Happy Belated Birthday Mom

I'm fairly good for remembering the birthdays of people. So imagine my surprise last week when my Mother says to me "I think this is the first time you've ever forgotten to wish me a happy birthday."

Oops.

And so I feel like a terrible son and I sit there wondering if there was anything I could try and do to make it up to her.

Hmmm...

And thus I decided to try and bake red velvet brownies again. Cupcakes for my Mom is something I've never done before. And this time I had decent recipes courtesy of both Lizzy and Michele, so I had a much better chance of doing these properly.

But immediately when I started, I noticed a problem. We had almost no butter left in the house. I had no choice but to make a third of the recipe and go from there. I also forgot to buy buttermilk and substituted 2% instead but I'm certain that it's still better than using sour cream like the first recipe I used suggested.

Maybe I could have added a bit more dye though...

 

As I'm going along, I begin to notice that it's getting increasingly difficult to mix the batter. I just attributed it to the mixture being more thick with this new recipe and continued on.

Until I realized that the mixer was dying.

Yep, looks like whoever used the electric beater last (probably me) was too inconsiderate to even charge the electric beater after using it (also sounds like me).

So I had to mix the batter by hand near the end. Wasn't that bad. Also learned the hard way why you don't mix liquids and powders together. I hope no one minds getting a chunk of hardened cocoa in their cupcake later on.

Baking goes without incident and in the end I get:

Voila.

It may be hard to tell from this photo but these looked (and tasted) A LOT better than the first batch. I can't tell if it's because I'm improving or if the second recipe is way better.

Unfortunately, I used the last of the butter to make the batter so that meant no icing. And maybe that wasn't such a bad thing, because all the icing I ever make turns out disgusting and weird looking.

Mom said she liked the cupcake. And only ate half of that. My sister, Bree, ate half of that half and then said there were crunchy things inside. My brother and Dad have not touched one and I doubt they will.

It doesn't look that bad does it?

Theresa got one and she said she enjoyed it. But I'm certain that if I burnt a cupcake to a crisp and gave it to her she'd still "like" it. Looks like I need more practice with baking but it's always nice to make progress.

The Disappointing Cupcakes

Theresa isn't too fond of cupcakes. Which is unfortunate seeing as there is a cupcake craze going on. But one day we passed by a bake sale on campus and got a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese icing on it. Which she strangely loved. It may have been just due to the cream cheese icing but that's not the point.

There was a type of cupcake she liked, cupcakes are "easy" to bake. I need to learn how to bake this thing. Simple as that.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find Lizzy's red velvet cupcake recipe on her blog. Only a red velvet brownie. And after the results of this particular recipe, I think I'll try the brownie one next time instead.

Pretty much.

Now for those unaware, I'm Canadian and I have a preference for the metric system. So when I saw a recipe that offered ingredient amounts in metric I gladly followed it.

Until I realized most of my tools were in imperial.

So that's the first possible reason why my cupcakes didn't turn out so great. Switching from metric to imperial probably caused some discrepancies. And I was making a half recipe so again, more math. Math is bad. I know I'm Asian and I'm supposed to be good at math, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I also reduced the recipe down to 12 cupcakes, so if I failed, there would be less failure. So imagine my surprise when I poured the batter and got this:

Something seems wrong here...

In case you can't count, that's enough batter for 9 cupcakes apparently. Not, 12 like I had planned for. So, not only was I unable to do conversions properly, I didn't even make enough batter for the converted recipe.

So I dump the cupcakes into the oven. Think nothing of it. Start working on the cream cheese icing.

And then oven starts smoking.

This is probably bad.

Fortunately, it wasn't my cupcakes that were burning. No, someone else had cooked something in the oven recently and it had got all over the place. Said person also didn't clean the over afterwards so now it was being burnt into the sides and bottom of the oven.

I'm also fairly certain the smoke wasn't doing much for the flavor of my cupcakes.

In the meantime, I continued trying to make the icing. Who remembers my curry brownies should remember the icing I made. Watery, kind of gross looking and not that tasty.

My cream cheese icing was exactly like that EXCEPT replace watery with gritty. I think I'm improving. Well, not to the point of actually using it on my cupcakes. Not that the cupcakes were amazing either.

If you ask me, it looks the same as the first picture.

They didn't taste that great, they weren't that red and the icing was going into the garbage. I later realized that using salted butter for icing is probably not a good idea. And you know what? Maybe it was a good idea that I didn't have enough batter for 12 cupcakes. Considering how good these 9 were.

I'm also going to assume the recipe I used wasn't that great. If anyone can directly link me to a good one, that be great.

Theresa is not going to see these failures in person. Hopefully the next batch turns out better.

BONUS PICTURE: DELICIOUS ICING

Welcome Back Dear

After 4 long weeks of being stuck in some foreign country, Theresa is back. Safe and sound in Canada.

Where the food is less questionable (and in some cases, actually edible), the people are more tolerable, and if she gets sick or injured she doesn't have to bribe the doctors to insure that she's going not going to die.

I'm not kidding about the last part.

Oh China...

Anyways I'm looking forward to our dates before I head to China myself. My main objective is to buy her things. See, I gave her a decent amount of Yaun before she left. I told her to spend it on herself and buy something nice.

I specifically tell her NOT to buy me anything. I repeat, DO NOT BUY ME ANYTHING.

So, what does she do with the money? Well, she donates a good chunk of it to her tour bus driver who got into an accident that wasn't his fault. However, the tour company couldn't care less and were still going to charge him for repairs. Theresa decided to help him out with the costs, and that's fine with me.

