Wedding Cupcakes

Time flies! It has been almost two months since my daughter got married and I have been too busy with work to blog about this happy event of mine.



Sylvia and Andrew were married at the Church of St Mary of the Angels on the 24th of April 2010 and the wedding banquet was held the next evening in the Grand Ballroom of The Regent Hotel.

Hubby walking Sylvia down the aisle.


Friends asked if I will be making the Wedding Cake. I would really really loved to except I know I will not have the time to do so due to work commitments and the wedding preparations running up to the day itself. However, I could not let the wedding pass without giving it my personal touch could I? And so I made cupcakes for the buffet after the Church wedding ceremony. I know that if I do not ‘deliver’ the cupcakes all would still be well. I shiver to think what would happen if I could not ‘deliver’ the Wedding Cake that is to be cut in front of all the guests at the Banquet!! Brrrrrr……




The 200 cupcakes were made to the theme of butterflies and lavender hues as that was what my daughter wanted. For three weeks prior to the wedding, I would come home from work and start making the butterflies and roses at night. The weather was horrid. There was so much rain especially during the week immediately before the wedding. My roses did not dry well and I had to resort to buying the readymade ones. Luckily though, the butterflies dried well as they are much thinner. Although many did break at the wings, I just used royal icing to mend them.



I was actually quite nervous about making these cupcakes as I have never made them covered in fondant. My previous cupcakes were just simply frosted with swirls and topped with sugar ascents. I had no idea how it would turned out but when they were all completed, I was beaming like the moon. The oohs and ahs from the guests were rewarding enough to tell me that I had done a pretty good job.



I was also glad that I had made a wise choice of choosing a buttermilk lemon cupcakes instead of plain butter cupcakes. Buttermilk cakes are very moist and soft. Though I made them two days ahead, they remained exquisitely moist and soft. The citrusy lemony flavor also paired well with and cut down the sweetness of the marshmallow fondant.



I also had some pretty cupcake wrappers custom made with the bridal couple’s initials of “A & S” and theses were couriered to me from the United States . They cost me a bomb but it was worth every dollar as they are so beautiful.
I was too busy to take any photos of the cuppies myself as I was too busy entertaining the guests. Fortunately for me, the photographer did and he did a beautiful job of it too!



Getting ready for their Grand Entrance into the ballroom with the six Guard of Honor.


The couple making their first entry into the ballroom.


Riding a Harley Davidson into ballroom for their second entry.


Cake Cutting


Hubby and I dancing.

"Thank You For Your Guidance"

That was the subject heading of an email I received recently.

It was a mail from Joyee, a visitor to my blog. She had written to me previously to asked for tips on decorating a cake with sugarpaste as she wanted to make one for her son's year old birthday.

All I did was to share some of my past experience on how to give sugarpaste the ''tender loving care'' needed to give the cake a smooth finish.

She wrote to thank me for the tips and attached some photos of the beautiful cake she made. Joyee did a wonderful job of decorating a two tier cake with Anpanman figurines, insects and fencings. I tell you, for a first timer, she blew me away.

So appreciative is she that she had to send me 'Thank You' pressie. It was a pack of Basler Lackerli cookies which she had asked her husband to bring back for me from Switzerland. She had read from one of my earlier posting

that I have not tasted the real cookie before and to quote from what she wrote on the gift card: "Here's a treat for you to show my appreciation". Wow! It is really a great treat. The cookie is really good. It is sweet, but not cloying sweet and it has the nicest citrusy flavor from the dried citron.

I just want to say to Joyee again, you are the one that made it happen, not me. You have a hidden talent which you are just discovering.

Okay now to the cookies. Hmmm...comparing what I have made to this, I would say I am pretty close to it in taste except mine was sweeter from the too thick sugar glazing ontop (a comment that was also given by my niece). It is addictive! For me, the chewiness just makes me want to eat one, two and then three cookie. Thank you Joyee.

Here is the Real McCoy


The cookie. You can see that the sugar glazing is much thinner than mine.

Cashew Chicken Cheesecake

What a whole lot of Cs?

A Cashew Chicken Chessecake that has even more Cs:~ Cream Cheese, Cheddar Cheese and Parmesan Cheese. Yup there are three kinds of cheese in this very unique cheesecake.

And there three layers to the cake too!

Layer one at the bottom has chopped roasted cashews in the cheesecake batter.

Layer two is a filling of minced chicken, mixed vegetables, button mushrooms, onions and parmesan cheese.

Layer three is cheesecake topped with grated cheddar cheese.

