I love Valentine’s Day because I love pink and I love hearts – it’s also a perfect time for sweets. This year I made some old favorites with a twist:

I made my Neapolitan cookies but used TEENY cutters and cut out little hearts. They look so good in the pan but unfortunately they spread like crazy…

They are still cute but it makes me want to use a miniscule cutter next time to see how small I can really get these things.

I also made up some M & M cookies but used the ‘Valentine’s mix’ which means pink, red and white. Cute idea but the M & M’s don’t show up that well. Doesn’t matter, they were still delicious.

Then I made mixed boxes of red velvet cupcakes and chocolate ganache cupcakes. I just love how the white and brown look together with the little hearts.

Who knows if people appreciate all this work, but I had fun making all of it. Now what holiday is up next…?

Neapolitan cookies recipe, here.
M&M cookies recipe, here.
Chocolate Ganache cupcakes recipe, here.

Eating soba noodles on New Year’s Day is supposed to guarantee you long life. Hm. So much for ‘an apple a day’, I guess.

Anyway, I took the kids to the Japanese American National Museum where they had an ‘Oshogatsu’ New Year’s Day celebration. They showed the kids how to put together a bowl of soba noodles and then the kids got to eat it too! Not bad for a FREE museum day.

ingredients:
12-14 ounces dry soba noodles (buckwheat noodles)
dipping sauce
nori (dried seaweed)
green onions
kamaboko (fish cake)
cucumber

sauce ingredients:
2 cups dashi (soup base)
1/3 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup mirin

First make the dipping sauce, put the dashi, soy sauce and mirin in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Turn off the heat and cool. Quite honestly – I’m not gonna be a stickler here – you can get a bottle of dippin sauce for like two dollars at the Japanese market if you are so inclined. I won’t say nothin’.

Fill a large pot with water, approx 4 – 6 cups. Bring to a boil. Add the dry soba noodles and stir – usually this take only 2-3 minutes. Drain the noodles well and rinse with cold water.

You can top the noodles with anything really. Cucumber cut small, nori cut into fine strips, sliced kamaboko. Shredded chicken or char siu works too. (See somen salad recipe.)

Put some soba into bowls, top with the toppings you like and add a small ladle of the sauce. You don’t want a soup, you just want your noodles to be wet. Aaaaand…eat!

New Year’s Day for Japanese Americans is a BIG deal. You are supposed to cook for days – lots of different good luck foods – to ensure that everyone who eats them will have a prosperous new year. Yeah but what about the poor sucker who has to make it all?? Er, that’d be me. And yeah, it’s not easy.

My friends and family all love to celebrate Oshogatsu (Japanese New Year’s Day) but no one wants to do it, of course. I enjoy taking on the the task for some reason, and every year I try to outdo the year before and see how many dishes I can make. Maybe I’m trying to hedge my bets with the ‘good luck food’, that this year will be better than last. Next year I’m scaling back, um, honest.

I always make some traditional foods, some party foods, and some just cause they taste good foods – and of course, lots and lots of desserts.

So here’s all that I made for New Year’s Day – here’s to hoping for a good 2010.

Honey Shoyu chicken wings
Root Beer pulled pork
O.G.’s flank steak
Shrimp & Bacon salad
Lumpia
Potato Salad
Spam Musubi
Somen Salad (noodles – for a long life)
Tazukuri (teriyaki fish – for a prosperous year)
kuromame (black beans – for health and success)
kurikinton (sweet potato w/chestnuts – for wealth)
gobo (burdock root – for a strong family)
edamame
kamaboko
tofu
Ozoni (traditional new year’s day soup)
Broken Glass Jello
Pink mochi
Green tea cupcakes w/mascarpone strawberry frosting
Red Velvet cupcakes

**some photos by foodlibrarian

New Years Day is coming – I’m resting up for two full days of cooking. A big part of my Japanese New Years party is mochi. Mochi is a traditional Japanese rice cake – it can be sweet – but on New Year’s it’s plain, eaten with kinako or soy sauce+sugar.

