I am proud of this one. I love baking bread. The part I like the most is when the dough rises, doubled up the original amount. And punching it. And let it rise again. Lol. My place smells so good, I feel like am in a bakery wonderland.

The rise of the dough.

I got this recipe from The Fresh Loaf site – an awesome website for bread lovers. The original recipe is here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/blueberrycreamcheesebraid.

Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid
Makes 2 braids

Sponge
1 tablespoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 cup warm milk
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

Dough
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup sugar
2 1/2-3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

Blueberry Filling
2 cups blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Egg Glaze
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk

Cream Cheese Filling
3/4 cup cream cheese
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon egg glaze

I couldn’t find unbleached all-purpose flour at the bakery ingredients store near my place, so I bought 2 packets of high gluten flour (each weigh a kilo). I thought I would be using it a lot, but seriously, unless you like a real tough bread, DO NOT incorporate too much of this flour in your recipe. When I first used this flour I substituted a cup (or more) of all purpose flour with this flour and the bread turned out too tough and dry. Not yummie at all .

For this blueberry cheese braid, I only used 2 – 3 tablespoon of high gluten flour, mixed with all purpose flour. The bread is soft and moist, just the way I like it aha aha! I like it! Aha aha!

Blueberry braid in the making.

For the first braid filling, I used something like a chunky pureed blueberry paste or whatever you wanna call it. Fresh blueberries will cost me a bomb, and I can only find them at supermarkets. This not so fresh pureed blueberries is cheaper, and it’s ready for spreading. I just added a couple of tablespoon of lemon juice to compensate its sweetness.

Blueberry braid.

As for the second braid, I stuffed it with green apple – original recipe is here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/blueberrycreamcheesebraid#comment-165

Apple braid in the making.

2 cups of freshly cubed Granny Smith apples
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup BROWN sugar
1 cup walnuts
1/3 cup corn starch
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tbsp. butter

In a small pot, combine; butter, brown sugar, and chopped walnuts. Stir until combined. Add apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon juice, and corn starch. Combine and heat until you get a gooey concoction . The goal is to get the nuts a touch roasted…the apples will finish baking in the oven.

Big fat ass apple flavoured caterpillar.

If I were to make these wonderful braids again (which I will, definitely), I would wanna try stuffing it with butter mixed with brown sugar, sprinkle with semisweet chocolate chips and cinnamon powder. Ah… the soft, moist, gooey cinnabons.

It’s baking tiem!!!!

I was rushing to work yesterday morning when I posted the ‘Devin cuppies’ pix, so now am gonna elaborate more on the cuppies. Am new in the cuppies world, so yea if you ask me what cupcake is, for me it’s just some mini cakes. I have always wondered what the difference is between cupcakes and muffin, I can only tell the difference from their looks. But I found this information from the cupcakeproject website, and it says:

‘A basic formula for muffins is 2 cups flour, 2-4 tablespoons sugar, 2½ teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 1 egg, ¼ cup oil, shortening or butter and 1 cup milk. When the fat, sugar and egg ratio in a recipe reaches double or more than this, you have reached the cake level.’

I remember making cupcakes using some leftover of my fruit cake batter and I personally think that they tasted better than if it were to be baked as a normal cake. I don’t know why there should be any difference, probably size does matter after all.

I’ve been baking cuppies using a few recipes, but the one in the picture is courtesy of Magnolia Bakery’s recipe. I love the texture, but I have to say I am not a big fan of a complete sweetness without a slight hint of saltiness. How do you appreciate sweetness when it’s all plain sweet? You would appreciate your health better when you’re sick, you’d appreciate your wealthiness better when you’re broke. Same goes here, salt will bring out more flavour in sweet cakes and savouries.

So let’s see what we need to make these lovely cuppies..

Magnolia’s Vanilla Cupcake.
Recipe’s adapted from http://hubpages.com/hub/Magnolia-Bakery-Cupcakes

1 cup unsalted butter, softened (225gm)
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups self rising flour
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla

And no salt.. BOO!

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit (180 celsius).
2. Line two 12-cup muffin tins with cupcake papers.
3. In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth.
4. Add the sugar gradually and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes.
5. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
6. Combine the flours and add in four parts, alternating with the milk and the vanilla extract, beating well after each addition.
7. (for 3-layer cake skip to step 11)
8. (Cupcakes) Spoon the batter into the cups about 3/4’s full.
9. Bake until the tops spring back when lightly touched, about 20 to 22 minutes.
10. Remove cupcakes from pans and cool COMPLETELY on a wire rack before icing with butter cream frosting.
11. (3 layer cake) Divide batter among the cake pans.
12. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a cake tester inserted into center of cake comes out clean
13. Let cakes cool in the pans for 10 minutes.
14. Remove from pans and cool COMPLETELY on wire rack before icing.
15. When cake has cooled, ice between the layers, then ice top and sides of cake with either Vanillia OR Chocolate Butter cream frosting.

