Archive for the 'Life' Category

April 2nd, 2018

Recap: March 2018

March was very much a birthday month, not only for me but for several coworkers. I celebrated mine with lots of food, and then I baked for my coworkers! It actually gave me a chance to try out a few new things I’ve been wanting to do.

For one coworker, I baked mint chocolate chip cookies, which is a recipe I’m already known for. For the others, I did new things:

  • Chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream – I normally do a mint buttercream with chocolate, but I made a chocolate buttercream this time to make it super chocolately. I forgot to take photos of this though!
  • Spiced chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting – I wanted to try a smokey and spicy chocolate cake, so I altered my recipe to include cinnamon, ancho, and cayenne. I paired it with a cream cheese frosting to contrast with the spice.
  • Chiffon cake with strawberry jam and whipped cream frosting – Each part was a new recipe for me! (How did I not realize how easy it is to make jam??) This cake was light and refreshing compared to my usual flavor-rich cakes.

They were all a big hit, especially the spiced chocolate cake! I’m glad I have coworkers who are willing to be my taste testers 😉

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15 · Posted in Monthly Recaps
March 15th, 2018

Birthday Eats

I’m sure this doesn’t surprise anyone, but my ideal way of celebrating my birthday is with food… lots and lots of food. And I got my wish!

Even though my birthday was on Tuesday (13th), my husband and I started celebrating earlier because one of the restaurants I wanted to go to is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. On Sunday, we headed to Kemuri Tatsu-ya, an izakaya-style restaurant where most of the menu are small dishes to be shared.

It’s funny because when I was younger, my birthday always fell on Spring Break, and friends would often be out of town, making it hard to celebrate. Now I’m not in school anymore, but my birthday falls on SXSW, a super popular festival that takes place throughout town. It’s fun for out-of-towners, but inconvenient for locals as we struggled through traffic and closed highway exits to make our way to the restaurant. My birthday is never at a convenient time!

We’ve been to Kemuri before, so we pretty much knew what we wanted to order already. We started with small starters like street corn and kushiyaki (skewered, grilled food), and we also got the BBQ boat which comes with 3 meats. It changes each time, and this time it came with brisket, unagi (eel), and duck – all of which were amazingly tender and delicious. Then we ended with BBQ tsukemen, which is a dipping ramen with a smoked brisket broth. We left feeling full and happy!

Grilled street corn

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13 · Posted in Life
March 2nd, 2018

Recap: February 2018

February felt like a much less sluggish month, probably because I had way less allergy problems. Though, I don’t think I was any more productive because I spent hours and hours watching the Olympics. In the past, I didn’t pay much attention to them, but this year, I decided to give it a try and… I got addicted to following along!

As for Valentine’s Day, my husband and I like to treat it as a day where we cook something we haven’t done in a while and/or we splurge on nicer ingredients. For example, we’ve made steaks before and will look for nicer, aged steaks. One year, we made homemade okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake), which we had never done before. This year, we decided on Japanese curry! Though we’ve done it many times before, we haven’t made it at home recently, and we also bought some highly marbled short rib for it. I didn’t take a good photo of it, but here’s a phone photo:

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11 · Posted in Art, Cosplay, Hobbies, Life, Monthly Recaps
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