Last Day of PG

2 Oranges, a Vegan apple cinnamon swirl loaf, real-honest-to-goodness-delicious Almond Burfi!! A golden 'snowflake' and single blueberry garnish on the burfi diamonds.

The vegan cinnamon swirl loaf takes a pound cake recipe, 1 apple peeled and chopped into small cubes, cinnamon-sugar mix with tons of butter cut into it, soy flour and water paste to replace the eggs. This stuff is really wonderful. It isn't finger food, though, it's incredibly sticky and is amazingly difficult to get out of a toddler's hair.

After having tried making Burfi many times for almost 3 years now and having failed each attempt I finally decided that maybe it was the cookbook that was the problem and not me! So I went online to find a recipe and the one that I chose was not only easy but addictive. It's from recipezaar.com: http://www.recipezaar.com/19421

PG Day 4

Limes, mangoes, cashews and strawberry flavored Konnyaku jellies! I added a blueberry to some of the jellies and a drop of food coloring to different parts of the mix for color. They came out very neat, but a little hard to eat. Maybe I cooked the mix a little too long before pouring into the moulds? They were tough to take a bit out of and wanted to stay a single unit. How beautiful they were, though!!

A note about storing the jellies: keeping them in a container in the fridge seems to not be a good storage method, they kind of melted.

More Pancha Ganapati

Apple turnovers with red sugar on top and a circle of slivered almonds, basmati rice with sultanas and cinnamon sticks, two apples. The turnovers I had already made some days before and were being put into the oven frozen. My normal method of finishing them didn't work because as I poured on the melted butter it immediately froze and the sugar would roll right off. I had to pour butter and shake sugar at the exact same time for it to work. The rice and everything else was made into Apple Pulao later in the evening. I'd never made or eaten apple pulao before but wow was it delicious. Rice pudding with apples, raisins, almonds, cinnamon, sugar and cardamom...Yum!!!

Lights viewing Bentos

We were planning on going to view some holiday lights this evening so I was looking forward to making dessert bentos for us. But as the day wore on it became obvious that my husband and daughter were too sick to go out. So...what better than a dessert bento to cure the horrible icky funk of the dreaded cold? In other words, I had the idea for the bentos and I couldn't bear not making them!

Cashews, miniature brownies, Shagapare, mistake fudge and sesame snaps wrapped in aluminum foil to keep them from sticking to everything. Since we weren't actually going anywhere I didn't try to make things fit with a lid on.

Pancha Ganapati sweets continued

A bowl of blueberries, a bowl of uncooked rice with sultana decoration, cashews and something I am choosing to call "mistake fudge". The fudge was originally supposed to be Almond Burfi. I have never been able to make Burfi and this time was no exception. It came out gooey and refused to set. It tasted wonderful but the only way to eat it was with a fork. Determined not to let the yummy goodness go to waste I decided to experiment further and put it in a 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes. It came out as wonderful bars of almond fudge-like substance. They are easy to pick up and eat and incredibly addictive.

Pancha Ganapati sweets

The diamond shaped sweets are an Indian dessert called Shagarpare. I had never tried them before or even heard of them but the recipe was in the "1000 Indian recipes" book and I wanted to try something new. I have absolutely no idea if they came out anything like what they are supposed to be, but the did come out very yummy! They are a bit like someone used a steamroller to flatten out donuts. The dough is rolled and cut to shape then deep fried after which the pieces are rolled in sugar syrup and left to cool. I went a step further with my experiment and put some food coloring in the syrup which looks a little wierd in the finished product but makes it look a lot more interesting on the plate :)

On the right is a plate of Sesame snaps, one of my all time favorite candies. It reminds me a bit of peanut brittle. Again the original recipe came out of the "1000 indian recipes" book but I modified it just a tad by lessening the amount of sesame seeds to sugar ratio. I love the taste of more sesame seeds, but it's much harder to cut the snaps when they are thicker with the sesame seeds.

Gyoza accepted! (LCE #15)

Grapes and blueberries, 2 piles of Maruchan Teriyaki Yakisoba, corn in star container, 2 miniature veggie Gyoza, 2 triangle onigiri with carrot slices on top, 1 star onigiri with Mrs. Dash 'Furikake'.

The results of my first try at making gyoza were yummy! Even A-chan liked them which is about as amazing as it can get. A million thanks to Cookingcute.com where I found the 'making gyoza tutorial' which gave me the courage to try it! It was much easier than I was expecting to do the pleats. I made a batch of regular ones for myself and my husband, then a batch of miniatures for A-chan. They were frozen and then cooked as per Cookingcute's instructions straight from the freezer. I used a few different ingredients than she had in her recipe so I was a bit nervous before the first bite, but we all agreed that they were delish!