Diana Does Tokyo (Day 1 and 2)

Japan rocked for two things – its people and its food. Even though many Japanese don’t speak English, they try their best to help you out how ever they can, which is indeed very helpful for a Lonely Planet traveller (ie sans tour guide, staying in hostels) like myself.

Of course, my main aim for this trip was to EAT. That, I did. My conclusion is, I can honestly say that I want to eat Japanese food for most of the rest of my life. I love the freshness and the way it is presented. Everything is ornately placed, intricately prepared and generally YUMMY. Because I took over 500 hundred photos during the trip, I shall make the effort to talk less, and show more.

Day 1: First supper at the hostel in Tokyo

Chocolate milk and nato sushi wrap

Day 2: Grilled meat sticks at Shinjuku

Grilled chicken cartillage

Grilled chicken meat

Grilled enoki mushrooms wrapped in pork slices

Chocolate cake and coffee at a cafe in Harajuku

Day 2: Picnic at park in Shinjuku (we bought our food from Isetan food hall – it’s Japanese takeaway heaven!)

Tonkatsu galore!

Day 2: Picnic at an ex-imperial park in Shinjuku (with Ai!)

Our picnic food!

I was in a tonkatsu-kind-of-mood.

My picnic companions’ sushi bento

Tonkatsu sandwich – odd, but it works

For someone who calls her blog dianadoesdesserts, how could I have missed the Pierre Herme macarons!?? I tried the Ispahan and Chocolate – both extremely delicious.

Me sitting pretty (and full).

 

The Vanilla Series: Vanilla Biscuits

The next vanilla-inspired recipe in this series is the vanilla biscuit. I suspect that it belongs in the macaron/macaroon family, because it does not consist of any fat and has less flour. With a tinge of a lemony aftertaste, this biscuit is as light as air, and will literally melt in seconds in your mouth. Good for sugarless tea-dipping.

Vanilla Biscuits (adapted from the trusty Le Cordon Bleu Home Collection Series – Biscuits)

Ingredients

65g caster sugar

1 egg

1egg yolk

2 – 3 drops vanilla extract or essence (or 1 vanilla pod worth of vanilla seeds)

1 teaspoon finely grated lemon rind

65g plain flour

extra caster sugar, to dust

First, bring a half-filled saucepan of water to boil. Put the sugar, egg, egg yolk, vanilla and lemon rind in a large bowl and place over the pan of steaming water. Please make sure that the base of the bowl is just above the level of the water.

Whisk with electric beaters for 5 – 10 minutes, or until the mixture becomes thick and mousse-like and leaves a trail as it falls from the whisk. Remove the bowl from the pan and continue to whisk for 5 minutes, or until the mixture is cold. Your mixture should now be almost ivory-cream in colour and almost double in volume of what you started with.

What you start with:

What you end up with:

Sift the flour and fold into the egg mixture. Use a metal spoon and fold until just combined. Spoon the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a 2 cm (3/4 inch) plain nozzle and pipe rounded mounds of the mixture about 2 cm (1 inch) in diameter and spaced well apart onto the baking trays. Sprinkle with the extra caster sugar. (Forgot this step).

Leave the mixture to dry on the baking trays for 4 – 5 hours at room temperature. Preheat the oven to slow 150 degrees Celsius (300F/Gas 2).

Bake for 20 minutes, or until golden brown and firm to the touch. Transfer the biscuits to a wire rack to cool. Yum it down.

In other news, I’m leaving for Hong Kong soon, for a short holiday with my good friend. After that, I’m leaving for Japan to meet up with another good friend of mine who’s staying in Tokyo for one month. I’m extremely excited about both trips, so look out for some of the many many photos I’ll be taking. Wish me luck!

Chocolate Mint Wafers aka Girl Scout Cookies

The weather is killing me. Even the walk to the train station, which lasts about seven minutes, seems to take forever as I am so drenched in perspiration that my make-up threatens to run (not a good visual, I know). That’s why, these are times when you need a dessert that chills the mouth.  

Hence, while recipe-surfing on marthastewart.com, I decided to try out this lovely Chocolate Mint Wafer recipe, reminiscent of those Girl Scout Cookies which I have such fond memories of. It’s not simple, but I can honestly say that it’s one of those cookies that will surely impress your friends/colleagues/future-parents-in-laws/parents.

