Wedding Anniversary Fondant Cupcakes

Leon & Veronica's 25th wedding anniversary was the first I've ever attended (still looking good, you two!) and it was beautiful, with singing and dancing presentations from their talented nephews and nieces but the most entertaining and heart-warming presentation was by their three kids who re-enacted scenes from their first meeting. My favorite was the 'The Most Awesome Proposal In The World', something like that. I was probably the one who laughed the loudest in the ballroom of over 300 people.

And so we did it, decorated 328 cupcakes and a top cake in one day. I wouldn't have been able to do it if not for my friends Elaine, Aifuah and Lily. I started around 9 am while Aifuah came about an hour later and the others before lunch time. We worked so hard that we forgot about lunch (Hub bought some buns but nobody stopped to eat). I had planned to deliver the cakes (this part I hate; I didn't know that I'd have to deliver) by 4 or 5 pm so that the couple can take photos of my piece de resistance before the guests arrive but a near-disaster happened at 2:30 pm and I only got to the hotel at 6:40 pm (the cakes were delivered earlier) to oversee the setting up of the cake stand.

Aifuah is the expert in sugarpaste cakes, at least among us, but she got the flu early in the week so she couldn't make the covering fondant on Thursday as planned. She had made 1 kg of fondant on Monday for the flowers. So I had to get commercial fondant from the stores. Commercial 'rolled fondant' is soft, marshmallowy and very pliable. At RM10 a kg, commercial fondant is affordable and SO much easier to use than home-made fondant. With home-made fondant, I could make a small rose in 8 to 10 minutes but with commercial fondant, which doesn't need much kneading, I could get the same thing done in 2.5 minutes.

The near-disaster came when Aifuah draped the covering fondant over the very tall (3 stacked cakes, about 9"/22 cm high) American-style prune buttercake. The soft and stretchy fondant immediately pulled off at the edge of the cake top, leaving a piece of jagged-edged fondant on the top and the rest of the fondant around the bottom of the cake. We were stunned! I would have cried if I was the only one doing the job.

Aifuah suggested we cover the cake with Swiss buttercream but the butter needed to thaw and the icing would melt if the completed cake was not chilled. Lily suggested royal icing but I haven't made that in years plus it needed to harden. I decided to make our own covering fondant, even at that late stage, because Aifuah and I have made fondant before and it was better to go with something we know. Elaine ran to the nearest cake ingredients shop to get liquid glucose but she also got a kg of imported fondant (lifesaver!). Upon kneading, the fondant  was crumbly and dry. Arggghh! In a final effort, I threw the crumbly fondant, the salvaged soft fondant and lots of icing sugar into the mixer. The texture was much firmer and we held our breaths as Aifuah draped the new fondant over the cake (reduced to 2 stacked cakes now).  The fondant didn't pull away. By then it was about 4 pm. 1/4 of the cupcakes were still not done because of the fuss over the failed fondant.

What have I learnt? 1) Decorating 328 cupcakes and a main cake on the same day is asking for trouble! i should've covered the main cake the night before as planned. I couldn't because I couldn't find 6" round cake boards in the stores for stacking the main cakes. 2) Delivery is part of the deal (I didn't know that) and thank God I got last minute help from friends and their wonderful kids! 3) I have wonderful friends who didn't complain, and instead said they enjoyed themselves. Love you ladies, you did a wonderful job!

We didn't cut the tops off the cakes at first and that resulted in gaps between the cakes and the fondant.





The top cake was covered in ivory colored fondant, flowers were made with home-made fondant.

The cake stand, made with the help of Elaine and my helper Vero, was based on a post by Cake Journal.



To Iona & sisters: Thanks for delivering the cakes!

Sugarpaste Crazy

It's past 1 am and I can't sleep! I've been making sugarpaste (fondant) roses all night and just not getting them right. The first practice rose I made was a mixture of the techniques I learnt from a sugarpaste course when Wey was a toddler and from You Tube videos. I was pretty happy with the result, considering that the last time I made roses for a wedding cake was more than a decade ago, and proceeded to the second rose, sticking to what my teacher had taught: roses come in odd petals of 3, 5, 7 and so on. By the time I got to the 3rd row of 7 petals my rose looked like a pink cabbage. No good. I decided reluctantly to forget about rules.


The first rose.



The second rose: a pink cabbage.


Third rose, petals too thick.

