The Pings: Jon, Jenny, Elton, Rafa and Charlotte

We love sweets! Sprinkles is cupcake joint in LA, of “The Girls Next Door” fame. No Sprinkles in Hawaii, but Jonathan bought me a box of Madagascar Vanilla Sprinkles cupcake mix at Williams-Sonoma. It’s kinda like the Betty Crocker stuff, but way tastier.

We made the Sprinkles cupcakes with a home-made butter cream frosting tonight. Elton and Jonathan “helped” by cleaning off the frosting on the mixing spatula.

It was a very special treat for Elton and I’m afraid that he’s now addicted to butter-cream frosting!

Here’s a picture of Crystal modeling our finished cupcake! They were perfect- crunchy on the outside and moist on the inside with a generous topping of butter cream. Yummy!

We had a ton of left over ham, steak, and duck from family dinner yesterday. I actually made an entire ham for Easter Sunday potluck at work last night, so we had half a ham left over for dinner tonight.

One of our favorite ham dishes is ham with man-tou. Man-tous are Chinese steamed buns, similar to the soft white buns surrounding char sui bao at dim sum. I used Jonathan’s mom’s recipe and made a batch of steamed buns for dinner tonight.

First, I mixed the yeast, flour, water, and sugar together and let the mixture rise for an hour.

I punched the dough down, let it rise again, and then formed them into little buns.

The buns steam for 15 minutes, and voila! Man-tou!

We like to cut them into strips, fry them to get the outsides crispy, and serve them with ham. Mmmm!

Elton loves to sleep on the couch.

This is my favorite series of sleepy Elton photos.

Stretching out on the couch.  Elton getting comfortable…

Getting sleepy….

Asleep!

This week was Thor’s eight Birthday! We had a birthday party at Julie and Grants. There was tons of food, family and an Easter egg hunt!

Here are the kids getting ready for the Easter egg hunt.

After gathering plastic candy filled eggs, the kids colored hard boiled eggs. Mom and dad hard boiled and brought 46 eggs to color!

Janell and her favorite eggs.

And, of course, there was cake. Julie got a dog friendly strawberry cake from Diamond Head Bakery and it was delicious.

We all sang Happy Birthday to Thor. Here’s a picture of Thor enjoying his cake. Elton got a little bit of cake and ice cream too, and he loved it!

This weekend, Crystal and I went boogie boarding at Waimanalo Beach. It was a great workout! A little overcast, but we were still able to work on our tan and enjoy a shave ice.

Here’s Crystal after catching a wave!

We worked up a huge appetite, and after getting cleaned up, we went to Azteca, a really great Mexican joint Crystal found. I got a beef enchilada and flan and Jonathan and Crystal each got the very large triple combo plate– Here’s Jonathan’s two enchiladas and carnitas taco… mmmm…

Crystal, Jonathan, Elton and I went on the Makapuu Lighthouse Hike. It was a beautiful day! On the way up, we had beautiful views of the ocean, sandy beach, and Waimanalo. Here’s Crystal enjoying the view!

The view from the top!

It was such a nice day, we could see all they way to Molokai!

There were a ton of whales splashing in the ocean too.

On the way down, Elton got pretty pooped, so Jonathan carried him.

After the hike, we stopped by Koko Marina shopping center and cooled down with shaved ice. Elton loved his share!

We love celebrating holidays at work with potlucks!

This week, Jenny, one of our NA’s, brought in food from O-Bok, my favorite Korean joint! Her parents own O-Bok, and we were treated to yummy meat jun and kal-bi. As usual, all our potluck food was very delicious and we had tons of extra leftovers.

The night crew and the meat jun. Mmmmm…

Diggin’ into the Kalbi! I probably ate an entire tray of meat jun by myself!