Wedding cake is a piece of art

My church friends got married last Friday, they ordered 2 wedding cakes. I was so happy to have this opportunities to work on it for them.

It's quite challenging because I was making them for 125 person!! I was quite stressful last whole week... timing & ingredients are quite important to make cakes :s

One thing drove me crazy is that to mess up the kitchen, I really hate seeing my kitchen being dirty and messy! I liked keeping it clean while I was baking cakes haha! I wipe the table all the time when I cook :s do I have OCD?? 
When I made the icing, the icing sugar just spread everywhere... EVERYWHERE! I just let it spread everywhere and clean up at the end this time as I was making few batches of icing :s felt so good when I cleaned up the kitchen, I even mopped the floor...


Making the 3-level cake was challenging, it is so heavy! I was lucky that I bought the turning platform when I was in London. When I iced the cake, I could turn around and made it even. It is indeed an important tool to invest if you want to ice a round cake nicely.

For the decoration, I really sticked the pearls ONE BY ONE!! Actually at the beginning when I finished icing the cake, I thought it's good to leave it like that because the icing was nicely done :) but then I thought it would be nice to have some pearls on it to make it more elegant. 
So I started putting pearls... it took me hours to finish it. But when I took a photo, I found that these hours of work worths!

My original design was to put some roses and some other flowers of the bouquet on the top of the round cake. On the wedding day I guess they didn't buy them, but they had only other flowers left to decorate the wedding venue.
So... I just assembled what I had on hand, the effect looked good also. I was surprised hehe!

See... creativity haha!
Yay! I like it :)






PS I love the smell of the icing and the cake haha, I was tempted to eat it when I work on it :p


I know my cats were so tempted to eat it!












I try not to forget mentioning the square cake haha, it's pretty also :) I like putting the initial of their names "S" & "E" - it is not my design, I just used their design on the invitation card :)










My moment of victory - When the cakes brought out, people took photo of the couple with the cake (I know, they are the main focus point of the whole event), but also the cakes alone hoho, I was happy :) 
The couple tasted it immediately, they told me it was tasty and beautiful :D Ahhh... I am relieved.

NOW, let me have some rest this week and relax :)

Raspberry shortcake

This week is a crazy week... because I'm making 2 wedding cakes for our beloved brother and sister at church, for more than 100 people. I feel a bit stressful but I know God is in control :)

I can't ignore our breakfast, I still need to do it hehe, so I made raspberry shortcake this time. This recipe is from Marta Stewart.

I made it several times before but I spread the jam on the shortcake, this time I bought some mascarpone cream so I want to use it to see how it tastes. I am happy that it tastes rich!

This batch - I added cranberry in it, you can also add other dried fruits like raisins...

Ingredients (about 12-13):
3 cups flour
6tsp sugar
4 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
170g butter at room temperature

1 tsp orange zest => strongly recommend to add it, the flavor tastes so good with orange zest!

1 cup heavy cream/whole milk - I used 30% cream

Decoration:
Whipping cream (at least 30% fat)
Raspberry/strawberry

Instructions:
1. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, salt
Then add in butter & orange zest, mix well

2. Add in heavy cream & whole milk, mix well

3.(Optional) sprinkle sugar over the top

4. Line a baking sheet on a tray, use a spoon to scoop the dough and place on the tray

5. Bake at 205°c for 25 mins

5. For decoration, cut the shortcake into half.
Whip the cream until firm, put in the piping bag and squeeze it on the 2nd layer of the shortcake.
Put fruits on the cream and then cover with the top layer of the shortcake

Enjoy!

Making salad builds up your creativity & brings some excitement to your taste buds

I like salad, it is fast, efficient & delicious :) It's healthy too!

When you prepare your salad, what do you think of? Salad, tomatoes, olive oil, vinegar... that's all? NO! There are so many ingredients you can add in according to the season. 

It is indeed a test of creativity :)

About ingredients, I love adding fruits, cheese, nuts, seafood...

Sauce is important, which gives flavor to the salad, can lift up the taste :) 

Basically I stick to olive oil & vinegar. But sometimes I add honey & lemon juice & lemon zest to bring out the refreshing taste!

I added grapefruit and mozzarella :)

I added shrimp, melon, lemon, honey

Egg (see the yolk, yummm), nuts, seeds, raspberries with Spinach
















I hope you will now try to explore new ingredients, be brave and be creative!

Also please feel free to share your salad ingredients with me :)

Happy Friday

This is Hong Kong style bun :)

This French book for children to learn French, with cute pictures :) I do learn both English and French in this book haha! I want one for myself :)

Have a happy Friday & a nice weekend all of you!

Voyage in Budapest

Last week we went to Budapest to visit our friends living there, yes, they are Hungarian! (Let's do the Hungarian dance haha!)

It's the first time we go there so we were excited.

They have the oldest metro in continental Europe, may be in the world also? The trains are short :) The door closes really fast and quite violent after the weird warning sound haha (My husband said he should have recorded the sound haha)











We saw old and new buildings mix together, river Danube, beautiful view along the river (the Parliament is really nice), different status of people from different countries, pubs inside an old compound (that's chic) with lots of art works....




This is street art I guess ;)




















Outside a window of a shop, with a funny sign haha!















Things are so cheap there! We can have cheap meals :) What I appreciate also is that people can eat whenever they feel like, there is no fix breakfast time, lunch time & dinner time... For me it is convenient because I like tasting different food, so I needed not have regular meal!

People really like eating or drinking in the street, it is one of the booth on the street, people just queue to buy the bread roll. You can have different tastes like sugar, cinnamon, walnuts.. 

Oh Ice-cream, mousse, cake, macaron... this is heaven... it is very rich and it can be almost a meal!

Another thing is that we discover the coffee, they have a lot of café.

One of the nice Café, with nice decorations - old tiles, woods on the wall - very artistic :)



Tea is very popular in the Eastern Europe, especially fruit tea. I like rapsberry tea!

They have coffee called "melange" - coffee with honey at the bottom! I like it :)

I almost forgot their famous activity - Turkish bath! We tried all the pools with different temperature haha! It was a good experience. :) That reminds me a lot when I was in Finland, we had hot dry naked sauna haha!
Sorry no photo :(

I just love this city...

Now I have to get back to work :(