LIVING GREATLY : Raya 2016

Assalamualaikum

Selamat Hari Raya everybody!

Maaf zahir batin

Remember when I said I didn't want to prepare anything for Raya?

I didn't do that for real, because at the Raya Eve last night I made myself some Raya cookies.

It's so terrible if I didn't prepare anything for Raya huhu

I made the cookies at Yana's house because I don't have oven at home, and it's always better to carry home some lighter containers full with Raya cookies rather than carrying a huge heavy oven to borrow, then to return it again will be another laziness. Last year we borrowed someone's oven from our neighborhood, what a chaos along the way haha!

So for that, I went to the Fathalla, a supermarket near my neighborhood, with Yana to buy the ingredients.

It's so tiring guys, it was like oceans of humans there in Fathalla, especially at the cashier area.

And of course we reached Yana's house, drenching in sweat!

The first thing to do was to make the jem nanas (pineapple jam sounds so specifically for the bread spread) for the tart.

So this time, I decided to make my long time craving tart nanas and cornflakes madu (which is easy to make and always delicious at the same time)

And yeah we had to make the jem nanas out of the whole uncut pineapple, which was wow, I have never cut one! So we slaughtered off the crown, then peeled of the weird skin of the pineapple, and finally, carefully took out the pineapple eyes, Yana said that we looked like dissecting some human muscles haha

I was so amazed at how we successfully cleaned out the pineapple but forgot to snap some pictures.

Then we cut it into smaller dices. I thought that we had to blend the pineapple, but Yana's housemate's Mom said that blended pineapple will have lot of juice. Hence, the dice.

After that, we fried the pineapple dices without oil, waiting for like 10 minutes for the pineapple solid dices to transform into something semi-solid and it felt like forever~

Urgh why so stubborn these dices!!

I felt like blending them! Less than a minute later, I found myself transferring those hot stubborn pineapple babies from the pan into the blender, and less than two minutes later, we got the semi-solid form of pineapple! But still we had to fry to dry it before leaving the jem nanas inside the fridge to cool off!

After breaking the last fast of this Ramadan, we started to prepare for the Raya cookies.

While waiting for the jem nanas to cool off, I prepared the madu for the cornflakes, by using the 'main taram' method, I melted some amount of butter which I didn't know how much exactly, together with the honey and sugar. Clearly, I'm not the type of cook you wanna refer to for the recipe~

After the destined couple had successfully mixed together, I left it for a while to let it cool off, and while that I went crushing the cornflakes, after some time I took the pan out from the kitchen, I put the crushed cornflakes, some raisins, some bijan, and colourful hearts and stars into the lovely couple mixture of butter and honey. Mix them carefully till all the cornflakes coated with the lovely sweet couple.

Came this annoying phase of most of the Raya cookies, to make all of them into bite-sized!

For cornflakes madu, we put it into colourful paper cups, well all my Raya cookies were in cups =.=

So yeah, Yana and I super-patiently put the stuff into the cups, after that, baked them in oven for like 10 minutes, don't remember the temperature, Yana managed that out. The cornflakes madu had finally done!

Now the more difficult part; tart nanas,

I've never made tart nanas before, I was just Mummy's helper, so my knowledge about making tart nanas is basically observational not experiences!

But worries no more, we have the internet and stuff to sort this tart nanas problem out!

So the ingredients are, wheat flour, corn flour, butter, sugar, egg, powder milk, vanilla essence, and yellow artificial colour so that the dough didn't look pale.

If you really wanna know how to make the dough, feel free to search on your own, because the procedures are basically the same.

Mixing the butter, egg and sugar!

After the flour family joined the team!

After my hand joined the team haha

Firstly, we made the trial of three pieces to improvise everything in case these trials have gone bad.

The result after the second longest 15 minutes of my life ( well the first is always OSCE exam man don't you ever dare to seize the throne) was the crust went well, but the jem nanas was a mess!

So SOUR, after all the three scoopfuls of sugar! I've tasted it seconds after I broke my fast and it was good! Maybe it was the post-fasting tongue, so low threshold~

I was so frustrated and decided to improvise the jem nanas, who wants to eat sour tart nanas tell me? Even me the tart nanas all time lover would reject weird-taste tart nanas!

I literally threw LOTS of sugar into the pan and started the frying process all over again!

After thorough tasting and LOTS and LOTS of sugar had been poured into the pan, we decided to cool it off inside the fridge.

While waiting, we made the dough-later-crust and put them into the cups, after finishing the whole dough, we took out the jem nenas and again did the trials, this time two pieces, couldn't waste more of the innocent dough.

After 20 minutes this time, we took out the trials from the oven and cool them off before tasting them.

The result was.........it went WELL! SO WELL !!

Excitedly, Yana and I stuffed the jem nenas onto the crust!

Weren't they beautiful? kikiki~

So that was the story behind the tart nanas!

And today was the first Raya, I woke up for Subuh and couldn't sleep anymore, it's so weird we didn't have to makan sahur anymore, my stomach rumbled so much, but Yana refused to wake up.........

No Yana, no cook, no food :(

Oh ya btw I slept at Yana's house last night, because those tart nanas only done after 12 freaking am!

Soon after that, Yana finally woke up and realized that it's Raya today haha~

She cooked me some fried rice, we didn't cook the rendang ketupat and all, we could have it at the Mara Raya Feast later.

Went home along with the Raya cookies, prepared the baju raya, took bath and got ready to attend the Mara Raya Feast!

I don't have any decent photo of myself alone huhu