Food for Thought from Ihsan

Chicken and Lettuce Wraps

2011-09-26T21:05:00.000+01:00

The trouble with buying fresh vegetables is that... you gotta use them up. Somehow. Sadly, I end up throwing a lot of my vegetables because they go rotten. :( But not this time around. In keeping with my current health kick (no, seriously!) I have decided to try and actually use them up.

And that's where these come in. Problem with buying lettuce for sandwiches is that you don't really need a lot. Just one, maybe two leafs would be enough. So... what if you were to use the lettuce as the main star of the dish, not just a side show? Of course, a salad would be best but... as I said, I really, really don't like salads so much. But these? These are sort of like a salad, only... not. :D The lettuce is wrapped around flavoursome flavoursome chicken, to form a lettuce sandwich. Sounds awesome. So... here we go. :)

What you need:

Lettuce leaves of your choice.
1/2 tablespoon sesame oil
1 boneless, skinless chicken thigh, minced
1 small red onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
1 teaspoon fresh ginger, minced (I used ginger powder :P)
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes
4 oz. (1/2 can) water chestnuts, chopped (I used much much less)
3 green onions, chopped

What you do:

Wash lettuce leaves, drain and set aside. Leave whole. You may cut out the spine if you prefer, though this is not necessary.
Heat osome oil over medium-high heat in a large skillet. Add the chicken and cook for 5 minutes, breaking up the meat into small pieces. Add the sesame oil, onion, garlic, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, ginger, vinegar and chili flakes. Cook until the meat is well browned and the onions are translucent.
Add water chestnuts and green onions and cook for 1 minute until well mixed.
Spoon meat mixture onto lettuce leaves. Enjoy. :)

Well now. This was a surprise. I really wasn't sure what to expect with the water chestnuts, so I didn't add so much. They kinda smelled like longan, which was a bit off putting, to be honest. But it wasn't too bad, really. They added a nice crunch to the whole thing. :)

To be really really honest, this would have been more fun if it eaten in a group. Of course, eating is always more fun with people but... this one lends itself to group eating particularly well. Only, if you were making this for a whole bunch of people, I would use pre-minced chicken instead of mincing it yourself like I did for this one.

Anyways, all in all, it was delicious. The chicken was flavoursome and I managed to use up almost a whole head of Romaine lettuce with this. :D So aim achieved, yay!

Quote of the day: Lettuce is like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.

Roasted Chicken Caesar Salad Sandwich

2011-09-23T21:00:00.000+01:00

Chicken Caesar Salad is basically the only salad I will eat. Not happily, but I will eat it. I feel like a rabbit while doing so, but hey, that's the price you pay to be healthy-ish, right? Not to mention, rabbits don't eat chickens. Probably not. Now there's an image. :D Imagine a rabbit chasing a chicken for it's dinner. Hilarious.

Anyways, the thing is, when I pack it for lunch, I'm never satisfied. I am just not cut out to be a salad eater. Not really. Sigh. It's sad. Then, I read somewhere of putting chicken salads into sandwich form. Well, that sounds kinda tasty. I didn't use to be such a huge fan of sandwiches, but I've grown into them. There's so much you can do with them. :D And they're simple to do too. So here we go :D

What you need:
Roasted chicken, shredded
Your favourite Caesar salad dressing
Lettuce (I used romaine lettuce)
Sandwich rolls (wholewheat ones are healthier and tasty too :D)

What you do:

In a small frying pan, fry the chicken in just a little bit of oil until slightly browned.
Add in the salad dressing and heat until the sauce is thickened and coats the chicken nicely,
Pile onto the sandwich buns and top with shredded lettuce. Add in a little bit of cheese, if you want. Shhh. Go on. I won't tell.
Enjoy hot, or cold. :)

And that's it. Of course, the pure salad form is far healthier since it has more lettuce in it, but meh. Still. These were tasty. I love Caesar salad dressing. It's garlicky a little, and just a bit cheesy. Delicious. Having it with the chicken, in sandwich form... was delicious. Problem with the salad is that, unless you drown the lettuce in dressing, you can't really have *all* the lettuce covered in dressing. That would defeat the purpose of a salad, really. And this sandwich? This lovely melding of dressing and chicken and a fresh wholemeal bun and yes, the lettuce... it's a lovely compromise. :D Perfect for the lunch box. <3

Quote of the day: Enjoy every sandwich.

Tiramisu Cupcakes

2011-09-21T21:45:00.000+01:00

Ahh, tiramisu. Probably the most favourite of the desserts we make at home. Many of other desserts we have made have been overshadowed by it. Problem with serving it during events such as open houses is that ... people tend to take a lot. Not a bad thing, it's only because it's so delicious. But that means that we have to make a *lot* just to have enough for everyone. And even so, we always run out.

And this is where these cupcakes come . It's basically tiramisu, only in a cupcake. And generally, people don't really take more than one of cupcakes. It's in-built portion control, plus they look adorable. :D It's a little bit harder to make, in that you bake the sponge fingers right in the cupcake liners, but I think it's pretty worth it. I'd definitely make it for an event where we were expecting large amounts of people. (PS Sorry for the picture... the only one I could find) Also, I really have no idea about the proportions between the sponge fingers and the cream cheese filling. :( Just make one batch of the cream cheese filling and make more, if needed. Anyways, here we go!

What you need:

For the sponge fingers:

4 eggs, separated

2 tablespoons + 2/3 cup white sugar

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

For the cream cheese filling:

250g cream cheese, softened

2 eggs, separated

1/3 cup sugar

200-250 mL thickened cream

Coffee, made with cold water

Milo

What you do:

Heat the oven to 200C.
To make these cupcakes, you should use those stiff cardboard cupcake liners. They're slightly more expensive, but makes it much easier to eat. Fit large pastry bag with a plain 1/2 inch round tube. If you don't have one, just cut off the end of a Ziploc bag. (We used this :P)
For the sponge fingers, place egg whites in a bowl and beat on high until soft peaks start to form.
Slowly add 2 tablespoons of the sugar and continue beating until stiff and glossy.
In another bowl, beat egg yolks and remaining sugar.
Whip until thick and very pale in color.
In a small bowl, whisk together flour and baking powder.
Fold half the egg whites into the egg yolk mixture.
Fold in flour, and then add the remaining egg whites.
Transfer mixture to the pastry bag (or Ziploc bag) and pipe strips that look like ladyfingers (or whatever shape you'd like) onto the prepared baking sheet. Alternatively, evenly divide the batter between the cupcake liners. The cupcake liners will not be filled to the top (see the photo above).
Bake for 8 minutes.
To make the cream cheese filling, beat the egg whites until stiff.
Beat the cream cheese until stiff. Add in the sugar, cream and egg yolks. Beat until smooth.
Fold in the beaten egg whites into the cheese mixture.
Drizzle 1 tablespoon of the cold coffee into each cupcake liner filled with the cake.
Spread the cream cheese filling over the sponge fingers soaked in coffee until the cupcake liners are almost full. Spread the Milo thickly over the top and decorate with small chocolates, if wished.
Leave to cool for at least 4 hours before serving. Ta-dah.

Yes, I know. Slightly more complicated, like I said. Lookit all those steps. But don't worry. Most of it is easy, just using an electric beater. I think it might even be possible to substitute broken up pieces of ready-made sponge fingers dipped in coffee instead of making them yourself. Just make sure to add in enough at the bottom to cover completely.

And of course, these were very popularly received. They looked pretty, tasted delicious, were definitely the hit of the open house. Yet again. :P At least most everyone got to have some, I think. It'll be pretty hard to top tiramisu as our main dessert, sadly. Even though we made so many different kinds this time. :P The adorable little cups you see beside the cupcakes up there are mini trifles. Just jellies poured in a plastic cup, then covered in custard, cream and mixed fruits. Also delicious. :)

Anyway. Until next time~

Quote of the day: Friends are like cupcakes in my pantry of memories.

Pan-fried Salmon with Garlicky Green Beans

2011-09-17T16:36:00.000+01:00

Let's take a short break from all the sweetness, shall we? We'll come back to them, I promise.

When this blog first started out in... oh, 2006 (wow, has it really been 5 years?), it was initially to kind of... document the dinners me and the boys (Hadi and Justin, does anyone still remember them? hehe) were having. Justin was the healthy one, always not putting in enough salt, frying with too little oil, etc. Hadi was the adventurous one, sometimes with great results, sometimes with... well, not so great results. Chocolate Chicken, anyone?

I kind of miss those days. Cooking is so much more fun when there's someone else to cook for. Not to mention, 2 days out of three, I didn't have to do anything but eat and wash the dishes. So relaxing. But anyways. These days, this blog is mostly about the cakes and bakes that me and my sisters whip up. More delicious perhaps, but not healthy. :P For anyone's waistline. Let it not be said that Ihsan has made people fat, so here is a slightly more healthy recipe for you all, based on this salmon recipe and adapted from this green beans recipe. :D Here we go!

What you need:

For the salmon:

2 salmon fillets skin on (175-200g each)

20g fresh ginger grated (I used ginger powder :P)

2 garlic cloves, minced finely or grated

50 ml soy sauce

1 tablespoon sugar

Vegetable oil

Salt and pepper to taste, with a sprinkling of chili flakes

For the green beans:

Handful of fresh green beans, cleaned and cut to be even

1 shallot, thinly sliced

1-2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed

4 tsp olive oil

Sea salt and black pepper to taste

What you do:

Mix the ginger, garlic, soy sauce and sugar together and season with salt and pepper. Once combined pour into a shallow bowl which your salmon fillets will fit in. Place the fillets skin side up so that the pink flesh is in contact with the marinade. Leave in the refrigerator any where from 15 minutes to 3 hours. The longer the fish is left to marinate will increase the depth of soy and ginger flavours in the meat.
Take fish out of the fridge for a good 20 minutes before cooking to allow it to come to room temperature. In a large, heavy frying pan heat the oil over a medium to high heat until very hot. Lightly pat the fish dry with kitchen paper, and season the skin side with a little salt.
Place the fish skin side down in the frying pan and hold down for 15 seconds until you feel the flesh relax in the pan - this will help prevent the fish from curling up while cooking and create that delicious crispy skin – and continue with the other fillet.
Once both fillets are in, turn the heat down and turn the fillets over. Cook for 1 minute, then add your marinating juices and continue to cook for another 2-3 minutes. To check if the fish is ready take the fish out and place it skin side down. With a fork gently separate the flakes. It should flake easily.
Reduce the marinade in your pan until slightly thickened and serve poured over your fish with a sprinkling of chili flakes, if you want it spicy.
Meanwhile, for the green beans, mix everything together in a bowl. Spread green beans on a foil lined baking sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes at 180C - 200C until the skin starts to shrivel, stirring once or twice during baking. Unfortunately, the oven I have is rubbish, so I had to stir fry the beans instead. I also added in some spring onions.

And there you have it. :) If you go easy on the oil, this will be perfectly healthy. Salmon's good for you, with all the omega-3 fatty acids that it has. Plus, fish is much healthier than chicken or beef as its much leaner meat (well, depending on the cut, I guess) In any case, this is not a very common dinner for me... I usually just have baked chicken with rice, haha. The greens are a new thing... I'm trying to eat more vegetables, I am... but... sadly, I don't find vegetables very tasty... oh well, perservere and you shall get your aim, no? As for the salmon... well, let's just say I prefer chicken. Plus, I didn't have much marinade left over so did not have any to pour after it was cooked. :( So it could have used slightly more flavour... oh well.

I cooked enough for two portions and so had the other half as a packed lunch the next day. Was still good. :D Bet the boys would have liked this.

Quote of the day: You ain't supposed to get salmon when they're swimming upstream to spawn. But if you're hungry, you do.

Nutella Cheesecake Bites

2011-09-14T21:52:00.000+01:00

Nutella, for me, is a recent thing. Well, fairly recent. Last couple of years. Before, it was always this strange chocolatey thing that my siblings put on bread then toasted and smelled really good. But I never was an adventurous eater and never tried it.

Until one day, I did. And it was amazing. <3 Now I'm a huge fan of nutella. Cheesecakes, not so much, but these cheesecakes are teeny tiny bite sized portions and let's admit it. Anything with Nutella has to be good, haha. So here we go! (Note: Did not make these, my sister did. I just observed :P)

What you need:

For the crust:

2/3 cup graham cracker crumbs

2 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons butter, melted

For the cheesecake:

250g cream cheese

400g can sweetened condensed milk

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 cup sour cream

1/4 cup Nutella

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Line a mini muffin tin with cupcake liners.
In a small bowl combine graham cracker crumbs, sugar and butter with a fork until well combined. Place about 1 teaspoonful into each mini-muffin liner, pressing down firmly. Bake for 5 minutes; set aside.
In a large bowl, beat cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk with an electric mixer until smooth. Beat in egg and vanilla, and then sour cream, until well combined.
Spoon filling over prepared crusts, about a tablespoon to tablespoon and a half into each. Drizzle or pipe Nutella over filling and swirl with a toothpick. Resist urge to lick fingers.
Bake for 15-20 minutes or until cheesecakes are set. Remove from oven and allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Remove from pan onto wire rack to cool additional 10 minutes, cover and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before serving.

My oh my, these were super tasty! When we had them freshly, the crust was crispy, the cheesecake creamy and oh-so-Nutella-y. Since these were tiny too, they were not too rich at all. (Though of course, some people had two, or three, or ten, haha)

Of course, these were part of the array of desserts at the KTB open house and were popular precisely because they were so small. You don't feel obligated to have a huge chunk of cheesecake. They are of course, so much more tedious to make but oh so worth it! They're so cute. :D Cute little bites of Nutella perfection, hehe.

Quote of the day: There are limits to self-indulgence, none to restraint.

Strawberry Swirl Cheesecake Cupcakes

2011-09-12T07:48:00.000+01:00

So after a crazy two weeks in Brunei for Raya, it's back to the UK for me. Raya is the usually the time when me and my sisters (well, one of my sisters at least) try out new recipes and despite the major lack of time, this time was no exception.

The best thing about making things around the festive period is that... its usually fairly easy to get rid of them without having to eat a ton of sugar by yourself. In our case, we made several desserts for the KTB Open House and that is what you shall be seeing over the next few weeks.

First up are these adorable strawberry swirl cheesecakes, based on this recipe. Here we go!

What you need:
For the crust:
1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
3 tablespoons sugar

For the topping:
170g fresh strawberries
2 tablespoons sugar (or more, depending on how sweet your strawberries are)

For the filling:
1 kg cream cheese, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line cupcake pans with paper liners. In a small bowl, combine the graham cracker crumbs, melted butter and sugar. Stir together with a fork until well-blended and the dry ingredients are moistened. Press 1 tablespoon of the mixture into the bottom of each cupcake liner. Bake until just set, 5 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack. Turn the oven down to 160C.
Make the strawberry puree by blending the strawberries with the sugar in a blender until smooth.
To make the cheesecake, beat the cream cheese in a bowl with an electric mixer until fluffy. Blend in the sugar until smooth. Mix in the salt and vanilla. Beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing after each addition.
To assemble, spoon the cheesecake batter over the crust in each cupcake liner until 3/4 full. Dot 1/2 teaspoon of the strawberry puree over the cheesecake filling. use a toothpick or a wooden skewer to to lightly swirl and create a marbled effect.
Bake until the filling is set, about 22-25 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through the baking. Transfer to a wire cooling rack and let cool to room temperature. Transfer to the refrigerator and let chill at least 4 hours before serving.

Well, there you go! A pretty easy recipe, if you ask me. The only disappointment was the strawberries, which barely tasted of anything. Just a little bit sour. Oh well, what to do. You make do with what you have, yes?

Anyways, these cheesecakes, in the words of an enthusiastic friend were "just lovely!". Having them chilled is a must, they're much better that way. But the cheesecake filling was soft and creamy and not too dense and heavy. The slightly sweet, slightly sour strawberry part made a perfect complement to the cream cheese. All in all... lovely. :)

Of course, presentation-wise, they're a bit lacking. If I had more flavourful strawberries on hand, it probably would have been nice to have a little teeny one on top of each cupcake. I also did not mix in the strawberry puree with the cheesecake filling carefully enough, so in the end, they blended too much, making the strawberry red a little paler than I would have liked. But all these are just cosmetic... the cake itself was delicious and I urge you to try it. :)

Quote of the day: Because you don't live near a bakery doesn't mean you have to go without cheesecake.

Pusat Ehsan Charity Bazaar

2011-09-05T14:46:00.003+01:00

Hey everyone. :)

It's been awhile, and I promise I have a lot of new delicious recipes for you guys to drool over, but in the meantime, I'd like to bring your attention to the Pusat Ehsan Charity Bazaar which is happening in less than a month. Sadly, I won't be in Brunei at the time, but it would be awesome if you all can go and support it. :D Seems like its gonna be a lot of fun! You can win yourself some techie stuff too, if you're lucky. ;) Details are below! Click to embiggen.

Smoked Salmon Flan

2011-06-10T11:44:00.000+01:00

When I saw Nikki of Delisioucity post pictures of a smoked salmon flan on Facebook, it looked absolutely lovely. I'm not a huge fan of salmon, or even fish in general, but I just had to try it. Something that looked that good had to taste good too. And one of the better things about flans, they are dead easy to make. Plop in some pastry on a tin, put in your fillings, pour in the custardy bit, bake and ta-dah! You're done. So here we go!

What you need:
1 pack ready-rolled shortcrust pastry - 375g (or you can make your own)
150g smoked salmon
300 mL single cream
3 eggs
Handful of dill
Black pepper and salt
Cheese, as much as you like of whatever you like. I just used mature Cheddar.

What you do:

Line a 10-inch flan dish with the shortcrust pastry. Bake in a preheated 200C oven for 15-20 minutes. Take the pastry out and lower oven temperature to 170 C.
Take out of oven and scatter the salmon over the bottom of the dish.
Meanwhile, beat the eggs, cream, black pepper and a sprinkling of salt. Add in the dill and shhh, a little bit of cheese if you want.
Pour this in the dish over the salmon. Sprinkle more cheese over the top. Carefully carefully (I almost spilled it!) bring this to the oven and bake at 170 C for 35-40 minutes or until the quiche is firmed and golden brown at the top. Serve hot or cold. Yummy both ways, am sure.

Ahhh, will you just look at that. Thing of beauty, it is. I do so love pies and pastries. Chicken pie will always be my favourite, but this might be a nice change. Plus, its so much easier to make than chicken pie.

Despite this having salmon, I quite liked it. The smoked salmon was lovely, not too fishy. The filling was cheesy and delicious. Mmmmm, delicious. To be honest, I didn't really notice the dill in there. Didn't add enough, maybe? Thought it was rather a lot. Or, it could be this was from a long time ago and I've just forgotten. ^^;;

In any case, if you're looking for a simple yet rather impressive dish to serve or bring to a potluck (which is what I did), this is a pretty good contender. Preparation takes just 5 minutes and after that, you can just leave it in the oven while you go and get ready. Or you can have it for lunch/dinner, your choice. :P

Quote of the day: Only very clever man can bite pie without breaking crust.

Cookies and Cream Oreo Fudge Brownies

2011-06-03T11:02:00.013+01:00

If there's one thing I love more than cookies, its brownies. The perfect brownie - moist, fudgy and oh-so chocolatey. We've made a lot of brownies over the years as you can probably tell, some were awesome, some were not so. My favourite is probably the Chewy Gooey Chocolate Brownies, though the results with that recipe can be quite variable. But this was the first time I saw brownies with OREOS in them. And not only does it have Oreos, it has ice cream (!!) and chocolate fudge sauce, hence the name. The pictures look amaaaaaaazing, so me and NisNis (lol) had to try it. Since I sadly don't have an oven at my place, we had to wait till I visited her. So here we go!

What you need:

1 box brownie mix

Eggs and oil (as called for the brownie mix)

1/2 cup of cookies and cream ice cream

1/4 cup hot fudge topping
Oreo cookies

What you do:

Preheat oven and grease an 8-inch square baking pan.
Combine brownie mix, eggs and oil as directed by the box but do not add the water.
Add ice cream and fudge to the brownie batter. Stir to combine.
Pour half the brownie batter into the prepared pan and layer with Oreos, then top with the remaining batter.
Bake for 40-50 minutes, or as directed by instructions.

The one thing that I did not like about this recipe is that it uses a brownie mix. No matter how good the brownies look on the picture, they never taste as good as one made from scratch. We were quite tempted to use a different brownie recipe and just layer in the Oreos, but were not sure how to substitute in the ice cream and chocolate fudge sauce, haha. So in the end, we went with the mix....

And how did it turn out, you ask? I still had my reservations after opening the box, did not smell like chocolate at all! But what to do right? You gotta do what you gotta do. So we tried our best to make the brownie batter the correct consistency - probably added a bit too much ice cream there, haha. And in the end... well, it wasn't quite what I was expecting. =(

Partly because of the brownie itself, made from scratch really is better. This tasted artificial, too sweet and nothing like chocolate. It looked good on the outside, but ... taste could have been much much better. And not only that, we overbaked it a little (ahem) and I'm pretty sure that made the Oreos a bit too dry. >.< Not to mention you could hardly taste the Oreos under the "flavour" of the brownies.

I do think that there's potential here - there's Oreos involved, how can there not be? If ever I get the time, I'd make this with my usual brownie recipe. Not sure how to put in the ice cream and fudge, but part of the fun will be finding that out. :P

Quote of the day: Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

2011-06-01T10:31:00.001+01:00

Well, this is yet another post with the very honorable CHEA LU as a guest. :D With so much stress to handle, its lovely to spend an afternoon baking. Of course, one must remember not to stress about the baking either, otherwise, it defeats the whole purpose. Like these cookies, for instance. We had no measuring scale, no measuring cups. Just us. Did that stop us? Nope! First time I'm making cookies with just guesstimations and I gotta say, pretty pleased with the results! Here we go:

What you need:
250g unsalted butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar (I suggest dark)
1 cup granulated white sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups quick cooking oats - we used my favourite, Sainsbury's Whole Rolled Porridge Oats, yum!
2 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon powder - omitted
1 cup chocolate chips - we probably used a lot more than this, hahaha

What you do:

Cream the butter and sugars together in a large bowl. Better if you used an electric mixer, but we just used a wooden spoon. Wasn't kidding when I said we had nothing with us...
Add the eggs one at a time, beating in between additions. Add the vanilla.
In another bowl, combine the oats, flour and salt.
Gradually add this mixture to the creamed butter and sugars. Mix in the chocolate chips, yummy.
Leave the dough in the fridge for 30-60 minutes to firm it up a little.
Preheat your oven to 190C. Form the dough into ping-pong sized balls . Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes, or until golden. Cool on racks and enjoy!

These made a nice huge stack of cookies. We had a veritable mountain of cookies by the time we finished. Loveliness! There's hardly anything more beautiful than a huge stack of cookies waiting for you, haha. ;D

Anyways, cookies as you might now, are pretty popular on here. I like cookies much better than cakes, though admittedly, they are much more tiresome to make. There's plenty of chocolate chip cookies, my favourite of course is version 6.5. I've made a few oat cookies before, though not very many. Do a search for "oat cookies" on here if you want to track them down. Made chocolate chip oat cookies once before, a long time ago. Those were kind of nice, I remember. Main difference is that this one has a lot more oats and no cocoa powder.

Now, you would think, since these have a lot more oats in them (3 cups!!!) they wouldn't be as nice. But I dare say, these were much nicer than those other ones. Oats taste so much nicer in cookies than in porridge, don't you agree? They should be called Cookie Oats, instead. Maybe then mor epeople would eat them, haha.

Anyway, these cookies were chock full of chocolate chips, with a delicious flavour from the oats. Best thing was, they weren't even the slightest bit chewy. Crunchy all the way through, just the way I like my cookies! If you make this, I suggest you use the best oats you can. :D Think that would make a huge difference.

Quote of the day: Number one, I absolutely love making chocolate chip cookies. I mean, it's fun. It's exciting. Beyond the fact that I love making them, I love eating them.

Nigella's Nutella Cake

2011-05-19T13:29:00.000+01:00

Well, this one is a very very very late post. So late that in fact, the friend who I made this cake with has given up on me ever posting about it. And she wanted to be mentioned by name too. So here it is. I made this cake with CHEA LU. Keep that in mind. :P She picked the recipe and all. Is from *the* Nigella Lawson so it has to be good, in her mind. So here we go!

