I hope that everyone had a fabulous Easter! While my night’s rest was cut short with an early rising it was a nice holiday. So I got ready in my Sunday’s best, grabbed the (possibly) disasterous cake pops and a bottle of wine and we headed for to catch a train to Long Island. Now, up until this point we hadn’t actually tried our cake pops, but I vowed that we’d try them on the train and if they were bad maybe we could just forget them on the train and never mention them again! We split one on the train though and sure enough they actually tasted pretty darn good! And they were pretty cute (forgot to take pic sorry!) so the frustrating night before ended up having a happy ending. Yay! I like happy endings!

And so about an hour and a half later we were getting off the train and headed for mass at the church Chris and his family grew up going to. The service we went to had an Easter-Egg hunt for the kids following mass so there was an extra number of children packed into the mass. Chris warned me that their priest sometimes thinks he’s a stand-up comedian, and he didn’t fail to impress. It was a really nice Easter mass speaking to the sacrifice and God’s love. He talked a lot about how today people are afraid to give all of their trust or faith and rather only take in small pieces. For example, he talked about how people can find any and every excuse to get out of going to church while we make rationalizations for other things in our life. He gave a funny example with this guy who told his wife he wasn’t going to mass that day because he didn’t like the priest, and the wife responded you don’t like the bartender, but you still go to the bar! I thought it was a funny comment anyways. It was a good point though that we find every reason to run away from faith and God and during a season of hope and renewal it ended on a nice message of striving to do better. Overall a nice sermon though!

After church we headed back to Chris’ family’s house for brunch complete with all 4 boys at home (which doesn’t happen that often I learned). It was a really nice brunch and it was nice to be taken in for a family function during a holiday I’d normally spend with my family back home! After brunch we got a little bit of a break before we headed over to Chris’ Aunt’s house for another round of eating for dinner! I cannot say I went hungry on Easter that is for sure! I finally got to meet a couple of people whose names come up in stories all the time, but I hadn’t actually met yet so it was nice to put a face to the name! One of his cousins and her husband also lived in Seattle for a couple of years while her husband worked at Microsoft so it was fun to talk to some people familiar with Washington! Chris’ aunt pulled out the photo albums too as soon as she knew I was from around Seattle and already agreed to jump on the next plane to Seattle when I go back to visit (Glad Seattle had a lasting impression on her!).

It truly was such a wonderful visit though and I’m so glad I was invited!

This weekend got off to a great start on Saturday with a trip down to Chinatown with some great company of the Media Maison staff and guests for Dim Sum! My first experience with Dim Sum happened this summer during my visit with my boss and since then I’ve been looking forward to my next trip. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been a little spoiled with my Dim Sum experiences because who else can you go with that you get to skip the wait, get VIP seating and treatment, and have all of the best foods picked out for you? Well, you do if you have a boss like mine! My boss is originally from Hong Kong and speaks fluent Catonese making the Dim Sum experience a lot more authentic than I would probably have on my own if I went with some friends. We went to the Golden Unicorn, where I would highly recommend. If is Sam’s favorite, who was raised in Hong Kong, then I think it is about as close to real Chinese food as you’re going to get! It’s such a different experience from the normal Chinese-American restaurants we are used to!

After brunch we headed out for a bit of dessert before heading uptown at Baked by Melissa. Baked by Melissa is famous for their bite-sized cupcakes that equate to that perfect last bite! They had a couple of special Easter flavors too so it was fun to try some new flavors. After cupcakes we were onto our next mission of finding all the ingredients for these things called Cake Pops that I have been talking about making for weeks. That ended up taking a little bit more time than expected. Because New York grocery stores are so small there are a lot less options in variety. After visiting 5 stores though we settled on the variety and prices and just finished off our list. After that we decided to go to Chris’ apartment to attempt the cake pops because the Yankees game was going to be on, and you know how boys are with their sports. That would have been all fine and dandy except for the fact the boys haven’t turned on their oven once since living in their apartment for the last 7 years! I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I mean an oven is an oven right? Wrong, once I opened the oven to see if it was pre-heated the apartment filled with smoke from the oven. We later found out it was probably burning off dust inside (gross!). So, we had to pack everything back up and trek back to my apartment, no Yankees game included. 

Once at my apartment where the oven works perfectly fine we were back on the road for success, or so I thought. It turns out that making cake pops were not the easiest thing for us. Certainly not as easy as the Youtube videos make them look! I dyed some Easter eggs in between to try and calm my frustrations, but it was a mere distraction. Even Scootie got into the action of dying eggs and also knocked over one of the dye cups.. Oh Scootie. Once the eggs were dyed it was back to the cake pops.. dun, dun, dun.

By this time it was 1 o’clock the batch of melted chocolate I used food coloring to dye purple didn’t turn out and I was ready to call it a night with 12 done and about 20 to do. We finished as many as we could before wanting to pull our hair out, but that moment came a little too soon. I just wanted them to be perfect so I could take them to Long Island for Easter! Perfect was not on my side though and I ended up going to bed exhausted and frustrated.