Blanc mange

I have a weakness for desserts and this sweet tooth of mine isn't particularly good for my waistline. But who can resist blanc manges? :)

Blanc mange is a sweet dessert commonly made with milk and thickened with cornstarch, set in a mould and served cold. Here, I used custard powder so my blanc mange tasted somewhat like custard. I didn't even need to add colouring because the custard powder gave my dessert a lovely yellow tinge. This was one of my favourite desserts growing up.

Ingredients:
8 oz milk
2 Tsp cornflour
1/2 tsp essence
1 oz sugar

Directions:

1. Blend  cornflour with a little milk. Place remainder of milk to heat.
2. Remove from fire and pour the heated milk over the blended cornflour. Remember to keep on stirring all the time.
3. Return to stove and stir over fire till boiling. Let the mixture boil for 3-5 minutes. Keep on stirring.
4. Add sugar and flavouring (if needed) and pour into wetted moulds.
5. When set, turn out onto a glass dish. Serve cold.

Chicken pizza with mushroom and pineapple toppings

Christmas day dinner with the family resulted in me baking all afternoon. I love cooking for my family and seeing them enjoy the food is extremely satisfactory.

The main on my menu today was pizza. It's one of the easiest one-dish meal to make, you can bake in bulk, and it's yummy comfort food that you can eat for days. Pizza toppings are extremely fun to prepare because it gives the cook the freedom of adding in whatever comes to mind, and the result will always still taste good. I love that I live a very short distance away from Tesco that I can impulsively plan menus and pop in to get my ingredients. And when Tesco runs out of yeast, there's always Cold Storage nearby as a backup plan. 

Ingredients:
The dough:
1/2 cup warm water
1 sachet of active dry yeast
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp oregano
2 cups sifted plain flour

Toppings:
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 yellow onions, diced finely
2 large carrots, diced finely
6 large tomatoes, sliced finely
Portabello mushrooms
1 can sliced pineapples
2 fillets of chicken breast meat, cut into bite sized pieces
1 can tomato puree
Oregano for sprinkling over the pizza
Mozzarella and cheddar cheese mixtures, coarsely grated

Directions:

To prepare the dough:
1. Place warm water in a mixing bowl and add in the yeast, salt, sugar and oregano. Stir to dissolve the yeast.
2. Add one cup of flour and blend all the ingredients together with a spoon or mixer until smooth. Stir in the remaining flour then cover with a clean cloth and allow to rest for 10 minutes.
3. Spread dough evenly with oiled spoon over a pizza tray.

To prepare the toppings:
1. Saute half of the chopped garlic and all the onions in about 5 Tbsp oil till fragrant. Add in the tomato puree.
2. Add in the carrots to the pan and continue sauteing until the carrots are tender. Add in the chicken meat and fry till it's cooked. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Assembling the pizza:
1. Cover each dough with a few tablespoons of puree mixture. Layer with mushroom, sliced tomatoes and pineapples. Sprinkle some chopped garlic, add a dash of oregano over the toppings, and sprinkle loads of cheese over the pizza.
2. Bake in 200C oven for 25 minutes until cheese is bubbly.

Chocolate gingerbread men

Since the Christmas season is fast approaching, what better time than this to be baking some gingerbread army. I'm not a big fan of ginger flavour so I scoured the internet to find a chocolate recipe instead. Unfortunately the outcome wasn't as expected because my cookies cracked so my gingerbread men looked more like 'The Thing' instead lol!

My source for this recipe came from GotChocolate. Not highly recommended because for some reason the cookies don't taste as good as they look. I didn't quite like the cracks in my little men. But anyhow, here's the recipe that I used:

Ingredients:
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2/3 cup sifted cocoa podwer
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2/3 cup vegetable shortening (I kept adding more shortening because the dough was too dry, and even then it didn't really help)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1 large egg
3/4 cup molasses
Red cherries chopped up
2 Tbsp icing sugar to make the white icing.

