My simple meals

While I do not bake as fervently as I wish to, I have upped my cooking capacity – mainly simple meals that I can eat for dinner and bring to work the next day.

They include:

- fried vegetables with oyster sauce

- pizzas (mainly topped with potato and onion, fresh vegeables, ham and cheese)

- stir-fried chicken with baked cashew nuts

- curry chicken with diced cauliflower

- mee siam (using prima taste)

- pastas (mostly tomato-based)

My next endevours include:

- hainanese chicken rice (including chilli sauce, authentically-made with chicken oil, yum)

- lion’s head, literal translation from shi zi tou (braised lettuce with meatballs)

- roasted duck or lamb of some kind

- more variations of vegetable-based meals – I’ve been reading lots of Mark Bittman on NYT.

When I next go home (in April), I will eat

- bbq stingray with less sambal, and more of that sour, onion chilli sauce please!

- fish soup (more fish please!)

- fish head with salted bean paste sauce and pork lard (my dad’s recipe is the best)

drool…

Sites I’ve been drooling over

1. www.orangette.blogspot.com – her writing is fluid and her photographs are gorgeous

2. www.norecipes.com – i like his inspired take on cooking (after all, isn’t it what most home cooks from a previous generation did?).

3. www.cookinglight.com

I’ve been writing lots in list-form recently. Work does that to you, I think.

Christmas is all around me

This Christmas will mark the first time I won’t be spending it with the family in Singapore. In any case, my family was never that big on celebrating this festival. It was always more of a watch-Home-Alone-and-Indiana-Jones-reruns-on-TV kinda day. Well, I’ll definitely be missing them (and my lovely friends), especially since there’s a new baby in the house (not mine, thankfully).

Yixiao came down for almost three weeks (with one week spent in Japan), and together, we headed off to Lantau for Buddha admiring.

Of course, what would our excursions be like without some dessert!

Her ice cream (caramel hazelnut and mixed nut cheese?) looked delicious, but I had in mind to try the tau-hway (soya bean curd) at the monastery.

In search of my perfect LBD for a formal event cos I-have-all-this-money-and-no-dress (nose flares ala Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman), we headed on a shopping tour in Causeway Bay. Alas, it was found in Zara (it says classic, elegant and gorgeous to me).

To rest our tired feet, we had a break at Azabu Sabo (Fashion Walk, Level 2). I discovered a new fondness for green tea ice cream.  Some crazy photos we took:

Haha.. I love this photograph. We look CRAZY, yo!

Finally to complete this Christmas post, I would like to write down what I’m appreciative for:

1. Being able to start a new job in a new city with so much support and help (from new friends and of course, that somebody)

2. Having friends back home whom I know will be there for me no matter what

3. Knowing my family cares very much for me

4. Being healthy, and more importantly, knowing that good health is something I should not take for granted

5. To have people I love safe and healthy

Okay, till 2009! Take care!

Congratulations to Mr and Mrs Goh!

One of my close girlfriends from junior college got married yesterday in what seems like the perfect fairytale wedding (from the photographs and videos on Facebook). I am very happy for what they have built together, and are about to build in the years to come. This deserves many smiley faces.

Meanwhile, my first work weekend has come and almost gone. I did the usual eating, sleeping, and now studying routine. I think I need to start a new hobby.

Thank you

As I am trying to figure out how to write this post without sounding overtly sentimental, I find that I should say it as it is.  It’s friends like them whom I know that no matter what happens, will always be there to support me. It’s friends like these that make me want to be a better, stronger person. It’s friends like these that I will keep for life.

I feel really blessed to have so many people who love and care for me, and also very importantly, whom I care and love. As I embark on a new chapter of my life in Hong Kong, I will constantly remind myself to keep in touch with you all. It’s a promise to myself.

Because this isn’t really farewell, I shan’t say goodbye but see you later!

The Vanilla Series: 3 Vanilla Cupcake

Cupcake Bakeshop by Chockylit has always been one of my favourite sites to ogle at for its beautiful photographs of intricately-made cupcakes. Therefore, as a present for the GMG + significant others at tomorrow’s long-awaited reunion, I decided to make use of this recipe and the last pod to whip up something special. That said, the 3 Vanilla Cupcake (with Vanilla frosting) should definitely also be in the running for the ultimate vanilla recipe. It uses vanilla extract, vanilla seeds AND vanilla sugar (which fortunately I had on hand due to me saving the scraped-out pods in caster sugar).

For extremely clear instructions, you should click on the link to the site. I simply halved the recipe, cut down on the sugar content in the cupcake, and used light cream cheese for the frosting. Also, I didn’t sprinkle vanilla salt.

 

To add an individualised touch to the cupcake, I used my rainbow pearls (bought in Hong Kong way back in August last year at a supermarket in Tung Chung) to spell out the first letter of each of their names.

Glad to have met up, GMGs!

With this final post, I come to the end of The Vanilla Series, which I thoroughly enjoyed conceptualising (I like how this word makes it sound as though I did lots of planning and strategising). For future posts, I would definitely like to come up with more themes, perhaps lemon zest, or coconut, or purple food or whatever crazy ideas you guys would like me to try out. Just leave me a comment, and I’m game!