What you need:
6 large eggs
Pinch of salt
125g soft unsalted butter
400g Nutella (1 whole large jar!)
1 tablespoon water
100g ground hazelnuts
100g dark chocolate, melted

For the ganache icing:
100g hazelnuts
125mL double cream
125g dark chocolate, chopped into small-ish pieces

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease and line a 23cm springform tin.
In a large bowl, whisk the egg whites and salt until stiff but not dry. In a separate bowl, whisk the Nutella and butter together, then add the water, egg yolks and ground hazelnuts.
Fold in the cooled melted chocolate, then lighten the mixture with a large spoonful of egg white. Beat this in, then gently fold in the rest of the egg whites, a third at a time.
Pour into the prepared tin and cook for 40 minutes or until the cake is starting to come away on the sides, then leave to cool on a rack.
Meanwhile, toast the hazelnuts in a dry frying pan until the aroma wafts upwards and the nuts are golden-brown in parts; keep shaking the pan so that they do not burn. Transfer to a plate and leave to cool.
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, add the cream and the chopped chocolate and heat gently. Once the chocolate is melted, take the pan off the heat and whisk to the right consistency for icing.
Unmould the cooled cake carefully. Ice the top with the chocolate icing and dot with the toasted hazelnuts. Serve!

We made our hazelnuts into a creepy looking heart, as you can see, hehe. Truth be told, this cake turned out *very* well, considering we didn't have any weighing scales. It helped that it didn't need flour or sugar, since we can roughly guesstimate the rest. And of course, Nutella. One whole jar of Nutela. Umph! <3

Mmmm, is there anything better than Nutella? Truth be told, I was very slightly disappointed with this cake. Oh it was good, but... I thought it would taste more of Nutella. D: Since we couldn't find ground hazelnuts, we first used hand-chopped hazelnuts on our first try. We didn't quite like having the hazelnut pieces in there so in our second round, we used ground almonds instead. Eh, turned out well enough.

Also, one last thing, although I love love warm brownies and cookies, the warm version of this cake was a bit meh to me. It taste much much much better after a night in the fridge. Seriously. So cooling it is highly recommended. Other than that, hope you do enjoy!

Instead of a quote, I found this ode to Nutella poem here. "You look so good, taste so nice, I'd even eat you on fried rice" LOL, do have a look!

Peanut Butter and Rice Krispies Brownies

2011-03-17T11:35:00.001Z

Whew, it has been awhile, hasn't it? Sorry for those who have been waiting desperately (ahem ;D) for an update. I do have a few posts lined up, but somehow have not managed to time to write them. In a bid to end procrastoblogging, I am just shouldering through it all and writing one up. RIGHT. NOW.

Anyways, this was from awhile ago, last year, lol. The sisters and I were visiting the cousins + the one brother in Bradford and we really really wanted to make something. Because for once, we had an oven in reach! It was a bit hard because of limited equipment available so we decided to make something easy. Or at least, it looked easy. :P Looked super tasty too, which is oh so very important. Apologies about the pictures, as the kitchen was rather dark... I tried my best though! Anyway, here we go! :)

What you need:
For the brownies:
Use your favourite recipe :P I simplified the original author's recipe for brownies, which is as follows
100g chocolate
250g butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup flour

For the Krispy topping:
1 cup chopped Reese's peanut butter cups - did NOT have this unfortunately, so we subbed with peanut butter + chocolate. *sad face*
1 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 tablespoon butter
1 1/2 cups Rice Krispies cereal

What you do:

To make the brownies, melt butter and chocolate in the microwave. Add in sugar and mix until fluffy. Add in eggs, beating in one at a time. Add flour and stir until just combined.
Pour into greased baking pan, ours was 9x11 or something. Bake at 180 C for 20-25 minutes.
Remove and top with broken up Reese's Pieces (we just slathered on peanut butter and sprinkled chocolate chips...) and bake for 4-6 minutes more.
Meanwhile, melt chocolate chips, peanut butter and butter. Stir in cereal. Remove brownies from oven and spread this chocolate mixture on top. Refrigerate for 2 hours before serving. <3

Lookit all those layers. :3 This was lovely indeed! The brownie was fudgy, the rice krispy layer gave a ncie crunch to it all and was deliciously peanut buttery. I don't like peanuts but I LOVE peanut butter with chocolate. *drools*

We cut out a portion for ourselves and gave away the rest to the the cousins and brother and some housemates too. Hope they enjoyed it! <3

Quote of the day: There's nothing like unrequited love to take all the flavor out of a peanut butter sandwich.

Chocolate Lava Cake (Molten Chocolate Cake)

2010-12-23T13:05:00.003Z

So yonks and yonks ago, me and Hamizah went to Cheezbox for lunch. Food was so-so but the memory of the Ultimate Chocolate cake remains to this very day. Not that I remember what it tasted like now, but I remember it was good. Fast forward a couple of years, I've tried various different molten chocolate cakes here and there, but none quite got it right. Not to mention all (including Cheezbox's) are exorbitantly priced, for a student anyways.

So what better than to recreate it at home right? Never really bothered before, but with the youngest sister being here and bored and missing baking, well, what to do right? Unfortunately, my place doesn't have a *proper* ovem, but we visited NisNis (lols) in Colchester last weekend so we thought... well, why not? We found a simple recipe, she has an oven.... so here we go!

What you need (for three 6-oz ramekins):
100g dark chocolate, best quality you can find
100g butter, cut into cubes
2 eggs
50g caster sugar
20g self-raising flour

What you do:

Melt the dark chocolate and butter together in a microwave.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together until the mixture turns pale and frothy.
Pour the chocote-butter mixture into the egg-sugar mixture. Stir in the flour with a spatula until everything is smooth and well-combined.
Grease ramekins with melted butter (do this well, otherwise your cakes will be stuck!). Fill the ramekin almost 3/4 full with the chocolate mixture.
Bake the cakes in a preheated 180C oven for about 10 minutes. As suggested, we used exactly 11 minutes but this would be highly dependent on your oven.
When baked, gently remove the cake from the oven and leave to cool for about 1-2 minutes. Use a spoon to gently loosen the edges. Carefully invert the cake onto a serving plate. Serve with plenty of ice cream. <3

Sigh, so sad. This would have looked gorgeous with some berries and ice cream, but we were sadly not very well equipped in props. Had to make do with a couple of cherries, haha. Oh well. Doesn't detract from the overall yumminess. :3

Like I said earlier, this is very highly dependent on the oven you use, so it might take you a few tries to get it right. For the oven we used, I think 11 minutes was a bit too short as the bottom of the cake had not fully baked yet. But no matter. The key to getting this right is to underbake the cake slightly so the middle is all warm and yummy, mmmm! Served with some ice cream, then this is perfection! Particularly on a cold winter's night.

The best thing about this though is that it is soooooo easy! You could totally prepare the batter in advance and just pop it into the oven right before finishing dinner. So good! Am plonking a recommended label on this one. :DDD

One word of caution, I thought this was a bit too sweet. Perhaps it was the chocolate we used, but the next time I make this, will definitely be reducing the amount of sugar. Apart from that, everything is A-ok. Gorge yourselves silly on this lovely lovely cake!

Quote of the day: Any sane person loves chocolate.

Chocolate Fudge Brownies

2010-10-01T06:03:00.001+01:00

Whoops. It has been awhile since I last posted, hasn't it? :o Been a busy little bee. ^_^ With... games and stuff. >.> I feel a bit rusty in posting now, so forgive me if this one is short...

Anyways, I've been in Brunei for close to a month now and it's almost time to go back. Boooooooo. I came back just in time for Raya (literally - came back 1st day Raya) so with the Raya madness and feasts, have not been able to make much stuff. The little sister likes to bake though, hehe, so she insisted we make a few. Here was one she tried before and we made again. Enjoy. Here we go!

What you need:
250g low-fat soft cheese (whoops, we used full-fat cream cheese)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
250g caster sugar
2 eggs
100g butter
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
100g self-raising flour, sifted

Chocolate Ganache Icing
3/4 cup whipping cream
227g dark chocolate, chopped into fine pieces

What you do:

Lightly grease a 8-inch square shallow cake tin and line the base with baking paper. Preheat an oven to 180 C.
Beat the cheese, vanilla essence and 50g of the caster sugar together until smooth, then set aside.
Beat the eggs and the remaining caster sugar together until light and fluffy. Place the butter and cocoa powder in a small saucepan and heat gently, stirring until the butter melts and the mixture combines (We used a microwave... shhh!! XD), then stir it into the egg mixture. Fold in the flour.
Pour a third of the brownie mixture into the tin and smooth the top. Carefully spread the soft cheese mixture over it (we piped it on, easey peasey), then cover with the remaining brownie mixture. Bake in preheated oven got 40-45 minutes and cool in the tin.
Meanwhile, to make ganache topping, boil whipping cream. Add chopped chocolate and stir with a rubber spatula until smooth. Refrigerate until spreading consistency, about 1 hour. Continue to refrigerate if mixture is too thin. If too firm, allow to sit on the counter for a few minutes. Using a palette knife, spread the icing over the brownies. Leave to set, then cut into squares to serve.

The original recipe actually used chocolate buttercream instead of chocolate ganache, but we figured that would have been too sweet, so we subbed it out. :D It worked out rather well.

This brownie is kinda sweet, not that chocolatey without the ganache. But the cream cheese works rather well, think. The only problem was.... this was super super messy to cut and serve. >.< Mostly because of the ganache. Might be easier if we freeze it first next time, maybe... I've always liked frozen tapak kuda and Kit Kats, so why not frozen brownies? :D It'll be like... brownie ice cream-ish.

But yes... that's it for now, I'm afraid. I have a couple more overdue recipes coming up, a milo pie and perhaps even ice cream. ;D We shall see. In the meantime, enjoy and as always, be careful of what you eat and don't over indulge. :P

Quote of the day: And above all... Think Chocolate!

Honey Garlic Chicken Pizza

2010-08-17T10:51:00.002+01:00

Wow... it has been awhile since I last posted. Too busy with work, I suppose. And games. XD Anyone here plays Perfect World International? =D

Anyway, moving on, first of all, let me wish all Muslims a "Selamat Perpuasa"! ^_^ Enjoy the month and its various advantages while you can. Go easy on the eating. This site has a few tips. Of course, with all the sungkai buffets and promotions that would be available in Brunei, you'd probably find it a bit hard, eh? Over here, I make do with what I can. But once in awhile... I really do want to have an indulgent, calorie-laden meal. And what is more calorie-laden than cheese? =D I found this recipe from another food blog of someone who used to live in Brunei it seems, A Housewife's Tale. Do check it out, she has step by step photos. She even made her own pizza dough, but meh. I just bought mine. ;D Otherwise, I used her recipe almost exactly. Here we go!

What you need:
Pizza base - use your favourite recipe, or store-bought

For topping:
Honey garlic BBQ sauce
Boneless, skinless chicken cut into bite-sized pieces - I used two drumsticks for one pizza
2 whole roasted garlic
Mozzarella cheese - lots of it
Green bit of a couple of spring onions
Sesame seeds

For the sauce:
1 cup water
1/4 cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon honey
3 cloves garlic, minced/crushed - I used garlic powder
2 tablespoons BBQ sauce
1 tablespoon cornstarch

What you do:

To make the roasted garlic, chop off the tops of the garlic bulbs and seal tightly in aluminium foil. Bake in 200C oven for 1 hour. Or, you can do what I did and roast it in a toaster oven for 20 minutes. When cool, squeeze the bottom of the bulb to squish out the cloves.
To make the sauce, mix everything together and bring to boil. Lower heat and keep mixing until sauce is nice and thickened.
To cook the chicken, marinate in a little bit of the sauce (perhaps while the garlic is roasting) and cook as you like. I just stirfried mine, but you can grill, roast, BBQ, etc.
To assemble the pizza, pour the remaining sauce (reserve a little bit for later) over the base and spread a thin layer. Squish out the roasted garlic and spread all over. Add the chicken pieces, then cover everything up with a nice thick layer of cheese. Bake at 200C for 15-20 minutes, or until cheese is browned and bubbly and base is fluffy.
To serve, sprinkle toasted sesame seeds and finely chopped spring onions over the cheese. Drizzle the remaining sauce all over and serve immediately.

There ya go. =D It was pretty easy actually. Everything was done and finished in about 45 minutes or so, including the cooking time. I remember Ibu also had a recipe for honey garlic chicken pizza but at that time, I wasn't really interested in food all that much, so I really don't know what she used for it. D=

But anyway, this one was pretty similar to Pizza Hut's version, I think! At least, from what I can remember of my fuzzy memories. The roasted garlic is a must. Don't skip the roasting, otherwise your garlic will be too strong. The sauce was pretty spot on, just a little bit of everything to give something sweet, something a bit garlicky. I think it would have been nicer if it was just a bit salty, so I would add a pinch of salt next time.

So there. =D Honey Garlic Chicken Pizza! Those in Brunei might not appreciate it so much, but hopefully, those of you in the UK will. =) And even for all you people in Brunei, you can have your favourite honey garlic chicken pizza at a fraction of the cost. Plus, you can add in as much chicken pieces as you like. No need to be stingy. XD The only thing I miss would be Pizza Hut's pizza base. Sigh. Drool.

Oh well. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this and hopefully, I will post another recipe soon!

Quote of the day: When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore.

Strawberry-Banana Smoothie (Non-Dairy)

2010-06-27T12:04:00.001+01:00

So it seems as though summer is finally here in the UK, at least for a little while. Today will supposedly be one of the hottest days this year, a searing 30 C. With a lack of space in the freezer, I've been relying on fizzy drinks from the vending machine to statisfy my thirst for cold beverages, but lately, it seems as though all shops are selling strawberries at half price. Add to the fact that I've recently discovered these really nifty self-sealing ice cubs bags, it all points to a cold smoothie. So here we go. =)

What you need:
1 banana, cut into 4
10-12 strawberries
10-12 ice cubes, depending on how thick you want your smoothie to be

What you do:
Add all ingredients into a smoothie maker or a blender (I use one of those hand-held blenders) and blend until smoothie. Easy peasy.

Yeah, I know. It's a cheat of a recipe, haha. So easy yet so delicious. At first, I wasn't too keen on having banana in there, but the banana does make it thicker. Plus, I quite like the flavour. My brother usually uses his hand blender to make apple juice, but I think that this makes a lovely alternative. So delicious and healthy too! No need to add sugar.

The best thing is, you can put in whatever you want into a smoothie, really. You don't need ice. Some smoothies use a bit of fruit juice or sometimes yoghurt. You can have basically any fruit you want in there. Here are some smoothie recipes sites:
Smoothie-Recipes.net
Smoothies Recip e
Smoothie Web

Back in Bristol, I think Hadi had a bit of a smoothie phase as well. Not quite sure why he gave up... I think maybe he found it too expensive, or something. Which is true. I like to have berries in my smoothie and these tend to be expensive. But if you used seasonal fruits (in the UK, of course) I think it would be much cheaper. Hence why I wanted to make this, with strawberries at half price. =) In Brunei, you could probably try to make smoothies out of the local fruits. Not quite sure how that would go, but I'm sure it would be equally yummy. Mangoes, for sure, would be fantastic. Watermelons too. The brave and daring can go ahead and make durian smoothies, haha. ;)

Now I just have to figure out how to bring this during my weekday lunches. Definitely in a thermos flask, to keep it cold. I read somewhere that to keep smoothies as cold and thick as possible, you can try freezing the fruit beforehand. And even freezing the smoothie after you make it. Which is a good idea, I think. I will try that soon. But I do need more bananas now...

Quote of the day: Acting in 'Star Wars' I felt like a raisin in a giant fruit salad, and I didn't even know who the cantaloupes were.

Pasta Caprese (Pasta with Mozzarella and Sun-dried Tomatoes)

2010-05-22T21:44:00.002+01:00

I bought some fresh mozzarella the other week but completely forgot about it. So when I remembered that I had it in the fridge, I looked around for recipes that use mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes (which I still have in the fridge as well) and found this. It looked really simple and I had all of the ingredients, so yay! Unfortunately, once I opened the pack of mozzarella, I discovered that it had gone bad and I had to make alternate plans. But the recipe was still buzzing around in my mind, so a couple of days later, I went and got another pack of mozzarella from the supermarket. So here we go. =)

What you need:

100g pasta, of your choice

40g fresh mozzarella

5 sundried tomatoes in oil, drained

Handful of fresh basil leaves

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Salt and black pepper, for seasoning

What you do:

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. Add in the pasta and cool until al dente, around 10 minutes, then drain and allow to cool.
Meanwhile, roughly chop the mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes.
In a bowl, mix together the mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes, basil and olive oil.
Toss the mozzarella mixture with the cooled pasta and mix well, seasoning with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Serve.

This is very very similar to a recent recipe I posted, pasta with sundried tomatoes and feta cheese. It's just a change of cheese, really. When it comes to cheese, mozzarella is not a favourite of mine except on pizzas, maybe. It's a bit... bland, to me. I suppose with anything, the fresher it is, the better it will taste. I probably haven't found the right mozzarella yet, maybe. I definitely prefer the feta cheese version better. Or maybe Cheddar! Mmmmmm! <3

But anyways, this is a super easy recipe, and easy enough to substitute and add what you like, I suppose. It definitely needs some meat in there. I had it with some spicy chicken wings from Chicken Cottage. Those are soooo delicious! I was getting a bit bored of them, but then, they changed the recipe a little, I think. There's some sort of... spice powder in there, or something. Some masala mix, maybe. And it's delicious! At least for me.

Anyways, I got a bit sidetracked. I wasn't too impressed with this dish. It was okay, but nothing too special. Looks gorgeous though. Oh well, maybe I'll have better luck next time. =)

Quote of the day: The difference of a single day is perceptible. Vegetables can only be tasted in perfection, gathered the same day.

Black Pepper Chicken

2010-05-18T21:29:00.001+01:00

Mmmmm! I literally just finished having this for dinner and just had to write about it while the deliciousness of it all was still fresh in my mind. Yeah, I know. Sad. =P Anyways. I got this recipe from yet another food blog, and the picture looked so tempting! I just had to try it, even though it involved frying chicken, which I don't really like to do too often. Too troublesome and unhealthy to boot. But this I must try. So here we go!

What you need:
1 boneless, skinless chicken thigh cut into bite-sized pieces (I cut the skin up and put it in. Shhhhh!)
Cornflour, to coat
Veggies of your choice, I used red pepper and broccoli
Oil, for frying

For the sauce (mixed together):
1/4 cup oyster sauce
1 tablespoon kicap manis (or just soy sauce with a pinch of sugar)
1 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground white pepper

What you do:

Heat up enough oil for deepfrying (I just shallow fried) in a wok.
Season the chicken pieces with a bit of salt and pepper. Lightly coat with cornflour and fry until crispy and golden.
Remove the oil (it will probably be very floury) and add one tablespoon of oil in the wok.
Add in the veggies and stirfry to your liking. When ready, add in the sauce mixture and heat until bubbly. Add in the chicken pieces and stir to coat in the sauce. Serve immediately, with rice is awesome.

Well, what more need I say. Crispy chicken with a sauce is always always good. One of my favourites is honey chicken. Mmmmmm! But I do believe that this one is even better. Not only is it crispy, I love oyster sauce. The pepper just makes it all even better. I might even add in just a touch of chilli next time, just to give it a different sort of heat. And the clincher is that this has veggies! You can add as much veggies as you like, which is always good. Of course, the more you add, remember to add more sauce. =) Broccoli with oyster sauce is awesome, like in the crispy beef with chilli and broccoli, which is also very very good.

The only thing I don't like is that you have to fry it. Health concerns aside, oil can get expensive if you buy it regularly, haha. Not that I have been, which is a good sign. Have had a 1L bottle for more than 6 months now. Anyway, enough babble. My point is, I want to try roasting the chicken in the oven instead of frying it and see how that works out. I shall try that tomorrow. Yes, it's so good that I shall have it again tomorrow. Mmmm! I shall update here tomorrow on how it works out.

I wanted to save some of this for lunch tomorrow, but could not resist. Oopsie. Oh well, maybe I can get better pictures tomorrow. Because it was getting dark already, I had to take this picture near the window abd right outside were a bunch of guys playing football. I was scared that they would think that I was taking a picture of them instead of the food, haha. Anyways, see you tomorrow, hopefully!

Quote of the day: I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.

I used to feel the same way but not anymore. Broccoli is now one of my favourite veggies. <3 Hee~

Pasta with Sundried Tomatoes, Basil and Feta Cheese

2010-05-17T08:58:00.001+01:00

Now that the days are (supposedly) getting warmer, I feel eating more... spring-like food. Fresh greens, light meals... nothing too heavy. (although I still love chicken goreng. Always.) So I was looking around for ideas for light pasta dishes - no rich meaty tomatoey sauce for me. In fact, my favourite pasta dish has no tomatoes in it at all. And then I got the idea of using sundried tomatoes (mmmmmmmmmm!) with pasta and looked around for suggestions. So here we go. =)

What you need:
100g dried pasta (per person)
5 sundried tomatoes in oil
Bunch of basil leaves
Feta cheese, as much as you like
Salt and black pepper

What you do:

Cook the pasta according to directions on the packet.
Meanwhile, drain the tomatoes and reserve the oil. Slice the tomatoes into fine strips
Once the pasta is ready, return to the pan and drizzle a little bit of the oil from the sundried tomatoes.
Add in the tomatoes and stir to mix.
Add in the basil leaves (torn) and the feta cheese (crumbled). season to taste. Mix well and serve immediately.

And that's it! Soooooooooooo easy right?Just cook the pasta and mix everything up and it's done! Exactly the kind of recipe I like. =D And this is definitely the kind of pasta dish i was looking for - it was a bit oily but absolutely delicious. In fact, I cooked a bit extra and packed it for lunch the next day and it was just as nice:

With this pasta, I cooked myself some garlic roast chicken, which was also delicious. But anyway, I'm a fan of feta cheese now. Never really tried it before, but it's great. On the other hand, it is a touch strong so feel free to substitute with your favourite cheese. =)

And on that note, I shall end this post. See you next time!

Quote of the day: We are indeed much more than what we eat, but what we eat can nevertheless help us to be much more than what we are.

Roasted Red Pepper and Feta Rice

2010-05-03T19:34:00.000+01:00

So... Food for Thought is four years old today (well, a day late, but never mind)! Check out the very first post (and very likely, only) post on stir-fried tofu. ;) The blog started out as a joke almost, cataloging all the dinners my hosuemates (Hadi and Justin, if you still remember them...) we had as undergrads in Bristol University. There were some good ones, there were some bad ones but all in all, the most popular recipe here has to be the buttermilk chicken, I think. I don't blame you. That one's a beauty. Throughout the years, this blog has been mostly about easy recipes but (mostly) delicious food. "Student" recipes, if you like. That's not a surprise because when I first came to the UK, when I first started this blog, I have to admit that I knew nothing being in the kitchen and cooking. I had an aversion to it that I obviously had to overcome if I wanted to eat all my Brunei favourites here - stuff like cucur ayam and chicken pie come to mind. I also started trying my hand at baking up some cookies and whatnot and happily report that I've obtained what is (for me) probably the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Very awesome.

Over the four years, we've graduated and the other two are now happily working. But I've been continuing on with my studies and so... am still around in the UK. As a direct result of this though, the number of posts have been dwindling, as some of you might have noticed. It's partly because I've been getting busier and busier, but also partly because it's really no fun cooking for one person. Most days, I have the same chicken for dinner, as my parents might have noticed, haha. Lately though, I've ... realised just well, just how many people read this blog. From what started out as a joke, it's now been... well, a point of recognition for some people, to put it one. That makes me feel... happy, proud almost. And so, I've been trying to update just a little bit more often these days. So... anyway, I'd like to thank all current, past and future readers for coming here and visiting this little blog of mine. It's been a source of fun, stress at times when I had to think up of names for H+J's imaginative dishes but always always something that made me appreciate food more. So much so that... well, food is almost constantly on my mind these days, haha, as some people seem to have noticed. Anyway, thank you for sticking with me all this time, and hope you (and me!) will stick around for years to come.

Now, let's get on to what you came here for, shall we? On with the food, an adaptation of a delicious looking recipe that I got from another food blog. Here we go.
What you need:
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 shallots, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped (I used garlic powder)
2 chicken frankfurters, sliced
1 roasted red pepper, sliced
5 leaves fresh basil, torn
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 cup (the one you use for measuring out rice) long-grained rice - I used Thai fragrant rice
1 1/2 cups (80mL) of chicken stock
30g feta, crumbled

What you do:

Heat the olive oil in a pan. Add in the shallots and garlic (if using) and stir-fry until softened and fragrant. Add in the frankfurters and fry until heated. Add in the red peppers and basil and season well with salt and pepper.
Add in the rice and fry until slightly translucent. At this point, you could do one of two things. You can either add in the chicken stock and simmer with the pot covered until it's cooked OR you can just dump the whole thing in a rice cooker and leave it alone to cook, which I did.
Whichever way you did, once the rice is cooked, remove from the heat, mix in the feta and serve immediately.