Directions:

1.Preheat oven to 180C. Grease baking sheets with shortening and set aside.
2. In a large mixing bowl, mix the flour, cocoa powder, ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, salt and baking powder until well mixed. Set aside.
3. In a separate large bowl, cream shortening and brown sugar until smooth fluffy. Beat in egg, then the molasses.
4. Add in prepared flour mixture into the wet mixture. Reduce mixer speed to LOW and beat till crumbly bits of dough forms.
5. Turn dough onto a floured surface and knead just until it forms a smooth mass. I couldn't get this to work because my dough kept cracking because it was too dry. From then on, I kept on adding shortening but unfortunately didn't really help either.
6.Divide into thirds and roll one of the thirds to a rectangle about 1/4 inch thick. Flour the dough and a rolling pin only as needed. Use a gingerbread man cutter to cut out the shapes. Decorate with cut cherry pieces.
7. Bake for about 6-8 minutes until cookies feel dry but still are a little bit soft.
8. Remove from oven and cool completely.
9. Pipe the white icing to create the deco effects.

I was so sleepy at work today and since I didn't have any coffee fix to hyper me up, I turned a little morbid and took pictures of my gingerbread man while nibbling on him. Definitely made me feel much happier after! :p

Chicken pie

Most of the time, I don't plan what to cook and I don't like to wait when I want something done. :) So today while out running errands, I had this 'brilliant' idea to bake mini chicken pies because I remembered that I still had puff pastry in the freezer. I say brilliant because I am super impulsive.Traits of a bad cook, I suppose.

The chicken pie filling is relatively easy to prepare, and it's easier still if you didn't have to make the pastry from scratch. Yeah I'm that lazy, but I'm just trying to simplify some things at hand. Given lots of time, there are plenty of recipes and methods from search engines that teach you how to make flaky crust from scratch. Best of all, the pies can be frozen after baking to be enjoyed at another time so I suppose that will be my dinner one of these days. My ingredients were enough for 20 mini pies.

Ingredients:

5 large potatoes, diced

1 large carrot, diced

1 large yellow onion, diced

1 piece of deboned chicken breast meat, sliced into small bite-sized pieces

Half a clove of garlic, chopped 

1 cup of frozen peas

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1 can of Campbell's mushroom soup

1 box of puff pastry (the one I bought had 40 pieces)

1 egg yolk beaten + some milk (to brush over the pastry)

Directions:

1. Saute the garlic and onions in about 5 Tbsp oil till fragrant.
2. Mix in the potatoes and carrots to the pan and continue sauteing until the potatoes and carrots are tender. Add in a little water while sauteing.
3. Add in the chicken meat into the mixture and fry till it's cooked. Stir in the frozen peas. Add salt and pepper to taste.
4. In a separate pot, cook the mushroom soup as per the directions from the can.
5. Pour the soup into the vegetable mix and let it simmer till the mixture thickens. Remove pot from the stove and let it cool completely. The ready mix should look like thickened clam chowder.

6. Fit in the puff pastry squares into aluminum foil molds. Scoop about 1 1/2 Tbsp mixture into the mold and top with another puff pastry square. Flute the edges of the squares together so that they look nice and pretty.
7. Preheat the oven to 200C. Snip a cross over each individual pie so that the filling is able to expand. Brush the tops of each pie lightly with the beaten egg mixture so that the pies look nice and golden after they are baked. Bake pies for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.
8. Serve immediately.

I served the pies with a cup of hot Lipton tea, and later we had pears and persimmons for dessert. Weird combination I know, but it was indeed a truly delicious meal. And I'm looking forward to defrosting the remaining pies for dinner another night soon.

Orange chiffon cake

It's my parents' 43rd anniversary today and since I'm back home early from a work event, I thought I'd bake an orange chiffon cake since it's a family favourite. It's something that I've been meaning to try out for a long time because we always just buy a cake from Cold Storage when the craving hits. Baking from scratch is really quite an adventure and this recipe from Aunty Edna is a tried-and-proven-working recipe, so says mum. 

Ingredients:

7 egg whites with 1/2 tsp cream of tartar

5 egg yolks

3 oz flour sieved together with 1 1/2 tsp baking powder

5 oz sugar

2 Tbsp orange rind

4 1/2 Tbsp orange juice

4 1/2 Tbsp corn oil

Directions:

1. Mix the flour and sugar into a bowl.
2. Make a well in the centre and stir in the egg yolk, orange juice, rind and corn oil. Stir briskly until batter is smooth.
3. Beat in egg whites until very stiff with cream of tartar.
4. Pour batter into the egg white mixture and fold in gently.
5. Put into ungreased tube tin and bake at 150C for half hour.
6. Invert tin and leave cake till completely cool. Run knife around the edges and bang the cake out of the tin. (Yes, seriously bang). Serve with vanilla ice cream.

