sugar, which made the frosting not too stiff and shiny and caused more difficulties for me when decorating the cake. This is always the problem for me when making cakes since I always look for less-sugar in everything I want to eat. However, I was willing to sacrifice this for the better taste of the cake, which I knew that it would be much more welcomed by my friends. 

We had a very good time at the party. We also recorded what was going on and made into a clip. What a memorable friends-gathering to me.

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