Domo-Kun Cookies... NOT

My niece Laney wore a cap the other day to her birthday dinner.
It was brown, with a patch of red rectangle, outline on top and bottom with a string of white triangles, lined with braces.
It was weird looking.
And she loved it.

Then my son Ryan wanted one for himself.
With a mustache.
This is what his cap looks like.

How am I getting so dated?  I should have known about Domo-kun.  How am I going to be a 'cool' Mom if I don't know these things?

So to redeem my 'cool', I decided to bake Laney somehting Domo-kun theme for her birthday.  I settled on the   Domo-kun cookies made by Diamond for Dessert.

What a disaster!

The dough was hard to work with.  It was soft and sticky.  When I left it in the fridge for too long, it got too rigid to shape.  Not cold enough and it was sticky.  And the dimensions provided made really small cookies.  And I didn't know how to shaped the dough to be 1 1/4-inch by 3/4-inch.  By the time you put all the pieces together, the dimensions were lost, and the dough took whatever shape it wanted.

So I started eyeballing it, no measurement.  It was better, but I was quite frustrated with the dough.  The first few cookies might look somewhat Domo-like, but the rest was just pathetic.  Consider the amount of work I put in, and the little number of cookies getting out of the whole thing... Disappointed. 

When time to bake them, I didn't realize that the cookies would expand so much.  That explained the small dimensions given.  My cookies came out meshing into each other. But again, by this time, I already gave up the ideas of even trying to decorate the cookies.  However, I was hoping that they still taste good since it was a Thomas Keller recipe.

The cookies were very tender.  I cut them 1/4-inch thick, but they spread so much during baking that the cookies came out pretty thin.  The cocoa in the brown part was dominant.  And it was salty.  There was 1 1/2 teaspoons in the cookies below.

But they didn't taste too bad actually.  My sisters didn't care for them.  The kids surely didn't care for them.  But they grew on me.  I don't usually eat my own baking, except for those noone else wanted to eat, because I couldn't just throw them out.

So I ate a lot of these cookies.  Maybe that's why they grew on me.  But for sure, I won't be making them again, so no point of getting the recipe.

Babycakes Cake Pop Maker

I finally bought the Babycakes Cake Pop Maker in March.  Yes, I know the 'Cake Pop' trend is almost over, but I never cared for the original cake pop with the thick gooey frosting mixing in cake and shaping into round balls.  Especially store bought icing.  With shortening.  Enough said.

And I knew about the Babycakes Cake Pop Maker, but I thought it was just too much hassle, until I went to a cake pop party.  Besides, for $20, I can justify for an afternoon activities with my sons and my nieces.  But I also got a Tovolo pancake pen for $10.  It was getting expensive, especially I didn't have any coupon with me.

Before starting, I consulted my best friend, Google, about what to do.  Some tips were helpful, such as using the pancake pen for filling the holes, unplug the maker while filling, coat the holes lightly with oil to prevent sticking, etc.

I started out with a basic vanilla recipe from the booklet that came with the maker.  It turned out well.  Some were round, some were not, and they were all eventually consumed.

This is the basic vanilla mix that came with the instruction booklet.  I didn't fill the wells / holes full enough.

Thus the cake pops came out flat on top.

Then I tried it out with a cake mix since I read that cake mix would work as well.  I wanted a lemon flavor but was too lazy to zest the lemons (that I have not bought), so I got a Duncan Hines Lemon Supreme cakemix. Prepared per instructions, and baked using the Cake Pop Maker. 

Then I tried with the cake mix.  This was the cake mix I used.  You will see that the 'moist' cake mix might not be the best choice for the cake pop maker.

The cake pops were full and well rounded when just baked.

But soon deflated with a cake mix.  The cake were too fluffy and soft and couldn't hold the structure.  Those cake pops made from the recipes from babycakes have firmer, drier and more dense, thus can keep their shapes better.

And finally, the perfect cake pop.  Haa, just kidding!  I just flipped the bottom over.  This must be how the  covered picture from the box was taken.

