Fresh Fruit Birthday Cake

I also made the cake for the birthday party.  I baked a mandarin chiffon cake topped with vanilla cream and fresh fruit.

The cake was sliced into three layers and had fresh pineapple compote in the bottom layer and mango cream.  It was topped off with more cream and decorated with fresh pineapple; nectarine; kiwi fruit; mango strawberry; blueberry and finally a mandarin glaze! 

Cake decoration and assembly did take quite a while I can tell you!  Doubt if patisserie shops would be as slow as me!  If did cause a sensation at the party and I'm glad to say it was all eaten!

Biscuits for a 1 Year Old's Birthday

Last week, our niece turned one!  How quickly a year has gone by!  She is ever so cute and lovable and there was a party to celebrate her birthday - although it was mainly for us adults as she hasn't got any little friends or cousins yet!

I made some cookies that I then iced.  They looked good in the book and so cute and fun to make.  I soon got bored of icing them though!

New Year Goodies II

The next thing I made for new year was Pineapple Tarts.  Essentially, this is a cookie with a jam paste centre.  It's popular with Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesians during the Chinese New Year.  I tried these last year after some blog-surfing as I like pineapple.  This year I made the pineapple jam myself from fresh pineapple as opposed to tinned which I did last year.  The flavour is much better.

There are many, many recipes for these out there on the internet and different shapes too.  Some are sausage roll like where the pineapple paste is encased in a rolled pastry which has been squeezed from a pastry press leaving lines over the pastry surface.  Indonesians call it Nastar.  Others are completely encased in pastry and perhaps shaped into oranges with a clove as the stalk or into animal shapes. 

I tried a piped version but it wasn't very successful as the dough is firm and my piping nozzle too fine.  The butter in the dough began to melt with the force of my squeezing and didn't look that good.  Plus, it was really hard work!  Eventually, I settled on rolling the dough out and cutting flower shapes out with a cookie cutter.  I made indentations with a spoon and filled the centres with a blob of pineapple paste. 

I have seen a recipe for melting moments which are piped into pretty rosettes.  I need to get a bigger star nozzle before I make them and I imagine they will be quite tasty with the sweet sharp gooeyness of pineapple paste!

New Year Goodies

As I said, I have been busy in the kitchen leading up to New Year.  I've decided I want to give new year food gifts to family and it's been a challenge to find the time after work.  Nevertheless, I have made peanut cookies, pineapple tarts and steamed radish cakes for my new year goody bag.  I am adding tangerines, japanese pears and some lai-see sweets to complete the ensemble.  I had wanted to present the gifts in a round basket but had trouble sourcing these.  Besides, I think it would have to be a large one too!  All I can come up with is a large gift bag.

Here's what I've made:

Peanut Cookies

They were shaped using a measuring spoon so each one is the same size.  They are quite simple to make once you've got everything prepared.  The time consuming bit is the peanut preparation.  It's well worth the effort as the result is a light and crispy, crumbly cookie with an aromatic roasted peanut aroma.  Very popular with my family!

The recipe is not mine but from another food blogger. 

Here is the link to her blog Chinese Peanut Cookies

Here is the peanut preparation. 

I roasted the peanuts in the oven til they were brown and fragrant.  You can do this in a dry wok/frying pan but have to be careful to toss peanuts constantly otherwise you will scorch the peanuts!  I often do that so I find the oven easier - the peanuts roast more uniformly too which makes skin-shelling easier. 

When peanuts are cool enough to handle, you just rub the skins off with your fingers.  My mum does this in handfuls.  When this is all done, she tosses the peanuts gently over the empty sink and blows on them simultaneously.  The papery skins fly off into the sink which you can clear up later.  This I find too messy, so I have the laborious task of rubbing each peanut in my fingers and putting the skins in a separate bag for disposal later.

I used my hand blender attachment to grind the peanuts.  I can't get it to a fine powder but my family like the course grainy texture of the peanuts.

The next bit is easy as you just mix the ground peanuts with flour and sugar and add some oil.  It comes out looking like wet sand but it's not a problem.

When you squeeze the sandy mix together it stays clumped.  So I used a measuring spoon to get my little cookie shapes.  I then placed these on a baking tray (no greasing required) to bake.  You can glaze with egg-wash.  I forgot.

Happy Chinese New Year!!!

Happy New Year!!!

May the new year bring you fortune, good health and may a million wishes go your way!

This year has been busy for me with returning to work after my Christmas break and I've somewhat neglected my blog.  I have been busy baking and crafting but not had a chance to update on here.

Year of the Tiger is MY year!  Both myself and my husband are born in Year of the Tiger and what is especially exciting for us is that we are going to have our own little Tiger too!  Baby is due in August and we are v-e-r-y excited as he/she will be baby no 1!

Here is the scan of our little tiger!  My work colleagues have said it's smoking a cigar!  Hubbs says it's on the bottle already!  Next scan due in Mid-March and am looking forward to baby's developments!

Have been very fortunate and this little one has not caused me any sickness at all!  The same went for my sis-in-law (hubbs, bro's wife) she didn't suffer from sickness either!  Have had a couple of instances where unpleasant food smells or food sights have made me feel queasy but that is about it!  Lucky b**** you may say!  Only thing is with not being sick it means I am gaining weight!  Seem to get hungry again very quickly!  I will be as round as a barrel very quickly!

I made some cupcakes to take into work when I made the news public to my work colleagues.  I said it was to fatten them up as I got fatter over the coming months!

They did a good job of demolishing the lot!  There were three different butter icing flavours: vanilla, lemon and chocolate.  I used a variety of sweets to decorate them with: Dairy Milk chocolate buttons, Milky Bar chocolate buttons, Minstrels and some sugar decorations.  I had wanted to put jelly babies on them but they didn't look very good. 

Diet?!?!? Well......it IS a Low-Fat Moist Carrot Cake?

I said 2010 would be a start of a new diet - well, healthy eating regime.  More fruit and vegetables, less processed foods and sugary and fat snacks. 

After seeing a scrummy looking carrot cake on a different blog, I have been itching to bake a carrot cake!  I waited until the apple crumble pie was fully demolished first though - can't have too much cake now!  This is not my recipe but one from a well-known chef.  I use a few of her cake recipes and find them fool-proof for good results. 

A made a few tweaks here and there by reducing sugar quantity by 25g and then using 150g light cream cheese and about 25g icing sugar for the topping as opposed to 250g of quark and 20g of caster sugar.  Basically use as much sugar you need to take the sharp twang off the cream cheese. 

The baked cake before topping goes on.

The cake does live up to it's name and is deliciously moist and light and very, very moreish!  It is full of juicy sultanas and is very flavoursome!

You can just take a bite now couldn't you?  The topping isn't too sweet or too thick - just as I like it!  The cake tastes divine - not too sweet either and I think would be quite acceptable on it's own.  The cream cheese topping just makes it more luxuriant!

If you want the original recipe I used here's the link - all credit to the author - a wonderful cake maker in my opinion!

delia - low-fat-moist-carrot-cake

I hope you enjoy!

I have made this cake before and you can change the shape of the cake.  I wanted to try my new spring form tube pan.  Hence the cake complete with it's cream cheese topping looks like a giant Polo Mint!!! 
Here's the cake in a square tin which I made to take into work on my birthday.

I coloured some marzipan orange and made them into baby carrots and added some (bought) sugar flowers to give the cake a nice Spring-time theme  (my birthday is in April.).  The topping is a lemon butter icing which went well with the cake.  I omitted the orange zest in the cake mix and didn't add the orange sugar syrup to the cake after baking.  It still tasted nice and was well received at work.

Just need to work off those calories I've just consumed in sampling the cake!

New Year, New Decade, New Start!

Now, am I crazy to choose to start 'blogging' at Christmas time?  The busiest time for most people and I think I'd be clever and start my own blog!?!?!  Nuts huh?

Well, there is always so much I want to do but if I spent less time in front of pc and more time doing I'd probably get more done!  I knew Christmas was coming and yet it smacked my on the bum this year I was so unprepared!  I was wrapping  pressies Christmas morning!  How bad is that?!?!?

I'd baked a batch of holiday cookies so they were ready for give-away pressies and also for my work mates to chomp!  I made some Cinnamon Snowflakes.  The lemon icing is time-consuming to pipe - maybe if I had a piping bag with small nozzle it'd make life easier rather than using a paper-cone with the end snipped off?

I also made some Orange Christmas Trees too!  Do you like the Smarties as baubles?  I took most of the holiday cookies into work and they were popular!

Well, I enjoyed a relaxing Christmas at home with the folks - it was fun playing with my niece who at almost 4 is beginning to find lots of new vocabulary and is surprisingly good at jig-saw puzzles!  She starts off really enthusiastically, but then her interest wanes until the final 6 pieces that she insists on counting!  She'll say, "How many left?"  Then starts counting, "One, two, three, four, five, six!"  Places one piece into the puzzle, then repeats the counting again!  It's amusing!  How kids bring smiles and happiness to a household!

New Year was a nice quiet affair at home.  I was watching the usual end-of-year reviews on tv.  Best bit was chomping a greedy-size portion of my Apple Crumble Pie! 

A shortcrust pastry base filled with soft apple chunks and sultanas, topped with crumbly, crunchy, cinnamony crumble.  A drizzle of cream and a blob of vanilla ice-cream!  Sheer decadence!

And now starts the New Year Diet!  Groan!