Coffee Chiffonlets

Scale of difficulty ★★
Yummy-ness ★★★★

I looooove coffee :) I love almost anything coffee flavoured so how can I possibly not make these chiffonlets? The cake batter was relatively easy to make. I had a bit of mishap with the meringue tho :( I accidentally dropped a bit of yolk in my egg white but managed to scoop it out. The cake was very soft and fluffy, very much like an angel food cake actually, but of course it is coffee flavoured. Since I didn't have a mini bundt pan, I just used the ordinary cupcake molds.

I made the syrup and ended up only using maybe 1/3, in hindsight I probably shouldn't have used it at all because the syrup made the cake all gooey and stinky :( I ended up throwing all the cupcakes into the oven for another 10 minutes to try and dry out the syrup.

I didn't use the dulce de leche whipped cream because I wanted to bring these to work as we'll be having a birthday morning tea on Tuesday. I thought the dulce de leche whipped cream might not survive the bus ride to work. So I decided to go with a mocha whipped ganache because the addition of chocolate is meant to make cream a lot more stable. I have no idea what is the problem with me, chocolate, cream and ganache! But I've made ganache probably 5 times and 3 out of 5 times my chocolate/cream have split!! I was very gutted this time that I think either my ganache has split or I've overwhipped it. Not quite sure what went wrong :( However I ended up adding a bit of gelatine in it and it turned out a bit like chocolate mousse, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Hopefully my chocolate 'mousse' will survive the bus journey to work tomorrow! Fingers crossed :)

PS: does anyone have tips on how to make chocolate ganache?

Two Fat Cats Whoopie Pie

Scale of difficulty ★★★ 
Yummy-ness ★★★

I haven't baked anything from Rose's book for a few weeks after a few baking disasters :( This week's recipe is something that's been on my 'to-bake' list for a while so I've decided to pick up my oven mitts again and start baking!

The 'pie' part of the recipe is quite easy really, doesn't involve any special technique, just whisk together the wet ingredients, add dry ingredients and buttermilk and scoop onto baking tray. I didn't have buttermilk at home and turned to google (when in doubt, google, lol). Google says if you wanna make buttermilk you can add 1 tb lemon/ vinegar into milk and it will magically transforms into buttermilk! So I added 0.5 tablespoon of lemon juice into mine.

            Does this pic kinda remind you of dog er....hm.... *something unmentionable on a food blog*

                                                   A lot bigger when they come out!!!!!!!!

After mixing in all the ingredients, I realised the batter was a bit too runny and if I put it on the baking sheet it would most definitely turn into a chocolate puddle, so I decided to add in a bit of flour (30g perhaps?). My other problem is I don't have a press release ice cream scoop and in hindsight it would probably be easier if we piped the batter rather than scooped it from the ice cream scoop. I don't know how many ounces my ice cream scoop is but our 'pies' ended up being MASSIVE!!! I didn't expect it to spread and rise that much! They ended up being bigger than my hand!! The 'pies' on their own are moist, slightly tangy but intensely chocolatey, and very very soft, I could just eat them on their own :) However I was very intrigued by the marshmallow cream and resisted the urge to eat all of them :)


I've never made buttercream before... besides that time when my sister made buttercream for home economics and it turned out like butter vomit..... ew............ I was a bit hesitant when I add the butter into the meringue, everything became runny. So I panicked and put it in the fridge and whipped it for a good few minutes....

                                                          Meringue and whipped butter

                                                                  Finished buttercream :)

You've probably noticed that my buttercream has a beige colour, its because I used golden syrup rather than corn syrup (didn't have any!). The end result is a buttercream that is smooth and oh-so-silky with a toffee- like flavour.

How did it taste?
The pie and the buttercream are both excellent,  however when you put two elements together it just became too much for me. The pie was incredibly rich (not to mention bloody massive!) and I skipped lunch after eating half of it. I brought most of them into the office but I don't think anyone is a big fan of it. I think I'll make the buttercream again, probably with a sponge cake and I'll probably make the pie again but in a cupcake form.

Bread Making

Scale of difficulty ★ (it is quite time consuming though....)
Yummy-ness ★★★★★


Making bread just always seemed like a very difficult thing to me... I was always terrified that my bread will not rise and I'll end up with a tough and flat dough.... till..... my mum's friend introduced her to making bread with the tangzhong (湯種) method. To view the original recipe, see http://en.christinesrecipes.com/2010/03/japanese-style-coconut-custard-buns.html  Since you can see the recipe and steps involved on Christine's site I'm not gonna repeat it, just gonna share with you some process shots and our end results!


Bread dough coming together after 30 minutes of mixing in the bread machine.

After an hour of letting the dough rest :)

Cutting the dough and let it rest for another 10 minutes

After putting in the filling and let it rest for 1 hour

End results!!

Ta da!

 YUM!

We love it so much that I think mum has made it 2 times in a week.... I think we'll get sick of it soon :P But honestly this is a great recipe and the bread tastes just like the ones you buy from the Asian bakery!

We've tried many other variations including green tea, nutella, pork floss, BBQ pork (cha siu), red bean, cheerios and bacon and cheese. Yep, I think our family is addicted so I just had to share it here :)