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.

Baymax Burger & Sushi

Baymax is one of those characters I love making, because he is adorable and so easy to make. Another one such character is Gudetama, but I'll leave him for another post.


Rice burger, instead of hamburger for dinner. Rice burger is just like a hamburger, except you substitute compressed rice cakes for the bread buns. The rice cakes are usually pan-fried till lightly browned, I skipped this step here because I want my rice to remain white.


For the fillings, there's homemade teriyaki chicken patties, lettuce and cheddar. I used olives and nori for Baymax's eyes and mouth.


Did you spot the mini Baymax burger? I used quail eggs, ham, cheese and lettuce for this.


I also made Baymax deco sushi. It's been a long time since my last deco sushi attempt. Quite happy it did not turned out too bad, was just trying my luck, since I don't have a recipe to follow for this.


The pink portion was rice coloured with some pink sushi mix. And the hearts on Baymax were cupcake sprinkles. They can't be left on the sushi for too long though, they'll melt and make a mess.


I've been making lots of different sushi lately, have shared a few on Instagram and still have some unshared ones. I still have two sets of Baymax sushi to share, but I'll leave that for another post.


Just one more shot of the Baymax sushi because I happened to take a number of shots, might as well share it, lol. :)

Big Hero 6 Baymax Bento

We finally caught Big Hero 6 in the cinema last wednesday night. We chose the 3D version and had the whole theatre to ourselves, lol. My boys were thrilled as they could talk and laugh loudly during the movie.