My sister wanted a double chocolate cake with sprinkles for her birthday, so I offered to make it.
Always the one for a challenge, I located a scratch recipe that called for espresso powder to deepen the chocolate flavor in both the cake and frosting. 🙂 I also decided it was time for me to try my hand at strawberry roses…
The finished product turned out pretty well, and my sister enjoyed every bite! Happy Birthday Sarah!
Thanks for reading!
-Anna San♥
Every year We Wish You A Merry Christmas plays on the radio, and the question that always follows “What is Figgy Pudding?” So this year I made it my goal to wonder no more, by surprising my family with homemade Figgy Pudding for Christmas. 🙂
The whole process was an adventure from finding and prepping the ingredients, to making and serving the pudding. I honestly had no idea what I was making until it was on my plate! I always pictured a fig puree with the consistency of pudding, but instead it was a cake with caramel sauce!
Surprisingly Aldi had 99% of the ingredients I was looking for 
Chopping the dates . Whole ones looked like bugs lol 
Chopping the figs – very messy work
Boiling the dates and figs
What I expected the figgy pudding to be lol
Cake batter?
Grating chocolate is time consuming and messy work
Combining all the ingredients…
Fresh outta the oven – it’s a cake?!
Prepping the caramel sauce
Voila! The finished product.
I had a lot of fun doing it, and even more fun sharing it with my family! Merry Christmas everyone!
Thanks for reading!
-Anna San♥
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
Being culinar-ily disinclined, I have never made pie before. So this year I decided that in addition to my usual Thanksgiving contribution of Green Bean Casserole, I was going to surprise everyone by making a sweet potato pie. 🙂 No one in my family has ever made one, and I acquired a taste for it from working at a McDonald’s who sold them.
This decided, plans were then put into place on how to make this a reality. However while looking up recipes to compile my shopping list, pecan pie came up as a suggestion. I glanced at it and thought, Maybe another time. Stopping myself in my tracks, I asked Why not now? So I found a recipe for that.
As far as I’m aware, no one in my immediate family has made pecan pie either, so I decided to make both! :3
When I brought the pies to dinner this evening, they were well received, the pecan of course stealing the show. It was a lot of work, but so much fun and well worth the effort. I wonder what I’m going to make next… 😉
Have a safe and happy holiday weekend!
Thanks for reading!
-Anna San♥
Golden Year Project: Complete!
Check out some of the nifty things I did down below!
So I saw the idea floating around Facebook recently to make minion (Despicable Me) inspired Easter eggs and decided that it was too awesome not to try!
Needless to say I enjoyed making these little guys and they turned out so well! 😀
Thanks for reading!
-Anna San♥
My swim instructor had mentioned that he had tried making mochi before and it didn’t turn out well. I’ve watched a good number of Japanese cooking videos and thought I might be able to pull it off. However I hate red bean with a passion so I opted for the plain sweet mochi recipe. Lets just say that it’s not as easy to master as it looks… >_>;
The sugar didn’t fully melt into the dough and was burning even with me lowering the heat and constantly stirring it. I ended up with little blobs that were ridiculously sticky, hard to handle, grainy and just massively sweet. (2 cups of sugar to 1 cup of sweet rice flour.) Trash can…
I’m not planning on attempting this recipe again however if I see any tips or tricks I may be persuaded…
Have you ever made mochi before?
Thanks for reading!
-Anna San♥
Everything Anna 
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