Let the Museum Tour Begin

Museum, museums, museums. That is what I said I will be doing all my weekends here at D.C. With the fine collection of Smithsonian museums that are all free, I have been visiting quite a few so far. It’s my second week here at D.C. and I have been to four museums. Not bad. There are a total of 18 museums in D.C., and two more Smithsonian institutes in New York. My goal is to visit all of them and write about them, and the idea is I will have a little D.C. museum guide here. There are also other museums that require (quite a bit of ) money to enter, such as the Newseum and Spy Museum. I do think I will eventually visit those but for now, the free ones. For this post, I introduce to you two museums: American Indian, and Air and Space.                                
                            

Learning the Science in Cookie Making and Testing it Out in D.C.

New city, new kitchen, new people, new job (internship). But making yummy food for myself and to share and make other people happy hasn't changed.

Steamed Cake: Forget About the Oven

Most people think of cake being made in the oven, but today I'm sharing a new option: steamed cake. Steamed cake is delicious, it's got a texture different from baked cake, it's dense, soft, and perhaps a healthier choice than baked cake since there is much less oil involved. Steamed cake is somewhat of a traditional Chinese sweet pastry, in the Chinese household (or Taiwanese, East Asia in general) a oven is not a standard appliance in the kitchen, in fact, very few kitchens in Taiwan have a oven. Therefore, if you are a oven, and you really feel like some cake, give this recipe a try. When I was an exchange student in the Czech Republic the dorm kitchen did not have an oven, yet one day I felt like making pastry so bad and I thought of the steamed cake. I found a recipe online, and improvised a bit making my own chocolate steamed cake. I made mine using a traditional rice cooker, which is basically a rather simple apparatus that involves a big pot with a smaller pot inside, and water between the two pots heated by electricity. You just need a big pot, and a big bowl that fits inside the pot.