No-Frills Recipes ... cooking, baking & excerpts on travel

K nown in Cantonese as 'Fa Kau', I made this fish maw soup for our recent Chinese New Year reunion dinner.  Fish maw refers to the fish stomach that has been extracted, cleaned and sundried and is only sold in dried form and needs to be reconstituted before cooking.  After cooking, the texture resembles somewhat like the sea cucumber as it's slippery and gelatinous with a mild fishy and rather bland taste.

Wishing All my Readers and Friends  A Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Wealthy and Joyous Chinese New Year  ~Gong Xi Gong Xi~

Sweet goodies are usually served to visitors during Chinese New Year and very rarely do we see anything that is savoury.  So for this year, I made something different ~ Savoury Chicken Crispies.  They taste delicious and family members do agree with me that this is something different from the norm and gave the thumbs up!

These G reen P ea cookies do not need much introduction as they have surfaced amongst the Chinese New Year cookies in recent years.  This recipe is adapted from Elinluv's Tidbits Corner and these melt-in-the-mouth cookies are really very yummy and you won't really stop at one.

O range  Bundt cake is another cake that I made recently for the New Year.  This cake is indeed delicious with the addition of orange zest and chocolate powder and I must admit that it was a good combination of flavours.  Thought you may like to try baking this for the coming Chinese New Year which falls on Monday, 23rd January this year.

I made a small batch of this Apricot and Almond cookies to sample for the coming Chinese New Year and they were good.  I rarely use dried fruits in my cookies but this combination of dried apricots and almonds is worth a try and therefore would like to share the recipe with you.

R ed velvet cupcakes were what I made to usher in 2012.  These crimson red cute little cupcakes were soft and moist and everyone liked the vibrant colour, just right for the New Year.  As my family members were not fond of cream or cheesy icing of any sort, I resorted to using good old icing sugar to spice up and give a contrasting colour to these cupcakes.