Mystery Murderer Dinner Party

Each year I try to do something different for my birthday, of course, this year was no expection.  I wanted to do a mystery murderer themed party for my birthday for a long time.  This year, I was able to make it with help from my friends and family, I was one happy birthday girl!

My friend had a mystery murderer party few years ago for her birthday.  She kept most of the materials and I borrowed the materials from her.  She and her husband were helping me to plan the party since they had experience of what we should do.  

For decoration, I had started thinking of how to decorating my party about a month before the party. I set few themed colors first (red, black, gold and white).  And work around with those colors and added little details to match the 1940s theme. Luckily, the themed colors at my house are red and little black, so I could easily reuse some of the decoration stuffs and frames from home and repurposed them.  We also created a photo booth and some photo props for pictures.  Everyone had a great time of taking pictures of the photo props I made.   

For desserts, I made few different desserts for the party, including donut holes and smore bites and of course cupcakes.  They were so yummy and great for us to walk around to communicate with other characters to find out who the murderer was.  I also made some little tags for each desserts, so people know what they were eating.

For food and drinks, we order Italian food from a local Italian restaurant.  Their price was very reasonable and food was great.  We also sticked with wines and old fashioned drinks the whole night.  We had two speical cocktails, Bee's Knees and Old Fashioned.  For non-alcohol beverage, we made cucumber rosemary lemon chiller; it was so refreshing!

I am so happy that most of my friends dressed up for their parts too.  They made the party even more memoriable than it could be. 

Here are some more pictures:

Found this old newspaper picture and a prescription for alcohol drinking online. 
Yup, you needed to obtain a prescription for drinking back to the 1940s.

My boot camp buddies=)

Another prescription I found online

Cucumber roseymary lemon chiller

Decroations on the dessert table

Posing with the photo props

My Asian gang

I love the setting=)

The boys in 1940s style

Our dessert table

smore bites

Cupcake Nuggets

I saw this very innovative creation on the Cupcake Activist's blog.  It didn't only make me craving for cupcakes, but chicken nuggets too.  They looked so real and so cute!  I need to make this one of these days=) Perfect sweet treats for kid's birthday party or bridal/baby showers=)

The recipe is originally from a blog, called the Cupcake Project.  According to the creator, "Cupcake nuggets are cupcake pieces breaded with cupcakes and then deep fried.  Cupcake nuggets look enough like fast food chicken nuggets to fool all but the nugget connoisseur, but taste like doughnuts with crispy, sweet exteriors."

For recipe and more interest cupcake projects, click here.

The Ranch Restaurant Dessert Review

Last week, Mr. G, I and few of my foodie friends went to the Ranch restaurant and Saloon to celebrate our long weekend.  The reason why I knew about this place because one of our friends works for the adjacent engineering company, which owns by the same owner of this resturant and saloon.  It's great to go with my friend because he got us 20% off on our bill since this is a high end resturant.  The 20% really helped to save some from our wallets.

The food and service were both beyond amazing!  I hate to go to a restaurant, where servers don't know anything about their menu and their wine list.  The servers here totally blows our minds away.  They were VERY attentive, TOTALLY knowlegable about their food, wines and desserts and quite funny.  We learnt so much about wine paring and food from our server that night; that's a plus aside from having a great dinner.  They have a special prixfixe dinner menu for 65 dollars per person this Summer. The menu came with 3 amazing dishes plus a dessert; adding an additonal 35 dollars, you could get pairing wines to go with each of your meal.  If you are foodie like me or aventurers, this menu was ways worth the price.

I didn't mean to turn my sweet blog to be a foodie review blog.  So I am going to ONLY focus on reviewing the desserts here; however, I will post some pictures from our main dishes just to share with everyone how amazing the dishes looked and tasted.

WATERMELON 50-50 BAR

Limoncello Semi Freddo / Sugar Queen Melon Soup

it was part of our prixfixe menu.  They used watermelon to create two different textured desserts - watermelon soup and watermelon bar.  To be honest with you, I don't quite like foamy type dishes because it reminds me of shampoo. I liked the watermelon bar though.  It's very refreshing with a hint of mint flavor.  

RANCH BLUEBERRY CROSTATA

                                             Meyer Lemon Curd / Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

My friend ordered this and I had a bite of it; and let me tell you this one was amazing!  the warm pastry mixed with the tart flavors of the lemon and blue berry were irresiable. 

