Dinners at home with my family almost always turns out to be a feast or buffet. If anyone’s coming over, you’re sure to be leaving with a very full stomach. Ever since the recent trickling of companies started to send me some of their products to eat or drink with for the past few months and my garden’s growing quite a bit of cucumbers, I thought I might as well utilize them for my dinners (and of course, my parents chipped in the help, both cooking and eating).
Big ol’ cuke
Large, fat cucumbers that are larger than my hand’s grasp are bursting out from its vines, I made a simple, refreshing salad by using the mandoline. The remarkable difference between homegrown cucumbers to the ones you buy from a grocery store is the freshness and the flavor; it’s so much sweeter and juicier. Continue reading “Dinners at Home” »
Last week or so while my family was still in this weird, almost obsessed period of making almost all Chinese sweets and baked goods from scratch, I went along with it and baked dan tats (蛋撻) or egg custard tarts. You may call me crazy but my argument is, there’s nothing like a fresh baked fill in the blank and if I know how to make it, why the hell should I buy it? Unless of course, I’m desperate to eat whatever I’m aping for. I know things like the egg custard tarts and Chinese-style baked pork buns would make your head scratch and wonder why bake it since it’s relatively cheap to buy? To sum up in a word, quality.
Before I keep ranting, here’s how I made them…
I didn’t realize that until my dad translated that for me when I found a recipe via eGullet which took me to this Chinese website called Leisure Cat. Funny thing is, my dad inscribed a bunch of dim sum recipes waay back about three decades ago and actually saved his little notebook. He compared notes and found it to be pretty much legit in terms of ratios. So, I used the crusts portion and went my own way when it came to the egg yolk custard filling.
Mis en place for the “oil crust” and “water crust”
There’s two crusts to make, yes. TWO. The “oil crust” is self-explanatory. It’s made with a pile of butter, lard and a smidge of flour (if you have to compare weights between the fats and the flour). The “water crust” is the low fat part of the dough. Both are essential to give you the crisp, flaky crust. Continue reading “Baking Egg Custard Tarts (aka Dan Tats)” »
The past weekend I baked my birthday cake early. I don’t mean a few days early, I meant a week early. Why? you ask. Well, this weekend I’m pretty busy with going to the Cook.Eat.Live food event, meeting up with a bunch of friends for dinner, and trying to fit in some studying time for the GREs in between (I’m planning to go back to grad school.) I thought I might as well bake it early and eat my way through with the help of my parents and Helen.
Broken up chocolate & baked cake
Once again, the good people of Scharffen Berger came to my aid, providing me the milk chocolate for this cake recipe. The recipe, white velvet cake with milk chocolate ganache is also from Scharffen Berger’s The Essence of Chocolate. Frankly, after trying multiple recipes from their book this is a great book for baking anything chocolate-related. Six recipes attempted and all were successes. I highly recommend.
To explain what’s in the white velvet cake, it’s basically a pale yellow/white cake with a very fine texture due to the use of cake flour. It’s a very simple cake that my mom wondered why I want to do such a thing on my 24th birthday? Frankly, I don’t want to deal with a fussy recipe and don’t want to put in too much time with my birthday cake. I’m aiming for simplicity this year.
Cake slice
Anyway, the cake was good as it sounded. A delicate crumb cake, that has a hint of butter, barely sweet, sandwiched and coated with milk chocolate ganache. What’s so great about Scharffen Berger’s milk chocolate is the caramelized milk flavor that’s very swoonworthy. (Heck, when I was decorating the cake. I was scraping a third of my ganache into a pastry bag, my mom walked over to the counter where I placed the nearly empty bowl, picked up the spatula, and licked it. She told me the ganache was delicious and wanted more! Alas, I can’t spare any.) Continue reading “My Birthday Cake – White Velvet Cake with Milk Chocolate Ganache” »
Bunch of Scharffen Berger chocolates & The Essence of Chocolate book
Last weekend was quite busy for me, as I baked two cakes from Scharffen Berger’s Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cooking with Fine Chocolate. To those of you who follow or actually look at my Flickr photos, I did attend to their luncheon several weeks ago. I followed up with Scharffen Berger and they were generous to send me two cake recipes worth of chocolate. Awesome…
Why the hell I want to bake in the hot, humid New York City weather? It’s for the sake of my brother’s 22nd birthday and my mom’s congratulatory cake(s) for being done and over with cancer. (My mom had her last planned surgery about 3 weeks ago, reversing her ileostomy. All is well now after the minor complications.) Continue reading “Chocolate Cakes Weekend” »
As promised from the previous post, here’s the recipe for my mom’s chocolate cake. It’s decadent, chocolate-y and nutty from the use of almond flour. Again, I had to make my own almond flour since the grocery stores I shop in don’t carry it. The other changes I’ve done was to add on the chocolate glaze that was left over from my brother’s cake and used Lindt’s Excellence 85% Cocoa Bar for the chocolate solids. What surprised me was the fact that it was easy to make.
