One month later...

Oh man.. i havent posted in a whole month!! Well, its not that I havent been baking, just that i eat the food b4 i can decide to get the camera, and having no pics is just quite boring. But in case anyone is curious.. in the past month ive done a Chocolate Torte for Janice, Chocolate Chip Cookies for Jocleen, and Banana Muffins for myself =) ( Sidenote : the banana muffins were damn good if I must say so myself )

Anyway, after the unfortunate events that have happened to me, I finally picked up some time to do something I havent done in awhile, Vanilla cupcakes with buttercream frosting! So enjoy the pics! These tasted wayy better than my first time, and the frosting has a nice pink colour and strawberry flavour. For those who watch sex and the city ( I dont =X) the recipe is supposed to be the same as the magnolia bakery that they showed there.






Ive been kinda lacking inspiration for awhile too, which explains the lack of posts, but I think i kinda got it back alr, been flipping through my recipe books a few more times and tagged out all those recipes I can try next, so hopefully, if time permits, you get to see more stuff come out soon. Prob want to start to pick a few cakes to set as my signatures and practice them like mad for the birthdays of certain important people =))

( The frosting looks v nice rite!!! I think this is my best atttempt at frosting ever. esp the pick colour.. i wanted to sprinkle those multicoloured tiny balls over them, but I think that would just make it too sweet )

lesson 1 : lemons are sour

Wow.. saturday is probably my worst day in the kitchen ever, period.

I had this great plan to turn up for my sentosa outing with a bag filled with food and treats..but... i ended up going there with an empty bag =(

Well, everything started off with my blondies, which were doing really well, until I put them into the oven, waited for 30 mins and went to check on them. To my horror, my blondie had turned black!! sighhh apparently, I had forgot to check my oven temperature and had it set 40 degrees too hot.

After that, I went on to make the kebabs I had been wanting to make for ages. They actually looked pretty good, but, I had used too much lemon juice in my marinate and they tasted really lemony and sour. So, in all, I spent 3 hours +++ in the kitchen, only to produce... abosulutely nothing.

Well, on a brighter note, this is my first 'food' post! since its my 1st time making food of any kind, maybe in the future ill have more roasts/grills etc etc etc to spice up the blog from time to time instead of all those cakes and sugar.

Here's my deceptively nice kebab pic

of coconuts and doughnuts

woohoo..my title rhymes..honestly, i didnt mean it.just came out that way =X

well..quite abit happened this week baking wise, so..ill start off with a THANKS to wanying, who gave me the bottle of malibu ive been needing all this while. for those who do not know, malibu is this really nice tasting coconut rum which works well for baking, and is the perfect kind of liquor for me, being sweet and having a very fragant scent of coconuts. and with that.i present, rum soaked cakes!


first up is my beloved bottle of malibu ( goes great with orange/pineapple juice)



the cake just out of the oven



in the midst of assembly

Sadly, I didnt get any good shots of the final product, firstly since I suck at decorating, and also coz my hands were shaking and I was in a bad rush.. oh well.. ill get it next time!

This recipe was one of the better ones i tried, being both simple, and producing a cake that had a nice moist texture, and a nice vanilla flavour, enhanced by my malibu. The final product was a little sweet though, coz of the syrup I added, but I was very happy that it came out successfully. I even added a coconut paste in the centre, which I thought was quite well done, but my bro reminded me that the cake tasted like those nonya kueh, not taht it was bad, just.. funny.

Well, im surely going to keep this as one of my standard recipes ill keep using, especially since it can be variated really easily around with.

And later on in the week ( just last saturday to be exact ) I attended a doughnut making workshop by Chef Audrey Tan at Shermay's Cooking School ( I used her recipe for my crepes )

It was my first time going for such a class, so I was a little nervous and all, but the class turned out to be really great, and totally worth my money. The whole lesson plan was very simple, starting off with a demo from the chef on making the dough, and then, we got to go down to the workstations and all make our own dough. It was here that I discovered that all the experience I had over the last 6 months amount to nothing when it came to kneading dough, i was totally screwing it up, but thankfully the instructors were really diligent in making sure everyone filled a tray with pieces of dough ready for frying, and it was a very good start for me in terms of working with dough.

After that, they showed us how to fry the doughnuts, probably the simplest part, save eating, and proceeded to show us how to top them off. This one was really interesting, as we were shown how to combine colours, make designs, pipe in jam, and flavour various chocolates. And, more importantly, we got to try it all out with our own doughnuts and bring them back, working with a huge selection of toppings provided by the school. Sufice to say, it was a really enjoyable experience and, I got myself a nice tasting box of doughnuts.