PBJ & MILK CHOCOLATE BAR

                                         Concord Grape / Caramelized Banana Ice Cream

Another well made dessert. Textrue was jello-y like a pana cotta.  It's GREAT enough to make Elvis to jump out from his grave.  LOL

Resturant Information:

1025 E. Ball Road
Anaheim, CA 92805
(714) 817-4200
Located on the
Ground Floor of the
Extron Building.

Resturant Hours:  Open Nightly 5:30PM - 10:00PM
Saloon Hours:  Wednesday - Saturday 5:30PM - 2:00AM/Sunday 5:30PM - 10:00PM (also check thier live entertainment schedule on their website)
Reservation:  Don't take reservation more than 6 people. 
Service Charge:  If your party has more than 8 people, 20% service charge is menataory.
Good for:  Romantic date night/speical occassiions/foodie friends, who enjoy good food and wine.  This is not a place to bring your kids though.
Price: Pricy, but worth it.
Tips and Fun Facts:
-The excutive chef and the excutive pastry chef of this restaurant are brother.  I think their family must be very lucky to have them to make Thanksgiving meal. 
- The owner of the Ranch owns his own farm, the Edwards Ranch Estates in the foothills of the city of Orange and the Santa Ana mountains. The Ranch supplies organically grown produce to the Restaurant & Saloon.
- If you are hard core Country music friends, you need to check out their saloon.  But don't forget your cowboy hat and boot though.  Otherwise, you will feel out of place.
-Pairing your dessert with this wine - 2008 Dr. Loosen Estate, Eiswein.  Trust me, you won't regret.  It's very good dessert wine.

Deep fried egg from the Chef

Appentizer from the prixfixe menu -

LOCAL DAY BOAT CAUGHT BLACK COD - melt in your month good black cod.

LIBERTY FARMS DUCK SCHNITZEL - the duck meat was really tender and juicy.

GRASS FED COLORADO LAMB LOIN -

compared to the Cowboy 36oz Ribeye, this dish was not as good.  Still good if there is no comparision.

The famous Cowboy 36oz Ribeye.  Very juicy, tender and all the fat of the meat made everything tasted even better=)

 

A Cup Cake

I did not miss spell one of my favorite vocabulary on the title.  I found this beautiful Cup Cake's picture on the internet and would love to share with you today.

Introducing Cakey Perry and Lady Goo Goo by Top of the Cake Pops

Rihanna and "Cakey" Perry, yum!

As I mentioned on my previous post, cake pops are getting very popular.  They are one fun to eat dessert (isn't everything on the stick taste better?!).  I found these cute pop stars, including Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Justin Biber...in cake pop format.  Urgh, they are too cute to eat!  If you want to learn how to make your favorite pop stars, this book, Top of the Cake pops could definitely give you some amazing ideas (see cover of the book below).  And check out more pop stars by Top of the Cake Pops below also.

The most popular boy bands

Guess who are here?!

Perhaps Elton John?

After Grammy Party

JLo, where is your famous asset?

Cereal Milk Recipe by Momofuku Milk Bar

I remember when I first started my real full time job, the only thing could make me get up early was a bowl of cereals.  I am not kidding, I even craved it when I was sleeping at night and so looking forward to get up in the morning to have that bowl of cereals (sounds totally unbelivlable, but 100% true!).  What made me so addicted to the bowl of cereals were the crushiness from the cereals and the silky smoothness from the milk, but what I love the most was that cereal milk left in the bowl. 

Admit it, you love that cereal milk too!  Momofuku Milk Bar in New York knew how much people love that cereal milk, so they "created" it and sell it at their store (very smart idea!).  Owner and Pastry Chef, Christina Tosi was nice enough to write a book and share some of the Momofuku's favorite recipes with everyone.  The first recipe in the book OF COURSE was their famous Cereal Milk.  If you want to try your hands to make their famous Cereal Milk, Serious Eats shared this recipe on their website and more important, they even converted the English measurement (the book uses English measurements) to American commonly use measurement.  Sweet=)

This cereal milk is very versatile.  You could use it to bake cookies, cupcakes and cakes and even ICE CREAM!  Tea and Letter is sharing the step by step process of making your potentially new favorite ice cream on their website, click here.

