Bunny Smoked Salmon Salad

After the Chinese New Year feasting, I've been having mainly salads for my meals for the past few weeks. One of my favourite salad dressing is honey mustard, I love the sweet and tangy taste. It's also fast to make and goes well with all types of salad.


I made myself a smoked salmon salad with honey mustard dressing and a honey lemon drink for lunch. I used Huiji Honey for the dressing and drink. The sleeping bunnies were made from quail eggs and nori.


Huiji Honey is a pure concentrated form of honey and comes with a jasmine flower scent. It is made from pure natural raw honey and comes with exceptional quality and high nutrients.


The unique part of Huiji Honey is that it's packed in a specially designed bottle to prevent spillage and wastage of honey. It comes with an anti-dripped cap. Handling honey can be a messy affair due to it's sticky nature.


With the special cap design, it ensures each squeeze of the bottle leaves no residue on the cap and allow users to squeeze out the exact amount of honey they need.


The bottle can also be recycled and used to dispense oil and other sauces.


Huiji Honey comes at an affordable price and can be conveniently found at all major supermarkets.

HONEY MUSTARD DRESSING RECIPE

Ingredients:
5 tbsp honey
3 tbsp dijon mustard
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp olive oil

Method:

1. In a bowl, whisk together honey, mustard and vinegar.
2. Gradually whick in olive oil till you get a creamy dressing.
3. This can be stored covered in fridge for 3 days.

Disney Tsum Tsum Sushi

I've made many sushi creations to date, but I think this set of Tsum Tsum sushi that I'm sharing today is my favourite by far. I had this idea for awhile and I'm happy they turned out the way I visualized. I will be sharing some photos on how I made these sushi, I hope that they will be useful if you intend to make some of your own. :)


The shapes of the Tsum Tsum characters are just perfect for making into sushi. For this set, I chose Donald, Pooh, Mike Wazowski and Olaf.

Mike is a tamago sushi, Olaf is shrimp sushi, Donald is salmon sushi, and lastly, Pooh is Ikura sushi.


I love them all but Pooh is my favourite out of the lot.


This was actually the first set that I made, there's two more characters here, Piglet and Pluto.


My boys love sushi and sashimi, but I think what they really like is that they get to dip them in soy sauce, lol.


If you are using raw ingredients for your sushi, it's safer to shape your characters in advance and place the ingredients on just before serving.


Want to try your hands at making these sushi? I'm will be sharing how I made Pooh and Donald sushi.


I'll start off with Donald. Since this is for sushi, I mixed some sushi vinegar to the rice before shaping it with cling wrap.


I used two different size oval cutters to cut out the bill and cheeks. I used egg for the bill and the pink part of kamboko(Japanese fishcake) for the cheeks. You can also use different size straws and pinch it to an oval to cut. For the bow, I cut out two heart shapes from tomatoes, using a pair of scissors.


I used a paw craft punch to cut out oval for the eyes from seaweed. I used a pair of scissors to cut out the bow for the hat from seaweed.


Place a slice of salmon on top of Donald.


For Pooh, add some mashed egg yolk to sushi vinegar rice to colour it yellow. Using cling wrap, mould out the rice, I moulded the back half of the sushi lower so that I can place the ikura on that part.


Cut out a strip of nori and wrap it around the rice.


I used a hole punch to cut out nori for Pooh's eyes. The other details were cut out using a pair of scissors.


Usng cling wrap, mould out Pooh's ears from rice and attached them on using pasta sticks.


Add on ikura(salmon roe) before serving these Pooh sushi.

Edible Valentine's Day Bouquet

Valentine's Day falls on this sunday, which is also the 7th day of Chinese New Year. We don't celebrate Valentine's Day, but I do like to make Valentine's Day themed food, just for the fun of it. I only managed to make 3 designs this year, if you want to see more, you can take a look at my past creations over here.


I'm sharing two of the designs in this post. The first one is this Pooh Bear bouquet. Everything is edible, well almost everything, the paper and string are not edible, lol.


