Pecan Tassies and ~Happy Thanksgiving!~

Hi everyone!!  Sorry for this late post on Thanksgiving...A day after it passed, but here goes!  Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  There are many things I am thankful for.  However, I feel like I don't always appreciate all the things I have.  This is something I have to work on.  The things I am thankful for are the usual: family, friends, house, food, and clothes.

For this year, the things I am especially thankful for is being able to find a fellowship at school that I feel like I fit really well in.  Another thing I'm extremely thankful for is meeting 4 international students who have changed my life.  I've been helping them improve their English, but I have also learned a lot from them too.  Also this year I'm living in an apartment as opposed to the dorms, so I have been cooking for myself.  I'm thankful that I am finally forced to learn how to cook because I never really liked cooking before.  I'm starting to enjoy cooking now too.  You know, the first time I actually cooked in my apartment, I set off the fire alarm.  T_T  To my credit, the alarm was really sensitive...but I can't believe I used Pam on a really hot pot and it just started smoking.  So now, I have started to use regular oil.  I'm also thankful for having a job so I can spend my own money on things I want without having to ask my parents for money.  Most importantly of all, I'm thankful for my readers!  Thanks for your support and advice.  I really do appreciate it. :D

So this year for Thanksgiving, I went over to S's house just like last year.  We had lunch at her house and the food was just delicious.  I really missed her and her family because the last time I saw them was last Thanksgiving.  Unfortunately, S. was extremely busy with her schoolwork so I was only able to see her for 15 seconds...literally... LOL.  I knocked on her day, asked her how she was doing, and then left her alone.  However, I talked to her mom instead.  It was quite funny.  Her mom was like, "I never imagined a day where I would be having a conversation with you like this."  Her mom had seen me grow up, so that's why it was so "weird".  Anyway, I really enjoyed this Thanksgiving lunch with her family and several other families present at the potluck.

I made pecan tassies for the potluck.  They were all polished off. :D  Some people couldn't resist going back for seconds and thirds.  I actually made these pecan tassies the week prior, with one of the international students (J.)  It was quite funny because he had to help me with making the crusts and stuff and I usually bake with my girl friends. XD  I brought the pecan tassies to a potluck too the past week and got rave reviews.  Whenever people say that something I made tastes good, I'm not really sure how I should react because it's not like I created the recipe.  But yea, these tarts are really good.  I ate some and had a very hard time keeping myself from eating more.  Also, even my brother ate them!  (He dislikes nuts.)

These pecan tassies are super time consuming.  They take around 3 hours to make (from the very start to the very end).  I figured out that the best way to make the crust was to make the dough, then just roll the dough into balls, use one end of my rolling pin to squish the dough into the cupcake pan and press the ball into the edges of the pan.  Everything else is super simple.

Pecan Tassies

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake

I think close to a year has passed since I bought a can of pumpkin puree.  At that time, I had found a few pumpkin recipes that I really wanted to try out.  What I didn't realize was that those recipes required pumpkin spice, nutmeg, or several other spices.  So I never used the pumpkin puree I bought until now, when I finally bought some pumpkin spice.

This chocolate chip pumpkin cake was pretty good.  It was a little bit too sweet for my taste, and I'm someone who really likes sweets.  I had already adjusted the amount of sugar used in this recipe too.  Another tweak I made was decrease the amount of chocolate chips to only one cup because two cups would, in my opinion, overwhelm the cake.  Even when I only added only one cup, each bite of the cake had several chocolate chips in them.

I liked how the cake turned out though.  If you are someone who likes pumpkin pie, then you will like this cake because it tastes like pumpkin pie in cake form.  I gave some to my friend A. and she said that her family enjoyed it.  However, my brother, on the other hand, would not even taste the cake because he dislikes pumpkins. 

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake
Recipe slightly adapted from Tracey's Culinary Adventures

Red Bean Nian Gao Pancake 紅豆年糕餅

Whenever my mom makes red bean nian gao, she also makes a pancake sandwich with them. The pancake uses a very simple batter that takes a minute or two to prepare. Depending on your own preference, you can choose to make the pancake thick or thin. The pancake surrounds the rectangular slice of nian gao while it's being cooked, allowing the nian gao to slightly soften, resulting in a perfect balance of texture between the pancake and the nian gao.

