Dessert for dinner

After a work happy hour last month, a couple of us decided to grab some food. Our original plan was to get ramen at Ippudo, but that turned out to be a huge wait, so we headed a couple blocks east and north to go to Milk Bar, one of David Chang's restaurants.

We started out with a couple orders of pork buns - high-end versions of northen Chinese cuisine staples. These were made with pork belly, cucumber, hoisin sauce, and scallions all stuffed into a white mantou.

This little Asian version of a slider was delicious. The pork belly was rich and flavorful and the fat had been rendered all soft and clear so it wasn't overwhelming. The cucumber and scallions added some veggie flavors and also cut down the richness of the pork.



I also had a milk - wild strawberry flavor. Kind of like a milkshake, but not as rich or thick, but just as sweet.

Then for dessert, we split 2 kinds of cake - dulce de leche and banana. These cakes were served cold and were 3 to 4 layer cakes with a filling (or fillings) between each layer. The banana cake was tasty, but anything cooked with banana is not my favorite so I concentrated on the dulce de leche one. This was amazing! The cake was light and fluffy and the cream filling was rich but not overwhelming or oily. It was like a mousse filling. It was so good!

Milk Bar was a fun stop but I wouldn't go there for a full meal. I'd rather try David Chang's other places, Ssam (right next door to Milk Bar) or Ko (with their impossibly hard to get reservations) for dinner. Even though the pork buns were delicious and super high quality, I can probably get something a lot cheaper and maybe half as good in Chinatown. Milk Bar would be a fun place to just grab dessert (like yummy dulce de leche cake) after dinner or after going out for the evening.

A cookie of any kind...

Another one of my favorite baked good recipes is a Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from the Food Network. This recipe is great because not only is it super easy to make (I'm done with cookies to eat in about an hour), it's super forgiving with the ingredients.

I have substituted the chocolate chips with peanut butter, toffee, and butterscotch chips and they all taste great.

Once I forgot to put in the white sugar and only put in the brown sugar and they still tasted delicious, so now I just use brown sugar and basically halved the sugar in the recipe. (I wonder how much healthier it is now?) I've also used Splenda in place of the sugar as well.

Another time, I didn't have enough flour left in the kitchen, so I combined the rest of the white flour, the last of the organic flour (which usually didn't work too well for me), and some all-purpose baking mix that I found in our cupboard, to make the requisite 2.25 cups, and the cookies still came out light and chewy and yummy!

Here's my crinkled copy of the recipe, with my changes (less sugar, less time in the oven) noted.

Assembling all of my ingredients "mis en place".


The stick of butter...


The dry ingredients sifted together...


The melted butter with eggs, sugar, and vanilla.


Mixing the wet ingredients together.


Adding the dry ingredients to the wet. You don't need a mixer for this at all.


The mixed batter.


Adding the chips in. This time, these were butterscotch.


The batter with chips folded in. This is always my most difficult step since the bowl is pretty much filled with batter and chips and I don't want anything to spill over. But I do want the chips to be pretty well distributed throughout the batter. (Although according to my operations professor in b-school, this won't happen because of the Poisson distribution.)


Then I wet my hands and start rolling little balls of cookie dough. I've tried to keep the balls small because these are pretty rich cookies. And then they go in to bake for 10 minutes. Our oven is pretty hot, so I start checking around 8 minutes. They also keep cooking after you pull them out so you have to account for the extra browning that might occur.


Requisite shot of my trash bowl.


Finished cookies! Don't they look delicious? They're soft and bendable and super chewy. (Which I always prefer over cr

Homemade cupcakes!

Ever since the kitchen has been remodeled, we have been getting great use out of our new oven and counter space.

I got to start baking again on a regular basis and one of the first things I made was yummy vanilla cupcakes from Nigella Lawson. For some reason, I can't find it on her site anymore, but here is my handwritten version.


Although this version usually ends up with 20 cupcakes and I don't use the extra tablespoons of butter or sugar.


First things first, assembling the cupcake cups. I use paper liners inside silicon baking cups. Cheaper than a muffin tin and the paper liners make convenient holders.


All lined up and ready for batter!


I always try to do "mise en place" and set out all my ingredients first. It's the secret of all great tv chefs (according to my game theory professor in business school) and it does make things go a lot faster.


First goes the sugar.


Here's the melted butter. I stuck the whole stick in the microwave and zapped it until it melted. The first time I made cupcakes, I didn't let the butter melt and I didn't have an electric mixer and my cupcakes came out flat and dry, so now I always use melted butter and the hand mixer.


Two eggs, sitting out so they warm up to room temperature.


In goes the flour, butter and the eggs.


Now the two ingredients you need if you don't have self-rising flour... baking soda...

and baking powder...


Some vanilla extract, which with the sugar, give all the flavor. (I need to learn to make my own and use real vanilla beans.)


Then a little milk. The original recipe called for 2-3 tablespoons of milk. I find 4 works a lot better.


The hand mixer! I love this little guy. I got it from Target and it works pretty well, except all of its speeds are Fast and Super Fast. I always get flour all over me if I'm trying to work dry ingredients in to a not-so-wet batter.


