All Good

It's now November and somehow I've lost track of time so quickly! All's been good here.

We've been enjoying the nice warm weather still ...

except ... it had suddenly gotten freezing cold today!

Halloween weekend, we ended up not doing much. We don't really celebrate it here except shops and restaurants. We did end up with pumpkin soup for dinner which the kids loved. It was the first time I've made it was easier than I thought.

And finally managed to try out the recipe from Our Kitchen for this lovely focaccia. It went well with our pumpkin soup, although I'm not sure these 2 would be good pairings, but nevertheless, it turned out really yummy!

The ingredients are simple and ones I already had. Used some whole olives instead of seeded ones as those were the only ones I had. Rosemary were from my little garden.

It was perfect and so easy to make. Importantly, the kids loved the simple meal (even if we had to pick out the olives and rosemary from their slices of bread).

Pretend Party Again

The kids are very very very excited about their upcoming birthdays and they requested we have a pretend party last Saturday. And we did. It was also for me to test out which cupcake to make and how I will decorate it. The kids even had an opinion on how I should do the frosting while they decorated the top with sprinkles.


The cupcakes actually turned out great and was just the right taste, not too sweet. The recipe was from Bakerella's Banana Cupcakes. And with the frosting it didn't feel too sinful. The frosting was from here which I found via Cake Journal.

One of the kids' classmate whom they've invited for the actual party got the date wrong and ended up at our doorsteps bearing this big bowl of goldfishes for the kids. This was the kids' first pets. The gold one for Audrey is named 'zhen zhu' meaning 'pearl' while the black one for Samuel is named 'mo long' meaning 'dark dragon' or literally 'ink dragon'; 'ink' because of the black colour. Unfortunately, 'zhen zhu' died a couple days later...


Then we followed up the little party with a quick play time at the Okura Garden Hotel's lawn (our new hangout) where Samuel picked up lots of leaves and put them in his bucket and poured all out onto the mat.


He picked more leaves to share with Audrey who had a bit of a fever.

'Pretend' Tea Party

Today was way too hot to do much so after coming home after lunch, we thought we'd have a 'pretend' tea party. Got the kids to put together some buntings which I'd cut out of an old wedding gift wrapper. They folded the top of the triangle paper and attached it to the string plus added a tape to keep the paper from falling off.

Then they helped make some cupcakes. Actually, it was also for a me trial to see what sort of cupcakes I can make for the kids birthdays in September (I know it's still a long way away but for a very busy person like me, I need a long long long leadtime to plan stuff).

The cupcakes turned out great. The recipes were from Cupcake Bakeshop by Choclit using her Plain and Simple Chocolate Cupcake with the Vanilla frosting and Yellow Cupcake from Martha Stewart's Food Magazine. I especially loved the vanilla frosting because it used a lot less sugar than other recipes. I'm still in search of the 'perfect' frosting that uses even less sugar, if that even exists. So if anyone has any idea it would be greatly appreciated.

And finally, love these cute cupcake liners which I got from Cupcake Social and Bake It Pretty. They somehow just add a nice touch to the cupakes.