The instructions and ingredients for this recipe are, as always on Ms Stewart’s website, clear and easy to follow, so it’s best to click on the link I’ve given. What I want to do is give you a visual guide of what to expect when you try the recipe out for yourself. There are three stages to it – the cookie, the mint ganache (cream), and the chocolate covering.

Let’s start with the cookie:

After you have creamed the butter and sugar, beat in the egg until well-combined. Mix in the cocoa powder and plain flour to form a dough. Roll it out into a round disc before chilling it in the refrigerator for at least an hour (or overnight).

My only comment is that it tastes better than it looks.

An hour (or overnight) later, roll out the dough to about 1/8 inch thick and cut out using any round cookie cutter (I used the jagged edge of a tart mould).

For the dough, please work fast. Because of its higher wet ingredient (eg butter, egg) proportion to the dry ingredients, the dough tends to turn soft very quickly. My advice, work in smaller batches, leaving the rest of the rolled-out dough in the refrigerator to chill.

Bake the cookies until you can smell chocolate (I wish that was applicable to most things in life), or for about 12 minutes. Now, I don’t mean that you have to be guarding the oven throughout the entire baking process, because the chocolaty aroma does waft out of the kitchen!  

The ganache:

This is basically a mixture of hot cream and semi-sweet chocolate. I mixed in about three drops of peppermint oil.

To fill your ganache onto a cookie, you could have easily spread a teaspoonful of it onto one cookie. But the smart-aleck in me decided to fill a ziplop bag with the ganache and cut off one end of the bag to create a “piping bag” of sorts. All I can say is, it was rather messy because the ganache was extremely malleable. In short, I should have taken the first route.

A sea of covered-up, filled-up cookies! Yummy!

For the final step, simply cover the chilled cookies with melted chocolate. And finally, the completed Chocolate Mint Wafers (along with the non-completed ones)!

It really is delicious, simple as that.

PS: I brought some along for Yixiao, Joyce (whom I now hail as the Queen of good-dress-buys-from-TF… kowtow…) and Zhirong during one of our lunch meet-ups because we should always share the love. The end.    

Lemon butter animal cookies

Aren’t these cookies the cutest?

Because I’m my own cheerleader, I’ll answer the question with a resounding YES!

I made these with cookie cutters that I bought for myself my niece. They were almost perfect – crisp, buttery, and so very adorable. The only complaint I have is that the lemon flavour could have been stronger (the recipe had called for a lemon extract, which I replaced with 1 tbs of lemon zest and juice each - seems like I should have doubled that).

Lemon Butter Cookies – recipe adapted from Country Living Picnics and Porch Suppers

~ makes about 36 animal cookies

Ingredients:

3/4 cup granulated sugar (I used caster sugar, and less of it)

1/2 cup butter, softened (I used Emborg unsalted)

1 large egg

1 tsp lemon extract (didn’t have that, so I replaced it with 1 tsp of lemon zest and juice each – on hindsight, I should have doubled that to enhance the lemony taste)

2 cups unsifted plain flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Steps:

Using an electric mixer on medium speed, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, lemon flavours, and vanilla until well mixed. Reduce the mixer speed to low.

Gradually beat in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Gather the dough into a ball, and flatten it into a 5-inch round, and wrap it in plastic wrap as shown below. Refrigerate the dough for at least 30 minutes or overnight.

When the dough has chilled, preheat the oven to 180 degree Celsius (325F). Cut out 2 pieces of waxed paper the same size as the greased baking sheets. Cut the dough round in half.

Between lightly floured pieces of waxed paper, roll out half of the dough to 1/4 inch-thickness. Remove the top piece of the waxed paper. And now comes the fun part, which shall be represented in the photos below.

They’re alive!!! ALIVE!!

Poor duckie turned black. (Bake the cookies for about 10 minutes, or until just golden brown at the edges. Cool the cookies for 5 minutes on the baking sheets. Remove the cookies to wire racks and cool them completely.

I like the smiling cow.

