Baked Vanilla Mochi Cake aka Crack Cake *updated recipe*

This Vanilla Mochi Cake is called "Crack Cake" in our household. Crispy flaky edges. Gooey chewy center. Heavenly vanilla. It is seriously addictive. And super easy to make. A very dangerous combination.

Seriously Addictive Chinese Chilli Oil

Floral fragrant Sichuan peppercorns, dried chill flakes, garlic and fermented black beans slowly toasted in oil. This chilli oil might not be much to look at but it packs a massive punch of flavour and nostalgia. You will find chilli oil like this in pretty much any side street noodle shop or dumpling joint in Hong Kong. There are a million different versions, each region will have some different take on it, every restaurant will have their own special twist on this classic condiment.

Flavour of the Month: New Flavour, Mt Eden

花よりだんご (hana yori dango) Meaning: Someone who prefers dumplings over flowers ~ Japanese proverb

I am a dumplings over flowers kinda girl.  


Whilst the Japanese saying implies the person prefers practical gain rather than aesthetics, for me the meaning is more literal: give me food over pretty things any day.  


My husband caught on to this early on.  While in the eight years we've been together, he has not yet bought me a bouquet of flowers, he has taken me out to many a delicious meal.  The boy knows the way to this girl's heart.   


For this particular delicious meal over summer we went on a double date with my brother in law and his wife to the restaurant that everyone seemed to be talking about: New Flavour on Dominion Road for some handmade dumplings and noodles.

A study in lanterns and dumplings

The lantern festival marks the 15th and final day of the Chinese New Year holiday and every year the Asia New Zealand Foundation puts on the Auckland Lantern Festival: a lavish three day long extravaganza with glorious techni-coloured lantern displays filling Albert Park and street stalls of delicious asian food lining the length of Princes Street.

You really get the sense you're in some exotic bustling marketplace in South East Asia rather than the immaculately colonial Albert Park next to Auckland University.

Me and my girls from high school went last night on a beautiful if somewhat muggy Auckland evening and ate our weight in dumplings, noodles, donuts, and steamed buns.

{$4 for 6 pork dumplings. I kid you not. Make sure you get plenty of soy sauce and sweet chilli on these bad boys}

Chinese New Year Feast at One Dream, Mt Wellington

Kung Hei Fat Choi!  Happy Year of the Dragon lovely people!

Chinese New Year is THE most important event in Chinese calender.  It marks the start of the lunar year and starts with a family feast on Chinese New Year's Eve, followed by another massive feast on Chinese New Year's Day and ends with a feast for the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the lunar calender.

For our New Year dinner we went to our family's fav little Chinese restaurant in Mt Wellington.  It's a gem of a place.  Family-run and tucked away next to Harvey Norman on Mt Wellington Highway, One Dream specialises in home style Chinese cooking that's authentic, delicious, and incredibly reasonable.

They are usually closed on a Monday but the lovely owners open just for us for Chinese New Year Day.  Legends.

Hong Kong Honeymoon: Foodies Highlights Part 2

{prawn and spinach dumplings? why yes please}

Before I get into the post proper I need to vent just a little....I was an unfortunate victim of a manky computer virus that had my poor laptop down for almost a week (a week!?) and requiring a lot of TLC to cox it back to life.  People who make viruses = not cool.  Grrrrr.

Ok, now that I got that off my chest...back to the foodie posting!

Now, how could I possibly blog about the wonders of Hong Kong food without talking about yum cha?  Yes, my friends, the 4th wonder of this Hong Kong Foodie Top 10 is not a dish but a whole way of eating.  In fact, this whole part 2 post chronicles uniquely Hong Kongese styles of chowing down.

Of course, this is by no means all the wacky ways of getting your eat on in HK...this is after all a top 10 from our trip and 6 days does not a comprehensive foodie tour make.  But even in 6 days we managed to rack up an impressive repertoire of eating styles, so without further ado, let the Hong Kong foodie good times roll.

{daikon cake? don't mind if I do}

Wedding = love Part 3: My big fat Chinese banquet reception

{all photos by Jel Photography unless otherwise stated}

Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast. ~ William Shakespeare

It's finally here!  The last installment of my Wedding = love album!  