I went back to the babycakes recipe and tried the lemon one with lemon zest and lemon juice.  Good flavor. But again, a bit drier than cake mix. Tried dipping. The first time, I over heated the candy melt and thus couldn't get it to flow smoothly, no matter now much shortening I added.  I googled and googled and saw that a lot of people were asking the same questions I did - why couldn't I get the smooth shiny texture like others?

I tried again, heating in 20 seconds interval on DEFROST, stirred and stirred, and erred on the side of caution so it wouldn't be overheated.  I was able to create that smooth and shiny texture.  However, by the time the candy got coated and excess dripped off, it was too dry to evenly coated the sprinkles on.  I still needed to play with it a bit more.

My cake pops.  I just tried sprinkles with a few just to experiment.  And actually, by this time, I was pretty lazy and unmotivated to do anything creative.

This is my best one.  I put the sprinkles in the bowl and dip it in right after.  You can see the candy was dried  already.

Thomas the Tank Engine Cupcakes with Marshmallow Fondant

My 2-yo nephew loves trains, especially Thomas the Tank Engine and all his friends.  For his birthday, I wanted to make the cupcakes that his Mom liked, the same recipe that I made last month for the tie-dyed cupcakes.  However, for decoration, I wanted to do a train theme.  With my limited ability as a baker and a decorator, I know that anything 3D is out.  I googled for ideas, combined and simplified and came up with the design below, which I did mostly with the three round fondant cutters I have.  I also tried the marshmallow fondant recipe for the very first time to make these cupcake toppers.

MARSHMALLOW FONDANT
 16 ounces white mini-marshmallows
4 tablespoons water
2 pounds confectioners sugar / powdered sugar
1/2 cup Crisco shortening (for coating your hands with).

I halved the recipe and still had plenty of fondant leftover.

Microwave the marshmallows and water in 30 seconds increment, stir in between, until melted.  It shouldn't take more than 2 minutes.

Mix the powdered sugar in slowly, stirring at first, until too thick to stir.  Grease your hand with Crisco and knead the rest of powdered sugar in until the mixture is soft and pliable.

I thought that I would have to knead a lot, but it came together quickly enough.

I used Wilton gel colors to mix in and color my fondant.  It worked out well.

People claimed that the marshmallow fondant tastes better than store bought fondant, I didn't even taste test it since I don't care for marshmallow nor powdered sugar nor shortening.  However, my son did, and he seemed to not mind it.

I initially made a lot of gray and black fondant thinking of a different design, but that was tedious and took so long, so I decided on this design.  As usually, my son Ryan is my trusted judge, and when he declared that the design "looked really good Mommy," I knew I had a winner.

I didn't make enough green and blue fondant, and past midnight, I didn't want to yet start another batch.  I still had some yellow and red left, with tons and tons of gray and black, so Ryan said let's do Angry Birds cupcakes.  He gave me some ideas for the design, and he even cut out the hair for the head and the tail.  We ended up liking the Angry Birds a lot.

The mouth below is too big.  Make it smaller next time.

The 80/10/10 Diet and Lobster Bisque

One week.  11 pounds, uhm, maybe 12, to go.  I’d settle for 2 pounds.


The Belly Fat Cure didn’t work.  True, I didn’t do anything.  Still. It didn’t work.


Meanwhile, I checked out “The 80/10/10 Diet” by Dr. Douglas Graham.  Did you know the 80 stand for minimum 80% of carb?  Awesome!  The other two 10s represented maximum 10% of protein and 10% of fat.  Hmm, so little fat?  Carb wouldn't taste any good without the fat!


Then, I learnt that the carb weren't my type of carb.  As in all-purpose flour, cake flour, or bread flour.  The 80% carb referred to wholesome, raw, UNCOOKED food.  Which are mostly fruits. Bummer!  Personally, this diet was just too ‘fruity’ for me.  Nix!


So all last week, I spent my team reading diet books while munching on cupcakes, macarons, mango mousse, Costco’s Tuxedo chocolate mousse cake (heaven!), cake pops, and cream puffs.  That didn't help my waistline, or the original 10 pounds I was aiming to get rid of.


