So You Want A Cheap But Meaningful Valentine's Gift

It was last Friday when I realised that it will be a Valentine's day the next day because my colleague said she want to get a Valentine's gift. I was blog-hopping then and I found the recipe for steamed moist chocolate cake. Thanks to Family First!. It looks very do-able to me. The recipe and instructions are easy enough for me to understand and I know I can get the ingredients easily from the supermarket. So, I printed out a copy of the recipe and my colleague saw it and asked for a copy too. I went and bought all the ingredients after work. On the way home, I mumbled to hubby. I said "The ingredients are not cheap and I don't know if the cake jadi or not". He said something like "Might as well buy one from the bakery". I said "I have not even started and you didn't even give me support".

Hubby was not working on that Saturday, which happened to be a Valentine's Day lar. Not that we have any plans. I didn't feel like going out to the mall and so was he. Since we all "mou-mou liu-liu", I might as well try to bake the cake lar. Meanwhile hubby entertained Ethan with a bubble-blowing session.

Everything went on smoothly until the last step when I needed to pour the self-raising flour into the mixture. I bought the flour few months back and when I opened it up, it was infested with tiny insects, which look like 'kutu' to me. OMG!!!!! So geli. I tried to sift the flour but it failed to separate the insects. Sigh.........my pot of mixture was sitting there and half way done and I don't have the FLOUR!! I quickly grab the car key and went to the nearby mini markets to buy the very important FLOUR. I went to 3 mini markets and all of them do not sell self-raising flour. ARGHHH!! How ar!! Then I thought, rather than throw the mixture away, I might as well give it a try and use normal flour and add more baking powder. That's what I did and the cake turned out well.

Thank goodness, I have a Valentine's gift at last. Ethan, who does not like cake, happened to like that cake very well. He insisted to blow candle but we couldn't find any at home. We just asked him to sing and so he sang "Happy Birthday" and insisted to cut the cake himself. He ate 2 slices of the cake!! As for hubby, when I asked him how is the cake, he said "Hmmmmmm.....". My translation of that answer is "If you must get an answer, I think it is nice". Luckily I still have a son, who is more supportive than the father.

The ingredients

The mixture in the steamer. I put the plastic timer
too close to the heat, it melted a bit :-(

Part of the mess!

Finally, the cake with a small deco that Ethan brought back
from school.

P.S. My colleague used the same recipe but she said her cake turned to be more spongy than mine. Maybe it's the self-raising flour. So, it's blessing in disguise? Since I have extra ingredients, I'm going to try to bake another one with chocolate glaze.

My Baby Can Cycle!

2 years, 8 months, 2 weeks & 5 days old.....

I bought a tricycle as a gift for Ethan's 1st birthday and he played on it on and off. Most of the time, we just pushed him around in the apartment compound and he always gets bored after a while and ended up pushing the cycle himself. The other day when we were at my mum's place during CNY, he sat on it (my sis has a similar one for my niece) and suddenly I saw him pushing on the pedals and the tricycle moved a little. Seeing that his legs are long enough now to reach and push the pedals, I started to teach him to cycle on that day (yeah!! after buying it for more than a year). He made a little progress and most of the time he cycled backward.

Since then, he's very interested in cycling and there was one day he cycled in Giant while we shopped. I kind of like it coz it's easier for us when he cycled compared to pushing the big trolley around and hitting everyone in his way (he wouldn't let us touch the trolley). In the end, Daddy had to force him to let go of the bicycle coz we're not buying another one just yet. He was crying non-stop on the way home. I told him that we will play bicycle at home and once we reached home, I quickly washed the bicycle and let him played in the house. So there is an additional thing now to clutter our house further.

Here are some photos and a video of him cycling.