The third rose looked better but still didn't look right. I plugged in Hub's laptop on the dining table and spent the next  1/2 hour ogling at Zurin's vintage roses, looking so real and beautiful that it's hard to believe they are made of sugar. They look too difficult and intimidating for me. I will have to fly to KL one day to learn how to make roses from Zurin. I spent another 1/2 hour at Cupcake Dlights, my top cupcakes and sugarpaste cakes blog crush. Zahirah's only in her late 20s and already made a big name with her creations. My sugarpaste teacher was trained in Australia, a world leader in sugarpaste work, and she mentioned South Africa as being one of the world's best in sugarpaste art and Zahirah is in Durban, South Africa. If you go to her blog, click on any photo and that will take you to her Flickr account which is filled with the most amazing cakes. I am just  AWED by her skills and her classy designs. Her work is so elegant and classy, I've not seen any gaudy designs, not one. Even her colors are incomparable. I think she mixes them and I don't think it's Wilton colors. If only she gives some tutorials on her blog. Her work is so amazing and breathtaking that going through them I felt like I was in a different world, a wonderland of roses, fairy tale characters and all things nice. My major crush for photography is Norjlus for travel and outdoor photos (another fairy tale world), Stone Soup for her to-die-for food photo skills (I absolutely adore her photos!) and Cupcakes Dlight for the world's most gorgeous gorgeous cakes and lately  photography too.


Inspired by CupcakeDlight, I made a simple violet pink rose that looks more like a gardenia.

I'm not as worried as I should be about this assignment because I have enlisted two of the best people for the job--A, who said she first learnt sugarcraft from  my blog only 9 months ago but now is so good at it (her cakes are awesome!) that I look up to her as my teacher and E, who's an excellent cook and expert at handicraft. What have I got to fear but the wet weather, which prevents the sugarpaste flowers from drying. I am a little bit anxious about whether V will like our creations because she came back from Australia last weekend to arrange her wedding anniversary celebrations and I haven't yet had a chance to see her. She's leaving everything to me, just giving a few instructions about colors and type of flowers.





I enjoy having a free hand at making the cake. It shall be 6 tiers, the 6th being the table. I will bake the top cake but the cupcakes will be baked by a professional baker because I just can't bake and decorate 320 cupcakes. Now I should get some sleep because tomorrow I'm going to make the actual roses for the cake.

Savory Egg Custard With Topping

It's been raining all day and I love it, especially when it rains in the morning. I think of all those people who have to go to school or work, and I curl up and smile under my comforter. Yeah, make your millions but I get to sleep in, I wanted to message to all those working friends whom I'm sometimes envious of. Cloudy days and cool weather are a great change to heat, humidity and sun. I was driving along the Likas coastal highway (our prettiest stretch of road) this afternoon and the wind was whipping up the sea and the palm trees and I had this feeling of freedom and joy. Weird, I know. I've lived in the tropics for too long. As I write this post, it's 11 pm, a cricket is chirping somewhere outside and there's a wind blowing through the house (my windows are always open; I hate air-con), making me chilly. The thermometer says 24 C on my window sill so I know it's colder out especially with the soft breeze. In such moments, I just feel so happy and blessed.

I am on an exciting project that will culminate this Saturday: I'm decorating 320 cupcakes and making a small cake for the first tier of a 5-tier cupcake cake for a friend's 25th wedding anniversary! I'll be cooking the simplest of meals this week so hang in there with me.

Plain Chinese savory egg custard is a humble home dish, a standby for times when there's nothing but eggs available. A more luxurious version of the steamed egg custard is the salted egg and pork egg custard, a crazily delicious dish that nobody can resist extra helping of rice to go with. Inspired by the tofu custard I ate in New Wong Kok Restaurant last week, where the meat and veggies are not stirred into the egg but are placed on top of the custard, I came up with a similar dish but instead of tofu custard, I made egg custard because it was a lot less work. I used whatever ingredients I had in the kitchen but I wish I had some carrots because the dish would've looked a lot prettier. The only thing I'll do differently next time is to cut the mushrooms smaller to go with the silky fineness of the custard.

I've found that the best egg to water ratio for soft, silky steamed egg is 1 large egg to 1/2 cup room temperature water. This makes very soft steamed egg, good for Japanese chawan mushi which is served in  individual bowls. Chinese dishes are served as shared dishes while Japanese food is served western style, in individual portions. Since Chinese egg custard is steamed in one large dish and spooned out, the amount of water should be reduced slightly to give a firmer custard. For four large eggs (enough for a family of 3 to 4 people, for a meal of three dishes), 1 3/4 cups water would make a custard that's smooth and soft but firm enough to hold up in a spoon. Steam at low heat for a smooth custard without holes and turn off the heat when custard is just set.

Eaten steaming hot, this is the perfect dish for a cool rainy night. Try it. Vary the topping to your preference. It's really good.