My horrible icing skill defies the taste of these lovely cuppies.

I added a pinch of salt, but I think that wasn’t enough. The topping is just a typical chocolate ganache (heavy cream + chocolate). I brought some of these cuppies to my brother’s place and he only had one. Well actually his kid had one but he didn’t finish it up so my brother was just eating the leftover hmmpphhh!! Yea I was so fucking sad . Seriously, I kid you not .

Think am gonna blame my horrible icing skill .

Well, this is not Coconut Curry Beef Noodles, but somewhat similar. I skipped the coconut milk though, so hmmm.. guess this is a pretty healthy dish. To all noodle fans, here’s a simple curry noodle recipe to satisfy your taste buds.

What you need:

• 4 red onions, half a clove of garlic and about an inch size of ginger – finely chopped.
• Chicken – cut into small pieces. Coat them with turmeric powder and salt.
• Fish balls, fish cakes, shrimps and cockles – optional, but seriously, cockles add a distinct taste to the dish.
• Curry powder – mix both meat and fish curry powder with water (6 tbs of meat curry powder and 2 tbs of fish curry powder).
• Chicken stock or chicken cubes – optional.
• Some veggies – tofu puff, choy sum and bean sprouts.
• Water and salt.

How to:

• Stir fry the finely chopped ingredients with oil for 2 – 3 minutes over medium-high heat.
• Add in the chicken and continue frying.
• Add in shrimps. I remove the shrimps off the pot after a 1 – 2 minutes of stirring else they’ll get overcooked.

• Add in the curry mixture when the chicken is golden brown.
• Stir until the aroma permeates the air.
• Add 2 cups of water or better, chicken stock. If you don’t have chicken stock, you can add some chicken cubes to enhance the flavour.
• Add in fish balls, fish cakes, tofu puff and whatnot. Tofu puff is excellent in soupy dishes, because they will absorb the soup and due to its very spongy texture, the juice will just squirt in your mouth when you eat them. Oh my, heaven.

• Add more water/chicken stock and salt according to your taste.
• Leave it to boil.
• As for the veggies, they can be added along with the tofu puff and all, but I prefer to have them boiled separately in salt water for just a couple of minutes to retain their nutrients and colour.

Serves: 6 or more.

om nom nom tiem!!!

Quote of the day: A woman’s place is in the kitchen, telling her man how she likes her steak.

..for my recent indulgence over chocolate-orange cakes!

Lol. As I’ve mentioned in my comment, we don’t have Jaffa Cakes here, though according to my brother I may get lucky at the imported items section. But I was too lazy to go out, and the idea of baking a chocolate-orange cake seems wonderful to me. Am not a big fan of plain orange juice, but mix it with chocolate, or turn it to some tasty concoctions, mmmm delicious!

Chocolate-orange cake.

I baked twice as my first attempt was pretty much a failure (but still the cake is almost finished by now). The first recipe which I found on the net was rated 5 stars by all readers. Hmm.. didn’t turn out well for me. The cake was pretty hard, crusty on top and the texture is dry. Prolly I did something wrong somewhere. My second attempt was much better. I modified my chocolate cake recipe and added some orange puree, and my family loves it

This recipe yields 2 cakes – am using a 8 – 9 inch round springform pan. Halve the recipe if you wish to bake a normal size cake. This one is rather huge, and use lotsa eggs. Oh well, you do the maths.

Ingredients:

• 450gm butter
• 600gm caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 9 eggs
• 400gm all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
• 150gm cocoa powder
• 2 oranges – I used an orange but I think it’ll taste better with 2
• Water

Steps:

• Wash the orange cleanly and boil the whole orange for about 30 minutes. Cool it off before you whizz it with a food processor.
• In a separate bowl, beat the sugar and butter until it’s fluffy and smooth.
• Add in the egg one by one into the batter while continuously beating it until it mixed well.
• Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Slowly add them to the batter bit by bit. Mix well. Try not to overbeat it in order to keep the batter ‘airy’.
• In another separate bowl, add in some water to the pureed orange until it levels up to 400ml, meniscus level. Sheesh. I don’t remember when was the last time I used the word ‘meniscus’.
• Sift the cocoa powder to the orange mixture, stir them well and fold them in to the batter. Mix well.
• Bake it for about 90 minutes at a 175C pre-heated oven. Use a cake tester, insert it into the cake and if it comes out clean, it’s done. The sides tend to shrink as well when it is well baked.

