My 29th birthday

I don't know if I'm alone here, but as I started approaching the end of my 20's, each birthday almost became a dread rather than a blessing. That said, I had a very relaxed and pleasant 29th birthday yesterday - especially since I had a stomach flu on my birthday last year! I spent the day meeting up with some of my students and chilling at uni, and had a potluck with friends in the evening at home. After dinner we watched tonnes of YIF magic videos and tried to decipher how he did those unbelievable feats. It was a day well spent and thanks to everybody for their kind birthday wishes!

First of all, the wacky birthday gifts:

Baking gadgets that I requested, courtesy of my flatmate Tim!

Also from Tim: an unusual recording of the Chopin Etudes by Evelyn Brancatt, with 24 accompanying recipes...

My favourite potato crisps and Vita lemon tea from Yuqing and Bing Bing:

Truffles from one of my students

Free vacuuming tickets from my neighbour Hitomi!

And roses (!!) from Jin Hai - the first time I received flowers outside of a recital...! I'm not sure how I should feel about it haha! :P

Strawberry cream tart

Kitchen disaster (and how to get on with life)

Chaos

In many creation myths throughout the world, the apparent order of the universe emerged out of a primeval chaos. In Greek mythology, Chaos was personified as the first of the primordial deities and the god of the air. In fact, primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality (particularly by Ionian philosophers such as Heraclitus). Cooks often have to do just the same: turning culinary chaos into something edible and tasty with a sensible form. With baking there is much less room for for this transformation: everything has to be 'right' to start with if you want your batter to turn into a cake rather than a cookie. Sometimes, however, you're left with no choice but to summon all your faculties to save your failed baking attempts.

Yesterday I had to prepare dessert for a last-minute dinner the next day with a friend who was leaving town soon. I had a carton of strawberries sitting in the fridge, so I thought it's good timing to make a strawberry dessert. I started preparing the dessert last night, thinking that I would have plenty of time in case something didn't quite work out. As it happened, one disaster followed another and it ended up with something very different from what I had set out to make. Thankfully, my rescue efforts weren't in vain it and I was informed that the end-result was edible!

Originally, I wanted to serve berries with a sabayon and caramelise it with a blowtorch. It looks stunning and doesn't require much work. A sabayon is an egg foam made with egg yolks and a sweet wine like Marsala. I didn't have sweet wine any on hand, so I thought that I could substitute with Chinese rose wine, thinking that rose would complement strawberries very well - I often make strawberry tarts with a pastry cream flavoured with this wine and it works beautifully. Well, this particular rose wine I had wasn't of very good quality to start with, and maybe there's just too much of it compared to its subtle presence in a pastry cream... The sabayon tasted bitter, confused and... cheap. I dumped the whole batch.