Crêpes

Today I found out that I am bad at flipping crêpes. Here is a picture of a crêpe with a rip in it, beneath the fold.
I got a French crêpe recipe from here (it's in French--my French is useful! Okay, I could've used Google Translate, but it has glitches-- it translated "1 tbsp butter" to "1 cup butter")! I made about 6 pan-sized crêpes from the recipe. Crêpes are really thin.


I used whole wheat flour, which I guess isn't traditional... but oh well.

My first problem was that the butter wouldn't melt when I was mixing the batter. Well, duh, it's something like 15 degrees C in the house! So, I ended up having really gloopy batter, but the crêpes turned out intact.

 Another problem was that I would flip the crêpes over before the bottom side had been thoroughly cooked, and I couldn't flip the crêpes correctly with my spatula. I'm sure there is a more efficient way of making crêpes...but no one has ever taught me. I ended up picking up opposite edges of the crêpe with my fingers (hot? No...compared to fresh coffee, not really) and the spatula, and somehow maneuvering it some 180 degrees.

Taste? Well, nothing burned, the crêpes were moist, milky, soft, and gooey and... crêpe-like (yes, they tasted like crêpes! Except, chewier due to the whole-wheat flour). They were more oily than I would've liked... I guess I should use melted butter next time (but I hate the smell of microwaved butter)? They were a tiny bit sweet, which I have a problem with; I guess I would just prefer to have really sweet crêpes, or non-sweet crêpes. Eating tiny-bit-sweet-crêpes is like drinking water with a tiny bit of sugar - not plain ol' thirst-quenching, and not delicious-sugary-drink either.


Maybe I just prefer the pancakes that I used to eat in Australia? I don't even know how those were made, but they were poofy (not American pancake poofy, though), dark brown, the size of a coaster, and full of holes on one side.

Boiled Dumplings

Delicious savoury food!! For some reason, I've been consistently craving savoury food throughout the last quarter of the year. Today my mum made egg and carrot filling for dumplings!! My sister and I filled the dumplings with the filling. Actually, my sister made one dumpling and I made the rest. Her dumpling looks like a bag (it's the second one to from the left in the image below). We had some dumpling skins left over, and my sister cut tiny holes out of one of them and made a "snowflake" design.

 I'm not sure how to make boiled dumplings look appetizing. So here they are, dripping with soy sauce, like mini brains dripping with blood... well, not really.

 SO DELICIOUS. Reminds me of childhood. Of being 5 years old and helping my mum make dumplings from scratch...and not being able to crimp the tops correctly...

Pizza Making!

My GA had a pizza-making event today! Maybe 15 of us hung out in the kitchen at 4 pm and made pizza dough. We started off with a pile of white flour, made a well, and poured in some yeasty hot water. Then, we added water and oil and salt, and kneaded the dough (adding water and oil along the way). We then let the dough rest for 3 hours (as I went to my Chem workshop...and I really need to learn E1 and E2 reactions).

Then, I came back from the cold and rolled out my dough, and waited for a pan. We only had 6 pans, and the oven would only fit 4 pans. And there were a lot of us. So, it's 8 pm right now, and my pizza's finally in the oven. Actually, I've already jumped up, TWICE, to my GA calling me from across the room and saying that my pizza's ready (but both times, it turned out to be someone else's. Oh well).

A (don't know his last initial) made really round pizzas. Mine aren't round...but they're, haha, "rustic". A, RK  and L all threw the pizza base in the air. I tried to as well, but I don't think it did anything remotely cool to my pizza base.

I put shredded cheese, some fresh mozzarella, and a chunk of string cheese on my pizza. There's also a little bit of basil (and store-bought basil looks really different from the basil in my backyard! It's a much lighter green, and the leaves are less jagged).

My second pizza is just cheese... and a speck of basil because we ran out of supplies. Ah well.

Potato Gnocchi

With a surplus of potatoes, I've been thinking of ways of eating them (other than mashed potato, even though I love mashed potato), and one of the ideas I found was potato gnocchi. I'm not really a gnocchi fan, since I don't have an emotional association with it. In addition, since we lack sauce in the house, the gnocchi is just another carbohydrate at dinnertime that pairs well with spicy stir fried Chinese food.

I agree with the recipe; the potatoes should've been baked instead of boiled because that way, they would've been drier and I wouldn't've obtained soggy, gruel-like gnocchi. Ah well. At least they stayed in shape (irregular) and didn't disintegrate in the boiling water. Maybe I should've baked them or fried them.

I don't think that this was the most appetising way of using potatoes, so I'm never making potato gnocchi again. Instead, I'm just going to make a freezer-shelf full of potato cake (tomorrow's post), which everyone, even MY SISTER, enjoyed.

