Basic Vanilla Pound Cake

My mum always loves buttery cakes but I will try to refrain from making it or use a lighter version with lesser butter because of her cholestrol level.


This pound cake was made just before a family gathering so that I could divide and pack it for my brothers and their family individually. I think this is the first time I made a pound cake using the same ratio of flour, sugar and butter. It sounds scary when I see the ratio of butter and sugar used but I believe the key to balacing between health and indulgence is to eat in moderation. It would not do good to your health if you are eating too much of only one kind of a healthy food.

The cake did not turn out as fluffy as I'd prefer and since its the first time I'm making a pound cake, I am not sure if I got it correct, as it was rather dense, but soft nonetheless. It is plain enough for those who love just absolutely plain butter cakes like my mum. I don't think I would make this often but maybe once in a while for my mummy. :)

Vanilla Pound Cake

Ingredients:

150g pastry/cakeflour

1/8 tsp baking powder

150g unsalted butter

150g icing sugar

1/8 tsp salt

3 eggs (about 150g)

1 tsp vanilla extract (priginal recipe uses 1 lemon, grated for its zest)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 170°C.
2. Line cake pan with parchment paper. Sift flour and baking powder together twice.
3. Beat butter, icing sugar and salt together in an electric mixer until light, fluffy and pale. Gradually add eggs and beat well.
4. Add flour and baking powder mixture and fold through completely using a spatula. Surface of the batter should be glossy and smooth.
5. Pour batter into prepared cake pan and make a lengthwise dent in the middle with a spatula. Bake for about 50 minutes.
6. When cake is done, remove from the baking pan and place on a wire rack to cool.

Recipe adapted from: "Okashi Treats" by keiko ishida

Wedding DIY - personalised wedding bear

I love to D-I-Y (Do It Yourself) stuffs. If baking had not become my top hobby, there'll be lots of handicrafts I'd love to do. Cross stitch (the one I'm making for my dd is still done halfway since like 1.5 years ago? :P), crochet, knitting, accessories and many more.

There were actually a list of DIY that I had planned to do for my ROM but I was too ambitious and some were actually unneccessary. dd had been asking me to have more rest instead of trying to perfect things here and there and making myself so tired nd busy, since I also have my work committments. Well, I guess those were common for excited bride-to-be like me. :P

There was one in my list which I have to do - personalise our wedding bear.

I actually prefer the wedding ring pillow given by Lee Hwa Jewellery if we purchase the wedding bands from them. However, after visiting a few stores, we settled for a pair at Soo Kee Jewellery. Instead of providing a wedding ring pillow, they gave a pair of wedding bear as a complimentary. I thought of making my own ring pillow but it is just not cost effective and with my sewing skills, it wouldn't turn out good. I decided to make do with the complimentary wedding bear but I had to let it have a "make-over" as it was too plain.

I made a set of clothing for them, added some crystals to the ring holder and some seashells to the base and tada! ... I have my own personalised wedding bear, solely my own. It became the star during my ROM as photographers were busy snapping shots of it away, no less than the groom and bride!

I am by no means a tailor who can actually made a set of clothing. What I did was I literally wrapped some ribbons and cloth on the bears and sew to seal it. For the bride, I wrapped a white silky ribbon with some patterned design over its body. Then I used a frill corsage kit (please refer to the picture below) to wrap it around its waist, that made up its skirt. The material is organza-like so it's very light and sweet. I also glued some silver sequins on it. Finally I gave the bride bear a final touch with a handmade string of pearl necklace! :)

I sewed a big ribbon to cover the untidy needle works at the back.

Making a piece of clothing for the groom bear was the challenging part. I can't simply wrapped a piece of cloth for a male. I thought of buying a pair of wedding bear and take off its clothes for my bear to wear! *lol* Very fortunately, I have my dear mum who took the trouble to help me out with it. She learnt some tailoring during her younger days and had in fact made me a cardigan and pyjamas for my brothers and I when we were kids. She said she had forgotten her skills but she still tried to do some trials and errors by cutting some scrapes of cloth. Finally she was able to cut out the shape for the bear's pants. What we did then was to wrap the black colour felt cloth over its thighs, and sew the pants tightly. The pants ended too tight for the bear so you'll find that it had difficulty sitting straight.

Instead of making it a coat, I came up with a brilliant idea of sewing a strap over it's shoulder (I do not know what this type of clothing is called). :) My mum took out her"antique" (vintage) buttons that she had kept over decades from our old clothings and I chose a matching set for its buttons.


