11111 + School bento #1

This is my very first post of the year 2011. But of course, the date's been rigged. How could I not take advantage of this date to remember my girl's very special birthday. :P The year has started off not too well, with the princess being sick. It all started with a high fever on 9 Jan. She woke up with a grouchy face and I asked her what was the matter. She refused to answer me at first but later said that she wasn't feeling well. We took her temperature and it registered high, somewhere around 38-39deg C.

I wanted to cheer her up, so while I was out to run errands, got her a cake from Four Leaves (she had requested for a strawberry cake for her birthday but I had no time or energy to bake her one). I had ordered Jewelpets icing a few days earlier thus I decided to improvise on the store-bought cake by decorating it with the sheets. It turned out a success except that I should have placed the sheets on just before serving the cake, as they had started to sag in the 3hrs the cake was left to sit in the fridge. But at the end of the day, it was still a joy for her to see her favourite pets greeting her on top of her favourite cake. :)

For this new school year, I made her 2 bentos. On the first week of school, this was what she got... a mini bagel with ham roll and a slice of cheddar, strawberries and a cherry tomato.

Happy birthday princess. Get well soon!

Pandan Chiffon Cake

It sure took me a loooong time to get round to baking my very first chiffon cake. Have been obsessed with the thought of baking it lately, and did quite a bit of homework before deciding to try this one I found through baking mum's blog. The part in the recipe that bought me over was, "I actually like this recipe better than the other one I have shared. When I do this recipe, I only need one bowl to beat the egg whites. As for the egg yolks I only need to use a whisk and whisk it by hand. No need to be thick and creamy texture". I knew this had to be the one for me. I love doing things the simple way. If it works, why bother with complications, right? ;)

The only thing wrong with this recipe is that it is enough for an 18cm tin while mine is a gigantic 23cm. And just when I was about to get the baking tin ready, I noticed a part in it had a dent and that was bad! I did not have a receipt and I was dying to bake it after putting it off a whole week, and now that I had everything I needed in the recipe, I couldn't wait. So, I had to make do by using some foil to cover the outside of the tin. I do feel so cheated as the tin didn't come cheap. It was partly my fault for not having checked thoroughly before my purchase.

While preparing the mixture, the smell permeating from it was heavenly. There's nothing like the combination of pandan and coconut. Absolute match made in baking heaven.

This was what my cake looked like when ready. It wasn't all that bad. It's just shorter by half than the usual size you get at the bakeries.

Once out of the oven, it had to be turned upside down to cool. Now I know the purpose of those little feet jutting out of the tin.

The end result? I managed to get it out perfectly in one piece, and it had a lovely golden colour on the bottom which is now the top. Texture-wise, a bit denser than what you get at the bakeries. It's a great challenge, but really much cheaper to buy it from the baker's. Haha. Flavour-wise, I think sugar could be increased by another 20gm as it was a bit short on sweetness.

PANDAN CHIFFON CAKE (recipe taken from Prima's website)

100g Prima brand Top Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 tbsp Pandan Juice (I used 1tsp pandan paste)
100ml Coconut Milk
4 Egg Yolks
50ml Corn Oil
¼ tsp Green Colouring (omit this if using pandan paste)
5 Egg Whites
¼ tsp Cream of Tartar
100g Castor Sugar (can try adding another 20gm)
pinch of Salt

Instructions -

Preheat oven to 170°C. (I used 160-165deg on my fan forced oven)

Extract pandan juice from finely pounded pandan leaves and add to coconut milk.
(**) I did not use pandan juice but used about 1 tsp of pandan paste instead.

Add egg yolk, 50g sugar, oil, colouring and salt to the coconut mixture. Mix well using hand whisk.

Sift Prima brand Top Flour and baking powder and fold into mixture. Mix until smooth. Set aside.

Beat egg whites and tartar at high speed until foamy. Add remaining 50g sugar and
beat until stiff.

Add 1/3 beaten egg white to the yolk mixture and mix using a hand whisk.

Slowly fold in this mixture to the remaining 2/3 of beaten egg whites.

Pour mixture into an ungreased 18cm chiffon tin and bake for about 50mins. (I used a 23cm and it took me 40mins)

Turn tin over on a cake rack to cool before loosening cake using a sharp knife.

Pineapple upside down cake

This cake has been on my to-do list for a very very long time. I just never felt the urge or rather, there was never a real push factor. Glimpsing a tin of pineapple rings as I walked past a shelf in NTUC, I decided to seize the moment and pick it up.

The tin sat on the kitchen countertop for 3 whole days. In the meanwhile, I had to psych myself to get it done.

I finally did it today! Yippee! But since I don't like maraschino cherries, I used some strawberries to fill in the gaps. As you can see, the red didn't turn out that well.

I used Nigella's recipe which you can find here. The cake is nice, although it doesn't rise all that much. It wasn't too sweet, and was really easy to make. Removing it from the cake tin was also a breeze.

This cake holds a very special place in my heart. During my Secondary school days, a friend and I joined a baking contest organised by my school and we won the second price with our pineapple upside down cake. :D However, I have no idea where that recipe has gone. What a pity.

