Another Birthday Cake

I had been rather lapse in posting lately. I had been lazy, busy and dizzy all week! When I'm in front of the PC, I felt dizzy, then lazy set in. However, I cannot be lazy anymore, otherwise, I'll have lots of backlog posts!! Goodness me!

I had been busy whole week, preparing for Saturday. I made Vanilla Ice-Cream and Cheesecake in the mid-week, prior to Saturday. As both of these needed to be refrigerated way before the actual day of consumption, I had to prepare them in advance.

1. Vanilla Ice-Cream. I went through all the ice cream recipe, wanting to find the easiest to make. As it was to be used as an accompanied to my sister's Chocolate Fondant, I want it to be easy and creamy. I finally use the recipe from Recipetips.com. I modified the recipe a little to suit my taste. Instead of 6 egg yolks, I used 10 egg yolks as my eggs were pretty small. I replaced vanilla extract with a vanilla pod seeds and used 2 cups of whipping cream instead. The end result?? Creamy, real & taste expensive!!



2. Triple Layer Birthday Cheesecake. My youngest sister requested for a cheesecake. I asked if she can accept anything exotic, she said she can't. As I've baked cheesecake for her and my BIL before, I couldn't think of what other flavour I could try. Last year was the Chocolate Torte. How time has fly! After going through my cheesecake recipes, I finally settled on the recipe from "Delicious Cakes" called Triple Layer Birthday Cheesecake. This recipe needed to steam-bake the cheese layer by layer, each layer for 30 minutes. The three layers are Coffee, White Chocolate and Chocolate. I was thinking of topping it with a layer of crusted oreos after baking. However, after baking, the top was so smooth...so beautiful! There was no cracks to be found anywhere! This was my BEST cheesecake I ever baked! So I decided to frost as little as possible, to keep the smooth top visible. So this was my final decoration!




Saturday bakes include the following.
3. Red Bean Buns. I bought the red bean paste from PH lately as I found their red bean paste to be very nice, and I remembered my dad likes it. So I made a whole bunch of them to be given to my family members. I made different designs and put them into the muffin trays, an idea I got from Honey Bee Sweets.



4. Kueh Makmur. This was in my "To Bake" list. After the unsuccessful attempt the last time, I had to try again using different recipe. I used Honey Bee Sweets' recipe this time, though quite a lot of work, I was quite determined to bake this. However, I had added the egg white while the flour were not thoroughly cooled, resulting in my dough being too wet to roll. I ended having to put them in the fridge, then adding a lot more plain flour to it. The baking caused the dough to crack. Fortunately, the overall taste was much better than the previous attempt. At least, it was still melt-in-the-mouth texture! Quite happy with the outcome, though not happy with the process!