I've never had feta cheese before, though I've always been tempted to try since I love cheese. The closest I ever got to it was in Justin's Greek Salad but at that time, I wasn't really all that adventurous with my food just yet. I even bought a pack of it when I was studying in London last time but it languished unopened in the Brunei Hall student kitchen, I never quite knew what to do with it, but this recipe seemed perfect. I love cheese and I love love love roasted red peppers.

You could get them very easily in jars, of course. Apparently, even in Brunei though I've never come across it myself. However, although red peppers are expensive here, ready-made roasted red peppers are even more so. So I chose the cheaper (and better!) option. It's so easy to roast your own pepper. Just cut it in half and stick it into an oven and leave it in there until the skin turns black. At this point, you can remove the skin very easily and there you have it! Your very own roasted red peppers. I was making this last night in my (contraband, shhh!) toaster oven and it made my room smell amazing. Roasting peppers smell really good!

I was kind of worried as to whether this would work in the rice-cooker, but to my relief, it did! It might be slightly more.. stickier and moister if you used the saucepan method, but I don't like my rice all that sticky so that was fine with me. It already looked really good what with the red pepper-tinted rice and the sausage slices and the dark green basil... add in the feta and it was just awesome.

I didn't know what feta tasted like... I assumed... salty, right? To me... it tastes just like cheese, hehe. I can't quite describe it, but I really like feta now. I should start using it in more recipes! It's apparently made out of a combination of mostly sheep's milk with maybe a bit of goat's milk. Interesting, never had those kinds of cheeses before. I have quite a bit left, so look out for those, okay? =)

Anyway, this was a nice and easy dinner, almost nothing had to be done besides chopping up the veggies and frying them. That's the kind of recipe I definitely like... easy and delicious! Anyway, see you next time~

Quote of the day: If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people

Bulgogi (Korean BBQ Beef)

2010-04-28T20:36:00.000+01:00

So... thanks to the cheesesteak sandwich and the lasagna, I've got quite a bit of beef in the freezer. I have to say, I don't usually eat that much beef. As I keep saying over and over, I'm a chicken girl. Plus, beef is *horribly* expensive here. Almost 3 times the cost of chicken! Craziness.

But anyway, since I already have it, I should do something with it, right? My favourite recipe with beef would have to be beef with broccoli (so good!) but I thought I might as well try out a new recipe. Yes, that's right, beef-lovers. Another beef recipe for you to try and enjoy. Here we go!
What you need:
Beef, cut into paper-thin slices
- from what I could tell, the beef they usually use in this dish is in fairly large slices, but being a poor student, I don't have much choice, really. I just took the cheapest cut of beef I could find and sliced that up. It's much easier when the meat is frozen and you have a sharp knife, which was what I managed to do for the cheesesteak sandwich. Due to a lack of time, I didn't manage to freeze the beef completely - after letting it thaw in the fridge during the day. Should not have done that, sigh. But anyway, I still managed to get fairly thin slices, so good enough. =)

3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons white sugar
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon sesame seeds, toasted
Chilli powder and crushed chilli flakes, to taste
Pinch of salt and a bit more of ground black pepper. I also put in a touch of ginger powder.
2 spring onions, finely chopped
2 small shallots, sliced

What you do:

Mix all of the ingredients except for the beef and shallot together, make sure that the sugar has dissolved.
Add in the beef and the shallots and allow to marinate in the fridge for an hour. (or much much less, if you don't have the time or patience, like I did)
To panfry, heat up a lightly oiled frying pan. Place the beef in a single layer and fry until cooked. It can be nice if you overdo the frying just a touch, so you get the sugar slightly caramelised and the beef a bit crisp. Enjoy with a bowl of white rice.

Wow, only 3 steps. Easy, right? The hardest part for me would have been slicing the beef up, but it would have been much much easier if it had been frozen. Ah well, never mind. It still turned out great! =D The marinade was a bit too sweet for me, but I think that's just for me. Other people, definitely my brothers, would like it, I think.

I think I should have drained the marinade before frying though, since the beef kind of simmered in the sauce instead of frying. But everything was good once the sauce was evaporated and turned sticky and clung to the beef, lending it a sweet slightly smoky flavour (thanks to me being overzealous on the caramelising bit, haha). I wouldn't say that this was anything special, but perhaps I am not doing it right? Not sure, never been to a Korean restaurant before. I might try to look out for this dish on the menu of Kimchi or the other Korean restaurant when I'm back in Brunei. Never really dared to try out those places, since I am really unsure on what to order but at least now there's an aim, right? =D

Quote of the day: I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.

Cheesesteak Sandwich

2010-04-18T19:25:00.005+01:00

First of all, I'd just like to mention that I'm trying to integrate my Twitter account use with this blog, so do follow me on Twitter if you're interested. =) I'll be posting pictures of food that don't quite need a whole post on their own, but are so pretty that they deserve to be shown somewhere, haha. Anyway, on with the food!

I first heard of a cheesesteak in the Sims 3 game. Unlike the previous two games before it, where your Sims would just cook random plates of food, in the Sims 3, you could actually tell them what to cook and a "Cheesesteak" was one of the options. It came out in the form of a sandwich. Very very intriguing. And the name. Highly interesting as well. I love cheese. <3

So I wikied it. And wow! It looks totally awesome. It's basically a long roll with lots of beef and lots of cheese. Sounds good! I kept it in mind to try to make it one day, but ... well, forgot about it, really. Until recently, when I got a couple of packs of submarine rolls and was looking around for ideas on what to stuff them with. And that's when the cheesesteak came up again. I *had* to make them this time, so here we go!
What you need:
(serves 1)
1 submarine roll, or long bread roll of your choice, lightly toasted
150g beef steak, cut into very thin slices (easiest way to do this is to stick them in the freezer for a couple of hours before slicing)
Cheese - apparently, the most authentic cheese to use in a Philadelphia Cheesesteak would be American cheese, but we don't have them available here... so this isn't a Philly cheesesteak recipe, just so you know. I used one of those processed cheese slices (like Chesdale, only more orange) and a sprinkling of mature Cheddar cheese)
2 shallots OR 1 small onion, sliced
1 clove garlic, crushed - I just used garlic granules
Salt and pepper, for seasoning

What you do:

Heat a tablespoon of oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. Add the shallots/onion and fry until fragrant and softened. Set aside.
Heat another tablespoon of oil. Add in the beef slices and fresh garlic, if using. Fry until well-cooked, all the while stirring and breaking up the meat into smaller pieces. Season well with salt and plenty of pepper and the garlic granules, if you're using that.
Add in the fried shallots and mix well. Put to one side of the frying pan in a long shape roughly the size of your bread roll. Place your cheese over the top of the mixture and allow it to melt over the heat.
Transfer mixture onto your warmed sandwich roll and enjoy!

Spoil the unhealthy-ness of it all with some fresh veggies, if you wish. ;)

Mmmmmmmm! Will you look at that? Soft bread, peppery beef, sweet shallots, melty gooey cheese... the makings of a great sandwich! And it's so easy to make too, as sandwiches usually are. Cooking the whole thing up took about 5 minutes, maybe. Preparation took another 10. So this is a quick recipe, something I like very much, hehe.

I'm definitely adding more black pepper next time... I think this would be perfect if it were more peppery. Also, I think I didn't add quite enough meat in there, but never mind. Add as much beef as you like. I wouldn't have added lettuce, but I really really need to use mine up, so in it went. I'm not too big a fan of beef, but the cheese definitely made up for it. Mmmmmmmmmmmm, cheesy! Absolutely delicious!

If you were looking to make this in Brunei, I'm not sure what you could use for the bread roll. Sausage buns won't quite cut it and I'm not sure if they sell these kinds of sandwich rolls there. Perhaps Supasave might have some more "exotic" kinds of bread, not sure. But the rest are all very easily available. It's basically a sandwich with beef and cheese. Can't go wrong with that. ;)

Quote of the day: Sandwiches are wonderful. You don't need a spoon or a plate

A Healthy Lunch: Chicken Caesar Salad

2010-04-06T07:58:00.052+01:00

Once the weather gets sunny and warm, making pretty food makes me feel happy. Mostly because pictures look so much better in natural daylight compared to artificial lighting. In previous years, I've always wanted to make cookies at around this time, but unfortunately, I don't have an oven this year. So sad.

Anyways, sunshine also brings to mind fresh green salads, at least to me. Now, I've never been a salad person as Ibu might tell you, but that doesn't mean I've never had the urge to try. I've tried an Asian Chicken Salad before, but didn't finish because it was too bland, too sweet. But another salad I've always wanted to try was Chicken Caesar Salad, so here's an easy way to make it. :)

Basically, you take either some baby gem lettuce or Cos or Romaine lettuce (which is traditionally used to make Caesar salad) and cut it into pieces. I used baby gem, since it's smaller and easier for me to finish up the whole pack. Next, you add in cooked chicken pieces chopped in pieces (I liked using the Ayam Bakar Goreng recipe) and croutons, which you can either make yourself by frying cubed pieces of bread or simply buy from the supermarket. They're widely available in the UK, though I'm not quite sure in Brunei. I got the garlic and cheese flavoured croutons from Sainsbury's. Last of all is the salad dressing. Again, you can make it yourself, but why bother? Just grab a bottle from the supermarket. If there is enough interest or if Caesar salad dressing is not available in Brunei, perhaps I shall try making my own dressing. But for now, I'll stick with the ready-made dressing.

And that's it! Just mix everything up and you're ready to go. I had a small portion last night and it was surprisingly tasty! I actually finished it up, which is no mean feat for someone who's not fond of veggies, haha. The dressing was quite delicious - sort of garlicky mayonnaise with a hint of cheese. I do think the chicken is an important part of the flavour, of course, so make sure you use something tasty. Feel free to use your favourite chicken recipe. :) The croutons were also nice sonce they were crunchy, giving a contrast in textures. What I decided to do then was pack another small portion for lunch today. Since I didn't want to risk the dressing making the lettuce soggy, I poured the salad dressing in a small bottle that I happened to have handy. Voila!

Isn't it adorable??? I have a matching tomato sauce bottle too, which I use more often, hehe. Anyway. If you plan to pack a salad for lunch too, it would be best to keep it cool. I plan on doing that by packing in a small bottle of water that I had frozen overnight.

Of course, that's just a small salad and definitely wouldn't be enough for lunch. So I am also packing myself a sandwich. I found these delicious looking cheese-topped bread rolls at Tesco's yesterday. They were only 36p and would be enough for two big sandwiches. Perfect!

For this sandwich, I added in beef pastrami, chicken salami, some extra chicken pieces from the salad, mature cheddar cheese as well as those cheese slices (macam cheesedale). This was baked in a toasted oven for about 5 minutes before I topped it with baby gem lettuce. Sandwich done! Wait for it to cool a little before wrapping it in clingfilm, ready for lunch. Yay! Can't wait to have lunch later!

Quote of the day: All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say 'Yo Goober! Where's the meat?'. I'm trying to impress people here Lisa. You don't win friends with salad.

A Healthy Dinner: Chicken Noodle Soup

2010-03-22T21:18:00.000Z

Here's an easy dinner idea for you all. =) Chicken noodle soup. Very easy.

First, heat up some water in a saucepan, and pop in a chicken stock cube. Bring to boil and add in a piece of chicken and chopped up cabbages. Cook for 10 minutes, then add in some broccoli and chopped up lettuce. Feel free to substitute wiith whatever veggies you have on hand - those were just the ones I had to use up. Add in some udon noodles - mine were fresh ones, so they don't take long to cook, a couple of minutes at most. If you use dried noodles, add them in with the chicken. Season well with black and white pepper, and perhaps some dried chilli flakes. I also popped in a couple of gyozas , home-made but feel free to use ready-made dumplings if you have them available. Boil till everything nicely cooked - don't boil too long. You don't want the gyoza and lettuce to be too soft. Fifteen minutes tops, and you have a nice healthy AND filling dinner! =)

I know, I know. Barely a recipe and something I've made before even. But this is even easier and even healthier, hehe. ;) Plus, the gyoza add a nice touch to it, I think. Boiling the vegetables all together also lend a great flavour to the soup. Anyway. Look forward to more brief bites from me over the next few weeks!

Quote of the day: To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.

Double Expresso Brownies

2010-03-08T12:53:00.002Z

I know. I know. It's been agesssssssssssss since my last post. I've had this recipe holed up ever since I came back from Brunei, but I've not had time to write it up. But hopefully, with better weather coming up, I shall be more motivated to cook for fun rather than cooking just to eat. =P

Anyway, this recipe caught my eye because it had espresso powder (which I have a lot of and no idea what to do with it) AND cornflour instead of normal flour. Cornflour! In a brownie! That had to be interesting! I had to make it... so here we go!

What you need:
125g cornflour
2 teaspoons instant espresso powder
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
50g dark cooking chocolate
125g butter
250g caster sugar
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
75g walnuts, toasted and diced - omitted

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease a 20cm by 30cm baking tin (we used a 30 cm square pan) with melted butter and line with baking paper.
Mix the cornflour, espresso powder, baking powder and salt in a mixing bowl.
Melt the chocolate and butter together in another bowl. Add in sugar and mix until well-combined. Add in eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add in the vanilla essence and flour mixture. Mix until well combined.
Pour brownie batter in prepared baking pan. Bake for 30 minutes, or until set in the center. Allow to cool before cutting into pieces.

Wow. Seriously. Wow. One of the best brownies we've ever made. It rivals the Ultimate Chocolate Brownies as my favourite brownie recipe. Or at least that was what I thought when I made this. Unfortunately, the perils of a terrible long-term memory means... I can't quite remember what this was like.

But I'm fairly sure that it had what I liked about the Ultimate Chocolate Brownies. Crisp and crunchy crust, soft and fudgey inside. That's my idea of a perfect brownie. Add to this the slight mocha flavour of espresso powder + chocolate and you get a winning combo! The cornflour definitely definitely gave a delicious texture... why do we not use it more often in brownies? I have no idea... But I am sticking the recommended label on this!

And that's all i can write about this... one of my favourite brownie recipes so far. I have got to make this again and give my fresh thoughts! If only I had an oven, sigh.

Quote of the day: Be a coffee-drinking individual - espresso yourself!

PS: The Ultimate Chocolate Brownies were successfully made by the SAS Home Science group, so yay!

Tiny Update

2009-12-04T08:26:00.005Z

Just wanted to say sorry for the extended absence. Been really really busy. I don't even eat a very good dinner most days. Although lunch is quite decent usually, hehe. Check this out:

Cool yeah? =D Hehe. Fried noodles, with baked potatoes and a tiny piece of chicken, veggie stiryfry and an orange as side-dishes. Very balanced, am proud of myself. ;)

Anyway... there might or might not be a post soon. Will see. In the meantime, please take note that my e-mail address has changed as someone stole my old account. =( So don't contact me there.

See you soon!

Tiramisu

2009-11-05T09:42:00.002Z

Hi there everyone! Sorry for the ultra-long absence. I'm currently furthering my studies yet again, and this time, not only do I not have access to a nice big kitchen, but I don't have time to do it either! Sigh.

Anyway, this recipe is a constant favourite at our place. Not only is it really easy to do, it's really really tasty as well. Initially, Kanum made it but now, Shuketron has taken over as the premier maker of this tiramisu. I've never made it myself, but as I told you, it's really really easy to do. And people love it. When we made it for our open house last Raya, Shuketron's Tiramisu overshadowed almost everything else that the girls made. Oh well.

But anyway, now you can make it too! Here we go!

What you need:

1 x 8oz pack cream cheese, softened

2 eggs, separated

1/3 cup sugar

Thickened cream, 250-200 mL

Coffee - made with cold water

Sponge fingers, as many as you need

Milo

What you do:

1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

2. Beat the cream cheese until stiff.

3. Add in the sugar, cream and egg yolks. Beat until smooth.

4. Fold in the beaten egg whites into the cheese mixture.

5. To assemble, dip the sponge fingers one by one into the coffee and place single layer into a dish of your choice. Spread half the cream cheese mixture over it.

6. Repeat the sponge finger layer with more biscuits and coffee, and spread the remaining cheese mixture over. Smooth the top. Sprinkle as much Milo as you like over the top. Shuketron has close to a cm of Milo usually, hahahah. Refrigerate for a few hours, preferably overnight, before serving.

So okay, I have to admit here that I am not a huge fan of tiramisu, but it seems like everyone else is! In this dish, the coffee-soaked sponges lend a flavour to the creamy cheese. And I have to say, I can see how everyone thinks it's wonderful. It's a delicious mixture of flavours - add the Milo and you're all set!

I've been meaning to post this for *years* now, but it's always been hard to take a pretty picture of this, unfortunately. In the end, I gave up trying to take a photo of a single serving, so unfortunately, you can't see all the layers. But no matter how it looks, people will always go for this and love you for having this. ;) Trust me.

Anyway, that's all I have time for today. Unfortunately, posts will be a bit sporadic, and probably no baking either, since I don't have an oven (!!!). Oh well. Till next time. =)

PS Check out the real-time chat widget! =D

Quote of the day: Did you know that "tiramisu" means "pick me up" (either physically or mentally, i.e. cheer me up) in Italian?

Oreo Cheesecake

2009-09-26T23:00:00.001+01:00

So today is my littlest brother's birthday. =) Only he's 20, so he's not so little anymore, but whatever. You've seen some of his dishes on the blog, such as the carbonara and briefly, spaghetti (actually originated from our cousin, but he has adopted it as his own, haha) and honey chicken (which I first made with him). His star tiramisu recipe (again, adopted from someone else, haha) is coming up here soon. He's gained a bit of a reputation as a cook, especially amongst his housemates in the UK.

Anyway, when I asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted us to make for his birthday, he came up with a very specific description of an Oreo cheesecake. We've tried to match his "demands" as closely as possible, haha. We did make the cake a little early though, for a family gathering last Thursday as more people would have been able to have a taste. Anyway, here we go!

(Oh, cheesecake recipe is adapted from here and the decorations slightly copied as well =P)

What you need:
For the crust:
28 Oreo cookies
Unsalted butter, melted - about 100-150g

For the cake:
1kg cream cheese - about 4 x 8 oz packages
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sugar
1 cup whipping cream
1/2 cup milk
4 eggs
14 Oreo cookies

Decorations (optional):
14 Oreo cookies
Whipping cream + sugar, to taste

What you do:

Grease and line a 25cm round springform baking tin. Preheat the oven to 160C.
To make the crust, remove the filling from the 28 Oreos and reserve. Place the cookies in a food processor and process to fine crumbs. (Or bash it with a rolling pin, I care not.) Add in just enough butter so that the cookie crumbs are just coated and not swimming in grease.
Press the crumb-butter mixture into the prepared baking tin, so that it covers the bottom evenly. Bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, place the cream cheese in a large bowl and beat until smooth. gradually add in the vanilla, sugar, milk, cream and the filling from the 28 Oreos previously and beat until smooth.
Add the eggs one at a time and mix until just incorporated. Remove the filling from the 14 Oreos and reserve. Break the cookies into large-ish chunks and stir into the cheese mixture.
Pour mixture into the prepared crust and smooth the top. Bake for 40 minutes or until the centre is almost set. Leave in the oven with the door closed for at least an hour, or until cool if you can. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, or overnight.
To decorate the cake, carefully remove from the baking tin and slide onto a large plate. I think ours was a flat glass plate about 30 cm diameter. Whip the cream, adding in enough sugar to your taste. Carefully frost the cake with the cream, covering the top and sides. Use it to hide any cracks, if you have any! =P
Remove the filling from the next 14 Oreos and place together with the filling from the previous 14 Oreos. Use the filling to form little balls, as you can see on our cake. Make as many as you like.
Crush the cookies into fine crumbs. Use the crumbs to cover the edges of the cake and dust very lightly over the top and sides. We spread the remaining crumbs around the sides of the cake, on the plate. If you don't wish to do this, use less cookies.
Decorate with the filling balls. We plonked a "Happy Birthday" sign on our cake, which we made out of chocolate and sprinkleables. Writing is made of white chocolate. Chill cake until ready to serve.

I think this is the most gorgeous cake I've made so far. Of course, I haven't made very many cakes, but still. The last decorated cake I made was for Hadi, back in Bristol - the chocolate cheesecake. I thought that was pretty, but just looking at the pictures of this Oreo cheesecake makes me feel all tingly. =D

Anyway, looks-wise, it's beautiful! How about taste-wise? Personally, I loved it. I'm not such a huge fan of cheesecake, but thanks to the cream and milk in this one, the cake was quite light and creamy and not overpoweringly cheesy. The Oreos, of course, are always tasty. And for once, my crust was firm! Yay!

As for the birthday boy, well... unfortunately, he thought that while it was nice, it wasn't cheesy enough and not quite sweet enough either. Haha. While I made as close to what I thought was my perfect cheesecake, he thought it wasn't cheesy enough... Figures.

As for the rest of the family, well, it seemed popular enough. A whole kilo of cheesecake was gone by the end, so it couldn't have been too bad. =P Unfortunately, the cake was slightly overshadowed by the tiramisu which had come a bit earlier, haha. Oh well, never mind. I liked this better than the tiramisu, but it's all a matter of taste. Some people preferred one, some preferred the other.

Anyway, that's it from me for now. Look out for a couple more tasty recipes coming up soon. After that though, posts shall be more sparse as I shall be off to the UK yet again and am not sure how things will be there. But well, I shall try to post when I can. In the meantime, Ihsan is out~

Quote of the day: Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.

Ultimate Chocolate Brownies

2009-09-23T23:00:00.048+01:00

First of all, a (belated) Selamat Hari Raya to all muslim readers. It's been a busy few days, so I haven't had the time to write a post. But never mind, here's one, a bit late. =)

These brownies are from the same book I've used for the Chocolate Honeycomb Brownies. They are described as having a "flaky, uneven surface and a rich chocolate centre". Sounds good! For best results, you are advised to use the best chocolate and cocoa powder you can, so I finally used the chocolate I've brought back from the UK last time, haha. So, here we go!

What you need:
1/3 cup (40g) plain flour
1/2 cup (60g) dark cocoa powder
2 cups (500g) sugar
1 cup (130g) chopped pecans or pistachios - omitted
250g dark chocolate
250g butter
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
4 eggs, lightly beaten

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Brush a 20x30 cm (8x12 inch) cake tin with melted butter or oil. We used a 10-inch square tin. Line the base with baking paper, extending over 2 sides.
Sift the flour and cocoa into a large bowl and combine with the sugar and nuts. Mix thoroughly and make a well in the centre.
Use a large sharp knife to chop the chocolate into small pieces. Add the chocolate pieces to the dry ingredients.
Melt the butter in a small pan over low heat or in the microwave, which is what we did. Add it to the dry ingredients, with the vanilla and eggs. Stir until the ingredients are well combined.
Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, smooth the surface and bake for 40-45 minutes. The mixture will still be a bit soft inside. Set side for up to 2 hours before cutting, or refrigerate if you prefer. When set, cut into pieces.

This is still quite an easy recipe, no "specialist" equipment required, like an electric mixer etc. It just has a few extra steps, is all. Unfortunately, at the time, we were still baking something else in the oven so this had to go in the fridge for awhile before we could bake it. I think that's most likely why the surface is not quite as flaky as I expected, but oh well, never mind.

Because this tasted just awesome! Super fudgy, with a really crunchy crust. You know how the brownie edges are usually the best? Well, imagine the texture of the brownie edge all ove the top of your brownie. Mmmmmm! Because we used very dark chocolate, it wasn't toothachingly sweet either, despite the 2 cups of sugar in there. =P

Because we made these during puasa (then after that, it was raya with its abundance of sweet foods) we didn't really get a chance to have these properly. So they were stowed away in the fridge for almost a week. And I have to say. I believe they got even better with the keeping! The crust is still super crunchy. The brownies are even more fudgy, almost like really really thick chocolate mousse, or ice cream even. So good! I do think the few extra steps are worth it. =)

Quote of the day: Will sell boyfriend for CHOCOLATE - all sales final no refunds no exchanges

Butter Prawn/Chicken

2009-09-18T16:38:00.001+01:00

Note: I haven't cooked this recipe yet, but someone had wanted a post on it, so here you go. =) You can substitute either prawns or chicken for the meat in this dish. Obviously, I prefer chicken. =P Recipe, after the picture~ (Note: Pictures are from dishes I ate at restaurants...)

What you need:

500g chicken/tiger prawn - season, coat lightly in flour and deepfry.