I was very impressed by Chef Audrey Tan too, not only was she very skilled and knowledgeable, I could tell she was very passionate about what she was doing, enjoying herself, and was very friendly and honest, wanting all of us to have the same joy she felt from baking/frying, which I think is very important as a chef.

Alright.. very very wordy post, and the worst part is.. I FORGOT TO TAKE PICS AT THE CLASS, too busy eating/ decorating my donuts =X

well.. i might take a very short break from baking.. just coz I have this weird impulse to make kebabs, so.. the next post you see might be about proper food for once =)

Nutella Muffins, and some other stuff

Man.. this post is wayyy overdue.. wonder what ive been doing that made me put it off.

well, it was the day of my camp's family day, so i had like a 2 hour work day, and decided to do something simple in the morning, and these nutella muffins were perfect! Really simple to make, and they tasted pretty good, but maybe its coz i ate em fresh out of the oven. I tried out a new style of muffins, which didnt need milk ( thank god ) and it turned out pretty good, kinda butter cake-ish thou. The nutella is really easy to use as well, almost like an instant topping, just add it in and swirl.. poof.. muffins!

Heres my pic : ( i thought it was pretty nice btw.. makes alot of diff to have the daylight)



On another note, I got the place for my donut class this sat! If my payment gets there in time that is, i dunno why i didnt get the 1st email they sent me to say i got the spot.. but it was kinda nice of em to keep it for me until now.. hopefully ill have donuts on my next post!

And..with further deviation.. i did this from Janice's blog.. so.. im going to post it here. Some personality thingy =)

Considerate Experiencer

Crepes!

oh my god! i made crepes today, think i got super high after making them and started sending the pics out to everyone i knew.

i was flipping through my new recipe book and saw one for crepes, and had this huge urge to make them instantly. So, anyway, i got down to work and cooked up some apples and bananas to top off my crepes and mixed up the batter, which wasnt really too hard, just abit time consuming. But, in the end, it was totally worth it, frying the crepes was really fun, and trying to flip them, and topping them off too, I so have to think of different things i can top them off with. Anyway, here are the pics, the recipe said serves 4-6, but I think i had enough for 20 crepes, shall use half next time.

Btw, im really happy with the pics that came out today as well! Here goes ( and i want nicer plates, hint)



ok, heres my workstation just before I mixed all of them one by one to get my crepe batter.



Heres the apples and bananas I cooked up to top off the crepes, the apples taste like apple pie filling =X




The final product, I was planning to make more kinds, but there arent enough people to eat at my house =(

New cookbooks!

Gah.ive been on the hunt for some new inspiration aside from cheesecakes, since im wayyy to lazy to go and buy cream cheese, esp since it doesnt keep too long so Im afraid i end up not using it in time, so I popped by Kino, and in the midst of a very very sinful book shopping spree ( I have alot of those ) , i picked up 2 new recipe books! ( I wanted to post up pictures, but im still not sure if thats against any copyright/legal/ip/ etc thingys)

First was a book called Muffins Galore! which, from the title, has like over a hundred muffin recipes, which i really need since Im kinda bad at muffins, dont know if its me or the recipes im using, so I thought Id try and get more material on it. The other book is by a Singaporean Chef! called Lust, which features a big handful of chocolate desserts, something I totally have a soft spot for, who doesnt like chocolate after all.

Oh, this same Singapore author, Audrey Tan, is also holding a donut workshop in Sept, hopefully ill be able to get a place for it and learn to make my own double chocolate donuts ( Watch out JCO! )

I made orange-blueberry muffins this week as well, didnt really turn out that delicious, though they were edible, I should have used fresh/frozen rather than canned blueberries as those kinda spoilt the texture for me.

Mann..long, wordy post, but I havent really made anything worthy of pictures yet, oh wells, getting too busy in the weekends, and weekday baking is too draining for me to grab the camera, haha

我回來了!!

Gosh, i havent posted in a month!!! to be honest, I actually baked cookies a few times in july, but.. was too lazy to put them up, more busy eating em =)

Anyway, now that im back from my extremely amazing taiwan trip, I can get back to baking, and the first thing I did was this banana cake, using my Doris Greenspan recipe book, and since I finally have ripe bananas at home.






i had quite good hopes for this cake as i was mixing up the batter since it already gave the nice banana cake smell ( im a huge fan of banana cakes), and it didnt let me down at all, i would have preferred it a little sweeter, but in the end, the cake turned out with a nice balance of banana and cake flavour, and had a soft and moist texture that i love in banana cakes.

im starting to run of out ideas of stuff that i can do without having to go and buy ingredients, so i guess its time to get hardworking and go shop for stuff, such as cream cheese for cheesecake. Also, maybe ill take some time off and attend a few workshops when I got the time, wanna learn how to decorate my cakes. Everyone else seems to be able to make prettier cakes than me =X