Desperate time calls for desperate measure.  I need more than a diet, I need willpower as well.  Thus, “The Seven-Day Total Cleanse:  A Revolutionary New Juice Fast and Yoga Plan to Purify Your Body and Clarify the Mind” by Mary McGuire-Wien seems like the perfect solution for me.  


Talking about liquid diet, I made lobster bisque for the first time last weekend.  It was so good I made it twice!  Actually, I was only helping the first time.


This lobster bisque tasted so much better than the one I tried at Austin’s Eddie V.  The bisque was so salty that I quit after one spoon.  So they replaced with the crab and corn chowder.  Yet again, I couldn’t swallow than two spoons of the chowder either.  They ended up not charging me for the soup.  Maybe it was just my luck that the chef just had an off day.


LOBSTER BISQUE
2 medium onions, diced
2 medium carrots, diced
1 bulb of fennel, diced
2 tablespoons butter
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon paprika
2 tablespoons full of tomato paste
2 shrimp bouillon cubes  + 8 cups of water (or 8 cups of lobster liquid)
3 tablespoons beurre manie (as needed)
2 cups heavy cream
½ cup sherry or cognac (or as needed)


I’m writing this recipe from estimation since we didn’t measure anything when we made the bisque.
I’m assuming that you already know how to boil the lobsters.  Something along the line of immersing them in boiling water for about 8 minutes if your lobster is about 1 – 1.5 lbs.  Depending on the size of your pot and the number of lobsters you are boiling, add or subtract a couple minutes.


Reduce the boiling water to about 10 cups.  Remove lobsters’ heads, smash it however you can and put the heads back into the boiling water to extract as much juice out of the lobster as possible.  Use this water for your bisque.  However, you could take the lazy route and use shrimp bouillons instead.  The flavor wouldn’t be as good.


Saute the diced onions, carrots and fennel with 2 tablespoons of butter.  Add 2 bay leaves and 1 teaspoon of paprika into the vegetable mixture.  Cook on medium heat until the vegetables are soft, and the onions turn translucent.  Add 2 tablespoons tomato paste, the 2 shrimp bouillon cubes and 8 cups of water.  (If you have the lobster liquid above, use that instead.)  I’m guessing that we put in about 8 cups of liquid, but it could be more or less, depending on how many people you have to serve.


Continue cooking until the vegetables are cooked really well.  Remove the bay leaves.  Puree the mixture.  Strain.  (I didn’t strain the first time, and it was still awesome, not as smooth as a bisque should be.  If you strive to impress, strain.)


Add the beurre manie slowly, one tablespoon at a time, until thicken.  I don’t remember how much I used really, about 2 tablespoons maybe, and you might like your soup thicker than mine, so adjust as needed.
Add the heavy cream.  Again, depending on how rich you want your bisque.  If you want it lighter, you might want to use half-and-half instead.  Mix well, simmer for a few minutes.  Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.  I didn’t need to add anything else as the lobster boiling water was salted already.


To serve, ladle soup into bowls. Pour about a teaspoon (or a tablespoon, or two, depending on whom you serve it to) of sherry or cognac on top.  If you are lucky enough to still have any lobster meat left at this point, put in the middle of the bowl.  Serve.

10 things to do at Brazos Bend State Park

1. Petting snakes and alligators.
2. Climbing trees.
3. Rolling down the hill and getting all dizzy and muddy.
4. Riding a bike along the nature trails, getting lost and too tired to pedal back.
5. Spotting herons and ravens and pretend that they are talking to you.
6. Getting pooped on while napping innocently on your stroller.
7. Picking flowers for your Mom and your Aunts so they can compete to see who has the biggest pile.
8. Having a picnic, eating Popeye's fried chicken and drinking Starbucks instant iced coffee.
9. Gathering sticks and see who has the biggest one.
10. Feeding the coin vortex and catching it before it falls in so you can replay the same coin again.  You can only do this on the day there’s no one around.

You get what you pay for - Azuma Sushi & Robata Bar

Lunch time.  Where to do?  Such ‘weighty’ decisions to be made each day.

