Wooden Treasure!

Making log cakes on Christmas Eve has become some sort of tradition for my mum as we go over to my uncle's house for Christmas. The cakes would then be the tea time "attraction", rounding off a hearty lunch and present swapping. Merry day indeed!

But scheduling conflicts led to the cancellation of Christmas gatherings for the past 2 years and this sadly meant no log cakes. However, the gathering was confirmed this year so the log cake was sort of resurrected and brought back from the...uhhm....cake graveyard.

I've always loved log cakes - something about them just sparks the festive mood in me! I'll sit at the table watching my mum roll the cakes, cream them and stick on the wonderfully colourful decorations to create these beauties!

So this year I thought it was about time I got stuck in and made my own logcake. I had a chocolate hazelnut cream one in mind months before Christmas Eve but I had to scrap the idea at the eleventh hour. The hazelnut powder I wanted to mix with the chocolate had been in the fridge for too long and it had become completely tasteless. I tasted the chocolate-hazelnut paste after mixing some and it felt like chocolate with bits of gravel...not cool.

Sadly, I had to be content with a plain chocolate log cake but oh well...there's always next year I suppose! My mum made the other cake a durian flavoured one that was white as snow! My whole house was filled with the heady scent of the king of fruits as the durian pulp was cooked, mixed in with the cream, spread over the cake and rolled into heavenly Swiss rolls...let me pause to empty my drool bucket.

After the the cakes were creamed and the "log lines" were drawn, all that was left was to decorate them and make them look all Christmassy. Thankfully both cakes turned out well in the end...though rolling Swiss rolls can be extremely stressful and terribly messy!

Anyways,

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Happy Days

Been almost a month since I baked and just thinking about getting stuck into flour, butter and sugar lifted my spirits tremendously so I decided that I NEEDED to bake something.

Something about scones keeps me coming back for more and the best part is having the recipe safe and secure in my ol' file! It's delicious, fragrant, versatile, terrible easy to make, requires little clean up...the list goes on and on really.

I had 3 types in mind but after making a quick run down to the shops, crossed out one of them and went with the other 2. Scones with jam are ridiculously yummy (the better the jam, the higher up in heaven you go!) and I've always wanted to try baking the jam inside the scones instead of slathering it on after it comes out of the oven. I've been toying with idea for so long that I knew I just had to try it!

It turned out alright but terribly messy and a little unappetizing I think. Looked like something exploded really...but I think taste wise it was pretty good with the sugar in the jam getting that little hint of caramel-smokiness after all that time in the oven!

The other type I wanted to try was a plain one since I've always done my scones with something added in. A little bit like back to the basics but not all the way back though, as I decided to top them with a little brown sugar.

I thought the sugar would melt but surprisingly the little crystals stayed quite firm so each bite of the scone had a sweet crunch to it!

Had a little bit of hazelnut powder sitting in the fridge for some time so I decided to add about 20 grams and upped the vanilla extract to 2 teaspoons....WOW! The whole house was filled with the heady scents of toasted hazelnuts and vanilla. Bliss.

Little bit o' midnight grubbin' never hurt anyone! Hehehe...

Lemon Mousse Is Possible!

Busy days these past few days have been...and they'll get busier still.

My dad's birthday was over the last weekend so my mum and I made the customary cake which is a must..although my dad didn't want one! Hehe..

Went for something a little different this time with a lemon mousse cake. Although it was still a mousse cake, I tried a mousse recipe that was different from the one that I usually use. This one used whipped cream as the major ingredient instead of egg whites or fruit puree so it was a little thick and slightly rough.

Wasn't entirely satisfied with it in the end - it seemed a little tough to me and in my opinion, a tough mousse is a lousy one! 

But I had no idea mousses could be made from lemons! 

Every Birthday Needs A Cake!

My mum and I were thinking hard for ideas for my sister's birthday cake and it took almost a whole week before we decided on one. We had a rough idea of what flavour and type of cake to make but we wanted it to be a little unique, something we've never done before. We settled on making a strawberry cheesecake with a peek-a-boo center after seeing it in on of my mum's cookbooks

My mum got down to making the cake on Saturday but I didn't have much of a mood to get stuck in till much later. I stayed away after learning from past experience that if I wasn't in the mood, the cake would probably get destroyed in my hands somehow!

Getting the strawberries to stay in the pattern was quite a painstaking chore and quite unnerving too as we thought the cheese filling would drag some of the berries out of position.

Thankfully it turned out well in the end! Should have grabbed more pictures though.

Hangin' Up Them Oven Mitts!

Sigh.