This is a toasted wrap, filled with scrambled eggs, ham and lettuce. I added on some Pooh Bear and hearts, moulded out of mashed potatoes. The honey pot in the middle is pasta.


These bouquets are much smaller and are made from bread instead. I filled them with scrambled eggs, smoked salmon and lettuce.


I added on a Baymax made of mashed potato, hugging one of the bouquet.


I will be sharing with you how to make these edible bouquets, they are not only for Valentine's Day, they can be served any time and they are also great for parties too.


First, slice off bread crusts using a knife.


Flatten the bread using a rolling pin.


Cut into a circle using a round cutter. This step is optional, it's just easier and neater if you fold a cone from a circle.


Make a cone using aluminium foil and wrap the bread around it. Bake at 180 degrees celcius for 5 minutes, flipping over halfway.


Wait till they cool down a little before removing the aluminium foil.


You can fill in with fillings of your choice. I filled mine with lettuce and scrambled eggs.


To make the roses, take strips of salmon and roll them up.


Fill the top with salmon roses and lettuce, you can use pasta sticks to secure the roses if you like. However, if you pack them in compactly, you don't really need anything to secure them.


For the wrap version, you can skip the first 3 steps and just wrap it around the aluminium foil and toast. This is bigger, so you will need to fill it up with more ingredients, I used scrambled eggs, lettuce and shaved ham to fill the inside. The roses are rolled up from ham, instead of salmon. Pooh bear and hearts are shaped from mashed potatoes, I did a tutorial on how to mould using mashed potatoes before, you can take a look here.

Hope you like this edible bouquet idea, I've more creations using this idea, but I'll share those next time. Have a good weekend!

Baymax Matcha Pudding,

Hello from across the causeway! We always spend our Chinese New Year here. I'm just lazing around while my boys play with their games and cousins. Since I'm rather free now, here's another long overdue recipe I've been meaning to update.


This is matcha pudding at the bottom, with Baymax made of Shiratama on top. Shiratama is the Japanese version of our Chinese Tang Yuan (glutinous rice balls). They are quite similar, so if you like, you can substitute with Tang Yuan recipe.


The grade of matcha powder you use does affect the taste of the pudding. You don't need the highest grade but it's recommended to get a slightly better grade one.


Shiratama goes well with the pudding but these matcha puddings taste great on their own too. The pudding takes server all hours to chill, so I suggest you make the pudding a day in advance.


Since Baymax is white, I did not have to color the shiratama. But if you are making other characters, you can color the shiratama using food colouring and also ingredients like matcha, cocoa powder, sesame paste, etc.


SHIRATAMA RECIPE

Ingredients:

Matcha pudding:
11/2 tbsp matcha powder
1 gelatin sheets
3 tbsp hot water
300 ml milk
31/2 tbsp sugar

Shiratama Baymax:
60g of Shiratama Flour
62g to 69g of Silken Tofu
Black food marker

Method:

1. To make matcha pudding, sift matcha powder into a bowl. Set aside.

2. Add 3 tbsp water to gelatine sheets.

3. Melt gelatine sheets over a water bath. Once dissolved, remove from heat and set aside. 

4. Pour milk into a saucepan and bring to almost boiling. Off heat, once small bubbles are seen. Add in sugar and whisk till sugar are dissolved.

5. Add 2 tbsp of milk to matcha powder from step 1. Whisk well till there are no lumps.

6. Add in the rest of the milk and gelatin, mix well.

7. Pour into ramekin or bowls and chill several hours in the fridge till the pudding has set.

8. To make shiratama, mix 62g of tofu with shiratama flour, use your hands to knead.
9. Knead till a smooth dough is formed.If the mixture is too dry, add a little silken tofu till the dough is just right.

10. Mould out Baymax using your hands.

11. Use food marker to draw on their features. Alternatively, you can also take a little dough and mix with black food colouring or charcoal powder, and use that to mould out the features instead. Cook them in boiling water till they floats. Remove and place them in cold water.

12. Sift matcha powder over pudding and place on Baymax before serving.