"My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine."
Mary Shelley.
Basia Bulat's Snakes and Ladders
Monday, 25 August 2008
Fight off some blues? ; 23:34
Music is universal. I listen to music in many languages, some that I do not even understand but the rhythm and arrangement grabs me. So, to present one of my all time favourite Japanese artiste, Utada Hikaru (宇多田ヒカル). I honestly do not understand past 10 words of Japanese and find it hard to learn. But that has not deterred me over the years to enjoy fantastic Japanese music, with my favourite of favourites being M-Flo.
Still, This was Hikki's latest studio effort and was originally released back in March 2008. I am ashamed that I had only learnt of this track today, but better late than never.
OH! I so desire those streaming mp3 players on people's website. Thanks to Mikey, I got a nice player, so whenever i am posting mp3s, you guys can listen before deciding to download. NICE OR WHAT????
*BEAMING CHEEK TO CHEEK*
i am happy. XXX Mikey! :D
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
kind of late... ; 17:35
Above was the process of making the "Pumpkin-Vanilla Soup". Recipe can be found in previous posts.
Also, I made some really yummy banana muffins too last Tuesday. Its so moist and was still moist even after a day in this cold Melbourne weather. I have been in a really shitey mood since last Thursday and very clearly unhappy.
When I am unhappy, I cannot bake. :D
Anyway, here is the recipe.
Banana & walnut muffins with crumbed choc chip topping. This recipe has been modified by me. Yield: 9 x 80g
1-1/2 cup flour 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt 3 large bananas, mashed 170g sugar 1 egg 75g butter, softened 80ml milk 80g chopped walnuts
Topping I have used a topping of chocolate chips and crumble. For the crumble, there's 2 recipe for you. One is my own very simple crumble recipe, the other one is the topping that was with the original recipe.
Knead with fingertips until resembles coarse breadcrumbs
Preheat Oven 190C. Line muffin mould. Mix all ingredients together. I measure the batter to 80g each for the muffin before pouring it into the mould. This is to ensure even sized muffins after baking. Top muffins with topping and bake in the oven for 19-20 minutes or until skewer inserted into the middle of the muffin came out clean.
I baked German Potato Muffin yesterday. Unfortunately, I can't share the recipe, because I do not have permission from the original author. Maybe, until I have modified the recipe beyond recognition. But till then, here's a picture to look at. :D
the kind of things that you do late at night ; 09:50
Twas a cold 6C Tuesday morning in Melbourne.
So much for a sunny day.
I had a long Monday yesterday, looking at chemistry the whole day. Actually, since Saturday, that was what I ever looked at. Still, long as it might, it was a really hilarious day studying chemistry with my friend, Casp. Honking at random strangers on the way home might not be my idea of random fun, but I had a great laugh.
Private joke: "Alooooone arrr wee?" :D
STILL, the fun did not start at around 1230 am. (Which was when I got home really). I planned to bake, but because of meeting with Casp for chemistry, my planned sort of got derailed a little. Nevertheless, bake I did.
I recently bought alot of ingredients, and is really on this baking itch. Having trawled the various food blogs and my recipe notebooks for recipes to bake. I am ready to bake-off.
Late last night, in 3 hrs I baked a batch of cookies, yielding I reckon almost a kilo or more of cookies. Mind you, it was not simple, it was not difficult either, but its a little bit more work than and I made several boos.
The cookies taste great. Honestly. I did a few tweaks to what I reckon when I saw the recipe, is definitely a keeper. But as a perfectionist and as a professionally trained chef, I should have known better to commit silly mistakes like this. LOL
Firstly, I bought the wrong kind of sugar, so now I am stuck with slightly less than a kilo of raw sugar. It called for light brown sugar and I bought raw sugar! =.= Then, it says to whip the butter with the 2 kind of sugars until fluffy. I pour the weighted caster sugar into the flour instead! ROFL Still, as the first batched was baked, I forgot when did I put it into the oven, so, overbaked, the cookies was slightly burn round the edges. LOL Ah, but when I check the cookies, to my horror, LOL, I got the wrong kind of chocolate chips! Mine melts as it bakes. AHHHHHH~~~~~
Must read labels properly. =.= But I must say, its still taste great. :D
The recipe was originally a Nigella Lawson. Yep, you can always count on Nigella if you are looking for "sinful and decadent" food. I did some slight tweaks to the recipe. So, here's the modded version.
INTENSE CHOCOLATE COOKIES
150g dark chocolate 150g plain flour 30g cocoa powder 1 tsp bicarbonate soda 1/2 tsp salt 125g unsalted butter or margarine, softened 75g light brown sugar 50g caster sugar 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 egg, cold from the fridge 200g dark chocolate chips 100g chopped nuts (I used walnuts)
Preheat oven 170C. Break the dark chocolate into pieces, and melt over a BAIN-MARIE. (A bowl over a simmering pot of water). Whisk until chocolate melts, but be careful not to overheat, the chocolate might turn grainy. Mix flour, cocoa powder, bicarbonate soda and salt together. Cream the butter/margarine and the two sugars together until light and fluffy. Add the melted chocolate into the fluffy butter and fold well. Beat in vanilla, crack in egg cold from the fridge and mix well. Fold in the flour mixture in batches. Make sure well mix and scrap the bottom of the mixing bowl well. Fold in chocolate chips and nuts.
