Wat Thai New Years Festival {Los Angeles, CA}

The Wat Thai New Years Festival is an awesome place to get your hands on some authentic Thai food, if not the best! Be sure to go here if you are around the area. My favorite is the beef salad, tangy, fresh and delicious!
The best thing about this festival though, has to, has to be the sticky rice with mango. It's one of my all time favorite desserts, but here, it's especially good. One, because it's authentic, from Thai ladies themselves, and two, because it's fresh! You can see the ladies cutting the mango right in front of you and the rice is just perfect, sweet but not overly so.

Yelp

Choux Pastry/ Cream Puffs

For Easter, me and my sister decided to make something different than our usual chocolate chunk and banana bread pudding. Although it's totally delicious and our family always begs for it, we felt like making a new tradition. Finally, after much recipe searching, we decided on a simple fruit tart with vanilla custard. Using the leftover custard from the tart, I decided to make cream puffs too. They are incredibly simple, way more simple than I ever could have imagined. Making them happens very quickly so you have to prepare yourself for some quick movements and have everything mise en place (or "put in place").

Fresh vanilla cream ready to be filled into lovely cream puffs:

For some reason my cream puffs came out kind of flattened, but I realized that I read somewhere in some recipe that you should prick the cream puffs in the middle of their baking time to allow steam to escape. Oops... no matter how flat they turned to be, they were still incredibly delicious!

Choux Pastry/ Cream Puffs

Yields: about 16 - 18 large puffs

Original recipe from Closet Cooking, which can be found here.

Printable Recipe

For the pastry:

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup water

1 stick unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces

1/4 tsp. sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

1 cup all purpose flour

5 large eggs, room temperature

For the vanilla custard:

2 large boxes of french vanilla pudding

2 1/2 cups of whole milk ONLY, no substitutions!

1 1/2 cup of heavy cream

Fresh out of the oven:

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Bring the milk, water, butter, sugar and salt to a rolling boil in a large pot. Reduce the heat to medium and mix in the flour, stirring constantly with a spoon until the dough starts to come together. Continue stirring the dough in the pan for another 2 - 3 minutes. The dough should be smooth and soft now. Pour the dough into a bowl and begin to add the eggs, one at a time. At first, the dough will begin to separate but as you keep mixing it should come back together. Immediately shape/ pipe the dough onto parchment paper lined baking sheets and bake for about 5 - 7 minutes (depending on you oven, mine tends to over bake). Then, quickly use a toothpick to prick each cream puff to allow the steam to escape. Next,  slip the handle of a wooden spoon between the oven and its door to keep the door ajar and bake for another 5 - 7 minutes. Next, rotate the baking sheets from top to bottom and front to back then continue baking for another 6 - 8 minutes until they are puffed, golden, and firm. Let them cool completely before filling them. For the custard, whip everything together until pudding has become thick, about 8 - 10 minutes.

NOTES:

* Once you pipe the dough it can be frozen for later use. Just pipe the dough and slide the baking sheet into a freezer. Once frozen, you can re-pack them into freezer bags. They can be kept in a freezer for up to a month. They will be baked in the same way, just add a couple more minutes to the baking time. 

* Cooked choux pastry (unfilled) can keep in an air tight container for 3 days and can be frozen for up to three weeks

FFF (Friday Flickr Favorites)

I guess it's a pink friday today. I adore the picture below, its my favoritist of the favorites!

"The happy cupcake face" by Right Moon

You can check out the rest of my favorites here.

Goodbye Cupcake Bites!

One of my favorite co-workers is leaving me for greener pastures... and I am sad, really sad actually. Whenever you see my page filled with new cupcakes and baked goods, it's usually because I am making them for Kayla. You see, I don't actually eat anything I make/ bake. Of course I nibble along the way because I have to make sure they taste good but I don't actually make them for the purpose of me eating them. Everything I make is usually for other people, and it's what I love to do. Kayla LOVES eating what I bake, and I LOVE to bake for her. A symbiotic relationship at it's best. 

A cross-section of a cupcake bite: creamy, chocolate-y, delicious!

