Dubai Chocolate Mousse Cake

We took the elements of the trendy Dubai Chocolate Bar and transformed them into a most fabulous Dubai Chocolate Mousse Cake!  Two special fillings, a layer of crunchy, nutty vibrant pistachio kadayif cream and a layer of airy, rich chocolate mousse are encased inside layers of a moist chocolatey chocolate cake, all of which are lovingly frosted with a chocolate ganache frosting.  OMgoshdarnit...can you tell that we love, love, love our chocolate, lol?!

Chrysanthemum White Bean Paste Nerikiri Cake

This lovely chrysanthemum flower is actually an edible treat!  It’s a Japanese sweet treat known as nerikiri and is simply made with white bean paste.  We’ve previously made a super cute Easter Bunny nerikiri with white bean paste and it was super fun as well as delicious.  

We’ve made a Chrysanthemum White Bean Paste Nerikiri Cake this time in the same way, just in time for the Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節.  Chrysanthemums bloom in the fall and are traditionally used as a background to gleaming mooncakes and flowered filled osmanthus jellies that celebrate the festival.   Today the chrysanthemum leads the way as a delicate, gorgeous to look at and yummilicious to eat treat. What a revelation!

Raspberry Charlotte Cake

We love cake!  Any kind, really, but especially the fancy, good to look at and eat kinda cakes.  For our birthdays I always make a fancy cake.  This particular cake, a most delightful Raspberry Charlotte Cake, came out really well and I wanted to share this straight forward to make but spectacular to look at cake with our dear readers.  Just in case you need a 'wow' cake to impress and celebrate.  Or just to eat and enjoy!  Cuz, you know, cake ❤️!

Pssst:  This is the perfect cake to make for Mother's Day!  

Chestnut Birthday Cake 栗子蛋糕

This is the Chinese cake du jour for birthdays!  At least it sure seems to be as almost every Chinese person I've asked has preferred this cake over all others as their birthday cake.  And it's a delight really, this cake, whipped cream frosting layered with the creamy, light, nutty, and irrepressibly delightful flavors of chestnut.  

My hubby has loved this cake since his childhood when a chestnut cake was the only slice of cake he got the whole year.  Poor thing.  Not nearly enough cake.  So every year, for his birthday, I make him a chestnut cake.  😋

Our cake has chestnut in the cake (a revelation!), white chocolate marscarpone frosting and freshly homemade chestnut purée piped on top in a golden, gorgeous, chestnut-y pile.  Lightly sweet, creamy, and packed with delicate nutty flavor, it's chestnuts all the way, baby!

Chinese Sachima Soft Flour Pastry Cake 沙琪瑪

With the Dragon Boat Festival 端午節 around the corner, we're already dreaming of those aromatic, meltingly tender bites of savory pork filled zong zi and sweet red bean zong zi.  YUM!  I love festival foods!  

This year, in addition to these traditional festival dumplings I decided to try making a personal childhood favorite of mine, the delectable Chinese Sachima Soft Flour Pastry Cake 沙琪瑪 (or 馬仔 as it is known locally in HK), a light, fluffy, tender pastry made of fried dough strips tossed with delicious caramelized syrup, dotted with raisins and roasted sesame seeds, then pressed and cut into delectable squares.  Kinda like a Chinese rice krispie cake in principle but uniquely different and even more delicious!  

I remember that my folks used to go all the way downtown to the Chinese bakery to bring back these treats, packed carefully in a beautiful pink box tied with a red string.  My sisters and I, the three of us, would fight fiercely over the biggest squares of sachima, which my sneaky older sister usually won.  Nowadays my little girl loves it as well and so we decided to make it together, it was so much fun!

Lavender Infused White Chocolate Cake

Dear readers, it sure has been a tough couple of months, hasn't it?  We, like many of you all, have been hunkered down at home, just popping out for groceries and a little walk once in a while.  It's been tough but necessary, and, now that we're getting more used to it, I'm finding that there is a space for a kind of meditation, a quiet place.  

I've been baking a lot, it soothes me. This Lavender Infused White Chocolate Cake is so incredibly tasty as well as being a comforting food for times like these, a tender and rich butter cake infused with the floral fragrance of immunity boosting lavender and the soul pleasing sweet creaminess of white chocolate.