Christmas Fruit Cake

I decided to take a break from cookie baking to try out a fruit cake recipe shared with me by a friend. Unfortunately I am not able to share the recipe here as per her request. I've never been a fan of fruit cakes. I don't like how very sweet it is with all the dried mixed fruits. But since this is a Christmas cake I decided to finally make it this year. I didn't put aside lots of time for the soaking of the fruits, and only did it 4 days prior to baking.

My schedule during the week was choc-a-block full so I only managed to bake it last evening and due to lots of hiccups during the course of the day, I only managed to put the mixture together around 5plus in the late afternoon and the cake went into the oven only at 6pm. The recipe stated 2-3hrs baking time! I thought I was in trouble as I miscalculated the time, thinking the party that I was due to be at was starting at 7.30. I thought, oh well, I'd only be about half an hour late or so. It wasn't till I put in the cake that I realized oh no, the party was starting at 7!! And then I began praying, please let the cake bake in over an hour like I heard one of my friends telling me, that was what happened with her cake. And would you believe it?! It was done in 1-1/2hrs! I was really lucky. Left the cake to cool overnight and finally cut it up this afternoon.

Both hubby and princess loved it. They had some little tasting bites of it. I'm leaving it to set for another 5 days and I hope my recipients will enjoy it as much as my family did. :)

It's another cookie recipe tomorrow. Look out for it!

Gobi

Have you heard of Gobi? Well, a friend mentioned it in passing and I didn't bother about it. All I knew was that they have a shopfront in Katong Mall but they do not sell cakes off the counter. You need to pre-order and collect there.

We were handed this box of cake from uncle and aunt who can't consume them so lucky us got to try it.

I love the box with angel wings. To know more about the shop, visit here.

Have the pictures spoken to you? Well, yes the cake was gorgeous and all, but for me, I found it too sweet. I'm not sure of the mousse on the top, but it was basically a green tea-flavoured cake. The chocolate surrounding the cake was very delicate. Wow, I really admire these chefs who can do artwork like that.

A fruit bento - #12

Mummy, can I please just have fruits today, pleassseeee. So here it is, a fruit salad bento, and I threw in two slices of kaya swiss roll which I got from Rich & Good. She only had cereal for late breakfast and didn't want lunch, so I wasn't too keen to just give her fruits but what to do...

This Paddington Bear bento box is a free gift when you purchase 2 tubes of Darlie toothpaste. Promotion is now on. Check out supermarkets etc if you are interested.

You get lovely swiss rolls at this shop. They are famous for their kaya as well as mango rolls. I haven't tried the other flavours yet.

Rich Orange Cake

The picture above doesn't really do the cake justice. As you can see from photo, there's a little portion in the middle where the cake didn't cook too well. But believe me, this cake is heavenly. I had some oranges in the fridge which have been there for quite some time, so this morning, I thought of baking something simple and which needed minimum ingredients, as well as, using the stuff I already have at home. This (Bee Lian's Rich Orange Cake from Allrecipes) fitted the bill perfectly. I followed the recipe mostly, but I substituted the flour for cake flour, adding a tsp of baking powder and half tsp of baking soda. I also used half a tsp of orange essence.

The result? A super light & fluffy cake, very very yummy. I wonder if it's because of the change of flour that made it fluffy, as most of the comments indicated that it was a moist and dense cake. It is slightly moist. I'll be making more of these, definitely!

Sponge cake

This was made a couple of days ago. I can't remember where I got this recipe. I tend to print out recipes when they catch my attention, and usually when it's something simple, I like to try it out. However, I wasn't exactly pleased with it. I have a pack of whipping cream in the fridge, thus decided to slice cake in half and spread it with jam and a layer of whipped cream, followed by top layer of cake and more whipped cream for topping. Hubby loves it, but I'm no whipped cream fan so I didn't have too much of it. :P

Thank you

Late this morning, I made a cake for D who took care of princess yesterday and today so we could go to the race free of any worries. Thanks very much for your help.

I made her a marshmallow cake. I think it's the best thing that I've learnt to make in a long time, after the snow skin mooncake. It's beautiful & yummy. I used my new heart-shaped mould and also a flowery plastic film for the perimeter of the cake. I had literally minutes to beautify it before they were knocking on the door. Hope they enjoy the cake.

While I was in the midst of assembling cake in the morning, hubby woke up so we went out for a late lunch at Suntec City. We couldn't decide on what to have before we spotted a sign at Bakerzin which advertised an all-day set menu which cost $13.80+++. After checking out what the choices of main course were, we decided to have a go. It is really value for money. You get to choose a drink and main course, and it comes with a soup of the day as well as free flow of bread. My main course alone cost $14.80 and hubby's sandwich cost $12.80.

We both had the Italian peach soda.

This was the soup, tomato I think.

As much bread as you like.

Prawn sandwich.

Chicken thigh in teriyaki sauce.

