More Books to Think of

Really tempted to buy these 2 books from Amazon. Chocolate Epiphany: Exceptional Cookies, Cakes, and Confections for Everyone by Francois Payard is a recently published book. The review from Amazon makes it sound like a really nice book to buy. I wanted to wait till the book is available for loan from the National Library to have a look before deciding if it was worthwhile buying but just how long do I have to wait? And the other tempting reason for buying online is the thrill of looking forward to the arrival of the books at your doorstep.

I am also contemplating about getting a pastry mat to roll my cookie dough, bread dough and puff pastry dough on. As there is limited work area in my kitchen, I usually had to prepare my bakes at the dining table. Having a pastry mat would be good for rolling doughs but a silicon pastry mat cost $36. I am just not sure, or should I just stick with buying bigger pieces of greaseproof paper to work on.

Steamed Moist Chocolate Cake

This was my masterpiece for Sunday. Steamed Chocolate Cake with a nice chocolate fudge topping. This cake is not only easy to make, meaning you don't have to beat butter or eggs and you don't even need an oven to bake it. This cake is cooked through steaming it over simmer water for 45mins. The cake is quite soft and the chocolate fudge complements the cake totally.

For those interested, do try it. The recipe can be found here. http://saucingaround.blogspot.com/2008/10/steamed-moist-chocolate-cake.html

Sandwich Loaf

Did this on Saturday, made 3 quantities of sandwich loaf recipe which I was quite pleased with. I was not happy with the result of the bread that I baked 2 weekends agao. I tried preparing the dough the night before and kept it in the fridge. However, I have forgotten to reduce the quantity of yeast for the recipe. As a result the bread had a yeasty smell and turned yellowish after it was baked. Overferment I guess. This round, the bread turned out good, and tasted very nice when it just came out of the oven. However, due to the lack of preservatives or bread improver, the bread only stayed fresh for 2 days. After that, it turned quite dry and stale.

Initially I bought an additional bread loaf tin from KL thinking that it would be nice to be able to bake 3 loafs of bread at one go. But after last Saturday, I really got to admit that I am not a bread person. I hate the hours of long wait just to be able to bake the bread. The bread goes into 2 rounds of fermentation and it takes like 3hrs before the bread can be baked. To me, this 3hrs is like forever as I constantly peer at the dough to see how big it has grown. After some thoughts, I decided to sell my third bread tin away to a bread making lover.

I will still continue to bake bread once in a while, but I don't think I will be baking them as often as I would bake cakes and cookies. The long wait kills ...............

Apple Crumble

This is a 10" square Apple crumble requested by a friend the weekend before Deepavali. Baked this the night before I departed to KL for a 3 day short trip with my family. My friend asked if it needed to be heated up before consumption and I told her that I personally like it cold.

The following week when I met her, she told me that her daughter agreed and said that I was right that the apple crumble tasted better when it is cold. The part that I cannot help laughing was that the daughter only ate the apple crumble cold so how did she know that it was true that it tasted better cold and not at other temperatures. Well as they always say - 'Kids say the darnest things!'

White Chocolate Balls

Yummy Chocolate Balls made from some left over brownies that I kept frozen for a while. Mixed it with granche and coated with white chocolate. When I first took a bite into this, I felt that it was very sweet, but when I tried one more another day, it tasted ok. The white chocolate hardened giving it a nice crunch when you bite into it.

As for the left over egg whites from the baking of the Kuey Lapis, they disappeared from the fridge and I realised my mother-in-law used it to make steam pork with salted egg. Oh well, there goes the biscottis.