INGREDIENTS

800 g mashed potato

~140 g whole-wheat flour (just keep adding until the dough is malleable and not too sticky)

oregano

pepper

salt

METHOD

1. Mix everything.

2. Pluck small balls from the dough and stick into a pot of boiling water.

3. Take out after a few minutes.

Nuts To You

Having been to and purchased unnecessary food from all three Nuts To You stores in Philadelphia, I reckon I can give a review. In general, I like Nuts To You, and each one seems to have its own personality.

The first one I visited, on 20th next to Chestnut St., was the most jam-packed (haha) and cosy. The lady let me sample the sugar-dried kiwi, and I'm very glad I tried it, because the kiwi had no fruit/kiwi flavour! I ended up buying 2 lbs of sour gummy bears, because they were "on sale" for $1.99/lb. Uh, they weren't on sale. Also, why are there so many pineapple flavoured ones? And cherry/raspberry flavoured ones? WHERE ARE THE GREEN APPLE GUMMY BEARS?!

The flour coated peanuts that I found at another store, 13th and Walnut, were on sale though, because they had run out of the pizza flavoured one. Actually, a guy came in as I was buying animal crackers, and he asked the cashier whether there were any pizza peanuts and he said that there weren't, which is why the price of the flour-coated peanuts were $0.99/lb instead of $2.99. This is pretty good for peanuts, in my opinion. The cashier was more reluctant on letting me sample a circus peanut from the 1 lb prepackaged bag.

A day later, I came across the Nuts To You on 7th and Walnut, and it looks exactly like the one on 13th and Walnut, except that there is no smell of popcorn :(. This store had exactly one bag of pizza flavoured flour-coated peanuts, for $0.99, so I bought those, and then I went to VP library and borrowed some books. I sat outside eating and reading until I got too many mosquito bites. It was pleasant, though now I'm at least 2 lbs heavier on account of the fact that I haven't run or swam since Thursday, and I've eaten at least 2 lbs of food from Nuts To You.

Once my life is out of schedule, I can't eat or sleep properly. I end up eating too much and sleeping too late. I need to get back to either the high school 7-2:32-5-10ish schedule, or my internship 6-9-5-7-9 schedule.

Nuts To You

721 Walnut St

1328 Walnut St

22 S 20th St

CAFFEINE Coffee Cookies!!!

My brother, JM, and a few other high school people are currently competing in an... M3(?) competition that started this morning at 6am and ends at 9pm. Basically, they are presented with a problem, and have to make some sort of model and proposal for fixing the problem. This year's problem has something to do with a drought in a lake in Colorado, I think. Anyway, I just went to visit them and they had a lot of untouched food just sitting there because they're so busy. It looks pretty hectic. My brother told me last night to make them coffee-infused finger foods because they would need the caffeine. So, I made coffee cookies.

I found a recipe online but I changed it a lot because for some reason, I feel confident in my cooking/altering everything. So, here is my version of ridiculously humongous soft, moist coffee flavoured cookies.

Ingredients for 26 ridiculously large [size-of-your-palm], flat, and moist cookies:

1. 1/2 cup oil

2. 1 cup white sugar

3. 2 eggs

4. vanilla

5. coffee [I'll explain this in the Method]

6. 2 cups self-raising flour

7. 1/2 tsp baking soda

Method:

1. At the crack of dawn, get half a cup of boiling water and spoon in 3-4 heaping tbsp of ground coffee. Add a few tbsp of instant coffee just for the caffeine kick. Add more tbsp of instant coffee to your liking! Actually, I'm not even sure I saturated the water that much; I'm sure I could've added MUCH more instant coffee. The end result was a cookie that tasted like coffee, but was not tremendously bitter. This, I would say, is the amount of coffee needed to make "normal" tasting coffee cookies.

2. Mix all wet ingredients in a giant bowl. Add in the coffee mixture with the granules, although if you don't like the spotty appearance, you can filter out the granules. The batter should be dark brown.

3. Add in dry ingredients. I used self-raising flour, which already had some baking powder and salt in it, for simplicity. [a.k.a I didn't have non-self-raising bleached flour]

4. The mixture should be quite gooey, a bit stickier than cake batter, and look like the very first image above.

5. Spoon onto cookie sheets and bake at 380 degrees F in a unpreheated oven on the bottom rack for 9 minutes.

6. Let them sit in oven for 10 minutes at least, or longer if you want. Alternatively, let them bake for another 1-2 minutes.

7. Let them cool on cooling racks, and they should harden a bit but still be moist, flat, and a bit cakey.

Note: They puff up to 2 times their original size.

