Kaelan's birthday dinner

We have this tradition for us, that for our birthdays each year, we cook each other a nice meal.

For my birthday last year, Kaelan made an awesome Beef Wellington for me. For his birthday this year, he wanted a surf and turf burger.  This is a bison/beef patty with a lobster tail, with a French cheese sauce and homemade fries and onion rings. It turned out pretty good I would say, with few improvements for future since I've never cooked lobster before and I under-cooked it.

This is one of my favorite desserts that Kaelan made, his recipe, is a Chunk Pecan Pie (chocolate rum pecan pie). It is delicious!

Aria Dessert Tour

One of the things I wanted to do before Zoey's arrival is to do a dessert tour of couple places on the Strip that I have never tried. If you do a Yelp search for dessert in Las Vegas, one of the top rated one is Jean Phillippe inside Bellagio or Aria.  I started looking through the pictures and I was determined to try at least something from here. They have so many choices when it comes to desserts, from hot chocolate, pastries, gourmet boxed chocolates and crepes...etc.  

I wish I had more room in my stomach to try everything they had... and the crepe. Maybe next time!
 
Jean Philippe Patisserie

Categories: Desserts, Chocolatiers and Shops, Bakeries

ARIA
3730 Las Vegas Blvd S
Las Vegas, NV 89109

(877) 230-2742

 

Entire dragon made of chocolates, even the cherry blossoms too!

I forgot the name of this one, but it's a chocolate mousse covered in chocolate fondant toppped with a macaroon.  OMG it's a foodgasm in your mouth! A must try for a chocolate lover!

Nutella Napoleon, very light and fluffy!

Key Lime Pie

Chocolate covered strawberries, my favorite at $3.75 a pop but totally worth it.

We then stopped on the 2nd floor of Aria to get ice cream from Chill. Kaelan had the strawberry cheesecake and I had the mango passion sorbet.  We were both in a sugar coma afterwards but it was worth every penny. Our dessert tour came to about $40 total ($20 for the trio dessert, $10 for ice cream and $10 for the chocolate covered strawberries).  Then Kaelan picked up a little gift for Zoey at the gift shop, as you can see here.

Mango Passion Sorbet at Chill.

Apple Pie!

I'm addicted to cooking shows and one of my favorites is Master Chef, we were watching Monday's episode and one of their Mystery Box challenge was the all American classic - apple pie. They have just 1 hour to cook the apple pie and some of them look delicious and some looked disastrous. But I've been craving a good pie for a while and I have never made one. So with hubby's help and his background in cooking and pastry, we decide to make our very first own apple pie.

I didn't realize what a long process it's going to be, from prepping to cooking to baking, it took total of 3 hours at least.  But the end result was delicious, it beats ANY store bought pies, it's a lot of work but definitely worth it at the end. See for yourself:

Prep the dry ingridents

Chop up some cold butter

Work it into the dry mixture, break it into small pieces

Slowly work the dough and put in the fridge if it gets too warm. You cannot let the butter melt.

While the dough is in the fridge, cut and slice some apples.

Season the apples with the sugar and spice and let it sit for 10-15 min to sweat.

Roll out the dough quickly. If it gets too warm the dough will break.

Set it into a pie pan.

Trim off the excess edges.

Texture the edges and fill it up with the apple fillings.

Cut up the rest of the dough into strips. We'll be doing a weaved topping.

Lay the first ones on like this.

Then weave in one by one. Over and under.

Trim off the excess.

Bake with foil for 25 min then take off foil bake for another 25 more.

Finished!