Archive for February, 2012

Weekend fun: Gingerbread cupcakes with lemon frosting

February 20th, 2012 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Food I can cook in China, Life

So I baked cupcakes over the weekend!

For my mommy, who doesn't eat them so I can eat them alllllll.

The cupcake craze landed in Beijing right about the same time I did, way back in 2009. Now, there is a gourmet cupcake shop near my office, two bakeries that deliver cupcakes to your door, and a trendy cafe that specializes in cupcakes.

Like everywhere else in the world, they are expensive little mofos, costing from 22 kuai ($3.49). For less than that, I could get a bowl of beef noodles and two rou bings for a not particularly healthy, but filling, dinner. Cost of living, folks. I don’t know why I have to pay U.S. prices for cupcakes in China, but it has something to do with bakers who are unwilling to use inferior Chinese ingredients.

I’ve only made cupcakes a handful of times with this tea cupcake set my sister got me a couple of Christmases ago. How charming! Too bad they only come in cute numbers, like four, so all that hard work gets eaten in the span of two minutes. That amount of effort is only justified for a few occasions.

So I’ve spent more than two years looking for a cupcake pan small enough for my oven. Not just for cupcakes, you know, but also muffins. But my oven is so small that even half-sized pans for mini muffins were too big! So I have mostly just been buying cupcakes.

An Easy-Bake Oven for not-quite grown-ups.

But now, I don’t have an excuse to indulge in these delightfully sinful treats anymore! My mommy solved all of these problems in one go, and got me this appropriately pink cupcake maker for my birthday! I was finally able to test it out this weekend and made a batch of blueberry muffins and gingerbread cupcakes. This could be the start of something very exciting, like cupcakes every weekend!

Long nian kuai le, and other stories

February 13th, 2012 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Life, Shenanigans, Travels

Winter. It’s boring and cold, especially in Beijing, which turns into a giant windy freezer box for a good four months. I blame the cold for everything, including my disinterest in writing.

But I have actually been up to stuff, such as:

  • Looking for an apartment. Man, what a hassle! Especially in the cold. After going, in the cold, to see a crappy apartment, you just don’t feel like looking at anymore. Instead, you feel torn about whether you want to go back out into the cold or stay in the crappy apartment, which is dirty and decorated weird, but is shielding you from the cold. Nevertheless the real estate agent, who speaks to you in a jarring voice that could only be described as soothing robot voice, drags you to see another apartment anyway, which is too expensive. And crappy.
  • Finding an apartment. Wow! Boyfriend and I totally lucked out. We found a huge apartment for a great price and it’s opposite a park and not much further to the office than old current apartment! And we didn’t have to pay an annoying, unhelpful agent for it.
  • Getting tired of Chinese New Year festivities. Can it be? After two years of month-long firework extravaganzas, I was growing tired of the spectacularly loud and colorful displays of exploding gunpowder? Hmm. Maybe not tired of, but not as impressed and enthralled by. Or can I chalk up my malaise to tighter government regulations?
  • (Speaking of fireworks, I cannot NOT get giddy and excited when I see colorful explosions in the sky. But how come Chinese people look bored when they set them off? Is that what decades of setting off fireworks does to someone?)
  • Buying pet dragons. It’s the Year of the Dragon!
  • Going to the Philippines. I went to five of them, in fact. I did not detect any hostilities remaining from the hostage deaths incident of 2010. Nope, they were very friendly and servicey. Unfortunately, there were also a lot of Chinese, who I presume were also taking a break from China. Still, I nominate it for Best Holiday Ever.
  • Getting tan, parasailing, bananananana boating, falling into ocean, playing badminton and beach volleyball, driving a motorbike, taking boyfriend on motorbike ride, staying in a bungalow, staying in a resort, staying at a bed and breakfast, being an extra in a movie, snorkeling, wading through shallow waters to get to a boat, climbing into one boat from another boat, getting sunburned on a boat with a 5-pound coconut.
  • Watching three of my teams lose in the same week, all from last-quarter/minute/extra time comebacks. God, how depressing. (The last one was just Sunderland in a non-important match, and I only care about them because boyfriend gets upset if they lose, but man, unnecessary. The other teams shall remain unnamed.)
  • Moving. I’ve never hired movers before, but they are so efficient! I hadn’t even finished packing and they had all my shit in the truck ready to go. Jesus. They make me WANT to move. Then, boyfriend and I spent the past weekend scrubbing and cleaning and unpacking and organizing and rearranging. Now that most of it is out of the way, we can go furniture shopping!

So that was the last 5.5 weeks in a nutshell.

The unreported food shortage

February 9th, 2012 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Life

There is a food shortage going on right now in Beijing. I went to three different restaurants for lunch today and they were all out of food.

Restaurant 1: Wild Honey

Boyfriend and I sit down, ready to try something new. It was 1 p.m., admittedly on the late end for lunch, but the small cafe was still full of diners. I chose a tuna sandwich; he went for some kind of pizza with nachos. The waitress (not even kindly) informed me that they are out of bread. Seriously, bread. A pretty staple ingredient for more than five things on their menu. Fine, croissant, whatever. We wait. Ten minutes later, waitress comes and tells us that they are out of nachos! But why did it take them 10 minutes to discover they were out of nachos? We left.

Restaurant 2: 钰花溪 Tangka

So this spicy ramen place seemed to be out of everything we tried to order. Out of six things we pointed at, they had two, which is what we ended up with.

Restaurant 3: Not really a restaurant

I went to check out an herbal tea shop to see if they had bubble tea. They didn’t. Not that they were out of it, they just don’t have it on the menu. Anyway, I tried to get a coconut sago thing instead, which they were out of. At this point, I just gave up trying to order anything.

Actually, it’s quite common to go to a restaurant and, upon ordering your favorite dish, be told they are out of it. Oh, geez, you wonder, why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning, like they do in the U.S.? But you grudgingly move on and try to order something else you like. That’s when you realize why they didn’t tell you what they were out of at the beginning — because they’d be reciting so many dishes.

Restaurants in China serve giant book-fulls of dishes, which means they need to stock a shit ton of raw ingredients. However, they don’t, and bad management/planning means that they don’t stock enough of lots of things to meet demand. I wonder if their lack of respect for demand stems from their Communist days.

Well, it could be worse. There could actually be a food shortage.