A Celebration Day !

There's a few birthday celebrations today. How lucky to have your birthday falls on August 31st, the whole nation celebrates with you !

What a coincidence, the cakes today are all cream based with fruit filling. My Kitchen Aid (KA) had been hardworking, whipping rounds after rounds of double cream, I must have used 3 1L pack of double cream ! I find chilling the bowl of my KA mixer makes whipping much easier, I get a perfectly stiff whipped cream. I've used chilled plastic bowl for my double cream but sometimes I get cream that refuse to whip, which is too soft for icing a cake.




This is a durian cake, probably the last one for this season. My supplier told him the next batch of durian will be available maybe end October.



A lemon cotton cheesecake. My cheesecake is without any icing but since I've whipped extra cream, I piped some on top of the cake for the same person who's having the durian cake as well. How lucky, to have 2 birthday cakes on his birthday !



Blackforest cake
A Taiwanese friend's son, whom we call Di Di turns 2 today. Last year, he had a cotton cheese cake with train set decoration. His mum tried JF's blackforest cake & wanted the same cake for his birthday with lots of sweets.



A whopping 3.5kg mango cake for a sweet grandpapa who's 61 today. As the mango season is over, I had a hard time looking for mangoes around KK, managed to get some @ the Fillipinoes market, they were big, juicy & rather sweet but the cost were more expensive than when they were abundant !


After everyone has collected their cakes in the late afternoon, I finally have time to take a short nap, off to a quick dinner & thereafter hubby & I brought the girls to watch "You don't Mess With the Zohans". I've never really like Adam Sandler but think he's cool in the movie, with that funny accent & those dance moves !

Cupcakes For JF !

JF requested that I bake another cake for her to bring to school to celebrate her birthday even though it was over. I though cupcakes would be a better idea for kids, she was happy with it so I went ahead to check with her teacher the number of kids in her class. There is 17 of them but some are not back from holiday. To be sure everyone has a cupcake, I let her bring 18 cupcakes to school today.
This is a vanilla cupcake with butter cream frosting. I baked the cupcakes in a party hat design cupcake case from Wilton, just nice for a kid's party. After a few attempts, I've come to understand the tactics of piping, thus doing it better now.

Prawn Wonton Noodle Soup

The lunch we had this afternoon was too heavy. I wasn't really hungry at dinner time but hungry or not, I won't skip any of my 3 meals or else my gastric is going to give me a hard time later at night !
The stock of this noodle was made last Saturday with the chicken bones that I got from the market, after straining it was kept in the refrigertor until today. I've added some prawn shells to the stock to further flavour the stock.
The wonton was made with 1/2 kg prawns, shelled, deveined & chopped, 1 sprig each of chopped spring onion & Chinese celery, seasoned with some salt, sugar, pepper, ginger juice, sesame oil, Shao Tsing wine, corn flour to bind, stir the mixture in 1 direction until sticky. With this mixture, I managed to make 30 wontons. I've always like bowls of noodle soup, anytime, so tomorrow's lunch for hubby & I will be this as well, saves the hassle of cooking, since the girls will be off to school tomorrow.

Fish & Chips

JF wanted fish & chips for lunch today. It was easy as I've already have some breaded dory fillet in my freezer. I wanted to get crinkle cut fries but she wanted shoe string instead, this packet of fries was a mistake, they were mostly broken so I ended up with many small bits of overcooked fries which went into the bin. This coleslaw is a healthy version, I made it with both white & purple cabbage & carrot, cut with the slicer attcachment of my food processor. The dressing is made with 1 small container of yoghurt, juice of half a lemon, 1 grated onion, 3Tbsp of mayo & sugar to taste. I did not add any salt to the dressing & I only combined the dressing with the cabbage/carrot mixture upon serving because we don't like soggy coleslaw.






I've also baked some little chocolate molten cakes for dessert. I've used Valrhona 55% dark chocolate for these cakes. I probably didn't grease & flour the rameskins well, some part of the crust was stuck to the rameskins, that's why we got such ugly cakes ! This one is the 'prettiest' of all that I've baked, sigh....... the last time we had this was about 1 1/2 years ago !

Jana Faith is 6 Years Old Today !

We had dinner at Kung last Saturday to celebrate JF's birthday ! There were 12 of us but 7 are kids so you can imagine how 'noisy' the gathering was.....
She had a blackforest cake for her birthday. Instead of the usual 2 layer filling, I only filled the cake with 1 layer of whipped double cream & pitted dark cherries, the sponge was brushed with some kirsch infused cherry syrup before frosting.

It's no longer colouring books & crayons that keep the kids occupied while the adults are enjoying themselves over food & drinks. They had their Nintendo DS with them. CJ got one from my sister on her BD this year & my friends' kids each had their own one so poor JF is the only one who doesn't have a DS, so after a phone call back home, I got my sister to get her one DS too, what a generous 'yee yee' she has !!!

