The Happiness Initiative

Mountain bread wheat wraps with beetroot hummus, tuna & apple, tomato salsa, and lentil salad

My good friend and colleague, Alena, (hello, it's been a while since she's been mentioned here) and I have decided to follow our other healthier, fitter friends' footsteps towards clean eating. We're really into food, desserts, and cooking though, so we're going to take things one step at a time. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to go all health-freak on you and stop with my cakes completely. This is about making a sustainable lifestyle adjustment, it's not a crash diet, and I hope that it becomes something I can maintain for the rest of my life. I just enjoy food far too much to cut out a lot of it, so instead of a clean eating initiative, we have decided to call it The Happiness Initiative. 

What are the guidelines of THI, you wonder? Well, I'm glad you asked, buddy, cos here they are:

1. Eat well prepared food made of the best ingredients
2. Do something fun and artsy (check out the local music scene, paint a table, I dunno, anything!)
3. If you're going to have dessert, bake a friggin cake and have a bite 
4. Don't sweat the small stuff. Adopt our mantra: It's NACHO problem, you don't have to TACO bout it
5. Wake up, and smile at yourself in the mirror even if you're hungover
6. Oh yea, have a drink every now and then, but don't push it
7. Let's get physical, physical, I wanna get physical (walk, ride a bike, swim, play tennis, have sex, tickle your siblings, dance to corny music) 
8. Do at least 2 things you've never done, in 2 places you've never been in a year
9. Treat yourself, have something to look forward to every month

Easy, right? lol this is by no means a list to follow, this is simply our list of how to be happy. I'm a strong believer that you don't chase happiness, you simply have to be happy, and so these are just a few things I do to make myself happy on a daily basis. 

For our first week of putting the THI into motion, we prepared a few dishes that we can store in the office fridge for our lunches and daytime snacks. Thank the stars for a good pantry, by the way. These recipes are SO easy, and takes about 15 minutes to prepare so it doesn't take anything to whip them up the night before and bring them in to work the next day. Hope you give them a shot! 

Beetroot Hummus

Tahini:

• 5 cups sesame seeds
• 1 1/2 cups of olive oil

1. Preheat the oven to 180C, toast sesame seeds for 5-10 minutes (do not let it burn, a golden brown will suffice)
2. Blend the tahini and olive oil until you achieve a pourable texture

Beetroot Hummus:

• 1 16oz tin of chick peas
• 1/4 cup liquid from the chick peas tin
• 3-5 tbsp of lemon juice (or to taste)
• 1 1/2 tbsp tahini
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• Salt to taste
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 medium sized beetroot, peeled and cooked

1. First, peel and chop the beetroot into small 1cm and cook in a saucepan over a low heat. I just brushed the saucepan with olive oil. Cook until soft, so about 30 mins? lol sorry
2. Blend all ingredients for 3-5 minutes on low speed until thoroughly mixed and the texture is smooth

Apple & Tuna salad

• 1 can tuna flakes in water, no salt added
• 1 Granny Smith green apple, cut into cubes
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• Juice of half a lemon
• Pepper
• Pinch of sea salt flakes

Hello! Just mash it all up in a small bowl, you can eat it as it or use it as a filling for wraps and sandwiches

And a recipe contribution from Alena:

Tomato Salsa

• 3 large tomatoes, remove pulp, chopped into cubes
• Handful of coriander
• Dried oregano
• Olive oil
• Red wine vinegar
• Sea salt
• Pepper

Once again, just mix it all up in a bowl and chill in the fridge

Sorry for the radio silence lately, but so much has been happening and I simply haven't found the time to type up posts worthy of you readers. I'll try to get some time in this weekend, but between a concert on Saturday and fancy dinner cooking party on Sunday, I'm not sure when I'll be able to do it. But no worries, I am a miracle worker, I'll have a post up in a week.

Much love, be happy, and enjoy this amazing painting done for me by the lovely and talented Alena:

Alena is a very talented painter, and she's taking commissions now, so if you're interested in owning a piece of her art, drop her an email at alena.murang@gmail.com 

A Very Happy Unbirthday

I've definitely moved past the pretense of having reasons for baking anything. As you can see from the image above, every day is cake day if we go by the the Mad Hatter's habit of celebrating Unbirthdays. Which I wholly subscribe to.

This beetroot chocolate cake was long overdue, however, as Jessica and Angie have been asking me to make it since I made it last (Angie's birthday). So as we were due for a lunch meetup, I thought I'd bring a treat for the Unbirthday girls.

For this particular rendition of the cake, I used the exact same recipe that I used here, but added a touch of Wilton's delphinium blue colouring to the cream cheese frosting (in 2 different degrees of colour) to create the effect that the lovely Miz Rosie posted over at her crazy cool blog, Sweetapolita.

Didn't quite pull it off as she did, as my frosting was a little too runny, but I think it's still quite adorable.

If you're looking for a heavy, beautiful chocolate cake, I suggest you give this recipe a shot and treat yourself to an Unbirthday Cake.

I'm saving my recipe share for the next post, and this one is more of a picture dump of the stuff I've been up to in the past week, so please bear with me as I share the more mundane details of my personal life with you.

Above is a collection of iPhone pictures I took of the wedding cake and cupcakes order that I received a few weeks ago. For the cake, I used 4 layers of my favourite white cake recipe, with lemon curd filling and lemony swiss meringue buttercream. To decorate the cake, I used the Wilton 127 tip and swirled around on my revolving cake stand. The cupcakes were in 3 flavours: chocolate, earl grey, and the white cake, using plain swiss meringue buttercream, piped on with Wilton's 104/103/61 tips. I made 2 full batches (the recipe in the link is a quarter portion of a full batch) of the frosting recipe for both the cake and cupcakes, and coloured them in 4 shades of pink.

