Gingerbread House (Part 1)

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…walking in the winter wonderland…

Last night, Miah and I decorated a Christmas tree, I’ve chosen a gingerbread man theme for the tree, with gingerbread man baubles and a pair of gingerbread men frolicking in the tree~Then I thought, what’s better to complete the theme than building a gingerbread house for the little merry gentlemen?

So, the construction work began today, following this recipe from BBC food: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4900/

Spent a good few hours in the afternoon to build the walls and roof panels and felt exhausted! Decided to leave the walls to cool completely for a night so that they will harden and dry completely. Come back tomorrow to see Step 2 when I will (hopefully) put the walls and roof together :)!

Pizza Bread

With half a jar of guacamole left over from my birthday party, I decided to make some pizza bread and use the guacamole as a dip. I planned to make a thin crust pizza bread, but following the 1-cm thickness guideline from the recipe, the thin crust became thick crust =.=….Nonetheless, the olive oil added to the dough gave the bread a subtle but lovely flavour and the bread was very nice freshly out of the oven 🙂

Devon Apple Cake

Proper baking again, finally!

Today, I decided to bring the taste of Devon into my home. So, 2 new friends – ground Saigon cinnamon and mixed spices – joined my baking cupboard crew to make this happen! Very exciting!

Dad and Mom bought me a small recipe book during their trip to Devon, called “Favourite Devonshire Recipes”, in there is this Devon Apple Cake recipe, and this was what I decided to try my hands on today.

The aroma of the spices and apple together worked magic! I bet better than drug! I could smell Christmas! (You can tell I’m a bit high from smelling the spices I’m sure =P)

This is a healthy (i.e. not too much butter/sugar to make me feel too guilty to bake it) and easy-to-make cake. A perfect tea cake flavoured with a classic combination of apple and cinnamon.

The whole family sat round the table to sip Whittard’s strawberry tea and enjoyed my freshly baked Devonish cake. A great simple afternoon indeed.

MEssy Baker’s Birthday!

On Monday, I turned 2 dozen years old~!

To feed all my lovely friends and family who came to my Silly Wig Birthday Party on Sunday night, I bought a big Angel Cake from Maxim’s and asked everyone to write/draw something on my cake with food colouring =) This was my cake~! (I drew the little black butterfly~)

Microwave Cup-sponge cake

Today’s Lesson: Microwave cake does not work.

Driven by curiosity and laziness, I made sponge cakes in small cups in a microwave following this recipe today:

A: 2 spoons of plain flour + 2 spoons of sugar (or 1 spoon of sugar + 1 spoon of cocoa powder) + 1 spoon potato flour + 0.5 spoon baking powder

B: 1 egg + 1 small spoon of vegetable oil

Steps: 1. Mix A, 2. Mix B, 3. Mix A with B, 4. Quickly spoon the mixture into cups/mugs and heat in a microwave for 2 mins.

End product looks like this:

It was dry like real sponge, those for cleaning…Miah suggested serving it a la mode, the moist from the ice-cream did help the cake get down but it was still quite bad…

An alternative way of heating up these cup-sponge cakes is to steam them for 10 minutes, which I do believe will turn out a lot better than this…

Profiteroles

What can I bake if,

• I don’t have time to wait for a dough to raise (i.e. can’t make bread)?
• I have no sugar (i.e. can’t make cake, cookie, muffin or even cream…)?
• I don’t want to eat something with too much fat (i.e. most kinds of dessert that require lots of butter)?