Now, you can either use a spoon and drop them onto the baking tray lined with baking paper or you can roll the dough into a log, chill it and then cut them into shape. Anyway, theres' no need to flatten them as you spoon them onto the tray, just make sure you keep them few cm apart as they might spread. Bake for 18 mins. They will become hard when they cooled. :D
The other bake.
As the cookies was baking, I prepare the ingredients for another. This is a modded Genoese sponge with a glaze that IS NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED!
The batter for the cake was easy enough, I just mod a basic Genoese sponge recipe to include some coffee flavour and chocolate in it. The glaze though, as I wanted a reallly shiny ganache, I pick Oriol Balaguer. I know some might go "WHO??". but, if you do a google on him, or if you are already that keen foodie, you will already know who this amazing guy is.
But, it took me 3 attempts to get the ganache sort of right. You see, it requires you to melt sugar without caramelizing it. Easy you say, honestly, if its just sugar vs heat. It's not. Firstly, I got to simmer some water to make a reduced chocolate and coffee mixture. Because I was lacking saucepan, I had to pour the mixture into a little cup as I reuse the pot for the sugar. I can do that, but I didn't realise that it was important to keep the choc-coffee mixture warm.
Anyway, after a bit of mess, irritated that i caramelized the sugar TWICE, I decided I did not want to waste more caster sugar. So, the "smartie" me uses normal white sugar -which has bigger crystals! which means need more heat to break apart the bonds aka higher heat to melt! SMART! I learn chemistry all day and I uses WHITE SUGAR!!!!! Just goes to show how much I am using my brain. :D
Right, after about 20 mins the sugar finally melted and as I pour the cooled choc-coffee mixture into the melted sugar, it splosh, spit and bubbled! Yeah, its expected, so you got to be really careful not to get splashed by the mixture. Sugar can really hurt you. This is from first hand experience when I was working as a pro chef. But another pain here was that because my mixture was cooled, it immediately harden the bloody sugar! Oh!!! So I ended up with this biiiig chunk of sugar clumping the bloody whisk.
Well, massive whisking as I continue to heat the glaze somehow "saved" some of the glaze. And in the end, it turns out sort of, nice! I might have heat too much of the sugar, because in the end, the glaze when cooled became really fudgy like. But I love the end result of it. It just mean that now, I got to heat my cake before serving. :)
It might be a real pain. But I will do it AGAIN. :D
Here is the recipe.
CHOC-MOCHA GENEOSE SPONGE -this is a modded recipe.
Preheat oven 180C. Grease a cake tin or a loaf tin. (I used a loaf tin) Mix cocoa powder with 4 tbsp of boiling water into a smooth paste. Cream sugar and butter until fluffy. Mix self raising flour with baking powder.
NOTE: If you do not have self raising flour, per cup of the self raising flour, replace with exact amount of all purpose flour but throw in 1 to 1 -1/4 tsp of bicarbonate soda and 1/4 tsp of salt.
Beat egg into butter sugar mix one by one, making sure it is well combined before adding the next one. Fold dry ingredients in batches, followed by the cocoa paste and espresso. Bake for 25 minutes or until skewer inserted in the middle of cake came out clean.
CHOCOLATE GLAZE -again i modded the recipe here.
20g dark chocolate 120ml water 4 tsp instant coffee powder 20g cocoa powder 70g caster sugar pinch of salt
Break up chocolate pieces and set it aside. In a saucepan, simmer water, salt, coffee and cocoa powder for 3 minutes. Set aside but keep it warm! In another pan, melt the sugar over medium heat. KEEP AN EAGLE EYE ON IT! You want melted sugar, NOT caramelized. Once the sugar melts, pour the coffee-choc liquid into the sugar! It will spit and bubble crazily at this point. BE CAREFUL. Continue whisking until all the sugar are well incorporated over low heat. Whisk in dark chocolate and continue whisking until melted. Any bits of crystallized sugar can be sieved out using a fine sieve.
Once glaze is cooled, but still quite liquid, pour over the cooled cake.
GOOD LUCK! :D
Oh! After all that, I actually got my time wrong for class. 1130am for first class and I arrived at uni thinking my class was at 930am. WITH 4 hrs 10 mins sleep! :)
Last night, I post about my little adventure with potato and sweetcorn soup. It was cheap, the cost of the soup was only 3 dollars and I made enough to feed myself for a week and more. I think as a student living alone overseas, you really need to be frugal at times. (I have to admit though, frugality is not my strong point).
Anyway, few days ago, I was walking in the market and I came across these lovely butternut squash for just AU 90C each! Unbelievable price :D Naturally, feeling that I had stumbled upon a good bargain, I bought the squash without really thinking what I am going to do with it. Pie, custard, panna cotta, soup or as a side dish. So much possibilities.