2 egg yolks + 3 tablespoons milk

20 pieces curry leaves

10g (or to taste) chillies, sliced thinly

30g butter (original recipe said - 10g teaspoon... huh, not sure what that means)

1 tablespoon oil

Flour, to coat

Seasoning

What you do:

Beat the egg yolk lightly with the milk and set aside.
Heat the oil with the butter in a pan and stir until butter is melted. Fry the curry leaves and chilli slices until fragrant.
Pour the egg mixture slowly into the pot. Mix with a whisk until bubbly and flossy.
Add in the chicken/prawn and mix until well-combined. Serve immediately.

To be honest, I'm really not sure how this recipe will work out. The original recipe (in Malay) sounds very confused and is missing a couple of steps, so I adjusted it to something that sounds more reasonable. You can probably try editing the steps too, see how it works out and well, hope for the best?

I've made this before, though using a different recipe, and unfortunately, the floss didn't turn out. I got a soggy mess, haha, so never felt like making it again. Especially since it's so easily available in Brunei, though if you're overseas, it would be a different matter, I guess. This is one of my favourite, favourite dishes here in Brunei, and I would surely miss it once I'm back in the UK. Sigh.

Anyway, good luck in making this, 1. Tell me how it goes! =)

Double Crumble Strawberry Cheesecake

2009-09-15T23:00:00.024+01:00

Now that Raya is about a week away, me and my sisters have started our "Raya baking", hehe. Of course, with the various sungkai gatherings we've had, especially with the family, we've had plenty of oppurtunity to practice and perfect our recipes. ;) This particular recipe is a case in point. One afternoon, right before a family gathering, we were determined to use up our frozen strawberries. Looking around online, we found this recipe, and fiddled around with it a little to suit our purposes. So, here we go!

What you need:

Crumble layer:
2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 egg yolks
1 cup caster sugar
150g unsalted butter
Pinch of salt

Strawberry cheesecake layer:

500g cream cheese
3 medium eggs + white of 1 egg
3/4 cup icing sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
400g strawberries, hulled and sliced - we used frozen

What you do:

Grease and line a 10-inch square baking tin.
Add in all ingredients for the crumble layer in a food processor and pulse until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Or, you can mix with your hands until they are well-combined and have a crumble texture.
Spread half of the crumbs evenly over the bottom of the baking tin and press down gently.
In another bowl, combine all ingredients for the cheese layer and mix until well-combined. Because our cream cheese was still stiff from the refrigerator, we used a hand blender to make a smooth mixture.
In a small bowl, beat the egg white until soft peaks form (using an electric mixer) and fold into the cheese mixture. Add in a handful of the sliced strawberries and beat using the electric mixer until combined.
Carefully pour the cheese mixture over the crumbs in the baking tin. Arrange the rest of the strawberries on top of the cheese and sprinkle the rest of the crumble over the top.
Bake in an oven preheated to 180 C for 35 minutes. Reduce heat to 160 C and bake for another 35 minutes. Ensure that cheese is set and not jiggly before removing from oven. Leave to cool completely in the tin before placing in the refrigerator to chill for a couple of hours or overnight. Serve cold, garnished with fresh strawberries if you like.

My, that's pretty. I've always liked recipes with crumble. They don't look elegant, but they look charmingly home-made! Hehe. The reason we decided to do this in a square tin was because that would be easier to cut into small bite-sized pieces. Because we didn't want the cake to be as thick as a normal piece of cake, we also decided to halve the cheese layer but keep the original amount of the crumble layer as, in our opinion, the crumb is the best part of the cheesecake! ;)

Because we did this sort of at the last minute, we didn't have time to cool the cake properly. After cutting off a portion for home and doing a quick photo shoot, it was off to our aunt's place for sungkai. Sorry if the pictures are a bit messy, haha. The cheesecake layer was still very hot and wasn't that firm yet. Anyway, at our aunt's, we placed the cake in the freezer for about an hour or so before cutting it into squares. People were definitely appreciative of it, I think. Again, the younger generation were particularly enamored of it, though not the children. I don't think most children appreciate cheesecake at their age. They all particularly liked the crumble layer, and I got some inquiries as to what it was made of. There were also some grumbles about lost diets, haha. Alas, since it was after sungkai, people were already quite full, but somehow or other, everything was gone by the end of the night, so that's all good. =)

Cut to the portion we have at home. That one has been chilling for almost a whole night by the time we dug into it. And I must say, it was even better. Very thick and creamy and cool. Babah was quite a big fan of it (as well as Izzah, who loves strawberry cheesecake). Babah thought that the textures and flavours were really great - creamy yet crunchy, sweet yet a bit sour... between the two of them, they probably ate the most, haha. Though that was partly because the boys didn't dare finish up the cake, but never mind.

In any case, this was a success, I think. Not bad for a last minute recipe. Someone on the tagboard had asked if I had a recipe for blueberry cheesecake, which I don't, but you could probably replace the strawberries with blueberries if you'd like. Also, if you're interested, the blogger of the original recipe had also posted a recipe for Blueberry and Chocolate Crumb Cheesecake, which very similar to this strawberry cheesecake recipe and looks good too! I want to try that chocolate crumble some day... So yes, unknown, if you'd like, you can use that one. Very similar to this recipe, which turned out to be quite a success, so that one should be nice as well.

We're not quite sure if we would be making this for Raya though. Since it's very rich, not sure if people would be able to take it, after hitting loads of houses, haha. But never mind. This would make an awesome cake. Just double the cheese layer and use a couple of round cake tins and decorate with a few strawberries.... pretty! =D I bet whoever you are making it for would appreciate it. I would even double the crumble layer some more. The crumble is really really good!

Anyway, this is it for now. See you at my next post. =)

Quote of the day: We were getting 1,000 inquiries a week. Once we got nearly 1,000 responses for a recipe for diet cheesecake!

Mars Bar Crispie Slice

2009-09-11T23:00:00.030+01:00

Well, here is another quick recipe for you all. I actually first came across this cookie when we held a barbecue at our house a couple of months ago. One of my sister's friends had brought along what she called a Mars Bar cake and it was just awesome. Slightly chewy, slightly crunchy and had the wonderful caramel taste of Mars Bars. We asked for the recipe, and she said that it was online everywhere. A quick Google search later, and we were ready to make a batch for ourselves. Here we go!

What you need:

3 standard Mars bars, chopped into smallish pieces

2 tablespoons golden syrup

85g butter

Enough rice krispies to coat

200g milk chocolate, melted (optional)

What you do:

Melt the Mars bars, golden syrup and butter either in a pan over a very low heat, or in a large bowl in a microwave. Be careful not to burn in either case. You might need to use a whisk to make sure the chocolate has melted completely and smoothly. I did.
Add in as much rice krispies as you like, making sure you have enough melted chocolate to coat them properly.
Press the mixture into a greased and lines baking tin. How big depends on how thick you want it. I used an 8-inch baking tin and got quite a thin layer. At this point, I sprinkle more rice krispies on top of the mixture and press them in gently. This gives an extra crunchy layer, yum!
Leave to set in the fridge. If using the chocolate, melt and spread all over the cake. Leave to set before cutting into pieces.

Yum yum yumminess! These are quite similar to the Maltesers cake, in that they use pre-made chocolate and golden syrup and such. But these have a different texture since they're chewier and easier to cut. (Oooh, that Maltesers cake looks good. Might make it again soon.)

But anyway, I love these Mars Bars cakes (or cookies) as well. The rice krispies stay wonderfully crunchy and give a great contrast to the chewy chocolate. Because I knew these were quite rich, I made them into a thin layer, though of course, you can choose to make them really thick as well. The recipe is easily doubled or even tripled. They were slightly different than the ones my sister's friend brought over though. These kind of melted more easily, and the golden syrup flavour was a bit more prominent. But doesn't really matter. Still very very very nice. =D

We kept these in the freezer, though you can just keep them in the fridge. Despite being in there for a couple days (since they were out of the way, the people of the house kind of forgot about them, haha. Out of sight, out of mind), they still stayed chewy and not at all hard in any way. The rice krispies stayed crunchy too, mmmm! I might add even more rice krispies to my next batch. I think they make it slightly less sweet and slightly less rich, so you can eat more! Haha. Plus, I want to make the next batch thicker so as to make it look more presentable. So more rice crispies might be a good idea. (Plus, chocolate is so expensive now! =( )To make it even more chocolatey, you could even try to substitute the rice kripies with chocolate rice cereal, such as Coco Pops. That should be very tasty, mmmmm! Using Cornflakes might also give a different flavour. In short, use your favourite cereal!

Anyway, I think this will be a firm favourite at our house. So delicious and so easy to do too! Definitely will be part of our Raya baking. Speaking of which, Raya is in just over a week!

Quote of the day: I'm a big fan of the Mars Bar Diet. You don't eat the Mars bar, you stick it up your arse and let a rottweiler chase you home.

Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing

2009-09-08T23:00:00.005+01:00

As promised, here is another adapted recipe from the Tate's Bake Shop Cookbook. I had actually made this earlier, but the cupcakes were all eaten up before I could make the icing. Whoopsie. So here's another try, this time for a family event - hence the sprinklables, to make it look even prettier, haha. Here we go!

What you need:
Cupcakes:
6 tablespoons salted butter
150g semisweet chocolate or darker, chopped
1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1/3 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup plain flour

Icing:
3/4 cup icing sugar
3/4 cup creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup salted butter, softened to room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup heavy cream

What you do:

For the cupcakes: Preheat the oven to 180 C. Line a mini-muffin tray with paper cups, or grease.
Combine the butter and chocolate in a microwaveable bowl and microwave on low, stirring occasionally, until it is just melted.
Stir in the sugars. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each one. Stir in the vanilla, then the flour.
Fill the muffin cups with the mixture.
Bake the cupcakes for 10 minutes, rotating the tray halfway through, or until a toothpick inserted comes out with moist crumbs attached (like a brownie). Repeat with the remaining mixture. Leave to cool completely before icing them. (If you wish to make normal-sized cupcakes, bake for 20-25 minutes)
For the icing: Place all the ingredients for the icing except for the cream in a small bowl. With an electric mixer, beat the ingredients until they are creamy.
Add in the cream and beat the mixture until it is soft and creamy.
Spread or pipe the icing on top of the cupcakes and top with chopped peanuts (for adults) or sprinkles (for kids) if desired. We had to pat the sprinkles on to get them to stick, and just decided to dip the whole thing in a bowl filled with sprinkles. That was faster and much more colourful. =D

This was such a gorgeous recipe. So easy to make and so tasty! The cupcake batter was very soft, almost like brownie batter. The resulting cupcakes were also like brownies, very fudgey and chocolatey. Yet, despite the fudginess, it was somehow light and airy as well. Soooo delicious! We got 55 mini cupcakes out of this, just so you know. A airy yet fudgey brownie cupcake. Just perfect. =)

The peanut butter icing wasn't that much harder to do, though you do need an electric mixer. Beating it by hand would be too difficult, as the peanut butter is quite stiff. What results is also delicious - tastes like peanut butter, yet is creamier and not quite as rich. Its also not as sweet as I expected, despite the sugar in there. It was slightly salty, slightly sweet quite peanut-ty tasting icing. Very nice, if you like peanut butter.

I have to admit, I am a recent fan of peanut butter. I don't really eat it with bread and such, but I do like it in biscuits and, as it turns out, with chocolate! ;) Mind you, while the peanut butter icing had its fans, the children generation were not quite as enamored of it. Turns out that not a lot of them actually liked peanut butter. Whoops! Guess it was a mistake to bring these to a family event then, haha. But I think most of the adults liked it. By the end of the night, they were all finished though, and that's all that matters. The chocolate cupcake part remained very popular though.

Another problem some people had with this though, was that the peanut butter completely overpowered the chocolate. I do admit that this is true. One way you could circumvent this would be either by baking big cupcakes (and hence have a bigger cupcake to icing ratio) or just use a smear of icing on top of the cupcakes, instead of piping it on like we did. I think we might try that next time. In any case, I think this recipe is definitely going on the recommended list. Just make sure the people you make it for like peanut butter! =P

Quote of the day: It's like peanut butter and chocolate. Each is great, but they're better together.

Blondie Brownies

2009-09-04T23:00:00.002+01:00

I had promised to bring over the blondies from previously to a family function, but when I saw this recipe in a book that I have (Tate's Bake Shop Cookbook), I couldn't resist. I've made a couple of recipes from the book before - one of the chocolate chip cookies versions and white chocolate brownies. The chocolate chip cookies were not all that, though the white chocolate brownies were tasty enough. Nevertheless, I decided to go for it, though I adapted it very slightly. =) So here we go!

What you need:

Blondies:

2 1/4 cups plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter, softened to room temperature

1 3/4 cups firmly packed light brown sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Brownies:

3/4 cup plain flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda (whoopsie, just realised I forgot to add this in)

1/2 teaspoon salt

300g semi-sweet chocolate, chopped finely

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/3 cup salted butter

2/3 cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons water

2 large eggs

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease and line a 10-inch square baking pan.
To make the blondies, in a large bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt.
In another large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until they are light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, until they are well-blended. Mix in the vanilla. Stir in the flour mixture until it is well-blended. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Fold in the chocolate chips. Spread the batter (it will be very stiff, almost like cookie dough) evenly into the prepared pan. Set it aside.
To make the brownies, in a small bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda and salt.
In a large bowl, combine the chopped chocolate and vanilla.
In a saucepan, combine the butter, sugar and water. Bring the mixture just to a boil. Pour the hot mixture over the chocolate and stir until it is melted. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the flour mixture and mix until it is just combined.
Pour the mixture over the blondie mixture and spread it evenly.
Bake the brownies for 40-45 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out with a moist crumb. Don't overbake. When they are cool, cut them into squares.

Whew, that was a pretty long recipe, eh? Because there are two layers, it understandably takes awhile to make, but it's nothing too serious. :) It took longer than I expected to bake, most likely because I used a slightly smaller baking tin, but in the end, all was firm enough to cut without being too gooey. So that's good, right?

Anyway, the results are pretty (though a bit messy). The two tones look very nifty, people kept on asking whether I baked them together or separately. A friend had suggested that I put in white chocolate chips into the brownie layer, making a contrast of sorts with the blondie layer. Sort of a negative image, haha. That's a cool idea, I'd keep it in mind for next time. The brownie layer also had a lovely crackly crust, but because we were cutting these into pretty small squares, we were hard-pressed to keep that crust intact. Ah well.

Apart from that, these were very well-received, I think. Less than half remained at roughly 10 minutes after sungkai. Not a bad record. :) The whole thing was slightly chewy, not at all cakey, and very delicious... Mmm! I particularly liked the edges, but that's always the case with brownies. I find the edges are the best bit.

So anyway, I think this recipe was a success. I don't really like trying recipes from this book, as it doesn't really have a lot of pictures, but I've earmarked a couple more recipes to try before puasa is over. Look out for them! :)

Quote of the day: Caramels are only a fad. Chocolate is a permanent thing.

ANZAC Biscuits

2009-09-01T23:00:00.015+01:00

Last December, I took the opportunity of RBA's cash-for-miles promotion to swing myself a cheap ticket to New Zealand, to visit a friend who was studying there. I had meant to blog about the food there, but never got around to it. Which was a shame, really, because it seems as though New Zealanders like their food. Especially the chocolate. Mmmm, the chocolate! I visited the Cadbury World there, which had free samples (yay!), a gorgeous chocolate smell wafting through the halls and a chocolate waterfall. But even in the supermarkets, I saw chocolates (especially from Cadbury's) that I had never seen before in the UK, let alone in Brunei!

Naturally, most of my "souvenirs" for the family back home consisted of chocolate, chocolate and yet more chocolate. My more thoughtful friend decided to send over some gifts for them of her own, though she decided more on biscuits and cookies rather than chocolates, haha. All of them were delicious, but Babah particularly liked the ANZAC biscuits, since he's a pretty big fan of oats. Click here to read up a little bit on its history, courtesy of Wikipedia. =) He wondered if it were possible to make it at home, so after looking up a recipe, we were good to go. So... here we go!

What you need:

1 cup rolled oats *

1 cup plain flour, sifted *note, see below

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup dessicated coconut

150g butter

2 tablespoons golden syrup

2 tablespoons boiling water

1 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

Note: In the end, my dough was a bit too soft (and greasy to make nice biscuit piles, so I added more oats and flour to make it firmer. Not sure if you would have to do this, but just thought I would let you know)

What you do:

Combine oats, sifted flour, sugar and coconut in a large bowl. Melt butter and golden syrup together in a small pan.
Mix boiling water and soda together. Blend into butter mixture. Pour over dry ingredients; mix well.
Place spoonfuls (I used about a flat tablespoon's worth per biscuit) onto greased baking trays, allow room for spreading.
Bake at 150 C for 15-20 minutes, or until golden. Loosen while warm. Cool on trays. Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely. Store in an airtight container.

Not being a fan of coconut, I was a bit leery at using coconut in this recipe, but decided to put it in anyway. Was almost glad, as it smelled fantastic during the baking. Since it was already puasa, I couldn't have them straight away... I bet they would be awesome warm from the oven.

But that's not to say that they're not good once cool either. Babah enjoyed them, and so did my brothers, it seemed. Although it wasn't quite as popular with the younger ones as our normal chocolate chip cookies, it still wasn't a bad contender, I must say. Personally, I loved it. A nice change from chocolate chip cookies. The coconut and golden syrup imparted a very nice flavour to the biscuits, kind of ... toffee-ish, somehow. Yet not quite. Delicious, in any case.

As usual with cookies containing oats, be sure to keep this in an absolutely air-tight container. Otherwise, they will lose their crispness. And I love crisp cookies. =) Of course, if you prefer them a bit softer and more chewy, underbake them very slightly and maybe ease up on the air-tightness, haha. But mind you, these biscuits are apparently meant to be very sturdy cookies. According to that wiki article, they actually have baking competitions where they see whose biscuits can withstand the highest drop without shattering. Sounds interesting, haha.

Anyway, this being Ramadhan, look out for more sweet treats, coming soon. Gotta practice for Raya!

Quote of the day: Once we sowed wild oats, now we cook them in the microwave.

Cheesy Spring Rolls (Popia Cheese)

2009-08-28T23:00:00.004+01:00

Well now, here's another easy peasey recipe for all of you. Cheese spring rolls! That's right. I first came across the idea of deep-fried cheese at Swenson's, where they coat cheese (Mozarella, I am thinking) in something, maybe a thin bread layer, then cover in breadcrumbs and deepfry. Mmm-mmm! Soon after that, we had some cheese spring rolls at NurWanita restaurant, which used a saltier cheese, probably Cheddar, and were much more tasty because of that. Not only were they more tasty, they're much easier to do too! So, here we go!

What you need:
Spring roll pastry, about 5-inches square in size
A block of Cheddar cheese (or any hard cheese of your choice), but into batons about 3-4 inches in length

Oil, for deep-frying

What you do:

Roll up the cheese sticks in the pastry as you would normally do for spring rolls. Fold up over one end, fold up the opposite corners and roll up to get a cigar-shape. Seal the corner with water. Repeat for all the remaining cheese batons.
You can either fry them straightaway, or freeze them for later use.
Heat enough oil for deep-frying. Fry the spring rolls until crisp and golden-brown and serve immediately (Yes, you can fry from frozen.)

Again, such an easy recipe! Everything is premade, just chop roll and fry and ta-dah! Done. =) I can't believe we've never thought of it before, seeing as we love cheese, but ah well, never mind. That's partly what restaurants are for, no? To give you inspiration. Especially since the restaurant counterparts are terribly overpriced. Of course, ours may not be half as pretty, but they have that charming home-made look. ;)

Of course, this isn't particularly healthy, but what the hey. Indulge yourself, just a little bit. We have this (together with prawn and beef spring rolls) as appetisers during our sungkai. Just lovely. =) Keep them warm in an oven, if you have too. Don't have the temperature too high though.

As always, enjoy, and see you at the next post. Something slightly more demanding, I promise. =)

Quote of the day: My physique is down to 20 years of eating cheese.

Custard Marshmallow Pudding

2009-08-25T23:00:00.002+01:00

Good morning everyone! Hope your Ramadhan is going well. =) To kick things off, I have here a quickie recipe which Ibu made for a family event during the first day of fasting. Here we go!

What you need:
One plain un-iced cake, flavour of your choice
Custard - for an easy custard, use one tablespoon of custard powder per cup of milk
Vanilla marshmallows
Half a bar of Crunchie chocolate, crumbled into small pieces

What you do:

Cut the cake into small pieces, roughly 2-inches square maybe. Place in a single layer in a serving dish/bowl. We had enough to make two bowls.
Make the custard and pour over the cake pieces. While still hot, place some marshmallows over the top so that they melt with the heat. Sprinkle over the chocolate pieces.
Refrigerate for a few hours until custard is cold. Serve chilled.

Easy, no? =) You can, of course, use a home-baked cake, but its far easier to just buy from the supermarket. We used a pandan chiffon cake, and that was good, but imagine how much better it would have been if we had used a chocolate cake instead. Mmmmm~

This is quite similar to a trifle, I guess, only that instead of jelly, marshmallows are used. =) They both have the same function, to impart some flavour into the dish. So feel free to modify as you like and add your favorite toppings. To make it even richer, you could even whip some cream and spoon over the custard. Yum!

Quote of the day: You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Chocolate Chip Blondies

2009-08-21T23:00:00.003+01:00

Happy Ramadhan to all Muslim readers! =)

I had it in mind to try out what blondies taste like, when my cousins said that they had made some but, alas! I was not in time to try theirs out. Very popular, it seems. So I decided to try and make my own. =) It also helped that a friend also wanted me to try out a blondies recipe, so that will work out just fine. As for the recipe, I find that Smitten Kitchen is always a good place to find some new delectable treats, and sure enough, I found a recipe for basic blondies. Here we go!

What you need:

8 tablespoons butter, melted

1 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

A pinch of salt

1 cup plain flour

1/2 cup chocolate chips (modify as you like - the original recipe had a list of additions you can add to the basic recipe.)

What you do:

Grease a 8x8 baking pan.
Mix melted butter with brown sugar and beat until smooth. Beat in the egg, then the vanilla.
Add the salt and stir in the flour. Add in the chocolate chips.
Pour into the prepared pan. Bake at 190C for 20-25 minutes, or until set in the middle. Underbake slightly for a gooey-er texture. Allow to cool before cutting into squares.

Hmmm, as you can see, the thickness of my blondies are not quite the same as the thickness as the ones in the original recipe. Am pretty sure that that is because she doubled the recipe and used a 9x13 pan, which is not quite the same as using a 8x8 pan on a single batch, I would think. Ah well, not much harm done except that I should have adjusted the baking time to make up for this. Or maybe I will try the doubled recipe sometime soon.

I had actually wanted a gooey blondie, but as you can see, mine are far from gooey, haha. One good thing though was that the texture stayed dense and chewy, which is (apparently) how a blondie should be. =) Which is great! In fact, it was kind of like a really soft and chewy chocolate chip cookie, very nice! I had wanted to make it slightly more fancy (gotta admit, it looks kind of plain) and tried spreading Nutella on the top, but found it too sweet.

In fact, most everyone preferred it plain. It got a really good reaction from the family. Mostly because of the texture. And the chocolate chips. The friend who had requested for a blondies post also had a chance to try it and she liked it, so that's also great. =)

I do want to make this again, sometime soon. Am thinking on what other additions to make besides chocolate chips, but I can't seem to think of any which would be more popular than chocolate, haha. I will try doubling the recipe next time, I think. I might also use dark brown sugar instead of light brown, which I had used in this batch. That would enhance the flavour, which is always good~ =) This is a very easy recipe to do, so I'm not really tempted to find a new one. If the next batch works out, I might make another post to update you all.

In the meantime, happy fasting! Remember not to overeat, lest you regret it come Aidilfitri.;)

Quote of the day: Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.

Pepperoni Pizzeta Squares

2009-08-14T23:00:00.038+01:00

Apologies for the serious lack of posting these days. We shall have to address that soon, what with Ramadhan coming up and all. I shall (hopefully!) be posting lots of tasty treats for you all to drool over then. In fact, the motivation for this particular recipe comes from wanting to find something that would be an ideal light meal for breaking your fast, and maybe even suitable for finger food for Raya. We shall see. A lot of kinks have to be straightened out, it seems. Here we go!

What you need:

1 sheet ready-rolled sheet of puff pastry

Roughly 10 sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil

About 25 pieces of beef pepperoni, more or less depending on the size of your pastry sheet

A sprinkling of cheese, of your choice

What you do:

Place the sheet of pastry on a square of baking paper, and place on a baking sheet. Preheat oven to 180 C.
Meanwhile, drain the sun-dried tomatoes and process using a blender/food processor into a rough paste. Spread this paste evenly over the surface of the pastry.
Arrange the pepperoni slices (in a single layer, and in orderly rows) over the tomato paste. I got 25 slices in. Scatter the cheese over the pepperoni.
Bake in the preheated oven for about 20-30 minutes or until the pastry is puffed and golden and the cheese melted. Allow to stand for a minute before cutting into squares, with a pepperoni slice in each square. Serve immediately.

