SUCCESS! Lemon Curd!

I made lemon curd and it didn't fail like last time (A sour experience that I would like to pretend did not exist)!! I followed the recipe from The Really Good Life, a blog I found today when I was searching for "savoury food". I might have mentioned this before, but I've been preferring savoury food over sweet food for the past semester. Though, I suppose I'm (almost) always in the mood for lemon curd!! :D

Her site is pretty neat, by the way.

Since I had 75 g of butter, I made less lemon curd, which is alright because I don't want to have leftover lemon curd when I leave for Penn again (because if/when I come back during Spring break, it will still be in the fridge). So, nearly direct from The Really Good Life, scaled down, with my own verbose comments (for my own future reference, so I won't worry about the ratios being incorrect/stuff not thickening):

Makes about...800 g

2 lemons
2 eggs
75 g butter cut into smallish chunks
120 g sugar
2-3 tsp cornflour aka cornstarch
vanilla

1. Grate off lemon peel. Highly difficult for me because my grater is quite blunt.
2. Squeeze juice!! Mix sugar and vanilla with the juice! It's fine if the sugar doesn't dissolve.
3. Stick eggs in a saucepan and mix eggs with a spoon (I lack a whisk...) or fork, and add in butter.

4. I was really cautious and had everything on low heat. I vigorously mixed the egg/butter mixture on low heat for about a minute, and saw that the butter had started to melt slightly, so I took the pan off the heat, and poured in the lemon/sugar/vanilla mixture. I kept stirring vigorously, and added 1 tsp of cornflour. Then I put the pan back on the stove on LOW heat and kept stirring.
5. Two minutes later (still vigorously stirring because I was so scared that the eggs were going to become scrambled), the mixture was still thin, like the consistency of milk. So I threw in another tsp of cornflour, cranked up the heat to MEDIUM and kept stirring.
6. Two minutes later, the mixture was still the consistency of milk! I threw in another tsp of cornflour, and wondered whether this would be a good rice topping as opposed to actual lemon curd.
7. By then, I was stirring once every 5 seconds (as opposed to 5 stirs/second).
8. SUDDENLY, THE MILK-THIN LIQUID STARTED TO THICKEN! I increased my stirring speed to 2 stirs/second, and the liquid became the consistency of ketchup, and then applesauce, and then light pancake batter. I turned off the heat and stirred for another 5 minutes or so (when I took these pictures).

9. Pour into jars. Cool. Refrigerate. Consume within 2 days (not necessarily, but that's what happens because I love food...)

IT THICKENED! IT'S SWEET! IT'S SOUR! IT'S CURD!! IT CURDLED! IT'S SPREADABLE! I CAN HOLD A JAR OF IT UPSIDE DOWN AND IT WON'T PLOP DOWN! YAY!!

Not on my non-existent list of New Year Resolutions, but lemon curd is a pretty sweet ending to 2011. Have a meaningful 2012, dear readers (the 0 to 2 of you).

Fairy Cakes

As a reward for being less of a whining brat than usual (she's "only" cried twice in the past 12 hours!), I taught my sister how to make fairy cakes. Basic fairy cakes, without creative fillings.

I got a... mini fairy cake recipe here but I modified it tolerate a stick of butter. I ended up with 10 really buttery fairy cakes, though I did make them in egg tart containers so they were slightly bigger than the conventional fairy cake. And, yes, fairy cakes are essentially cupcakes but the phrase "fairy cakes" sounds better.

My sister followed the recipe, weighed out ingredients (with my help), mixed everything (with my help), and went to read when I stuck everything in/out of the oven.

If an 8 year old can do it, you can. Don't ever revert back to those putrid cake mixes!!

To me, the recipe looks like it's for pound cake.