Today, Groupon Now helped me make a choice! 

$20 for $40 worth of food at Azuma Sushi & Robata Bar. 

Checked out their menu online.  The appetizer menu looked so good:  cold soft tofu, grilled whole squid, pork belly - Berkshire pork belly, tofu skin, egg, shimeji mushrooms, Japanese mustard.  They had me at pork belly!  I still have my pork belly obsession after trying it at South City Kitchen in Atlanta. 

We wanted to try their robata (Japanese grill) dish, so we ordered the Combo 6 kinds ($16) with gesso squid, caledonia shrimp, pork belly, angus new york strip, shiitake mushroom, and shishito pepper.

An order of Crazy Irishman Roll ($12) of salmon, tuna, avocado, green soybean paper flash fried, spicy mayo, unagi sauce, green onions, and masago.

And one order of Azuma Beef ($17) – angus new york strip simmering in iron konro.

We must order at least of $40 worth of food!  Yes, we are on a ‘diet.’

The roll was the best dish we ordered, but even so, it was nowhere comparable to Kaneyama’s.  The wasabi had no kick.  At all.  I ate the raw wasabi and nothing, no pungent, no tingling, just like green flour paste.  Yuck! 

On the robata, I liked the grilled squid the most.  It was crunchy with just a bit of chew, neutral flavor.  Everything else was so mediocre.  The beef was tough and chewy.  But most disappointing was the pork belly. Berkshire pork is known for its flavor and tenderness due to its high fat content.  These pork pieces were so lean and dry and flavorless and had no fat on it whatsoever.  I wondered where the ‘belly’ went.

The Azuma beef was again, tough, chewy with a sweet teriyaki flavor.  It’s the worse dish of the meal.

For $17, it tasted worse than any dish on Fufu Cafe‘s $5.50 lunch special.  However, unlike Fufu Café, I hope Azuma wouldn’t serve you a dish that they had mistakenly served to another table, let it get cold for 10 minutes, fetched it and tried to serve it to you. When you told them that you wouldn’t eat something that’s been sitting at someone else’s table for 10 minutes, they brought the dish to the back of the restaurant, (spit on it for all you know), brought it back out 30 seconds later, and tried to sell you that it was a new dish, which normally took 20 minutes to steam.  Like you would be so stupid not to notice the same dumplings with the same soy sauce stain at the exact same spot on the dish. 

While you were disgusted with their tactic, you wouldn’t want to be such a cheapskate making a scene for a $4.50 dish.  Principles be damn, so you went ahead and forked up the money to pay for it.  What’s more, you wouldn’t even dare stiffing them on their tip because the next time you came there, there might be spittle in your food.  And yes, you would go there again because you just couldn’t beat a $5.50 lunch for such awesome greasy artery-clogging food.

But I digressed.

The Belly Fat Cure and Tie-Dyed Cupcakes

Two weeks.  10 pounds.  I’d even settle for 5 pounds. 

So I checked out “The Belly Fat Cure” by Jorge Cruise.  Gosh it sounded so promising.  “Drop 4 to 9 lbs a week without dieting.”  My kind of ‘cure.’ 

Spent the morning skimming though the book.  To follow through this program, I would have to limit myself to 15g of sugar and about 120g complex-carb a day.  I looked at my morning cup of coffee.  Oops, there went the 15g of sugar for today!

I was excited the first 30 minutes reading and looking at pictures of the success stories.  Oh I can do this!  After all, I don’t have to be on a diet.  Just limit my carb intake, and eat everything else.  The next 30 minutes brought despair.  No “real” dessert!  What.so.ever!  Guess that’s not the lifestyle for me.

So after sharing the information on the Belly Fat Cure with my sister during lunch, we decided to make cupcakes.  The ones that she liked so much before.  With the awesome icing.  And mango mousse.  Maybe we can fill the cupcakes with mango mousse.  Well, that ‘diet’ was just doom from the start.