A very simple recipe, as you can see. Feel free to modify any of the ingredients to suit your taste. I wanted to use up the last bits of sun-dried tomatoes I had still in the jar, and thought that having a circle to pepperoni on each square of pastry would be cute, haha. Treat it like a pizza, if you will. Possible toppings inlude - onions, mushrooms maybe, even little shredded bits of meat.

Unlike a pizza, however, do not go overboard with the cheese. You don't want to overwhelm the pastry with the cheese and you don't want it too soggy because of the cheese either. We used Cheddar cheese, but it seems that it was a bit too oily. Add to that I had underbaked the pastry (by accident) slightly, the end result was a bit too soft for my liking. Some squares, especially around the edges, were crisp though and those were delicious!

Apart from that, I quite liked the topping. Babah, in particular, liked how the sour tomato sauce contrasted with the slightly spicy pepperoni. And of course, the cheese. I would have preferred a mature Cheddar, I think, for this one, but we only had some "normal" Cheddar cheese, common in Brunei. Perhaps even Kraft's processed Cheddar would do, that one is wonderfully salty, haha.

I think that this recipe could be a keeper, just need to tweak it a little. I had thought the pastry was done as it was beautifully puffed up, but alas! the bottom was actually undercooked as I had used the wrong mode for the oven. It deflated quickly once it was out of the heat. Shall not make that mistake again! Then there's the problem of which cheese to use. If you like it, I would highly suggest Parmesan. But since we don't, I'll have to experiment and see which ones give the best result.

Anyway, that's it from me for now! Hopefully, the next post won't be too long in coming. :)

Quote of the day: My idea of feng shui is to have them arrange the pepperoni in a circle on my pizza

Chocolate Honeycomb Brownies

2009-07-21T18:20:00.000+01:00

Originally, we had thought we had found our perfect brownies with this recipe. Recently, however, after we decided to make the brownies without the ganache topping, we found that it was rather... blah. Don't get me wrong, with the topping, the brownies are delicious. But sometimes, you feel a craving for something ... plain and chocolatey, without any fanciful toppings and sprinkles. Not that the sprinkles are bad or anything. ;)

Luckily, we had recently come across one of Ibu's old Periplus Mini Cookbooks... you know, those small cookbooks they sell for about $5. :) Ibu has quite a collection of those. One of them was titled "Brownies, Fudges and Toppings". For some reason, we hadn't flicked through it recently, and my... what a treasure we found! All sorts of delectable brownies. :) I had made one batch, but that didn't survive the photo-taking before it was all eaten up, haha. Since we were out of ingredients for that one, we decided to make these... Honeycomb Brownies. Here we go!

What you need:

100g chocolate-coated honeycomb bars

125g butter

185g dark chocolate, chopped

2 eggs

1 cup caster sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla essence

1 cup plain flour, sifted

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Lightly oil an 8-inch square baking tin. (We used a 10-inch tin). Line the base with baking paper, extending over 2 sides.
Roughly chop the honeycomb bars. Set aside.
Melt the chocolate and butter together and allow to cool slightly. Transfer the mixture into a medium bowl. Whisk in the eggs, caster sugar and vanilla essence.
Add in the sifted flour and stir until well-incorporated. Fold the chopped honeycomb through the mixture.
Pour into the prepared tin, pushing any exposed honeycomb into the mixture, and smooth the surface.
Bake for 35 minutes, or until firm. (We baked for 25 minutes) Allow to cool in the tin before cutting into small squares to serve. Refrigerate in an airtight container for up to 1 week.

Mmmmm! We had happened to have some Crunchie bars around, so this was a good choice. Of course, I had to stop various people from scoffing it down while it was lying around chopped, but we made it in the end! This time, I made sure to take pictures straight out of the oven before anyone was around. And even then, one of my brothers was bugging me about it as the delicious chocolatey smell had permeated through the house. (We haven't been baking in awhile, see... He's been bugging us about cookies too. Kasian.)

Anyway, the reason we decided to use a 10-inch pan instead of an 8-inch one was because we wanted a thinner brownie. Might not have been a good idea in the end, as the honeycomb was all melted, leaving little mounds on the surface of the brownie, reminescent of the moon's surface actually (or a volcano), but it still tasted alright. Really really good, in fact. the texture was sort of... chewy fudge with a hint of gooey-ness from the melted honeycomb. And if the reaction we got from it was anything to go by, it was a resounding success! :)

Ibu took one slice before cooking dinner and looked to have another square as dessert, but alas! The boys had already wolfed it down. Oh, the boys plus Izzah, who had it warmed with ice cream. yum! The only person who didn't quite like it was Babah, who said that he liked cakes and biscuits, but not so much brownes which seem to be a cross between those two. Haha. But that's precisely why I love brownies!

Speaking of texture, the edges of this one were extra crunchy, probably because of the thinner brownie, but I thought I should mention it. Just in case. I think next time, I will stick with an 8-inch pan for this one. Hopefully, the honeycomb pieces will be left intact then. But make sure you use a deep pan. Otherwise, the whole thing might just spill over during the baking. Look out for more brownie recipes in the coming weeks. )

Quote of the day: What is the meaning of life? All evidence to date suggests it's chocolate.

Linguine alla Carbonara, version Shuketron

2009-07-17T23:00:00.037+01:00

Apologies for the lack of posts lately. Been busy, internet's been wonky and I finally got to play Sims 3. All of those compounded to a huge lack of time/ability to be cooking as well as posting.

Luckily, I am not the only one in the house who enjoys cooking. Roughly half of us siblings are experimental cooks (the other half just eat =P). One of them is my brother, who shall be known by his nama glamour, Shuketron. Haha. Having recently come back from his first year at UK, he proudly told us that in his house, he was the one who cooked most of the time. Unlike my first year of my degree, it seems as if he had tried a whole variety of dishes on his willing housemates.

Foremost among them, is Pasta Carbonara. Enjoy. =)

What you need:

Chicken salami/sandwich meat - about 250g worth, sliced

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 large onion, sliced

8 button mushrooms, sliced - omitted, as the rest of us don't like mushrooms

500g boneless, skinless chicken breast, sliced

500mL thick cream

Milk

250g mature Cheddar cheese, grated

Chicken stock granules, white pepper and herbs of your choice, for seasoning and flavour

500g dried linguine

What you do:

Place the salami in single layers on a baking tray and bake in a 180 C oven until the exterior is browned and crisp. Set aside.
Meanwhile, cook the dried pasta in boiling water until your desired texture is achieved.
In a large wok, heat the olive oil and fry the sliced onions until browned and fragrant. Add in the mushrooms and the chicken strips. Fry until chicken is cooked through and season well with stock granules and pepper.
Add in the cream (and about a cup of milk to thin the sauce slightly). Stir well to mix, and season with more stock granules. Add in the grated cheese and heat gently until cheese is melted and sauce is thickened.
Drain the pasta and add into the wok.
Slice the salami slices into thin fingers and add half of them into the wok. Mix well.
Place the pasta mixture onto a large serving dish and sprinkle the reserved salami and herbs over. Serve immediately.

Very rich dish. Very very rich. What with all the cream and the cheese. Definitely not for the dieters out there. =) I am not sure where he got the recipe from, perhaps it was one of his own. Nevertheless, despite it not being a "traditional" carbonara recipe (missing eggs), it was very very tasty. It has to be. The magical power of cheese and cream, hehe.

I've made something similar before, though the recipe was slightly healthier in that it used milk instead of cream. Fettucine alfredo is also rather similar. But of course, this dish is much much more calorific than either of those two. =P

The chicken salami we used was a wrapped one by... BMC, I think. Or PDS, one of them. I forget now. Back in the UK, I loved chicken salami sandwiches. Of course, here in Brunei, my choice is not quite so limited. I particularly like the beef pepper pastrami slices from PDS. Oh, and the pepperoni too. Mmmm!

But am going off on a tangent here. =) The recipe doesn't take too long to complete, although the actual preparation - slicing and dicing - might take you awhile. Its best served hot though, so make sure people are waiting at the table already when you finish everything. Once it gets cool, like anything, it kind of coagulates. Not very appetising. Serve with Parmesan, if your eaters want something stronger. =D

If chicken is not quite your thing, Ibu quite successfully made a prawn version. Everything the same, except that the chicken was replaced with fried prawns. Sounds tasty, except that I still have my prawn allergy. Ah well.

I have to say, I am impressed. Look forward to (maybe) some more dishes by the Shuketron. ;)

Quote of the day: My sisters like cooking at my place. It has a bit more room, and the food tastes a little bit better. A big pot of spaghetti and sauce, some warm French bread - works all the time. I think I've been eating pasta for 26 years.

Espresso Chocolate Chip Shortbread

2009-07-03T23:00:00.037+01:00

In recent years, I've found that while I do not like drinking coffee, I quite like having a pinch of coffee in my desserts. I often add a tablespoon or so or coffee in my brownies - I find that it adds an extra dimension somewhat. Mmmm. =)

I don't really add coffee to my favourite chocolate chip cookies though. But when I came across this recipe at the Use Real Butter blog, the gorgeous pictures stayed in my mind... until I finally made them a couple of days ago. So... here we go!

What you need:

1 tablespoon instant espresso powder

1 tablespoon boiling water

227g unsalted butter, at room temperature

2/3 cup icing sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 cups plain flour

3/4 cup mini chocolate chips, or 115 g bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

Icing sugar for dusting, optional

What you do:

Dissolve espresso powder in boiling water. Set aside to cool to tepid.
Beat butter and confectioners’ sugar together on medium speed for about 3 minutes, until the mixture is very smooth.
Beat in vanilla and espresso, then reduce mixer speed to low and add flour, mixing only until it disappears into the dough. Don’t work the dough much once the flour is incorporated.
Fold in the chopped chocolate or chips with a wooden spoon.
Transfer the dough to a gallon-size zip-loc bag. Put bag on a flat surface, leaving the top open, and use a rolling pin to spread the dough in the bag, until you get a square of about 1/4-inch thick. As you roll, turn the bag occasionally and lift the plastic from the dough so it doesn’t cause creases.
When you get the right size and thickness, seal the bag, pressing out as much air as possible, and refrigerate the dough for at least 2 hours, or for up to 2 days.
Preheat the oven to 165°C. Put the plastic bag on a cutting board and slit it open. Turn the firm dough out onto the board and, using a ruler as a guide and a sharp knife, cut the dough into 1 1/2-inch squares.
Transfer the squares to the baking sheets and carefully prick each one twice with a fork, gently pushing the tines through the cookies until they hit the sheet.
Bake for 18 to 20 minutes, rotating the sheets halfway through the baking. The shortbreads will be very pale – they shouldn’t take on much color.
Transfer the cookies to a rack. If you’d like, dust the cookies with confectioners’ sugar while they are still hot. Cool the cookies to room temperature before serving.

I had big hopes for this recipe. The comments seem to be very good. I even went out and bought a can of instant espresso powder, even though I had no idea how I will be able to finish up the whole thing. In the end though, I thought it would be worth it.

Unfortunately, it wasn't. Not sure whether it was because I did something wrong (doubt it... the recipe is super simple), or whether the recipe was not to my taste, but I found that the cookie was rather dry and a bit bland. I think it could do with more sugar and maybe with a pinch of salt even... I like my salt. ;)

Reviews from the family were also less than enthusiaistic. Most complained of a "dry and dusty" texture, although, predictably, Ibu quite liked it. :P Probably because it wasn't too sweet, unlike our usual cookies. Onthe other hand, I quite liked the cofee flavour. Wasn't very strong, but you could taste it. These would probably go well with a glass of cold milk, mmmmmm. Might try that tomorrow!

Other than that, I liked the way the cookies were shaped. Just roll everything in a plastic bag and cut into squares. Very easy. Ibu thought they were a bit too big, though I think it would have been quite hard to cut them into smaller pieces - as the dough softens very quickly in Brunei's hot climate. ;)

Ah well... all in all, this recipe was rather disappointing. Not quite sure what went wrong, but I have a whole can of espresso powder to finish, so maybe I'll try them again...

Yes, very short post. Been quite busy. =) See you next time!

Quote of the day: Remember, even if you don’t love coffee, coffee loves you.

Spicy Chicken Pizza

2009-06-26T23:00:00.063+01:00

I love pizzas. All that melty cheese, flavourful toppings... mmmm! <3 I'm more of a deep pan girl rather than a thin crust one, but to each, his (or her) own, right? Of course, there are probably as many toppings as there are people. This particular one is my current favourite at the moment. It's adapted from the Best Ever Chicken Cookbook. I was very swayed by the awesomely tasty looking picture there. Plus, I had recently discovered that I really liked red peppers (thanks to this pasta recipe) so I was quite keen to try this. I cancelled out the shiitake mushrooms and fresh coriander that it called for though, since I'm not quite a fan of those. Anyway, here we go!

What you need:

2 tablespoons oil

200g chicken breast fillets, cut into cubes

3 spring onions, sliced

1 fresh red chilli, chopped finely

1 red pepper (capsicum), seeds removed and cut into thin strips

1 small pizza base (about 10 inches diameter)

1 tablespoon chilli oil (I just mixed in 1 teaspoon of chilli powder in 1 tablespoon of oil =P)

Cheese, and lots of it!

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 190 C.
Heat the oil in a wok. Add in the chicken cubes and all the vegetables and stir fry over a high heat for 2-3 minutes until the chicken is firm but still slightly pink within. Season well. Pour off any excess oil and set aside to cool.
Brush the pizza base with the chilli oil. Spoon over the chicken mixture and spread evenly over the base.
Sprinkle grated cheese over the topping. (I like to use pizza cheese which has a mix of Cheddar, Mozzarella and Parmesan. Yum!) Bake for 15-20 minutes until crisp and golden. Serve immediately.

Wow! Just look at those vibrant colours, would you? Fresh red pepper, delicious golden cheese... splashes of green spring onion, here and there.... just beautiful! If I had fresh basil handy, I would happily throw it in as well. But my basil plant died a very sad death, so oh well... here I am, basil-less. So never mind basil...

This can be, of course, as spicy as you like it. Red peppers are barely spicy, and I used one of those large red chillies that you can barely feel the heat of... so mine was only mildly spicy, mainly because of the chilli powder I seasoned the chicken with and the chilli oil brushed on the pizza base. Don't forget the chilli oil. I didn't add it one time, and for some reason... the pizza was lacking a little something. So go for the oil. =)

But of course, if you want it to be super spicy, go crazy with the chilli powder and feel free to use a spicier type of fresh chilli. They're all good. I had a pizza using a scotch bonnet with Hamizah once. Didn't dare eat the pieces at all, yet the pizza was super spicy. It all depends on what you use.

Anyway, the reception to this particular combination of pizza topping was good, very good. One of my sisters eats only honey garlic chicken a la Pizza Hut almost exclusively, but the rest of them liked it well enough. Babah and I particularly loved it. Unfortunately, the second time round I made it, I forgot about the chilli oil, making everything a bit bland, so that was a bit of an anti-climax. But never mind, I'll remember next time. =)

The only thing I didn't quite like about it was the pizza base. Oh, it was acceptable - we used the pre-made ones you can get from Supasave. It's kind of cool that they sell the bigger ones now though. But although its "acceptable" bread, I just *adore* Pizza Hut's pizza base. So flavoursome, so fluffy... I know. They're a pizza chain, it's what they do. Plus, I've never been very successful at making bread. I once came across a recipe that claims to almost replicate Pizza Hut's fluffy crust, as it used two types of leavening agents - yeast AND baking powder... I never got to try it, no idea if I even have a copy of it still. It's just too troublesome to make your own, especially if you don't know if it will be a success or not. Ah well. I shall stick with Supasave's pizza base, I guess...

On another note, this topping would incidentally make a very delicious sandwich filling. Try it!

Quote of the day: My favorite time of day is to get up and eat leftovers from dinner, especially spicy food.

Crispy Chilli Beef with Broccoli

2009-06-19T23:00:00.066+01:00

As I've mentioned a couple of times before, my favorite food magazine while in the UK is EasyCook magazine from BBC. It may not be gourmet cuisine, but the recipes in there are easy and very student-friendly. Of course, doesn't mean you have to be a student to enjoy them. I am particularly fond of food which is cooked simply yet are so very tasty. Cucur ayam and spicy oven fried chicken are particular favorites. As are our chocolate chip cookies, which are sooooo easy to make!

Anyway, this particular recipe is adapted from one in the Summer 2008 issue of Easycook, an oldie but I never got to try many of the dishes while I was there, as I was just too busy. This is quite similar to Ibu's prawns with broccoli but using beef and made more spicy. =) Here we go!

What you need:
300g beef, sliced thin then cut into strips (I marinated them in a bit of salt and chilli powder for a couple of hours first)
3 tablespoons cornflour
Vegetable oil, for deepfrying

Small head of broccoli, cut into florets
2 cloves of garlic, sliced - didn't have time!
5 cm piece ginger, peeled and finely chopped - didn't have time!
1 teaspoon dried chilli flakes, or 1 dried chlli chopped finely
2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
Pinch of sugar
1/2 bunch of spring onions, sliced diagonally - forgot to put this in, oopsie

Salt and chilli powder, to season

What you do:

Toss the beef strips in the cornflour. Heat a 2cm depth of oil in a wok or deep frying pan until very hot.
Fry the beef in batches until dark and crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.
Pour off most of the oil and stir-fry the broccoli, garlic, ginger and chilli flakes for one minute.
Mix together the soy sauce, oyster sauce and sugar, then add to the vegetables. Cook for 2 minutes.
Toss in the beef and spring onions. Serve immediately, with steamed white rice or noodles.

I'll be honest with you here... I don't like broccoli. The main reason I wanted to make this was because the picture in the magazine looked sooooo good and while I am in Brunei... well, my family loves broccoli so it's a good chance to try it out. Unfortunately, I was running a bit late when preparing this and didn't have time to be too fancy. (The pictures are in fact taken using my phone, so apologies if they look poor in quality. There were starving people clamouring for food! =P)

The original recipe actually seasoned the beef with soy sauce and (a lot of!) caster sugar, but I decided to use mostly oyster sauce instead. Also, I probably didn't fry the beef until it got crispy enough - just till it was cooked. Not only that, I had also fried it in advance so by the time lunch rolled around, they had already lost their crispness.

But! But... despite all that, this dish was soooo tasty! I even ate the broccoli - and actually liked it! I can't tell you how many times I've tried to eat broccoli and never liked it. This was the first time I actually wanted to eat more of it. Even one of my favorite pasta dishes - Farfalle with Chicken, Broccoli and Peppers - hasn't managed to convince me. But after having this dish, I actually ate the broccoli happily when I cooked the pasta dish sometime after. Pretty amazing, let me tell you. Ibu and Babah should be happy, haha.

But enough about the broccoli... what about the beef? That, too, was oh-so-delicious! Granted, they could have been crisper. I shall fry them more next time I make this. But the oyster sauce was a great substitution, I think. Am not sure what soy sauce + sugar would taste like (why not just use kecap manis?) but I've always liked oyster sauce, so I loved this. And so did the rest of my family. =D I think though, next time I might fry some fresh chilli together with the garlic and ginger. Maybe even add more chilli powder/flakes to the pan. I didn't think it was spicy enough, but had to tone it down somewhat for one of my sisters. In any case, this is an easy delicious recipe and I am plonking it under the recommended label. =) Hope you will enjoy it too!

Quote of the day: Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

Confetti Lollipop Cookies

2009-06-16T22:49:00.093+01:00

Thank you for those of you who voted in the previous poll. About half the people wanted a post everyday, haha, but as that will be fairly difficult for me to do, I shall be going with the next largest vote - twice a week. I've been doing that for some time now anyway. Look out for a new post every Wednesday and Saturday morning. =) Of course, the easiest way to be updated is by subscribing to the blog updates - either by using the Atom feed link in your favorite RSS reader program, or simply by "following" this blog using Google Friend Connect. Now, let's get to the food.

While making the previous post's Custard Melting Moments, we looked through the blog a bit, as I had never come across it before. When Izzah saw the post for these Lollipop Cookies, she was all like, "Ooooooh! Lawa! (Pretty!)" But then we made the melting moments and forgot all about them....

Or so I thought. Until a couple of days ago, when she asked me if I wanted to bake something again. Should've known... That's right... she wanted to make the Lollipop Cookies, complete with the lollipop stick and wrappings! Hehe. Well, I do love cute food, so why not yeah? Plus they looked easy enough... So. Here we go!

What you need:
185g softened butter
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
2 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt (optional)
1/2 cup 100's and 1000's (the little round rainbow-coloured sprinkles)

What you do:

Beat the butter, sugar and vanilla with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add in the egg and beat until well-incorporated.
Sift in the flour and salt, and add in the 100's and 1000's. Stir with a wooden spoon until well-mixed.
Place dough on a large piece of clingfilm and use the film to roll and wrap into a 30cm log.
Wrap in plastic wrap and place in fridge for 2 hours, or until firm. (Since we didn't have the time, we stuck it in the freezer for about 30 minutes. It was still a little soft in the middle, but never mind...)
Remove the plastic wrap and cut into 1 cm rounds. Stick a non-coloured popsicle stick into the cookie, until halfway up the cookie round.
Place well-apart on a lined cookie sheet and bake in an oven preheated to 180 C for 15 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through the baking.
Cool on tray for 5 minutes, before allowing to cool completely on a cooling rack. If desired, wrap with cellophane and ribbon. =)

Since we didn't look at the recipe in advance (ahem, bad bad) we didn't realise that it required a two hour cooling in the fridge. But we decided to stick it in the freezer and see what will happen. =P Cutting the dough into slices was easy enough, but once they started defrosting, it got kind of difficult to stick the lollipop stick into them. Oh well, we managed in the end, but not after mangling the biscuits a little, haha. It is easy enough to shape back into rounds. =) And didn't they turn out gorgeous??

The 100's and 1000's make the cookies look ever so pretty! I don't quite like the colour combinations of the sprinklables we can find in Brunei, but never mind. Beggars can't be choosers. :) They look good here anyhow, only you can't quite see the blue-coloured ones. But yes... that is such a minor niggle...

One of the worries that we had was how good this would taste. After the extra-sweet Custard Melting Moments, I decided to add some salt. Apart from that, we more or less kept to the original recipe. Oh, except that we also made ours a little browner than hers, we baked them for slighly longer. Partly because at 12 minutes, they looked really underdone. But also partly because we like our cookies crunchy anyway. =)

Once the cookies were baked and cooled, the next task was to wrap them all up, all ready to give to my sisters' school friends. This was easier than I had expected. Just cut up large squares of plastic wrappers and wrap them around the cookies, securing the bottom with ribbon or wire. The result - beautiful!

And the reaction? "Awwwwwwwwww! They're so cute!" =D They look mighty adorable, don't you think? Something teenaged girls would definitely appreciate, haha. And don't worry! They loved the biscuit as well. It sort of tastes like a crunchy-er shortbread. Even Hanisah liked them. Which is rare, let me assure you. =P They were very sweet though, despite not having that much sugar (compared to some of the other recipes I've tried). Am not sure how this would turn out if you reduce the amount of sugar, but bear in mind that the texture would definitely be changed.

If you don't feel like doing all that effort, you don't have to make the lollipops of course. Just drop tablespoonfuls of dough on the tray and bake away. =) But I think it was definitely worth the effort. Maybe for a child's party?

Quote of the day: Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Custard Melting Moments with Raspberry Filling

2009-06-12T23:00:00.108+01:00

My sister and I tend to do a lot of "I'm bored, let's make something" baking. We usually try to drag our *other* sister to bake with us, but she fobs us off with excuses such as, "I'm cleaning my room now!" or "I really really have to take a shower. I feel icky!" or "Sakit kepala....". Never fails. Ah well, never mind. We've given up on taking her along on our baking adventures, especially since she hardly ever eats what we make, as she feels they're strange combinations of her favorite foods. Another thing we don't get, but never mind. =) She doesn't mind bringing them to school, where they never fail to get rave reviews, so that's okay. Hehe.

Anyway, our last few baked goodies have all been inspired by various ingredients we have in our pantry that are dangerously close to their expiration date. So it's good that we do random baking. This one is no exception. We've been trying to finish our custard powder since forever (by making custard, yum!) but when we found *another* packet in the fridge... well, something drastic had to be done. In a happy coincidence, we also managed to use some of the berries from the leftover frozen summer berries that we used for the cupcakes as well as the summer berry shortbread. So that's all well and good. Here we go!

(Oh, the melting moments recipe is adapted from a food blog called Eat First, Diet Later while the raspberry filling is adapted from this recipe here.)