Black Sesame Walnut Mooncakes 黑芝麻核桃月餅

Yay, it's almost time for Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節...my favorite Chinese festival!  I love the fact that it's a night festival (I'm an owl for sure) and the extravagance of Chinese lanterns floating like glowing gems thru the velvet night, illuminating the happy faces of children up well past their bedtime.  And...glory!...the sight of the Moon Goddess Chang'e 嫦娥 floating high in the sky in all her silvery glory is not to be missed.  

And besides all that I love making and baking and eating mooncakes, those wonderful moon shaped cakes stuffed with all manner of decadently delicious fillings.  (See the list of our other yummilicious mooncake recipes at the end of this post!)  And out of all those decadent mooncakes I think these particular mooncakes might be my favs.  

Maybe cuz I dig the fragrant nuttiness of roasted black sesame.  Maybe cuz I lust after walnuts. I don't know...maybe I'm just nutty.  

I just know that I love eating these deliciously satisfying Black Sesame Walnut Mooncakes 黑芝麻核桃月餅, with its tender golden crust wrapped around an oh so fragrant sesame filling dotted through with delicious bitter sweet bits of walnut.  I can eat a whole plate of these in one go!  That's right...the whole plate means all five of the mooncakes on the plate you're looking at...gulp, gulp...gone already!  Hee hee...

Mung Bean Paste 綠豆沙餡

This is one of the classic Chinese pastry cake fillings, the Green Mung Bean Paste 綠豆沙餡, a light, creamy, beany and nutty sweet golden filling that is one of my favorite fillings.  We used this paste to make our yummilicious Green Mung Bean Cakes 綠豆糕 for Duanwu Dragon Boat Festival  端午節 this year but actually it is more often used in as a tender filling for various Chinese cakes, pastries, cookies and even mooncakes.

Mung Bean Cakes 綠豆糕

It's almost time for Duanwu Dragon Boat Festival 端午節 when the mighty dragon boats are once again afloat on the harbors to race each other to the booming beat of drums!  

Did you know besides the making and eating of yummilicious zong zi to celebrate this festival (usually either the savory meat filled zong zi 肉粽子 or the sweet red bean paste zong zi 紅豆沙粽子) the origins of the Duanwu Festival also has to do with a traditional time of ritual protection against pestilence and poisonous animals brought on by the heat of the summer season?

One of the things done in order to protect against summer sickness was to consume 'cooling' foods to help the body dispel heat and eliminate toxins.  Happily one of the traditional 'cooling' foods made for this purpose is the delighfully light and sweet Green Mung Bean Cake 綠豆糕, an elegant mold shaped sweet pastry of fragrant mung bean paste stuffed with sweet red bean paste.  

So beautiful to look at and tasty to boot...you won't believe how fast these little cakes disappear!

Lemony Lemon Pound Cake

I've been going lemon crazy recently.  Lemons in everything to the point where my little girl has started rolling her eyes at me when I present my latest pièce de résistance.  But I can't help it, lemon is so good with everything from roasts to jams to sauces and cookies and cakes!  Even the ever popular Candied Lemon Peel, nom, nom... 

Which leads me to this most amazing Lemony Lemon Pound Cake recipe that I just had to share cuz one can never eat too much cake, amirite?  But seriously, this Lemony Lemon Pound Cake is a real keeper, the best lemon pound cake I've made, heck the best pound cake,  refreshingly tart and fragrantly lemony all the way through from the moist rich crumb to the hard lemony drizzle on top.

White Chocolate Mascarpone Frosting

Happy holidays!  And in the spirit of the holidays I give you...cake frosting!  And you're probably thinking...what the heck?  Well, it goes like this - we made a white chocolate Christmas cake which naturally had to have white chocolate frosting.  And thus we discovered our most favorite cake frosting ever!  

Recently we've been experimenting with all different kinds of frostings/buttercreams for our cakes.  After all a girl cannot ever have too much cake, amiright?!  Some frostings hubby found too sweet.  Others my little girl found not sweet enough.  And yet some others I found too buttery.  

But at long last we hit the jackpot with this White Chocolate Mascarpone Frosting,  an exquisitely light yet creamily chocolaty, slightly tangy and not overly sweet frosting that pipes like a dream, perfect for frosting and decorating cakes and absolutely yummilicious to boot!

