Gingerbread Cookies

We discovered this gingerbread cookie dough when we made our own Gingerbread House. It makes such a wonderful ginger cookie, the flavor is just spicy enough, the cookie comes out firm enough to hold the cookie shapes well through the bake yet is still tender when you bite into it.

So nice it is that we now use the dough to whip up loads of simple gingerbread cookies to have around the house all through the holidays!  Dress the cookies up with a bit of icing and you've got a great little holiday cookie ready in no time at all!

Little Girl's Pink Fondant Birthday Cake Part II

You're probably saying, wait a minute, where's the pink?  Well, the pink is on the inside of the cake, where it really counts.  This, dear readers, is the fancy and fabulous pink fondant decorated cake that I made for my little girl's seventh birthday.  

Now I would've made the outside pink too but my little girl was clear on that: no 媽媽, the outside of the cake, the fondant, should be white.  So white it is.  Oh yes and my little girl helped tremendously in the decoration of the cake, she's reminding me to be sure to mention that.  

We have already posted about making your own Homemade Marshmallow Fondant and baking your own moist and tasty Pinky Pink Soda Pop Cake and now finally we get to the really fun and exciting part, the part about decorating a little girl's cake with your own homemade fondant decorations!

Little Girl's Pink Fondant Birthday Cake Part I

 Now as lots of mamas and papas know, a birthday cake for a little girl or boy is not a straightforward thing to go about.  Every since my little girl was two years old I've been making a cake for her birthday, trying different recipes and flavors for the cake and the cake decorations (see here and here and here).  It's a hard thing to please a little one on their special cake for their special day, bless their little hearts but they can be quite critical!  

This year I decided to make a pink cake to please my girl's love of pinkness.  And I also wanted to try out my recent discovery while binge watching The Great British Bake Off (best baking show ever!) that it is actually rather easy to make Homemade Marshmallow Fondant, a play dough like edible cake decorating dough.  

Throwing all these things together, I managed to make a pretty looking Little Girl's Pink Fondant Birthday Cake, a moist tasty pinky pink cake on the inside and fabulously fancy homemade fondant decorations all over the outside.  I think this is the best BD cake I've made yet and most importantly my little girl absolutely loooved it!

Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies

Happy Easter!  This year, instead of our usual Easter Eggs, we decided to make some Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies instead.  I love Easter Eggs, especially the ones we make from natural Easter Egg dye, but sometimes I find it rather stressful to have that many eggs to eat up.  We shouldn't really eat that many eggs because both I and my daughter are eczema prone and too many eggs means itchy.  

So we switched it up and did Easter Decorated Sugar Cookies.  And you know what?  Making and decorating these cute Easter Cookies was a super duper fun and creative project to do with my little girl, as fun or maybe even more fun than doing our usual Easter Eggs!  Plus now we get to eat all these yummilicious beautiful to look at cookies!

Happy Valentine's Day! 情人節快樂

Happy Valentine's Day from all of us at The Hong Kong Cookery!

We think there's no better way to celebrate the holiday of love than to spend some time making and decorating cookies to give as Valentines to your sweethearts and friends.  So here is my little girl's funny family of heart cookie valentines (there's Mommy and Daddy Heart, Baby Heart, Sister Heart, and Grams and Gramps Heart.)

Our Valentine to you, dear readers!   情人節快樂!

Hand Painted Easter Eggs

When I was a little girl growing up we didn't do much for Easter.  More like nothing, actually.  Not that we didn't want to. Us kids wanted to, it was just that my 媽媽 and 爸爸 didn't really know how to celebrate a lot of these western holidays.  But I remember so clearly that one year when my parents somehow miraculously brought home these beautiful boxes of decorated chocolate Easter eggs, one for each of us girls.  

That Easter egg, in my memory, has got to be one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life up to that point (and probably well beyond.)  I stared and stared at that amazing, delicate, beautiful Easter egg for probably a month, not even daring to open the box and eat it.  I can't remember what eventually happened to that egg.  I only remember being in love...