What you need:
For the biscuits:
250g softened butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup icing sugar
1 cup custard powder
1 cup plain flour

For the filling:
1/4 cup butter (about 30g) - we were all out of butter!! Gasp! Since we had a can of Crisco (vegetable shortening) though, we decided to use that instead.
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/4 - 1/2 cup icing sugar, according to taste - we used 1/2 cup
6 frozen raspberries, thawed

What you do:

Preheat oven to 160 C. (It mentions that if you're using a fan-forced oven, you should decrease it to 140 C. We were using the fan-forced mode of our oven, but 140 C didn't cook the biscuits properly. I would stick to 160 C. Our second batch cooked at 160 C turned out perfectly.) Line a baking sheet with baking paper.
Beat butter, vanilla extract and sifted icing sugar in a bowl until light and fluffy.
Sift and stir in the flour and custard powder in two batches. Mix until well combined.
At this point, because we found the dough was still too sticky, we piped it onto the baking sheet instead of rolling it into balls by hand, as per the original recipe.
Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes. Allow to cool and firm up on the tray for 5 minutes, before transferring to a cooling rack to cool completely.
Meanwhile, to prepare the filling, beat the butter in a small bowl until light and fluffy. Add in the vanilla (and a couple teaspoons of cold water, if using vegetable shortening, as we did) and beat to combine. Sift in icing sugar and beat well to combine. Add in the raspberries and beat until well combined and smooth.
To assemble, spread the flat side of the biscuit with the filling and sandwich with another biscuit. Continue until all the filling is used up.

These biscuits are so bright and funky looking! Hehe. The custard powder made it a gorgeous bright yellow while the pink filling looks so pretty. I had specifically selected the raspberries out of the berry mix as I had wanted it to be pinkish in colour, not purplish... and look how it turned out! Beautiful! The texture, like-wise, is also gorgeous. Very tender, these are definitely called melting moments for a reason. When you bite into a filled biscuit, the contrast in texture is really good - first you get the crunchy biscuit, then the creamy filling, but then since the biscuit is so tender, it practically melts in your mouth. Mmmmm!

We had earlier wondered if we should flatten the biscuits before baking, but decided not to. Lo and behold, after baking, the biscuits were flat anyway. I think, if you refrigerated the dough for about 20-30 minutes after shaping but before baking, it might hold its shape better in the oven. That was what was suggested in a similar recipe in one of our books anyway. And the piped biscuits there looked like they retained their shape nicely. I might do that one day, if we ever make these again. =)

One last note about the recipe, if you do not wish to use custard powder, you can substitute with cornflour which should retain the texture of the biscuits. You would of course lose the yellow-ness and the delicious custard taste, but it's up to you. :) Now... on to the taste test!

We decided to leave half of the biscuits unfilled, so we halved the recipe of the filling. If you want to fill all the biscuits, you would need to double it, bear that in mind. The unfilled biscuit, though deliciously tender, was a bit dry and slightly bland for me. Since it is meant to have a filling, I think, the biscuit dough is not that sweet so that it wouldn't be cloyingly sweet when combined with the filling.

Actually, I found the filled bicuits to be a bit on the sweet side for me. I had purposely added a lot of raspberries so as to make it slightly sour, but it was still too sweet. I think, in halving the recipe, I messed up the calculation for the sugar and added more than what was needed. =P Another popular combination for melting moments filling seems to be lemon. Just add lemon juice in place of the raspberries, in that case.

But despite the sweetness, I still think these managed to be rather popular. I had served these to a group of friends (you know who you are ;) ) and they didn't comment much on it... but by the end, there was none left so I assume they liked it. =) By popular consensus though, these definitely taste better with the filling.

I think though, what I would do next time, would be to add in a pinch of salt to the biscuit dough... and perhaps to the filling as well. All I could taste was the sweetness, and I found that too overpowering. I know though, that some people don't like salt with their cookies, so that would be highly optional. =) Oh, and also, I had filled the biscuits a few hours in advance (and kept them in the fridge after) and the biscuits did not soften, so I assume you would be able to fill this in advance without worrying about whether they would disintegrate.

Quote of the day: There is something in the red of a raspberry pie that looks as good to a man as the red in a sheep looks to a wolf.

Mediterranean Chicken Skewers

2009-06-09T23:05:00.067+01:00

Together with Bobby Chin's BBQ chicken wings that we made for our BBQ (see previous post), we had also marinated more chicken wings in a different marinade as well as the requisite sausages and lambchops. Oh, and some prawns for the rest of them. =P In addition to all that food, I had also prepared a chicken recipe adapted from the Best Ever Chicken book (printed by Parragon), which is a relic from my Bristol days where I had to cook a different dish almost every night for dinner (and blogged about it everyday too! Amazing...).

The reason for this was because Babah doesn't really like BBQ chicken, as he feels that few BBQ wings are cooked properly all the way to the inside without burning the outside. It does take a bit of skill, I admit. To counter all that, I selected a chicken kebab recipe from the book. Since the chicken is boneless and in small chunks, it should cook rather quickly, right? So, here we go!

What you need:
4 tablespoons olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 teaspoons chilli powder, or to taste
2 tablespoons fresh basil, finely chopped - omitted, didn't have any with me
1 long thin eggplant
3 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into 2-inch cubes
1 red capsicum (bell pepper), cut into 2-inch squares
salt and black pepper

What you do:

In a small bowl, mix the oil with the lemon juice, garlic, chilli powder and basil. Season with salt and pepper. Add in the chicken pieces and leave to marinate at least 3 hours, or overnight.
Slice the eggplant lengthwise into strips 1/4-inch thick. Cut them horizontally about halfway along their length. Wrap the chicken pieces with the eggplant slices, reserving the marinade.
Prepare the skewers by alternating the chicken and pepper pieces. Lay the prepared skewers on a platter and sprinkle with the reserved marinade. Prepare the barbecue.
Grill the skewers for about 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender and the meat is cooked through, turning the skewers occasionally. Serve hot.

Initially, Babah was a bit iffy about the addition of the lemon juice. We stirfried a couple of pieces, just to see how it tasted. He seemed unimpressed and requested that I add some chilli powder just to add a bit of a spicy kick. So I did and left to marinate it some more, even though I didn't think it tasted all that bad. =P Also, in the original recipe, you didn't actually marinate the chicken. You just brushed the oil mixture over it while it was cooking, but I felt leery about doing that so I decided to just mix everything (except the veggies) up.

Preparing the chicken skewers was really easy, and fun too! I think the lemon juice tenderised the chicken meat somewhat, as they were skewered really easily. I had bought some metal skewers specifically for this since they looked really pretty and I couldn't resist, hehe. Of course, if you don't want to do this, you can just use satay sticks that have been soaked in water for a bit. Wrapping the chicken pieces with the eggplant made it look really quite slick. Almost professional looking, hehe. ;) Oh, as a side note, in the original recipe, you used half an eggplant and half a zucchini, but since I have no idea what a zucchini is and whether they sold any in Brunei, I just decided to use eggplant. Worked out just fine. :)

Cooking the skewers was also really easy. Since Babah likes his food cooked really really well, these were grilled until just before the eggplants turned too brown. The chicken was nicely browned at this point. The red peppers felt a bit undercooked though, so in future, I think I will either roast the pepper first or use roasted red peppers from a bottle (if I can find them!). I think half-cooked potato cubes would work really well here too. And maybe even a couple of cherry tomatoes. Mmmmm!

And yes, this will definitely be featured in our future BBQs as Babah loved it! Yay! Cooking it over a charcoal fire gave it a slightly different taste than cooking it over the stove and he really really liked it. He thought the veggies were a nice touch too, though I didn't touch them myself, haha. I did like the chicken though. The lemon gave a fresh taste to it, while the chilli powder gave a gentle heat to it. I couldn't particularly taste the garlic, I think I will use blended garlic next time.

And that's that! =) Sorry I don't have any pictures where the chicken was cooked properly - by then, our fingers were finger-lickin' sticky, hehe.

Quote of the day: Meat products should always be thoroughly cooked. You can have any colour providing it's not black.

Bobby Chin's Grilled Chicken Wings

2009-06-05T23:00:00.001+01:00

Just a couple small notes: I have an active poll going on at the moment, you can find it right above the post area of this blog. I would really like to know how often you guys would like me to update, so please do vote and tell me. =) Another thing is that I have added a new widget called LinkWithin.You can find this right at the very bottom of each post (after it has finihsed loading completely). It will give you suggestions on similar recipes, so that you will be able to look around the blog some more and maybe find what you want exactly. Very cool, I love this new feature. =D It's rather similar in function to the Similar Recipes widget, but I think it does a better job of suggesting recipes that you really would be interested in. Do check it out. =)

Now... on to the chicken!

The furor over Bobby Chin's visit to Brunei last month has died down somewhat. So this post is somewhat late, but oh well, never mind. After the achingly sweet things I have been posting about recently, perhaps a savoury recipe would be to your liking, hehe.

Anyway, this recipe is based on a recipe in Bobby's book, Wild, Wild East. Looking at the price that it is listed with over there, I realise that I got it rather cheaply. And autographed too. So all is good. =) But anyway, since we had a BBQ recently, I thought it would be a good oppurtunity to try out a recipe from his book. I changed the recipe around a bit though. Bobby marinated his chicken with only lemongrass. Since that didn't feel right to me, I added in more oyster sauce and chilli sauce to the marinade. I also didn't add in the veggies he called for, since I didn't see the point. Apologies for the burnt bits, we're still a bit inexperienced with cooking with a BBQ, hehe. I assure you, the ones at the end of the night looked much nicer. But by that time, my fingers were all sticky from eating, and I didn't really want to take out the camera to take a picture of it. Oh well. Anyway, here we go!

What you need:
15 chicken wings - I used the wings and the small drumsticks
3 stalks of lemon grass, finely chopped
8 tablespoons oyster sauce
8 tablespoons chilli sauce
2 teaspoon honey

What you do:

Place the chicken wings in a bowl with the lemon grass. Add in half of the oyster and chilli sauces and stir to mix well. Cover with cling film and leave to marinate for at least 3 hours, or overnight.
When ready and the BBQ is all preheated, whisk together the remaining oyster and chilli sauces together with the honey.
Drain the wings from the marinade and place them on the barbecue. Cook until just cooked, turning once. (Bobby says 5 minutes on each side, but I dunno... doesn't it take longer?)
When almost cooked, brush with more of the oyster sauce mixture.
Serve drizzled with the remaining sauce.

I like barbecues... and also picnics. I just generally like having food outdoors. =D There are many versions of BBQ chicken out there, and I have yet to find the perfect one.

Unfortunately, I shall have to give Bobby's recipe a pass. At least, not unless I tweak it considerably. I found the whole thing to taste a bit... generic, for some reason. Yes, I could taste the lemon grass and actually didn't like it all that much. I would either reduce it somewhat, or omit it all together. I also found the sauce to be not as spicy as I like it. Plus, the whole thing tasted rather too much like oyster sauce. I know, big surprise. =P I also don't like my chicken to be too sweet, so I didn't like the honey either. Maybe replace it with tomato sauce, or something.

So anyway, this one was a dud. I have yet to find another recipe in his book that I want to try. I don't see how these were the best BBQ wings he had ever tasted, no offence. I've tasted many which were much more to my taste. Oh well, shall try to make my own mix when the next BBQ comes around, hehe. In the meantime, look forward to the other dish we made that night, Mediterranean Chicken Skewers, coming in just a few days. Check back soon! =)

Quote of the day: Intelligence is something we are born with. BBQ’ing is a skill that must be learned.

Basic Vanilla Cupcakes

2009-06-02T23:00:00.038+01:00

As promised, the recipe for the vanilla cupcakes that I used previously - see here and here. The reason I like them better than the ones I used previously from Cupcake Creations is because they make exactly 12 cupcakes with flat tops, which makes them really easy to decorate, if you were in a mind to do so. =) Plus, I love the texture. Not overly airy, yet still light. Beautiful! And the recipe is really easy too. Just plonk everything in.

The recipe is, as mentioned previously, based on the basic cupcake recipe from the Cupcake Magic book. Its a small book, but I love the decorating ideas, though I have yet to try them properly. The chick cupcakes I made here were based on a design in the book though! Hehe. Its got loads more cutesy designs, so do check it out. =) But anyway, I decreased the baking powder by half, as when I used one full teaspoon, I found the texture not to my liking. A half teaspoon gave exactly what I wanted to get. =) Here we go!

What you need:
110g self-raising flour, sifted
110g caster sugar
110g butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

What you do:

Preheat oven to 160 C. Line a 12-hole muffin pan with cupcake cases.
Put all ingredients in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer until batter is very light and fluffy.
Place tablespoonfuls of the mixture into the prepared cases and bake in the oven for 20 minutes until golden, and firm and springy when you give them a light prod on top.
Allow to cool before decorating.

To make mocha cupcakes, replace 25g of the flour with 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder, and replace the vanilla with 2 tablespoons of instant coffee granules dissolved in 2 teaspoons of boiling water.

I quite liked the mocha cupcakes as well. The batter tasted overly coffee-ish (and I had already reduced the amount of coffee than in the recipe). But once baked, the cupcakes were chocolatey yet not overly sweet (even with icing) as the coffee helped cut down the sweetness a bit. Really quite good. =)

We also made another batch of cupcakes recently, despite my vow not to make anymore, haha. First was a batch of mini vanilla cupcakes topped with oreo creamcheese icing. That didn't turn out quite as expected, so will be unblogged (and I forgot to take pictures of them too...). They were delicious, just a bit on the plain side, both taste- and decoration-wise.

I also made a batch of normal sized vanilla cupcakes for Izzah to decorate with glace icing. I didn't want any part of the decorating, haha. Partly because I was busy finishing up the Summer Berry Shortbread Crumble at that time. But Izzah did a pretty good job, I think. Don't you agree? They look much better than the previous ones. It was a birthday present for one of her friends, I hope she enjoyed them. =) I am not quite sure how to store glace-icing-iced cupcakes though. Store them in the fridge, the icing gets kind of damp, but am not sure if they will be okay if left outside. If anyone has any advice, it would be much appreciated.

Quote of the day: You know you are getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.

Japanese Cotton Sponge Cake

2009-05-29T23:05:00.001+01:00

I don't bake cakes much. I prefer cookies, and perhaps cupcakes, but not cakes all that much. First is because a cake just feels so big. It seems as if we would take forever to finish it. Second reason is probably because my cakes never turn out all that well, most of the time. I much prefer a fudgy brownie, or a crunchy cookie. Cakes just taste so... cakey. :P

But anyway, that doesn't stop me from fliiping through cake recipe books, wanting to try maybe this cake, or ooh, that one? In one of Ibu's books called "The Creative Making of Cakes" by Alex Goh, one cake in particular caught my eye - the Japanese Cotton Sponge Cake. Not only does it have a lovely name (I am attracted to all things Japanese, haha), the picture of the cake looked especially tempting. It looked really really soft, yet was supposed to be moist in texture. If there's anything I can't stand, it's dry cakes. The four star difficulty rating didn't really deter me, haha. We decided to make it anyway. So here we go!

What you need:
60g butter
80g flour
80 mL evaporated milk
1 egg
5 egg yolks
5 egg whites
120g sugar
Pinch of salt

What you do:

Grease and line a swiss roll pan (we used a 10-inch square pan). Preheat the oven to 170 C.
Melt the butter, then add the flour and mix with a wooden spoon until well-blended.
Add in the evaporated milk and mix until well combined.
Next, add in the single egg and the five egg yolks and mix until well-blended.
In another bowl, whip the egg whites with an electric mixer until foamy. Add the suagr and the salt. Continue to beat until it forms stiff peaks.
Carefully fold in the egg white batter with the egg yolk batter. Add in a tablespoonful to the egg yolk batter to loosen it first, then fold the rest in until well-incorporated. Be careful not to overmix and deflate the mixture.
Pour it into the prepared pan and bake in the middle rack of the preheated oven for about 25 minutes, or until the cake feels firm.
Unmould immediately after it is baked and place on a cooling rack to cool completely.
When it is cold, cut into two horizontal layers and sandwich together with butter cream. Serve, dusted with icing sugar, if you wish.

Throughout the baking time, I kept peeking anxiously through the oven window (never open the oven door when a cake is baking, a major no-no). To say that I was worried it would not turn out well would be an understatement. At first, I wondered how it would rise without the use of a raising agent in the batter, but that question was soon pushed out of my mind when I saw the cake puffing up beautifully in the oven. I guess those are the egg whites at work. :D

Just under half an hour later, the cake was out of the oven and onto the cooling rack. And as promised, the texture was beeee-you-tifully soft. Pressing your fingertips on it felt like patting the finest grade feather pillow, hehe. When you actually ate it, it practically melted in your mouth - and not in dry crumbs either. I loved the texture of the cake!

The sharp-eyed among you might spot that the bottom part of the cake is not that airy though. I am unsure as to why that is, but am thinking that maybe we didn't incorporate it fully as we were really scared of deflating the egg whites. :P But, doesn't matter anyway, as there wasn't that big a difference in texture as far as I could tell. Also, unlike the picture in the book (ahem), the airholes in my cake were uneven in size. Again, unsure why that happened, but not a big deal, I suppose.

Initially, we were't planning on sandwiching the cake with buttercream. But although the texture of the cake was gorgeous, taste-wise it was actually a bit plain. Quite eggy, from the SIX eggs in there, and not much else. I experimented with different fillings first - tried jam and nutella, but ultimately decided to use buttercream. Which turned out to be a waste as I couldn't actually taste it, even with a thick layer! Sigh. Never mind.

So in the end, I am unsure as to what to think about this cake. While we all loved the texture, it tasted like a plain sponge cake to me. Of the fillings I tried, I actually think jam tasted the best, but since my sisters don't like jam, I decided to go for the buttercream. Which turned out to be a dud anyway. Ah well, you can't win 'em all. :) At least the cake turned out (almost) perfectly.

Quote of the day: Birthdays are nature's way of telling us to eat more cake.

My Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie (v6.55 -lol-)

2009-05-26T23:00:00.003+01:00

While me and my sisters have pretty much found the perfect recipe for chocolate chip cookies, we still itch to make palm-sized monsters of cookies loaded with chocolate - but crispy. Our favourite recipe (version 6.5) does not manage to bake up into large crispy cookies, unfortunately.

However, once, while we were making a double batch of the cookie dough, we accidentally added one portion of the flour only. To our utmost consternation, upon baking, our cookies turned really really really flat. Really flat, almost paper thin. And of course, paper thin cookies are *difficult* to remove from the baking tray, even with the use of non-stick baking paper. After much thinking and rehashing what we did, we eventually figured out that we only added half the flour needed. Once that crisis was over and dealt with, everything was smooth sailing. =)

But then, recently, we got to thinking... if halving the flour makes the cookies really really thin, what if we reduced the flour by a little bit, not such a drastic amount? And here are the results of our experiment. =) Here we go!

What you need:
275g plain flour (replace 50g with cocoa powder for triple chocolate cookies)
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon fine salt
170g butter, melted and cooled slightly
200g light brown sugar
100g granulated white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
200g plain chocolate chips (replace 100g with white chocolate chunks if making triple chocolate cookies)

What you do:

Sift together flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda, and set aside.
Stir together melted butter, both sugars and vanilla. Add the egg, then the egg yolk, beating well with a wooden spoon to incorporate the egg completely.
Stir in dry ingredients, then fold in chocolate chips.
Cover with cling film and refrigerate until dough is firm - about 30 minutes at least.
Preheat oven to 190 C.
Drop tablespoonfuls mounds of dough onto a baking sheet, flatten slightly, and bake in preheated oven for about 12-15 minutes, or until the cookies are turning golden brown. Cool on the sheet for 1 minute, then remove to a cooling rack to cool completely.

While I had initially planned on making a plain chocolate chip cookie, Izzah wanted to try one with cocoa powder in the dough, so here it is. :) Main change is a reduction of the flour by 50g, and replacement of another 50g of flour with cocoa powder. We've been reducing the sugar slightly in our cookies, and this recipe reflects that change. We've also used less chocolate chips/chunks, as this looks to be a rich cookie, what with the white chocolate and cocoa powder. =)

We had successfully main CRUNCHY palm-sized cookies (roughly 3 heaped tablespoons of dough) from this, although we adjusted the baking a little, with 10 minutes in the oven before we flipped them over and baked them for another 5 minutes that way. However, for the rest of the dough, we just used one tablespoon of dough for each cookie. Baking time was of course a bit less, and we also flipped them over for the last 5 minutes, because we were feeling a little paranoid. (After baking tiny cookies for such a long time, these larger ones feel like they're not cooking properly - though they probably are. I like to flip them over just to make sure they get really crisp. :P) For comparison's sake, we had also made our usual grape-sized balls of cookie dough.

Anyway, compared to our normal cookies, these are certainly thinner and crisper. So this particular experiment worked, I think. :D Except for the white chocolate. I am not sure what it is about white chocolate. I like eating a square or two on its own, but use it in baking and it becomes absurdly sweet. The ones in the triple chocolate cookies tasted like little lumps of sugar, making the cookie seem sweeter than it really is. Of course, the "white chocolate" they sell for baking in Brunei are probably just made up of oil and sugar, but I had used eating chocolate here. Oh well, never mind. The cookies were delicious anyhow. :)

No, wait, not just delicious. I mean, the triple chocolate ones were good, I must say. But the plain chocolate chip cookies were awesome. They are my perfect cookie, no doubt about that. They're crisp all the way through, but with just a little bit of a chew in the middle bit. Just a tiny teeny bit chewy. A bit like the texture of the summer berry shortbread crumble. And by making them larger than our bite-sized ones, they make people go "Wow! Now those are cookies!" Well, at least that was my reaction, hehe. I haven't really brought them out in public yet. But these cookies are gorgeous. Golden brown discs of chocolatey love. <3 Give only to your special ones. ;) Hehe.

Quote of the day: Ideas should be clear and chocolate thick.

Summer Berry Shortbread Crumble

2009-05-22T23:00:00.050+01:00

One of the cookbooks I had treated myself to during my year in London was Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey by Jill O'Connor. I had hemmed and hawed over it, but the lure of the name was irresistible. It sounded so decadent, and the description of the book didn't help either. So it was with an eager heart that I ordered it. When it arrived, I was (very) slightly disappointed as there were only a few pictures, but was soon appeased by the beautifully decorated pages (almost scrapbook-like!) and of course, the seriously decadent treats. One of the brownies she makes in there has both Snickers and marshmallows, in addition to lots and lots of chocolate.

I have yet to get up the courage to make that, hehe, but the first recipe I tried in the book was black-bottom cupcakes. This was before I made the previous Black Bottom Cupcakes I had posted about. The recipes were similar, but the one in the book used mascarpone cheese, which I like better than cream cheese. To my utter disappointment, the recipe turned out to be a dud. The cupcakes were greasy and the cheese just fizzled away in the baking. :( So for awhile, I stayed away from the book.

But I want to love the book, I really do. So I decided to try out another recipe. But as I was missing a couple of ingredients, and didn't want to make a really thick biscuit, I played around with the recipe a little. The following recipe is based on her Blackberry Jamble Shortbread Bars recipe. :) Here we go!

What you need:
250g unsalted butter
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups plain flour
3/4 cup jam, of your choice - I made my own. See below.

What you do:

Combine the butter and sugars in a large bowl. Using an electric mixer set at medium-low speed, beat until creamy. Add the vanilla and salt and beat until combined.
Beat the flour into the butter mixture on low speed, until just combined. (I preferred to stir it in with a wooden spoon. Add in more flour, if you judge the mixture to be too soft.)
Refrigerate the dough for about 10 minutes to firm it up slightly. Meanwhile, grease a 10-inch square baking pan.
Press half the dough into the pan to form a bottom crust. Wrap the remaining dough in cling wrap and refrigerate until very cold and firm, at least 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 160 C.
Bake the bottom crust until it is firm and just beginning to turn pale brown around the edges, about 20 minutes. (I actually baked mine closer to 30 minutes, as it seemed very very soft, for shortbread.)
Remove the pan from the oven and spread the jam evenly over the crust. Crumble the remaining shortbread dough over the jam to form a pebbly, crumbled topping.
Return the pan to the oven and continue baking until topping is firm and crisp and lightly goldne in colour, about 30 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool to room temperature.
Use a sharp knife to cut bars into your desired sizes. Remove from pan with a metal spatula and dust with icing sugar before serving, if you wish.

The main thing I was missing was almond flour, so I decided to replace it with more plain flour. I also halved the recipe for the shortbread, as I was looking to make a really thin shortbread. However, as I was making it, I was really really worried as it wasn't as stiff as the shortbread dough I am used to. I mean, I have never had to use an electric mixer to make shortbread before.... it was usually all by hand. After worrying about it some more, I decided to add a bit more flour to make it stiffer and stuck it in the freezer for about 5 minutes before bunging it in the oven.

