My cute pineapple tarts! For the Rabbit Year!

I wanted to try baking pineapple tarts for CNY this year and thought I should try doing some cute designs. I searched the cutters I have in my cupboard and thought this teddy bear would do...

I used Bake King pineapple jam and would recommend this to anyone baking pineapple tarts, it tasted great! Being my first time, I omitted sugar from the recipe and my tarts turned out a little dry and bland.

An idea then struck me while having lunch with Wen.

I thought maybe I should try making bunnies since it is the year of the Rabbit! I would only need eyes and the ears. I tried them out over the weekend, got leftover sesame seeds from my x'mas celebration and got some nice sunflower seeds to prepare the ears. Thanks to Wen, he had helped to shell the nuts, though while watching TV!
Lots of hard work on the making of pineapple tarts. First the dough has to be prepared and rested for hours (or overnight), then moulding of the pineapple jams, moulding the dough and jam into a round ball, stick on the sesame seeds, and next the shelled nuts. That's repeated almost 60times!

And off to the oven they stood.

After a good 20-30mins...

I was really glad how they turned out!

CUTE!!

So cute I couldn't bear to eat them.

The only problem... my testers felt they look more like rats than rabbits!!

Urghh..!!

Well, at least they do look cute.

Fruit Tart

I treated my family to a nice fruit tart for teatime, following the recipe of this website.

http://www.joyofbaking.com/FruitTart.html
And it turned out pretty good!

Sarah's Key

Sarah's Key - Tatiana de Rosnay
To those who loves historical fiction, this book is definitely for you.
I couldn't put this down.

A significant part of the Holocaust was secretly hidden away from knowing, July 1942 marked a dark period of French History. Tens of thousands of Jewish families were arrested and held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver and the Drancy internment camp nearby, finally shipped by railway transports to Aushwitz (Poland) for extermination. Not by the Nazis. But the French police.

The Vel' d'Hiv Roundup unveiled another 'interesting' fact about the French authorities at that time. As a sign of collaboration with the then mighty Germany, the French Police actually arrested Jewish children (below 16), in hope of making up a scenario to the general public that the families were deported for work, even though the arrest of children was not requested by the Nazis.

This book brings you to the past of 1942 and the present at 2002. It tells the story of a 10 year old Jewish girl Sarah Strazynski who is forced to go to the Velodrome d'Hiver with her mother and father, innocently leaving behind a 4 year old brother Michel locked in a secret cupboard with the assurance that she would return to let him out when it was safe... Read to find out what happened, what was discovered and what it eventually led to...

I told Wen about it and we agreed that it would make a good movie.
I did a google on the title and... voila! It is screening in Australia!
I can't wait to catch it when it arrives in Singapore!