Savory Egg Custard With Topping
4 large eggs
1 3/4 cups water (1 1/2 cups if you prefer a firm custard), room temperature
pinch of salt and white pepper
--put the eggs, water and seasoning (very light on salt because the topping will be seasoned with light soy sauce) into a heat-proof dish and beat the eggs with a fork until well-mixed with the water. Steam at low heat for 15 to 20 minutes (depending on the depth of your dish) until custard is set. Leave covered in the wok or steamer.

--while egg is steaming, cook the topping:

1/2 cup meat (chicken, pork or beef), chopped finely
1 cup mushrooms (mixture of shiitake, white button or crimini), diced
1/3 cup peas/gingko nuts/baby corn/carrots/corm kernels/bell peppers/any suitable veggie
1 t minced garlic
2 T light soy sauce
1/4 t caster sugar
white pepper
1 T cornstarch + 2 T water, mix well
1 to 1 1/2 cups water or light chicken stock
oil to fry
spring onions, cut finely

1. Put 1 T veg oil into a frying pan, add the garlic, then the meat and stir, breaking up the meat to prevent lumps. Add the mushrooms, other veg, light soy sauce, sugar and white pepper and fry until meat turns white. Add about 1/2 cup water or stock. Stir well, cover and let simmer for about 2 minutes.
2. Stir in the cornstarch water and add another 1/2 to 1 cup water/stock, depending on how much sauce you want. Taste and season if necessary.
3. Carefully spoon the cooked meat and veg onto the cooked custard, sprinkle spring onions over and serve immediately. Goes well with rice.

New Wong Kok Restaurant

The New Wong Kok Restaurant (NWK) has replaced the New Emperor Restaurant in Luyang. I enjoy the dim sum and a la carte food at the original Wong Kok, especially when it just opened, so I was quite confident that the new branch would not disappoint.

In the last two months, I've been to NWK for dim sum twice and dinner 3 times. The dim sum is passable good for KK standards and the a la carte menu items are very variable, ranging from disastrous to very good. The first time I dined there, my hub and I shook our heads all through the meal. We had the stewed pork leg (awful) and the mayo prawns (awful) and a plate of stir-fried greens. I didn't want to go near the restaurant again but this week I had to go twice, for a birthday dinner and a pre-wedding dinner.

The birthday dinner was surprisingly good and made me think that maybe I picked the wrong dishes the first time. This is what we had:


Stir-fried spring onions and ginger grouper slices. The grouper slices were fresh, meaty, delicious and the skin slightly chewy.


Steamed lean free-range chicken. Served with a minced ginger dip, the chicken was sweet and moist.


Crispy pork knuckle was good too although my friend thinks Equatorial Restaurant does a better version.


Sabah veggies with egg, yum.


This is a more fancy take on the humble Chinese steamed egg dish. Unlike Japanese chawan mushi, which is served in individual bowls, Chinese steamed egg is usually served in one big dish to share. Here, NWK jazzes up the dish by topping it with diced steamed egg, meat and veggies. The surprise was that it wasn't steamed egg but steamed house-made tofu under all those toppings. Yum. I enjoyed this dish and I want to replicate it at home. 

The next night, we went for a pre-wedding dinner at NWK again and although overall the food was edible (6/10), I came away feeling that the dinner was rather coarse. From the hot platter (6/10) to the fish maw soup (thin, bland 4/10) to the dried shrimps prawns (5/10) to the sweet and sour pork chops (too sweet, pork was too bicarbed, 4/10), I tried to be kind but the food just didn't impress.

The only two dishes I liked was the smoked tea leaves chicken and the steamed cod fish but cod being such a tasty fish can't go wrong even in the hands of an amateur. The last dish, taro ring with mixed veggies, was the worst because the taro was off. When steamed taro's been left for too long, it has a slight sourish taste. I glanced at the next table of young people and they had finished all their taro whereas at our table, the taro was left uneaten except for one person who didn't have much taste buds. The older adults knew the difference between fresh and gone bad and didn't eat the taro. And that's one thing about young people these days. They can't tell if they are eating food that's off. They just wolf everything down. Except for my Sniffer, who, like me, dropped his piece of taro at first bite. We complained and the waitress said "Thank you, thank you". Thank you for what? No apologies, no offer to replace the dish or refund the money. The thing about most Chinese restaurants is, customers are always wrong. I supposed that's why Chinese dining is cheaper. I'm so not going there again except for the dim sum. It's not that I'm difficult to please. It's that a few hours later, my stomach ached. The next day, my mom said she made two runs to the toilet. Enough said.


Smoked tea leaves free-range chicken. Similar to the steamed chicken except that it had a slight smoky flavor. Very yum.


Steamed cod--delicious.

Make that three items that I liked because I asked for an extra plate of the free dessert, the coconut snow jelly. My son thought it was disgusting because it was foamy but I liked it.




New Wong Kok Restaurant, Luyang Phase 1, same block as Apiwon.