What an explosion of taste! It is savoury, sweet, cheesy and nutty all at the same time.

Japanese Style Belly Pork

A couple of Sundays ago, Tan Hsueh Yun in her weekly food column Hunger Management (The Sunday Times, March 7, 2010), wrote about this belly pork from Japanese cook, Yoko Arimoto. Unlike the usual Hokkien Kong Bak which is braised in dark soya sauce with aromatic cinnamon bark, anise seed and cloves, this version is cooked with Japanese sake and whole garlics till meltingly tender.

I am not a lover of belly pork but what made me try this dish is the fact that it was cooked over two days. Day 1 is simply braising the parboiled sliced pork in cooking sake and water with a whole head of garlic for two hours. It is then left to cool and refrigerated overnight. On Day 2, Japanese shoyu and sugar is added to the pork and braised for a further 45 minutes.

The result? A very tender pork that is garlicky and 'sweet'. Not sweet sweet from the sugar but sweet from the condensed sake and the garlics. If you do not care for the taste of cinnamon etc from the Hokkien kong bak, then this Jap Style Belly Pork is for you.



Served with steam Leaf Buns

Year of the Tiger Chinese New Year Bakes

These are my first bakes for the Chinese New Year. Blossom Pineapple Tarts.

I made these again for CNY this year as it is such a breeze to make. Unlike the traditional open face tarts that you either need to crimp the tart pastries or slowly mould the pineapple to fit the hollow of the tarts, these Blossom Pineaapple Tarts are really quick to make.

Since last year, I have been receiving emails on and off from visitors to my blog asking if I needed a special mould to make them. Nope! I don't! I just cut the pastries with a petal cutter (I use the rose cutter from the Wilton sugarpaste cutter set) and then put a ball of pineapple jam onto the centre of the pastry and place it into the paper cases for baking. It couldn't be easier. Aren't they pretty. I have made a short video to show how easy it is to shape the tarts. Here is is:

Told you it was simple right?

The second cookie I made was a Cheesy Bak Kwa Buttons. Using the same shortcrust pastry recipe from the pineapple tarts, I added grated cheddar cheese, chopped bak kwa (barbequed meat) and some black and white pepper to the dough. These were shaped into tiny marble-sized balls and then flatten with the prongs of fork before baking.

What can I say? Ummmh...yummy yummy!

Bamboo Charcoal Challah Bread

Made a Challah Bread with Bamboo Charcoal powder on Saturday. The recipe is from Alejandra Ramos , a blogger from New York. She was using bamboo charcoal powder which she had crushed with a mortar and pestle at home. I communicated with her and offered to send her some Bamboo Charcoal powder as this was not readily available in the US. I am now waiting to see her beautiful Challah.

The six-braid Challah, when nicely braided is really stunning. However, my braiding skills are zilch and I really had a difficult time trying to braid the six rolls of dough together. If you look at the top left of the loaf, you would be able to see where I have wrongly overlap the dough instead of going underneath it.



Next to Alejandra's beautifully braided Challah, mine looked so deformed. However, do not be misled by looks alone as underneath that awful and digusting looking braided lump of a bread is a very tender loaf which is rich with the flavor of olive oil and slight hint of sweetness. The sesame on the crust gave it a nice nutty fragrance and crunch too.

The star ingredient, the Bamboo Charcoal Powder, only gave it the rich black on the crust and a purplish-grey on the insides. I had used only 2 teaspoons of the charcoal powder and you can see how black the crust is. You don't taste the Bamboo Charcoal at all but you know it is working its miracle as a detoxifying agent as that is what it is good for.

Basler Lackerli

My niece was once given a pack of cookies by a visiting business associate from Switzerland. She was relating to me how delicious these cookies were. The cookies are sugar glazed on top and they were dense, nutty, chewy with candied fruits, spicy and tasted gingerbread like. Oh yes, they are quite sweet in a nice way. It was a good thing that she had snapped a picture of the package on her camera phone. Though the picture was not very sharp, I could make out the words on the package to be Basler Lackerli. And so I started to Google for the recipe.

As usual, googling turned up tonnes of Basler Lackerli recipes. The common ingredients are almonds, chopped candied citrus peels, honey and an assortment of ground spices ~ cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, ginger, mixed spice. I chose a recipe from Pierre Herme that had white pepper and black pepper in it as I was intrigued as to how these two peppers will taste in a cookie.

