How I Spent My 23rd Birthday... Plus a Brownies Recipe!!

I'm back my fellow subjects! LOL! Kidding~ Had to be apart from my blog because my lappy had to undergo a massive repair! So, while I was silent from this blogging world, a lot people asked me to post an entry about my birthday but I was super lazy to do so (with a very valid reason may I say!). Now that I'm finally online..... let me enlighten you guys with the 'fabulous' celebration I did for my birthday which was....... N.O.T.H.I.N.G!!! Yup! Nothing!~


So, here's the whole story... On 16th December 2010, a day after JYJ's Xiah Junsu's 24th birthday (ceyh.. nak sebut gak tu.. hihi) I celebrated my 23rd birthday. And to be honest with all of you, that has got to be the most boring-est (grammar exception here please.. lol) birthday I'd ever spent in my life! Dad's in Penang for a hearing (I don't know why these people pandai sangat asked my dad pi dengar hearing kat mahkamah Penang sedangkan he works in Ipoh High Court!), Mum had to work.... jaga SPM and my 2 younger sisters were too busy doing their own stuffs to celebrate their kononnye beloved sister punye birthday.. (bertuah betol! I jadi beloved sis bile belanja u all shopping dgn tgk wayang je ek?).


But let's sweep this issue aside. Birthdays were never a big thing in my family anyways (nak sedapkan hati je ni)... So I don't really give a damn actually.. Especially since my friends threw me a birthday party in 2008 back in the UK and last year I had an awesome time spending my birthday with my midnight shifts colleagues in Royal Mail UK!!! So not doing anything for my birthday this year is nothing big! (Uisy.. terasa sangat loser menulis perenggan ini~ Big 'L' to the forehead peeps! LOL!)


So, to merely spend my boring birthday by myself, I decided to bake myself a birthday brownies! (OMG! I feel like a double loser writing this.. double big 'L' to your foreheads! Okay not your foreheads.. MY forehead! Rofl!). I've tried many brownies recipes before, but this has been my favourite so far and I've baked this a few times already! So peeps, here I am to share the recipe with you guys!~

The ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of sugar
200gm of melted dark cooking chocolate
(I suggest you spend more on this because more expensive dark cooking chocolate i.e Van Houten or Hershey's make your brownies taste better.. cheap ones are not nice!)
1 cup of vegetable oil
(can also use sunflower oil or canola oil for substitutes.. in my case, I used sunflower + canola oil.. please don't use normal cooking oil because they kinda smell)
2 tsp of vanilla essence
4 eggs
1 3/4 cups of flour (sift)
1 tsp baking powder


The methods:

Combine sugar, eggs, oil and vanilla essence in a mixing bowl. They will look like this after whisk...

Add melted chocolate and mix well.

Mix together flour and baking powder and add them to the chocolate mixture.

Grease and line a 20cm square cake tin and pour the mixture in. Bake for 40 minutes under a 180 degree Celsius temperature.


And this is how it will look like. Make sure to cool it down before serving~

To decorate, you can sprinkle some icing sugar on top of it or you can also make a chocolate glaze for topping. Another tip for making chocolate glaze, besides doing a normal double boiling method, add 2 tsp of vegetable oil to the chocolate to make the glaze look shinier and more beautiful + appetizing!

There you go! I never thought I had many cooking tips to share in the first place.. LOL! Hope you enjoy trying this recipe and if you do, please do respond to this entry and tell me how do you do! Maybe you can share with me your own brownies recipes~


And back to business.. this was how I spent my birthday. Nothing interesting really... but the next day, we went to KL and my dad paid for the whole family to do facial!!!! (Yup, my dad pun join skali!) Yeay!! Go DAD!!!! And to make it more awesome, instead of going to a spa, the facial was done at my aunt's home! Poor that lady had to stay until late evening.. Haha.. Pictures of the facial session are with my cousin and I have no intention at all to upload them here because trust me, all of us looked super funny!


I guess that's all for now~~ Happy 2011 and don't forget to enjoy and cherish every single moment of your life!! Chiao~