Bake Sale

Rodney's school held a bake sale recently. Every class, society and club was required to set up a stall.

Rodney and his classmates baked emoji sugar cookies. He asked me to give their stall a boost with my decorated cookies. As it was a last minute request, I could only come up with 9 pieces. Can you spot my teddy cookies on the cupcake stand? They were sold out pretty fast!

The Science and Math Club

The  Art Club

The Japanese Language Club. Their stall raised the most money.

Rodney clowning around as he peddles the cookies

All proceeds from the sale went to their school's building fund.

This week's cookies for Mother's Day.

Forever Friends Bears

Deng Deng

Hankering for paratha (Indian flatbread), the hubs and I hopped into a restaurant called The Paratha Kitchen. Funny, but there was no paratha on the menu!  A man who was seated next to our table complained loudly, "It's like going to a cafe named The Apple Pie that doesn't serve apple pies". Yup, I couldn't agree more.

Anyway, I ordered something unfamiliar called Beef Deng Deng.

Beef Deng Deng

Turned out, the beef was scrummy. The meat had a melt-in-the-mouth texture with just the right hint of spices in it. I learned from the waiter that Beef Deng Deng Balado is an Indonesian dish from Padang, West Sumatra.

According to Wikipedia:
Dendeng refers to thinly sliced dried meat in Indonesian cuisine. It is preserved through a mixture of sugar and spices, sun-dried, then deep-fried and simmered in a spicy sauce. It is similar to jerky. Dendeng was originally founded by the Minangkabau people. At first they made Dendeng from beef, drying it so it could be eaten for days and bringing it with them when they traveled. Balado is the sambal, a sauce made from  a mixture of cooked large bananas, red chili peppers and shallots and seasoned with salt.

Deng deng!  I thought it rang a bell !

This week's cookies

I Love-hate The Internet

I was just reading an article about the author's love-hate feelings about the internet. I share her ambivalence.
I love that the internet has connected me to so many wonderful people all over the world especially bloggy pallies and fellow cookiers. Without it, our paths would never have crossed! Used to be, "friends" were people we actually knew and saw  face-to-face and people, had, at most, a few dozen.
While I love my online friends, I kinda miss my 'real' friends who have morphed into virtual buddies. The internet has turned them into recluses.

Back in my days, "news" was something you found out about the day after it had happened, in a newspaper. When I wanted to check a fact, I had to hop into a library and hopefully find a book that might have the answer. If I wanted to research a country I was visiting, I had to buy a guidebook. If I wanted the lyrics to a song, I had to rewind the tape and play the song over and over again. Remember the song "Love in the first degree" by Bananarama? I  used to think the words were "guilty, guilty as a bumble bee" when the actual lyrics are "guilty as a girl could be"! LOL!

Like everything else in life, the internet has a dark side. I hate that it has turned people into voyeurs, exhibitionists and narcissists. It has unleashed unlimited freedom and power for haters, trolls, bullies, bigots, extremists ...  who delight in spewing evil, venom and hate as these cowards find it easier to say things like that behind the anonymity of a computer.

Had it not been for youtube and cookie forums, I could NEVER, EVER have been able to make these cookies.

Stained Glass Cookies

I wanted the stained glass effect but these turned out more like mosaic.
As fellow cookier Laegwen kindly puts it - An artist does everything on purpose!

Battle Of The Messy Room

My teen son's room!

Are your kids as messy as my son? Do you just give in or do you have firm rules about how they keep their rooms?


This week's cookies

It Is Written!

Oftentimes, when life gets rough, I need God's Word to keep me going. I know the best place to turn to is the Bible but I am clueless where to look.
Remember bloggy pally Sandra Kovacs Stein, author of Sincerely Wrong: An Improbable Journey? She has blessed me with an invaluable resource. Her new book It Is Written! helps point me to passages I don't know when I need them most.

In her preface to "It Is Written!", Sandra writes, "When I first discovered that my Bible was alive with promises and that it contained a roadmap, so to speak, of the path to follow and pitfalls to avoid if I wanted to experience the very best God had for me, I did something I never thought I would ever do to a book, I wrote in it. I underlined verses, put hearts and asterisks beside promises, and added little TPs (tried and proven) next to the ones I saw manifest in my life."

"My memory, however, does not always serve me well - especially when challenging circumstances test my faith. To help me through these difficult times, I started copying Scriptures into a little tabbed notebook, grouping them according to my various concerns. Now, when fear or depression threaten to overwhelm me, I can't think straight, or my mind goes suddenly blank, the tabbed sections make it easy to find what God's Word has to say about an issue, and I am reminded of what is truth and what isn't."

