Belated Mother’s Day/Birthday Post

I picked flowers from our garden for my mom.

My sister’s birthday was yesterday and last weekend she came home from college to jointly celebrate her birthday and Mother’s Day with us. Since my mom flew off to Taiwan for a month on Saturday, we celebrated early on Friday night.

Started off� by trying out a new sushi place by our house:

My uni order.

Sashimi for 4.

Kakuni (braised pork belly. So good! I love the fatty bits the best)

Sauteed shishito peppers and shitake mushrooms. Delicious; I could taste that they sauteed the mushrooms in butter. Luscious.

I made my mom a card and spent a good portion of the week baking this:

Taro Ice Cream Cake! Let me say, I worked my ass off baking this cake since each portion was homemade. It was my first time baking a layer cake and you’d think that I’d want to start off easy but no, I’m a masochist and I wanted to make this as hard on myself as possible @_@

Bottom layer: taro ice cream from scratch (I actually bought fresh taro, steamed it, made a sweetened paste with it then churned ice cream with it), then a layer of homemade chiffon cake, then a layer of homemade sweet taro paste, then another layer of homemade chiffon cake for the top. I also went through the trouble of making buttercream for the crumb coat and to sandwich the layers together, then I made a stabilized whipped cream to frost the top. Oh. And the amateur-ish purple decorations I made from piped royal icing that I did a few days before and let air dry. It looks a little “rustic”, but I’m thinking if I didn’t have to worry about ice cream melting, I’d have spent more time smoothing out the whipped cream.

I think by the end I almost hated the cake since I spent so much time on it. It nearly consumed my mind, just planning out the logistics (how to mold the ice cream and taro layers, how to frost and assemble without the ice cream melting, choosing what kind of cake to make as the type will affect its softness upon freezing, and the type of frosting to use on top). In the end though, it was all worth it as my family LOVED it (even my dad and he’s not even a taro cake fan) so that made me extremely happy and my efforts were worth it.

That being said, I want to try baking more layer cakes . . . just maybe not ice cream ones. Next time I’ll just serve ice cream on the side, a la mode.

It was kind of strange not spending the actual Mother’s Day without my mom around, but she landed safely in Taiwan and that’s all I could ask for. Hope everyone’s mother’s day was wonderful!