Victoria Sandwich Cake

I decided to tackle the Victoria sandwich cake again. This time was NOT going to be a half-baked attempt to recreate something that I knew worked 7 years ago. This time, however, I creamed the sugar and butter first, and I used bleached flour. The result? The second-best Victoria sandwich cake, ever! [The best one was the first one I made, because it was less burnt and more jammy].

Ingredients

150 g caster/granulated sugar

150 g unsalted butter

150 g self-raising white flour

1 tsp baking powder

3 eggs

JAM OF CHOICE!

Powdered sugar!

Method

1. Cream sugar and butter. This takes a long time, but it is extremely worth it. I suppose softened butter would be easier to cream, but I'm guessing the butter I used was around 18 degrees C.

2. Add 3 eggs and mix. You will get a lumpy mixture. The original recipe called for the use of an electric whisk, but I don't have one. I don't have many sleek kitchen utensils... so I just mix. Please, Victoria sandwich cakes were invented wayyyyy before electric whisks were [Victoria = Queen Victoria, right?]

Yes. Lumpy.

3. Add in flour one tablespoon at a time. By the last three tablespoons, you will have a really thick batter. The batter should ALMOST be cookie-dough-dense batter. The batter will have little lumps.

4. Separate batter into two pans. The whole point of the Victoria sandwich cake is its sandwich-ness. It is perfect for females to make for males, as it is a sandwich, but offers all the cakey goodness that men crave [ JUST KIDDING!].

5. Anyway, bake at 355 degrees F [or, 180 degrees C, as the original recipe says] for:

8 inch/20cm pans: 25 minutes [says the original recipe] on...the middle rack

9.5 inch pans [the pans I used]: no more than 20 minutes!! on the lowest rack

For me, I used the lowest rack and after I baked the cakes for 20 minutes, I let them sit in the oven for another 20 minutes. When I took them out, one was perfect and the other was a tad burnt. Ah well. Next time I'm putting them in for 15 minutes and letting them sit for 30 minutes.

6. Spread with jam. Warm jam is more easily spread, but cold jam is good too. Then, SANDWICH!

Victoria sandwich cakes are usually thicker, and the recipe I had was meant for 20 cm pans. So, my Victoria sandwich cake was rather thin. However, the taste, texture, and smell were not lost! It was rich, crumbly [big big big big big crumbs!], buttery, crusty on the circumference but spongy in the center, pure, fresh, and mouth-watering. It was not vanilla-y, small-spongy-holes, artificial, super-sweet, or like any of those yellow cake mixes at the store.

You will NOT find a cake like this in a box or frozen in a tin in a store in the U.S. You won't even find this in the bakery section! It doesn't taste moist like Boston cream pies-cakes, and it doesn't taste at all monotone like those *ahem* various "just add half a cup of oil and 3 eggs and mix and bake!" cake mixes. Victoria sandwich cakes are delicate, flavourful, and clean-tasting. One interesting aspect of it is that when you first bite into it, the cake doesn't feel that great; it's dry and crumbly [but not crunchy]. However, as you chew, you feel a bit of "juice" flow out of each thick crumb. Yes, this "juice" is sugary butter. How succulent.

The powdered sugar isn't necessary, but it adds a nice touch to the sandwich cake. Notice that the sandwich cake is not "yellow" or "white" or one uniform colour; it is composed of beautiful shades of caramel; it demonstrates elegance and hard work. Yes, I'm being dramatic, but this cake was definitely the most meaningful cake I've ever made [I'm... bad at making cakes...]

My sister started taking chunks out of it from 11am to 1pm. I told her to just take a slice already! She loved it.

SHE LOVED IT.

This is going to be her birthday cake! It's going to be better than last year's! It's going to be eight layers tall! [Maybe?]

Victoria sandwich cakes are also really photogenic in sunlight. Look at these pictures! No flash! Perfect!

Gooey Cheese "Biscuits"!

Well, I finally removed myself from Penn's food blog [I never posted on there anyway] because its style was very different from mine, and I prefer to vent out everything on this blog. Sure, they get more readers [do they?], but this blog was made by myself. Also, there's a lot of Penn-Dining-Hall- bashing/insulting/burning in effigy on there. While I disagree with the meal plan that we are forced to buy, I do like the food.

I had about half a jar of mayonnaise remaining from the potato salad I made last week, so I decided to use it to make something. But what? I'm not particularly fond of mayonnaise in the first place, so I had to make something that everyone else in the family would eat.

I found a recipe for mayonnaise biscuits written by someone who I don't think I like [judging by her writing style and comments and the fact that she uses mixes for basically everything; okay, I'm being narrow-minded and mean here].