I had to retrace my steps to remember which cupcakes she meant.  I’ve made so many, and tried all different recipes.  I traced my steps back to The Pioneer Woman blog.  I didn’t use her cupcake recipe because she used shortening instead of butter.  Reading the comments led me to this cupcake recipe.  A good basic white cupcakes recipe.  And I’d better post it here so I can refer to it later.

I only made one change from the recipe.  I used cake flour instead of AP flour.  And I weighted my cake flour. 

3/4 cup butter, softened

1-1/2 cups sugar (I cut out 1/2 cup of sugar from the original recipe as I don't like my cake very sweet)

3 large eggs

3 cups (310g) cake flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup water

1/2 teaspoon almond extract 

For detail instructions, visit Inside Nanabread's Head.

All ingredients should be at room temperature.  Cream butter and sugar.  Add eggs, one at a time.  Add dry and wet ingredients alternately. 

Scrape down, beat mixture in high speed for 30 seconds to make sure everything is mixed in well.  The batter made really nice ribbons.

In the latest copy of March 2012 Saveur magazine, the main feature was called Best Cakes Ever.  I learnt this tip about mixing the ingredients.  “Most home bakers learn not to beat their batter in order to prevent the formation of gluten, which leads to a tougher crumb.  While this may be a concern when using all-purpose flour, cake batter is less prone to gluten production.  And beating a cake batter for a short period of time actually helps smooth and aerate it.  Once the batter is just mixed, beat it on high speed for five seconds.  You will notice that it immediately transforms into a smooth emulsion, ensuring that the ingredients are evenly dispersed.”   

Using my hand mixer, I beat it for 30 seconds on highest setting.

Oven 350F, I baked mine for 18 minutes. 

The original recipe called for 18 cupcakes.  They rise very high in oven, but deflated once cooled.  I can probably stretch it to make 24 cupcakes.  However, I was also trying to do tie-dyed cupcakes, so I wasted some cake batter in all the different bowls.

Scooping cake batter into cupcakes.

Swirl them.  I didn’t mix the bottom four cupcakes, and they came out color-blocking. 

The middle one is one of the bottom four cupcakes above.  The other three were quickly consumed the minute they were out of the oven as my nieces’ first picks.

Cupcake was moist, light and tender.  Half of them were gone before I can even make the frosting.

Oh frosting!

That's why we wanted to make cupcakes in the first place.  Last time, the icing was so good.  But I want to make sure it wasn't just a fluke last time.  With me, flukes happen.  So I have to try it again before making them for my nephew’s birthday.  People outside of my family would be there, who might even eat my baking.

That's the best frosting I've ever had.  Well I wouldn't go so far to claim it, but it was quite tasty.  Especially if you don’t like the overly sweet, typical buttercream frosting made with butter and confectioner sugar.  I’ve read somewhere that the cornstarch in confectioner sugar makes frosting taste ‘off,’ and I couldn’t agree more.  Well, maybe except for the cream cheese icing, on carrot cake.  Yum!

Anyway, this frosting is quite good, and so easy to make.  The first time I made this frosting, I followed the instruction to a T.  I waited for the flour and milk mixture to thicken to a brownie consistency.  By the time it cooled, it turned into a hard paste, and I couldn’t get it to smooth out enough for the icing, no matter how long I beat.  This time, I just thickened it to a cake batter consistency, and when it cooled, it got to the brownie consistency, and my icing came out so much better.

Again, recipe for my reference, and in case the other site goes down.  More than likely though, this site will go down first.

5 Tablespoons flour

1 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup butter

1 cup granulated sugar

Mix flour and milk.  Thicken on low heat.  Cool.

Beat butter and sugar until smooth, which took quite a long time on my hand mixer.  The 25-year-old Sunbeam mixer that has been passed down from my Mom has finally died last week.  It’s been collecting dust most of the time in the last 25 years though.

Add the flour and milk mixture and mix.  Continue mixing.  Until you are tired of holding the hand mixer.  Or when you worry about your stand mixer overheated.  I wouldn’t know.  I didn’t mix it that long. I only had one hand-mixer left.

The final masterpiece.

And I meant final.  It was the last one left.