Chocolate Cupcake Bites

Yields: about 40+

Recipe/ idea can be found here.

Printable Recipe

1 box of devil's food cake

1 tub of cream cheese frosting

candy melts (color is your choice)

Bake cake according to the directions on the box. Once completely cool, use a fork to break up the cake into tiny crumbs. Add 3/4 of the frosting and mix well. If you want the bites to be more moist, add the rest of the frosting. I found that 3/4 was sufficiently moist for me. Next, use your hands to fashion appropriately sized balls for your mold.

There are two methods in which you can cover your cupcake bites. You can use candy molds (which can be found at Michael's) or you can use a mini cupcake pan lined with mini cupcake liners. For both methods, spread melted chocolate on the bottom and edges of the mold, then immediately drop an appropriately sized ball of cake. Stick in the freezer until the chocolate has hardened, about 5 - 10 minutes. Next, remove the molded chocolate from either the candy mold or from the cupcakes liners. Dip the tops into another color of candy molds, sprinkle with sprinkles/ jimmies/ whatever and then wait for them to harden once again. And you are done! Enjoy!

The invisible bowl of cake crumbs and cream cheese frosting:

A sea of rolled cake balls:

For some reason this did not work! When I made my dark chocolate peanut butter cups the chocolates came out so easily, they just popped! But I couldn't even pry these out and I ended up chipping the tray so I gave up.

My solution? I spread the melted chocolate onto mini cupcake liners and set them in their mini cupcake pans, plopped a cake ball in and let them harden in the freezer. They ended up being bigger than Bakerella's bites but they were semi-easier to extract. Once they hardened I just peeled off the liners, and they were set. 

I dipped them in both pink and blue melted candy melts and then topped them with sprinkles galore! 

I made little labels with goodbye messages for Kayla. CUTE!

Tailored Tuesdays

Tips to wearing boyfriend jeans successfully:

a. Wear heels to lengthen your legs, if you can handle them, which I definitely cannot.

b. Add feminine pieces to counteract the boyish part.

c. Be extra careful in wearing them if you are short!

d. Do not double duty on bagginess, i.e. wearing a blousy top or oversize items.

An example of such above:

1. Fendi "Ruffle front top"

2. Current/ Elliot "The boyfriend jean"

3. Lanvin "Satin platform sandals"

4. Roberto Cavalli "Large stone ring"

5. Christian Louboutin "Maykimay strass clutch"

all images can be found at net-a-porter.com

Anepalco's Cafe {Orange, CA}

Sometimes the best food is from the smallest, little hole in the walls. And Anepalco's Cafe is no exception. I love Yelp. It's brought me more insight and new discoveries than word of mouth ever could. I've definitely driven past Anepalco's numerous times and I probably would have never given it any more thought if I hadn't heard about it on Yelp.

Thanks to Yelp, I've found an amazing new restaurant! Anepalco's Cafe is a quaint little restaurant that has a mix of French, Mexican, and American food. They are most famous for their Columbian coffee and Chilaquiles. The coffee was indeed good, but I'm not quite sure if it's "the best in town" as they proclaim but their chilaquiles? YES, the best I've ever encountered. It's a beautiful sight to look at, topped with avocado cream and beyond delicious chile oil! Truly amazing.

We also had the Poulet Crepe, which was filled with chicken, mushrooms, swiss cheese and bernaise sauce. I haven't had a crepe in a while, and tasting this heavenly sight made me remember how good they were! The bernaise was nice and tangy, while the cheese was stringy and melty. It was just a damn good breakfast and portions were huge! My sister and I could only finish half of each of our plates!

Basically, if you live near by, you have to come stop by! It's a good, neighborhood eatery. I mean look at that delicious bite of chilaquiles!!!

Their website is here.

And their rave reviews from Yelp are here.

Veggie Cream Cheese

I used to work at the little place called Bagel Me!, if you've never heard of it, I suggest you familiarize yourself with it quickly. Yes, I had to wear a visor and apron, and yes I often had to deal with pesky customers, and yes I am forever embarrassed about it, but for some reason I always come back and I still continue to love it immensely. Albeit simple, their food was just amazingly tasty. One of my favorite things was their vegetable cream cheese, so creamy and flavorful. I was watching the food network one day and saw who else but Ina Garten whipping up this beautiful cream cheese, so I jotted down the recipe ASAP and vowed to make it. And here it is!

