Make Believe Cafe

Zaria made nice cup of coffee for me at the hotel when we were holidaying in Kelantan, since then, we'd made her the barrista at home.

She's responsible to make coffee or tea for me daily in the afternoon, and she took this job seriously, she sets up the timer and ensures the coffee or tea is brewed only for 2 mins. Sometimes she makes hot chocolate for Zara or tea for hubs as well.

She said we should open a cafe since she likes my cakes, biscuits and cooking and she imagines herself to be the barista at the cafe. And what would the role of her sister be? Popsicle maker since Zara has made a couple of flavourful popsicles like this Ribena passion fruit popsicle.



So this is her plan all drawn up and written down.

(The hubs' role is to take photos of customers according to her).

Absolutely Delicious Almond Cookies

I bought a pack of wholemeal almond flour from iHerb, and it was about to expire. Remember a recipe a friend shared with us a while back, I made some almond cookies with the flour.

A delicious, crumbly cookies, it's tough to stop munching on them once started.


♥Recipe For Almond Cookies (from Melyssa)♥

Ingredients
120g almond meal
180 flour
45g castor sugar
45g icing sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
120ml peanut oil (I used rice bran oil)

Method
Preheat oven to 180C.
Combined all the dry ingredients, then add in the oil to form a dough.
Shape them into small balls and bake for 15mins.

Simple and easy recipe and you'll get a lovely melt in the mouth cookies with nice almond taste.

DIY Chinese Traditional Lanterns 制作中秋节传统灯笼

The girls' school has a lantern making competition, and being the sporting parents that we are, we decided to join in by making traditional lanterns.

After googling, checking out a friend's father's DIY lanterns photos on FB, buying the materials (i.e. cellophane paper, craft wire), our dining area was turned into a work shop. The hubs and I did the wire shaping, the girls drew and cut out the designs they wanted to stick on the lanterns, and I glued on the cellophane paper. The whole of last weekend was spent on this.







Zara wanted a rabbit shaped lantern, while Zaria who didn't really care had a cuboctahedron shaped lantern just because we had a frame from an old lantern to follow.






I wasn't good at smoothing out the cellophane paper. Sunning it didn't work, and I was told I should blow it with a hot hair dryer after gluing on to smoothen it. Maybe next year.

But at least it's functional!




After all the gluing was done I hung it to dry, the evening sun actually casted a beautiful shadow of the lantern on the ground.


In the night we tried lighting them up, and the girls were pretty happy with the results.




Did we win? The results will be out coming Friday, but it's unlikely that we will as I'd seen the ones submitted by the others, and they were way more creative, or beautifully done than ours. Oh well, at least we did try.

Happy Mid Autumn Festival Everyone!