national bundt day.

so a few months back my friend sent me a link to an article from the blog, the food librarian. upon reading, i was immediately hooked and added it to my reader subscriptions. the more i read, the more i learned that mary, the food librarian, was familiar with my home digs! we may have lots in common.

of course, in the beginning, i would read the most recent post, but at the same time i'd delve into some older ones. and i discovered that there was a day devoted to bundt cakes! november 15th. i have nothing against the bundt cake and it's probably the style of cake i like to bake the most. there's so many different types of bundt pans that are so pretty, it makes it easy to make a fancy looking cake!

i told my co-worker/friend p about it, and she was excited about it, especially since since we and several other co-workers just recently had a dessert potluck day just for fun. so, in honor of national bundt day, the two of us baked bundt cakes to share!



p made a chocolate chocolate chip sour cream bundt (the one that looks pretty with the powdered sugar spinkled on top) and i made a double ginger sour cream bundt (the one that is less pretty due to the issues i had when i flipped the cake.)



when p and i decided to make bundts for bundt day i immediately began to think what kind of cake to bake. i began to scroll through some of the food/recipe apps on my iphone. i came across a recipe for a double ginger sour cream bundt in the epicurious app, which was from an issue of bon appetit. i tweaked it a bit and was happy with the results. it's a yummy cake, pretty moist, and the crystallized ginger and sugar sprinkles add a nice texture while eating. the original recipe called for buttering the pan and coating it with raw sugar, but what i did was to make a simple syrup infused with ginger, and then brushed the cake with the syrup, and topped it off with some sanding sugar. it made me happy when a friend of mine, as well as my sister, who aren't big on ginger, loved the cake!







happy bundt day!

november already.

september and october have come and gone with nary a post from me. where does the time go? for me, september began with lots of good eating and a quick trip to las vegas with my mother and sister. it continued with more eating, and keeping myself busy with little things, which continued into the month of october, with moments of pure laziness in between. october also found me baking rather frequently, becoming the proud owner of an iphone 4S (siri rocks!), and participating in choc walk on an early sunday morning. i'll touch on some of these in another post.

as of now, the ramen tour with my friend c is pretty much at its end - our pace had dropped off considerably since the summer, but we still made time to go. i hope to get the few remaining bowls posted very soon. we have one more stop to go from our original list, and our goal is to complete it before thanksgiving, which is closing in fast.

this past sunday night, c and i kicked off our "pho"n with phriends pho tour. (thanks c for the clever name!) the topic had come up during our ramen tour, and this pho tour is limited to shops with fun, clever, and unique names. we started it off at 9021pho. guess where that's located? yup! in beverly hills. geographically, this tour covers more ground than our ramen tour. we had originally agreed to complete the ramen tour before beginning the pho tour, but when the voucher is going to expire in a few days...we can't waste it. i had purchased a $15 for $30 voucher for 9021pho via bloomspot a few months back, and all this time i had thought it was going to expire on 11/15/11, but good thing i checked, it was set to expire on 11/09/11.



it's been rather chilly these days, so it was a great night for us to get warmed up with some pho. it's not the usual hole in the wall kind of pho place that we usually go to...it cost a little more than we what we usually see (trendy area!) so we were able to hit the $30 pretty quickly. my sister came with us, and we each ordered a bowl of pho, and started off with an order of crunchy rolls. instead of the egg roll wrapper we had expected, it was covered with noodles. definitely crispy and very tasty.





i opted for the hot and sour pho soup. it was great! it reminded me of the tom yum noodle soup that c gets when we go to three spice thai kitchen. along with some rice noodles that needed to be loosened up at the bottom of the bowl, it was topped off with some sliced carrots, baby bok choy, red onions, straw mushrooms (i wished there was more in it!), fish, shrimp, baby corn, and surprise - some chunks of pineapple. the sweetness of the pineapple was a nice contrast to the spicy heat of the soup. i topped it off with some asian basil and lime juice. very warming on a cold autumn night.