Kat's Notebook

Yesterday I was dismayed that my favorite Starbucks drink was gone for the year. It’s the Toffee Nut Latte Frappuccino. Starbucks only featured it during the holidays and apparently holiday was over. Why did I find it delicious? Was it because there was that special holiday festive mood sprinkled on it?  Looking back, I was [...]

Ever since we bought a 10lb box of strawberries from Costco, a thought came to mind: I want to make a strawberry cake! However before I moved into action I brainstormed what kind of strawberry cake I wanted. I researched recipes, pictures, and videos. I finally settled for a 2 layer chiffon cake with buttercream [...]

If you’ve been reading my past entries on recipes, the reason why I bake what I bake is mainly because of surplus of a particular ingredient. Well this time, it’s carrots! My mom loves carrot cake. When I was younger, she will order carrot cake and I would be puzzled why she would order a [...]

I’ve always avoided chocolate on my baking recipe. Chocolate is too sweet and fattening. Not that fruit-type of cakes are not but still chocolate evokes weight gain. But my aunt has told me to bake a chocolate cake for her co-worker who was the bearer of my Nintendo DS gifts. My aunt works at this [...]

The Chinese tang yuan is a mochi ball dessert with or without filling served in hot soup. I love this dessert. I can only remember a handful of times when I’ve eaten this in the past but still the memory was a bit blurred. I needed to satisfy this tang yuan craving. At first I [...]

I’ve gone without breakfast for a week and my stomach growls at work before lunchtime. I usually eat bread with cream cheese but I’m too lazy to shop for bread. Anyway, I’ve been eyeing the poor-looking overripe bananas my father left us and decided to make them into muffins. I thought I could do the [...]

Lately, I’ve noticed that I get indigestion more frequent than before. Twice now eating at home during my 1 hour lunch break, I will return to the office with a bloated and uncomfortable stomach. It’s an indigestion attack again. I usually pride myself of having a good metabolism. Before, I could eat a very big [...]

My baking extended to the French world with Pâte à Choux (paht-ah-shoo!). Exotic as it sounds, for the laymen we know it as Cream puffs! Lucky supermarket had a sale on eggs – 58cents/dozen. So off I went to buy and made my choux puff pastry. If you want to impress your guests with a [...]

My boss lent me this cupcake book one day because I was asking about cupcakes. Though I told her that not to bother, she still brought the book. I wasn’t able to get any recipes from there but it gave me ideas on what cupcake I’d like to bake. I’m not into chocolate-recipe desserts. I’m [...]