Chocolate chocolate chip cookies

There are some days when you need a chocolate boost, and the day before yesterday was one of them. I was having that uncomfortable feeling of constant thought was on my mind, and I was just longing for that someone, that something, that some-life to happen, but of course, he/she/it wasn’t going to. Well, when days like that hit me, I like to turn to chocolate, more specifically a dose of Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Mostly, this recipe works much better than the first one I tried out a couple of months back. Also, I like that the final product is crisp yet chewy, with a strong flavour of cocoa.

Here are some photographs of the process:

For 24 regular-sized cookies (I had enough for about 30 cookies).

Preheat the oven to 175 degree Celsius. Beat one egg, 1 tsp of vanilla, 3/4 cup of white sugar, 1/2 cup butter (115gm).

Combine 1 cup of plain flour, 1/3 cup of cocoa powder, 1/4 tsp of baking soda, 1/8 tsp of salt, and stir it into the butter mixture. Combine till well blended, and stir in 1 cup of chocolate chips (or as much as you want). Drop rounded tablespoonfuls of mixture onto an ungreased baking pan. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven, or just until set. Cool slightly on the baking pan before transferring to wire racks to cool completely.

Comfort in a bottle.

I need a new oven.

My Baby Belling oven and I have gone a long way. More than a decade, in fact. My dad bought it for me for my tenth birthday, after my disastrous attempt to bake a sponge cake in the microwave oven (let’s just say it wasn’t spongy). Since then, it has followed me through thick and thin. Today, it still heats up, but old age has mellowed its ability to estimate an accurate temperature. Which makes me more of feel like a prophet than a baker.

I feel that the cookies are going to be done. I have a feeling that the next minute will create a soft, fluffy chocolate cupcake. This heat should be the right one for a perfectly done roasted chicken.

In any case, a new oven would probably not be in the works anytime soon. But, I should like to plan for my own place in future, and I was inspired by an episode of Debbie Travis’ home makeover show, where she fitted a teal retro-looking stove-cum-oven for an eclectic look in the kitchen.

I did some research and found out that the oven was from Northstar.

My favourate range of colours:

Bisque

Photo from: elmirastoveworks.com

Robin’s Egg Blue

Photo from: elmirastoveworks.com

Avocado

Photo from: elmirastoveworks.com

Lovely. Of course, I won’t be getting this any time soon. But, I can dream.

I’ve been going to marthastewart.com quite often for new recipes. Her recipe instructions have a distinct Martha vibe about it. Very precise, very clear. The outcome is also usually quite perfect, but perhaps not as perfect as how Martha could have done it.  

The two recipes I have done are:

1. Healthy Oatmeal Cookie

I like that wholemeal flour is used, which ups the fibre factor. Chewy and yet crisp cookie.

2.  Frosted Chocolate-Buttermilk Cupcakes

I didn’t do the frosting, because I felt that the cupcakes were moist and sweet enough on its own. I eat it refrigerator-cold, perhaps because it brings back memories of my Sara Lee frozen chocolate pound cake days. I do believe (hope) that this recipe is a little bit less fat-laden. Oh, I also replaced the buttermilk with light sour cream, which probably altered the taste, but ultimately, it still worked well for me.

On a TOTALLY separate note, I would just like to end this post telling everyone who reads this blog to be nice to the people you love and care for. It sounds so obvious, but often, we hurt, whether knowingly or unknowingly, people who love us. Perhaps it’s because we have higher expectations of them, so we get frustrated when they don’t meet them. Perhaps it sometimes is easier to be mean because it makes us a little less vulnerable. Perhaps sometimes we are just in a bad mood. However, for all these excuses we might give, we should also realise that doing and saying things that show you love them, even things that might seem insignificant to you, is more important than just thinking it.

Pensive pensive.        

I’ve been sleeping at 10-11pm these past few days, which is pretty early I guess for many. Perhaps it’s lethargy from work, or most probably it’s boredom.

That’s why, I’m going to bake tomorrow. Probably a variation of the Horlicks biscuits. Don’t know why I just have this inexplicable urge to bake these semi-sweet tea biscuits even though I can buy these at probably $3 dollars for a whole pack. We’ll see how it turns out.

As afraid as I am of leaving for Hong Kong, it’s coming soon in a month, and I must say, it’s quite exciting to start my life afresh somewhere. With new beginnings comes new opportunities, and I’m awaiting to see how my new life turns out in a place where there are no previous impressions or expectations of you except for your own.  