Filling the cupcakes. I find for an average sized cupcake, a Chinese soup spoon of batter is the perfect amount.


Generally you don't need to fill the cup more than half-way or two-thirds because the cake is going to rise as it bakes.


I also made some mini cupcakes, using little paper liners I had bought at Mitsuwa. For these, a regular spoonful of batter worked well.


Another cooking tip I've picked up is the trash bowl from Rachel Ray. As you cook, you have a bowl set aside for all scraps and trash. It saves the time and trouble of having to walk back and forth to the trash can and then you can dump everything at the end.


This is such a time-saver and efficiency hint, even FI uses one when he's cooking!

The finished products!


Yeah, I know they came out a little weird shaped. I think it's due to the organic pastry flour I have. It just doesn't take to baking well. I tried them out in cookies and it's not so great looking either.

But regardless, they are super yummy!

Another Wedding Show!

Earlier this week, I attended a Luxury Bridal Show sponsored by The Wedding Salon. I was able to get a complimentary ticket to the event via Style Me Pretty, a wonderful wedding blog with lots of beautiful pictures and lovely ideas for weddings.

The show was designed for the luxury wedding market and all of the vendors there were such. Pretty much everything was out of my price range, but it was fun to walk around and get pictures of the beautiful table settings and taste cakes.

Here's one of the table settings. The centerpiece is gorgeous and huge, over 3 feet tall. I like the filler they used in the vase - clear rocks that reflect the colors of the table settings. See how blue they look in the photo? They're actually totally clear.


Here's another enormous table centerpiece. The column is covered in the white roses and white orchids decorate the top and base of the doric flower column. The shiny structure spiraling up the flower column are little gold votive candle holders. I think I would prefer a simpler version of this centerpiece, making it more of a ionic column without the orchids, giant leaves, and candle holders.


Here's a simpler version of a spiral candle holder and white rose centerpiece. In this one, you still get the height of the piece, but your guests can actually see each other across the table.


I love centerpieces that are low (so everyone can see each other) and still bursting with flowers. This low centerpiece is nice and girly with all of these pink roses.


The show had models in wedding dresses with bouquets walking around the space showing off the designs. What was really funny was that they had a sign hanging off of them with information on the dress designer, who made the jewelry, which florist did the flowers, etc.


Here's a wedding cake from Mark Joseph Cakes. I love the simplicity of this design (and so do bridal magazines, I've seen this cake in at least 2 issues) and the beautiful sugar bows. They had cake samples as well - chocolate with pistachio icing and vanilla with strawberry icing. Both the cakes were good, but I think the icings both overpowered the cakes and their flavors (pistachio and strawberry) were too strong.


Sylvia Weinstock had cake samples, which were super moist and yummy. No cakes to look at though. :(


Here's the gift bag everyone got, with gifts "worth more than $250". There were some cool beauty samples but that was about it. There were also tons of magazines, which made the bag ridiculously heavy.


Mars Candy had a booth there as well to show off their personalized M&Ms and Dove bars. For the M&Ms, you can even get your picture printed on the candies. Which while sort of cool, also kind of creepy, since you're basically eating yourself....


Here's a bouquet from one of the florists there. I like the bright colors and big bunched-up-ness of the roses.


All in all, it was neat to see pretty things you could have at a wedding, but I'm kind of glad I got to go for free. There were too many different types of vendors and not enough of each kind. When there's only 1 make-up artist, 1 florist, 2 cake people, but 2 dress cleaners, 4/5 vacation spots, and 4/5 jewelers, you're not going to really be able to do any comparison shopping or see a wide range of options.

My first wedding show

Earlier this summer, I went to my first wedding show. It was at Kate's Paperie and was called "Unveiling the Best". Kate's sponsored the event with Martha Stewart Weddings and Darcy Miller, who's the editor of Martha Stewart Weddings, was there as well.

Since I'm looking to be a DIY bride (well, as much as I can be with time constraints and general procrastination), I was mostly at this event to get ideas and see what details were popular at weddings.

They had some cool appetizers including some yummy corn salsa and these amazing deep-fried shrimp cocktails. Totally cool, but probably totally expensive. Not only were they giant shrimp but each were individually set in its own cocktail glass. Which means 1) time-intensive and 2) not eco-friendly (since they would have to clean each of them and use up a lot of water).


The caterer had some gorgeous dessert platters as well. Here are a bunch of truffle lollipops on display. These must have taken forever to make and set up.


Here are close-ups of the truffle lollipops and pastries. I took some samples home for FI. I wrapped them carefully in a bunch of napkins and stuck them in the top of my purse (very carefully).


A beautiful wedding cake! The flowers are super delicate and gorgeous. However the cake samples were okay, not great. They were too dense and a little dry.


Some pretty stationery sets.


A gorgeous purple and green themed table setting. I really liked this since our colors are lavender and yellow.

It was a fun way to spend an evening. I got to try some yummy food and dessert samples, got some free stationery and see some beautiful wedding set-ups.