Category Archives: Sweets/Bakeries/Desserts

New Year’s Eve

We had a nice low key New Year’s Eve celebration at Kat & Jon’s place in Russian Hill. Kat whipped up a yummy meal of seafood fettuccine and tomato baby greens salad. We had cocktails, wine, and champagne to enjoy while waiting for midnight.

I made a dessert which turned out pretty good that I think I’m going to try again to improve on it. The base recipe comes from Big, Soft, Chewy Cookies by Jill Van Cleave. It’s the recipe for raspberry bars but I didn’t have raspberries so used applesauce and this Korean tea made with fruits, on wikipedia, it is referred to as mogwa cha.

So here’s the recipe to try:

3/4 cup (1-1/2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temp
1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar plus 1 tbsp for garnish
1/2 tsp grated lemon rind (substitute 1/4 tsp lemon juice)
1/4 tsp ginger
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup finely chopped almonds (I used pecans)
1/4 cup quick-cook oats
2 tbsp dark brown sugar
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup raspberry fruit or preserves (I used 1/4 cup applesauce and 1/4 cup mogwa cha, the Korean tea is syrupy sticky so the applesauce was to thin it out a bit)

1. Heat oven to 350 F
2. Cream 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter and confectioners’ sugar
3. Add lemon rind, ginger, and 1 cup flour. Mix to form a smooth dough. Spread into an ungreased 8-inch square baking pan and press to pack evenly in the bottom
4. Bake until crust is set but not brown, about 15 minutes.
5. While crust is baking, combine remaining 1/2 cup flour with almonds, brown sugar, quick-cook oats, and baking powder in a bowl and mix together. Add the remaining 1/4 (1/2 stick) butter and stir until mixture is crumbly (using a fork helps)
6. When crust is done baking, place pan on rack and spread fruit spread onto hot crust and spread evenly
7. Sprinkle almond-oats-brown sugar topping (step 5) over fruit filling and press down lightly. Return to oven and bake until topping is golden brown, about 30 minutes.
8. Place pan on a rack and let cool; sift 1 tbsp confectioners’ sugar evenly over the top and cut into bars
9. Store cookies in the baking pan at room temp for up to 5 days

Sorry no pics, I forgot again to take some before they got gobbled up.

We watched the ball drop on TV in NY at 9pm and again at midnight and watched the SF fireworks from their living room window…

They have a beautiful view from their apt, I didn’t bring my dad’s digital SLR but I’m sure there will be time again when I can take more pics.

Happy New Year!

Hanoi Bistro

Leave a reply

https://webpos.wlinformation.com/hanoibistro/

I forgot to blog about this restaurant we went to on Tuesday night. I had an optometrist appt on Tues afternoon at Taraval Eyecare just to get a check-up and see how my vision is doing. My slight astigmatism is stable and now my left eye has caught up with my right eye… so now when I buy contacts, I don’t need to buy two different ones! hooray!

Since we were in the area, we decided to meet up with Tiff for dinner and she suggested Hanoi Bistro which is on the corner of Taraval and 19th Ave. While we were waiting for her to come back from shopping, we went to the public library down the street to get a library card! I haven’t had a public library card since high school. The SF system seems pretty convenient though, you can request books online to be held at a certain branch and you can return your books to any branch, not just the one you checked it out of.

At the restaurant, while waiting for Tiff, we ordered some appetizers to start, I got one of my favorite drinks, the three color drink. I was a little disappointed since it felt like there weren’t that many beans or jelly threads and later during dinner I saw them serve one to another guy that had way more stuff in it…

We ordered the fresh spring rolls and were able to have them make us half shrimp and half shredded pork. These were yummy. I always feel refreshed after eating them.

This is the pan fried onion cake. A bit oily but the outside was nice and crispy. The curry sauce could have been a little thicker as it kept on sliding off the onion cake.

After Tiff came, we ordered the rest of the main courses. This is the garlic noodles with five spice chicken. The garlic noodles were so good, lots of garlic flavor for sure! The chicken wasn’t too special, still moist so that was good.

Not a very good picture but here is the tamarind crab. The restaurant has a sign out front touting “Holiday Crab Special $19.95” so Tiff says she’s been wanting to try it since she drives by the sign at least twice a day. The sauce was tangy but the crab was so hard to eat, it was so saucy and the meat was hard to get out of the shell. We were exhausted after eating only a few legs.

We also had a bowl of pho which I didn’t photograph. It isn’t served with the plate of bean sprouts, mint, jalepenos, etc. Just the noodle soup. The noodles they have are the slightly wider flat noodles which is a nice twist.

Ron and I look forward to going back to try their tamarind chicken. The tamarind sauce was really good on the crab so it should be really good on fried chicken… mmm-mm…

Oh, interesting site I found while looking for the restaurants website, it seems like a health code inspection site of restaurants in SF, good thing that Hanoi Bistro passed without any violations…

Hanoi Bistro
890 Taraval St (corner of 19th Ave)

Hello Kitty Cake

Leave a reply

Since my bear cake failed, I had to come up with something to bring to our potluck. I signed up to bring cake so I quickly mixed up some strawberry cake mix and used my new Hello Kitty silicone cake pan. I used the leftover mix to make mini cupcakes to surround the Hello Kitty’s head.

I love Hello Kitty! (Not like you didn’t know that already.)

At the potluck no one wanted to cut into her head so I did the honors… just like my birthday cake.

We had a good potluck, too much food for our little pharmacy group at Mt. Zion so I still have half the head to eat for breakfast and snacks… we’ve been eating too many sweets…

Williams Sonoma Bear Cake Pan

1 Reply

http://www.williams-sonom…cake&cm_src=SCH

I bought this very cute Build-a-Bear cake pan from Williams-Sonoma that allows you to bake a cake in the shape teddy bear sitting up. The bear is in two parts and you use frosting to “glue” the two pieces together.

I cheated a bit and used Devil’s Food cake mix instead of making my own cake but I did make my own butter and cream cheese frosting.

Here are the two sides cooling on a wire rack.

I think next time I’ll try the cake recipe on the back of the box. The mix out of the box doesn’t seem to be dense enough so the cake is a bit “floppy”.

I baked the cake itself on Wednesday and let it cool overnight and attempted to frost it on tonight prior to our holiday potluck tomorrow afternoon. Well it turned out to be quite a disaster as the frosting wouldn’t harden so the two sides wouldn’t stick well together. I tried to salvage it by putting the frosting on the bear but my frosting wouldn’t spread well so my attempt of using it to seal the bear from the outside failed… so sad.

So now this poor bear will be our breakfast and snack for the next few days…

Bistro Boudin

Leave a reply

http://www.boudinbakery.c…f/bistro-boudin

Our infusion center had a holiday party at Bistro Boudin in Fisherman’s Wharf tonight. I haven’t been to Fisherman’s Wharf in a long time… I look forward to going back again during the day time to explore again. We had Hors d’œuvres, drinks, and just enjoying each others company away from work.

My coworker Monica was nice enough to give me a ride to the party and buy me a drink. This is something called “Passion”.