Sometimes recipes don't work (on my hand).

making kasutera

I always like to try new recipes, especially dessert recipes. Most of the time the outcome is great, and I am more than happy to share them. However sometimes the taste is just not that impressive. It could be that the recipe itself is bad, change of some ingredients makes it bad, or the person who is cooking it (that's me) is bad.

I tried 2 recipes that turned out to be not so good. One was kasutera (カステラ, a kind of Japanese sponge cake). I got this recipe from a dessert cookbook I recently bought in Tokyo. Basically it's just eggs, sugar, honey and flour, and it's very simple to make. What surprised me a bit was that it called for 100g flour, which to me was too much (we only needed 3 eggs in this recipe). The result was just as what I expected. The taste was good. It has very delicate honey flavor, but the texture was awful. The cake was chewy because of the flour.


berry strata

The other was berry strata from Giada's show, Everyday Italian. She is one of my favorite chefs and her dishes are always big hits on the table. However, this time was not the case. A strata is kinda like a bread pudding. It's also very easy to make. I happened to have most of the ingredients on hand and I really wanted to use the frozen berries that had been in my freezer for a while. The only thing I needed to get was ricotta cheese. So as soon as I saw this episode, I decided to make it. The strata baked beautifully, but it was the ricotta cheese that ruined the flavor (I think). The ricotta cheese didn't really blend in the whole eggy fruity flavor. Instead it tasted a little like some sweet lasagna (ricotta cheese is the major ingredient in lasagna). It's still sitting in my fridge now. I probably won't finish it.

stop sending me junk!

I receive about 10MB of forwarded mails per day, mostly from one source, my former boss. I don't mind if people forward mails to me. I'm happy that I'm not forgotten. I'm a bit concerned this time because it feels like it's the wrong person (a principal investigator, or to be easier, you can call him a professor) doing the wrong thing.

This started a little over 3 months ago. I sent a Christmas card to my former boss like I did every year. I then received an email from him about two weeks after. He wanted to make sure this was the email address I normally used and he would like to send me a manuscript about the experiments we did a few years ago. I replied promptly. The rest is what you see today: an average of 10MB forwarded mails every day! I opened and read each mail in the beginning, hoping that I didn't miss any important information he might leave in the mail. Not long after I got tired. He's not gonna send me the manuscript he claimed he had. Yesterday I checked my mails through Outlook, and I found I had over 200MB unread. I know I should be a bit more appreciative, but this is a bit too much.

I guess you need some luck to see cherry blossom

I think I'm a little too obsessed with the whole cherry blossom thing. I basically travel to Tokyo (on the way back to Taiwan) every year and usually it's in winter. The original plan of my latest trip was to go last December, but I was so busy that I had to postpone my trip twice. I finally made my decision because Ayu's Taipei concert was announced. I decided to go back in March.

I never saw cherry blossom in Japan before. Actually the only cherry blossom I saw was from the backyard of our old house. We had a cherry tree. This was the first time I was so close to see that in Japan because of the warm winter this year. The weather bureau estimated the cherry trees would bloom on March 18th. However, there's sudden drop of temperature during my visit. It was very cold like winter never left. My dream of seeing cherry blossom was therefore shattered.

Here's a picture of ONE cherry tree we saw in Yasukuni Jinja (靖国神社). We were supposed to see sakura fubuki (桜吹雪)!



Anyway, I'm now back to the US. What I can only do is to have some sweet sakura tea and look at my little souvenir lol.


sweet sakura tea. It's got real cherry blossom in it!


little souvenir from Yasukuni Jinja. Look how pretty it is.