In the old days my family used to pound mochi by hand with mallets. THAT’s old skool. Me? I use the new electric plugged in machine with very minimal work on my part because I live in the future.

I recently went to thefoodlibrarian’s house where they used old school machines to make their mochi. They’ve been doing it for 40 years and they’ve got the process down – steaming the rice, extruding the mochi, cooling the mochi, forming the mochi, letting it sit in a bed of mochiko flour, and then finally packaging it. We made over 250 pounds of mochi. Unbelievable.

It was a lot of work but so worth it. There’s nothing as good as fresh mochi!

Who can resist a tree made of chocolate? Buche de Noel do not have to be complicated. You can make a simple one with whipped cream rather quickly – and everyone will think you spent hours doing it!

Filling ingredients:
2 cups heavy cream
3/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup Valrhona cocoa powder
1/2 Tablespoon espresso powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Cake ingredients:
6 egg yolks
1/2 cup white sugar
1/3 cup Valrhona cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
6 egg whites
1/4 cup white sugar
powdered sugar for dusting

Make the filling first. In a large bowl, whip cream, powdered sugar, cocoa powder, espresso powder and vanilla. Start slow, then whip up good. This happens quickly, so watch it! Keep it in the fridge while you move on to the cake.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Prep a 10×15 inch jellyroll pan with parchment, lightly buttered.

In a mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks with 1/2 cup sugar. Carefully add the cocoa, vanilla, and salt.

In the bowl of an electric mixer whip egg whites to soft peaks. Slowly add the 1/4 cup of sugar, and beat until whites form stiff peaks. Go nuts! You want peaks baby, peaks!

Quickly fold the cocoa mixture into the whites.

Pour the batter into the jelly roll pan – using a spatula to even it all out.

Bake for 12 to 15 mins depending on your oven. Now, get a CLEAN dishtowel and dust it with powdered sugar. Turn the warm cake onto the towel. Peel back the parchment paper.

Now, roll the cake up with the towel. What you are doing is trying to form the rolled shape. Let cool in the rolled up towel for 20- 30 minutes.

Set aside about 1/3 of the filling mixture to frost the outside of the cake. Carefully unroll the cake, and spread the other 2/3 of the filling on top – keep to 1 inch of the edge of the cake. This is to prevent the ooze factor. Now roll the cake up again. Quite obviously NOT with the towel.

If you REALLY want it to look like a log, cut off about 3″ off the end of the cake – at an angle. Place that piece along the side of the log. What you are doing is trying to mimic a branch. Don’t ask why. Why are you eating a cake in the shape of a log in the first place, you know? Don’t ask.

Place seam side down onto a serving plate. Frost with the remaining frosting. You can make cute woodsy patterns if you like. Decorate with berries, or meringues and just refrigerate until you are ready to serve. Dust with powdered sugar before you serve it to look like a little snowy scene. This is an impressive dessert that takes very little time!

Just take the original recipe and make it CHRISTMAS-Y!

ingredients:
2 small boxes strawberry jello
2 small boxes lime jello
1 can sweetened condensed milk (Like Eagle or something, got it?)
2 envelopes unflavored gelatin
water

In a bowl, dissolve the strawberry boxes of jello into two cups of hot water. Pour into a flat tupperware. In a separate bowl, dissolve the lime jello into two cups of hot water. Pour into a flat tupperware. Chill the two containers overnight.

Ready a 9×13 pan. Cut the two jello flavors into small blocks. Mix together carefully in pan.

In a separate bowl, dissolve 2 envelopes unflavored gelatin in 1/4 cup cold water. Add dissolved gelatin to 1 3/4 cup hot water and condensed milk. Cool.

Pour cooled milk mixture over jello and chill overnight.

These colors look so nice for the holidays, you’ll have a festive christmas dessert table!

The kids wanted to decorate gingerbread. So I made up some dough and got out my GIANT 10″ gingerboy cookie cutter, which makes a pretty nice sized cookie. Lots of surface area for decorating!