Red Bean Nian Gao Pancake 紅豆年糕餅

Daikon Nian Gao 蘿蔔糕

It's a Chinese New Year tradition for my mom to make nian gao every year. She will always make 3 different flavors and give them out to relatives and friends. As a child I really liked the red bean nian gao, but I would never eat daikon nian gao or taro because I was really picky back then. Now, I like eating all three flavors. For the savory nian gao, it is best paired with a soy sauce with minced garlic.

Daikon Nian Gao 蘿蔔糕 is also better known as turnip cake or radish cake. They aren't made out of turnips, but daikons, so the name isn't as accurate. You can find these "cakes", fried, at dim sums. They have a solid texture. When pan fried, they have a nice, crispy outer layer and a warm, semi-soft inner layer.

Daikon Nian Gao 蘿蔔糕
Recipe from my mom

紅豆年糕 Red Bean Nian Gao

Here's the recipe as I promised, enjoy. I will be sharing several more in the coming days.

Red Bean Nian Gao 紅豆年糕
Recipe from my mom who learned how to make this from my grandma

Sugar Cookies

I've only eaten sugar cookies a few times in my life and the few times I've eaten them were when my friend A. made them.

On Club Day, a club fundraiser event at my school, my friend who is in charge of book club had a bake sale. The cookies included cc cookies and sugar cookies. After lunch, which was when the sale took place, there were still some leftover cookies. I didn't buy any cookies until after school when I saw my friend again. She offered me some cookies and I couldn't resist and bought them. I was so hungry after school that I ate 3 cookies all by myself while waiting for my mom to pick me up from school. I felt terrible....after getting the recipe from my friend, I found out that each cookie had 150 calories and a whole bunch of sugar (obviously). Oh well, what's done is done. So here is the recipe for the addicting cookies, enjoy!

I made these for my dad's coworkers because he was returning to work after taking a short vacation. I started preparing them at around 9 pm and chilled them for a few hours before finishing baking and packaging them at 2 am. Now that was the latest I have ever stayed up till to bake. 0_0 It was totally worth it though!

Sugar Cookies
Recipe from my friend A.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! May everyone have a great Christmas and New Years. I hope you all enjoyed Christmas dinner, spending time with your family/friends/loved ones. Another year has passed so quickly, soon it will be 2011!

Warning: The rest of this post is long and may be boring...it's a recap of my day. Also, the rest of this post is jumpy because I wrote my paragraphs in random order. haha

This Christmas I didn't do anything special because my relatives were all too busy to come celebrate. However, I enjoyed Christmas day by baking the Japanese Coconut Custard and Matcha Shortbread. This day was busy, busy, busy! The phone rang more than usual, and several people came over to my house at different times. My aunt visited with her fiance and my grandpa's business partner's son and his family came over too to see my grandpa and grandma. Looking back, I realize that even if I didn't have a huge family gathering, today was still pretty eventful.


For my family, Christmas is also a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. On Christmas Eve we went to a church service. They had a skit this year that was wonderfully executed. Me and my brother certainly enjoyed watching it very much. Some parts were a bit cheesy, but that added to the enjoyment. :) To add to an already good day, my grandpa and grandma from Taiwan also came along with us. They're currently staying at my house and it's very nice to have them here with me and my family because we haven't seen them for years.

Thanksgiving

Today's Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Things I'm thankful for:
My family for always being there for me and bearing with me too, my friends, God, my house, my school, my material things, my blog, my blog supporters, my life. I'm pretty much thankful for everything I have because I know that I'm very lucky. Not everyone is able to have what I have. I don't need to worry about not having a place to live, no food to eat, or just any basic necessity, I have them all. I'm thankful for my dad for working so hard to support our family, my mom for doing the housework and cooking for us. My parents for being so patient with me every day, even if I'm in a bad mood. My brother for being nice occasionally and annoying most of the time. :P My aunt and uncle for being so generous and kind. My cousins for being so funny, maybe a little annoying too, but still. My best friends for always listening to me. I'm thankful for many more things too.

I'm so thankful that I started this blog. If I didn't I wouldn't have known quite a few nice bloggers too. I really appreciate everyone's niceness to me and encouragement. :) Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Photos of the turkey are going to be posted soon.