chinese new year - your favourite foods

Happy Chinese New Year! Or as we say in Cantonese Sun Leen Fai Lok (Happy New Year) and Gung Hai Fat Choi (Wishing your prosperity)!

Chinese New Year is all about family and food. Which is what any great holiday should be about. Plus, food at Chinese New Year takes on all kinds of special meanings. Long noodles for a long life. Oranges & mandarins for prosperity. Hair seaweed for riches. The list is quite long.

As my family prepares to ring in the Year of the Horse with our own Chinese New Year family feast tonight, I asked some of my friends on Twitter what their favourite Chinese New Year dish was and why and got some great responses.

birthday cupcakes: earl grey tea (aka london fog) cupcakes

My sister's birthday was back in September and she chose Earl Grey as her birthday cupcake flavour and I was pretty excited to get baking. I already had a great Earl Grey buttercream recipe (why is everyone surprised by that?) so I figured it would be pretty simple to create a cupcake recipe around this.

These turned out pretty awesome - the subtle flavour of Earl Grey got stronger after sitting for a day, so when Suzy picked them up, they were pretty good. The best thing is that she really enjoyed them - at a rate of one cupcake a day.  :)

I also loved the cute cupcake papers I found for these Earl Grey cupcakes - they were a pretty blue with pink flowers - perfect for a tea party!

I also like to refer to these as London Fog cupcakes. One of my favourite drinks is the London Fog - a drink created in Vancouver, Canada that incorporates Earl Grey tea, vanilla and milk - very much like these cupcakes!

birthday cupcakes: frothy beer cupcakes

I wasn't all that surprised when Paul's brother, Mike, chose "beer" as his birthday cupcake flavour - Mike is a big fan of beer. I wasn't sure how beer would translate into a cupcake recipe, but he chose his flavour and stuck by it, so off I went in search of inspiration.

There weren't too many beer cupcake recipes on the internet (I was actually mildly surprised by this) but I did manage to find a few, and using them as inspiration, I whipped up my own version of beer cupcakes.

For the frosting, I took my go-to classic buttercream recipe (I've had fantastic results using this recipe as a base for pretty much any flavour I can think of) and added in beer. Instead of fancy piping (I had decided that manly beer cupcakes shouldn't have fancy-schmancy piped frosting) I used an ice cream scooper to place a large "plop" of frosting on each cupcake. Mike said it reminded him of the foam on top of a frosty mug of beer (hooray!), hence I named these "frothy beer cupcakes".

I have to say that these were the lightest cupcakes I've made in the "birthday cupcake" series. I think the beer added lightness to the batter. They have a subtle, but unmistakeable beer taste and the frosting adds another layer of beer flavour.

You can probably use any beer to make these cupcakes, but I'd recommend sticking to "lighter" beers, like white beers, pale lagers, etc. Something like Guinness might be too heavy and the recipe would probably need to be tweaked to handle that. I used Molson Canadian because we always have a lot of that hanging around.

On a side note, my mom, who doesn't drink beer at all and rarely eats sweets, made 3 of these cupcakes "disappear" over the weekend. I definitely need to make more of these soon!

birthday cupcakes: lemon curd cupcakes

My mother-in-law chose "lemon pudding" as her birthday cupcake flavour, which really put my mind into a tailspin. Lemon pudding? In a cupcake? How the heck was I supposed to achieve that?

And then, inspiration just dropped into my lap. Actually, it was delivered to my front door in the form of Mackays. You see, the lovely folks from Mackays over in Scotland have put out a #bakingwithmackays challenge to food bloggers and I was lucky enough to be sent a package of their goodies to experiment with. One of the lovely jars I received was their Lemon Curd.

So, confession time - I've never had lemon curd before. I may have had it in a dessert at some point, but if so, I don't remember. So I wasn't sure what it would taste like when I opened up the jar, but I was hoping it would be a suitable lemon flavour to base a cupcake around. Oh. My. God. This stuff is AWESOME! I ate about 3 huge spoonfuls before I had to remind myself that I needed some to bake with. But seriously, where has lemon curd been all my life?

Obviously, you can substitute any lemon curd into this cupcake (or even a different flavoured curd), but for me, it's pretty much always going to be Mackays Lemon Curd (unless of course, it's their Lime Curd...oooohhhh).

birthday cupcakes: chocolate Nutella cupcakes

Both my brother-in-law, Dave, and my sister-in-law, Alex, answered with an emphatic "chocolate" when I asked them what flavour they wanted their birthday cupcakes to be.

After a little more thought, Alex added that she wouldn't mind Nutella cupcakes either. Since I was delivering the cupcakes to both of them on the same weekend, I decided to cheat a little and bake them both chocolate Nutella cupcakes. 

I never ended up eating any of these cupcakes, although I did have a few mini bites made with the leftover batter. I did, however, get lots of comments from the ones that did get to eat the cupcakes so I have a fairly good idea of how they turned out.

birthday cupcakes: Crown Royal whiskey cupcakes (aka Boozy Cupcakes)

I never gave my father-in-law a chance to choose his birthday cupcake flavour - it was always going to be Crown Royal cupcakes.

You see, many years ago, when Paul and I were still dating, I gave a bottle of Crown Royal Canadian whiskey to his dad for Christmas after Paul told me it was his favourite. The tradition was born. Ever since, I have gifted Paul's dad with a bottle of Crown Royal every Christmas.

