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.

Three Weeks of Goodies

I have baked a little during the past weeks but was really lazy to post or blog them. So here goes, three weeks of goodies.

Three Weeks back.....Green Apple Kiwi Muffins. Baked with chopped green apples and kiwi jam, these were tangy, moist and soft at the same time. Behind the apple muffins are the Chocolate Coffee Cupcakes. Fragrant, chocolately and bittersweet at the same time, these cupcakes are your perfect companion with a cup of hot coffee.


Two Weeks back....Taiwanese Pineapple Tarts. In reality, the fillings is a mixture of Wintermelon & Nata De Coco. I bought the fillings from Taiwan a couple of months back and only got round to making tarts recently. The fillings were really good. They were not sweet, have many crunchy nata de coco bits inside and free from any artificial fragrance. Strangely, it tasted like pineapple. The lovely melt-in-the mouth shortbread crust was a recipe from another blog.


The Tarts packed in the cookie bags which were also bought from Taiwan.

Another bake were these vanilla cupcakes amd cherry chocolate cakes. We have this SFS2010 training in the office and I thought it would be cool to decorate the cakes with the company and training logo. Through Zu, a friend from a cooking forum, I had her help me print these edible icing sheets with the logos.. The cakes went down extremely well with the Management and colleagues and many were intrigued as to how the logos were made.

Last Week....Fruit Pastry. Chockful of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and chopped apples. This recipe is from Vi, who mentioned that this is extremely popular in Belgium. This was confirmed by my colleague Ilse, who hails from Belgium. Doing the taste test, Ilse gave me a thumb up and an A for authenticity.


Finally today.....Custard Peach Bread. It was really not a good day for making bread as it was raining cats and dogs and the temperature has dropped tremendously. Not ideal for proving bread actually but I just had this tremendous urge for making some bread.

Extremely Lazy

I have been extremely lazy lately. I had thought that after my exams, I would go into a baking frenzy. Surprisingly, I went on snail's pace. I was not motivated to bake nor blog. Ummh....something must be wrong with me! It has been almost a month now and I have only just started to crawl a little. I had better speed up before the next term starts in January as I do have many new recipes to try.

I was really glad to have four very good friends over for dinner last evening. Though it has been only close to five months since we started our course in July, we had became firm friends and a really dynamic project team to boot.

For my bunch of serious at times but mostly crazy, lively and funny groupmates I made:

Mee Siam - Topped with chives, beanpuffs, prawns and crispy shrimp skin.


Yam Cake Wannabes - The correct name should be Bread Pudding I supposed but everyone was stumped to realise that these are not Yamcakes but savory puddings made with bread. It tasted so yam-like that I had to call them Wannabes.


Frosted Cupcakes - I just loved this Vanilla Cupcakes. Soft and fluffy with a heavenly vanilla fragrance.


Mars Bar Velvet Cheesecake - I had this recipe for the longest time and this is the first time I have attempted this cake. It has chopped Mars chocolate bars inside and I also added some shredded canned pineapple to give it a little bite and some sour tang. Amazingly, the caramel within the bars oozes out like molted lava in little pools on the surface & when you slice through the cake. Personally, I do not really like this cake as it was way too creamy for me.


To wash the spiciness of the Mee Siam down, a refreshing minty Lime Mochito.


To Maria, Lai Foong, Joanna and Rayson, thanks for being such good pals. Knowing the bunch of you makes studying fun and I am really looking forward to the day when the five of us will parade ceremoniously on stage in our splendid convocation gowns and mortar-boards to receive our well-deserved scrolls.

Honey I Shrank The Doughnuts!

Aren't these mini doughnuts cute. They are each about the size of a normal door key which makes eating them so much easier.

The Doughnut Factory is a belated birthday present from Danny, my daughter's boyfriend, who came home from Australia for vacation. It was really sweet of him to remember that I was looking for this mini doughnut maker as the last time he and my daughter were unable to get hold of one in Bangkok as it was out of stock.


The doughnut maker is fantastic! However, the recipe that came with the instructions was a disappointment as the doughnut turned out more cake-like than normal. Although it still tastes delicious, I would have preferred it to taste closer to the real thing. So I shall be going in search of a recipe that will do justice to the doughnut maker.

Another belated birthday present which I just received from my daughter over the weekend is a BlowTorch. I have been contemplating for the longest time if I should buy one as I do not have many recipes on-hand that would require it's use. So if you have any recipes besides Creme Brulee/Baked Custard and browning the Meringue, do let me know.

Excusez-Moi

Please excuse me if I have not been answering your emails or comments. I am currently preparing for my exams and am buried in my books. My last paper is on the 7th of November and I promise to come back to all who have left comments and emailed me in the last couple of weeks after that.

Thanks for your patience, understanding and support.

Ginny

A Brief Respite from Books

Lectures have ended for this semester and I am giving myself a weekend away from books before starting on my revisions for the exams.

There are lots of stuff that I wanted to make but in the end, I made only a couple of sweets: Coconut Sweet Potato Tarts, Vanilla Sponge and Candied Pomelo Skin.

The original version of tarts from AuntyYochana were made with coconut and durians. As could not find any durians yesterday morning, I substituted with Japanese sweet potatoes instead. I brought them to a birthday party last evening and they were very well received.



Make friends with your neighbourhood minimart owner. They keep these empty pretzels cartons for me to use as cupcakes holder. See how convenient it is to transport the tarts! I just clingwrap them. No mess! No fuss!


Pomeloes are in season now. Do not throw the skin away as you can turn them into Candied Pomelo Skin. When I was a kid, my mum used to buy this candied pomelo skin which comes in little earthened pots. The made in China type is drier and quite 'chewy' from lots of maltose. The candied skins are placed in between layers of rice paper to prevent them from sticking to each other. They no longer comes in earthen jars but are packed in boxes now. It is not easy to come by them but if you are lucky, you may find some at the Yue Hwa Emporium.

As I did not cook mine till the sticky stage, the skin retains some moisture and were slightly juicy. Very nice served chilled.


Made another simple Vanilla Sponge but turned it into a luxurious version by filling them with Hazlenut Praline that has crunchy feulleutine in it. Tasted like a 'naked' Pralet in the end but nevertheless delicious.


And more bakewares to add to the collection: a Victoria Bundt pan from Kitchen Aid some festive silicon bakeware and a Cinderella Waffle Maker. All brought back from USA by my dearest brother, Michael.

Precious Choya Snowskin

My second moonies this year. Snowskin that is flavored with Umeshu Choya, a Japanese liquer that is infused with sour Ume plums.

I could have named them Double-Wine snowskins as the fillings are a Red Wine Cranberry-Lotus Paste. However, I prefer the fancier name of Precious Choya Snowskin as each moonie is topped with a flake of edible gold leaf. It took a lot of hunting on my part before I finally found the gold leaf at the Chinese Medical Hall.

Apparently, these gold leaves have a medicinal value (I do not know what??) and they can also be used on the face to beautify the texture of our complexion.

These moonies are definitely not for the kiddies as I had used quite a lot of the wine in place of the water called for in the recipe. I love how the sourish wine offset the sweetness from the skin and how it enhances the taste of the cranberry paste.