Also, this hurried chain of posting was not because I went mad. Rather, by tomorrow, I will be on my way to eating around Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka until the 3rd of July. I won’t be posting until then, I think.

So little money, so much food to try – Japan, here I come!

 

 

Pretty in Pink cake

 

We had decided to celebrate Xueling’s birthday before the trio left for their one-month exchange to India in search of themselves (just kidding.. they were going to work in the hospitals as part of their medical course). Of course, you can’t have birthdays without cakes, and so Michelle and I decided to make our cake a pretty-in-pink one.

I admit, I have succumbed to convenience. For the cake itself, we used a Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge cake mix, simply because it was affordable and easy to make. Of course, for true bakers, cop-outs as such would be a terrible sin. However, in our case, we were hot and tired (the weather is simply killing me), and the key aspect would be the lovely decoration.

Xueling’s Pretty-in-Pink Cake

Ingredients:

Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge Cake Mix

For the icing:

500gm icing sugar

100gm egg whites (about 3 egg whites)

1/2 tsp of lemon juice

food colouring/dye

Follow the instructions on the box to get a cake. We had separated the mix into two, so we had 2 square cakes to work with.

Make the icing by using an electric mixer to work the icing sugar, egg whites and lemon juice together. Add the colouring very slowly and cautiously to get the OCD-perfect shade of <colour>.

Ice one cake with about 1/4 of the icing mixture that you have. Use the rest to ice the entire cake as shown below.

Okay, that was when Michelle worked her magic. Because between the both of us, she has the better eye for aesthetics and design (being budding wedding planner that she is).

And the final product:

One piece of advice, fresh flowers wilt and decolour in the refrigerator. So, arrange them just when they are about to be served.  

Have fun!

I hope everything turns out well

I have been waiting and waiting. Finally, the package has arrived. I’m happy. Things have finally settled and I look forward to the next stage – as a working adult – of my life.

Right now, I just really really want everything to turn out well. For everything to go smoothly, without a glitch. That is the best birthday present.

In other news, I had a wonderful birthday dinner with the GMG (+ ryanboy) at the PS Cafe at 28 Harding Road. The ambience was lovely, the food was scrumptious and the company was, of course, perfect. After dinner, we invaded retreated to Char’s house for cake-cutting and Wii!

  

Me and my tiger prawn pasta at PS Cafe

The entire gang (+ one ryanboy – who has almost been officially inducted)

I just want to say THANK YOU!

the first try

Pandan cake was never my best friend. 

When I was younger, it was the cake I never ate. While my fellow mates (with less picky tastebuds) were happily chewing at their green-coloured, light chiffon slice, I was put off by the pungent, distinctly synthetic smell that the cake emitted. I learnt later that it was exactly synthetic pandan-flavoured essence that flavoured the commerical mass-produced brands.

With this memory trudged deep, I was never enticed to bake this cake… until today. Why you might (or might not) ask that my virgin food-related post was to be about the pandan cake? Well, a real (and delicious) pandan cake isn’t actually made of essence. Its key ingredient is the pandan leaf, which is used to flavour many Asian desserts and savouries. I thought, well, if I were to try baking this cake, I would have to get the real thing.

So I did. And according to instructions, I blended 8 pandan leaves with water. I looked at the results and wondered if I had made a mistake. Did I overblend it and turned it into its chlorophyll-ic smelling mixture? Was the mixture enough to dye the batter just the shade

of green? IS THIS ENOUGH SUSPENSE? Well, the cake turned out…. not too bad. Not the best I’ve ever made. Looks-wise, not Most Beautiful Cake of the Year standard. In fact, with my photo-taking skills, it might look worse than it actually does. I liked that it was an appetising shade of green. Not lucid enough to frighten off children. Taste-wise, it was okay too, I guess. The bottom of my cake was denser than it should have been, but the rest of the cake was light and spongy.

Finally…

 

(PS: I didn’t mean for this photograph to come out in such a Andy Warhol-wannabe manner. My camera has a weird sense of humour, which I cannot control. I also realise that you probably can’t tell that it’s the inside of the cake, which is fluffy and less scary in real life.)

I guess I shall end this post with what I learnt from this experience. Before, I had wildly-high expectations of posting a chic, witty (it’s an obsession with me, to be witty) post, that featured a beautiful cake bathed in warm studio lights. Then, I did it and realised that:

(1) I didn’t have a nice plate to put the cake on

(2) My camera was out of battery

(3) My house was not a studio

(4) I didn’t know what to write about

(5) (for those still reading) that writing and baking is not about being perfect. You can try to be, but sometimes you will make mistakes. The right (and logical) thing to do would be to learn from them, and not do the same thing again.  

I guess it suddenly seems apt that I chose to bake the pandan cake. As I bit into my (mostly) fluffy slice, I realised misperceptions can be changed. Just as I no longer hate the cake, I no longer have illusions about having to be the best blogger or baker in the world. Right now, I just want to learn to use my camera.