Osmanthus Flower Jelly 桂花糕

Chinese Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節 is coming around the corner!  It's the time of the full harvest moon, glowing lanterns held aloft by small hands, long nights of gazing longingly at Chang-O 嫦娥, lovely ethereal goddess of the moon, and stuffing of bellies to bursting point with delectable mooncakes, perfectly round to symbolize reunion.  

Homemade Marshmallow Fondant

You would never think, looking at it, that this cake decoration is actually pretty easy to make.  It looks so fancy, amiright?  That smooth perfect cake covering.  Fun crazy shapes of whatever you desire.  The imagination of a rainbow of colors.  

Well I never thought about making any kind of cake decoration even remotely fancy like this until I found out one day (while binge watching my most favoritest baking show, The Great British Bake Off) that you can make this amazing rollable and shapable and edible cake decoration/topping quite easily from marshmallow!  That's right, marshmallow.  Who would have guessed?  

From the humble marshmallow comes forth this Homemade Marshmallow Fondant, easy to make, easy to roll, easy to shape, gorgeous to look at, an edible cake and cupcake decoration that you can use to make almost anything you can dream up to dress up that fancy cake or cupcakes you're making for a special occasion!

Seriously Amazing Chocolate Tart

I wanted to share this chocolate tart recipe because it really is seriously amazing.  Not due to any special skills of mine or anything, let me assure you, this tart is amazing all by itself! 

I had to bring a dessert to a New Year's Eve barbecue that we were invited to and naturally wanted to impress and thus stumbled on this recipe for chocolate tart that seemed easy yet delicious.  But I was wrong...it was super easy and amazingly delicious!  Not just my opinion, this tart got rave stand up reviews from the folks at the barbecue, many of whom are chefs themselves.  

So if you're a super chocolate fan (like we are!) and need to produce an impressive but easy to make dessert, do try this Seriously Amazing Chocolate Tart.  You won't be disappointed, I promise!

Chinese Ma Lai Gao Steamed Sponge Cake 馬拉糕

I like to be able to have a bit of homemade cake or bread ready to feed my little girl before she goes to school everyday.  She is a very reluctant waker-upper in the morning and time somehow always ends up being squeezed tight in the rush to get her to school on time.  So it is very convenient to have a homemade goodie that we can grab and go, then eating leisurely on the walk to school.  

Sometimes we have my Best Banana Bread, sometimes Steamed Sugar Sponge Cake, sometimes homemade bread spread with Chinese Style Liver Pate.  But you know how kids are, they get bored really easily and say to you, with a grumpy face: 'Mom, this again?!'  Ouch, the hurt!  

But it's okay, this sort of rebellion inspires me to try new things!  So this is my latest for breakfast cake, the Chinese Steamed Sponge Cake Ma Lai Gao, or 馬拉糕.  A light, airy, sweet and buttery tasting cake that goes down real easy and  is a cinch to make!

Chinese Steamed Sugar Sponge Cake 白糖糕

Eating the deliciously bouncy Chinese Steamed Sugar Cake 白糖糕 always reminds me of being a kid.  Holding a squishy wobbly piece of cake in one hand whilst lazing on the sofa watching endless Road Runner cartoons.  Fighting over the last bits with my sisters.  Wondering why my cake had so many holes.  Thinking it was pretty cool that it had so many holes.  Trying to see through those many holes all the way to the other side.  And then eating some more.  

Remembering all these things that made me happy when I was a kid, I decided to make some wonderfully wobbly Steamed Sugar Sponge Cake 白糖糕 for my little girl today and, no surprise, she loved it!

Chocolate Birthday Cake | Kid Project

I always try to bake and frost a cake whenever family birthdays roll around.  Birthday cakes are always so happily received so I don't mind the time it takes to produce them.  As my little girl has gotten older she's always buzzing around me in our teensy tiny kitchen, wanting to lend a small but messy hand to my culinary endeavors.  Especially around cake baking time.  

So recently, when her daddy's birthday came around, she begged and begged to help with his birthday cake and I thought, why not?  My plan was simple.  Divide the cake batter into three smaller pans, thereby ending up with two cakes for me to stack and frost and one small cake for my daughter to frost all by herself.  That way, I reasoned, my little girl could have fun and we would still have a decent looking birthday cake (mine) to celebrate with.  Little did I expect that my cake effort would pale in comparison to my little girl's cake!