Mixed Fruits Marshmallow Cake

This was really funny... after I poured the jelly layer, some strawberries started swimming away. Notice the straying one in the picture above? It wasn't the only one. The fruits consisted of canned peaches, fresh strawberries, and fresh mangoes.

This blog is currently in lazy mode...

I haven't been updating as much as my juice has run dry. It's not that I have been very busy, but tidying toys and books to be given or thrown away seems to take up much of my time. I also wasn't cooking very much (lazy), but this past week, I've been good - staying home and cooking both lunch and dinner. It's the same old stuff, and they've been blogged about, so it will only be a repetition.

We are invited to a housewarming party today, and were told not to get any gifts as they do not need anything. It's actually a new home for an elderly couple and their family, so I decided to give something homemade, from my little kitchen.

I love this marshmallow cake, introduced to me by Cranberry and it turned out very well this time. I tried it on Thursday and it was a real disaster. Thanks to Cranberry for all her tips and it was a success! Now I'm proud to present my present. ;)

M&M (Marble and Meringue)

I have been slackening in my postings, I know that, as I've been asked frequently by friends, 'how come no updates?'. Haha. Well, haven't been feeling too good as the arthritis has been acting up, and have hindered a lot of my leg movements. I'm not sure if the weather is to be blamed. And also, it IS the time of year when many things are happening, being near Christmas and all, year end graduation concerts, school holidays - time to meet up with friends, and birthday parties every weekend(!), so won't have as many updates as other times of year as have not got much free time to be sitting in front of the mac. But first of all, I feel very guilty that I have not sent out the cookies for the cookie exchange which I have signed up for in the forum that I am in. I mean my sender has already got my cookies on the way over to me and I have only baked mine last night! It sounded fun when I signed up but how was I to predict that I would be in this state? I don't think the cookies will be late, but since I am only mailing them out these couple of days, I can't opt for surface mail which will take 2 months to arrive, as informed by the post office! So if I do participate again next year, will have to mail them in October! Yikes!

So anyways, enough of ramblings... a couple of days back, I left a block of butter out to soften in the morning and was out the whole day... now where did I go... hmmm... every day passes in a blur. After coming back in the evening, had to quickly prepare dinner and all the time the butter was staring at me. After princess was all ready for bed with daddy tucking her in, I still did not know what to do with the butter. Had intended to bake something but as it was getting late, was panicking and didn't want to put it back in the fridge. Did not want to do a full chocolate recipe so looked through my bookshelf and spied the cookbook that mum had given me a couple of years back. She got it from Cold Storage like free when you spent a certain amount of $. Flicked through and decided to do the marble cake as it called for a full block of 225g butter. One huge mistake I made was that I was too lazy to clean up the Chef so I used manual labour. Taking pointers from a forum pal, Josh, who said that the important thing about butter cakes is that you cannot let the mixture curdle or the cake will not be fluffy soft, gosh, I was spooning like a spoonful each time and you do the math with 4 egg whites. Sheesh. And on top of that, there was the cup of milk to spoon in as well. By the time the cake was cooled, it was past 12 am, but thankfully there was a 2hr episode of Amazing Race on that night, and the first country they visited was Ireland! :P


I also made some meringues yesterday with chocolate chips. Baked them for a couple of hours so that they would dry up on the inside and not be marshmallowy soft. The thing about meringues is that they have to baked super slow on very low temperature to avoid getting them brown. The first batch I made were a disaster. They were baking really nicely till I hung up a tea towel on the oven rack and probably turned up the heat on the oven by accident! While wrapping birthday presents, the room was suddenly filled with this sweet smell, and when I went to look in on them, they were all browned!!! Gosh! Waste of my effort so I took a break and started again in the evening. This time I was very careful, as they had to turn out perfect. The result is a highly addictive meringue, very light and crunchy. I love the lovely sheen on them.


Meringues

Ingredients -

2 egg whites
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
chocolate chips (amount to your fancy)


Method -

1. Preheat oven to 110 deg C (225deg F). Line 2 cookie sheets with foil.

2. In a large glass or metal mixing bowl, beat egg whites, salt and cream of tartar to soft peaks. Add vanilla. Gradually add sugar, continuing to beat until whites form stiff peaks. Add chocolate chips and fold in. Drop spoonfuls 1 inch apart on the prepared cookie sheets.

3. Bake for 1-1/2 hrs in preheated oven (I think mine was at least 2hrs in oven). Meringues should be completely dry on the inside. Do not allow them to brown. Turn off oven. Keep oven door ajar, and let meringues sit in the oven to completely cool. Loosen from foil with metal spatula (I find I didn't have to use spatula, just peeled them gently off the foil, they came out beautifully). Store loosely covered in cool dry place for up to 2mths.

Last evening, we had gone to Carrefour and saw this tiramisu selling for half price. Was $3-something. The use by date is the end of this month so bought one to try. I don't really fancy is as it is way too sweet. The alcohol in it is very strong, but unless you love really sweet stuff I wouldn't recommend it. Ok, time to make my own... probably for Christmas dessert. :)