My sister Josie, a purposeful life 2018

My forever active sister Josie, doing what she likes to do now that she has finally retired from her nine to five job. I am compelled to write something about her as she is always posting things that she has done at home. One of those favourite pastime of hers is learning how to bake so she could have her wonderful teatime at home. She is always doing something, be it pruning the plants or cleaning her whole house the tasks is extensive and exhaustive. I am really happy and glad that she is being occupied with all these leisure activities, this is a purposeful life and I wish her to keep learning and being occupied by things that she loved.

At her place, time for her to relax and enjoy a cup of tea and a slice of her home baked cake

                                   

Josie Home baked Cake

                                                                  (Pictures courtesy of Josie)

Mochi Dunkin Doughnut

Just the other day I noticed that our regular Dunkin doughnut store has a new version of Mochi doughnuts in very attractive and floral tempting shapes and flavour, I decided to try a few of them. I love the usual evergreen Dunkin doughnut flavour, like the Smiley with cream custard and strawberry filling doughnuts. I sometimes craved for those soft icing with hundreds and millions decor too. These Mochi doughnuts are a bit chewy and it takes time for me to get accustomed to chewing my doughnut, they are made using sticky rice flour. There are a variety of flavour like Strawberry Mochi, Glazed Mochi, and Mango Berry Mochi  are some of my favourites. Having tried about five of it, I still preferred my old fashioned Dunkin doughnut original flavour, but I can, once in awhile pretend to like all.

Tempting Mochi Dunkin Doughnut

Great for Teatime with my home made pecan Brownies

This one from Taiwan MRT station when we visited it a few years back

Pancake day

Today is Pancake day for me. I just love these Scallion pancakes for breakfast, teatime and in fact, anytime of the day when you feel like flip flapping after a monotonous day, a pancake can make your day blissful.
The ingredients are really very simple, all you need is flour, seasoning, minced scallions and shallots, a little water to mix the batter and you are ready to fry it in a heated non stick pan with a little oil. Fry it golden brown on both sides. For this particular pancake I use hot water to scald the flour and then fry it in a heated non stick pan. This type of pancakes are popular in China and Taiwan. It's their staple diet.

Scallions Pancake

Pancake dough

2018, Jonathan birthday

Jonathan birthday this year July 2018, was a  quiet affair with only  a few of his friends in attendance. It was because the next day we were due to fly to the UK for his graduation. I, as usual baked a birthday cake for this happy occasion. This time I chose to bake a carrot cake, which turned out quite satisfactory and very delicious, yes, I am not exaggerating as I have always loved carrot cake with the cream cheese icing. I even make some marzipan to cover the cake top before I iced it with the cream cheese so that it will be nice and even. I also bake my favourite sugar cookies, which is crisp and melt in the mouth taste. I actually gave these cookies, nicely wrapped as a thank you gift to Jonathan's friends. We did have a good time and later in the day Jonathan went out with his friends to celebrate a bit.

Delicious Carrot cake

Marzipan Covered  Carrot cake

Melt in the mouth Sugar Cookies

Garden of fruits at home in Patikang, Keningau

So much happening within these few months that I feel overwhelmed by it all. The weather has been
nice, that is warm and sunny and back home at my mother's place there has been a good bumper harvest of fruits. I sure would like to be there to taste those organic fruits as I could see by the picture they posted, all are juicy and full of goodness. My sister Josie even jokingly said that, oftentimes my sister Veronica and nephew Alex would walk to the exotic Longan tree  to just pluck the fruit and enjoy it. Well, I wouldn't be surprised at all because those fruits were tempting enough and the trees were overbearing with it.

Juicy Pineapple fruit from Marilyn's garden

Exotic Longan fruits

Lime green Star fruit