Poking the shortbread during various points of the baking made me even more worried, as it was really really soft. I left it in the oven until I realised that it was getting too brown and decided to just take it out and hope for the best. Thankfully, it firmed up after cooling. Phew! After spreading the jam on the cooled crust, making the crumble posed another problem as the dough was just too soft. >_< In the end, I managed, but wasn't quite happy with the results, but never mind. Into the oven it goes. Again, it was too soft and left it in so long, that I almost burnt it. Haha, that would've been a very perfect result, but never mind. All turned out well.

Not expecting much, I cut myself a small slice after it firmed up. And whoa - found out that it was good, really really good! The shortbread was (thankfully) crisp and buttery, but made very slightly chewy by the jam. I had purposefully made the jam not very sweet and that worked well here. Gave a tang to the whole thing, without overpowering you with sugar. Really really delicious! And since the slices were all quite thin, it didn't feel like it was too rich, which was great too. :D

I had expected this to be really popular with the adults, and was right. My parents turned up their noses at the Caramel Shortbread we had made at the same time and gobbled (well, not gobbled. But ate very enthusiastically. :D) these up. Brought them to a family function and they seemed popular there too - again, mostly adult eaters. I even managed to "test" them with a bunch of teenaged girls, and they liked them too! Some of them (apparently - I wasn't there myself) couldn't even decide between the Caramel Shortbread and these, which is really telling, as the younger population generally dislike anything with fruit and love anything with sweetened condensed milk. Just a general observation, haha.

A couple of observations though. One, these were a bit too greasy for my liking. Turned out fine in the end, but the tray had a film of grease as I was cutting them up. Not appealing. I might try another shortbread recipe next time. These are rather similar to the Raspberry Shortbread (which was a half failure) and the Apple Crumble and Custard Slice (not as tasty) I had made earlier. I think what really made the difference here was the jam. Just look at that gorgeous texture and colour! Its all purpley-red and lumpy! Okay, that doesn't sound that appetising, haha, but just have a look at that picture. It looks charmingly home-made, don't you think? ;)

In fact, the main reason I had decided to try out this recipe was because we had a bag of frozen summer berries leftover from when we were making the cupcakes last time. So instead of using a jar of jam, what I decided to do was to simmer the berries with a splash of water and enough water to make them taste nice but not too sweet. We simmered them for about half an hour or so, just enough to make them really nice and thick. Yum! You can, of course, blend the jam in a food processor to make it smooth, but I like it with the lumps. I had expected it to turn out purple, but it was instead a deep red, but whatever. :) Still delicious all the same. I do think raspberries look so much prettier, but again, never mind. It had worked out well, after all. :D :D :D

So while this recipe from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey had its sticky spots... the results turned out well enough so I think I will be trying another recipe fro it in the future. :D

Quote of the day: The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.

Not sure what that quote is referring to actually. It's supposedly some kind of proverb... :S

The Cupcake Journey (Part 2)

2009-05-20T01:59:00.003+01:00

This is Part 2 in a series of posts I have published on our various attempts at making cupcakes. Click HERE for Part 1.

Anyway...

Bolstered by our confidence in the cupcakes in the previous post with cream cheese icing, we decided to try out a new kind of icing - royal and glace icing. These two icings sounded especially tempting as they set to a hard surface, which means that my sisters would be able to bring these cupcakes to school without any unsightly smudging. ;) The process was messy, very messy. I even managed to turn my teeth green, haha. But in the end, we managed to create these works of "art", armed with just some plastic bags and a whole load of food colouring and probably a ton of sugar. My, that day was fun!

This is my group of chicks, hehe. While Hanisah and Izzah decided to be a bit more creative with their bunch of cakes, all I did was make the same design of chicks. Aren't they adorable??

So nice and colourful! We even made some royal icing that was stiff enough to be moulded into 3D shapes. Which explains Hanisah's unidentifiable purple animal, which is actually supposed to be a teddy bear. Haha!

And this is Izzah's beautiful butterfly. :D

Fresh from the glowing success of our Royal-icing cupcakes, I had planned to make something even more elaborate for Babah's birthday - a cupcake garden, with candy vegetables! Again, this was from the Hello Cupcake! book. I had stocked up the candies needed almost a month before and assembled the cupcakes within two days - almost without any help! Whew, but that was really tiring. Were the results worth it? I'll let you be the judge. =) Thanks to my sisters, who helped make the signs! (Sorry for the dodgy looking pictures... we were in a huge rush)

My pride and joy, candy carrots! =D Unfortunately, they sort of got wet while being stored in the fridge and their shape got distorted slightly.

Here's a slightly clearer picture. Aren't they adorable??

Here are some M&M Peas. =D

A blurry radish....

And a close-up of the signs and the shovel. (Oops, just realised that there are no close-ups of the lettuce. Oh well.) These were a very very last minute job, but not too bad for being that.

These were actually harder to make than I thought. Molding the veggies took longer than I expected, and I had to improvise for the lettuce when the method used in the original recipe did not work for me, as I had used a different kind of frosting. Plus, these do not store well in the fridge, because of the candies. They got all moist, for some reason. Pity. But in the end, the results were delicious. I made a batch each of vanilla and mocha cupcakes (recipe from Kate Shirazi's Cupcake Magic). The icing used was cream cheese icing.

Ooh, lucky! Found an online copy of the recipe. I am almost embarrassed to give it to you, as you'll be able to compare my ahem, less professional results with theirs, but never mind. I did tell you from the beginning, I have no talent in making cupcakes. =) So here you go - recipe for Garden Party Cupcakes from Womansday.com.

After all that effort, I probably won't be making decorative cupcakes anytime soon. Harder to make than I thought, so a big salute to all the cupcake-ers in Brunei. =)

The Cupcake Journey (Part 1)

2009-05-19T02:37:00.006+01:00

This is Part 1 in a series of posts I have published on our various attempts at making cupcakes. Click HERE for Part 2.

Cupcakes, as most of you very well know, are the trend right now, for almost anything - birthdays, weddings, beach parties... any social event, cupcakes are bound to be there!

Me, I'm not such a huge fan of cupcakes myself. Partly because I don't have such a huge sweet tooth, and partly because I have neither the patience nor the skill to create those works of art. ;) Hasn't stopped me from trying, though I do get bored/broken-hearted (due to my cupcakes not turning out as I had envisioned) half-way through.

Anyway, you've seen the vanilla cupcakes with buttercream icing that me and my aunt made in London (click here and here). When I got back Brunei, I thought I'd try to be... slightly more daring - to rather .... different results. =) Feel free to amuse yourselves with our wonky cupcakes. Post has been divided into two because I don't want to bog down your connection to load the pictures. Second part will be uploaded as soon as I finish with this one. =) And no worries! Relevant recipes (except for the decorative cupcakes - too long!) will be posted up soon.

First of all, preeeee-senting.... our Panda cupcakes - recipe selected by our brother Syukri, who also helped, hehe! Very messy job. Not much piping required, but we bungled up what we needed to do anyway. Hence the droopy eyes and dripping noses, hehe. Couldn't find chocolate-flavoured cereal rings, so our pandas have rather more colourful ears than nature intended. =P If you have more skills than we do and want to try this, the directions to these supposedly-simple cupcakes (and many more, besides) can be found in the "Hello Cupcake!" book by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. And just for your information, that link goes to Book Depository.co.uk which gives FREE DELIVERY WORLDWIDE (including Brunei!), regardless of the size of the order. Very awesome. =)

Because our panda cupcakes, while delicious, were still a disappointment beauty-wise, my sisters and I decided to go for a simple piping job in our next cupcakes. However, since not many of us were fans of buttercream, we decided to go for cream cheese icing, flavoured with summer berries. Some leftover chocolate ganache was used partly for flavour, and partly as decoration for the chocolate cupcakes. Of course, the requisite sprinkle-ables are also there. =)

For this batch of cupcakes, we made a batch each of vanilla cupcakes and chocolate cupcakes. Opinion on which one was better was divided - the younger generation seemed to prefer the chocolate ones, while the ahem, not so young generation thought the chocolate cupcakes were too rich and preferred the relative simplicity of the vanilla cupcakes. Different opinions, different tastes, but all agreed that the cupcakes were tasty. (And looked quite pretty, besides). The beautifully-coloured cream cheese icing was very well-received, I have to say.

For these cupcakes, the recipes I used for both types of cupcakes is from the book "Cupcake Magic: Little Cakes with Attitude" by Kate Shirazi. This one is a fun little book, but sadly, utilising many ingredients that I covet but are not easily available in Brunei. Things such as edible glitter!!! Sigh. Ah well.

And that's the end of Part 1. =) I haven't decided when to do Part 2, surely within the next day or so. And of course, various recipes will possibly be posted up in the next few weeks. See you soon!

Crispy Oat Cookies with White Chocolate and Sea Salt

2009-05-10T00:07:00.084+01:00

I've mentioned several times over, I think, on how I like my sweet things to be complemented by a slightly salty undertone. Whether it be a savoury dish,like my favourite Honey Chicken, or our chocolate chip cookies, I like it to have a touch of salt in it. =) So when I came across this recipe for oatmeal cookies that actually had sea salt sprinkled on it, I thought "Wow!" and bookmarked it. And forgot about it for the next year or so... until now, when I decided I really should get a start on all those recipes I've bookmarked. :) So here we go!

What you need:
1 cup plain flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon table salt
14 tablespoons (about 200g) unsalted butter, softened slightly
1 cup white granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
170g good-quality white chocolate bar, chopped
1/2 teaspoon flaky sea-salt

What you do:

Whisk flour, baking soda, baking powder and table salt in a medium bowl. Preheat oven to 175 C and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Beat the butter and the sugars until light and fluffy. Scrape down bowl with rubber spatula, then add egg and vanilla and beat until incorporated. Scrape down bowl again. Add flour mixture gradually and mix until just incorporated and smooth. Gradually add the oats and white chocolate and mix until well incorporated.
Roll about a tablespoon of dough into balls, place on the prepared baking sheet about 2 inches apart. Flatten each ball to about 3/4 inch-thickness using fingertips.
Sprinkle a flake or two of sea salt onto each cookie.
Bake until the cookies are a deep golden brown, mine took about 10-12 minutes as they were smaller. Rotate baking tray halfway through baking. Transfer baking sheets to a wire rack to cool.

Unfortunately, my cookies did not form what she called a "shell of an oatmeal cookie...". As you can see, mine had spread in the oven and were flat... very very flat. When I read through the comments (boy, should really have done that *before* baking), it seems as though some other people had the same problem, while others didn't. While the cause of the thin-ness is as yet, unknown, someone reported that she had successfully made the hollow cookies after substituting 6 tablespoons of the butter with vegetable shortening. Ah well... maybe for my second attempt.

Anyway. Although the cookies were thin, they were very crispy with a slight chew to them, probably because of the oats. But I really like this sort of texture! :D Which is great. The oats though... I might grind them up a little bit the next time round, as I thought they made the texture too grainy-feeling. Oh, how I wish I had Sainsbury's Taste The Difference Rolled Oats here. I can only seem to find one particular brand of rolled oats, and they really aren't as tasty as the Taste the Difference ones, which featured prominently in my meals last year in Butter Oat Chicken. :) Yum!

Rather surprisingly, these cookies were also an unexpected hit with the teenager demographic. I really thought they wouldn't like it as much because of the oats, but told my sisters to bring them to school anyway as we couldn't possibly finish it all in time before they started to get stale. (Poor schoolchildren, acting as guinea pigs for all my baking experiments... :P) And they liked it. Wow. One even commented that it tasted like Famous Amos cookies... which I don't quite agree with, but hey. Anyone can have their own opinions. :) I rather think that the version 6.5 cookies are closer ti Famous Amos in texture, if not in taste. There were some mixed reactions, of course, mostly because of the oats. Nevertheless, both batches of cookies brought to different schools were finished within the day, so that was a load of my back! :D

Even more so, these being oat cookies. I think they would go soft very easily in Brunei's humid climate. So I was really eager to get rid of them. :P These are the times I wish my brothers were around, so I don't have to worry who is going to eat what. They will be gone by the next morning, haha! Oh well, we'll be seeing them soon, so yay! :)

Quote of the day: If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Chicken Kolomee (Kolo Mee) (v2)

2009-05-02T23:10:00.063+01:00

It has been awhile since my last (rather disastrous) attempt at making kolomee. I have been looking around once in awhile for another recipe to try out, but haven't found a nice looking one. But, recently, I came across this recipe for kolomee at a fellow Bruneian food blogger's blog (haha, that is quite the mouthful), Foodie Tales, and thought... "My, that sounds delicious". Coincidentally, I also came across fresh kolomee noodles being sold, so I thought I might as well try it out. So... here it is, the second version of my attempt at kolomee. More or less follows the original recipe, but slightly adapted to make it easier to make. =) Here we go!

What you need:
(All amounts are to taste)
Minced chicken
Half a chicken, cut into small-ish pieces, for steaming (optional)

Seasonings:
Oyster sauce
Soy sauce
White pepper
Sugar
Sesame oil

Fresh kolomee noodles
Crispy fried shallots, for garnishing
Chopped spring onion, for garnishing

What you do:

Firstly, if you wish to have some steamed chicken on the side, season the chicken well with salt and a touch of sesame oil and steam until cooked through.
To cook the minced chicken, marinate for about 10-15 minutes with the seasoning ingredients.
Meanwhile, make the kolomee sauce by simmering more of the seasoning ingredients with a bit of water until slightly thickened, and set aside.
In another pan, stiryfry the minced chicken together with the marinade. Taste and adjust the seasoning, if you wish.
To prepare the noodles, it apparently depends on what kind you have. The oil-coated kind is apparently easiest, just dip briefly in hot water. Unfortunately, I only saw the flour coated kind, which is a bit harder to cook. To cook it, boil in hot water for about a minute or so, drain and wash with cold running water, then blanch briefly in hot water to heat it up.
To assemble, place the noodles on a large serving platter. Pour over the kolomee sauce and mix well to coat. Top with the cooked minced and steamed chicken, then scatter over the crispy fried shallots and spring onions, and serve immediately.

One of my sisters is sort of a kolomee fanatic. Most of the time, when we go out to eat, she would order kolomee, even in unorthodox places to have it, such as Indian eating places. So my benchmark, this time round, would be whether she liked it or not.

And she loved it! Well, she didn't explicitly say so, but she ate a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean, a lot. ;) Of course, there were a couple of complaints, like how the steamed chicken at her favourite place tastes much better, but they were tiny niggles, not true complaints at all. The sauce was almost exactly how "restaurant" kolomee tastes to me - mostly salty but balanced out with sweetness and more than a touch of sesame oil. Simply perfect. :)

Even with the slightly adapted recipe, it still took quite a bit of time to make. This led to our breakfast being a bit later than usual, but oh well, it was the weekend after all. :) I didn't like cooking the noodles at all, and would love to give the oil-coated version a try, if I can find it.

Anyway, this was definitely a huge improvement over version 1, which was salty salty salty without any balance in flavours. There were some comments which suggested a similar recipe to the one above, but I "forgot" to try it until now. Oh well, doesn't matter anymore, I guess. If I need a home-made kolomee fix, I know where to go now. :)

Quote of the day: The more you eat, the less flavor; the less you eat, the more flavor.

Rainbow Popcorn

2009-04-25T23:01:00.041+01:00

One of the many miscellaneous items in our pantry that needs to be used up are a couple of cans of popping corn, apparently belonging to Hadi. I have no idea why he wanted them, he never even opened them. The trouble is, me and my sisters aren't really such huge fans of popcorn... but we are forced to do many things in our mission to clear out the various ingredients and such that need to be used up, so popcorn it is! Imagine my delight when I saw a recipe for RAINBOW popcorn. I like all things colourful, hehe. So, here we go!

What you need:
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 cup popping corn
3/4 cups sugar - reduced from 1 1/2 cups
50g salted butter, or add about 1 teaspoon salt or to taste
1/2 cup water
2-3 drops food colouring, of your choice.

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Heat the oil in a large pan. Add the corn, cover and cook over medium heat. Hold lid tightly, shake pan occasionally. Cook until the popping stops, then set aside.
Combine sugar, butter and water in a small, heavy-based pan. Stir over medium heat until the sugar has dissolved. Brush sugar crystals from the sides of pan using a wet pastry brush. Bring to the boil and boil without stirring for 3 minutes.
Remove from heat. Divinde syrup into as many equal portions as you have colours - I used red, green and "natural". Add colouring to each bowl; stir until combined and no streaking is visible. Divide popcorn into equal portions. Toss each batch of syrup into each portion of popcorn until popcorn is well-coated.
Place popcorn onto an oven tray and bake for 5 minutes or until popcorn has separated and crystallised. Place popcorn in a large bowl, toss to combine colours. Serve on the say of making, or keep for up to two days in an airtight container.

This wasn't actually all that bad! I realise that our popcorn looks a bit pale... that is mainly because I was too wary of putting too much food colouring in. The next time we make this, I'm dumping a whole lot in, because I am sure it will look even prettier. :D Yes, yes, I know, bad for you. But never mind... its only once in awhile!

As you can also see, we reduced the sugar in this by half. This probably caused the syrup to be more watery, leading to more popcorn being needed to mop it all up. You are, of course, welcome to use the full amount, but I found the half-sugar one to be more than sweet enough for me. It was nicely balanced by the addition of salt, but this was our own modification on the original recipe. You might not want salt in it, I'm not sure, in which case, use unsalted butter. But I liked the sweet-salty contrast very much. =)

Being popcorn, of course, we brought this as "contraband" to the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic. (Yes, this was sometime ago...). Yes, you can buy popcorn there... but this is rainbow popcorn, which trumps normal popcorn, haha. As for the movie itself, I liked it well enough. It had its funny moments and Hugh Dancy made for a really sweet Luke Brandon. =) As with anything, the book seems much better in comparision, but oh well. Can't really expect much from it. I would actually watch a sequel, if they were making one... which I doubt.

Back to the popcorn... the short baking in the oven really helped. It transformed the popcorn into crisp little morsels. Just perfect! But, due to Brunei's humidity, they do get soggy really fast, but no worries! Just pop them briefly in a hot oven to crisp them right back up. :) It took us awhile to finish this, so it had several trips to the oven without any bad effects, hehe.

Quote of the day: With all the horror in the world and all the crap that's going on, for an hour and a half you go eat some popcorn and laugh with your friends. That's what a movie is all about.

Bangkok: MakYah Restaurant

2009-04-22T23:31:00.000+01:00

So... okay... this post is way way way WAY overdue (we went to Thailand literally at the end of 2008). In case some of you haven't been reading the news, Bangkok is not a very safe place to be in at the moment. Though that might change in the two weeks this post is scheduled to be posted. But in any case, it eventually will be safe again and people will start going there to shop, again. Shopping there is very good, or so I am told. I like the markets, myself. :)

Anyway, after all that shopping, I bet you would get thirsty. And most likely, very very hungry. While we were there, we went to a couple of halal restaurants, but this particular restaurant stood out. It wasn't very far from our hotel, about 5-10 minutes walk. (Full address: 497/16 Petchaburi Road, Ratchatevee Payathai) At that particular moment in time, we had been living on instant noodles for quite some time. Proper restaurant food was few and far in between, and most of the time, not to our taste. (Imagine, SWEET beef murtabak. Like, really really sweet. I could barely keep it down)

So we were delighted to find this restaurant in our exploration of the local neighbourhood. Its name suggests Malaysian cooking, and indeed, the owner (I presume) speaks Malay fluently. Though the rest of the staff seem to know Thai only. Oh well. Anyway, the cooking was definitely Malaysian, I think, though with a hint of Thai. Apologies for the bad pictures, I used my phone camera and the restaurant was very dimly lit.

This was my sister's glass noodle dish. Very very very spicy, but really quite tasty!

This was the tom yam soup. Apparently very nice, but I didn't eat it myself, since it was seafood.

This was some sort of cucur udang (prawn fritters). My sisters loved it.

This was the requisite veggie dish for my parents. They loved it as well.

We all ordered this... watermelon ice freeze. Not sure what I was expecting, but it tasted like watermelon made into a soft drink, only it wasn't fizzy. I dunno, it was strange. Didn't like it so much.

This was a grilled fish dish. (I'm sorry, really can't remember the names since this was so long ago! I should have written it down, or something...). This was also met with lukewarm feelings, as it was a bit on the bland side. Oh well.

And this.... is the point of the whole post. Simply one of THE best fried chickens I have ever tasted! (Excluding fast food chicken, of course). And believe me, I know my fried chickens! ;) Perhaps we were just hungry at the time, but I really doubt it. Each piece was succulent, not at all overcooked and dry and oh-so-flavoursome! I have no idea how they do it, but the seasonings go all the way in. Simply the best!

And so... here's a restaurant that you might want to try out, if you ever are stuck in Bangkok without a place to eat. It's more than decent, though a bit higher in the price range than I expected. But for that chicken... it was soooo worth it!

Bobby Chinn, Live in Brunei

2009-04-19T23:30:00.003+01:00

So... Bobby Chinn was in Brunei recently... Bobby, who, you ask? He's one of the myriad of celebrity chefs who has his own show, World Cafe Asia, which has just started its second season on Astro!

...

I wouldn't know about it, my parents don't believe in TV.

Anyway, moving on, thanks to the kind people of DST, Simpur and the owner-proprietor of the What I Ate Today blog, I was given the oppurtunity to attend a cooking demonstration at DST HQ by the man himself, Bobby Chin. Despite my aversion to all things social, I thought this might be an interesting experience and decided to go.

And an experience it surely was. Bobby was a really entertaining guy. Can't quite say much about his cooking, since we didn't get to taste it or anything. Well, most of us didn't. There were a few sticky situations with some ingredients being missing, but all in all, it went smoothly, mainly due to his great personality, I think. Well, he is a celebrity chef, I suppose. He should be used to these kinds of things. :)

Anyway, I can't, for the life of me, remember what dishes he was making. There was a lettuce roll thing, full of veggies. A noodle dish, and a dipping sauce to dip it all in. Apparently, all these recipes are available in his book which was, of course, being sold during the event. You can get your own copy at Book Depository, which offers free worldwide shipping. :)

I've browsed through the book a little. There are a couple of interesting looking recipes; I'm mainly drawn to the ones involving chicken wings, hahaha. Look out for posts on them, hopefully, in the near future. The main plus of buying the book there with Bobby around was, of course, this:

=) (No, he doesn't speak malay... someone spelt it all out for him. And no, I didn't ask him for that inscription, haha. I love it, though.)

So all in all, it was definitely an experience, though not sure one that I would like to repeat. Oh, it has its great moments and all, but I was definitely out of my comfort zone there. Oh well, at least I tried it out once, right? =)

Black-Bottom Cupcakes

2009-04-12T23:14:00.066+01:00

Hmmm.... don't you tihnk it is time for a sweet recipe? :D We haven't made any new sweet treats in awhile, so when our cousin held a birthday celebration at his place, we jumped at the chance. Since we had some cream cheese languishing in our fridge, we thought we would use that. After quite a bit of discussion, we decided to make these black-bottom cupcakes by David Lebowitz. All the recipes I found online were all based on this single recipe. They are so-called because the deep chocolate part forms a cup around the cheesecake-like filling. Or so the theory goes...

We had in fact made an adapted version of this recipe earlier (unblogged) which used mascarpone cheese but the resulting cakes were oily and the cheese has somehow fizzled away during the baking. But most people used cream cheese without any problems, so I thought that this one should go fine. Anyway... here we go! :)

What you need:
Filling:
8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
2 ounces bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate, coarsely chopped

Cupcakes:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
5 tablespoons natural unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup water
1/3 cup unflavoured vegetable oil
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

What you do:

To make the filling, beat together the cream cheese, sugar and egg until smooth. Stir in the chopped chocolate pieces and set aside.
Preheat oven to 175 C. Prepare a 12-cup muffin tin by either greasing or lining with paper cups. (We used a mini-muffin tray)
In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt. In a separate bowl, mix together the water, oil, vinegar and vanilla.
Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and stir in the wet ingredients, stirring until just smooth. Do not over-stir or the cakes will end up tough.
Divide the batter among the muffin cups. Spoon a few tablespoons of the filling into the center of each cupcake, dividing the filling evenly. (We used about half a tablespoon of cake batter and 1/2 a teaspoon of filling for the mini-muffin cups)
Bake for 25 minutes, or until the tops are slightly golden brown and the cupcakes feel springy when gently pressed. These moist will keep well for 2 to 3 days if stored in an airtight container. (We baked the mini-sized ones for about 15 minutes)

Alright then... the main modification we did was to use mini-sized muffin cups instead of the full-sized ones. Makes for easier serving. Plus, they are ever so much cuter!