Many bottles of Crown Royal later, I didn't hesitate that this would be the flavour to kick off my birthday cupcake series.

birthday cupcakes for the family

Earlier this year, I had the crazy idea to bake cupcakes for each of my close family members on their birthday. But, not just any cupcakes - these were going to be special birthday cupcakes based on a flavour that was either requested by them or chosen by me based on what I think they'd enjoy.

This was going to be a great learning experience for me because...well, first off - I'm not that great at baking cupcakes. They generally come out okay (in other words, edible), but not swoon-worthy. Plus my piping skills are horrible. And I mean horrible, I mean HORRIBLE.

However, since my last cupcake attempt many months ago, I have managed to become a little better at managing my oven (thanks to my macaron experiments), plus I have an amazing buttercream recipe that has become my standard frosting/filling, so I figured this would be a good time to pull out the old cupcake tins and give it another go.

If nothing else, it would make for a fun series of blog posts, right?

So, I hit the store and bought a variety of cute cupcake liners, large frosting tips (I never realized that there were HUGE frosting tips, which I'm hoping would improve my piping skills and pulled out the cupcake carrier I got from Alex (my sister-in-law) at Christmas.

I then announced my plans to my family.

You could hear crickets, I swear.

After they figured out what the heck I was trying to explain ("yes, you get to choose the flavour, but not EXACTLY the flavour, I'm going to INTERPRET the flavour you choose.") they got into the spirit and gamely told me what kind of cupcakes they would like for their birthday.

Some, of course, were easier than others: Chocolate? I can handle that! Beer? Ummm...I think I'll need a few practice batches for that! But overall, I think this is going to be a fun ongoing series of blog posts. I'll be sure to also mention how successful (or not) each recipe was!

Check back soon as I'll start sharing my birthday cupcake series results!

happy first birthday!

365 days (actually, 366 since 2012 was a Leap Year) ago today, I posted my very first blog post here on kitchen frolic.

In the span of a year, what started out as a tentative step into the world of food blogging has turned into lots of wonderful new opportunities, allowed me to meet some incredibly friendly and generous people (both online and in real life) and increased my time in the kitchen. I'd like to believe that my cooking has improved during this time too!

I started this blog in order to encourage myself to become a better cook and to document my adventures (along with Paul) in the kitchen.While I can happily say that my blog has seen us spending more time in the kitchen, many other wonderful things that I never expected have also happened along the way. To name just a few of the highlights from my past year of food blogging:

• meeting Thomas Keller at a launch event for his latest book, Bouchon Bakery
• attending our first Toronto Underground Market
• pulling out a batch of non-cracked, non-hollow, with-feet macarons from my own oven
• getting a Direct Message through Twitter from Nigella Lawson
• becoming a Brand Ambassador for Canadian Beef
• placing the first-ever order at HotBunzz
• becoming a monthly contributor to the FoodiePages blog
• creating my online Cookie Advent Calendar

Plus, I got to see "kitchen frolic" painted on a downtown Toronto wall, pinned to a map in TV show The Glades' production offices, chalked onto a restaurant sign and printed on a T-shirt and a McCafe mug! Even after a whole year, it's still pretty exciting to see my name on something I didn't create.

Of course, one of the best parts of starting this blog has been getting to meet so many friendly and passionate food-lovers from around the globe. There's no way I could name all of you here, but you know who you are. Whether we exchange blog comments, have back-and-forth Twitter conversations or have eaten together in real life, I am so glad that my path has crossed with yours and I hope to meet many more of you in person someday!

And just like any milestone, there are a few people that I have to thank:

A very special thank you to Paul for putting up with my kitchen messes, for accepting the fact that I have to take photos of all the food before he can eat it and for not complaining too much that I bake more than I cook.

Another thank you goes to my family and friends for putting up with my incessant food-fact spouting, for constantly gifting me with food-related Christmas and birthday gifts (especially my sister, Suzie!) and for being brave enough to try my kitchen experiments.

And of course...

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for being on the other side of the screen and spending some of your time reading my blog!

happy 2013!

Happy New Year friends!

2012 has been a wonderful year of new adventures for us, and me in particular, most notably starting a new job and launching this blog.

I've met so many wonderful people through kitchen frolic and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for supporting and encouraging me as Paul and I continue to explore new recipes and food experiences. I am still sometimes in awe of how extremely warm and generous the online (and real life!) food community is and I know that 2013 will be full of new friendships, new tastes and fun food adventures!

I don't know if I want to set any "food resolutions" for 2013, as I'm horrible at following through with any type of resolution, but some of the things I definitely want to accomplish this year:

• keep on blogging (at least twice a week!)
• cook a new dish from one of my many cookbooks at least once every other week
• meet more of my online foodie friends in real life
• improve my piping skills (as in piping frosting, meringue, etc)
• keep practicing making macarons

Some of my "non-food" resolutions for 2013, which I might mention from time to time here on this blog are:

• read 50 books (I took the #50bookpledge)
• launch my own PR/marketing company

What about you? Are you making any resolutions for 2013?

long weekend = food

We just celebrated Canada Day long weekend and it seems that all we did was eat! Check out some of the food we noshed on these past three days....(more detailed posts involving Kawartha Dairy ice cream and blueberry muffins coming soon!)