Jean & Hon's Wedding Cupcakes

It's Jean & Hon's wedding today, at the True Jesus Church.

This couple have a lovely website, do check it out.

I've been asked by Jean to bake some vanilla cupcakes for the lunch reception at the church. To suit the theme of the wedding, butter cream icing has been tinted a shade of blue. Their initials are written on little heart shape white chocolate cut-outs & placed on the cupcakes.

Birthday Log Cake

It's nice to have your birthday near Christmas, so you could have a log cake as your birthday cake ! Beatrice had a log cake for her birthday celebration, it's lemon log - lemon sponge filled with home-made lemon curd & frosted with butter cream. The cake is only adorned with holy leaves, with a sprinkle of chocolate shavings & dusted with cocoa powder & icing sugar.






Eva ordered this green tea cake for her Dad who is a doctor. I've baked the sponge in a round shape this time, still filled with whipped dairy cream & adzuki red beans.

When Eva ordered this cake, she even provided me with the cartoon doctor image, what a sweet & thoughtful daughter ! Hope her dad had enjoyed the cake......

Cookies Cookies !

CJ's cookies

JF's cookies


This post is supposed to be published last night after I finished baking. By the time I sat on the computer, it was 10pm. After uploading the image, I was already dozing off........

I've started my Christmas baking on Monday, mostly fruitcake & cookies. I love the aroma that lingered in the kitchen when the fruitcake was baking, once a year. Frankly, I do not fancy fruit cake but am falling in love with the aroma !!

Oh, talking about cookies, I baked over a 100 pcs & we (hubby, myself, CJ & JF) spent lunchtime on Mon & Tue decorating & packing them. I do not want the hardened icing to fall off so I've packed each cookie individually, that took me more than an hour, on my own, because hubby had to get back to the office & the girls were only interested in the decorating part !

I couldn't find any mini M&Ms in any supermarkets so I've got to make do with cachous. CJ's little fingers came in handy when sticking them to the cookies, mine were too clumsy.

From the start, the girls had been asking if they could have their own cookies for decoration so I put aside 2 cookies for each of them, JF was so excited when it was her turn. She must have used too much icing on the cookies because when she was eating them I saw her scraping the icing off !

Tart au Citron

I love sourish stuff of any kind, even though I'll have a hard time after that due to my gastric problem.
This lemon tart is one of my favourite desserts. I've got so many favourites that if you ask me which is on the top of the list, I can't decide, I'm an absolutely dessert person, in fact a cake person !!
Hubby is not a fan of lemon. So each tiem I have extra almost drying up lemons in the chiller, I would whip up this tart but will make it into a smaller one because it'll be only CJ & I eating it.

Ingredients :

12 oz Pie pastry
Grated rind of 2 lemons
2/3 Cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 Cup caster sugar
1/4 Cup whipping cream
4 Eggs, plus 3 egg yolks
Icing sugar, for dusting

Preheat oven to 190C. Roll out the pastry thinly & use it to line the bottom of a 9" tart pan. Prick the bottom of the pastry. Line the pastry sheet with baking paper & fill with baking beans.
Bake for 15 mins, until the edges are set & dry, remove the baking paper & continue baking for another 5 mins, until slightky golden.

Place the lemon rind, juice & sugar in a bowl. Beat until combined & gradually add the whipping cream, beat until well blended. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then beat in the egg yolks and pour the filling into the pastry shell. Bake for 15-20 mins, until the filling is set. If the pastry begins to brown too much, cover the edges with foil. Let cool & dust with icing sugar before serving.

* I usually fill the pastry shell with soya beans when it comes to blind baking. I'll keep the same batch of soya beans so each time I make tarts I'll use them over & over again. When the sides of the filling have set & the centre still slightly wobbly, I'll remove the tart from the oven. It will be firm as it cools. The filling will crack upon cooling if it's over-baked. The taste is still good but will not be very presentable if you're serving it at a dinner party.

Spiced Beef Shank

Besides stewing our beef shank, this is another way of cooking it that all of us love.
Just like the way they serve at Chrystal Jade, where the portion is small & we can never get enough of it. In fact this can easily be cooked at home.

Ingredients :

1 kg Beef shank
1 Pc ginger, cinnamon stick, mandarin peel
2 Stalks spring onion
2 Star anise
6 Cloves
1 Tsp Szechuan peppercorn

Sauce :

3/4 Cup Soya sauce
3 Cups water
4 Tbsp Shao Tsin wine
75g Sugar
2 Tbsp Dark soya sauce

Boil beef shank for 5 mins. Remove, rinse & drain. Place the rest of the ingredients with the sauce ingredients into a saucepan & bring to boil. Add beef shank & bring to boil again, turn down the heat, let simmer for 2 hrs.

Leave shank in the sauce till completely cooled & refrigerate overnight. Remove shank from the sauce, slice thinly & serve.

Serve shank with some sauce from cooking, with chopped garlic, spring onion, dash of sesame oil & black vinegar.

Train Cake

This is another candy train done last weekend, July 18, 2009




It's Timothy 2nd birthday celebration today. He loves train sets so mummy has asked me to bake a train cake for him. So designer & I came up with this one.

She wanted a 1.5kg chocolate cake made into a train set, with an engine head & 3 boxcars. Instead of candies, mummy wanted fresh fruits as decoration on top of the boxcars. Since it's a chocolate cake, we frosted the boxcars with different very bright shades of yellow, blue & green. Mummy has wanted kiwi on green car & mango on yellow car but we thought there's no contrast in the colour so kiwi was on yellow & mango on blue. Just fruits on the cars will be too plain & may not attract kids that much so for the green car, we've topped it with skittles ! Different type of candies such as marsmallow, liquorice allsorts, jelly beans, etc. have been used in this cake, hope little Timothy had a great time at his party !

60th Birthday Celebration

It was Laily's mum's 60th birthday last Saturday.

She had 2 cakes baked for her mum, in numeric 6 & 0. The '6' cake was durian cake while the '0' was yam cake. Each cake weighed 1.5kg & due to her refrigerator space, I had to place the cakes onto 2 cake boards. Instead of cutting away the cake, I've piped buttercream in the centre of it to make it look like a 'hole'.