Anyway, in the first batch, I was worried whether the cheese would frizzle up and disappear again, but this one turned out slightly better. Still not as nice as the picture given in the original recipe, but hey... at least it is there, right? Maybe it's because we used the mini size, so it's really noticeable if a little cheese mixes in with the chocolate. In an attempt to make it *stay*, we tried sandwiching the filling in between two teaspoons of batter, but thta didn't work out that well either. Oh well. At least its still there, right? Needless to say, people liked the ones that had a lot of filling compared to the one with a lot of the chocolate part.

Not that the chocolate cake part was bad, or anything. I really liked it. It was a huge improvement over last time, in that it wasn't greasy at all. Plus, I just love something that is deep, dark and chocolatey. Yum! It's just that people like cream cheese, I guess. :) I really liked the mini sizes too, it transforms them into bite-sized pieces of chocolatey magic, instead of sometihng huge and rich and difficult to finish. :P

So yeah... these turned out rather well, I thought. It wasn't literally black-bottomed, but still delicious nonetheless!

Quote of the day: Chocolate causes certain endocrine glands to secrete hormones that affect your feelings and behavior by making you happy. Therefore it counteracts depression, in turn reducing the stress of depression. Your stress-free life helps you maintain a youthful disposition, both physically and mentally. So eat lots of chocolate!

Pandan Chicken

2009-04-05T17:15:00.000+01:00

Following on from my previous post on the Bann Nucha Thai restaurant, I thought I would bring you a recipe from pandan chicken. Now, it wasn't because I was so overwhelmed by the pandan chicken I had there, but rather because my grandmother had inexplicably sent Ibu home with two large bunches of pandan leaves and we were wondering what to do with it, haha. I offered to make a batch of pandan chicken with some and the rest were shipped off to my other grandmother who made really good kelupis with them. :D

Anyway, back to the pandan chicken... Because it was a rather last minute decision, I decided to just go with a recipe from Kuali, instead of comparing and contrasting other recipes available online. So... here we go!

What you need:
400g chicken drumsticks, deboned and skinned
Large pandan leaves, for wrapping

Ground or blended together:
3 shallots
2cm knob of fresh young ginger
2 cloves garlic
1 stalk lemon grass, sliced
3 dried chillies, soaked

Seasoning:
2 teaspoons light soy sauce
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon corn flour
1/2 cup thick coconut milk

Oil, for deep frying

What you do:

Cut the chicken meat into 7 x 2.5 cm slices. Combine ground ingredients with seasoning ingredients and mix in chicken pieces. Marinate for 2-3 hours.
Add coconut milk and mix well to blend. Wrap two pieces of chicken with a pandan leaf and use a toothpick to secure closed.
Deep-fry wrapped chicken parcels in hot oil until chicken is cooked through. Serve immediately.

Okay... a few thoughts... this definitely definitely needed more seasoning. I found it quite bland, with the flavour of lemon grass dominating the whole thing. Lemon grass tastes nice, but only as a subtle flavour, not as a head-on collision with your taste buds. So what I would do would be to up the amount of soy sauce, maybe add a couple of tablespoons of oyster sauce and perhaps a few leaves of fresh coriander to the ground ingredients. I also don't see why they use dried chillies if fresh chillies are available, so I would suggest fresh if you can. I might also reduce the amount of lemon grass to half a stalk, maybe.

Second, there was way too much coconut milk. It made it all kind of liquidy and really really hard and messy to wrap. Didn't help that I cut the chicken pieces smaller than they said. So I would either add about a couple of tablespoons of coconut milk or maybe just cut it out altogether. Also, I have no idea how they do it in the restaurants, but this was really messy to wrap! If you don't like the idea of mess, you might want to cut the chicken into bigger pieces and just have one piece per parcel. Of course, you might have to marinate it slightly longer.

Last of all, in an effort to make this more healthy for you, I did two batches. One, deep fried, the other baked in the oven for about 20-30 minutes. End result was... there wasn't a huge difference. At least, none that I could taste. Except for the dramatic reduction in oil. So if you care about these sort of things, you might want to try baking it instead. :)

Quote of the day: There are many miracles in the world to be celebrated and, for me, garlic is the most deserving.

Bann Nucha Restaurant

2009-03-30T09:46:00.002+01:00

So... okay... I haven't been doing restaurant reviews in awhile. Partly because I haven't been going to any new restaurants nowadays and partly because the lighting in restaurants these days are just way too dim for my poor little camera to handle. :P But recently (well, actually, not that recently...), I had lunch at the Bann Nucha Thai restaurant in the mall with a couple of friends, and they had some decent lighting, so... well, here we go. :)

To tell you the truth, I am unfamiliar with Thai cuisine. Even while we were at Bangkok last year, when we ate at this halal restaurant near our hotel (a post about that will be coming up in the next couple of weeks, I "promise"), I didn't order anything fancier than chicken goreng. I know. Tsk, tsk, Ihsan. I already got scolded for ordering chicken goreng in a Thai restaurant in Brunei last time (see here), what more in Bangkok, yeah? :P But in my defense, I did try to see if there was anything else I liked. In particular, I wanted to try authentic pad thai that Hamizah is always raving about... but the restaurant we went to was more of a Malaysian restaurant in Bangkok, so... no pad thai to be found. Oh well, fried chicken it is! :P

But anyway, back to Bann Nucha... this one was definitely Thai oriented. The owner, I think, is Thai. At first, I was very impressed with the service. She greeted everyone personally, always ready with a friendly smile, so I thought... wow. That's nice of her.

But then, she started forcing food choices on everyone. Well, actually, on me, haha. My friends pretty much knew what they wanted, so I was left... and well, originally, I wanted a chicken dish sauteed with basil and chillies, but she was going on and on about the pandan chicken, and basically didn't let me order the basil chicken and forced on me the pandan chicken instead. Well, I thought, okay, she knows better, so fine.

Then the drinks... again with the forcing. Apparently, their sugar cane juice is freshly squeezed and oh so tasty and all natural! Well, what if you don't like sugar cane juice? She still forces it on you anyway! Mind you, I am not that assertive a person. Of course, I could have said no, but right after she talked about it, and my other two friends were like... "Yeah, that sounds nice.", she said "Okay, then, three it is!" and strode right off. Sigh. So oh well. Sugarcane juice it is...

This was Shah's seafood tom yam. :) I know, tom yam is usually red, but this is apparently kampong-style tom yam. Her own recipe, and very authentic. My two friends shared this, and seemed to like it well enough.

And this was my pandan chicken. This was my first time eating pandan chicken, and the pandan smell was kind of off-putting at first, but the chicken itself only had a slight pandan flavour. Other than that, it was really quite flavoursome, which is good. Oily though.

Hamizah's pad thai. Again, different from the usual pad thai. Due to the use of kway teow noodles and soy sauce, it resembled more of a normal fried noodle dish rather than pad thai so Hamizah didn't quite like it so much. When she tried communicating this to the owner lady though, she got told that its a special secret recipe sauce and is very authentic. Okay then.... I myself tasted it, and though I thought it wasn't bad, I am not a pad thai expert so can't vouce for how good it tastes. :)

And this was the ever-so-famous fresh sugarcane juice. Tastes like any other sugarcane juice to me, but whatever. Bit too sweet for my liking, and a bit too sugarcane-y as well, but it is sugarcane, so not surprising, I guess. It was icy cold though, which was nice. My friends seemed to like it too. I just don't like sugarcane juice, is all.

And so... that's it. :) Overall, service was nice if a bit too ... overpowering, or maybe overenthusiastic. Price range was middle-high. Ambience was okay, well-lit by the windows but the view wasn't anything to write home about. :P I probably wouldn't go here again though... If I ever get a craving for Thai food, I want to go to a place where I can order what I want without being pushed around. Those of you who are Thai food fans with a stronger backbone might want to check it out... the food is apparently quite nice (except for the pad thai) with "authentic" recipes, so... yeah. :)

Edit: Although I found the menu selection to have quite a variety of dishes (if only she would just let me order what I want!), I thought the drinks selection was a bit sparse. Which was partly why I accepted the sugarcane thing. There must have been about 5-6 drinks only.

Spicy Oven-Fried Chicken

2009-03-20T01:31:00.000Z

Back when we were in Bristol, we made use of Tex's Chicken powder a *lot* for dinner. It was very useful, easy and gave a delicious dish everytime. Since it was easily available there, I don't really know why Justin tried to copy it, but copy it he did. And everytime, there would be something missing in his home-made version. The chicken was still rather blah, no matter how much seasoning he claimed to put in.

Fast forward a couple of years, and here I am, in Brunei, with no stock of Tex's chicken powder available anywhere nearby. Of course, there are many many delicious things to eat here, but sometimes, a girl just wants to have fried chicken... but without any of the oil! And so.... I attempted to make my own copy of Tex's chicken. Here we go!

What you need:

One whole spring chicken, cut into smallish pieces
Salt and pepper, for seasoning

Plain flour, roughly 1-1 1/2 cups
Salt, to taste - use plenty! Don't be shy now...
Chicken stock powder, to add extra oomph!
Ground black pepper, to taste
Chilli powder, to taste - to make sure that the spicy taste will come through, make sure to put in enough chilli powder so that the resulting powder is tinged a slight red

What you do:

Season the chicken pieces well with salt and black pepper. Allow to marinate for 10-15 minutes.
Meanwhile, prepare the flour coating. Mix all the ingredients with the flour in a bowl. As all ingredients are to taste, I can't really say how much you should put in. But don't be shy with any of them, they will be "diluted" by the flour. Practice makes perfect, so the more you make this, the easier you can estimate how much to put in.
Coat the chicken pieces in the seasoned flour. Most people prefer to dip the chicken in egg first, before rolling in the flour, but I have no problems whatsoever with rolling the chicken in the flour straightaway.
Bake in a preheated oven for about 30 minutes, or until golden brown and cooked through. Use about 180 C to 200 C. I actually use a convection oven, Tabo, as Ibu affectionately calls it, no idea why. This makes it cook much faster, and makes it ever so crispy. :) Serve immediately.

This... is... the best! Granted, the seasonings can vary greatly, since I don't actually measure it out... but its usually well salted, and just spicy enough for me to enjoy without feeling like I am being tortured, haha. Unlike other roasted chickens we usually try, this one is very flavoursome, as the flavour is mostly in the flour coating which stays on the chicken... not run down into the gravy, making a yummy gravy but bland chicken. Nope, not here. I do tend to oversalt this though... not a good thing, though its delicious! Hee~

To facilitate this though, you really need to use small-ish pieces of chicken. Gives a bigger flavour to volume ratio. ;) I like to use spring chicken, since its tender and quite small as well. If using a more adult chicken, make sure to chop the thighs and breasts into 2 or 3 pieces, depending on the size. Of course, you can also just use wings or any other chicken part that you like. This recipe translates well to any piece, hence why we usually just use whole chicken chopped into pieces.

I actually like this much better than normal fried chicken. Those of you who know me would know that this is a *very* big achievement. I am very much a fan of anything fried and unhealthy for you. But this dish, baked with no oil at all, beats fried chicken hands down! Of course, its partly due to the *delicious* seasonings. But also, this gets less soggy than fried chicken, as no oil is used. Mind you, the chicken still turns out slightly oily, but that is all from the chicken itself. Natural chicken juices. Haha.

So anyway... this is a favourite in our house, and I hope it will become a favorite at yours too. =) It's something I've been looking for a long time... something that tastes just as good as fried chicken, if not better, but healthier!

Quote of the day: We didn't starve, but we didn't eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was.

Chocolate Caramel Shortbread (Millionaire's Shortbread)

2009-03-04T23:57:00.002Z

Whoopsie, sorry for the delay in posts. I have been a bit busy, sorting out life and stuff. :)

Anyway, continuing on in our quest to finish up the various random ingredients in our cupboards, the pick of the day this time was a can (actually, several cans) of sweetened condensed milk, i.e. susu manis. Now this one is a particularly hard one to use, as a lot of recipes I know of don't use more than a couple of tablespoonfuls. But eventually, we came across this recipe, which I have been meaning to do anyway. Its only the thought of making shortbread that made me nervous... I can't seem to make shortbread, even though it seems so easy. But anyway, here we go!

What you need:
175g plain flour
125g butter, cut into small pieces
4 tablespoons brown sugar, sifted

Topping:
55g butter
4 tablespoons soft brown sugar - we reduced to only 1 tablespoon
400g canned condensed milk
150g milk chocolate - we used dark chocolate, plus a bit of white chocolate

What you do:

Grease a 23-cm/9-inch square cake tin with butter. (We used a 10-inch tin)
Sift the flour into a mixing bowl and rub in the butter with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the sugar and mix to form a firm dough.
Press the dough into the base of the prepared tin and prick all over with a fork.
Bake in a preheated oven, 190 C, for 20 minutes, until lightly golden. Leave the shortbread to cool in the tin.
To make the topping, place the butter, sugar and condensed milk in a non-stick saucepan and cook over gentle heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture comes to a boil.
Reduce the heat and cook for 4-5 minutes, until the caramel is pale golden and thick and is coming away from the sides of the pan. Pour the topping over the shortbread base and leave to cool completely.
When the caramel topping is firm and cool, melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water. Spread the melted chocolate over the topping, leave to set in a cool place, then cut the shortbread into squares or fingers.

To my utmost delight, the shortbread here turned out perfectly! It was all nice and golden and crispy, which is just awesome. In fact, the whole thing turned out really well. The shortbread was crisp, the caramel sort of slightly gooey and the chocolate gives the whole thing a nice finish. A great combination of textures and flavours. The only thing that kind of spoilt it was the white chocolate. I can't seem to find good quality white chocolate here... the ones I keep on getting all taste of sugar and oil. Very icky. But we used only a little bit anyway, so that wasn't too big a deal, I suppose.

Some of you might be concerned about the sweetness of the caramel topping. We were too, I mean... a whole can of sweetened condensed milk AND sugar?? That sounds very sweet to me, so we reduced the sugar to one tablespoon. Even so, I was worried that it would be very sweet. But it turned out very well, I thought. Not overwhelmingly sweet. The condensed milk lent a nice creamy flavour to the shortbread. The shortbread itself was not that sweet anyhow. Plus, we used dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate, so that cut down on the sweetness a bit. In the end, it was something I enjoyed eating.

In fact, it was something that everybody enjoyed eating! :D (We brought it to yet another family event). Granted, the main part of it was demolished by the little kids, but most "adults" enjoyed it as well, though some did find it too sweet. But with the children? Very very popular. :)

If you like, you can reduce the amount of condensed milk, but I thought it was just fine. Of course, we did use a slightly bigger pan than in the recipe, so the topping was slightly thinner. You also have to keep this in the fridge until right before serving, in Brunei's hot climate, the caramel layer kind of melts if kept out too long. Which makes it harder to cut, once it's soft. But all in all, I think it was a great success. And quite easy to do too! I am giving this the recommended label. :D

Quote of the day: Simply put... everyone has a price, mine is chocolate!

Chocolate Bread Pudding

2009-02-20T07:10:00.000Z

Ah, bread pudding. I can remember when my flatmate first made this way back in the first year of my degree. It was one of the first things anyone had ever baked in that flat, so we were all really really excited about it, hehe. Then, when I came back this year, I found out that Babah is a *huge* fan of bread pudding. Apparently, it is usually served with custard. We never served bread pudding with custard, back in Bristol. :o

But that all has nothing to do as to why we made bread pudding. :P The actual reason was that we wanted to use up various ingredients in our house that have been around longer than they should, if you get my drift. This time, it was a can of evaporated milk (That is susu Ideal, to the Bruneians :P). I already do have a recipe for bread pudding somewhere.... ah, here it is. So when we saw this version for chocolate bread pudding.... well, need I say more? Here we go!

What you need:
6 thick slices white bread, crusts removed
450mL milk
175 mL canned evaporated milk
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 eggs
2 tablespoons dark muscovado sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
icing sugar, for dusting

Hot Fudge Sauce:
55g plain chocolate, broken into pieces
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
2 tablespoons golden syrup
5g butter or margarine
2 tablespoons dark muscovado sugar
150mL milk
1 tablespoon cornflour

What you do:

Grease a shallow ovenproof dish. Cut the bread into squares and layer them in the dish.
Put the milk, evaporated milk and cocoa powder in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is lukewarm.
Whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla essence together. Add the warm milk mixture and beat well.
Pour into the prepared dish, making sure the bread is completely covered. Cover the dish with clingfilm and chill in the refrigerator for 1-2 hours.
Bake the pudding in a preheated oven, 180 C, for about 35-40 minutes, until set. Remove the pudding from the oven and leave to stand for 5 minutes.
To make the sauce, put the chocolate, cocoa powder, syrup, butter or margarine, sugar, milk and cornflour into a saucepan. Heat gently, stirring constantly, until smooth.
Dust the pudding with icing sugar and serve at once with the hot fudge sauce.

Well well! Just look how it turned out! Isn't it gorgeous (for a pudding)?! When fresh out of the oven, the pudding is all puffy and crisp on the outside yet soft in the middle. Add in that gorgeous chocolate fudge sauce... you've got the makings of a great pudding! As promised, everything was really really chocolatey, especially when you smother everything in that sauce, hehe.

We actually made two batches; one for the house and another one for a family event. The one at the house was finished within two days, though I do believe that it would have been sooner if the boys had been around. The one for the event was finished within 15 minutes of people discovering what it was. I think it was mainly because of the sauce, haha. We made a double helping of the sauce, for the event, but by the end, very little was left! And we thought we made too much.... there's no such thing as too much chocolate for those people, I guess!

However... I do have one bit of advice. Serve this as soon as possible. Fresh out of the oven, if you can. Once it gets cooler, the pudding sort of sinks and becomes denser and not so soft. This may equal to not so tasty, for some people. That may have been the reason why people used so much of the sauce, hehe.

Except Babah. He says the whole thing is just too chocolatey. (Like, seriously??) Haha, I guess you just can't please some people...

Quote of the day: Among life's mysteries is how a two pound box of chocolate can make a woman gain five pounds.

Cheesy Beef Nachos

2009-02-08T11:02:00.033Z

As I've mentioned before, one of my brothers makes a really really good spaghetti. It has evolved somewhat over the years, but I stand by the fact that it is simply one of the tastiest spaghettis I've ever tasted. And its really easy to make too!

Anyway, the boys all love the spaghetti sauce and are always looking for different ways to use it, other than in pasta. One of their more successful inventions is this, cheesy nachos. Here we go!

What you need:
1 pack Doritos tortilla chips
1 portion beef spaghetti sauce, of your choice (for our recipe, simmer 1kg of beef mince with ready-made pasta sauce and Maggi tomato ketchup and season to taste)
Cheese, lots and lots of cheese of your choice. I like to use a mix of Cheddar and Mozzarella

What you do:
To serve, place tortilla chips onto a large plate. Spoon sauce over chips, then sprinkle grated cheese over the whole thing, Microwave for 30 seconds, or until cheese is melted. Eat immediately. You can also use the sauce as a dip for the tortilla chips.

Not sure if this counts as a recipe or not, but hey... my blog, my rules. :) And it really is tasty. One of my main weaknesses (in food) is potato chips. I am not quite a huge fan of tortilla chips, but I think it is put to good use here. This is a very decadent, very rich dish, I think. Not just keropok, but also beef and cheese in large quantities. It stands to reason that this tastes good, with so many things in there that are so unhealthy for you. ;)

If you don't like your tortilla chips to go soft under the sauce (for some reason, I do), you can always use the sauce as a dip. Spoon up the beefy sauce with the tortilla chip and eat to your heart's content. Yum!

Quote of the day: Bread and cheese is medicine for the well.

Rocky Road Bites

2009-01-30T10:46:00.033Z

In our zeal to make and bake lots and lots of sweet treats, my sisters and I often buy ingredients and forget about them soon after. This eventually leads to panic when we discover them a couple months down the road and find out that their expiry date is coming up soon. A pack of marshmallows were one of these forgotten ingredients, and so, we had to find a recipe that uses marshmallows. This is harder than it sounds because we all actually don't like marshmallows all that much. Goodness knows why we bought them in the first place, or what we were planning to make with them. :P

In any case, we finally found one, so here we go!

What you need:
125g milk chocolate - we used plain chocolate
50g mini multi-coloured marshmallows - we used large ones, chopped into quarters. But they were multi-coloured. :D
25g chopped walnuts - we used a handful of cashews instead
25g no-soak apricots - we used Jacob's Weetameal biscuits instead, broken up into small pieces

PS - I know, it seems like we changed *ALL* of the ingredients, haha. But that's the beauty of this recipe! You can adapt it to your taste

What you do:

Line a baking tray with baking paper and set aside. (We used mini cupcake cups instead)
Break the chocolate into small pieces and place in a large mixing bowl. Melt the chocolate and set aside to cool.
Stir in the marshmallows, cashews and enough biscuit pieces so that it is well-covered but not too liquidy from too much chocolate.
Place heaped teaspoons of the marshmallow mixture on to the prepared baking tray (or cups, as we did). Sprinkle with sprinklables, if you so wish.
Leave the sweets to chill in the refrigerator until set.

And that's it! Supreeeemely easy sweet treats! And let me tell you, these are a real treat. We used plain chocolate instead of milk mainly because we didn't have any milk chocolate handy.... but I quite liked it, as its less sweet with more of a chocolate flavour rather than sugar. You get enough sugar from the marshmallows anyhow.

Anyway, I really really liked these. The chocolate-covered marshmallows turn into something really really nice and not so marshmallow-y... slightly chewy, even, while the biscuits give a nice crunch. Again, you can use any biscuits you wish, we just happened to have the Weetameal ones handy. :D

We decided to place them in the paper cups to make them easier to handle, but if you wish, you can also make them on the baking tray and then place the bites into paper cases before serving. They just look prettier, is all. Also, after a few failures in getting people to eat unidentifiable chocolate things, we decided to sprinkle some rainbow sprinkles to ... well, make them look prettier, hehe. These are highly optional.

The best thing about this is that its so easy. Little kids can definitely help, I think, though not without making a huge mess. :P You can use any ingredient you happen to have at home. And they're delicious! Nothing much you can complain about that combination. :D

Quote of the day: Chocolate is nature’s way of making up for Mondays.

Chocolate Tiramisu Layers

2009-01-22T08:23:00.000Z

One of my siblings' favorite dessert to make (and eat!) is a tiramisu made of, of course, cream cheese and sponge fingers and liberal sprinklings of milo. It's hugely popular with the rest of the extended family as well. Surprisingly, one of the most adept at making this dish is one of my brothers, so when me and my sister decided to make tiramisu for a recent family gathering, we were struggling to remember how to make it. I never made it myself.

We did manage to track down the recipe in the end, but because we were unsure as to the freshness of our eggs, and this was an unbaked recipe... it might have not been a good idea. So we decided to make this one instead... here we go!

What you need:
(serves 6)
150mL double cream
300g plain chocolate
400g mascarpone cheese
400mL black coffee with 4 tablespoons caster sugar, cooled
36 sponge fingers
Cocoa powder (we used milo), for dusting

What you do:

Whip the cream until it just holds its shape. Melt the chocolate, then leave to cool slightly. Stir in the mascarpone cheese and cream.
Pour the coffee into a bowl. Dip the sponge fingers into the mixture briefly so that they absorb the coffee but do not become soggy.
Place 3 sponge fingers on 3 serving plates.
Spoon a layer of the masacarpone and chocolate mixture over the sponge fingers.
Place 3 more sponge fingers on top of the mascarpone layer. Spread another layer of mascarpone and chocolate mixture and place 3 more sponge fingers on top.
Leave the tiramisu to chill in the refrigerator for at least one hour. Dust with a little cocoa powder just before serving.

The main difference between this recipe and the one we originally wanted to make is that this recipe uses mascarpone cheese instead of cream cheese. Plus, this one also has a boost of chocolate added into the cheese, which makes for a really creamy, really chocolatey dessert. Which is just perfect...

Or at least it would be, if we didn't use too many sponge fingers and spread the cheese mixture too thin! See... this was supposed to be individual servings, as you can see from the recipe. But to make it stretch, we used enough sponge fingers for two containers about 8 x 5 inches in size. The first container wasn't so bad, but the second container was quite dry because the sponge fingers, of course, had swelled up in size, leaving very little cheese in between them.

That being the case, these still proved popular, so if you're looking for a new tiramisu recipe to try, why not this one? :) I shall have to try their signature tiramisu someday, but for now, this will suffice.

Quote of the day: There's nothing better than a good friend, except a good friend with chocolate.