INGREDIENTS FOR 10-12 FAIRY CAKES
120 g butter
120 g caster sugar
2 eggs
vanilla
120 g self raising flour
METHOD

0. Let butter sit outside fridge for a (few) hours.
1. Cream butter and sugar.
2. Beat in eggs and add vanilla.
3. Fold in flour and drop a huge tablespoon into a paper case.
4. Bake at 177 degrees C/350 degrees F in an un-preheated oven, on the second-top shelf, for 22 minutes. I usually use the bottom shelf but today I had potato bread baking down there. The bottom shelf calls for less cooking time, obviously.

5. The top of the cakes should be cooked and a fork stuck into cake should come out with no crumbs or goop. (The fork test always prevails!!) The cakes may look a bit soft and gooey when you take them out, but once they cool, they harden a little but still remain moist (due to the butter).

Usually I'd be done now, but my sister wanted to put icing on four fairy cakes so she made the despicable butter-sugar mixture (with my help).

I made 1/4 of the icing recipe listed here, which was enough to liberally ice 5 fairy cakes.

So, my sister loved the cake. Obviously.

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).

Pancakes!

I found someone selling a pancake maker for $1 on Craigslist last month in Center City. I lugged that pancake maker from 13th St. all the way back to my apartment. Last Saturday, I dragged the pancake maker all the way back to NJ.

I don't need a pancake maker, obviously. I don't care if my pancakes are rectangular or cloud-shaped, or if they're a tad burnt. I just figured that $1 is a nice price to pay for a non-stick electric saucepan with 4 circular compartments. In college, I can now fry eggs, make pan pizzas, create grilled cheese sandwiches and heat up cookies, all in my room! Which will be very nice.

At the urging of my sister, I made pancakes today. I was going to follow this recipe completely, because I do want to try Drop Scones. Unfortunately, my brother had finished the milk last night. So, here's the modified recipe that worked out alright and yielded dry pancakes. Next time, I will definitely follow the above recipe, but since I appeased my sister, all is well.

Ingredients - 20 pancakes
250 g self raising flour (it has salt included)
25 g sugar
4 eggs
170 g raspberry yoghurt (which includes 26 g sugar)
30 g water
25 g melted butter
vanilla (to appease my sister)
frozen blueberries (to appease my brother)

Look at how pointy the tip of this egg is!

Method
1. Sift dry ingredients.
2. Melt butter and add all wet ingredients.

3. Scoop 1.5 tbsp (2 tbsp is okay. 3 is tolerable.) of batter onto pancake maker and let it cook until it poofs up and looks cooked. This takes about a minute.

Things I'm going to have to change next time to make myself happy:

1. Use 200 ml (whole?) milk, of course, instead of the yoghurt-that-no-one-eats-but-my-mum-buys-it-anyway-due-to-advertising-and-familiarity.

2. No vanilla or blueberries. I want to make perfect plain pancakes before I start with the flavourings.

3. Don't melt the butter. Cut the butter in. I really don't like melting butter. The smell is putrid, it looks like adipose tissue, and I might as well use oil if I want to melt butter! I guess it's just preference.

4. Use less sugar and less butter

5. No water.

Late July Vanilla Bean and Green Tea Sandwich Cookies

I'm going to admit it; I was highly swayed by advertising. The phrase "Green Tea" caught my eye, and I believed that for once, I could buy a green tea flavoured cookie from a non-specialty store!

I was so upset when I realised that these sandwich cookies do not taste like green tea. Green tea is actually the last ingredient on the list. In fact, if it weren't for the placebo effect [after chewing on the cookie for simply ages and thinking, oh! Perhaps that bitter note was the green tea!], I would honestly just say that they are normal sandwich cookies.

Compared to Oreos, however, they are much more flavourful. The cookies are crunchier, more chocolately, and more crumbly textured [instead of the uniform texture of Oreos]. The vanilla filling isn't that waxy, actually tastes vanilla-ful, is less sweet, and really melts well in my mouth. It has dimension, unlike the Oreo cookie filling.