Then my two favourite Sarawakian Siblings and I decided to finally get down to business and try our hands and making our own pasta. The first batch (you can see the cling wrapped roll on the lower left hand side of the picture above) didn't turn out very well as we might have used too few eggs (note to self: always read the whole recipe twice before trying)...

For the second batch, we got some valuable advice from a very skilled friend of the families, on the optimal egg to flour ratio (100g flour:3 eggs), and went a little gentler with the mixing. I'm not too sure what went into the sauce, as that was J's area, while Al and I worked meticulously on the rolling, filling (ricotta cheese), and cutting out of the ravioli.

All in all, we had a great meal, and so much fun preparing it. I've had a great time these past few weeks with the baking and cooking, and general experimenting with flavours and ingredients. Honestly, I can't wait to see what the coming weeks will have in store for me. 

I leave you with this gem that J found, as it's been my kitchen soundtrack for a week now, and I love it! 

Of Anniversaries, Chocolate, and Love

My parents met each other at different times. In fact, my mother met my father years before he met her. 

Don't worry, I'm not going to go off the recipe blogging track and begin writing a time-travel romance novel. 

To hear mum tell it, she had a crush on papa since she was fourteen years old! They went to St Teresa's Girls School and St Joseph's Boys School respectively, and (from what people tell me) he fancied himself quite the Big Man on Campus; he played sports for the school, was listed as one of the top students of the state in his year, and well, there's the whole mixed heritage thing he had going for him I suppose. 

It has been thirty-six years since mum first fell into puppy love with papa, and as of this week, they have been married for twenty-nine years. Out of those twenty-nine years, they made and raised four wonderfully bright and attractive (lololol) children, even if the distribution of said intelligence and genetic blessing was imbalanced, as the first batch got far too much (oh, make it stop!) of the good stuff. They have bought, sold and lived in a total of fourteen houses (nomads, much?), crossed the seas countless times in pursuit one can only assume frequent flyer points, changed career paths seven times (shared number), shared at least 10 000 meals together ("A family that eats together, stays together" yes, Papa *salutes*) and only some crazy zany nerd would bother to count the rest. 

My parents have always put the family first, and growing up with those values, I don't think anybody can blame me for wanting the kind of love, stability, and intimacy that they have. They are each others' best friend, and that is all I really want. 

I took the day off work today to spend a day with the family; the kids are on holiday from school and it's my parents' anniversary! I couldn't not bake them a cake! Plus I had quite a number of annual leave days I needed to clear by the end of the month.
So on this beautiful Friday, after a very lazy morning spent by the pool, I got started on this super special Chocolate Beetroot Cake with Beet Creamcheese Frosting. There was so much batter that I decided to bake smaller cakes instead, and ended up with two 8-inch cakes. One for my parents, and the other for my to bring to an outing with some of my close work friends tonight. 

I would love to get into my parents' whole love story, and soon I will get around to telling you about the time my father met my mother. Now that, folks, was quite cray. 

But for now, let's channel a bit of Bob Saget as he retells the incredibly unromantic tale of how Ted Mosby slept with the same 3 women over ten years and Uncle Barney shagged everything that moved... and bring you back to the current day. 8th of June 2012 to be exact. 

In precisely two weeks time, my cousin, Lana, is going to marry one of the most stand-up men I have had the pleasure to meet since coming back to the country, Omar. 

We're rushing around with our last minute fittings, picking up items from various places, receiving frantic phone calls at the most inopportune times, and all the usual wedding-in-the-family activities. Just a few days before her wedding, our whole mildly insane troupe will be flying into Miri, Sarawak (top 5 happiest places in the world) where we will have a massive Sarawakian-style pre-wedding party! 

Alright, alright, it's really about the wedding, the marriage between these two people, and the life that they are about to embark on together. 

But it's also a little about the food and drinks and dressing up. For the rest of us that are not the bride and/or groom at the wedding that is. 

Last weekend, we gathered the close cousins/friends for a tea-time bridal shower for Lana, organised by the newlywed Amy. She chose the place (love it!), theme (think I got it...), and most importantly: the games! We had so much fun over the space of a few hours, with Kaly and I up to our usual competitive tricks and winning all the games (are bridal showers like birthday parties, where the bride should win all the games?) and prizes, and being quite ungracious while doing so.

I wasn't going to blog the cake recipe that I brought to the bridal shower, mostly as it's so simple... but then again, I reckon that those are the best kind! My work-wife, Diyana, sent me the recipe for the Black Magic cake a few months ago and since then I'm sure I've used it at least four times. Forsooth, I stopped wondering why my waist is expanding.

Black Magic Chocolate Cake

Recipe from my baking addiction

• 2 cups sugar
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup Hershey's Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup strong black coffee
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 180C and line or grease your baking tins. I used a Wilton Bundt pan
2. Here's the best part: Combine all the ingredients in the large bowl of your stand mixer and just let it whizz on medium for about 2 minutes! 
3. Pour batter into your baking tin and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a skewer inserted at an angle comes out clean
4. Frost as you like (for this occasion, I whipped up some Chocolate Orange ganache) and Tada! 

So ridonkulously easy, I don't even know what to do with myself. This recipe will yield one of the fluffiest, lightest and chocolatey cakes you will ever have in your life. Try layering it with unsweetened whipped cream! The balance of textures in that mixture creates a wonderful mouthfeel that you'll find yourself craving weeks after. 

Anyway, enough about the cake: To Lana & Omar, I can't wait for the wedding, and I'm sure you two are going nuts at the moment with all the prep, so probably don't have the time nor the inclination to read this blog, but if you do: I wish you both all the best that you can find in each other, that you will make happiness and laughter, and that you will have damn good-looking children! Love you both so much xx Nabs