I glued some "blings blings" on the ring holder. :D


These are my mum's collection of "antique buttons". ;)


This was supposed to be a corsage kit, from Daiso and I used it for the bride's skirt and it turned out really pretty.

Thank you mommy for helping me out. :D

Charity Breakfast, 3rd year in a row!

When I received the email circular about this year's charity breakfast event, I paused for a moment, closed the email and continued with my work. As much as I would like to continue participating in this event like I did for the past two years, this period of time is extremely busy for me that for that moment when I saw the email, my first thought was "impossible to do it this year lah."

Had my work buddy (who was nominated to be the representative of our department for this year's charity breakfast event) not been persuading me to participate, I would have just gave it a miss this year.

With the support of my good buddy cum baking kaki, Huiqin, we eventually gave it a go again! Timing was bad though, as it was held on a Thursday, which means that we can't have the whole day to prepare like we did last year which was held on a Monday. We applied for half a day off the day before but we didn't have the luxury of time to make as many for sale because I had to "return" the kitchen to her by 4pm on the day of baking so that she can cook and prepare dinner.

We decided brownies as one of our items this year, as it was much easier to make and the baking time for a tray is shorter. We reckon that brownies would not be a good breakfast item, hence our alternative item was sandwiches. As there were other stalls selling sandwiches as well, Huiqin came up with this pizza bread. Althought the taste was good, it would have turned cold by the time we reached the office. A few sample tries for our colleagues indicated that it was not a very welcoming item on the menu.

As we were pondering whether to go ahead with the pizza bread item, this idea suddenly popped up in my head - using my sandwich maker to make toasted sandwich on the spot. My mum have this sandwich maker which my brother won it in a lucky draw many years back. We used it only a few times and it was the best choice for making freshly toasted sandwiches on the spot.

This year, things somehow didn't turn out smoothly as expected. The brownies were a little burnt just because we overlooked by a mere 1-2 minutes and were not in time to tent the top part of the brownie. I managed to salvage it by trimming the burnt portion and frost the top with chocolate icing. (hopefully my colleagues didn't see this!) :P Anyway, I'm not too worried cos' the taste of the brownies was still good.

Another mishap was, on the day of the charity breakfast event, the coordinator missed our stall and we were left with no stall. Anyway, eventually we still managed to share a little space with another colleague and managed to sell all our brownies and sandwiches, thanks to the support of our colleagues. ;)

One really has to put his heart and soul into doing something to make it successful. I thought over and reconciled that this year, somehow I wasn't committed enough to this event whole-heartedly, partly because I did not want to spend too much time on it because it was out of my busy schedule. Yet I still wish to participate because it's a charity event and out of my collesgue's persuasion. It has taught me that if I ever decided on doing something, I must do it WELL, especially if it's baking-related, I do not wish to tarnish my name. :P

Huiqin in action - making sandwiches

I was in charge of toasting the sandwich.

These are truly the experienced cooks and entrepreneurs. :)

Chocolate Swiss Roll

I'd mentioned in my previous post that I've tried one swiss roll recipe from 孟老師的美味蛋糕卷. There you go, a soft moist swiss roll cake base that my boss commented it tasted better than P***ar. ;) But i did some cheating. :P I didn't male the cream myself. Instead I used store-bought hazelnut cream that was left from my making of praline paste. I believe the hazelnut cream played a big role too. I'd attempted to make white cocolate cream but somehow it didn't came out successful. I'm sorry I really could not recall what I'd done that resulted in my failure. That's the problem when I had backlogs and waited too long to blog. I simply couldn't remember :P

I really enjoyed making, eating and looking at this swiss roll. It makes me doubly happy when people are happy receiving a piece of chocolate cake. :D

You may find my posting getting shorter at times cos' of my work committments and other personal activities I have. I'd definitely keep my baking going as much as I can but as for blogging, I'd still try to keep this blog going to document my journey and sharing recipes whenever I can. :)

Chocolate Swiss Roll Sponge Cake

Ingredients:

30g unsalted butter

25g fresh milk

200g whole eggs, beaten (about 3.5)

20g egg yolk (about 1 egg yolk)

95g castor sugar

60g cake flour

15g cocoa powder

Method:

1. Sift cake flour and cocoa powder. Set aside.
2. Melt butter with milk over a double boiler or microwave. Set aside.
3. Beat whole eggs, egg yolk and castor sugar with high speed until light and creamy. When the beater is lifted, it leaves a trail that does not disappear immediately. Continue beating for another 1 minute using low speed to stabilise the batter.
4. Fold 1/3 of the sifted flour into the batter and mix well.
5. Fold the remaining flour into the batter until the flour is well incorporated.
6. Scoop a small portion of the batter into the melted butter-milk mixture in step two and mix well briefly. Then pour the mixture back into the batter and mix well, until the butter and milk mixture and batter are well combined.
7. Pour into a 36cm by 26cm swiss roll pan and bake in a preheated oven at 180°C for about 12 minutes. When the surface starts to turn brown, i would usually tent with an aluminium foil to prevent the surface from turning too brown, as it may crack during the rolling process. (Some swiss roll pans that comes in a square is 26cm by 26cm. You can mutiply the recipe by 0.7. For a pan of 43cm by 33cm, you can mutiply by 1.5)
8. Turn out baked sponge cake onto a cooling rack and allow it to cool before spreading onto the cream.

I will post the recipe for the cream should I make it next time. You can use any creams e.g. ganache, whipping cream, whipped or butter cream, as you desired. :)

Sneak Preview on 10.10.10

I am married, to Mr Fong on 10 Oct 2010 or 10.10.10, the perfect 10 ( 十全十美 which stands for perfectness) :P

Together with 118 couples or perhaps even more who didn't sign up for the event, we exchange our vows before 5pm in the beautiful Palawan Beach at Sentosa. Heaven's on our side, as the weather was really good; though hot and sunny, the sky was clear blue with beautiful clouds, perfect for beach photos. we were glad it didn't rain and everything went smoothly. Before our photographer is ready with the photos, I'd just upload a few photos taken by my dear friends to have a glimpse of my solemnisation at Sentosa. :D

I didn't take a break the next day as I'm tied down with work. But I'm taking a day off today and wanna spend a day with dd as a different status (hubby and wifey) hehe *shy*

Wedding contest

Two more days, and our marital status will be different. :) I'd definitely not be used to becoming a Mrs or Mdm. so I'll still remain my salutation as a Ms. :P Friends and colleagues have been asking whether I'm excited or anxious or not... Hehe... to be frank, I'm still not too anxious yet, but I don't know what will be on that day. :P

My team of colleagues gave me a card and gift vouchers to congratulate me on my wedding. Really appreciate their thoughtfulness, especially my boss, who has been very nice and concerned about my preparations for my ROM, and even helped me find out how to apply for marriage leave and get the vouchers for newly weds from the HR department, which i wasn't aware of she had not told me. Her gestures allow me to see another side of her, a good boss who not only leads the team well, but also cares about the welfare of her subordinates. Whenever she asked me about my wedding, she would be reminiscing about the days when she got married...:D

As you know all, I'm taking part in the "I do" wedding at Sentosa and they actually came out with a contest - "The Most Celebrated Couple" Contest! Prizes include:

Champion: 3D2N stay at Resort World Sentosa & Universal Studios tickets
1st Runner-up: 2 pairs of Universal Studio tickets
2nd Runner-up: 1 pair of Universal Studio tickets

My eyes blinked when I saw the prizes. But to be the most celebrated couple that's prominent enough to stand out, we need to create an identity, through:
Team members (i.e our family or friends) need to have a cheer or jingle for us;

Create a strong couple identity with unique attire and dress code; Haha that's definitely out for us. I'm not the adventurous one and would want just to wear my traditional white wedding dress. In fact there was this option of opting to have an underwater solemnisation but we opted out of it. :D

Props such as banners or ply-cards.

Looks like we'll have to give the contest a miss because what we wanted is to have a relax, outdoor wedding with our family and close friends (although there'll be more than a hundred couples!) If only the contest is opened for voting online, I'll definitely ask all my friends, family and readers to vote for me. ;)

Roll, roll, roll away...

I was on a swiss roll baking fenzy few months back after I bought this chinese book 孟老師的美味蛋糕卷 by Elyn. When I received the book from my mail box, I was so thrilled and really love the book so much that I began reading right from the beginning on the introductory and tips on swiss roll making, and flipped through the pages over and over again, just to drool at the beautiful pictures of the swiss rolls. The book wasn't light, but I did not mind bringing the book to work so that I could read it while I'm travelling to work on the train, after which I would complain that my bag was too heavy and why on earth am I bringing such heavy book to work.