Of course, I may be swayed [yet again] by the fact that these are organic and reputedly made by one family [although how they get each cookie to look perfect with the indents and stuff is beyond a "one family operation", in my opinion, and as the website states that this is all cooked up by one mother, she should understand that other mothers/people in general don't like spending 2x the amount of money to buy something that is already unhealthy. Except for the mental-chillness of eating cookies, they are physically not really healthy, no matter what people say.

Chocolate Chip Cake-Cookie Puffs!

I thought that it was a good idea to make a Victoria Sandwich cake. I weighed the sugar and butter and flour according to a recipe that I used around 7 years ago in Food Tech class, and I started mixing...

And then I realised that this was NOT going to work out because

1. The "batter" was the consistency of cookie dough.

2. The butter was globby.

3. The "batter" was brown, not yellowy-creamy-white, because I had used whole wheat flour instead of bleached flour.

4. I didn't have an electric whisk.

I'm not really sure why the batter worked out right 7 years ago, but completely failed when I tried to make it again. The method said to add the butter into the flour and sugar, rather than cream the butter and sugar first, which is what I'd usually expect to do.

So I added 3/4 cups of milk and then realised that the globby, pungent butter [Okay, the butter wasn't pungent, but I've decided that I don't like the smell of butter by itself. It needs to be creamed with sugar to smell good] was not going to somehow melt and homogenise into the mixture. I did not take a picture of it because it was terribly ugly.

So I added another 250 grams of flour... and make chocolate chip cake-cookie puffs!

It doesn't look like the dough is airy and not-dense, but it actually is. When you poke it, it should feels soft, and a hole should be easily made.

[Note the usage of my pie pan from "Santa"!!]

They aren't that sweet, which is good.

Ingredients for 45 cookie puffs:

1. 400g 100% whole wheat flour, or basically enough to make a dough that you can mould into balls with your hands - just keep adding flour by the tablespoon

2. 150g butter [about 1.5 sticks]

3. 3/4 cup milk

4. 3 eggs

5. 170g sugar

6. vanilla and chocolate chips, however much you want!

7. 1 tbsp baking soda

8. 1 tsp baking powder

9. Numbers 7. and 8. aren't that well tested out. Straight after baking, I could taste the baking soda, but after letting the cookies sit for two days, the taste of the baking soda is... gone...

Method:

1. [Don't do what I did, and mix the flour with the the butter...] Cream butter with sugar, and add eggs and vanilla. Add milk.

2. Add flour by the tablespoon.

3. Use hands to roll a dough. The dough SHOULD NOT STICK to the hands. Sift dough if you feel like it.

4. Add baking soda and baking powder.

5. The dough should be light, airy, NOT DENSELY PACKED, gooey, and feel plasticky.

6. Add however many chocolate chips you want.

7. Make balls the size of meatballs, maybe with a 3cm diameter.

8. Bake [see below]

I baked two batches. The first one was on the middle rack at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes.

The second batch was on the bottom rack at 360 degrees F for 6 minutes, and then left in the oven for ~10 minutes.

They should be done when a fork stuck inside the centre of the cookie comes out clean. They will appear soft when taken out of the oven, but they harden.

Both batches turned out basically the same...The cookies do not spread in the oven. In other words, you can make them into any shape you'd like.

The image above includes both the first batch and the second batch... and they look the same. They also taste the same; cakey, airy, dry-ish, not bland, textured [due to the whole wheat flour] and not too sweet. They don't taste greasy or rich or saturated with chocolate chips. Actually, maybe they're more muffin-y than cakey. You decide.

My mother likes them. She thinks that they look like meatballs! They are quite 3D, due to the baking powder and baking soda, of course. These can totally be cakes...except that they don't require a cake pan or paper baking cups.

So, how are my baking skills? I can turn a failed cake recipe into a cookie recipe... I guess that shows that I'm not a complete neophyte, right?

And now to actually make a Victoria sandwich cake...

