Cinnamon Rolls

I am awfully backlogged with posts. I still have a whole bunch of foods from IFT, Ithaca, Toronto, and the rest of the summer to discuss! Unfortunately, I am in the midst of projects, jobs applications, job interviews, and studying for the GREs (but actually not, because I still haven't gotten through one practice test yet).

For study break a few weeks ago, I made cinnamon rolls for the first time. Although the recipe gave a serving size of 12-15 rolls, I ended up with 16 (I mean, how do you cut 15 evenly-thick rolls?) in each batch, giving 32 rolls overall.

The residents devoured the rolls like vultures fighting over one chubby mouse.

I didn't make any icing because it would've just been messy, and there would've been fifty students strolling around making doorknobs sticky. For the two batches, I think I used around 21 g of active dry yeast, and twice the amount of sugar in the dough (since there was no icing). As it was over 80 degrees in my room, I let the butter soften at room temperature, and the buns rose pretty quickly.

This is my kitchen, work desk, dining table, closet, bookshelf, and bedside table. My goal is to keep it scrupulous and clean/sanitized all year.

The fun part! I pressed out the dough (no rolling pin) so that it was about 7mm thick.

The rolls rose a lot! I didn't grease the foil pan, yet the buns came out pretty easily, no doubt due to the butter in the rolls trickling out while baking.

Mmmm. All I got were some crumbs (and a loud marriage proposal, that, of course, was just a disguised compliment)...but that's perfectly acceptable, because I have the skill, so I can make 1024 more, if I really wanted to.

Coconut Pudding!!

I adore pudding.

I intended to make some Hawaiian haupia today, but in retrospect, it seems that I've made a chunky Puerto Rican tembleque instead, purely by accident. It doesn't really matter, because it's still creamy, delicious, fantastic coconut.

Haupia is supposed to be more solid, like a jelly, and is served in cubes. However, my coconut pudding wouldn't set (not that it matters, since it's still really gooey and delicious) and I also had added vanilla (my sister wanted it) and cinnamon (I wanted it) to the concoction, thus making it more of a tembleque. I also wanted to add nutmeg but my sister opposed that idea. Either way, I stupidly put the hot slurry into a plastic container, so maybe my tembleque is now infused with plastic fumes. Fun.

The pudding's also not really photogenic, especially with indoor photography (it's been raining on/off for the past 64 hours).

The original recipe is here, but I modified it (figures...)

INGREDIENTS for about 500 ml of tembleque

400 ml (1 can) coconut milk

100 g (or more) fresh coconut

50 g sugar

0.5 tsp salt

vanilla

part of a cinnamon stick

20 g cornstarch

40 ml fat-free milk

METHOD

1. Roughly chop coconut. If you're really finicky, you can shred coconut but it takes a lot of time. Chopping coconut chunks into pieces ranging from shreds to pea-size is perfectly acceptable.

2. Mix coconut, coconut milk, sugar, salt, and however much cinnamon and/or vanilla you want in a saucepan.

3. Plop saucepan on medium heat, and stir. You'll start to see bubbles on the side of the pan. Dissolve the cornstarch to the fat-free milk in a non-plastic container.

4. Keep stirring the mixture in the saucepan until you see huge gloopy bubbles form in the middle of the mixture, which will start to foam and rise. This took me about 7 minutes in total.

5. Pour all of the mixture from the saucepan into the milk/cornstarch mixture and stir quickly! Remove cinnamon pieces (optional. Just remember you have them there).

6. Let goo cool. Stick it in the fridge.

7. SLURP UP THE DELICIOUS FRESH&CANNED COCONUT FLAVOUR!

For me, the tembleque had the consistency of really thick porridge/gruel after refrigeration, but it did not adhere to other materials very easily (unlike yoghurt) so it was probably 70-90% the texture of haupia, since it wasn't entirely solid. It tasted mildly of cinnamon, which was really great. The pudding part tasted pretty light, which complimented the fresh chunks of coconut.

UPDATE: Actually, leaving the pudding in the fridge overnight meant that my pudding is solid, can be cut into cubes, and looks more like chunky haupia.

UPDATE (26 August): I made coconut pudding again today without coconut milk; I just grated fresh coconut, added 800 ml of water to it, threw in some cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla, and let it simmer on the stove for about 20 minutes. Then I mixed some cornstarch with a few tablespoons of cold water and then added the hot coconut slurry to it. Cornstarch clumps when it's added to hot water (from my experience).

Apple Pie!

I finally made a pie. Refer to here for a story about the last few pies that I've made...

0.5 cup of sugar

3 tbsp whole wheat flour

cinnamon and/or whatever spices you like

3 giant apples (You know, the ones from Costco), sliced. I had one Rome, one Royal Gala, and one Golden Delicious.

Pie crust!! (whole wheat!)

All you do is layer apple with sugar and flour. I managed to get three layers of apples in my glass pie pan (which doesn't seem to have issues with dough sticking on it, so it's cool).

On the bottom rack, I baked for 20 mins at 375F and 15 mins at 350F. Then, I let it sit in the oven (while the oven was cooling down) for about 50 minutes to an hour.

I guess it's a matter of preference, but I really don't like apple pie when the apple parts have the consistency of mashed potato/applesauce. I also don't want super sweet apple pie.

So, for me, improvements to this recipe would be

1. Less sugar in apple filling. For sure.

2. Bake pie in less time (Possibly bake the crust for 10 minutes first, then add in the apple, to get less soggy apple).

3. More sugar in crust.

We had leftover pie crust because the top design didn't really use much crust, so my sister ended up making cookies with it (microwave for 45 s). Pie crust cookies are really yummy, actually.