I found myself asking all of the above questions today. (I always find myself asking questions of the sort on weekends…Soon this blog will have to be renamed as “The journey of a lazy baker with nothing in the kitchen cupboards”…)

I flipped through 6 recipe books, thinking this might be the first weekend of me being home but not baking anything…but then…I found it….Profiteroles! Who knew!! The choux pastry part of profiteroles only required water, a bit of butter, plain flour and 3 eggs! Sure, I can’t make the cream to go inside the profiteroles and I can’t make the choco-brandy sauce to go on top of the profiteroles, but you know me, I can always think of quick lazy yet usually workable substitutes 😛 Conveniently, we have chocolate ice cream at home, which gives me both “cream” and “choco-sauce” all in one~

The pastry was easy to make up to the point where I was supposed to pipe the “dropping” mixture into balls, but the mixture was too droppy it could not possibly be shaped into balls. When in baking trouble, you can always fall back on to muffin cases. I spooned the mixture into my mini muffin cases and baked them in the case, thinking I would make profiterole halves and just put ice cream in the middle of two halves to make profiteroles. Half a dozen of them actually puff-ed up into balls (and the others looked like halves as planned…). They are really profiterole-like with a hollow inside and taste good with chocolate ice-cream too~

Mini white loaf

Excited about finally having a bread loaf tin, I decided to make a loaf of white bread for my Aunt Clara who has been a fan of my baked goods and a reader of my blog 🙂

Remember I recently had issue with getting the dough non-sticky and smooth and rise properly? I think I’ve found out the reason: it wasn’t the filtered water, it’s because of the cooler weather which made the yeast less active and therefore the dough has to be worked much longer to get into shape properly. Today I worked the dough diligently until it’s really smooth outside. I then placed a bowl of hot water beneath the pan in which I placed the rising dough. It did the trick! The dough rose for both stages. However, I did something silly again, mixing up two steps (I blame the sequence of pictures printed on the recipe book…), and mindlessly pressed out all the air from the dough AFTER the second rising stage when it should have been the other way round…I tried to save the dough by giving it another hour to rise after that…

The mini white loaf turned out looking quite like the thing in the picture on the recipe book, but I think it would have been fluffier inside if I didn’t make that silly mistake.

Aunt Clara decided the whole family should try the bread too while it was still warm, so we all had some of the loaf as an appetizer tonight 🙂 yummy!

 

My New Toys

Although I had not been at home last weekend and therefore couldn’t bake, I was shopping for new baking toys at the Wing On’s special sale~I bought a cake ring, a tea loaf baking box, a cooling rack and a long-needed electronic scale. With my new equipments, I can attempt many new recipes :D!

Pitta Bread

Something is wrong with the bread dough in the last 2 weeks. They just wouldn’t form a smooth non-sticky dough no matter how long I knead them. I’d say this made shaping the dough very difficult (if you can keep a blind eye on the lumpy surface on the pitta bread), or impossible, actually, if you’re a perfectionist. I used the same brand of bread flour, the same salt, sugar and active dry yeast. I’m not sure, but I think the Brita water filter did something funny with the water I used for making the dough. Another theory I have is that, perhaps I should give the dough a little bit more help first before I left it for 10 minutes for the water to be soaked up by the flour and continued on more kneading action. I’ll do some experiment in the next few weeks…

Today, I made something that looks like pitta bread (sort of…). I always thought, to make the air pocket in each pitta bread, air must be injected into the dough before baking, but there wasn’t such a step in the process at all. And weird enough, even for this bad attempt, the pocket formed inside! (Not all the uglier ones have a pocket inside though because of the very unprofessional way I used to shape them, i.e. just pulling and moulding them with my hands and no pin roller…)

This is how the pitta bread looked, the upper side is white, the fire-facing lower side is brown.

Chestnut Bun

I love making bread. (Have I said this already before?) Partly because I know it can’t go too wrong, and partly because I know my whole family (including my puppy BUNnie) will love it, too, no matter what bun I make. We all love buns. Today, I had miah as my helper. He helped with the the kneading of the dough:) I bought a tube of chestnut paste about a month ago, and decided to use it as the filling for today’s buns~Following the recipe, we added 10g of butter to the dough. I felt that the butter affected the raising of the dough. It usually raises much faster and the surface looks smoother too without the butter. 15 mins of bakng in a 190*C oven was not enough to make the buns go brown either. The best way to serve them is to, first, heat the buns up in the microwave for 10-20 secs, then heat them up again for 1-2 mins in a small oven. This will ensure that the chestnut inside will be hot, and the outside of the bun will be crunchy.