Enjoy=)

(All pictures were found from Google Images)

The Best Dessert I ever Ate - Bacon Chocolate Bar with S&P Ice Cream

We don't go to Los Angeles (LA) as often as we want to due to couple reasons (far distance from OC and the horrible traffic and parking situation).  We felt that we did miss out a lot in LA - all the bar scene, fancy and classy restaurants, interesting and unique places and museums...  About a month ago, we decided to take a mini weekend get away trip in West Hollywood area to explore the city and escape our normal busy lives in Orange County for a few days.

The highlight of the trip to me was visiting Animal restaurant, located in LA, by the famous Melrose neighborhood.  I have heard so many positive comments and impressive compliments about this place on different media.  I was beyond excited when we got there.  We didn't make any reservation, so we waited for about an hour and half for our table (not bad for a busy Saturday evening at a hip restaurant like this in LA).  We ordered five small dishes (Pork Belly BBQ Sandwich, Fois Gras with maple sussage and home made biscuit and gravy, Halibut with Peas, Churrizo with Melted Cheese, Marrow Bone with Chumichurri Sauce) for the two of us.  Everything was amazing and I could taste the freshness and well-preparations in each dishes.  Of course, we could not leave the restaurant without having some sweet to end our meal, so we ordered their signature bacon chocolate bar with salt and pepper ice cream and Dulce De Leche.  The Dulce De Leche was average, nothing really special about it.  However, on the other hand, the bacon chocolate bar and the s&p ice cream was delish!  No wonder it was featured on Food Network's show, The Best Thing I ever Ate. 

 

Let me tell you the presentation of the dessert - Very elegant and modern looking presentation.  And the bar looked like a piece of bacon with different kinds of chocolate in between.  The saltiness from the bacon mixed with the bitterness from different kinds of chocolates and the perfect sweetness from the creamy and silky ice cream was a perfect harmony; it was undescribably incredible. 

Baklava Recipe

Due to my background of growing up in a multi-cultural town and the love of traveling, I always enjoy trying out recipes of different countries and/or regions.  In the process of preparing the dishes or deserts makes me understand more about the culture of each country.  Beside traveling, making food is a great way to learn more about other countries. 

My parents started taking us to travel when I was just a little kid.  We have been so many wonderful places (Greece, Turkey, Egypt, England, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Italy, Portugal, France, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, portion of Mainland China, and America [of course], etc) throughout the whole world.  I feel so lucky that I got to see so many different things (good and bad) in such a young age; it surely opened up my mind and sights to think outside the box and learnt the best from other countries. 

Just a few weeks ago, I had an itch of trying to make a famous and popular Mediterranean dessert - Balkava at home.  Believe it or not, this dessert is so easy to make and is additively delicious.

Recipe (adopted from All Recipe.com)

Ingredients

• 1 (16 ounce) package phyllo dough (from the frozen section of the gocery store)
• 1 pound chopped nuts (walnuts, almonds or pistachios)
• 1 cup butter (melted)/PAM
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup honey

Directions

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F(175 degrees C). Butter the bottoms and sides of a 9x13 inch pan.

2.  Chop nuts and toss with cinnamon. Set aside. Unroll phyllo dough. Cut whole stack in half to fit pan.  I used my new Ninja blender/juicer/food processor.  I will tell you more about how much I love about my Ninja blender later.  It is a great piece of tool to add to your kitchen=)

3.  Cover phyllo with a dampened cloth to keep from drying out as you work. Place two sheets of dough in pan, butter thoroughly. Repeat until you have 8 sheets layered. Sprinkle 2 - 3 tablespoons of nut mixture on top. Top with two sheets of dough, butter, nuts, layering as you go. The top layer should be about 6 - 8 sheets deep.

4.  Using a sharp knife cut into diamond or square shapes all the way to the bottom of the pan. You may cut into 4 long rows the make diagonal cuts. Bake for about 50 minutes until baklava is golden and crisp.  (The blodded and colored note is very important!  Once you baked it, they are very hard to cut.  So DO remember to cut it before putting it in the oven.)

5.  Make sauce while baklava is baking. Boil sugar and water until sugar is melted. Add vanilla and honey. Simmer for about 20 minutes.

6.  Remove baklava from oven and immediately spoon sauce over it. Let cool.

Pulling it out from the oven when they are golden brown.

Pour your honey sauce on it immediately

Serve in cupcake papers.  This freezes well.
 Leave it uncovered because it will get soggy if is wrapped up.