Last evening my family joined three other families for a Chinese stir-fry dinner to celebrate an exciting trip that all of our boys will be taking…an adventure in China! This wonderful opportunity is offered to students through the Chinese Bridge-Summer Camp–sponsored by the Confucius Institute Headquarters in cooperation with Confucius Institutes in the US. Our kids will explore China, learn some language skills, and enjoy many cultural experiences…I’m so excited that our University takes part in this program! An opportunity that otherwise might not be experienced within our family! But as fortune has it, our oldest son and several classmates will be taking this trip of a lifetime! One of my friends (who has a son also traveling) decided to host a celebratory dinner…with Chinese food in mind! This gave me the opportunity to try something that I’ve always wanted to do…make home-made fortune cookies! How festive to make over-sized cookies with personal messages inside for each boy! Fun, right? Well, let me tell you after several attempts I quickly realized that if you can bake a fortune cookie that looks and tastes like what you get in the restaurant…you are seriously talented!! I’m a decent baker…not professional by any stretch of the means…but I have been known a time or two to bake up some tasty treats. But this trial in the kitchen was a true disaster…however, from every mistake comes enlightenment! So today I will share what I learned…
semi-home-made fortunes…
all excited to make fortune cookies for this fun dinner party, i looked up several recipes online and chose one that i thought to be pretty easy. ha! without wasting a bunch of time wallowing in my sorrowful attempts, i will just say that i couldn’t get it right…i made only ONE that sort-of resembled a droopy fortune cookie…more like a wonton! but the good news…a way to cheat! did you know that if you take a toothpick or bamboo skewer and a box of packaged fortune cookies…you can carefully dig out the original fortune and replace it with your own?
open a box of fortune cookies and find the ones with the largest gap in the outer corner of the fold. then with a pick, gently get behind the fortune paper inside and work it around so that a corner of the paper sticks out enough to pull it right out! (it doesn’t have to be very much paper peeking out to grab onto it!) believe me, you’ll find many with a gap big enough to fit a toothpick in…i only broke three trying to get the papers out! (perfect for a little snack!)
my original intention was to write some long, exciting message to each boy–but since i had to re-insert a new message rather than place it inside a home-made cookie, my note had to be substantially shorter!
a little humor–the messages to the rest of us…
carefully push the new message inside…it really will go in all, or most of the way. only a couple of mine had a tiny piece of the paper showing. (and you can take the corner of a 3×5 card or recipe card and shove the exposed paper down in farther if you like. this won’t mutilate the message…pushing it in with the toothpick might!)
i couldn’t believe how easy it actually was to do this! now for the packaging…i put each boy’s cookie in a separate baggie clipped with a tag backed in red…the Chinese color for good luck!
the rest of the fortune cookies with the not-so-exciting-messages are packed in little boxes…a single cookie for each of the non-traveling guests to take!
have some fun with fortunes…the easy way!
if you’re interested in learning more about the Chinese Bridge-Summer Camp, check this link to the University of Toledo and search Confucius Institute or call your local University!