Winter Hot Pot & Birthday MishMash

The best way to combine food and friends is in celebration of birthdays! Angela put together a small hot pot dinner for all her February birthday friends.

Activities are a must at these gatherings, such as mahjong!















When it comes to scarcity of utensils, one must be creative. Yeah, eat cake with chopsticks!

























































The feast included two soup bases for the hot pot (one for those who prefer spicy soup), tons of eggs, dumpings, egg dumpings, enoki mushrooms, beef, fish, fishballs, kimchi, veggies, and noodles! Yum!

Watch out for Angela when she's in the kitchen!


- Candice

Cream Puff time!

The following ingredients were used to make this delicious dessert:

1 cup water
3 1/2 ounces of unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
3 eggs, beaten
2 egg whites

strawberries and strawberry powder

I decided to add some variation to normal cream puffs and threw in whatever I had on hand - this time, I used fresh strawberries and some strawberry milk tea powder. ;D The process is quite simple. Boil then simmer the water and butter in a saucepan, remove, and add flour. Return to heat. Combine the eggs and egg whites and add to the mixture. The dough should have a nice sticky consistency. Use a pastry bag to squeeze the dough onto a cookie sheet, whatever size you like. Baking times vary, but I used 400 degrees at about 20 minutes.

The filling is very versatile, as you can add ice cream (an easy favorite!), pre-whipped cream, homemade cream, fruits, etc. I chopped up some strawberries and threw some in with some homemade cream (heavy cream whipped for about 20 minutes) and strawberry powder - and voila! Strawberry cream puffs ready to eat!

This took a surprisingly long time to make, but was worth it in the end! Don't forget to top with powdered sugar!

- Candice