Happy Birthday!

It's a wonderful feeling you get when someone asks you to bake a birthday cake for their friends or for someone in their family. To me, that's a great deal of trust that someone places into your hands. Trust that you will give them a cake worthy of a birthday party, and trust that you won't disappoint them.

Birthday cakes are pretty stressful to make. That's a fact - well at least to me it is! I think it's because without the cake, there can be no real celebration. I can't imagine having a birthday party with no cake to blow the candles out from or having a cake that looks nothing like a birthday cake...it just doesn't make any sense!

So when my friend asked me for one I was initially hesitant to accept but I decided to go ahead with it since it was for a dear old friend's 21st birthday! You'll never know if you don't try I guess!

Chocolate overload was requested and chocolate overload it was! Basically, it was a chocolate cake with 2 layers of chocolate whipped cream sandwiched in between and topped off with a chocolate ganache covering the top and sides of the cake. No make that smothering instead of covering.

There were hitches aplenty along the way but luckily I had loads of help from my mum and sis! Thankfully it came out alright in the end!

For Mum

Mother's day is an occasion celebrated like no other isn't it? The outpouring of love and affection for the one person that we hold so dear to our hearts is almost overwhelming. But mothers deserve that I think! Over at my house, its almost tradition to celebrate Mother's Day and Father's Day, along with birthdays, with a cake so I had been planning one for quite some time now.

It helped that I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted so I decided to go for something that I've never tried before instead of sticking with the safe choices. After searching online for ideas and recipes, I settled on a Gula Melaka Mousse Cake, which was sort of a new experience for me as it was the first time I was using palm sugar though I already was an ardent fan of its smoky rich flavour.

If it didn't turn out...well I would be disappointed but then again, you have to try at least once! This was going to be the first Mother's Day that my sister wouldn't be around to make the cake with me since she moved out, so I was kinda worried about that to be honest!

I meant the cake as a surprise though my mum was expecting one(since its tradition!) but in the end I had to tell her because I was kinda afraid it wouldn't turn out well. Darn it...in the end, she helped me from beginning to the end! So much for surprises eh? But I was extremely grateful for her help as I would have gotten stuck couple of times without her guidance!

Thankfully, I was able to find a recipe online that seemed pretty reliable and had quite a few positive comments so I knew I could trust it to turn out well. The danger that comes with using online recipes is that sometimes the cake/cookie/whatever just doesn't turn out like the glorious looking picture on the page.

But this one was pretty good - simple, very few ingredients needed and easy to replicate. Try it!

Everything I know thus far about baking and cooking, I learnt from my mum and I owe it all to her. I think perhaps she passed on her intense passion for the culinary arts when she was carrying me in her belly! So this one is for you mum, Happy Mother's Day!

Back In The Groove - Pineapple Cheesecake!

It's quite clear to me now that baking makes me happy. Unfortunately, there just isn't time during the semester to go anywhere near the oven with peace of mind. So I decided that now since the semester is done and dusted, I should get back to baking to put the semester's disappointments well and truly behind me.

Moving on...

My mom had her eye on this recipe for a Pineapple Cheesecake for quite sometime and I was just happy to get stuck in! Pineapples are a personal favourite of mine but they don't get turned into cheesecakes or mousses as often as they should due to their pretty high acidity which doesn't let the gelatin set. And no one wants a runny cheesecake or mousse now do they?

This recipe called for canned pineapples which are great but don't really come close to the taste of the real McCoy if you ask me. Cream cheese made way for the ridiculously creamy Mascarpone cheese which just makes everything a thousand times more sinful!

The recipe was pretty complicated...alot of mixing Mixture A into Mixture B and cool in ice water baths or heat over simmering water..stuff like that. But then again, I felt that the creamy, heavenly end product was well worth all the extra effort here and there. And I stumbled on an excellently rich and delectable custard recipe along the way so all in all, a good day at the office I must say.

One regret I had was adding the rum flavouring...just 1 tablespoon of that stuff which didn't seem like much at first, but it made the cheese mixture taste a little like cough medication. Argh! But I think adding a tablespoon of rum instead of rum flavouring would have done the trick. After all, pineapples and rum goes pretty well together!