Dorayaki

The last time I had dorayaki was some point 4 or 5 years ago, from Maxim's Bakery in Hong Kong. It was something like $4.50 or $5.50 HKD for a big red bean or peanut butter filled dorayaki. So, you can imagine my excitement before trying these mini chocolate dorayaki! For those who don't know, dorayaki is a Japanese pancake thing; there are two cakey, moist pancakes, with red bean paste (or something else) sandwiched in the middle. Doraemon loves dorayaki. I don' really have an emotional attachment to them, though.

The name of the brand is "very cute", which is kinda ... well, cutesy.

Unfortunately, this dorayaki was too crumbly and dry. The filling tasted nothing like chocolate; instead, it tasted of red bean paste (which is still good, though).

New Year Party!

First post of 2011! I will now post about my "birthday party" on the 31st of December 2010. It's actually not my birthday on the last day of the year [but I do know someone who is born on that day!], but the idea was that I meet up with my friends from high school and celebrate my birthday which is around this time of year. The funny thing is that my mum actually let my friends stay overnight. The sad part is that 80% of the people I invited couldn't come due to another party or travelling. So, my brother invited his friends [and they took the TV to play games], and my mum invited her friends, so we ended up with a group of around 20 people. I also made a birthday cake, since I didn't want to buy a cake that had icky stuff in it. The cake I made included whole wheat flour and balsamic vinegar.

This layer of cake actually turned out alright [I was using a brownie recipe, so it's a bit flat and dense], but the first two layers were way too thin; when they were piled together they looked shorter than a pie. Or a fruit tart.

Orange glaze - 3 tablespoons of orange juice, 1 tablespoon of milk, and 1 cup of sugar! The glaze only had a hint of orange when it was dry, though.

See how flat the first batch came out?

A very coarsely-ground recipe for this cake [if you want 1-2cm-thick brownies that fit two 9.5 inch pans]

Ingredients:

2 cups of whole wheat flour

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of milk

1 cup of oil

1 cup of cocoa powder

3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar

1.5 tsp baking soda [want it poofier? add 1-2tsp baking soda]

some salt

Method: Mix and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees F. Add more time if you want to.

First layer=blackberry jam

Second layer=marshmallows [Should've gotten marshmallow fluff, which doesn't have gelatin, but I didn't realise that I was going to be making a four-layer cake].

Third layer=peanut butter icing!

And... the cake! I have more pictures but I'm not uploading those because I do not want people to know my real name.

[The best] Sprinkles [in the world]! They're just like the ones from Australia - the Hundreds and Thousands that my mum used to put on honey bananas [except that these are only pink, green, and white, instead of rainbow-coloured].

So there were other foods, and I took pictures of them too, but this is one that I want to commemorate. This was brought by HM's family, and HM is my sister's friend. It's primarily composed of glutinous rice spotted with quartered jujubes [red dates]. Enclosed in the chewy, sticky layers is a mound of warm red bean paste. Curly swirls of orange and lime rind gently garnish the outside of the hemispherical [or parabolic... Actually, perhaps more parabolic, since bowls are generally more parabolically shaped] dessert.

Everyone said that the cake was nice, but they could've just been saying that because they knew that I had baked it. Apparently, one of the kids had been eyeing it for a long time before my mum realised that the kid wanted cake. The kid's mum told me that it tasted "fresh" and "rich", which are nice compliments! Another comment includes the "It's good". My sister, who had helped me with it, of course was scarfing down cake and burping out compliments.

We later watched some Harry Potter upstairs because my brother and his friends were still playing games on the TV downstairs, and then we watched the ball drop, which was seriously anti-climatic [as it is, every year].

We finished Harry Potter, and BV and I watched some Snoopy [yes, Snoopy and Harry Potter are awesome!]. It was a great birthday-partyesque-dinner-type-thing.

Sesame Chocolate Cookies!

In the book Chocolate by Nick Malgieri, I found a recipe for almond chocolate cookies on page 179. Actually, they're called "Sicilian Easter Hearts", although after my tweaking, they are official not such an object. I also didn't bake the cookies. I just microwaved them.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups of flour and cocoa powder. Use whatever ratio you want.

1 cup of ground sesame - We happen to have ground sesame [a.k.a. sesame flour?] at home. You may have ground almonds.

Ginger powder

0.5 cups of honey

0.5 tbsp baking soda

Some sugar and/or instant coffee powder. Just 'cuz.

Water

So, you just mix everything except the water. Then, add water at about a tablespoon at a time until you get something that resembles dough. This dough must be really dry, but it also has to be malleable. In other words, you can roll balls of it in your hands without it crumbling. If it gets too sticky, too bad, you're out of luck :P.

I stuck mine in the fridge for easy slicing. Then, I sliced three of them [small pieces] and microwaved it for 30 seconds. Seeing that it was still a tad gooey, I microwaved it again for 20 seconds. This time, two of the cookies turned out fantastic, but the third one was a bit too hard in the middle. Either way, this is way more efficient than actually baking the cookies. I'm not sure how many these yield, since I have the rest of the log in the fridge, but the book says that it "makes about 15 large cookies".

Although eating this raw had the same texture as... say, almond paste, I think I prefer it cooked. I prefer it cookied. Haha. It's a bit too dry. So, after microwaving, I prodded them, and they were really poofy and looked like mini pastries, even though they were technically "low fat" [technically, there is a ton of fat in sesame and cocoa powder. However, the fat in those substances pales in comparison to the % of fat in oil or butter or cream cheese, which is basically 100%]. They even tasted like some sorta cakey-cookie thing! The cookie above was really moist in the middle, as you can see. I couldn't really taste much cocoa powder, due to the fact that there was three times as much ground sesame as there was cocoa powder... so I think this leans towards the more "exotic" and "non-traditional" flavourings of cookies, which is cool. I couldn't taste much ginger spice though :(, which is a bit of a letdown. Guess I'll add more next time. I think I'm going to experiment with the microwave a lot more now... since I have proven that it does NOT produce inferior cookies. I mean, the past few years, the microwave has yielded disasters concerning cookies... but this was a nice change.

Spaghetti and a Broken Mug.

I was just about to update when I decided that I would go get my Pink Panther mug and microwave some gingerbread batter. The mug somehow slipped as I was picking it up from inside another bowl, and fell about 10 cm smashing on to the countertop.

Apparently, there had been a lot of oil in the bowl, which inevitably coated my mug. I guess I didn't pick it up properly... I don't recall ever dropping a mug before this one.

So. Now, there are four major pieces left of my mug. You've all seen the mug before in previous posts; it's one of the regular vessels for anything microwaved. It's large enough to use as a bowl. I had breakfast using it today! :(

I ended up microwaving some gingerbread batter with a piece of it anyway. More about that later. I'm wondering what I'm supposed to do with this mug... though my mum is throwing it away tonight. :'(

On the other hand, my actual post today is about what I made for lunch. Spaghetti. Thin whole wheat spaghetti is really yummy, just plain [and a tad undercooked. I love undercooked spaghetti!!]. But, I made a sauce anyway...

Ingredients:

Drained spaghetti water

3-4 HEAPED tbsp tomato paste [PASTE. Not sauce.]

Dried oregano

2-4 tbsp white vinegar

1/4 of an onion

Two mashed up veggie burger patties [I got sick of Boca burgers so I'm trying to use up what I have left before I go to college]

NO SALT.

Garlic

Method: Stick everything in the pot [the water should still be around 100 degrees C] and let it simmer for a while. Then, pour it on the spaghetti, and consume.

YAY for basic! R.I.P. my mug.