Chocolate Star Cakes!

I sort of followed my Victoria sandwich cake recipe but also sort of made up my own ratios of ingredients because I wanted to use up the orange juice (~0.5 L left now--last night my brother and I had orange juice with seltzer water. It was pretty neat).

I could actually make a Swiss roll with this sheet of cake, but I figured stars would be more photogenic. I've just proven to myself that my cookie pan can double as a cake pan...

INGREDIENTS (2 20-cm rounds, or 1 huge cookie pan)

200-250 g caster/granulated sugar (your choice)

250 g unsalted butter - keep the butter wrappers!!

2 eggs

120 ml orange juice

>50 g unsweetened cocoa powder

150 g self-raising white flour

50 g whole-wheat flour

2 tsp baking soda

I initially added the orange juice to make an orange flavoured cake. However, I should either grate in some orange rinds, or just not use any cocoa powder because the chocolate makes the orange flavour barely noticeable. However, the orange juice and the baking soda react (acid/base) extremely neatly, to create this super moist and crumbly cake!

 METHOD
1. Cream sugar and butter.
2. Beat eggs, add eggs to creamed sugar/butter and stir. Add in orange juice. You will have something resembling puke (but yellow). It is COMPLETELY OKAY if there are lumps of butter in the batter.
3. Sift in cocoa powder and half of the flour. FOLD! (figure 8).  This will not look pretty.
4. Sift in the rest of the flour and the baking soda. Fold a little more!
5. Pour onto a pan greased with the butter wrapper.
6. Spread evenly.
7. Bake for 16-18 minutes on the bottom rack of an oven at 350 F or 180 C. Let sit in oven for 10 minutes. Then, open oven, poke a fork into the center, and see if it comes out clean. If it does, it's/you're all set!
8. Cut into shapes with a cookie cutter or just eat it. It turns out that cutting cake with a cookie cutter leaves loads of crumbs.

Ma Lai Gao (马来糕) (Malay Cake)

My mum used to/still does buy these cute round little yellow (not natural cake-type yellow. I mean Spongebob-style yellow) cakes from the freezer section of Kamman, the Asian food store. They're called ma[3] lai[2] gao[1] (马来糕). It literally means "Malaysian cake", and for a cake so small, I wonder how it's so succulent (yes, out of all words, I believe that "succulent" is the most accurate adjective). All you have to do is stick them in a microwave for a few seconds, and they end up so spongy and chewy and pillowy.

When browsing through food blogs, I found a recipe for ma lai gao, and I tried it out today. Since I didn't have white flour with me, I used 100% whole wheat flour (whoo!). Evidently, it didn't end up looking Spongebob-yellow. It didn't taste much like the store-bought one either. It was much more buttery and had irregular air bubbles. The store-bought version had perfectly uniform batter, and has a really distinct taste that I couldn't replicate in this version.

This version is still amazing though, but I really wish that I could copy the store-bought version instead, even though I think it used shortening and other random stuff (I'll check next time). The whole point of making the ma lai gao from scratch was so that we'd never have to buy plastic-covered, made-six-months-ago ma lai gao from Kamman anymore!

Unfortunately, since I'm now back in Philadelphia, I won't have access to a steamer, brown sugar, or my tasters (my brother and sister, since they're the ones who eat the ma lai gao), so I guess I'll have to wait until August.

However, this is the quest I've been waiting for! I'm gonna replicate the store-bought ma lai gao!

Do Twinkies Really Need More Embellishment?

Oh look. Tiramisu. I mean, Twinkie-misu. I mean, crap on fat. Actually, I'm not even sure what it's supposed to be. And... there's an ingredient and method list. Which is longer than this post. How difficult is it to unwrap a Twinkie and slosh it into a bowl of cream?

And... for those who want to marry Twinkies; this is the perfect wedding cake. It's even pre-cut! And, you don't have to buy Thank You gifts, since all your guests are going to die of heart attacks from Twinkie-immersed-in-sugar-and-butter-and-food-colouring!

Please tell me that this book is just a hallucination. I don't actually see a "cookbook" for this thing called a "Twinkie" right? SAY IT ISN'T SO!... This is plain absurd.

Okay, I've never consumed a Twinkie before, so, perhaps they are the most delicious little pieces of gold ever. Truthfully, though, judging by the ingredients and the fact that I like chocolate cake with mousse more than "flavoured sponge filled with oily cream", I probably won't have a predilection for it, anyway.

Also, since April, Costoc has been stocking Veggie Crunchers, which I talked about way back, when my mum bought the exact thing from Kamman. Though, this version is marketed for the U.S. crowd, I'm guessing, and the wrapper is a tad different. The ingredients are the same, though. I was pretty surprised when I saw these at Costco.

And I suppose you've all noticed that my blog has recently been quite devoid of actual items that I've cooked... I've just been really occupied... There are four placement tests [Biology, Chemistry, Calculus, and French] that I need to study for, for college. I also recently have had some time consuming circumstances concerning a certain someone [It's a good thing.] Sorry guys, though, for now.