"This book is an expanded version of my little notebook. I encourage you to personalize it by filling the blank sheets and verses and categories of your own. May it bless and encourage you, and help you live a life of victory in Jesus, instead of as a victim of your circumstances."

Sandra's
Blog - At The  Foot Of The Cross
Books - http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005FNEBH0

Note: This is not a review, just a shout-out for a gift Sandra has blessed me with.

Thanks, Sandra!


Cookies I made this week.

Daylight

Over here on our side of the pond, we get an average of 12 daylight hours all year round. The sun always comes out at about 7:00 AM and it gets dark only after 7:00 PM. I have lived with this comforting certainty all my life and can't imagine otherwise.

I am thinking of a very silly incident that happened when I was in Los Angeles umpteenth years ago.

It was winter and my first time away in a foreign country. I was travelling with a group of Malaysians and Singaporeans on a conducted tour. The group comprised mostly honeymoon couples and a mother and daughter pair. I was solo.

After a sleepless 18 hour flight from Kuala Lumpur, I just had to crash into bed as soon as we arrived in LA and checked into a hotel. Earlier, we had been briefed by the tour leader to assemble at the hotel lobby at 6:00 PM with our luggage as we were leaving for San Diego. It was about noon when I hopped into bed.

I woke up to find the room in total darkness. In my mind, it meant only one thing-
Darkness = after 7:00 PM! 
It also meant that I had overslept and the group had left without me! I panicked big time. In those days, there were no cellphones or internet. In blind panic, I made a collect call to my parents in Malaysia. Looking back, that was a really stupid thing to do. My poor parents! They were worried sick! Long story short, Dad contacted the tour agency in Malaysia and they managed to contact our tour leader.

There was a knock on my door. Guess who? It was the tour leader who happened to be sleeping in the room next to mine. He didn't look amused having been just woken up from his slumber. Glancing at his watch, he said sarcastically, "It's only 5:00 PM and the coach isn't arriving until 6:30 PM. What is the problem?" "But it's already dark outside! I thought it was way past 7:00", I replied sheepishly. He glared at me like I was the stupidest person on the planet. "It's winter. It gets dark after 5:00 and now if you don't mind, I have to catch up with whatever sleep I had missed. I will be up all night to make bookings for accomodation and restaurants for the rest of our tour. Good Day!"

Dang! Why didn't anyone tell me it gets dark early in the winter?

And yes, I did scare the daylights out of my parents. My dad stayed up all night to say the 9 hourly St Jude's Prayer when he got that desperate call from me. St. Jude is the helper and keeper of the hopeless.

Happy Spring, pallies!

A proud mommy moment

I have some good news to share. My son, Josh, clinched 9As and 1B in the recent SPM examination. He sat for 10 papers. The Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM), or the Malaysian Certificate of Education, is a national examination taken by all fifth-year secondary school students in Malaysia, equivalent to eleventh grade in American's K–12 (education). As his scholarship at the university he is currently attending was awarded based on the results of a pilot exam he sat for earlier before the actual exam, he is now entitled to a further upgrade to the scholarship which commensurates with the actual number of As a student achieves.

Well Done, son!

Josh at a laboratory session

Upon Josh's request, I made these cookies as tokens of appreciation for the teachers from his secondary school for their hard work and dedication in tutoring and mentoring him.

I Feel Goat

A funny thing happened when I was visiting an uncle in his kampong (Malay word for village). I was greeted by a goat just as I was stepping out of the car. It even nuzzled me! In all the years of my visits to this kampong, I had never seen any goats around.
All over the country, people are looking for goats to pet and touch as it is believed that touching a goat in this Year Of The Goat/Sheep/Ram is supposed to bring good luck. Goats are even brought into the malls for city dwellers to pet.

And a goat came to 'pet' me instead! How  lucky is that! I feel good!

By the way, today is the 15th and last day of the Chinese New Year. Bye Bye, Year Of The Horse!

Here's to a better 2015!

I made these Chinese God Of Wealth/Prosperity  cookies. Those boat-like thingys are 'yuanbao'. A yuanbao is a small metal ingot used in ancient China as money.

Some Interesting Facts To Share

The God of Wealth is a Chinese deity who can bless one with luck, wealth and economic opportunities. Although worshipped throughout the year, he is especially popular during the Chinese New Year when the community welcomes a new year and mark the start of a new social calendar.

