Another way to use a colander

We received all kinds of presents this Christmas. One of them is silicone collapsible colander. Kids can be really imaginative. While they have never seen anything like this before, Livie asked:

“Is this a toilet seat? Do you think my pee will go through the holes?”

Honestly it does look like a toilet seat, don’t you think?

Gingerbread House

Jennifer brought a ginger bread house which she received from a friend. Livie had a great time building it with Yee Sum. This is Livie's first gingerbread house. Of course I have to post it.  Thank you Yee Sum!

Lemon Ginger Bavarian Cream

Cherry's Ginger Bavarian Cream cake made for Diana's birthday wowed me.  It looked very pretty, very professional looking.  I wasn't going to make it so soon because somehow I thought I had to save up the courage to do it.  Now since my custard buns didn't work out for Mrs. Yip, I had a good reason to try making it, a lot earlier than my plan.

The cake is easy to make but assembly is hard, especially when my loose bottom cake pan is thicker than Cherry's. She gave me detailed instructions on how to put the cake together already, but I still had to modify it a bit to fit my thick cake pan.  Livie wasn't feeling well today so the two of us couldn't go to the dinner.  Without me being there to look after the cake, a lot of the lemon mousse was squeezed out when Ho cut it up.  I think the problem was in the mousse, it was not thick enough.  You can see the lemon mousse became very thin from the picture below. Room for improvement again!
 

Steamed Egg Custard Peach Shape Buns

I promised Mrs. Yip to make her egg custard bun (流沙奶黃包) for her birthday. I was going to make them in traditional peach shape buns to fit the celebration theme. As the post title explained, it didn’t work. The proofing and shaping was fine, but the dough rose so much in steaming process that they became gigantic buns.

 

I also made a little hedgehog for fun but since the dough was too thin, all the filling burst out from the spikes. It was such a brutal scene for the little animal that I didn’t bother to take pictures of him.  If I do take pictures, they will look a lot like those from the CSI tv show. Poor thing. Well, I’ll try another recipe next time. I'll make the dough thicker, hopefully I can get a healthy hedgehog from it. Since this bun didn't work, I made Cherry’s invention Lemon Ginger Bavarian Cream cake for Mrs. Yip instead.