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 Bean Ice Cream (without an ice-cream maker)

I recently bought a pack of three precious vanilla pods from my favourite baking one-stop shop, Phoon Huat. Therefore, the next three recipes, including this one, will feature the vanilla in all its pure glorious form. To kick off this Lemony Snicket-wannabe series, l have chosen a simple Vanilla Bean Ice Cream recipe, also keeping in mind the need to keep cool in this weather.

However, I did face a little problem – I don’t own an ice cream machine. Fortunately, the Internet has everything useful, useless, and un-useless that you need (or not) to know. Thus, I was able to find this website which gives you straightforward instructions on churning your mixture into ice cream without an ice cream mixer.

Vanilla Bean Ice Cream (adapted from the Food Network website – please note that I have halved the original recipe)

Ingredients:

1 vanilla bean 
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup whole milk 
3/4 cup sugar 
1 1/2 large eggs

Let’s begin with making the ice cream mixture.

You start with the vanilla pod. For those who are unfamiliar, it looks like a long black thin stick. The aroma is intense when you slice into it lengthwise using a sharp knife, and using the back of your knife, you try and scrape as much of the vanilla seeds into a large heavy saucepan as such. 

Stir in pods, cream, milk, and sugar. Bring mixture just to a boil, stirring occasionally, and remove pan from heat.

In a large bowl lightly beat eggs. Add hot cream mixture to eggs in a slow stream, whisking, and pour into pan. Cook custard over moderately low heat, stirring constantly, until the custard thickly coats the back of a spoon, or until a thermometer registers 170 degrees F. (Do not let boil.)

Pour custard through a sieve into a clean bowl. Place the bowl in a large bowl of ice water and let the custard chill, stirring occasionally.

Moving on, churning to get the ice cream:

Place your chilled (very important) custard in a wide bowl into the freezer for about half an hour. The ice cream should have started to freeze at the edges but not fully to the centre. (In my case, my freezer wasn’t cold enough - so I placed my bowl in a bowl of crushed ice with salt to further lower the temperature and chilled it for 45 mins). Take the bowl out of the freezer and beat the mixture until it’s creamy again.

 

(Yixiao, if you’re reading, thanks for the extremely cheery oven mitten. Its first public appearance probably isn’t the most apt one, considering that it’s used to protect my hands from the HEAT. Haha. Don’t worry, I’m going to use it more appropriately in future recipes.)

Repeat the process until you have beaten the mixture for a total of three times (including freezing the mixture in between the churning). Put the mixture into the freezer for a final time until it’s ready to eat, which might take half an hour and above, depending on whether you like your ice cream consistency soft or firm.

I admit, this is a time-conscious process, and will require that you are at home (and awake) for a couple of hours. Also, I would have liked it to be less sweet. However, the result you get is a unadulterated thicky custard that melts in your mouth, leaving a lovely aftertaste of vanilla. In other words, it’s worth it.

Note: For those who own an ice-cream machine, simply freeze in the maker. Transfer ice cream to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden. Ice cream may be made 1 week ahead.

 

 

The Classic French Baguette + The almost-forgotten nephew

Here’s another bread recipe from the Le Cordon Bleu – Home Collection cookbook. Again, I’m very impressed of how reliable this cookbook is. 

On the surface, you might think that the baguette is just a rolled-up sausage version of the white bread. Of course, it isn’t, and professional bakers actually use a special flour that is not readily-available to the home cook. Fortunately, we can substitute that with a mixture of bread and plain flour.

Baguette – the bread, not the bag (the original recipe makes four loaves, which I’m guessing would be a little bit too excessive. I’ve halved it.)

Ingredients:

15g fresh yeast, or half a packet of self-active yeast

325g white bread flour

175g plain flour

5g salt

Instructions:

First, you sprinkle the yeast into 300ml of lukewarm water and leave it for 5 minutes before stirring it with a wooden spoon.

Sieve both flours and salt into a bowl, make a well in the centre, and pour in the yeast mixture. Stir to combine, and you should see this:

 

My dough mixture seemed a tad too dry, so I added more lukewarm water. Then comes the electric mixer fitted with dough hooks, which creates this:

It’s both smooth and elastic. Put the dough in an oiled bowl, and cover with a damp clean cloth. Now, it’s ready to be risen until doubled in size (the timing will depend on the temperate of your kitchen – mine took about 1 1/2 hours.)

Now comes the fun part, divide your dough into two. Try and twist each into a long sausage roll and place it on a baking pan sprinkled with plain flour (ensuring quite some space apart between each roll). Spray a fine mist of water and sprinkle plain flour over the dough.

Again, cover with the damp cloth and leave it to rise until doubled in size. Bake it in a preheated oven 220 degree Celsius (425F/ Gas 7) for 20 – 25 minutes, or until it’s golden brown, crisp and hollow sounding when tapped on the base. Remove from the tray and cool on a wire rack.

Final product:

It smells extremely good when it first comes out of the oven, and of course, me being me, I couldn’t resist a chunk (or two). The crust is so crunchy and and the bread is wonderfully soft and fluffy. Yummy.

For my brother: Here are some photos of the almost-forgotten nephew – Mr Lucas Yeo – and his birthday party at our house. He’s not very friendly at this moment, and he can scream pretty loud – kinda like Natasha when she was a baby. Haha.

He smiles!

 

Quite cute, la.

 

the macaron, some what

Fearless. That was me when I first started baking. I remember when I would attempt to make Baklava (an extremely sweet and nutty Turkish filo pastry dessert), profiteroles, mooncakes (that turned out so hard that it bounced up when I dropped it on the floor) and kueh lapis (a steamed Malay cake that has a coconut pandan layered ontop of glutinous rice. The level of difficulty stated on the recipes didn’t stop me back in my heyday. Only the cleaning did.

Back then, you could say that I had nothing to fear but fear itself.

But things changed. As I grew older, time became a commodity that shouldn’t be wasted. Weight became a factor in deciding which recipes to try. It wasn’t so much about trying new stuff, but more about trying what I knew worked and was good. So what was left were one-bowl, 3-step and low fat desserts. Which isn’t very fun admittedly.

Today was different though. Something strange came over me and I decided to try the macaron. Notorious for having a love/hate relationship with the home baker, the macaron is meant not for the fearless.

After much research, I settled on David Lebovitz chocolate macaron recipe. It seemed simple and user-friendly enough. Because the macaron shell consists of mostly egg whites and sugar, the technique involved is the key in getting the right texture (firm, white peaks are optimal). Also important is that the utensils used are clinically-clean. The batter looked promising. The first batch of shells baked at 180 degree Celsius.

At about the 15th minute, the burning smell wafted out of the kitchen.

 

Imaginary thought: hmmm… okay…. never mind. 

Actual thought: oh shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Taking a minute to breathe, I lowered the temperature to around 160 degree Celsius, and the second batch turned out much better. It rose somewhat and had an even lighter shade of brown.

I could have simply eaten the shells alone. Even though they didn’t have the lovely base that macaron shells that should sit on, they were sweet, light and crunchy.

The results.

 

It tastes good enough. The cream was bittersweet, which was a good contrast to the sweet shells. But looks-wise, let’s just say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

To be honest, I won’t try the recipe anytime soon. There are some desserts that are meant to be baked at home and some that are meant to be bought. In this case, the macaron falls into the latter (the flavours at Bakerzin are lovely – especially the rose lychee).

But I’m glad I did – because it made baking that much more exciting to me again.