I used it as the basis of what I made, but I made it better! You know it! Sure, they are "biscuits" in the American conventional definition, but they're definitely pretty good. A bit oily, but kind of like cheesy potato patties [without the potato]. The picture below is the batter made following her recipe.

The following is my version! Note that these are not British biscuits. Those are sweet, and a synonym for those is "cookie".

Ingredients for 12 patty-type-American-"biscuits"

1. 14 to 16 tbsp mayonnaise [Please. Get. The. Fatty. Original. Kind.]

2. 1/2 cup of fat-free milk

3. 1/4 cup whole fat milk, put into jar and swirled around so that the last globs of mayonnaise can be used

4. 1 cup of self-rising flour

5. 2 big tbsp of 100% whole wheat flour

6. 1/2 tsp baking soda

7. 2 cups of shredded cheese!

8. Lots of garlic powder and herbs! No salt is fine in my opinion.

Method:

1. Mix everything except ONE CUP of cheese. You will get something that looks like the image above^ [the dark spots are dried herbs; I used oregano, basil, and thyme]. The dough should be like muffin dough, and very sticky. It doesn't taste that great when it is uncooked.

2. Spoon evenly into 12 muffin cups. Since I don't have muffin cups, I spooned them into tart shells. And a pumpkin-shaped mould.

3. Sprinkle remaining cup of shredded cheese over each spoonful of batter.

4. Bake for 14-16 minutes at 400 degrees F in an un-preheated oven. I never preheat my oven...

5. Leave everything in the un-operating oven for 15-20 minutes.

These biscuit-patty-gooey-thingys taste very cheesy, gooey, and a bit oily. They are not the conventional dry American biscuit that you get at fried chicken restaurants. The texture is extremely spongy [like a sponge cake!]. They are a bit puffy, but they didn't rise much in the oven.

Now it really looks like a pumpkin...

Starfish!

In my quest to make Goldfish crackers, I have instead ended up making Pufferfish and Starfish.

Yes, Starfish! I think I burned myself a few times in the process; right now, certain skin areas on my hands feel kind of raw. Ah well.

Before I started, I firmly decide that I would follow this recipe. However, since I am PIE-314 and enjoy taking risks that make my dishes terribe, I end up tweaking everything. Though, this time I had a legitimate reason for changing stuff. The butter wouldn't mix properly.

The recipe asked for room-temperature butter. Right now, room temperature is around18 degrees C. In science," room temperature" is around 20 to 25 degrees C. The butter was hard, and hard to mix. So I ended up adding more milk than the recipe called for.

I also ended up adding less flour, because the dough was extremely dry.

So I give you STARFISH! [or any other shape, really]. - 38 to 40 crackers!!!

Ingredients:

1. 1 stick of butter [half a cup]

2. 4 tbsp low-fat milk [or whole milk]

3. 2 cups of shredded cheese. Don't worry, it'll break into smaller pieces! :) I used a 4-cheese blend.

4. 1 cup of whole wheat unbleached awesome flour plus 4 to 8 heaped tsps

5. 0.5 tsp baking powder [I think I used around 0.8 tsp, though.]

6. A bit of salt and/or pepper.

7. A lot of herbs. I used dried oregano and thyme.

Method

1. Mix butter, milk, cheese, salt, herbs. The butter will be lumpy.

2. Add in one cup of flour and the baking powder. Mix for about 20 minutes. [Or, if you're gifted at mixing, unlike me, fewer than 20 minutes].

3. Keep adding flour by the tsp [I think I used around 8 tsp] until it easily forms a ball that isn't stick. At this point, you may use your hands to knead it. It should be pretty dense, not sticky, and easily rollable without having to flour the cutting board [I rolled out the dough onto a wooden cutting board. A floured surface should not be necessary].

4. Depending on how crispy/crunchy/soft you want these crackers to be, roll out the dough. Some of my crackers are thin and have the texture of Wheat-Thins, and others look like snickerdoodles [but taste like cheese puffs...].

5. For those without ovens, microwave for 30 seconds on one side and 30 seconds again after flipping. The taste is about the same as the baked version, although the baked version has semi-burned corners [which I like]. I made 38 starfish and 3 microwaved crackers. I suppose I could've made 40 starfish in total, but I really had to try microwaving them, to see how they'd turn out [for when I have to cook in college].

Alternatively, bake them at 350 degrees F for 10 minutes on the bottom rack, and leave them there until a fork poked in comes out clean. You can also bake at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes, but if you can all your pans onto the bottom rack [which I can't], 10 minutes of baking saves more energy than 15 minutes. You can put them really closely together, since they do not poof out or expand much.

Enjoy!!!