My co-teacher's family!

Check out the photo's that Aaron and I did of my co-teacher's neice and nephew at a park on Yeong-do a couple weeks ago!  I'm pretty sure Korean kids are some of the cutest on the planet!

Full post here:

 Aaron Nicholas Photography

 

Homemade Pepero!

"HAPPY NOVEMBER 11th - aka PEPERO DAY!"

There's nothing more generic and unoriginal than giving your friends, co-teachers, girlfriend, boyfriend or spouse, a box of store bought pepero on pepero day!  Don't get me wrong, store bought pepero is great, but homemade is BETTER, don't you agree?!

Last Friday, I picked up a package of nude pepero (1,800 won) and a package of white melting chocolate (2,500 won) - {not pictured,oops!} in Seomyeon.  Luckily I had lots of leftover stuff to decorate my pepero with from last Christmas when I made Christmas cookies, and last Wednesday when I decorated cupcakes!  

I grabbed the tallest and skinniest ceramic cup I had and filled it with the white chocolate, dropped it into a pot of warm water (medium low heat) and waited for the chocolate to melt, occasionally stirring it with a metal chopstick.

Then, I dipped my first pepero stick, laid it out on the wax paper and quickly decorated it to my heart's content before the chocolate hardened! 

Aaron decided to get in on the pepero decorating action! :)

And of course Maverick (AKA: Project Kitty) tried to get in on the action, too, before his little paw was swatted off the table by his mom!  

I could have done this all day if I had had more pepero and more chocolate!  I was definitely in my element.

No finished project is complete without an Instagram, right?!

All in all, I think I dipped and decorated about 50 pepero sticks!  Somehow though, when I was packaging them for my co-teachers, Aaron's co-teachers, and my friend Ashley who I'll see tomorrow, I ended up with 42.  I think there may be a pepero monster living with me!  

2012 Asia Series Game!

The 2012 Asia Series kicked off this week, with the best baseball teams from all of the major Asian leagues, along with the winner from Australia, competing to see who's the BEST in Asia!  Our friend Jinho's sister gave him some FREE tickets to the game, so he invited Aaron, me, Gill, Sam, Crystal and his girlfriend Anne to go to the game today!  FREE baseball tickets with some of my favorite friends?! "YEP! I'm in!"  

Definitely don't have to ask this girl twice!

The orange plastic bags on our heads are handed out by the stadium staff, at the 7th inning, as a way for fans to easily clean up their own garbage before leaving their seat.  Years ago, a tradition began among the Lotte Giants fans to tie the bags on their heads to encourage the team by creating a sea of orange and black around the stadium!  Gilly made ours into cute little bows...

Sam's looked like Alien antennae...

... and Aaron's was a bow tie!  

His bow tie flew off and tried to choke me!  LOL

A little good luck kiss for the Giants.  Muah!

Today's game was between Korea's Lotte Giants and Japan's Yomiuri Giants... not that I really cared who was playing though!  In my opinion, baseball games are about eating baseball-ish food with a choice drink in hand with great friends around to catch up with, cheers to cheer along with, and oh yea, baseball to watch!  Today's game was no exception!  Even with Lotte losing the game, the 7 of us had an awesome time together!  ... and that's what it's all about, right?!

"Lotte Giants Fighting!"

Geez Louise!

This afternoon, 11 of my friends and I were using KAKAO messenger to text each other in a big chat room.  We were texting about something that had happened, and one of my friends wrote: "Geeze Louise!" ...and our amazingly awesome Korean friend (who will remain nameless) responded with, "Who's Louise?"  

Needless to say, it made all of our days!  Hilarious!

Decorating cupcakes in Korea!

Last night, Ashley, Stella and I all met at Dan Hana Cake in PNU to get our cupcake decorating on! 

When it comes to doing cutesy/artsy things, Korea's got it down pat!  This place is basically a full service cupcake/cake decorating shop, with a full menu where you can choose your frosting flavors, frosting colors, frosting tip styles, cake flavors, cake shapes, cake sizes, and cupcake flavors!  There are endless opportunities for dessert decorating fiends like myself!   I snapped a photo of the menu, for anyone interested in how this whole things works. Double click the photo for a larger view. We decided to buy 6 cupcakes (12,000 won total) and 3 different colored frostings (1,000 won each).

After our cupcakes and frosting had been ordered, we headed over to the decorating area to pick out our toppings!

It was all a bit overwhelming - How can you possibly choose when there are a thousand options?!  

Luckily, they have this wall of pictures to inspire you!

Or... you can just walk around and see what other people are doing with theirs!   We had some cake decorating artists in our midst last night - mostly high school girls and 20 something year old couples!

I decided I would do a "days since anniversary" cupcake for Aaron.  Koreans love to count the days that they have been together, but since Aaron and I don't have a distinct dating anniversary, I decided to base it off of our wedding anniversary!  Thanks to the DATE DURATION CALENDAR website, finding out we had been married for 102 days was a piece of cake!  Ashley decided to do the same thing, but her dating anniversary with Adam ended up being 1768 days! WOW!  We grabbed little red plates and loaded up!

By the time we were ready, our cupcakes and frosting had been delivered to our table!

I was READY!

Let's do this!

Ashley's first cupcake was a "ddong (aka poop) themed cupcake"!  Yes, Koreans think poop is cute!

Tada!

Stella went with "portrait cupcakes" of her and Chris! :)

This is my "anniversary cupcake" complete with a sugar J, A, heart, 1 - 0 - 2, peppero cookies, sprinkles and 3 flavors of frosting!  I don't mess around when it comes to celebrating my marriage! 

Here they are, in all their glory!  Mine are in the back (I have no excuse for the freaky face cupcake except to say that decorating cupcakes is WAY harder than it looks!), Ashley's are in the middle, and Stella's are in the front!  Not bad for our first time though, eh?!

Even after decorating 6 cupcakes, we still had all this frosting left over! (I recommend getting 1 or 2 if you're doing cupcakes).  

So, we did what any other frosting-loving-American's would do!  We squeezed it into our mouths!

But not for long! The owner of the place actually brought us a plate full of these little pieces of cake to enjoy, so we piled the frosting as high as we could and laughed as it smeared over our faces!  Or wait, maybe that was just me! :)

When we were ready to go, we loaded our cupcakes onto a tray and walked it up to the front to pay.  They just looked at each of them, figured out what toppings we used, added it up, and gave us the total (24,000 won, which evened out to 8,000 won per person or $3.66 per cupcake!) SCORE!

Now, before I give this place a raving review, I do have to say that the cupcakes are more like muffins and the frosting is the consistency and taste of cool whip, but other than that, it's PERFECT and a super fun thing to do with girlfriends or as a date night!

If you're interested in going and you live in Busan, you're in luck because there are 2 locations!  

Here's the map for the Dan Hana Cake in PNU, where we went...

... just look for this staircase!  It's on the 2nd floor, just below Thirsty Moose.

...and here's the map for Dan Hana Cake in Seomyeon!

So, there you go!   Now you've got a place to get your cupcake decorating on while living in Korea! :)

You can thank me later!