With the semester just 1 1/12 days away, I think this will probably be the last time I'll set foot anywhere near the oven for the next couple of months. With that in mind, I jumped on the final chance I had to make something. This was of course, done under the pretext of clearing away the leftover flour/sugar/whatnot so that my mum wouldn't start nagging about me singlehandedly causing a rise in the number of diabetics. Heh...

Anyway...I had some chocolate in the fridge from making my friend's cake so I decided to make a Zebra butter cake. The chocolate really made the cake a thousand times richer than normal but also a thousand times more delectable! Ah happy days.

I saw this can of strawberry pie filling when I was trawling the aisles in a supermarket some weeks back and I bought it without having any really concrete plans as to what to make with it. It had been some time since I made a pie so I thought perhaps another was probably due about now.

But I was bored with the usual 'cover the top with another slab of dough' or 'open top' type of pies and I've always wanted to try the lattice pattern that I've seen some use to add a touch of uniqueness to their pies.

Usually the dough would be pretty soft and go all crumbly when I try to pick it up and arrange the strips to create the pattern but this time around it held firm and I was able to arrange the strips without too much of a fuss(though it did break here and there).

But it was all good after taking it out of the oven so I was pretty satisfied. It's a real boost to the spirits when what pops out of the oven matches your mental picture pretty closely!

Death By Chocolate

I heaved a huge sigh of relief when I handed the cake over to my friend...baking for others is pretty stressful! It's not that the difficulty has gone up; just that the stakes have skyrocketed.

If I bake something just for the fun of it like I normally do, then even if something goes horribly wrong, it either ends up in the trash or you can still eat it while consoling yourself. But if someone places an order for a birthday cake then you better hope to the high heavens that you have a good cake for them when they come round to collect it.

Can't just shrug my shoulders and say "Oh well...maybe next time I'll have a better one for you!".

Then there's the matter of taste. Your cake can either end up being the toast of the day or absolute drivel. The scary thing is that different people will have different expectations and tastebuds(?) so there's another problem.

My friend wanted as little cream as possible and more chocolate so I went for overkill by totally omitting any cream and overloading it with good ol' chocolate. Felt like I was making a Mud Cake instead of a chocolate cake really!

Thankfully I had my mum's help - I think she was more excited about my first order than I was! - especially with the decorations. It's great to have an extra pair of hands in the process guiding you like a lighthouse all the way from start to finish.

My friend either had extreme faith in me or was totally drunk when asking me to make the cake...I hope its the former rather than the latter...but I owe him so much for giving me the chance!

Woohoo!



Time for some soul soothing before hitting the sack.

Happy Birthday Mum!

Birthdays are an excellent excuse to bake a cake. And if it's a birthday of someone in the family, it's the perfect time to try something new - 'coz if it doesn't turn out well...the least that could happen is a last minute trip to the bakery to buy a cake!

My mum's birthday cake was a no-brainer for me. She loves durians more than anything else so I had my mind set on a durian mousse cake from a long time back. I had a basic mousse recipe and every mousse that I tried was based on that one with a little tweaking here and there in the ingredients. I've never done a durian mousse cake before but I knew I just had to do it!

Making your own fruit puree is always a bit of a gamble as the sweetness, texture and freshness of the mousse will all depend heavily on it. Most importantly, if the fruit puree is too dense, the mousse may not set and you'll end up with cake floating in a gooey mousse mixture.

It was the first time I bought durians on my own and I made a mistake choosing ones that were a little too ripe. That meant that the taste was a little too strong and the cake would probably not last more than 3 days in the fridge....one more reason to eat it up quick! Hehe...

The durian puree made the mousse mixture so thick that I was resigned to having an unset cake, but thankfully the kitchen gods were kind to me and it turned out well! The mousse wasn't really smooth and had a slightly grainy look but I think that was due to the sheer amount of durians in it!

I felt like I needed a gas mask at some point because the smell was just too much to bear! I like durians but there's definitely a limit...

Normally my mum or my sis would help me with the decorations a whole lot 'coz I'm quite hopeless at coming  up with ideas. But now my sister's moved out and I couldn't really ask my mum for ideas to decorate her own birthday cake, so I had to do it. It looked good in my mental picture but it came out looking pretty half-assed on the real deal...so hmmm guess I gotta work on that too.

Back In Business...Just Maybe.

It's been something like a month since I went anywhere near the oven to bake and I was itching to make just about anything.

I thought I would make a cake since it's been some time since I made one and after much deliberation and flipping through my terribly limited mental repertoire of recipes, I settled on making a feather patterned and a polka dotted Swiss roll. I had already tried my hand at the feather pattern a long time ago but it didn't turn out well at all. The polka dots was something new to me so I was kinda excited to see whether it would be successful....or not.