Veggie Cream Cheese

Yields: about 20 oz.

Printable Recipe

16 oz./ 2 blocks of cream cheese, at room temperature

2 tbsn. finely diced green onion/ scallions

2 tbsn. finely diced carrot

2 tbsn. finely diced radish

2 tbsn. finely diced celery

1/4 tsp. pepper

1/4 tsp. salt

Mixing all of the ingredients together:

In a medium sized bowl, whip the cream cheese until it is creamy. Add the rest of the ingredients into the cream cheese and mix until everything is well incorporated. Place into tupperware and refrigerate for approximately 24 hours to let the flavors meld. Spread over your morning bagel, sandwich, etc. and enjoy!

How do I like to enjoy my veggie cream cheese? The most classic way possible: on a bagel, and of course with plenty of lox, tomatoes, red onion, and capers. DEE-licious! But it's great in omelets, smothered in sandwiches, with chips and salsa or just by the spoonful (just kidding, but hey if that's your preference, no judgement here).

Basically, the best breakfast in the world:

Pecan & Toffee Blondies

I've been wanting to make blondies for a while now since I first encountered them in a sundae at Milk. Conceptually, these blondies should have been delicious. In reality, they were good. But this was due to my own human errs. Because of my obsession with all things cute, I decided to bake these as mini blondie bites... big mistake. I ended up overcooking them a teensy bit due to them being in such a tiny pan! Don't get me wrong, they still had nice flavor but they were just a little hard rather than deliciously moist. One day, when my obsession with cuteness dies down, we shall meet again...

Pecan and Toffee Blondies

Yields: about 10 - 12 bars

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, original source: How to Cook Everything

Printable Recipe

8 tbsn. butter, melted

1 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 tsp. vanilla 

pinch of salt

1 cup flour

1/3 cup pecans, chopped

1/3 cup toffee chips or Heath bars, chopped

Butter an 8x8 pan, set aside. Mix the melted butter with the brown sugar, beat until smooth. Next, beat in the egg, then the vanilla. Add the salt, then the flour. Add the chopped walnuts and Heath bar, incorporate well. Pour into the prepared pan and bake at 350 F for 15 - 20 minutes or until golden brown. Cool before cutting into squares. 

FFF (Friday Flickr Favorites)

Short one: thank GOD it's FRIDAY!

You can find the rest of my favorites here.

Cranberry Pecan Chicken Salad

Alas, school has commenced once again... and I'm back to salads and sandwiches for the rest of my living days. But hey, I'm not complaining, especially since my salads will be topped and my sandwiches filled with this glorious chicken salad. Nobody does it like Smitten Kitchen. I've made this chicken salad pretty often, but I guess never gotten around to blogging about it. I really shouldn't have waited to share this one because it is in one word: AMAZING. It probably also has the power to cure the world of AIDS, end world hunger, and bring peace to this world. Ok... maybe not but it really is delicious. I slightly adapted it to fit the current state of my pantry because it really is moldable to what you have on hand. It's yummy with walnuts or pecans, with any vinegar you have on hand, and I often make it with way less mayonnaise for health's sake.

Cranberry Pecan Chicken Salad

Yields: 4 - 6 servings

Slightly adapted from Smitten Kitchen, original recipe can be found here.

Printable Recipe

4 cups of cubed (1/2 inch) chicken, about 1 3/4 lbs.

1 cup pecans, toasted and roughly chopped (walnuts are good also)

1 celery rib, diced

2 tbsn. finely diced shallot

1 cup dried cranberries

1/3 - 2/3 cup of mayonnaise, depending on your preference

3 tbsn. red wine vinegar

2 tbsn. fresh chopped tarragon or herb of your choice

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. pepper

All of the ingredients before mixing:

Toss all ingredients in a large bowl until well combined. Enjoy on top of some leafy greens or some nice, crusty bread. Enjoy!

The finished product: