Gingerbread People!

 

Mmmm...I love the smell of Christmas baking. My family used to never do any Christmas baking, but now I want to make it a tradition, just because it makes the whole house smell so nice and warm and cozy (cosy? I always get confused). And of course, we get yummy cookies to eat for days after as well.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

A close-up...see that chocolate melting?

 I have made these over and over since I first discovered them in the summer. They are so very delicious as chilled cookie bars...mmm. I've made it with both turbinado and granulated sugars (and brown, for that matter), and while the turbinado adds a good crunch to these, I personally just like them with regular old sugar...hahaha because I don't normally have turbinado sugar at home, I used up all the little sugar packets we had saved up from Starbucks, etc...I got a full cup of sugar that way, though it took a while! It was a nice treat, and since it was for a birthday present, I didn't mind taking a little extra time to try it out.

These are slightly oily, more so as bars because probably the oil pools a bit or something...oh well, if you chill them they're totally fine. Excellent, even.  These are my favourite no-butter chocolate chip cookies :)

Clementine Cake! So good, and so healthy!

My mum wanted me to use up some of the many clementines we had lying around the kitchen...my family likes these little oranges, but there are just too many in a bag to finish all at once.
So I did a quick search for clementine/orange cake because for some reason I was really craving for some cake. And my search page was flooded with this one recipe. I looked it over, and I was shocked.
No added oils or fats, no flour in sight, and just five ingredients?! I thought this cake would not, could not work.
I was wrong.
The recipe yielded a beautiful golden-yellow cake with a cool and refreshing taste. I stuck it in the fridge after a day and it was even better cold! I loved the citrusy fragrance and flavour of it. The clementine juices seemed to be absorbed by the almonds as the days went by.

Oh yeah, this is important: IT IS MUCH MUCH BETTER A DAY LATER THAN FRESH OUT OF THE OVEN! Boy, was this concept hard for my household to understand. Except after they had a bit on the first day, while it was still warm, they didn't really like it. Something to do with the texture. My sis hates nuts. Or anything healthy, for that matter. And my dad, who once told me to look for recipes without much flour in it, told me to just stick with the flour. Psht. I knew it.

Anyhoo, I certainly liked it. It was a nice change from the typical cake, and I was getting tired of chocolate anyway. Actually, I don't think I've ever really loved chocolate cake. Clogs up my tastebuds too much.

Pumpkin Pie...Long Overdue!

Well I meant to post this for Thanksgiving...wayyy back in October. At least we got to eat some homemade pie at the right time then!

The crust was really too salt, so next time, if I decide to make it (though I probably will do a different pie next year...maybe blueberry..mmm) I'll cut down the salt, maybe add sugar instead. It also got soggy by the second or third day, so I resorted to just eating the filling, which was plenty good by itself! This was a butterless crust & pie I found on allrecipes.

Happy Lunar New Year! &..The English Patient Book Review

Have a happy happy Lunar New Year everyone...

I was going to post about the Clementine Cake I made a couple weeks ago but...it's almost 3am! Uhoh. It's not going to be a good day tomorrow...I mean, later today. I will post about the cake (which was delicious, by the way) later on then.

The Most Amazing Brownies Ever. Period.

My friends DEVOURED these brownies. They ate a double batch at one party. Then they polished off a triple batch at the next. We were sugar high for the next hour, but that was alright, because these were amazing. Hard to stop at just one piece.I researched a long time to find a good butterless brownie recipe. Actually, I've only ever tried one recipe, and every time I want to try a different one, I can't bring myself to do it because I miss these ones so much, and if you're gonna bake a sweet treat then why wouldn't you go for your favourite? I've been meaning to try black-bean brownies for a while now, so hopefully one day I'll get a little tired of these and bake up a batch of those!
My sister, who really rarely eats a lot of sweets, LOVES this. She keeps telling me she'll get fat, the skinny squirt.

New Year's Resolutions

Here we go...

1) Do 6 laps on lane 8 on the track in 15 minutes. I've slowly slowed down over the course of the last three months, which is sad because I'd built up to 6 laps in 16 minutes or so... :( I don't like winter. It is not a good season to be out in the weather.