Then she spends the rest of the money on a gift.

For me.

So, other than trying to get back at her for failing to follow instructions, I'm trying to make our dates cater to whatever problems she encountered while overseas. We tried to communicate as best we could via emails. And from those emails I've narrowed down the most common complaints she had while she was there was:

1. Why is this internet so terrible?
2. I miss Western food.
3. Am I going to die if I eat this? It tastes so good but it might kill me if I keep eating.
4. I really hate all this "fancy" Chinese food we're eating.

Yeah... I wouldn't eat that either...

So my other goal is to take her out to eat. Especially now that I'm more confident in my driving skills we can go to a greater number of restaurants and later in the day. In the past, a huge problem we had was being unable to go out for dinner due to the amount of time it took for Theresa to bus home.

Well, we could get dinner near her place. BUT most of the restaurants near her side of the city are terrible. We would know, we've been to a lot of them. But this isn't a problem now! Now we can go to restaurants on MY side of the city. And she can get a ride home.

Unless something like this happens.

In the meantime, I'm also trying to bake/cook something for her too. So hopefully I can get that done in time as well.

Another Baking Attempt

It has been a long time since I've baked anything. So I decided to try a recipe I found on Lizzy's blog. Lemon squares looked easy enough to make. Plus, I think Theresa is fond of lemon flavored things? So this would be possible to bake for her in the future.

Even if they'll never quite look as good as they do in the pictures that Lizzy posts.

This is probably what a cake baked by me would look like.

So first things first. Making the crust for the squares. This came to me as a bit of a surprise because from the pictures I couldn't really see the crust. Also, I haven't really made crusts so this was new to me.

And I don't think it turned out too badly, except it looked kind of weird. What with my finger imprints all over it as I tried to smooth things out.

It's all lumpy...

Yes, I did a rather odd job with the aluminum foil there. Kind of lopsided and sloppy. I probably should have grabbed a larger piece of it.

Next we have the actual lemon part. Nothing to special happened. I mean, you're just mixing lemon juice and sugar. Even I can do that without causing a fire. In that goes over the crust.

It's all bubbly...

Another thing I really liked about this recipe was how little mess there was and how fast I was done. So little clean-up and it's something quick you can do within an hour. Well, you can probably do it faster than me. I'm not exactly the greatest baker ever.

And when it finally came out. It looked ok. Again, not as good as Lizzy's but it's still edible. I opted out of putting powdered sugar on top because my Mom preferred it that way.

Still came out lumpy.

A few things to note. The center was kind of gummy. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't bake it for long enough or if it was supposed to be that way. It was more tart than sweet, possibly because again, no powdered sugar but Mom liked it that way so that's the way I served it.

Also, it went moldy within a few days. I actually don't know if it was mold or not but my Mom claimed it was and threw whatever remained away. This came as a surprise to me but this is my first time baking lemon anything.

Next, I'm going to try and see if I can make curry from scratch. We normally use those curry paste things and I'm certain it would be better with fresh ingredients.

Baking Curry Brownies

I've had moderate success with cooking but not so much with baking. Baking is what my sister does and the whole family loves her banana bread and white chocolate chip cookies. Whenever I bake everyone kind of half-heartedly eats it so I feel less bad about myself.

But, I've been trying to practice my culinary skills and now, I need it's time to try and bake something. Microwave brownies don't count, it's time to try actual brownies. Mich posted a recipe for brownies on her blog the other day and what made these brownies unique was that she added curry powder to it. She insists that they're amazing so let's find out.

Assuming I don't screw up.

Ok, even I'm not this derpy.

And actually, I kind of did mess up. To start with, I somehow misread sugar as "flour" on step one and bam, things aren't looking too good.

Hoping that my brownies aren't completely ruined I try and compensate by mixing in the remaining ingredients one after another (as opposed to in the proper order and in their separate respective bowls) and I think it looked ok?

And I had yet another surprise when I opened the can of coconut milk and instead of liquid, I was greeted with this dense, white solid at the top. Confused, I just spooned this white substance into my batter and kept going.

So far so good/bad?

Later I would find out that there WAS liquid, the actual coconut milk was underneath this, this, I don't know, what would you call it? Coconut butter? Fat? I hoped for the best and dumped the batter into the oven.

In the meantime, I tried to make the icing. It didn't look like icing. I'm not going to even show you guys a picture, it was pretty gross and sad. It somehow managed to be watery with clumps of coconut "butter" floating around. If you're really curious, take a bottle of hair conditioner and squirt some of that into a bowl of water, give it a stir and that's what my "icing" looked like.

Needless to say, I threw it out. Especially when it transformed and became this watery, grey sludge.

Sigh...

But wait! Don't lose hope for me yet! We still have the main attraction to reveal. While I was messing around with the "icing" I had the brownie batter baking in the oven. 40 minutes later, I open it up, dump the contents on a plate and....

Viola.

Hey! It doesn't look too bad. I think. I don't really bake that often and this is my first time baking proper brownies. So I have no idea if it's supposed to look that way. I also opted to use mint chocolate chips instead of normal ones. Because I love mint chocolate.

Taste-wise I think it also turned out decently. The center is nice and moist and no hint of curry. I'm sorry Mich but I don't eat brownies that much so I can't tell if there was a difference caused by the curry. Or maybe any benefit of the curry was negated due to my horrible mixing skills.

So there we go, I didn't fail too hard. Yay for me. Any suggestions as to what to bake/cook next? I'm open to almost anything.