I’m very cryptic today. I guess there are days (or nights) when you just feel this way.

On a separate note: what I made for his dad’s birthday some time back.  

I thought these were cute.

I am not a baker

That’s what I felt when I attended Joycelyn Shu’s Christmas cookies demonstration class on Sunday at Shermay’s Cooking School.

How could I have been calling myself that, I asked myself? What I had been doing so far was simply mixing, dropping, kneading, watching the minutes (all very inaccurately, I must add).

Let me first give you a very short gist of the class. Joycelyn Shu (also known for immaculately presented baked goodies on her website, Kuidaore) first started with showing us (about 30 students, all females) how to make the lemon rolled cookie dough, then moved on to spiced gingerbread cookie dough. After the break, we learnt how to make royal icing and fondant, and finally ended with different ways to decorate the cookie.

Throughout the class, Joycelyn was meticulous and very clear in her instructions, answering our queries. However, I must say that what impressed me the most was seeing the decorations that she had done. I had seen her beautiful creations on her blog, but I had thought that they were something of a myth. Look, how can anyone make buttons out of icing for the gingerbread boy? It was simply impossible, I had thought. But apparently, it can be done. You will probably need to have oodles of patience, arm strength (for keeping it in the same position for long periods of time), and simply lots of love for the people you are decorating the cookies for.

So, the moral of the story is, your friends can tell how much you love them by seeing which cookies you give them. One decorated cookie = some love, 2 decorated cookies = some more love, > 2 cookies = Romeo + Juliet, undecorated store-bought cookies = you hate them.

 I’m not going to share a lot of photos cos I think you can go over to her website to drool over them. But I do want to show you how much detail goes into each cookie.

If you notice, there are even button holes for the gingerbread boy’s buttons.

 

The snowflake will make a beautiful present for the Christmas season.

Finally, I thought about it, and realised that if I am serious about baking, I have to get serious about it. Like buying an oven that has accurate temperature settings (my 10 year old Baby Belling has gone a bit bonkers). Like not getting distracted by the TV when I’m mixing the dough. Like going for proper classes to learn proper techniques.

Yup, so I’m quite glad I went for this class. It made me realise how closed my eyes were.  The next step would be to get serious soon.

After he’s left…

Okay, after a whirlwind weekend of over-eating, meeting up with his family, buying a lovely Marni dress (which I’m going to show off later), attending a very Chinese-style wedding (which had a Chinese-style of starting at 8.45pm, after we polished off 3 plates of peanuts), it’s finally back to the reality of job-hunting and project work.

It’s not that I’m complaining though. There’s a certain excitement to finishing up school and attending the interviews. I feel busy. Which I like. I guess, the only bad thing is that I will miss him while he’s gone.

I first have to blog about my Marni dress. I fell in love with it at first sight. 

 

In fact, when there was another girl who wanted to buy this dress, I IMMEDIATELY reserved for my own. Ain’t nobody is going to take my Marni away from me. Nobody! 

I also baked double chocolate chip cookies. I’m not going to link my recipe because you can go to www.recipe.com, type in the best chocolate chip cookies, and get the recipe. I usually choose the one with the most reviews and highest ratings. I’m aint going to go against 100 opinions.

I think I used Barbara Bush’s recipe. Her recipe makes for a good batch, nice and crisp with a nice dose of cocoa.

 

Take note though, she used a lot of butter. Not really diet-friendly, but it’s still good.

On one very stress-filled day, I made brownie. This brownie, however, was special. It was almost fat-free. I used a recipe that didn’t require any added fat, from a recipe book that I bought a long while back from my primary school, an all-girls’ convent school. The recipes listed in the cookbook were all created by the alumni and their family members.

The cake is nice. But I guess being fat-less doesn’t give it enough moist-ness. Or maybe I baked it for too long. It turned out a little dry.

My suggestion is to add a little bit of moistness – butter, milk.

Rachel’s Brownie – from CHIJ St Nicholas’ Girls School Family Recipes

makes 16

Mix 2 eggs, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon vanilla essence, 1 cup sugar, 2/3 sifted flour and 1/3 sifted cocoa and pour it into a pan. Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 25 – 30 minutes.