I made up some royal icing and let the kids have at it.

The Baby went wild with the candies and was more interested in eating them than actually decorating.

I made up some Batman faces to stick on top of them, the idea was to totally Batman-them out in black and yellow, but I saw how much fun the kids were having just going whole hog with the candies, so I got caught up in the fun. They turned out not so much Batman – more like creepy Candyland. Still they were delish, then again, cover anything head to toe in candy and you can’t go wrong.

When I first learned how to carve a pumpkin, I mean really carve one – I was working in one of my first architecture firms and we were having a design competition (of course). Not wanting anything ‘crappy’, they taught us all the basics of carving, and I’ve never looked back. Every year I think about what I’m going to carve, but don’t get down to it ’til right before Halloween.

The Baby is waaaaay into Batman. So of course he wanted one carved into a pumpkin. I’d done Batman before, so this time I thought I’d do it with a little extra oomph. Action pose!

To start off, just print out something from the computer. Line weight and positive/negative space will help you out immensely – the simpler the better. (Or you can always freehand something, which is how I did the Peter Pan pumpkin.) Tape the image to the pumpkin.

Now this is how *I* do it, I don’t necessarily recommend it, it’s just an old school way of doing it. I use and x-acto knife and punch holes (like tin-punching) all over the lines I want to carve. I even made a video, here:

I don’t know why the Baby is yelling “AGUA, AGUA!!” in the background. I guess he wanted water? You never know with him. Sometimes he just yells BACON for no reason. Anyway, after you do all that punching…

I trace the punched areas over with a pencil. I accidently got a shot of the sign on my desk in the back and it cracked me up, so I left it in the picture.

After you have your image on the pumpkin, start carving. Just go for it. I use and x-acto for everything only because I am comfortable with it. It gets tiny clean lines done easier and let’s you scrape away mistakes fairly easily. When you cut, your pumpkin will weep. It’s sad. No, seriously – with every cut, the juice will weep out, just dab at it with a towel and keep going.

Now, I clean out my pumpkin AFTER I’ve carved it. Weird I know, but I find it easier. Because here’s the trick – after you’ve taken out the guts and seeds, really scrape down the area behind the image you’ve carved. Try and get a 1/2″ to 1″ thick wall, but leave the rest of the pumpkin walls thick. Why? That way when you light it from the inside, your image will pop a lot better.

Here’s your final image, now…light it!

It’s simple. Just pick something easy. 5 minutes into this one I was questioning my sanity, but only because I knew exactly how I wanted to to look. Thin outlines are time consuming. Pick something easier, with a lot of negative space. A LOT. Once you do one, they’ll just keep getting easier, I promise!

Every year I say I’m probably not going to do a pumpkin.
Yeah. Right.
Then I can’t help myself.

I’ve made Peter Pan:

Julius the monkey from Paul Frank:

PLEX from Yo Gabba Gabba:

Batman:

And even…MYSELF.

If you want to see the process of how I did these, go to: Pumpkin Carving how-to.

I wanted to make something cute and seasonal. A giant stash of candy corn proved to be just the inspiration.

ingredients:
White cupcake batter
yellow gel dye
orange gel dye
buttercream frosting

So I’m not going to give you a white cake recipe because you should have one, but if god forbid you decide to go with a box mix, well – just don’t tell me about it. Don’t get me started.

Once you have your NON- box mix batter (heh) separate it into two bowls. I like to use gel dye because it doesn’t take that much and give you a strong color. Dye one half of the batter yellow, the other orange.

Prep your cupcake pan by filling the liners 1/3 of the way with yellow. Then go back and top that off with 1/3 orange. Bake as your recipe directs.

Once cooled you will have a lovely two tone cupcake, resembling the bottom of candy corn! Now for the white top – make up some white buttercream, and get your mini sous chefs to decorate with candy corn!

These are a very easy way to make cute Halloween treats and the kids love to help!