KookyCulinary

From the previous post, Looks like everyone is very familiar with bird’s nest! Hehehe… And no, Miche, I didn’t get it from the caves. It is actually from my hometown. In the recent years, my hometown in Sitiawan, Perak has been invaded by the swiflets. So “swiftlets hotels” started sprouting all over town to welcome the birds. Tall buildings like the one below which used to be a shoplot are the ones being converted. If you look carefully, you can see little rows of little dots on the building. Those are actually little opening for the birds to enter the building. Then they will play recorded bird sounds to attract the birds to enter & make their home inside and of course, hope that the birds will build their precious bird’s nests. Some of these buildings even have air-conditioners in there to make the birds comfortable!!

Not only are existing buildings being coverted, new buildings are built specially for these swiftlets like this one that looks like an abandoned building.

The cons about having all the birds in town are that it gets very noisy especially in the evening when the birds are returning home. Everyone plays their recorded bird sounds & it really gets irritating sometimes. Also there’s the danger of getting hit by bird poop as they fly by!!

However since almost everyone that we know are in this bird nest business, we get freebies quite often. Unfortunately we get the unclean ones since they are straight from the source. So whoever wants to eat them has to do the tedious task of cleaning them! And boy, was it tedious!!! According to a relative, a seasoned hand will only need about 1 hour to clean each nest. My sister & I took almost the whole day to clean 2!!! Hahaha…. 

Tough job!!!

Besides eating and visiting family during my trip, I was very busy with this thing. Do you know what this is?

The little helper and mommy would like to wish all our Chinese readers a very Happy New Year!! Wishing everyone “XIN NIAN KUAI LE” (HAPPY NEW YEAR) and “XIAO KOU CHANG KAI” (SMILE ALWAYS). GONG XI FA CHAI!! 

Wow, I guess the cake was too easy to guess huh? Yep, I will be trying to make a princess cake. My little girl is into her “I’m a princess” stage now, so I decided to indulge her and make a princess cake. Hopefully it will turn out nice.

Many people have asked whether I have taken a baking/decorating class before and the answer is no! I am hoping someday I will but so far I have never taken any classes. Everything I’ve done is all self-learned. My daughter’s cakes are my experiment grounds. So far, I have decorated less than 5 cakes. In fact, The Pooh cake was my 1st ever attempt at cake decorating (well, not counting the practice piece I did 2 days before doing the Pooh cake).  Then for Elmo cake, it was my 1st attempt at fondant.  I will blog more about this later.

For this princess cake, I am trying out sugar paste craft. This is the result of my attempt! What do you think?

I use cookie cutters to cut the flower and just roll a little ball on top of it to make the center.  It was a fun first try. The hardest part was the trying to get the sugar into a pliable dough. The kneading really took a lot of strength! But once it’s a dough, it’s just like playdoh. It can be made into any shapes imaginable!! Will try to see if I can make something else other than a flower. FYI, I almost failed art class in high school!!! hahaha……

Sorry for the lack of update lately. The last few weeks has been a little crazy and so will the next few weeks. I haven’t been cooking much lately. We have been eating out so much that I think I should start doing restaurant food review!! Even if we eat at home, it’s usually sandwiches or one dish meals. I still have some old photos that I need to post but haven’t been able to find the time to edit them. Soon, I hope!!

Anyway, one of the thing that has been keeping me busy is that my little one will be turning 3 this weekend! So I have been doing a little experiment in the kitchen, testing out her birthday cake.

For her 1st birthday, I made a Pooh cake

For her 2nd birthday, I made an Elmo cake

Guess what she’s having this year? This is a sneak preview.

This is not the actual cake. I’m still experimenting with the cake. Not too happy with the way this cake turned out. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to using the mold. Will have to try out another recipe tomorrow. So any guesses as to what cake this will be???? :P 

From my steamboat post, this mommy wanted to know what I use for my steamboat. 

This portable gas stove is what I use. It uses a gas can and you can usually get it from the Asian grocery store. It’s actually very handy and can be used for other things besides steamboat. We even used it when we had the major power outage caused by hurricane a few years ago. While others were eating plain bread & chips, we used this to cook Maggi mee & boil water!!

Welcome, welcome!!!  Thank you for dropping by!! Please, have a seat, relax, put up your feet & make yourself at home . . . 

Here’s some coffee . . . . .

How about some donuts? 

Or maybe some roti canai?

Look around, drop me a comment or 2, & hope you enjoy this new place. Do come back and visit often, ok??? :P 

Tada…… here they are……. my homemade salted eggs!! It’s been 20 days since I started my little experiment. Yesterday, I decided to test one of the eggs out to test its saltiness.

Verdict: The egg white has just the right saltiness but the egg yolk is not quite there yet. I think I will let it sit for another 5 days before testing it again. What do you all think? Looks good??? :p
Will report back again in another 5 days. : )

P/S: Pssstt…. tigerfish, phew……luckily it didn’t turn into little chicks!! hehehe……

Here’s my little experiment in progress………. Do you know what it is???

It’s . . .
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Homemade Salted Eggs!!!

I don’t know about others but I have the hardest time finding fresh salted eggs. They do sell many varieties in the Asian market and I’ve bought a few of them but they have never been really fresh. If you boil it right away, you probably would not noticed it but if you crack it open raw, you will find that the egg yolk is almost never whole or if it is, it’s pale yellow in color. Nowadays, they even sell salted eggs that have been cooked.

Why am I hunting for beautiful orange-colored salted egg yolks? So that I can make mooncake!! To me, mooncake without the egg yolk is just not right……hehe….. Oh, and I love salted egg yolks in bak zhang(dumplings) too!

I always thought that I need brine to make salted eggs then I came across this recipe in Lily’s blog. It’s the first time I’ve seen salted eggs made without brine. Very interesting!

I did this batch on July 27. So it’s been about 10 days. Another 10 to go!! Can’t wait to see how it turns out. : )

Yikes! I just realised that I missed the 1 year anniversary of this blog!! I started this blog on July 6, 2006. Can’t believe that it’s been slightly over a year. Time flies….. Since I forgot to bake a cake to celebrate, I borrow my little girl’s 1st birthday cake : p

Happy Belated Birthday, my dear blog!!

I started this blog for a couple of reasons. First, I was curious about this whole blogging thing that everyone is crazy about. And secondly, I wanted to document my food experiments so that one day I can look back & say Hey, I actually cooked that?

I’m kinda shy to say that I only started cooking about 5 yrs ago. Before that, I didn’t know how to cook unless you count cooking instant noodles as cooking : p Even my DH was a better cook than me!

Then abt 5 yrs ago, we moved to a place where the nearest decent chinese food was about an hours drive away & the nearest Malaysian restaurant was at least 600 miles (yes, 600 not typo)away. It’s true about the saying “absence makes a heart fonder”!! When we were living near a Malaysian restaurant, we never went there but since we’ve moved away, DH & I were craving for Malaysian food all the time. Since I was not working at that time, I decided why not I try to cook it for myself. I cooked my first dish & discovered that it wasn’t too difficult after all. It’s actually rather fun. And so my cooking journey goes on………

Now I look back & find that I’ve come a long way since my first dish. There’s still a lot of things I would love to learn like cake decorating, baking artisan bread etc….

This blog has been an encouragement for me to cook & bake more since I have to update it all the time. It’s been a challenge sometimes with a clingy toddler but hopefully I will continue to fill this blog up with lots of new food photos. : )