Bustier Cake: Post-Mortem

After the birthday song, here are the step-by-step pictures of DH cutting into the cake.

First, he had to choose a left or right breast. He picked right.


Gingerly does it!

Bingo! The right 'Right' breast!

DH just missed cutting the cherry into half. Talk about precision!

You can see the circular mark left by the cherry and the indentation on the wall of the other half.

That's DH with his prize. The Cherry!

So your question. What if he picked the wrong side? Well nothing actually. He will just have to eat up both breasts. It was just for the fun and suspense.

The Prune Butter Cake


Me and the Birthday Boy.


Notes added on 17 Aug 08: I have received several emails asking if my bustier cake was baked in a bustier-shaped cake pan and where can the pan be purchased.
Nope! No bustier-shaped pan was used.
The bodice was sculpted from a 7" x 10" rectangular cake and the boobs were baked in mini half-ball pans. The whole cake was then assembled and covered with different layers of marshmallow fondant.

A Bustier Cake for Hubby

DH will be celebrating his birthday next week. I thought I will make him something special. A Bustier Cake

It has been a really long time since I last made a fondant covered cake and it took me half a day to put this whole thing together. The effort is well worth it when it was finally completed. The cake is a Prune Butter Cake and the Marshmallow Fondant is flavored with Yoghurt candy oil. The most difficult part of putting this together is the skin toned area and the lace bustier. And as I slowy mold the fondant to take the shape of the breasts, I secretly wish to myself that I am the owner of these beauties.

Oh! There is a surprise instore for DH when he cuts the cake. I have buried a cherry in one of the breasts. Let's see if he prefers the left or the right!

A Week of Asian Food

Not planned, but it happens that what I made last week hails from various parts of Asia.

West Malaysia: From Sarawak, the land of the Ibans, I made a Steamed Sarawak Kaya Cake. I received two different recipes for this cake. Though they have different ingredients, the name is similar. So to avoid confusion, scribbled SSKC-Version I and SSKC-Version II on the recipes for ease of differentiating them. I shall not go into details of the ingredients of the two versions for the time being until I have experimented with both recipes.

This is SSKC-Version I . A very soft, moist and fragrant cake that is redolent with the richness of kaya.



East Malaysia: This savory layered steamed cake, which I have made many times, is made by layering cream crackers with a spicy mix of luncheon meat and large onions. What prompted me to make this Oriental Lasagne again is that the cans of luncheon meat had started to make its appearance on the supermarket shelves again after vanishing almost overnight due to a food recall by the health ministy. My rationale is that if it the supermarket is allowed to sell them again, then they must have been given the all clear signal.



Indonesia: Chendol Avocado Smoothie with avocadoes purchased from Batam. They were really cheap! 5 big fruits for approximately S$2.00. The smoothie was layered with chendol strips and sweetened red beans and topped with palm sugar syrup.


Philippines: I first tasted Polvoron more than ten fifteen years ago when a business associate brought us some during one of his visits. I am not sure if I should classify this as a cookie or a sweet. Anyway, when Elaine, my colleague returned to the Philippines for a holiday, I grabbed the chance to ask her help me buy the Polvoron plunger. Here is my Peanut Butter Oreo Polvoron.

Something Old....Something New.....

Stealing a line from the popular prose, I thought I had better post some of those photos which I have saved in my temporary folder since December 2007. I was really busy during that period and could not find the time to post up the pixs. So here goes..

But first, let me do the New.

Steamed Honey Cake

I just love the slightly chewy texture and the honeycomb structure. This Honey Cake or Ma Lai Koh is different from the usual Ma Lai Koh in that the batter has to go through two stages of proofing totalling more than 17 hours prior to steaming. I suppose that is why this cake has the lovely vertical tunnels versus the conventional type which is more like a dense sponge cake.

Ingredients:(Adapted from Traditional Koh Kuih, Lap Mei & Cookies, Y3K Publications, Malaysia)
(A)150g low protein flour or Lily flour
150ml water
1-1/2 tsp instant yeast

(B) 200g castor sugar
1 tbsp honey
1/4 tsp salt

(C) 7 eggs
60g low protein flour
50ml corn oil

(D) 1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
2 tsps water
1/8 tsp alkaline water

Method:
1) Mix ingredients (A) in a big mixing bowl. Cover with cling wrap and proof for four to six hours.
2) Transfer mixture to a mixing bowl and add in ingredients (B) and beat till sugar is dissolved. Add in the eggs and beat well. Add in the remaining ingredients (C) and continue to beat well. Strain mixture into a basin and proof a second time for 10 to 12 hours.
3) Prepare an 8" bamboo steaming basket by lining with two layers of cellophane paper and securing it firmly with twine.
4) Mix baking powder, baking soda and water from (D) together. Mix it into the proofed batter. Add alkaline water, mix well.
5) Pour into the steaming basket and steam over high heat for 30-35 minutes. Cake is done when skewer inserted comes out clean.