Lots and lots of polka dots

Feather design for the other one

As luck would have it, the oven chose this exact moment to go 'kaput' so I had to turn to the microwave oven which was smaller, and scale down the recipe according the biggest tin that would fit in. The result: 2 failed attempts and lots of trial and error before something presentable came of it.

In the end, the feather patterned one had to be converted into a cream sandwich sponge because the pattern side was too sticky to roll. Sigh.

The polka dotted one also got converted as it was just too thin to make a decent roll out of. Double sigh.

There's probably a ton of modifications to be done on the recipe but my mom and I felt that this was probably the most edible one heehee.

A Tart For The Summer

I stumbled upon this recipe for a Strawberry Mascarpone Tart many months back while looking for other recipes but somehow, each time I wanted to go ahead with it, something would hold me back.

Not this time though. I stuck to my decision to do it and thankfully it turned out alright!

Its definitely one of those recipes which looks much harder to pull off than it really is...but in any case, this one will blow a HUGE hole in your pocket...trust me. =(

Got lucky with the strawberries as they were nice and plump without too much of tartness in taste. Macerated strawberries...I had no idea what they were before doing this recipe and now I'm wishing I'd known about them earlier!

Wasn't sure about the blind baking time for the shell though so I resorted to keeping it in the oven for an "extra 5" after 20 minutes (kinda like hitting the snooze button on your alarm. "extra 5" 's are hardly ever a good idea) and paid the price for it with an over baked tart shell that was a wee bit hard.

Time to go raid the fridge! Heh.

Nuffin' But Muffins!

I think the beauty of muffins is that you can choose to make them in almost any flavour you wish and they'll still turn out pretty good. Muffins, unlike their not too distant cousins - the Cupcake - aren't strictly desserts either...you can have them for breakfast or tea if you wish! They're just so versatile, have none of those fancy rich frostings and are terribly easy to make. 

So there was just no good excuse I could find to put me off doing a couple over the weekend. I decided to step away from the traditional flavours like banana and went for cranberry-lemon, mango and chocolate.

Well I know chocolate IS the epitome of traditional when it comes to muffin flavours, but there's just no way you can say no to a warm chocolate muffin (with a oozing chocolate center to boot) is there?  

Neither could I!

Macadamia Bliss!

This recipe for a Coconut Macadamia Cheesecake has stayed at the back of my mind ever since I saw it in one of the books my mum has. I knew then that I just HAD to try this out someday. Well since I probably will get no better time to meddle around the kitchen than now, I decided to make it yesterday!

I had lots of help from my sister who's done countless cheesecakes before so thankfully the whole process was quite smooth sailing. It was my first attempt at a cheesecake I think, and although the recipe was quite simple...well, making it was another thing altogether.

As the name suggests, this is a pretty hefty cake calorie wise but everything about it is absolutely wonderful...from the nutty aroma to the rich golden brown colour to the thick creamy centre...ooohhh! But with this cake, good things definitely come in small packages and anything more than a small slice is likely to give you a coronary!

A chocolate dipped macadamia to top it off!

It looks pretty messy..not very appetizing! :(

The sheer amount of macadamia nuts in the filling meant that the cake retained a gooey middle even after spending the whole night chillin' in the fridge. That would be something to keep in mind - IF I ever make this terribly sinful cake again though!

Time to hang up my oven mitts for now...sigh!

Checkmate!

I nearly drove my mum up the wall with my incessant questioning about how to get the checkerboard pattern right...I thought I knew but after checking with her I realised that my method would have resulted in...disaster? Or something close to that.

Thinking in 3D gives me a headache 'coz its so ABSTRACT and confusing...but thankfully it was alot easier once I got down to making the cake!

Seemed to me that it was quite sometime since I did a mousse cake so I thought I'd do one...but I wanted something that was going to be a little different from the ones before.

Also decided to make a mousse that I haven't tried before so I went for a Chempedak mousse. It's one of my favourite fruits since I was a baby and the heady, almost perfume-like aroma of the fruit is rivaled only by His Highness, the Durian himself!

ARRGGHH. Stupid crinkles.

The surface of the cake was kinda ruined as I forgot to smooth out the crinkles in the aluminium foil covering the base of the cake ring and the crinkles on the foil got transferred onto the cake once the mousse  was set. The pattern also didn't come out as it was supposed to...one of the "squares" of mousse went missing amongst the cake pieces and it would have been nicer if there were more layers. =(

Guess it's back to the drawing board for this one.