Happy Cooking in 幸福小窝

This is going to be a long post, documenting the pictures of the food I've cooked in my new house since the day I moved in.  Pardon for the poor iphone camera - taken photos, without any recipes.  In terms of cooking, I'm still not good enough to post any recipes.  Most of them were based on my intuition or some basic cooking experiences / dishes I'd learnt from my mum.  In fact, some dishes were prepared with me calling my mum for help!

I created a photo album in my facebook, naimg it "Happy Cooking in 幸福小窝", loading all these photos of food I cooked but never had any chance to post it here. Friends marvelled at my dishes but there was nothing to marvel about because some could just barely made it to the dining table so long as my hubby is not too fussy about the dishes I cooked. At times, I would also cook too large a portion that ended us too full to speak while there were times the portion were too small that we had to look for tibits after dinner!

Hope that the list in this album will look and taste better and better!

My very first dish made here. Just a simple bee hoon soup with veggies, fishball and frozen packed dumplings.

Pandan agar agar

This is an all-in-one stew of lean prok, potatoes, carrots and french beans. One pot of this dish is enough to go with steam white rice. Simple meal just for my hubby and I. :)

Seafood baked rice.

I baked these sweet potato in the Happycall Pan. :)

One of my usual baked. Banana crumble muffin made during of the Chinese New Year gathering.

Haha, my hubby made this with my supervision. All using Happycall Pan. It's one of my birthday dinner. :)

Stir-fried black pepper pork using a pre-packaged black pepper sauce. I like buying frozen pork that comes packed in diffierent cuttings of the meat, lean pork, pork ribs, pork chop, etc. They are easy to defrost as they were packed and frozen in small portions and very fresh.



Simple stir-fried broccoli

Hearty breakfast that my hubby like. But it's too unhealthy and I'd only made once so far.

Puff pastry wrapped with fish. I learnt from The Little Teochew that it's called Fish En Croute.

Chinese Old Cucumber soup. Trying very hard to cook up the flavour that my mother-in-law cooks. :)

One of those occasional lazy weekday dinner. Korean instant noodle.

Baked mash potato with tuna

Meatball pasta using leftover meatballs from Ikea

Oven-baked fries


WoooH! That's about it all. I didn't include the baked items since I would like to include recipes for most of them. I do cook less on weekdays now because am really tired after work and usually when dinner starts, it's already 830pm, which my hubby and I would be too hungry to even judge how well I have cooked! :P

Double Soft Bread Revisited

After more one year, I finally can bake bread again. :) The bread machine died down last year and without it, I was no longer able to have the luxury of time to knead a bread, and bake a bread.  With my newly acquired Kitchenaid of 6 months old, but only used it for less than 10 times, or perhaps less than 6 times, I must put it to a good use.

I'm so happy to be again smelling the aroma of freshly baked bread in the comfort of my home. With the available ingredients, i.e. some leftover whipping cream, I chosed this recipe which I'd done when I was still new to bread making. This double bread never failed me even though I was new and did not have any proper loaf tin or bread machine at that time. While I had the help of my kitchenaid to do the kneading, the sticky dough made shaping a rather tedious task. I didn't manage to shape it into a nice smooth dough but it still rose beautifully and its wrinkled texture actually didn't affect the outcome at all.

I wanted to make a square loaf but during the final proofing, the bread dough rose over the brim of the loaf tin, that I made do with a traditional loaf! That's what traditional loaf used to look like, ain't it? :)

I love the tall loaf!

The uneveness in the three shaped dough!

This bread is called the double soft bread, first found in a Chinese blog - Warm  & Sweet Home.  To get the recipe, please link it to my previous post. ;) I didn't make any changes to the original recipe though if you read the comments in the previous post, it was said that this recipe yields good result with 50% bread flour and 50% plain flour.

My New Home

It's another 2 months + since my last posting and sometimes, I really thought of giving up this blog since I hardly have time to update it, and probably no one reads it now. But one thing that is for sure is that, I have never forget all the food bloggers out there whom I have been following for the past few years.  I may be silent, but that doesn't mean I lost all my past passion, just the fact that committments have changed so lesser time is devoted to blogging or posting a comment. I believe this is true for all food bloggers or those who have stopped blogging. Once the passion for baking / cooking is found in you, it will never stop.

So I decided that anytime I feel like updating my blog, I would just do it!

This post is all about my new home.. which is a really outdated post as I've already moved in for 3 months++.  I've cooked more than I baked in this new kitchen and loving every moment and every bit of my kitchen. Still a noob in cooking, I'm glad that my hubby is not fussy and eat whatever is my new "experiments".

Another impediment to blogging is that after having used my brother's DSLR camera, I can no longer tolerate the pictures captured by my sony digital point and shoot camera! I know without my sony digital, I won't have mybakingcottage today. :P I'll have to say that the pictures taken by the iphone has a better resolution and produce clearer picture.

I'll just let the pictures bring this short post to an end. I'll try to post more food related postings if I can spare some time like today! :)

 My beloved open-concept kitchen. It's a small kitchen but I love the counter top and so far around my neighbourhood, I've not seen anyone knocking down the kitchen wall and do up this kitchen design. So far not much of a problem with the grease and oil with simple stir-frying. :)

 This is our family's portluck housewarming in Jan. :) I like how the mirror appears as though the food doubled. :)

View from my window. Nothing fantastic, just the playground from my 5th floor unit. :)