The kids had chicken & beef bulgogi to share among them. We had a feast of meat, meat & more meat. The restaurant served a marinated pan fried rib dish which was very tasty, priced at RM30/portion (400g). They also serve a belly pork lookalike braised pork dish served with cucumber & onion salad, hubby loves the salad, it's also priced at RM30/portion. Since I don't take fatty meat, I got to remove any fatty part before eating, the flavour was good, I think I could taste mirin/sake in it. We also had shabu-shabu with beef slices, this was really good, paper thin beef slices, no fat, with lots of vegetables ! I have totally forgotten to snap pictures of the food while eating, guess I'm not quite a blogger yet !! Found few pictures that my friend has taken of the food in my camera but not a single one on those wonderful meats, haha......

We had a great time, the kids had a even greater time, playing the DS whole night without mummy nagging but that's not good, 4-5 hours of continuous play, I could see that their eyes were tired by the time we left past midnight.

I planned a nice lunch today but engaged in some matters so didn't have time to cook. JF was ok that I cook for her tomorrow instead & her 2nd cake with the lunch.

* Kung is open daily from 5pm - 2am, contact number 016 5881429.

Black Sesame Buns

I've always like black sesame, in sesame sweet soup, chiffon cake & bread as well. As sesame contains its own natural oil, these buns keep well, still moist even after 2 days ! These buns are made with organic black sesame powder & I've added some toasted black sesame seeds from Japan. I've tried using black sesame seeds from China but found that they are not as aromatic as the Japanese ones.
I used to make my buns in muffin cups because I'm not good in shaping buns. Even though the buns are pretty in muffin cups, I find it a waste to be throwing away the cups all the time. After few attempts of shaping our buns, I'm better in rounding up those dough balls now & I'm happy that I've done a better job now.....

A Busy Saturday !

I think I've been lazing around for too long, yes 6 weeks is a long long time. Besides baking & cooking (clearing my deep freezer in fact !), I've not been preparing food & freezing them for easy meals. My deep freezer is almost empty, got to do something since the girls going back to school....

After my morning run, I'm off to the market stalls at Foh Sang. Got some ribs at the butcher, a 'kampung chicken' & 2kg of chicken bones from the chicken seller, next to the fish mongers but didn't buy anything because hubby don't like smaller fish, so fillet is the only thing on my mind. We adore garouper but it's difficult to get fillet of this fish nowsadays, even snapper is nowhere to be seen, that completed my marketing.

After breakfast with hubby, I started my day of toiling in the kitchen. The 'kampung chicken' was packed into a container & sent into the freezer, for making soup next week. As for the chicken bones, I cut away all the neck attached to them as I find making stock with them 'scary' ! As usual, all the bones blanched, dumped into a large soup pot with onion, carrot, ginger, Jin Hua ham, spring onion, dried scallops & oh I found a bag of prawn shells in my freezer so that went into the pot too.

While the stock is cooking, I took out my slow cooker & soup pot from the kitchen cabinet, it's some Asian dessert time. I still have some dried bird's nest pieces that my mum gave me during my CNY trip home, so it's time I reward myself. I've used 8 pieces today, together with some American ginseng, 8 pandan leaves tied into a knot & some rock sugar, all these went into the soup pot, ready to be double-boiled. Oh, hubby saw on a TV programme that by adding boiled eggs to the pot, you get a nice aromatic sweet soup. So I tried with just 1 hard boiled egg, in fact you need to fill the bottom of the soup pot with hard boiled egg, I didn't know that only after the sweet soup is done, 6 hrs later. Nevertheless, it does give off a nice aroma when I lift the cover of the pot. I made the girls eat the egg, they said it was very sweet !

While the chicken stock & the bird's nest soup was cooking, I whipped up my cake batter for 2 cakes order. Now that the oven is baking too, I marinated the pork ribs that I bought this morning with some soya sauce, sugar, pepper, ginger juice, crushed garlic, Shao Hsing wine & set this aside for the flavour to penetrate the ribs.
The girls finished my last 2 pieces of apple streusel pie this morning, since I still have some pandan juice left from making the pandan swissroll few days ago, I whipped up another batter for a pandan chiffon cake, a healtier version, no coconut milk, of course the cake will not be as aromatic as one that contains coconut milk, but at least enough to satisfy my craving for cake today !

After all this, I deep fried the marinated ribs, placed them into a container as well & froze them so it'll be easier for me anytime I want to have some braised ribs. Saturday is the day I spend time on food preparation as I'm a person who gets really cranky when I'm busy with my baking & there's no almost ready food in the freezer that I could easily cook & serve at meal times !

Since there's no luck on fish fillet, I got to turn to frozen Dory fillet. I know that frozen taste is not great & the texture of this fish is soft but looks like this is my only choice. After thawing the fish fillets, I cut them into smaller pieces, seasoned them with a pinch of salt & lemon pepper, dredged them through flour, then beaten eggs & coat them with panko breadcrumbs. Every piece is lied flat on a try & sent to the freezer for them to firm up before I store them in zip-lock bag.
It's almost 3 pm when all these are done & I've produced 2 large bags of garbage !
At least now the freezer is packed, there's no worries about my girls' lunches next 1-2 weeks.
I was so busy & the kitchen so messy today, taking pictures didn't cross my mind. I'll post a few of the cakes that I've baked for the past week.
Tonight we're having dinner with friends & their kids, at least I can really relax, I've baked a black forest cake to bring to the gathering, will post it up when the cake is cut.....