The baked cookies were really good. The finely chopped candied peels and lemon zest gave it a citrusy fragrance which combined well with the spices. The peppers gave them just a slight warmth in the mouth. I added kirsh and lemon juice to the sugar glaze to give the cookie more tang and to cut down the sweetness.

The two cookie bags you see in the background are for my niece as only she could tell me if my cookie tastes like a Basler Lackerli.

Her comments: "Hmmm yum yum. It tastes the same but not the same if you know what I mean." Well what she meant was like Chicken Rice. Although each stall is selling the same chicken rice, the taste of the chicken rice will differ from stall to stall, though the 'main' taste of the dish will not be far from each other.

Oh well okay. I am still very please to be able to replicate the closeness although I have never tasted the original Basler Lackerli myself.

Christmas Bakes

My Christmas bakes started quite late this year.

Normally, for the fruitcake, I would soak the dried fruits in the first week of November and then bake it in the second. I will then let the fruitcake mature slowly and lovingly brush them with liquor every few days apart till decorating them near Christmas. This year however, I had about ten days in all to soak, bake and mature the cake

I made four 7cm round cakes in all. Two were covered and decorated with fondant. One was decorated simply with dried fruits. And the last.......it is still wrapped in clingwrap and brown paper to mature further.

Sleeping Santa ~ Well, Santa has lots of work to be done on Christmas Eve distributing Christmas pressies to all the kids and of course to you and me. So he really needed to sleep well to have enough energy to run around town.


Another Sleeping Santa ~ Sorry for the blurry photo. I have a fantastic Nikon D90. Unfortunatly, I have yet to master how to take good pictures with it. Sigh!


The Plain Jane


I also made some Gingerbread Men, Hearts and Stars for my colleagues and their kids. They were decorated simply with sprinkles and mini M&Ms.

Cookie Bouquet

This is the cookie bouquet which I made last week. The sugar cookies were decorated two ways. Some were first outlined in medium consistency royal icing and then flooded with thin royal icing. The others were decorated with sugarpaste which were 'glued' on using piping gel.

Christmas Themed Cookie Bouquet

The Classic Poundcake

Saturday morning and I was goggling aimlessly for cake recipes - any cakes it does not matter as I have nothing specific in mind ~ sponge, butter, angel, brownie, chocolate, mud, ……. Pages and pages were uploaded and finally I settled on something quintessential, the classic Orange Pound Cake.
As the name implies, a true pound cake uses butter, flour and sugar in equal ratio of a pound each which by the way, is how the cake derives its name (as though this is some marvelous new news to you). This just has fresh orange juice added to it for the citrusy flavor and to lend it a rich golden color.
I made half the recipe, followed all measurements but just held back 30gms of sugar and the cake turned out perfect - moist, buttery, fine crumbed and not sweet. Perhaps the sourness of the orange juice has given it a good balance.
I baked them in a six-hole mini bundt pan and once baked and cooled, they were drizzled with a simple frosting made with fresh orange juice and icing-sugar. The result? Perfect paired with a cup of hot Earl Grey tea.


Alas it was only while uploading the photo to Photobucket that I realized I had forgotten to take a cross-section of the cut cake to show you how fine the cake was.

A Wedding Cake for a Birthday Celebration!!

What in the world is a Wedding Cake doing in a Birthday party you may ask.

I made a Croquenbroche, which is a traditional French Wedding Cake for my extended family's mass birthday celebration which falls in October. Croquenbroche which literally means "crunch in the mouth" is a tower of profiteroles stacked into a conical shape and drizzled all over with toffee. When you put one of these profiteroles into your mouth, you will bite into the crispy and crunchy toffee, which gave the cake its unique name.

Well October is the month in which there are so many of us in our family celebrating our birthdays and it has become an annual tradition whereby we will have a mass birthday party. My Croquenbroche is an updated version which I shamelessly copied from a very popular bakery in Singapore. I first laid eyes on this beautiful creation when I attended my boss's housewarming party in late September. As his wife had just celebrated her birthday a day earlier, the hardly touched birthday cake was also brought out for all of us to enjoy. That was where I got the idea to make this cake for my mass birthday party. Whilst hers was a 20cm/8inch cake with 40 profiteroles stacked on top, mine has to be much bigger for there were so many of us.

For the base, I made a 10inch square chocolate cherry cake covered with a layer of yummy and sinful rum-laced dark chocolate ganache. It was then topped with close to 80 pieces of plum-sized custard-filled profiteroles.

About half of these profiteroles were frosted in melted dark and pastel-colored white chocolate. They were then decorated with handmade sugar flowers, chopped almonds and silver & gold Nonpareils. The completed Croquenbroche was given a finishing touch with three handmade sugar Gerbera Daisies and fresh Physalis.

