Taiwanese weddings have a myriad of customs, too many for a single person to know or for a single couple to follow.

One of the most commonly followed is the "tradition" of giving a box of wedding cookies to the bride's guests. Calling it a tradition would be a little bit of a stretch because this is apparently a relatively new phenomenon. People used to give wedding cakes, which are truly Chinese-style cakes with different fillings. But in a trend of imitating Western culture those are slowly being replaced with Western-style cookies.

Unfortunately the packaging of these wedding cookies is so elaborate that they not only demand a fair amount of patience to eat, but also result in a huge pile of unnecessary trash. Let's take a little tour of such a box of wedding cookies ...

This is one of Taiwan's typical wedding cookie boxes.

Opening the box exposes the first layer ...

... which hides another layer underneath.

This is the entire cookie content of that huge box. When I buy cookies in Switzerland this amount might come in two simple bags.

Let's weigh, shall we? 596 grams.

The amassed trash from just one box of wedding cookies.

And the pile of individual cookie wrappers next to a Swiss Army Knife for size comparison. Again, let's weigh ...

744 grams of trash for 596 grams of cookies. That's a cookie to trash ratio of 4:5!

So there you have it ... 596 grams of cookies and 744 grams of trash. Multiply that with a - moderately estimated - fifty guests of the bride and you get the impressive amount of 37.2 kilograms of mostly non-recyclable but easily avoidable trash.

In all fairness, at least these cookies were good. Many wedding cookies I've had - and trust me, there were a lot ;-) - belonged into the 'just okay' or 'who baked these sugar mounds?!' category. There even seems to be a pattern where the quality of the cookies is inversely proportional to the fanciness of the box.

One of my favorites so far was the brand that one of my friends picked. The cookie wrappers aside, the simple and useful box has made a good home for my Clif Bar and Luna Bar stock:

The refreshingly simple box of IRIS wedding cookies.

Last weekend a combination of a friend's request for chocolate cake and the desire to take on fresh baking challenges recently led us to try one of my family's favorite recipes.

I wasn't exactly optimistic about the outcome given that it involves a few steps that my traditional mix-it-all-and-bake cakes don't require. There's separating eggs (who likes to touch eggs?!), melting chocolate in a water bath, glaze-proofing the cake with warm jam, and finally pouring a cup of thick chocolate glazing on top of it, hoping that it covers the cake's surface equally.

Well, despite a few mishaps such as yolk in the egg whites, burn marks on my arms, an overzealous oven, and poor garnishing timing (and, apparently, lack of talent) it turned out quite delicious!

And just to show you how delicious it is, let's take a look at what's inside ...

You've got to love the chocolate part. :-)

As with so many foreign foods finding good pizza in Taiwan isn't easy, just like it isn't easy to find good Asian food in, say, Switzerland. (If you live in Switzerland and are thinking that your local Chinese restaurant isn't that bad, chances are it doesn't qualify as good real Chinese food. :-)

Fortunately there are always (plenty of) exceptions to the rule, and Bon Appétit in 竹北 (Zhu bei, Jubei, Chubei, insert your favorite spelling here) is one of them. Here's what their pizza looks like:

Pizza Vegetarina:

Pizza Giardinera:

And yes, they are as good as they look!

Of course, pizza makes hungry for dessert, and what better after pizza than chocolate? So, we went on a little shopping spree in Carrefour and bought as much stuff as we could possibly fit on the scooter. A selection of our items:

The 1.6 kg of chocolate don't quite compare with our visit of the Lindt factory store in Switzerland last summer, which looked something like this:

If you're wondering where all these calories go stay tuned for the next blog post about one of our favorite weekend activities: hiking.

Butchering European culture has developed into an innocent tradition here in Taiwan. Most noticeably this has to do with food, one of my "favorites" (to tell, not to eat!) being pasta with ketchup instead of actual tomatoes.

Today I'd like to present something that takes the cake in so many ways. There's a bakery chain called 提拉米蘇 (the Chinese transliteration of 'Tiramisu') that is hugely popular, to the extent where people line up outside the shop or wait for several weeks to receive their online cake order.

Here's what the object of people's desire looks like - the Tiramisu cake:

They even have a diagram explaining the cake's structure: a base of digestive biscuit, two layers of mousse, a layer of chocolate cake, and to top it off cocoa powder imported from Malaysia.

Let's attribute the fact that half the ingredients don't show up in traditional tiramisu recipes to artistic interpretation.

What really takes the cake is how they bend the largely unknown and unspectactular history of tiramisu into a deeply "meaningful" story based on a mistranslation and an awful lot of imagination (a.k.a. 唬濫 - Taiwanese for "bullshit"):

Can you feel the Tiramisu coming back up yet?

Update (2009-11-23): Overprice alert! After continuously shrinking their already small portions - last time I went there their house pickles had shrunk to about two slices of gherkin and one olive, and the dip was barely enough for three fries - Mr. Toast has recently increased their prices by up to a whopping $30. For a meal where you are guaranteed to be hungry two hours later that's too much, so I no longer recommend this place.

Even though blogging about restaurants and food is hugely popular in Taiwan now (big surprise with all the delicious things you can find here) that's not the reason for this post. It's just that trying Western food is often a big disappointment, so when it's not that deserves an honorable mention. I hope I can add to that in the future.

With all the bad news and shops that have been disappearing lately (mostly tea shops but it's not like there are not five others waiting to fill the gap) it's nice to see people trying out new stuff. Last weekend we happened to notice a tiny new place along 光復路 (Guang Fu Road), not far from Nova, that sells grilled sandwiches.

We gave it a try and were not disappointed. There are many original combinations to choose from and for a few bucks extra you get fries and a drink. (I know fries may not sound that exciting but in Taiwan they're not as common as you think. :-) From the two we've tried - BBQ Chicken and Mushroom Salami - we slightly favored the latter one, mostly because of the delicious sauce, but both were excellent. Even the bread is good and crispy, not like the soggy "bread" they serve in Subway.

The portions are slightly on the small side, so you'll need a side order, but the prices are pretty reasonable. The place is also kind of small: only three tables. But you can take away and apparently the owner is thinking about adding a delivery service.

Below is a photo of one of their sandwiches and a copy of the menu.

Mr. Toast Gourmet Grilled Sandwich Bar
新竹市光復路二段276號
Guang Fu Road, Sec. 2, #276, Hsinchu (between Nova and 清大夜市 Qing Da Night Market)
03-571 7373