"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing..." -Helen Keller
 
What kind of wonders can be found on the back street? Well, besides the Backstreet Boys (who we encountered a little too closely at Karaoke TV last night), we happened to stumble into a chocolatey surprise, here pronounced "Oh-va-tian"...

Um, can you say "More Ovaltine Please?!?!!!!!!!" Yes, friends, here on the back streets of China, we have found the subject of the ever-made-fun-of commercial, Ovaltine. I drank one cup, then I extended my cup for seconds with the enthusiasm of an Ovaltine kid. Good stuff. Drink up, friends!

But beware-- according to this poster I found, Ovaltine consumption before bed may result in an alternative lifestyle.
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Photo Source: http://www.mommywords.com/2011/06/have-breakfast-smoothies-with-me-and-ovaltine-at-type-a-parent/
 
One of our good friends was coming over for lunch and a birthday celebration in her honor. I figured she might enjoy panda-themed cakes, so I made these little cupcakes. The problem was, we found out the day before she came that she didn't like chocolate, which is what the lower part of the panda should have been made of for the best look. Also, she showed up 2 hours earlier than we expected and had to leave earlier than expected, so these were hurriedly thrown together in the other room... They're not all they could have been, but they were a cute idea we'll probably try again when we have more time & more interest in chocolate.

First, I used some mini yellow cupcakes and frosted them with cream cheese icing. I used a dark chocolate bar which had already melted during shopping to draw on the rings around the eyes and the mouths. The eyes and noses are made of dry black beans, and the ears are halved mini-Oreos, one of the two western cookies we can buy here.
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The base of the panda body was a regular-sized cupcake (should have been chocolate). I frosted them with cream cheese frosting and sprinkled on brown cookie crumbs. Normally, this part would have been chocolate cake sprinkled with Oreo bits or left plain. I put big Oreo halves (or fragments as I hurriedly worked with whatever happened as I chopped) on the front of these cupcakes as panda arms, and added a dollop of cream cheese frosting to help secure the heads.
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Finally, I attached the heads. They should have had little Oreo-half feet as well, but time just wouldn't allow. Still, they were cute & fun. I think it might have been her first theme cake!
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Half birthdays are a young Sirles family tradition. This year, for Austin's 24 1/2 birthday, two of his friends came over for homemade hot pockets and cake. Now theme cakes are most certainly a Lowe family tradition. Following in my mother's footsteps, I decided to get to work. This year I made a dinosaur theme cake. So fun, and altogether pretty easy!

First, I made two round chocolate cakes. The recipe will appear shortly on the "Cooking & Eating" page.

I frosted the first cake with some green cream cheese icing that was a total experiment with some cream cheese we'd been randomly given from another town. I covered the top of the cake and let the frosting hang down around the outside edges.
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Then I chopped up the second round cake to get four small cirles, each one slightly smaller than the last. This was for the volcano.
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I stacked those four circles and cut around them to even them out. The volcano look was a good thing and allowed me not to worry about any rough or uneven places.
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Now I went into a number of toy stores looking for dinosaur figurines and could find none. The conversation usually went something like this (in Chinese, of course):

Shop worker: Miss, what age child are you shopping for?

Me: (Thinking to myself: There's no way I'm going to answer that question.) Um, I'm just looking for some small dinosaurs.

Shop worker: We don't have any.  [Kind of looks at me like I'm crazy.]

So I settled for these paper dinosaurs I had at home. Yes, I just happen to keep a collection of paper dinosaurs. I laminated their feet with scotch tape so they'd be re-usable, then I dug them in. I also placed some candy rocks from the local supermarket around the cake.
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The last thing to do was to add some lava to that volcano. I made some vanilla pudding and dyed it red, then poured it down the side of the volcano.
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And that was that. We had a great time. Austin loved it.
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So I cut open a watermelon the other day and found this beautiful swirl-shaped design. Are watermelons always like that? I thought this was super cool!
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No, we're not in Japan, but this might be as close as we're going to get. We gave making sushi our best shot.

First: the cucumber slices, carrot slices, beef strips, rice, and seaweed sheets.
Second: cover the seaweed with a thin coating of rice.
Third: Lay strips of veggies and meat.
Fourth: Roll it up.
Perhaps our downfall was the lack of a sushi mat, or really cheap seaweed sheets, or that our rice was too hot or too wet... but there was definitely a downfall. It was still good; it just looked more like a seaweed massacre than an elegant night at a Japanese sushi restaurant.
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What do you do when you have a whole stinking bunch of bananas that you've completely forgotten about until it's too late? If there's just one banana, I'll toss it into the next batch of pancakes or maybe just toss it in general... but to waste a whole bunch?... Desperate times call for desperate measures... these are only a portion of the oatmeal-banana muffins that came out of our countertop oven... Austin was a happy man!
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He loves to hear "I love you." He loves soft pretzels. Why not both in one?
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I took this picture of some pancakes I made a few months ago and think, if I may say so, that it's the way all pancakes ought to look. Notice that I took the picture... there are some things you just have to remember because they're not going to happen every time... Of course, the most beautiful background for this picture was my lovely kitchen counter. Yuck!
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In a country practically devoid of turkey, sometimes one must make their own. The first is a picture of a fruit turkey Austin and I made for last Thanksgiving; the second is a picture of a turkey cake we made in the basement of my old dormitory a few years ago, back when we were "just friends."
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Last week we invited some friends... somewhere between friends and acquaintances, really... to our home for dinner on Friday night. They called a few days before Friday to let us know they'd forgotten that it would be their daughter's birthday on Friday and they were having a party at 6:30 pm. They invited us to the party instead, and we rescheduled the dinner at our place for Saturday evening.

Friday evening. 6:38 pm. We were strolling in, fashionably late. (Is there any other way, really, when fashion is just bursting out the seams of your being?) We knocked on the door and it opened several seconds later. Expecting to find a party of screaming six-year-olds, we were met with silence, and a host who may or may not have forgotten we were coming... They just smiled and went to the kitchen to start cooking. We sat on the couch and watched TV with the birthday girl. Later we were told we were the only ones who would be at the party that night. So interesting... so slightly awkward... did they know we were coming to the party to which we were invited?

Finally, around 8:00, they started calling a bunch of people, and slowly, the six-year-olds trickled in, just in time for cake. I applaud them on their impeccable timing. 

Now this country isn't really rockin' it on the birthday cake front. In fact, we didn't know if they knew what real cake was, so we decided to make some cake for dessert the following night. All of our normal desires for health were replaced with a drive to introduce this family to some real cake. I found a great little recipe for cake, and another for icing, and went for it. I baked it in two circles, then assembled and frosted them to make this little ladybug cake. For a cake that took only 3 minutes to decorate, it was really cute and well loved.
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The cake in its early stages of ladybug-ship.
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The completed ladybug. I left the head unfrosted, frosted the body pink, added some Oreos* as spots, and some chocolate sprinkles (thanks, Austin's family) to divide the wings. We had a thin pink candle I rounded for its smile and some white foam circles that I designed as eyes last-minute. So fun!

*I raced to the supermarket last-minute for these Oreos, one of the few western food products existing in our town. They were out of regular flavor, so I grabbed these ones called "Double Delight," assuming they were just like Double Stuffs or something... Turns out, they were half chocolate filling, half peanut butter. Do they have that in America? They're super amazing... A dangerous discovery!