Lemon Cream Cheese Cupcakes
Thank you Jenny for sharing the lovely, yummilicious recipe with me. I have made these cuppies thrice and each time, I get rave reviews from friends, relatives and colleagues who just can't get enough of these soft and lemony morsels topped with a tangy lemon frosting. Two variants here, with Chopped Walnuts and with Dessicated Coconut.



Now for Something Old ~ Circa December 2007 and February 2008.

Mini loaves of brandy infused Christmas Fruitcakes for giving away to friends. This is my favorite fruitcake recipe from the Australian Women's Weekly. It is really more fruit than cake and is not overly sweet as I reduced those sickenly sweet glaced cherries, mixed peels and increased the more acidic fruits like sour cherries, cranberries and apricots.






For the Chinese New Year, I gave the Koi Fish Nian Gao (Sweetcakes) a miss and made some auspcious Gold Ingot Sweetcakes instead. It was really a tough act trying to balance the pointy ends of the plastic moulds during the steaming process without toppling them over.

The Ingots, with the moulds removed and ready to be served.

The rest of the Ingots were packed (with their plastic moulds) into traditional wooden boxes as gifts for relatives during the rounds of Chinese New Year visitation.



Oh and I did managed to bake some cookies and made some Fried Spicy Peanuts too.

Buttery melt-in-the-mouth Belinjau Cookies. They are both good and bad at the same time. Good because you just cannot stop at one. Bad because, with each piece you pop into your mouth, you are mentally totalling up the additional calories and promising yourself 'this will be the last piece'.

The shelled and skinless peanuts are marinated in a five-spice and red fermented beancurd mixture and then deep fried to a golden brown. The crispy crunchy nuts are definitely a good accompliment to a mug of ice cold beer!

Making Up for Lost Time

Having gone out of action for many months, I seems to be making up for lost time. I made two cakes last week. Nothing new as these were tried and tested, fail safe bakes for me.

Cranberry Apricot Buttercake


Chocolate Anonymous Cake sans fudge


Made these Mango Mochi today after seeing them on Florence's blog.


Luscious Thai Honey Mango enclosed in a soft, yet chewy glutinous skin

Golden Oreo Cupcakes

Yippee! Exams are over and I have approximately two months to relax before the last semester begins.

My first bake. something to warm-up the oven, Golden Oreo Apricot Cupcakes.

The Golden Oreos were bought in the US a couple of months back but I had chucked them in the pantry till now. I am not sure if they are available in Singapore yet as I have not been shopping much but I am sure they will be available here pretty soon.

The Oreos were chopped and added to a basic Vanilla Cupcake batter along with some diced apricots.

Just for the fun of it, I decorated a few of them with an underwater scene.

Gimme Another 3 Weeks

As you see, I have not updated my blog since January. In fact, I hardly visited my own blog as I was kept real busy both at work and my studies.

I did receive numerous emails for recipes and I have tried to reply as many as I could. If you did not hear from me, I offer my sincere apologies. Give me another three weeks. By then, my exams will be over and I should be able to get into some action (well at least for a month till my next semester begins).

Until then, thanks again all for your continued support.

A Whole Lot of Flip Flops

Here is a batch of cupcakes which I made two weeks ago for my niece's betrothal day.


The idea was to topped the cuppies with the Chinese character of Xi or Double Happiness. Initially, I had thought it would be just a simple matter of rolling out the paste and then cutting out the shapes with the Xi character vegetable cutter. How wrong was I! The paste stuck so badly to the cutter that there was no way to remove it without tearing it apart or distorting it's shape in the process. I tried dusting the cutter with cornflour and icing sugar. I even used a very fine artist brush to give the cutting edge a very thin coating of shortening. All to no avail as the sugarpaste just refused to bulge from the cutter. In the end, I had to lightly press the cutter on the sugarpaste to get an imprint and then cut out the shape manually with a penknife.

This laborious process took me from 11am till 7.30pm and I only managed 16 Xi characters in the end. Boy! Was I tried after that.


After an hour's rest, I decided to make flipflops out of the balance sugarpaste. This is much easier and I managed quite a few pairs of flipflops within the hour.