Breakfast at the Comfort Inn

I'm still talking about Boston. Eh, I suppose it's a good thing since I haven't actually eaten anything worth noting, except half a "German Apple Pancake" from the Ritz yesterday with EY, but since I had run there, I didn't bring a camera.

The breakfast at the Comfort Inn was nice, considering that for the past two days, I had been eating stale raisin bagels and mini muffins at the other hotel... with utterly no nutritional value. I went ellipticalling at around 7am since I hadn't run in AGES but I was honestly really tired. Anyway. I ended up drinking a ton of milk and eating a lot of food.

They had these egg patty thingys, which is basically a thin cylinder of some egg material that you microwave for 45 seconds and stick between some toasted English muffins. Come to think of it, I have no idea what that egg patty is. It could be leftover egg pieces from the day before, mashed together and pressed through a mould. It could be some premade egg and maltodextrin mixture. There's probably PHO in it. I don't want to think about it. I love toasted flour products! I ate a piece of processed cheese in the sandwich even though I dislike processed cheese... but I suppose this is some sort of comfort food, since way back when I actually like Mc.D in HK, my brother and I used to get this if we were early enough to get to the shopping centre before 11am. Usually we weren't.

They had a waffle maker so I made some waffles which were really airy and too crispy for me. They actually tasted like inflated wafers without the layered creamy filling. Which I guess wasn't too bad.

Waffle maker!

My brother didn't finish half of his cinnamon bun so I ate it. It was too bready so it conflicted with my previous cinnamon bun experience at Cinnabon, where the cinnamon bun was like a huge buttery pudding thing with an avalanche of icing.

Another sandwich, because I got bored of waiting for the rest of the family. It didn't help, though, because I ended up making tea for my grandpa, coffee for my dad, and waitressing pieces of bread and waffle around to them. Even though we were literally 3 steps away from the food table.

One thing I don't understand: I used one plate. One cup. Everyone else in my family is INCAPABLE of using one plate and one cup. They all used at least three plates. Maybe three cups. One for juice and one for milk and one for tea, I suppose. I don't understand, because I usually eat more than the other members of my family do. So, if using ONE plate and ONE cup is so simple for me, why is such a difficult task for them!? It's not even like what we were eating was going to ruin a plate by drenching it in gravy or something. Like I said, when I go to college, I'm just going to bring my own ceramic plate/mug and metal spoon and try set an example so that we, as consumers, won't be so wasteful.

Mad Cool Grad Partayyyyyz

I have not updated in ages due to:

1. School. I actually had 5 projects.

2. Grad Party planning, and shopping for grad stuff [presents, shoes, dress. Bleh.]

3. Graduation reshopping because the dress I had gotten earlier was too formal. I can not tell the difference between a sundress and a prom dress. Unfortunately, I needed the former and had bought the latter.

So, the past week in pictures... [I don't know why my formatting got messed up, but bear with it].

1. First garden snow peas, thanks to my dad :D We also got our first two strawberries, and a bunch of blueberries.

2. JB's grad party, 19th - pasta was really hard at the top, but not crispy. So, it was hard to bite, but I liked it. Something I noticed is that nobody's pasta has herbs in it... I'm gonna put basil or oregano in my pasta dish at my party :)

JB's dessert. Costco on a plate, pretty much. I didn't know the ingredients of the stuff in the cake [turns out there was trans fat], so I think I should be more wary, next time. Well, now I've decided that I'm not gonna get a red velvet cake for my grad party. Actually, I think that I'm not gonna get a cake. Just get cookies. And pie.


MJ's Grad Party - 19th - This is the best damn picture ever... you can see the mood - summer chillaxin'. My first legitimate pina colada, and it was great. The crushed ice added a nice touch to it and I could definitely taste the coconut and the pineapple. To cap it all off [haha. Think bottlecaps], there was no alcohol! Yes!


MJ's grad party - 19th - Seriously good mashed potato with peas. Funny how no one is making mashed potato with apple [That's what I ate the first time I had it...], then two types of rice - the browner one had some kinda herb in it that I didn't really like, but the rice wasn't too mushy, which is good. The pasta and cheese was really great. Every party has a pasta dish. And cake. It's just a trend I've noticed.

The garlic bread was okay. The fried plantain was simply delicious... I couldn't decide whether it was savoury or sweet, but the inside was soft and gooey while the outside was crispy. After learning about it through The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver last summer, I've honestly been interested in trying it out. And it was great! MJ's got great food. Seriously. She even had green puffed rice and marshmallow treats, but I forgot to take a picture of most of the food I ate. Plus, I was in the pool the majority of the time.

16th - MP and LS's chem project was about baking, so they made carrot muffins and sourdough bread. I'm not in their class but MP gave me some :) The carrot cake was really nice without the icing, and the bread... It didn't really taste like sourdough; it was crumbly, dry, and the crust tasted the same as the inside. I don't know if I have the authority to make a statement on the definition of sourdough, as I have only had it once before in my life. That time, it tasted much more different from what I ate that day.


13th - NYC with my mum. We were dress shopping as I have stated earlier, and for lunch, we went to one of the NY-style restaurants, where a pound of food costs a certain amount. We went to Speedy's, which is around 36th and 6th, I think [Not sure.] A pound of food costs $9.50 there. I suppose if one was obsessed with eating salads, one could get a ton of lettuce and tomato for a pretty low price.