I made some orange candy using this recipe. I glazed the top of both cakes with the remaining orange syrup to give a stronger orange flavour to the cakes. Stacked both cakes on top of each other and layered it with a chocolate mousse and finally, smothered the cake with a creamy chocolate ganache.

My cake impersonates itself as pacman.

My food mixer isn’t working anymore so I had to do all the beating and mixing manually, occasionally switching turns with mom. It was pretty tiring and since the butter was just taken out of the fridge, I had a hard time in beating it till smooth. Think I’ve developed bicep muscles.

I find myself humming the ‘cake’ song while baking this cake. Am blaming someone else for that

Anyway, this cake is great
It’s so delicious and moist
Look at me still talking
When there’s Science to do
lalalalalalala..

I’m happy and in a very good mood today .Haven’t felt this happy for quite sometime. Life is good

And so I was planning to post about my birthday last DC10 but I haven’t edited the pictures yet so am gonna post on something that I love doing besides dicking with my computer.

Baking!

Red Velvet cake.

I love baking cakes. Just before my birthday was my niece’s birthday. I baked for her the Red Velvet cake aka Waldorf Astoria cake, which I like the most for it looks. The contrast between the vibrant red colour with the cream cheese frosting is just awesome. But I personally feel that the cream cheese frosting is too sweet for my liking though (I used 2 cups of icing sugar). I followed the recipe from Pinch My Salt website. The only thing that I modified is that I used 2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour instead of 2 1/2 cups cake flour. This cake uses quite a lot of colouring.. I don’t think I’d put so much if I were to bake it just for the family, non-occasion stuff. The taste is ok, but the next time am gonna bake it I think I’ll just add in a little bit more of cocoa powder or chunks of bittersweet chocolate.

I think I did quite a good job decorating this cake. Simple and cute lol.

Yummie!

Another cake that I baked is this rich chocolate cake. It’s a flourless cake. Very rich, suitable for chocolate fanatics. The chocolate cake is supposed to be sliced into half, with a thick layer of whipped cream in the middle, but since the texture is soooo soft I couldn’t even placed the cake to a proper cake board, I didn’t dare to try slicing it.

Just look at how chocolatey the cake is

So here’s the recipe, adapted from DianasDesserts:

Rich Chocolate cake

113gm butter, cut into pieces
300gm good quality bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
6 large eggs, separated
1 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
butter and flour, for greasing and flouring cake pan

1 ) Melt chocolate in a double boiler until it almost melted.
2 ) Add butter and stir until mixture is completely smooth. Keep warm.
3 ) Beat egg yolks using a food mixer until its light and lemon coloured.
4 ) Gradually beat in 3/4 cup of sugar until mixture becomes thick.
5 ) Blend in the chocolate mixture and vanilla.
6 ) In a separate mixing bowl, beat egg whites until it form soft peaks.
7 ) Gradually beat in the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar.
8 ) With a rubber spatula fold 1/3 of egg whites into the chocolate mixture.
9 ) Fold in the remainnig egg whites and blend it well.

Oven settings:

First 15 minutes (pre-heated): 190 C
Next 15 minutes: 150 C
Last 30 minutes: 120 C

After an hour baking the cake I let the cake stand in the oven for about 30 minutes with the door left ajar. Then I took it out, cover the pan with a damp cloth and let it stand for about 10 minutes or so. Then because the cake is so soft like it’s going to melt, I just refrigerate it for several hours before glazing it with chocolate ganache.

For the chocolate ganache:

300gm good quality bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
200ml double cream
A pinch of salt

Prolly not the proper way of preparing a ganache though:
1) Melt chocolate in double boiler until it melts completely.
2) Remove from heat and add in double cream. Whisk until it thickens.

Rich Chocolate cake.

It has almost a similar texture like a chocolate mud cake, something that I’ve been looking for for ages. I was planning to cover it with a chocolate mousse, but I forgot that I need to wait the melted chocolate to be slightly cold before whipping it with double cream, so I ended up with a chocolate ganache instead. Not a bad thing.. not a bad thing at all. Eating this chocolate cake alone is nice, eating it with a whipped cream, is artery choking. Lol. But it is seriously delicious. This recipe is definitely for keep

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