I must be crazy!

Today is Mother's Day. I should have my feet up and be served and pampered. What did I do instead? Donned my apron for 7 hours pottering between the kitchen and dinning room, making bread AND egg tarts! To be fair, we had dim sum for lunch with Daniel who came for the day. Also, I spent time cooking dinner and watching 'Dancing on Ice' in between. I had been wanting to make the 2 items for quite sometime. Adrian and the girls love egg tarts (not me though) so seeing them enjoyed eating it at lunch made me all the more want to make it. Crazy as it sounds, I thought I'd make bread too when I wait for the dough to harden in the freezer. A few weeks back, we went to a friend's place for dinner. He's a chef and cooked us a sumptuous meal. Not only that, he made us a variety of Chinese buns (custard, charsiew, sausage and ham/egg) for us to bring home - 25 in total! I only had one experience of making bread, that was when I was in uni. I made lai yao bao (cream bun with dessicated coconut sprinkled on top) and it was a success. Today, I attempted charsiew and ham buns.

I followed this recipe for the egg tarts. The oil dough was a mess! Too wet. I thought I'd misread the weight for the ingredients but I checked many times and I didn't make a mistake. Went ahead anyway. The egg custard was good but as the oil dough failed, I had lots of trouble with the rolling and folding. I should have gotten the ready-rolled puff pastry from the supermarket instead (will do so next time!). Anyhow, the end product didn't look that bad but because the dough wasn't folded properly, the pastry wasn't light and fluffy enough. I have only 4 tart moulds (which turn out to be too big) so I used my Chwee Kueh moulds too.

The buns turned out OK too. Not sure about the taste yet. I wasn't sure how to cover the charsiew with the dough so the shape didn't turn out nice and round. The first one had its filling leaked out and another's skin was too thin the filling 'burst' during baking. Oh well, first attempt. It's more fun making the buns. Will definitely do it again. I'm still trying to find more Japanese bread recipes. Anyone has any? Get the bread recipe here.

Louisa gave me a huge card last week (she couldn't wait for today to come). At school, she made me another card (it was in her bookbag and she kept telling me I can't open her bag and that I can't look under my pillow until Sunday) and drew a picture of me. She also gave me a daffodil. In class, she was asked to write about 'My mummy is magic....' This is what she wrote (with spelling correction):

"My mummy's magic because she can carry me twice a day and she cooks yummy scrummy food and she does sewing and she paints with me and she gives me a great big hug and she makes wonderful cakes. Love from Louisa XXXXXX "

That is a really long sentence but oh so sweet! She told me after I read it that I can't really carry her anymore because she's getting too heavy for me and that I sometimes don't cook yummy food (such as when I always cook rice and Chinese food).

(she said she forgot to paint my glasses)

To those of you who celebrated Mother's Day today, hope you had a wonderful day with your family.