A touch of Claire- baking, cooking& life

I'm a big fan of the word 'ROUTINE'- placing the parts within the range of my everyday life to the exact time/location. Wake up at 7am every morning (6:20 am when I feel like doing some extra workout), go to lab, and back home. Happy hour& drink with my girls on Friday night. Grocery time every Saturday morning at the nearby farmer's market- I assume even 'more routine' than a typical graduate student routine. When I got to think of the reason, I thought of 'lameness' at once. It is probably the simplest thing to follow the routine. Even your muscles burn less calories when you keep doing the same exercises every day. And always my brain just falls into the same thinking mode: it is time to XXX now! You hear people saying such things as 'You are amazing to stick to XXX!'. But the truth is after you form a habit after 27 days, it becomes your routine and you just follow it unconsciously.  EATING is just the same for me. I do l...

I've been making crepe cakes in a row for three weeks! That sounds ridiculous even to myself, but I just like to keep practicing one recipe until I finally feel happy about it. As a result, I never get the have the 'beliked' cakes often. Now, after my crepe cake battle, I did learn some tricks, especially about how to have really thin crepes. Let's have some troubleshooting, shall we? For those who are not familiar with crepe cakes, or care only about how they taste but never bother to know how they're made, crepe cakes are assembled by layers of crepes, filled with cream in between. To make a crepe cake, you make the crepes individually, let them cool, and layer them to compose the cake with the cream as 'glue'. The whole process is nothing fancy, just get your 'bricks and cement' ready and be a good builder! What is tricky are the quality of your materials, in other words, to get your crepes as thin as possible. There are professional crepe ...

I think I'm always more a savory person than a sweet person- I can totally control myself upon chocolate ice cream and strawberry milkshake, but can never behave myself well when it comes to rye bread and cheddar cheese. Actually, I think cheese could totally ruin my diet one day!  I don't know if the flavors one fancies have anything to do with his/her personality; I guess I can find some sort of psychological explanation behind one's eating habit. (Scientists are studying all types of weird questions anyway- why did dinosaur extinguish, why one plus one renders two, why do cells have cytoskeletons lol) The most straightforward explanation I could have is "I'm more a tough girl than a sweet girl." Don't know if that is true. So this time I thought it might be nice to try some sweet to my daily bread. The mission figs seem to be a good pick as the touch of sweetness. They are sweet and full of aromas. The figs were cut into rather big chunks so th...

Inspired by my friend, I got a jar of coconut oil from supermarket. One big jar of around 6 bucks- not fancy at all. However the moment I opened it, I was immediately lost in the sweet& aromatic coconutty smell. (Anyone likes me who just can not resist everything about coconut, you know it!)  Coconut oil is so versatile that you can find articles named '101 uses of coconut oil' everywhere. My friend has been used the coconut oil as her make-up remover, and it works perfect for her. I do like massaging the aromas into my skin, but my water-proof mascara and eye liner are just too stubborn to get off easily. Instead, I've been using a lot of the coconut oil on myself (NOT the bread yet lol) as hair mask- I apply it all over my hairs and twist into a bun before going to bed, and wash it off the next morning when I take a shower. I have quite dry hair, which definitely benefits from the nourishment; PLUS just imagine sleeping with yourself smelling great all night! ...

I don't know if it's just the hypes among us trendy New Yorkers, but suddenly all my friends are talking about this bakery called Lady M. It even become a must-try activity in my friends' list when some of them come to NYC. So I can't help but wonder, what's the magic about Lady M? Of course as a phD. student who solves problems by trying them out (rephrase: as a FOODIE who cannot resist to try anything yummy), I waited in the line and finally got to try their signature Green Tea Mille Crêpes. It was worth waiting, the cake was nice with my favorite green Tea and an interesting texture.  However, are all the hypes and craziness about this cake really worthy? I wasn't sure... I was expecting something heavenly. Then I looked up their webpage and saw their description about the cake: Fine green tea powder is infused into every element of our delicate Green Tea Mille Crêpes, a sight to behold with no less than twenty lacy thin crêpes enveloping the light...