Mini Coconut Cream Puffs

Happy Monday! My weekend was completed with a Moon Festival family dinner, a hotpot dinner, some leftovers and non-stop eating these mini cream puffs.

When I was a kid, Moon Festival was a big deal. A lot of home-cooked Chinese food, fresh fruits, moon cakes (although I am not a big fan), small and giant lanterns…The most important part of this festival though is that kids were literally allowed to play with fire! We used to be crazy about lighting candles, let the wax drip in an empty moon cake tin, and re-boil the wax inside. Thinking back now, I don’t understand why I found it fun. But kids are kind of hard to explain sometimes. This absurd wax-boiling activity was dangerous as kids could easily get burnt. It also left a big mess on the street considered how much work it involved to scrap the leftover wax from the ground. Being said that, this activity is one of my most vivid childhood memories of what Moon Festival used to be like in my home town!

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Blueberry Streusel Muffins

So my last kid has started kindergarten. And lunch/snack packing has become one hell of a job in the morning. You know when you are making breakfast, getting your kids to brush teeth, change, not play, sit down to finish breakfast, not fool around, get in the damn car… all at the same time. It’s quite hard to squeeze in another task called “lunch packing”. Except I have to squeeze it in.

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Coconut Crepe Cake

Guys like coconut. It’s well proven considered all the males I know love dessert in coconut flavour. Except my son. Well, he doesn’t even like chocolate. So he is an abnormal human being that we don’t have to pay attention to at this point.

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Espresso Cheesecake with Chocolate Ganache

I won’t lie and pretend that I wasn’t ready for school to start again tomorrow but, man, it was a great summer! Fantastic one indeed!

A few days staying in a cabin right by Glimpse Lake. No internet. No TV. No phone. Just a surreal and priceless lake scenery. Families, friends, kids sharing life on life. And then friends from everywhere flew over to visit us. Tons of dinner parties, staying-overs, get-togethers… There was not one single second that my house was not noisy, thanks to those 600 crazy kids and another few adults who were shamelessly chatting and yelling and bitching around as what we call “catch-up”. The moment when my house was silent, it was because we went out to beaches, parks, Science World, movies, golfing, soccer, baseball… Simply non-stop!

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Nobu’s Miso-Marinated Black Cod

So here continues to find my Asian cooking roots after my first trial of beef brisket with daikon and leek in clear soup with great success.

One of the big reasons that I haven’t cooked Chinese as much is because Asian cooking does require more preparations, details, fresher ingredients… Not that I can’t handle these. I just figured cooking western food could also be delicate and scrumptious, not to mention sometimes it’s definitely more convenient considered how much I love one pot meals.

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