GIANT egg tart

Have you ever seen an egg tart THIS HUGE? Came across this idea of making a giant egg tart yesterday and decided to go for it!

The recipe I used is for making 24 small Chinese egg tarts. Small ones should be baked in 150*C heat from above and 210*C heat from below for 30 mins. For this one, I baked it for 45 mins at 180*C, testing the egg filling’s texture along the way.  Unlike making the pastry for the huge berry pie, making the pastry for this tart was much more messy. The dough couldn’t really be rolled out properly because it was basically just a cookie dough and therefore break easily, spreading it to a round tart shape with a 27 cm diameter with a pin roller was hopeless. I just used my fingers and palms…The cookie base of the tart is therefore too thick. The taste is fine, the egg filling is perhaps a bit too sweet for my taste, but surprisingly, when you eat it with the cookie base, the whole thing together taste less sweet.

香港一蛋撻?

Green Tea Cookies

I have used this simple butter cookie recipe since I was 13. It’s so easy to remember the recipe because I simply have to remember the 1:2:3 rule – which is the proportions of sugar, butter and flour respectively. This time I added an egg yolk and replace 10 g of flour with green tea powder. First mixing the sugar with the soften butter, then adding in the egg yolk, then flour and green tea powder. I made small dough balls with my palms, then flattened them with a flat-bottom china spoon. I added wave patterns on the cookies with a fork, like how villagers make unique marks on their bread doughs before they put them in the communal stone oven~12 minutes in the oven later, wala, cookies that melt in your mouth as soon as you bite into them were born~and this time, their buttoms were not burnt! Moving the rack in the oven up worked 🙂 Next time, I’ll make them even smaller, bite-size. Now, they’re more like 2-bite-size.

Banana Wholewheat Muffin

Half way through making these muffs, I realized, I used very similar ingredients in making Bunnie’s Bday pupcakes~

I wanted to make a healthy treat today, something that did not require loads of sugar or butter. It’s okay to indulge into a really sweet and full treat once in a while, but I can’t let myself do it weekly or all the efforts in the gym will go to waste :P! These muffs only needed about 2-3 tbsp of sugar and 50ml oil (I used extra virgin olive oil). The rest of the ingredients were all healthy stuff: wholewheat flour, soy milk, banana. Easy to make. A perfect lazy and light treat for afternoon tea.

Sesame Breadstick

The breadsticks are a success! Best eaten when still warm 🙂 crunchy outside, chewy inside. Ah, just realised, they tasted like Pizza Express’s doughsticks! The recipe is basically the same as the one for the first french roll I made. Freshly baked bread is just wonderful~

This time I think I’ve worked the dough better, with more power and smoother forward movements.

To make them more restaurant-style-like, I could have cut them thinner, then they would have been more biscuit than bread-like. I bet that would have been nice too~

Chocolate & Blackcurrant Jam Swiss Roll

The last swiss roll I made turned into a roll of crunchy ladyfingers, so, I decided I had to take on the swiss roll challenge again when I get back to HK where I have the electronic whisk. And I did today! Not to too much of a success, but I did it again! And I’ll challenge it again!!

I know, it doesn’t look great~BUT, this time, the sponge cake bit was definitely softer than the last time (thanks to the electronic whisk), though it was still not smooth enough to roll without cracking. There are also a lot of uneven holes from air bubbles. I still haven’t figured out how to get the sponge cake even softer (maybe a different recipe? now it was a 1:1 flour-sugar ratio), but a flatter bigger spatula might help levelling the mix on the baking tray and forcing out the big air bubbles. Dad & Mom also commented that the cake was a bit dry, so I gotta come up with some solution for this problem to before I try my hands on making swiss roll again! Bring it on!

Wholewheat Bread

Good baking needs enough time. That’s today’s lesson.

I was in a rush to finish with making the bread coz’ I was going to a play tonight. Turned out yeast just cannot be rushed. I didn’t allow enough time for the dough to rise, so the bread turned out very dense. My weak muscleless arm also couldn’t work the dough enough…Gotta work harder in the gym to get those muscles to work the dough better next time…

Learnt also that one cannot make wholewheat bread with wholewheat flour only. To get the chewy bread-y texture, one has to mix the wholewheat flour with some plain bread flour.  Interesting.

Nigella’s Chocolate Chip Muffin & Birthday PUPCAKES

I’ve always liked Nigella Lawson, more as a person than her food in particular though. As a woman, she’s very sexy, and not in the size-0-model way. Her food, however, always tend to be on the overly indulgent side (i.e. lots of sugar, lots of fat…). This is why her chocolate muffin recipe came as a surprise to me: http://www.nigella.com/recipe/recipe_detail.aspx?rid=12489. She used vegetable oil instead of butter for her recipe. You can tell from the lighter taste that the muffins are healthier than the usual ones you get in stores.

Next Wednesday will be my little puppy sister, Bunnie’s, 2-year-old birthday. We had a little birthday celebration for her last night. I made the Chocolate Chip Muffins for my human family (coz’ chocolate is poisonous to pooch), and for Bunnie, I made my first attempt on pupcakes, with apple, cheese, oatmeal, yoghurt, honey and wholemeal flour. The taste is perhaps too subtle for human, but Bunnie loves it!

Round bread roll

I made these round French bread roll today following a recipe from the same recipe book bought from the Book Fair. They are super easy to make and very adorable. They are a little bit sticky on the inside. Sister thinks it’d taste even better if it can be more airy inside. So maybe I can try to trap more air into the dough next time by using the thumb-ing technique, which means actually sticking your thumb into the dough and then folding it to trap the air in.

Cranberry “Minimuff”

This weekend, I made some cranberry mini muffins (a.k.a. “Minimuff” in my world). I used dried cranberry, the fruity sharpness made the butter muffin quite interesting. Because we didn’t have milk, I used the soya milk instead and it still worked~(why is my place always so lack of ingredients, forcing me to improvise~?).  They are all in bite size. Love it!

There is no yummy healthy dessert…

The past weekend was all about relaxing, de-stressing and detoxing at the Chiva-Som health resort in Hua Hin, Thailand, naturally there was no opportunity for me to bake, and frankly I’d like to extend that tranquillity in me and do as little as possible before I start on my new job tomorrow. I think you will understand and forgive me for this when you see where I stayed:

During our stay, we tried many healthy wholewheat muffins, tarts, cookies, even a mini green pea sponge cake. I am sorry to say, but I cannot imagine how these wholewheat baked goods can be made yummy. They tried to flavour it with herbs, nuts, and vegetables and even chocolate chips, but they all failed to make them taste of the comfort that a good dessert should bring. Until I taste otherwise, I shall conclude that a good dessert has to be somehow fattening~and wholewheat is not the way…