Bel Cafe

Georgia Hotel finally opened up their cafe. Prior to their renovations, they had an amazing cafe with extraordinary desserts. It was called Senses. After they closed, I haven't found many comparable to that. I would describe their desserts like eating a cloud...that luxurious!!!

So when walking home, I saw Bel Cafe opened and walked in to see their desserts. I was disappointed with the selection since there were only 5 items....cheesecake, various pound cakes, lemon tart, dark chocolate hazelnut raspberry vanilla mousse and white chocolate something coconut. And macarons.

I bought a pistachio macaron. It was ok. I think I've had better. It didn't have enough pistachio taste compared to what I had from other bakeries.

I've started to develop a taste for macarons. Though a bit sweet, I love the airy texture. My favourite is pistachio. Actually it's the only one I've tasted since I find it too expensive to try all the flavours and end up always picking pistachio.

Cake Pops

I bought Cake Pop recipe book over a year ago (before my New Year's resolution). I've been wanting to try it but timing didn't work. It's got great pictures that I love looking at the pictures.

Fall Bavarian Apple Cheesecake

After posting on my Facebook that I was willing to bake anything for anyone, as long as they pick it up or it's on my way to where I'm going, my coworker requested a cheesecake.

I decided to make this cheesecake as it's easy and one of my favourites. I've made this many times for potluck. One person commented that she's never liked cheesecake but she really enjoyed this one. I believe her because I've seen her decline cheesecakes before at other parties.

This recipe is from Kraft recipes from their website. Here is their picture of how it should look like.

Muffin, Cake and Brownie

Tonight I felt like baking so I baked. If I had a big freezer and ingredients at home, I'd bake more things. Actually ingredients is no problem since Safeway is opened til 12am so my problem is storage. I don't like wasting food, that unless it is eaten, I can't make more.

Tonight I made three items but will only blog on two of them. I made a pound cake, spinach corn muffin and brownies.

Baked Chinese Cake 雞蛋糕

I tried making the what I learned in class. In the class, we added lotus paste. I didn't have lotus paste so I just made the cake.

Method:
First I mixed eggs and icing sugar until it was very very light.



I beated it for a long time because it wouldn't turn light yellow. So I kept beating and decided it was better not to overbeat. Wonder if you can overbeat eggs.

Baking for the Royal Wedding

I don't have a lot of opportunity to bake a layered cake since its hard to eat such a cake by oneself, so I made it while I had enough people to eat it. I made a Layered Banana Cake. It was from the Wooden Spoon for Dessert Recipe Book.

While baking the cake, I was reading the paper and saw a scone recipe. Because of the Royal wedding, there have been lots of recipes for British food, including scones. So I decided to make the scones, in honour of the Royal Wedding while working on my cake.

The Best of the Best - Best of Bridges

I was introduced to The Best of the Best and More by a coworker. I immediately liked the book because it was a simple to follow the recipes and very doable. Plus the ingrediants were attainable easily and most grocery stores. So, in January, I started making some of the recipes, as part of my New Year resolution. I'm going to talk about it here two items I made from this book.

At this moment, I'm not at home and not able to take a picture of the recipe book but I'm going to check my Amazon link and see if I can show a picture of it.

The Best of the Best

Let me tell you a little about this series. It's quite well known in Canada, though it's more well known by my mother's generation. It's a Canadian series that started in the in 1976 by friends who wanted to share the food they made during their bridge club meetings. This book has become very popular here that they are reprinting them and making new volumes for a new generation. (http://www.bestofbridge.com/about/)

Past bakings

So, I've decided to go through some pics and add them here. In this post, I'll be showing pics of past baking.

Fruit tart

So this is a French fruit tart. It was actually very good, though I'm still working on my pastry skills. It seems like my pastry is rather still and not as flakey as I would like it to be. However the custard was excellent. I will try to make it again but maybe a small one. I'm going to have to keep working on my pastry because I've made it a couple of times and they are hard. Any suggestions to make it flakey?