It is Bulan Ramadhan (the Muslim fasting month) and the most common food readily available this month are…
Dates
I love dates (the edible kind!) and I’d stock up on plenty of dates during Ramadhan each year. Do you know that dates are fruits like this…
Fresh dates
And no, you can’t eat it when it looks so crunchy and nice because it’d be dry. It is best eaten when it is ‘well done’ as in when it softens. Anyway, dates are packed with nutrients and quite good for health too.
If you like honey and you also like chocolate, you will love this recipe for a honey chocolate cake! It is a combination of two of the most wonderful things on earth! Well, other than chocolate and peanut butter, I think honey and chocolate goes quite well together too.
I watch quite a lot of Nigella Lawson’s cooking shows so the honey chocolate cake recipe is her recipe, not mine. However, I’d still like to share it here since it is absolutely wonderful!
Compared to the baked mooncakes, making the ping pei mooncakes are much easier and simpler, though it still takes up quite a bit of time mixing the dough, kneading it, wrapping the filling and moulding it. I always preferred the non-bake mooncakes compared to the baked ones, probably because can eat it cold!
Before I ventured into my mooncake making experiment, we bought some commercial mooncakes to try. So, if you are not the type to slave for hours to make your own mooncakes, you can always get pretty good commercial mooncakes available almost everywhere this month.
Leong Yin Mooncake
We have tried quite a few different ‘brands’ of mooncakes over the years and most are much too sweet. We usually stick to the few that are not too sweet such as the Leong Yin Mooncake and Foh San Mooncakes (from Ipoh).
As a chocolate lover, I am always on the lookout for a great place to buy chocolates and I absolutely love the specialty handmade ‘designer’ chocolate shops in a few shopping complexes in KL.
It is too bad that there are no such shops here in Penang but I can probably understand that there are probably not much market here since those chocolates are really expensive and we all know how kiamsiap (stingy) Penangites are.
So, a few months back I stumbled upon The Chocolate Boutique in Leith Street here in Penang. Actually I knew about it when . . . → Read More: Where NOT to buy chocolates
Chocolate lovers like me do not really need any reason to indulge in the sinfully wonderful dessert / snack but it is wonderful sometimes to learn that eating chocolate is good for your health! Here’s a video on the benefits of eating chocolate everyday which I found interesting:
Alternatively, you can read about the benefits of chocolate (and also get loads of other chocolaty information) at cocoa-chocolate.com or by clicking here.
Now, let’s get down to business. I found this sugar-free, dairy-free, low GI, gluten-free chocolate called Mini Blues over at Cold Storage and couldn’t resist but buy . . . → Read More: Guilt-free Chocolate!