Anyway, soup we shall make from the lovely squash (courge in French) and here I offer two vesion of it. :D
Soupe de Courge a la Vanille (Butternut squash and Vanilla Soup) note: this was taken from the lovely chocolate and zucchini foodblog and modded
2 white onion, sliced it 200g or 2 medium potatoes (choose a floury kind, like Russet) 1 tbsp pure vanilla extract (or if you got a rich pantry, 1 vanilla bean, scrapped) 1.2kg butternut squash 120ml liquid cream 1.5 litre chicken stock or water salt and pepper 100g butter, room temp and diced
Peel and cut butternut squash into pieces or alternatively, after you have scraped out the seeds and membranes, steam it whole until soft and just scrape out the flesh from the skin afterwards.
Peel and cut potatoes into pieces.
Saute the onion but do not caramelised it until soft. If you don't want it to have any oils at all, don't saute the onion but just boil it together with the squash and potatoes.
Now, bring to boil in a stockpot, the liquid, squash, potatoes and onion. Once boiled, reduce to a simmer and cook til both the potatoes and squash are soft.
Pulse the soup with a handheld mixer until fine. Add more liquid and bring to boil if its too thick. Stir in the vanilla and butter cubes and pulse. The butter is to give the soup that shiny and smooth texture and also makes the soup more sweet, believe it or not.
Stir in cream. Season to taste. Voila!
Pumpkin Soup with Sage Pesto
1kg butternut squash, peeled, seeded and chopped 2 medium sized floury potatoes, cut into pieces 2 large onion, chopped 1.5 litre chicken stock or water (depends on how skrimpy you are :D) 125 ml cream few knobs of butter pinch of nutmeg salt and pepper
In a stock pot, bring to boil butternut, potatoes and onion together with the stock. Once boiled, bring to low heat and simmer til vegetables are soft. Pulse soup til smooth with a handheld mixer. Season with salt and pepper and nutmeg. Throw in the few knobs of butter and pulse the soup to incorporate it. Stir in cream.
SAGE PESTO
8g fresh sage 20g flat leaf parsley 2 cloves garlic, crushed 1 tablespoon toasted pinenuts 30g toasted walnuts (optional) 4 tbsp olive oil 1/2 tsp salt or fleur de sel 25g grated parmesan
In a food processor, process the sage, parsley, garlic, nuts, oil and salt until smooth. Transfer to a small bowl and stir in parmesan. Season to taste.
Serve the pumpkin soup with a dollop of the pesto.
Serving suggestions: To accompany the two butternut recipe, you can have some savoury muffins as a side dish. Here is a recipe for caramelised onion muffins.
50g butter 3 red onions, thinly sliced 1 tbsp soft brown sugar 250g self raising flour Note: if you do not have self raising flour, use the same amount of plain flour and add in 1/2 tsp baking powder with 1/4 tsp baking soda 3 tbsp chopped fresh basil 90g grated cheddar 1 egg (about 55g) lightly beaten 1 tbsp olive oil 315 ml milk
Preheat oven 190C/375F. Lightly grease 12 muffin holes with softened butter or if you are using muffin cups, then you do not need to grease the muffin moulds. Melt butter over low heat, add onion, cook stirring until very soft. Add the sugar, and cook, stirring continously for 2 minutes. Let cool. Sift flour into a large bowl, stir in basil and cheese and season to taste. Combine egg, milk and oil. Mix finely. Make a well in the flour, and pour in the milk mixture. Add in 3/4 of the onion mixture. Fold gently until just combined. The batter should be lumpy. Spoon mixture into the prepared moulds and top with the remaining onions. Bake 20-25 minutes or until risen and golden and when a skewer is inserted, comes out clean.
So what do you reckon we need to fight the winter blues? Lots of warm tasty soups! Now, I have been quite inspired lately to make soups. They make good fill-me-up for my lunch breaks and immensely cheap to make. You be aghast by the kind of price people are paying for soups in melbourne.
Last week, I made potato and sweet corn soup. It was totally unplanned. I was walking round and round the Safeway supermarket in my area mulling over what to get, as I walked around the veg section, I was thinking potato and leek soup. But you need bacon for that, and I do not want to buy 100g of bacon only to use a slice. So, I dropped the idea.
Still wandering around Safeway, and holding 2 big potatoes, I came across some canned sweetcorn on sale. Not bad. AU 1.29 for 420g. Let's buy a can!
Anyway, my housemate reckon I should write recipes for fellow students that are looking for recipes that is budget but yet healthy and delicious. Well, I have to say this potato and sweetcorn soup is restaurant grade :D
POTATO AND SWEETCORN SOUP
300g potatoes (use potatoes thats good for mashing) 1/4 white onion 2 litre chicken stock 420g sweet corn 100ml liquid cream 100g butter
Peel and cut potatoes into cubes. Slice the onions. Together with the chicken stock, bring to boil with the potatoes and onion, once boil, simmer until potatoes starts to be soft. Add in 3/4 can of sweetcorn, reserving the other 1/4 for garnish later. Mash the potatoes with fork as you simmer and using a handheld mixer, pulse the soup until fine, if its too thick, add more stock and bring to boil. Add in butter and pulse with the mixer and finish with cream.
Stir in remaining sweetcorn for that crunchy bite.
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