Hazelnut, chocolate and orange biscotti

Biscottis are Italian oblong-shaped almond biscuits made long and crunchy, best dunked into coffee.

I attribute my craze of biscotti to MC, who got me started on baking biscottis. Because as he says, once you start munching on them, you find that you won't be able to stop because it is THAT addictive.

So far, I've been baking biscottis almost every other day (third time and counting) and each time I find my biscottis improving. Being the experimental baker that I am, I'm substituting the ingredients with whatever I can source in the pantry and I find that the best concoction consists of hazelnuts, chocolate with a dollop of orange flavouring from the orange peel. 

The recipe that I used is an adaptation from MC's biscotti recipe.

Ingredients: (Yields about 30 biscottis depending on how you cut them up)

2 cups all-purpose flour 

3/4 cups granulated sugar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 large eggs

3 Tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 Tbsp orange zest

1 cup hazelnuts, lightly roasted

A few pieces of cooking chocolate chopped in not too small pieces (I used bitter chocolate)

1/2 cup cranberries (optional - they end up tasting a little like gummy bears in the biscotti which I thought didn't taste too right)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. Combine the flour, sugar, ground cinnamon, baking powder and salt in a bowl of an electric mixer and mix them briefly to combine.

3. Whisk the eggs, oil, vanilla essence and orange zest in a separate bowl.

4. Add the wet ingredients into the flour mixture. Beat on medium speed until combined. This will make a dry, stiff dough.

5. Stir in the chocolate, hazelnuts and cranberries.

6. Divide the dough in half and transfer to baking sheet. Form 2 logs into the length of the baking sheet and flatten to about a 2inch strip. Make sure there is space between the logs because the biscotti will expand a little. Bake till almost firm to the touch, about 30 minutes. Remove from oven and cool.

7. Reduce oven to 150C. Move the cooled logs to a cutting board. Use a serrated knife to cut 3/4inch thick strips. It's better if the strips are even thinner.

8. Place the biscotti slices on baking sheet, with the cut side down. Bake till firm to touch and completely dry, about 10 minutes. Remove from oven and turn them onto the other cut side, bake another 10 minutes.

9. Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack. Store in an airtight container for up to a week.

Raspberry swirl cheesecake

I was in the baking mood tonight and I was looking around for something to bake while walking around Tesco. Stumbled across cream cheese on offer and the first thing that came to mind was a cheesecake.
An adaptation from Martha Stewart's recipe, which was pretty much a success for a first attempt, and cupcakes instead of a full sized one (in order to keep myself from overindulging in them), here's my take on a raspberry swirl cheesecake.
Plus, of course, cupcakes are easier to share with others and I've been very generous with my cakes. It is, after all, the Christmas season of caring and sharing so I'm spreading the joy around.

Ingredients: (Yields 24 cupcakes, but probably less if each cupcake had more cheese filling)
For the crust:
1 cup digestive crumbs
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
2 1/2 Tbsp caster sugar

For the topping:
6 oz. fresh raspberries
2 Tbsp. sugar
Since fresh raspberries were too pricey, I substituted with raspberry jam, diluted with a little hot water.

For the filling:
1 lbs. cream cheese
3/4 cups caster sugar
Pinch of salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 large eggs

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 160C. Line cupcake pans with paper liners.
2. For the base, combine the biscuit crumbs, melted butter and sugar. Stir together until well blended and all  the ingredients are moistened. Press about 1 1/2 Tbsp of the mixture into the bottom of the cupcake liner and bake until just set for 5 minutes. Let the crust cool.
3. For the filling, beat the cream cheese on medium-high speed until fluffy. Blend in the sugar, salt and vanilla, then beat in the eggs one at a time.
Spoon a few tablespoons of the cheesecake batter over the crust. 3 spoonfuls would be good, although I scrimped and put about 1 1/2 only.
4. Dot about one tsp of raspberry puree over the cheesecake filling and use a toothpick to swirl and create the marbled effect.
5. Bake until filling is set for about 25 minutes, rotate the pans halfway through baking. Transfer to a wire cooling rack and let the cakes cool to room temperature.