Having had a white wedding, our reception was a Big Fat Chinese Banquet.  And yes I mean really do mean big fat banquet with a whopping 12 courses!  

No sirree, we don't do nothin' by halves down here.

{Menu with all 12 courses of our banquet complete with the meaning behind each dish! Photo taken by David Chan}

Hong Kong Honeymoon: Our Top 10 Foodies Highlights Part 1

{That, my friends, is A Foodcourt With a View.}

So sorry for neglecting my post as of late, blog post that is.  It was the university hols and we were lucky enough to get to spend some of it in the shopaholic/foodie's dream city Hong Kong for our sort-of honeymoon.

Why sort-of? Well, it was our first trip away together (and first full week of seeing each other) after getting married which is very honeymooney.  But the main purpose of going back was to have dinner with and catch up with my relos in HK which is less honeymooney.  And my Mum came with us - not that honeymooney at all. 

So while it was technically our honeymoon, hopefully we'll get to go somewhere later on and lie on a beach for days with just the two of us (hint hint darling husband??).

So as a blogapology for the post-tardiness I present you our Top 10 Hong Kong Trip Foodie Highlights.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of what you should eat when in HK.  That would need to be a top 100 at least!  No, no, this is a much less ambitious venture: a round up of the tasty meals and morsels we loved most on our trip back this time.   I'd probably need to go back for months to get a more definitive must-eat list...which I would LOVE to do sometime, so if you're reading this Harper Collins - call me??

Wedding = love Part 2: The Chinese tea ceremony, hair combing ritual and other wedding traditions

 

There are seven necessities related to the starting of a family's life: firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar and tea. ~ Chinese proverb 

Chinese weddings are steeped in tradition and symbolism, superstition and folk lore.  I'm not usually a sticker for tradition,  I really wanted to have Traditional Chinese Tea Ceremonies at our wedding.  There's just something wonderfully romantic about wedding traditions, don't you think?  Knowing that my mother, my grandmothers, their mothers and generations of Chinese women before them have followed the same rituals at their weddings for hundreds of years, made even little old kiwi me feel connected with my heritage.  A link to the past on the first day of our future together.  What an incredibly moving and humbling experience.  

Having said that, since ours was an East meets West kinda wedding, we didn't stick exactly to tradition and cherry picked the things we had time for.  I'd like to think of it as Chinese culture meets Kiwi ingenuity.

 {All photos taken by Jel Photography unless otherwise stated}

Dragon's Gourmet, Epsom, Auckland and being a banana

I've always been a bit of a banana: asian on the outside, kiwi on the inside.

But it has recently come to my attention that my tastebuds may be just a wee bit more asian than I first thought.

I've lived in New Zealand since I was five and was for all intents and purposes was a kiwi kid: played touch rugby in primary, did the Kiwi Kids Triathlon, had a mince and cheese pie from the tuckshop for lunch everyday.  At home though, Mum and Dad were very Chinese in their tastes: Dad cooked traditional Cantonese dinners and when we go out it would be to Chinese restaurants and Yum Cha. I, on the other hand, have always preferred variety be it indian, italian, french, carribean, morroccan etc.  Just ask anyone, I'm an easy girl to feed: I'm just happy to be eating.  I've eaten everything from fetal chicken eggs to frog's legs to rabbit stew.  Be it bacon and egg pie or peking duck my motto is get in my belly. 
 
Or so I thought....

It's only upon moving down to Dunedin, where there aren't a heck of a lot of Chinese restaurants around, that I've discovered that I really miss good authentic Chinese tucker.  Guess it's like missing your mother's cooking yeah?

So, if like me, you're craving lunch Canto styles, and you happen to be in Auckland, then check out Dragon's Gourmet in Epsom for an authentic Hong Kong tea house experience.

{refreshingly tangy lemon iced tea}

Cookies for Grandma: Traditional Chinese New Year Peanut Cookies

Is it just me or is 24 hours in one day is far too little?   30 or 35 hours would be more like it.

Dear big man upstairs, for my next Christmas prez I would really really like just a couple more hours a day, if it's not too much trouble.  Thanks big fella. 

For the last couple of months the days have just flown by so fast I find that we are suddenly in March and I swear new years was only about a week ago.  Where on earth did February go?