Chocolate Shell Ice Cream

I think that this was the first time in my life in which I tried a hard shell coating ice cream. Once, when I used to go to Mc.D, I ordered a sundae, and the guy gave me one of these instead... and I told him, no, I wanted a chocolate sundae. So he promptly dumped the ice cream into the bin and made a sundae for me.

I wish he had just given me the chocolate coated ice cream... that would've been cool...

Anyway, in March, I tried the chocolate-shell ice cream for the first time in my life... and as you can see above, one end of it was smooshed, due to the fact that it arrived in a box from Carvel [my sister's friend's parents own a Carvel]. I saw the mum today at the library, actually, which is why I thought about blogging about this [I've not only lacked the chance to blog about this, but also haven't eaten anything of note today to blog about, so this is a suitable time to talk about this ice cream].

I imagined that the chocolate coating would taste waxy or oily, due to my belief that there are tons of random emulsifiers and additives in order to make the chocolate have a low melting point, but also a low freezing point. Actually, while I was at Carvel, I made a bunch of these... you basically make a vanilla soft serve, dunk it in the melted chocolate [or cherry] sauce AT AN ANGLE for 3 seconds, and gently pull it out and let it stand there for a while. The shell forms FAST. I unfortunately lost an ice cream through this procedure, but I think I made.... around 10 of them? I never cared to try one, though.

So, taste-wise... the chocolate actually tasted sweet, like chocolate. It wasn't waxy. It wasn't bland. It wasn't very chocolatey, either, but actually sort of tasted like a less creamy version of fudge. Maybe chocolate plastic would be a good description of it.

The vanilla ice cream... is just vanilla ice cream. Eh. And, the cone was just a sugar cone with PHO but oh well.

Ice Cream Cakes.

My sister's friend's parents [which, in other words, are my parents' friends, which, in other words, are my acquaintances and/or friends] own an ice cream store. They own the Carvel on Main Street in Madison. I did mention them before, when I had the chance of actually making stuff at the store for fun!!!!
Anyway, over the past two years, they've been giving us ice cream cakes for the usual American holidays. It's pretty cool, literally, for my sister because she adores vanilla ice cream. I personally am not as huge an ice cream fan as I am a cookie/cake/baked stuff/bread fan. So, it's awesome, yes, but not as amazing as if I got free baguettes every few months.
They gave me a graduation ice cream cake, though, so that was cool! I cut off my name, though, since there are the issues of spammers and stalkers and idiots who use the internet to my disadvantage, if I were to release my name to the world. So, in reality the cake looks better :)

And, the past.


Look at that texture! It's actually whipped cream.
Fudge topping. I approve. Usually, it's just a layer of vanilla and chocolate, with chocolate cookie/cone crumbs in between. Along with PHOs but I suppose these are sentimental exceptions, not that I consume much ice cream cake...

The past two weeks.

Yes, I know I haven't updated in so long.
All that homework... and I've been sleeping at 9pm for the past week because I've been really tired, and my track times are getting progressively worse. I might have exercise induced asthma; I'm not sure. Well, things that have happened lately... my sister's birthday, Chipotle!
Okay here:
Crispy clear.



I have to make a point here. My brother cut the cake from Costco before taking a picture of it. YOU DO NOT cut the cake before taking a picture!! And the cake... hm... I liked the strawberry mousse but I'm avoiding [yes we still have it, two weeks later - come on, it lasts THAT long because of the preservatives] because of the HFCS and PHO.


MY CAKE!!!!! I spent two and a half hours [from 10 to 12:30] making it, while Niffy was sleeping. The vanilla layer kinda screwed up, but it was. Extremely. Moist. Better that the chocolate layer, anyway. I used a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar in it, because the recipe said so. I can't really tell if it made a difference, but you could NOT detect any vinegar-ness in it. The icing... Well, it was melted chocolate icing in the middle, then peanut butter icing on top, and vanilla butter+sugar icing on the sides. The Nifster loves icing.




Those are fork-marks, checkin for done-ness.