A touch of Claire- baking, cooking& life

I can't wait to post this cake!! I made it to celebrate a friend's defense party. I've celebrating a lot recently, I weirdly feel happiness mixed with light sorrow. Like it is wonderful that my friend is becoming a doctor today, but I just get so frequently uncertain about my own future; like I just knew that  a close friend of mine got engaged today- my memory about college life suddenly flooded in my mind; how I wish I could witness the moment with you guys!!! I guess maybe right now everything seems to be behind the mist and full of uncertainty, eventually if you retrospect, things are shaping in some direction for some reason. I just want to say I was SO HAPPY that I was asked by my lab mates to make a cake (I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!) and it is just amazing to be trusted =D The cake is assembled by a green tea sponge cake (I love this sponge cake recipe!!! which is in Chinese...  http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5578602f0101gn6e.html ) and a cream cheese mousse with f...

This week has been CRAZY!! (Whoops did I say that sometime somewhere already?) But I mean for real! I'm just constantly going through my forever confusion about many: life, science, science, life, what to have for lunch today lol, WHAT DOES DNA REPAIR HAVE TO DO WITH T CELL FUNCTION??? OK, the last one is just the 'brilliant' qualify exam (FYI, qualify exam is the test I need to take in order to become a phD candidate which I'm not yet) topic that I somehow came up with! And all my last week was all about this wild idea... I don't want to talk more about that- I've bored my lab mates enough and I'd better make a STOP. On the other hand, science is just all about someone coming up with crazy idea and someone else prove it right (or wrong). It's fascinating if you think of it in this way, but it is always so ambiguous, too. I get lost so easily T^T......I always feel it is so hard to feel fulfilled from experiment, which is a different story for bakin...

After baking two birthday cakes in a row last week, I finally had enough "pretty and fancy" for the moment. I mean, it is always more important for the good-looking of a cake, especially if that is a gift. I did throw my failure of eclairs to trash bags just because they were not pretty. I felt bad about that as those eclairs should taste just as good, but in my mind, what's the point of baking cakes and cookies if they are not pretty?!  But when it comes to breads, I have different criteria especially for artisan breads. I do think my bread is pretty, though it is so "black", hard and simple. I love the smell of its wheatness and nuttyness, love the hard as stone shell but soft and moist inner texture, love the bread "singing for a while" after just taken out of the oven (it will crack a little bit from hot oven to room temperature)... I want to write a poem for you, my bread hahaha~~~ OK, I have to say I'm just conducting "self fulfilli...

I can't wait to post this cake I made this week; I wanna tell people how 'intelligent' I am!  (=￣ω￣=)　 By saying that I mean this 'seemingly fancy' cake is a pure recreation of what I have in hand.  So my situation this week was- 1. I need to bake a nice cake for a really good friend of mine before Friday, and it needed to be good! 2. I had a full-scheduled week of experiments and my qualify exam proposal (still not much progress for that lol) before Friday. 3. The checkers cake I made last weekends made me completely exhausted, the good thing about which was I saved two layers of chocolate sponge cake and that saved me! As it's finally spring, (Wait, there will be a snow next Tuesday??? New York is just crazy!!! %^&*() I want to make a strawberry charlotte, with the chocolate sponge cake as the base, strawberry bavarois mousse as filling, and all fresh berries on top. But I also needed ladyfingers to line the side of a classical charlotte cake, which I...

I made this cake for a friend of mine in lab; it was his birthday last Sunday. He's a really nice guy; thus I think he deserves a good husband! He was searching for Lady M the bakery's menu the other day to pick a cake for his friend's birthday, and he loved the checks! So not creative enough, but why not trying baking my friend himself a checks cake this time- I knew he was gonna love it! To be honest, I'm not super crazy about the checkers cake- it consists only plain sponge cake and chocolate sponge cake, and the point they are selling is the assemble. OK, nice presentation is important, I guess. But a nicely-presented sponge cake sells 80 bucks!!! I'm so going to save this money XP When I got to make it, I changed the plain sponge cake to white chocolate cream cheese mousse, so it has another layer of flavor and texture. It was not my creation, I was referring to this recipe. http://www.xiachufang.com/recipe/261895/ . The whole process was not super difficu...

I went to a party last weekend, which means I got to bake something AGAIN! Yay! I mean, right now bringing the desserts seems to have been my routine. I'm actually pretty happy about this- my baking has been finally approved, to some extent, and I need someone to share those calories when I just want to play with cream and butter so much  <(￣︶￣)> But as I didn't want to spend a whole day on a fancy protocol, I mean, recipe lol, I went for the NO-BAKE cheese cake. It was sort of like a pudding; the texture was built up by cream cheese, egg yolk and gelatin. It was SO simple- mix all the ingredient, pour on a shortbread crust, and let it cool down in the fridge for 4 hours till it doesn't flow. To make it more presentable, I spread some whipped cream topped with fresh blueberries. The recipe is as follow, still in Chinese, though... http://www.xiachufang.com/recipe/1074414/ Btw, all my friends loved my cheese cake. (I heard "btw" in English actually mean...

I do bake a lot of cookies, cakes and pastries; I found them extremely useful when I go to parties or simply want to please my foodie friends.   Indeed, I can always find myself a justified excuse to bake. (Once I started to make the first birthday cake for my friend in lab, I unconsciously have set myself into this situation. So, I felt really relieved that I don't need to bake for the next coming birthday- that is my own lol.) But I don't 'consume' many of the sweet stuffs I bake; baking makes me more aware of how good 'calories' taste, so I actually lost some pounds since I started baking XP.  What I do bake for myself all the time are sourdough artisan breads! They have even replaced rice totally to become my staple now. I just enjoy the aroma of grains so much and cannot have enough of those bread! I like to try different recipes of artisan bread, mostly changing the grains and nuts I put into the dough. It's amazing that combination of different g...