We had a wonderful Easter dinner at home with J's parents.
When I saw chick-shaped deviled eggs and pink radish mushroom online, I thought I should make them. I am so happy with my creations! They were truly adorable. Also I made two kinds of dips:
roasted vegetable spread and Cook's Illustrated's Cannellini bean/Edamame dip. I used low-fat cheese for the former and low-fat Greek yogurt for the latter. Served with toasted Challah bread, both were tasty.
Main dish was smoked duck and brisket. This was the first day to try our new smoker that J's parents gave J last Christmas. Since we couldn't find a fresh whole duck, J's parents kindly bought one and marinated it for us by following a recipe of Spit-roasted duck with Chinese flavorings by Steven Raichlen. For brisket, we adapted a recipe of Braggin' Rights Brisket by Cheryl and Bill Jamison. After about 5 hours, Duck and brisket were done. Both were beautifully smoked!
J's mother made Spring pea and mushroom with prosciutto as a side. Delicious! J quickly made toasted bread with cheese and herbs.Yummy!
I made Texas-style BBQ sauce by adapting a recipe from Cook's
Illustrated, too. The sauce was pretty tart. According to J's
suggestion, I added a couple of table spoons of honey and simmered it
longer. The sauce turned out very nicely. I enjoyed the sauce on brisket very much.
Ah, talking about a dessert... I made 5 layer coconut cake with passion fruit filling, following a recipe from Food & Wine. It went wrong. Recently when I was researching an authentic recipe of Pad Thai, I knew Palm sugar is one of the key ingredients and how healthy the South-Asian staple sugar is. I bought a bag of Palm sugar from Nuts.com last week, looking forward to making Pad Thai once I get tamarind paste soon. On the other hand, when I was going to bake the coconut cake the day before Easter, I read the recipe that called for 2 and 1/4 cup of sugar, which sounded too much. I would like to reduce the amount at least to 1 and 1/2 cup. And suddenly I had an idea to replace all the sugar with Palm. I read some articles/blogs saying you can simply replace refined sugar with Palm sugar for cooking although some said Palm sugar is not as sweet as regular sugar, which should be no problem because the passion fruit filling and whipped cream would be well-sweeten with Splenda. However my idea didn't work. Perhaps because I changed the amount of sugar too much. Or simply Palm sugar didn't fit to the recipe. In terms of the recipe, it was kinda strange. Mixing all-purpose flour and sugar with butter and coconut milk all together at the beginning? Without creaming butter and sugar? No cake flour? The recipe most likely would develop gluten badly and make the cake super dense.... But the beautiful cake picture on the magazine convinced me everything would be alright. No, it didn't. The cake was dense and tasted awfully terrible.
I loved the passion fruit filling. The topping of coconut and sweeten soft whipped cream was more than perfect. Sadly the cake experience was nothing but tragedy... In order to get it over, let me back to one of many happy moments from this Easter.
Hello, my little chick, you are so cute and make me smile!