The funny thing was, despite I love this book, I only tried one of its chocolate swiss roll recipe, and it was superb! However, that was not what I am blogging about for this post. I'd wanted to go according to date to blog about the earlier two swiss rolls again from "Okashi Treats" by keiko ishida. I think this was one of a cookbook which I had attempted most of the recipes, due to the well written recipes with clear instruction and pretty pictures. I have to admit I'm very visual when it comes to cook books and food.

This was a basic sponge swiss roll. The ingredients are so simple that I doubt it would turn out anything fabulous. But I attempted this because on that day, I was tempted to bake a swiss roll, but was lazy or press of time (I couldn't remember) that I just wanted to find a simple recipe that would not require beating twice in separate bowls (if using the chiffon cake method). I contemplated for quite a while before finally decided to give it a try. I have confidence in her recipes, so I thought I should be able to churn out a swiss roll, the only thing was the texture. Without oil, butter, milk or any cornstarch but just three basic ingredients - 3 eggs, 60g castor sugar and 50g of pastry flour (sifted twice), and beating as you would for a genoise - beating eggs and sugar over a double boiler until light before folding in the flour. Wouldn't the roll turn out dry? So I believe you would now know why i hesitated.

So how did it turn out? Well, it was dry, but was quite soft and roll-friendly. Haha.. As you can see from the texture, the texture is quite coarse, due to the lack of oil/butter and milk as a tenderiser. This recipe, as used in Keiko's book, is for a banana swiss roll, where the roll is wrapped over a banana, and can be used for cake base or cake layers. In fact this recipe exist as one of the basic recipes at the front pages. So, I shouldn't have used it purely for a swiss roll. It would be better used as a base such that the sponge itself doesn't take centerstage of a piece of cake. :)

Alright the other swiss roll that I made was this dark brown sugar swiss roll with white chocolate cream. Using dark brown sugar, this swiss roll has an interesting taste that doesn't feel too sugarly sweet. The texture was soft and fine and just one bite into it, my friends' comment was nice! :) What I like about this recipe is that althought it separates the egg whites and yolks, it doesn’t require you to make the egg yolk batter and meringue separately as you would for a chiffon cake. You make the meringue, fold in beaten egg yolk, followed by the flour and melted butter, all in one bowl. This method is new to me as it is not introduced in any one of the 5 method introduced in 孟老師的美味蛋糕卷, yet the texture was really soft, moist and easily rolled without cracks even though I rolled it with the baked surface on the outside.

The sad thing was I didn’t allow the white chocolate cream to chill overnight, causing the cream to melt soon after it was out of the fridge. :(

I'd recommend this recipe for those who have been making a swiss roll but have yet to try a method like this. :)

Recipe for white chocolate cream

150g whipping cream
50g white chocolate

Recipe for sponge cake

40g pastry flour
15g rice flour
40g unsalted butter
70g dark brown sugar
4 egg whites (about 140g)
20g castor sugar
5 egg yolks (about 90g), beaten

Method

1. Prepare white chocolate cream one day in advance. In a saucepan, bring whipping cream to a boil. Place whie chocolate to a boil and pour hot cream over. Wait for 30 seconds, then stir the mixture with a spatula until smooth. Set aside to cool, then chill in the refrigerator to overnight.
2. On day of baking, preheat oven to 200°C. Line a sheet of swiss roll pan with parchment paper. Sift both flours twice.
3. Melt butter in a double boiler or microwave. Set aside.
4. Make meringue. Place egg whites into a clean bowl and beat until foamy. Add castor sugar and 1/3 of the brown sugar and continue beating for a few minutes, then add remaining brown sugar and beat until egg whites are glossy and stiff peaks form.
5. Add beaten egg yolks and fold lightly. Add flour and fold gently with a spatula, then add hot melted butter and fold through.
6. Pour batter into a prepared pan and spread evenly with a scraper. Bake for 10-13 minutes.
7. When done, unmould the cake from pan and place into a plastic bag to cool. (The recipe says it can be kept in the plastic bag until the next day if you do not intend to roll it that day).
8. To assemble, whip white chocolate cream until light and fluffy using an electric handheld mixer. Turn cooled sponge onto a clean work surface. Peel off the parchment paper and spread the whipped cream evenly.
9. Gently roll up the sponge to make a swiss roll. Chill in the freezer to allow the swiss roll to set before slicing into pieces.

Recipe adapted from: "Okashi Treats" by keiko ishida