During this time, his image appears on posters, New Year cards, red packets, in the shape of a candies and as mascots. Nearing the new year, some organisations even invite an artiste dressed as the God of Wealth to send New Year greetings. Think Chinese Santa Claus!

Usually dressed in the style of a Chinese Mandarin official and in red, he holds symbols of wealth such as a gold ingot or the Ruyi, a sceptre stylised as a celestial fungus.

The most well-known God of Wealth is Zhao Gong Ming but the God of Wealth is also commonly regarded as the manifest of not one but several individuals commonly associated with the ability to bless people with wealth, luck and economic opportunities.

Source - http://www.chinatownology.com/God_of_wealth.html

Green For Luck

2014 wasn't a great year for me and I'm hoping that 2015 will be a better one. I'm not really into Fengshui and all that Chinese hocus-pocus but I was told that wearing green this Year Of The Sheep will enhance your wealth luck. I could really do with some wealth luck!
Anyway, green is my favourite color and I look really awful in red though wearing red during the Chinese New Year is believed to be auspicious. Ha, maybe that is exactly the reason why I've never had wealth luck for as long as I remember. I don't wear red! Growing up, we wore red every Chinese New Year as it was a family tradition. We were like walking 'ang-pows' !

image credit - http://www.oldshanghaionline.com

Ang-pow literally means "red packet" in Hokkien  and are those lucky red envelopes with money in them that are given out as gifts during festive occasions like weddings, birthdays, and throughout the fifteen days of Chinese New Year. Traditionally, they used to depict images of good luck - blooming flowers for prosperity, school of fish for overflowing wealth each year, children for laughter and happiness, and sail boat for smooth sailing in business and life. But these days, it's not uncommon to see images like angry birds, hello kitty or even Olaf on them! Heck, they are not even red! Why am I not surprised?

image credit - http://www.lelong.com.my

When we were in primary school, we would 'house-hop' for ang-pows during the Chinese New Year. We would go in a group, unsupervised, from house to house in the neighbourhood, on foot and sometimes riding on our bicycles to collect those little red packets from the parents of friends and even from people we barely knew! I guess times have changed. The word 'pedophile' was unheard of then.

Speaking of green, I made this St Paddy's doggy for an extra dose of good luck. Green and shamrocks, how wrong can you go?

Chinese New Year Break

As I'm typing this, we're on a road trip back to our hometowns to celebrate the Chinese lunar year with first, my in-laws In Penang and then my parents in Ipoh. On a normal day, it takes about 3 1/2 hours to reach Penang but judging from the heavy traffic ahead, I think it will take us all day. Last year, we were on the road for 8 hours! Not fun especially when you're incontinent. The annual exodus to hometowns for family reunions celebrating the Lunar New Year holiday already started on Saturday. All that haste and urgency is because everyone's presence is expected during the reunion dinner on the eve of the Chinese new year.

Chinese Lunar Year Cookies

Happy Chinese New Year, pallies!

Li-Chun

I know it's just a myth but I couldn't help doing that egg standing thingy on Wednesday, February the 4th. That day was Li Chun, the first day of Spring in the Chinese Calender.
I was told that this urban legend originated from China when American Annalee Jacoby witnessed a peculiar ritual while she was in the capital city of Chungking at that time. A crowd of people came to balance eggs. It must have been quite a sight, and so she wrote about it for Life magazine and it has gone viral since.

image credit - http://www.dajiyuan.eu

According to Chinese legend, it is easier to stand an egg on its end on what they call the first day of spring in China which is a month and half before the first day of spring as recognized by Americans.

A teacher instructs children to erect eggs in a kindergarten in Linyi City, east China. Many places in China follow the tradition of erecting eggs on vernal equinox. It is said that due to the sun's equidistant position between the poles of the earth on the first day of the spring, special gravitational forces apply.
image credit - http://news.cultural-china.com

However, science has proven that the balancing of most eggs on their broad ends is not particularly difficult at any time of the year. No physical influence of other celestial bodies on the egg can affect its balance to the extent required by the folk belief. Gravitational and electromagnetic forces, in particular, are considerably weaker and steadier than the disturbances created by the person's breathing and heartbeat. I guess it just needs heaps of patience and very talented fingers.

I've never once succeeded.

One broken (it rolled off the counter) and 2 cracked eggs later,  my effort ended up in these hedgies I made.