Cakes, Indonesian, Malaysian

Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: The Making of a Sarawak Layer Cake

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Kek Lapis Sarawak – Sarawak Layer Cakes

kek lapis sarawak layer cake medley - copyright house of annie

Want to know what goes into making such beautiful cakes? So did we!

Getting to Know You

Kek Lapis, or Layer Cake, is originally from our neighboring country of Indonesia. It is made of many, millimeter-thin layers of cake, baked one layer at a time to emphasize the layers. The recipe usually calls for butter, eggs, sugar, flour, and other coloring or flavoring ingredients, but no leavening agents. It’s more like a pound cake than the light layer cakes that we have baked in the House of Annie’s own oven.

About 20 years ago, Sarawakians took kek lapis to the next level by incorporating vibrant colors and different flavors than the original Indonesian recipe. They went even further by crafting intricate designs into the middle of the cakes. These beautiful designs are what makes Sarawak Layer Cakes so unique. The cakes are served on special occasions like birthdays, weddings, or cultural celebrations such as Aidilfitri, Christmas, and Chinese New Year.

Continue reading Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: The Making of a Sarawak Layer Cake →

Site News

Stop, Blog Thief!

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Thanks to a lot of commenters and personal emails, we have been alerted to a site that has stolen content from the House of Annie blog and many others. Compare the two screenshots below:

Scraper’s site

House of Annie site

I am extremely upset to see my work posted on someone else’s site, because I have put in hundreds of hours building our site only to see someone else just come and copy our posts to their site. (Okay, they didn’t just copy — they also edited each post to take out our signatures and also changed the internal links to point to their site.)

Because this “scraper” blog is hosted on Blogspot / Blogger (Google), there are a couple of things you can do to report it. If this blog has stolen content from your site, file a DMCA report to Google. The URL for the online report is

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/request.py?contact_type=blogger_dmca_infringment

For the rest of you dear readers who are just plain mad and would like to do something about it, report the blog as Spam by going to

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/request.py?contact_type=spam&hl=en&blog_ID=&blog_URL=

and entering

http://hot-kitchen.blogspot.com

in the text box.

Hopefully Google will investigate and take this site down.

To the scraper who stole our content, I leave this haiku:

I wish you would get
A hundred thousand bug bites
Where the sun don’t shine

Aloha, Nate

Update Oct 6, 2009: DMCA report submitted to Google. We’ll see how long it takes to get the site taken down.

Update Oct 7, 2009: Google has taken down the site! Hot-kitchen has gone cold.

LET THAT BE A LESSON TO YOU BLOG THIEVES!

Thai, Vegetables

Simple, Sweet and Spicy Cucumber Salad

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sweet and spicy cucumber salad

I bet that for those of you that grow your own veggies, you’re probably inundated by cucumbers right now if you’re growing them. That and zucchinis—well, if you’re growing zuchs, you should expect to be inundated!

Cucumbers are lovely to eat when they’re fresh. Crisp, juicy, and so cool when the summer is so hot. Living here in Malaysia, cucumbers are used raw in so many dishes (mostly as garnishes but also as a nice contrast to spicy and heaty foods).

While visiting a friend’s aunt recently, we were invited to stay for dinner (have I already mentioned how hospitable everyone is here?). She served us this cucumber salad and Nate just loved it. It was really delicious, a nice combination of sweet, tart and spicy. I, of course, asked for a recipe. It was such a simple recipe and I couldn’t wait to try it out myself.

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Malaysia

Ramadhan Bazaar Dinner

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I really didn’t feel like cooking last Thursday. It was one of those days when I just felt lethargic, and didn’t have any mood to do much. The day had started with rain and then more rain. The whole morning was dark and gloomy and by the time the sun deemed to peek out, it was already mid-afternoon. Somehow the weather just made me feel very unproductive. Or maybe it’s that one-month mark of being here…feeling not quite like this is home, missing California and feeling somewhat homesick (which is strange because I am Malaysian after all).

So when it came time to prepare dinner, I just didn’t have any energy to do it. I called Nate at work and told him that we’d have to eat out and get some food to go. He tried to convince me that we had enough food at home to make something and maybe we could just pick up a roast chicken or something to go with it. I tentatively agreed but I still wasn’t really feeling it. I was just not wanting to cook anything at all.

Then, it struck me. In all the chaffeuring I had been doing sending Nate to and from work, I passed by this Ramadhan Bazaar at Stutong Market almost every weekday. And almost everytime we passed it on the way home, I would say to Nate, “we should stop by one day and pick up dinner from here before the Ramadhan (fasting) month is over.” And by Thursday, the fasting month was quickly coming to a close; Aidil Fitri would be celebrated on Sunday. So I called Nate back and said, “let’s go to the Ramadhan Bazaar and pick up some dinner there instead!” He thought it was a great idea and so that was where we headed after work.

Continue reading Ramadhan Bazaar Dinner →

Making you hungry for the good things in life