2) Drink two extra glasses of water than I usually would.

3) Get to bed at 11:30pm. No more 1am homework parties.

4) Get into UBC! Wheeee

5) Bake some of this stuff:
Lemon Olive Oil Cake
Ice Cream Scones
Sweet Potato Bundt Cake
Chocolate Puddle Cookies
Oven-Baked Fries
Lemon Meringue Pie
Chocolate Silk Pie
Blueberry Pie
Carrot Cake

...bake my sister some birthday cupcakes. And cake pops. She likes the pretty stuff.

6) 1 book/month. Start with Wuthering Heights.

7) Practice speaking French because God knows I've forgotten half the language. Maybe I should sign up for Explore again this year...

8) Get my driver's license. Immediately.

9) Start swimming again.

10) Check out some new restaurants. Stop going to Earls and Hmart and Whole Foods to 'eat out'.

Stuff I Did Over Winter Break

1) Baked:
Chewy Chocolate Cookies
Brownies (my friends' favourite)
Clementine Cake! Yummy.

2) Created my first cookie recipe! Cheerio Raisin Bites

3) Finished a couple books

4) Received about a ton of presents. BAKING EQUIPMENT! YIPPEE! I predict many a baking storm coming our way.

5) Went out to eat. A lot. And had so much cake. Urgh...

6) Jump-roped 3000 times in half an hour and near about killed myself the next day at taekwondo class. Did this thing twice and have plans to go out and do it again TODAY. Ow.

7) Turned 18. Omgosh old.

8) Cleaned my desk. It promptly went back to its original state after about a day.

9) Watched probably more than half of the 85 episodes of Family Outing*. Worked out my ab muscles a lot by laughing, chuckling, chortling, and choking.
* Korean TV show

10) Tried to do physics and math. Failed this.

11) Went boxing day shopping and wanted to jump off the escalator. Wouldn't have hurt myself anyway, there were just too many people crawling. all. over. the. mall.
No more of that, I say.

12) Bought some new clothes and shoes. Hate shopping now with a passion.

Quite an eventful two weeks. Most restful I've had in a few years, anyway.
Looking forward to the new year! Yay!

The Thirteenth Tale- Book Review (brief)

I always get annoyed with this kind of book. The kind that start out slow, then suddenly accelerate, and run along quite smoothly for a a while, and then crash and smoulder at the end. Yeah. I didn't even read the last couple of chapters because I was so disappointed. The middle of it was good because there was a lot of mystery and creepy stuff going on. I liked the stories of the past MUCH better than the seemingly whiny voice of Margaret, the girl who sets out to write the biography of a famous dying writer. Really? It just seems too unlikely that a writer as renowned as Vida Winter (fictional character in the book...) would choose a complete stranger to write down her life story. Oh well. Anyway, I liked it when Vida was the one talking, because Margaret just constantly whines about her dead twin. Which sounds bad, but she just goes on and on about it. That's all she cares about, apparently, apart from books. And I wouldn't mind that that much either, except then she goes and SEES her sister's ghost. It was just...too, well, unbelieveable. I'm usually a fan of ghost stories, but here, the ghost story seems forced, and an afterthought. Or maybe I just don't get the 'gothic' genre. Which is what this book is, from what I hear.
I would give this 2.5 out of 5, based solely on its ability to pull me in during Vida Winter's parts. Otherwise, I wouldn't like it at all.
Now, onto bigger and better books!

BBC Book List

I absolutely love book lists. I love that I can go down the list and check off the ones I've read and highlight the one's that pique my interest. But it also makes me feel lazy...I mean, how many years have I used the excuse of 'no time' as a measly excuse for not reading? I guess since whenever I started to be overwhelmed by the amount of studying I had to do. I've noticed that I only ever read books during the summer now, and even then, I tend to be impatient and flip to the back before I get through the first three chapters. BAD HABITS DIE HARD. I'm too impatient with books. I haven't read an entire book through from cover to cover since a very long time ago.