My, the whole cake weighs a tonne and am I glad I had the foresight to drive eight dowels into the cake to support the entire creation. I dread to think what would have happened had this not been done and I am pretty sure the cake base would be squashed from all the weight pressing down on it.

Until the next mass birthday party, my sincerest best wishes to my brothers Clarence and Charles, sister Yvonne, sister-in-law Betty and Susan, nephew Alvin, niece Joey, niece-in-law Riana and her toddler daughter Krisalyn, nephew's girlfriend Michelle, my daughter Sylvia and to ME. Yes me! I am an October baby too!

More Moonies

More Moonies. Chocolate Moonies this time. The first time I made this was two years back with the fillings made out of lotus paste and chocolate. This time around I used Dou Yong, which is green bean paste. There is no real taste difference between lotus paste and bean paste though. For the skin, I had used Dark Muscovado Sugar instead of the normal brown sugar and it gave a richer molass taste. For decoration, I added a strip of pure gold foil to the skin.

Chocolate Snowskin

Moonies

It has been ages since I updated this blog. As usual, I have been submerged under piles of work and meetings that took me away from my desk most of the time which resulted in even more work piling up.

Last Saturday, I finally found some time in the evening to make my first batch of mooncakes. I made a Nutty Bacon Mooncake which is the traditional baked type and a Mint Snowskin with white lotus paste, which is the chilled type.

The Nutty Bacon Mooncake is a quite similar to the Five Nuts Mooncakes except that it uses streaky bacon fried to a crisp instead of using the sweeter bakwa. The bacon lend the mooncakes a savoury smokey flavor and crunch. It is also not as oily as the commercial type as some bakery also add diced cooked pork fats to the fillings.

Nutty Bacon Mooncake





The chilled Snowskin is really refreshing with the added mint essence. As you swallow each bite, you could feel the cool mintiness gliding down your throat.

Mint Snowskin Dome


Mini Mint Snowskin


This is the Basic Snowskin Recipe I used:
150g Kou Fen (cooked glutinous flour)
180g to 200g icing sugar
40g shortening
220g chilled boiled water
Food color and essence as desired
Prepared lotus paste, bean paste or other fillings.

Method:
1) Sift kou fen and icing sugar together.
2) Rub in the shortening till evenly distributed.
3) Add the water and knead into a smooth dough.
4) Put into a plastic bag and let it rest for about 20 minutes before using.
Note: If using essence and color, mix it directly into the water before adding to the kou fen.

Wrapping:
1) For the mini snowskin above, I scaled the skin into 20g and fillings into 30g.
2) For the dome shaped snowskin, I scaled the skin into 150g and fillings into 70g.
3) Roll the scaled skin into a ball. Put it into a plastic bag and press with your palm to flatten.
4) Wrap fillings with the skin and press into moulds.
5) Chill in an airtight container before serving.

Excuse Me, Are You A Cake?

Cupcakes: “Errh excuse me, are you a cake?”
3-Tier Cake:“Well yes, of course I AM a cake. Isn’t that obvious? I look every inch a cake don’t I?

Single Tier Cake: “If you are a cake, why don’t you smell like us? You do smell funny. You know that don’t you?”
3-Tier Cake:“I don’t smell like you only because I have a big bottle of baby powder tucked right in my middle! And quit being so rude to me, I am much taller and stronger than you guys and you know WHAT that means don't you?”

Edna Faith: "Hey you cakes, quiet down. This is my party and don't steal my thunder or I will have you all eaten up. And Diaper Cake, I am not done with you till I finished MY BUSINESS on your smug face."

Ha Ha! I can imagine this conversation going on at the table amongst the Cupcakes, Single-tier Cake and Diaper Cake, as they eyed each other with suspicion.

It was Edna Faith’s Full Month party and I made this Diaper Cake for J, the baby girl’s mummy. Knowing that L and G will be bringing some lovely edible cakes to sweet Edna's party, I opted for a conventional baby gift presented in an unconventional way. A Baby Diaper Cake.

The baby diapers are rolled up individually and arranged in rings and then finally stacked into three tiers to look like a cake. The cake was decorated with other ‘ingredients’ like roses made with baby socks, pacifiers, toys and a pretty headband.

Diapers all rolled up and fastened with ribbons and rubberbands.


Roses made with baby socks.

Diaper rolls adorn with a butterfly


The whole 'confection' is topped with a You’re Sooo Sweet cake topper.