It’s just one of those mornings when I have to get up at 4:30 AM and start cranking out breakfast. I know it’s an insane time for most of you to get up that early but if you have a demanding mother who requests you to bake this as the last home baked breakfast for your younger brother before he goes back to college, you have to do it. Trust me. Living with a mom who can start World War III for the smallest things isn’t worth the fight.
Are you worth my sleep time?
So, I started prepping my usual go-to bread, my variation of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s cinnamon raisin loaf, the night before. (What I’ve altered from her recipe was replacing the cinnamon spiral with sweetened, flaked coconut, soaked the raisins, and made the dough a bit sweeter). I shaped it, proofed it, and placed the loaves in the refrigerator overnight. Thankfully, my mom’s willing to take out the loaves from the fridge around 3 AM since she’s usually having her early morning food cravings.
I popped these babies in the oven around 5. When the loaves are about three-fourths baked through, the entire house smells like toasted coconut. Besides the fact that it made me hungry, it woke up my sleepy-headed father who wouldn’t normally wake up until 7:30.
Hmmm…maybe you’re ain’t so bad after all
Innards
At least my efforts weren’t wasted: my mom’s happy about this loaf since she likes soft bread; my dad’s happy just to eat fresh baked bread and my brother liked it because it’s tasty. I’m just happy because everyone’s happy with the food (I also baked a batch of cranberry orange muffins), have my morning cup of coffee, and GO TO SLEEP.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your family! I’m going to skip a few posts about places I’ve eaten since it is time-appropriate and it’s one of those rare home baking posts. Ooooh… I can bake.
I know I haven’t written in a loong time. It’s not that I’m ignoring you intentionally, it’s just that my life is flooded with a lot of drama that I don’t want to go into depth. If you can recall recently about my mom being sick and all, she has been operated a couple of days ago and she’s doing okay so far. She’s just fatigued and a bit dizzy since she’s been in bed for a while and the surgery has taken a bit of a toll on her. As I’ve said earlier I’m behind so I’ll catch you up with the food things that happened since my last post that was notable.
Back two Friday mornings ago, my parents and I went to Mt. Sinai Hospital to meet the surgeon and consult about what will happen to my mom and schedule the surgery. After that, I have to run a few errands in regards to school so I left my parents and walked down Madison Avenue. Somehow I was curious to about Yura & Company’s food when I was about to pass by, and just dropped in to see what they have.
Some things in life are better simple. Take cake for example. I know a typical person would love cake slathered in buttercream or any smooth, sweet frosting. I would too…but I wasn’t feeling fussy these days since a batch of buttercream wouldn’t survive the heat in my kitchen since these days the weather in New York City it is hot and humid: a baker’s worst enemies. I just wanted a simple pound cake – unadulterated, simple but nevertheless delicious.
This is to back track everything that has happened the entire week or so. Starting with some homemade bread.
I made this bread before I actually ate out with my aunt (the one who’s visiting from Hong Kong) from my earlier post, at Chung Moo Roo but since I don’t really have a real recipe for you to write about except that it’s a very close derivative of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cinnamon Raisin Bread from The Bread Bible except that I used whole wheat flour (about 15 – 20% total) to make it healthy.
My aunt is somewhat of a health conscious person, so that’s why I did that. However, I did make it a bit “bad” by making a barely sweetened chocolate paste for the swirl portion of the bread. All I did was use about 1/2 cup of unsweetened Valhrona cocoa powder, 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar and 3 tablespoons of melted butter and mix it up to a paste and let it solidify to a paste.
Here’s the before and after baking photos: Unbaked loaf
Big ol’ cuke
. To those of you who follow or actually look at my Flickr photos, I did attend to their 