Chinese New Year fell at the beginning of February this year, right smack bang in the middle of the intense craziness, one week before I moved down south.  We had Grandma over for dinner and I had meant to make some Traditional Chinese New Year Peanut Cookies, which as the name suggests, are peanut cookies made and served traditionally at Chinese New Year.

But in amongst packing and organising and general mayhem, the cookies fell through the gap and even though I had all the ingredients ready and the recipe all sussed out, I didn't end up making them in time for the dinner.

Grandma did come over for dinner though: we had amazing scampi sashimi, steamed tofu with ginger and spring onions, pan fried snapper and stir-fried kang kong.  I love cooking for my Grandma - there is just something incredibly wonderful about cooking for someone who has cooked all her life, who taught my Dad to cook who in turn taught me to cook.

I ended up making the cookies a couple of days later, fully intending to get some to Grandma before my big move but again just got too busy and I never got that package of cookies to her.

My Grandma passed away at the end of last week.  After a sudden and completely unexpected stroke.

I won't get the chance to give her cookies again.  Being down in Dunedin, I didn't get a chance to say goodbye before she slipped away. It's really hit me rather hard.  Another suckerpunch.  Grandma was the only grandparent I've ever known and it's incredibly sad to think of all her stories, her recipes, her hopes and dreams that we never got a chance to ask her about.

I think from now on, I'll make sure to take time out to breathe and bake cookies.

Ch ch ch ch ch changes, Chinese New Year and Cereal prawns

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~ Robert C. Gallagher

Happy belated Chinese New Year!  Kung Hei Fat Choi! Welcome to the year of the Rabbit.

I don't know what my horoscope is supposed to be for this year but it's definitely a year of Change with a capital C.

I've tried on many different hats in my time: pharmacy, research science, and most recently, lawyer.  But deep down, all along I've wanted to be a doctor.  I just missed out when I applied straight out of high school waaaaay back in '02 and that blow made me bury those dreams for a long time.

Now, I've been given another chance.  At the ripe old age of 26, I am uprooting my life, moving away from my loved ones, my friends, even my fiance to go to med school in a completely different city on a completely different island: Dunedin.

It has been an agonising decision...can I do it? Move away from everything I know and everyone I love to live in a place I've never even visited.  I'm excited and exhilarated but at the same time terrified and sad.  The hardest thing is knowing I'm leaving my Mum all on her own and be living away from C just when we are about to get married.

But at the end of the day the question was - is it worth it?

And it is.

Nothing worth having is ever easy and it's facing your fears and challenging yourself by doing things out of your comfort zone that shapes you as a person.

So this Chinese New Year, I am saying au revoir to the life I know to follow my dreams and to celebrate I tried a brand new super yummy Malaysian dish: Cereal Prawns.

Pay it forward dumplings

My blog is called 'baking = love', but it could easily have been 'food = love'.  Whenever a friend or loved one is unwell or going through a tough time, I can't help but want to make something to take over to them.  Usually I bake something sweet but I also like making dumplings to send as part of the care package.

Why dumplings?  Well, everyone likes dumplings, right?  Not only are they delicious and nutritious, they're a meal in one, with carb, veges and meat all in one little package.  They're also something just a little bit special. Something you wouldn't normally get to eat at home.

Practical reasons aside, these dumplings also have a special meaning for me.  

The recipe was taught to me by an auntie* who came and helped us out when Dad passed away.  When all the visitors had gone and friends and relos went back to their normal lives, we were still shell shocked and left trying to work out how to deal with life without Dad.  Auntie came in, helped us tidy and sort out our house, cooked us dinner and taught me some of her signature dishes.  She taught me how to make dumplings to keep in the freezer so that when I got home late from uni I could have dinner on the table in a jiffy.  She was our guardian angel during that time.  There's no way I could ever repay her for her kindness and thoughtfulness. So instead, I am paying it forward, with dumplings.

Yum Cha at Pearl Garden, New Market, Auckland.

It was a good friend's birthday a couple of weeks ago and she didn't want to make a fuss about it, so stayed pretty low key around the time of her bday.  So low key in fact, the day came and went without us getting together to celebrate.  Well, we weren't having any of that!  So A and I locked her in for a belated bday lunch at Pearl Garden in New Market.