Royal Icings Again

It seems that "Royal Icings" are most versatile, easiest and one of the better ingredients to be used in cake decoration. It's not difficult to get the ingredients - egg whites, icing sugar & lemon, and it's not expensive.


This week's decoration was based on Royal Icings again. For lesson 10 (so fast??), we did masking on dummy cake (made of styrofoam), and did some pipings on the dummy cake. I put my beautiful dove from last week, on the masked "cake". Then piped some fleurs-de-lis and double drop-strings at the sides, using Royal Icing. My other coursemates were also enjoying what they were doing, and all showing their creativity!




Amy did a brush embroidery to show her. Her works are really very fine and nice. Not forgeting, she fed us with some baguettes too! She really spoilt us by feeding us all these time!


The following lesson was on piping flowers using piping nails. The initial look at the demonstration seems easy, but the actual piping was really challenging. Many of us needed her personal demonstration and attention to get the flowers right. It wasn't easy to achieve the real look. Fortunately, we managed to do that by the end of the lesson. Looks like Royal Icing is here to stay for the next few lessons!



Oh yes, I'm just looking forward to the Food Bloggers Potluck Party tomorrow! Finally it's here!

It's Choux's Time!

I had previously wanted to make choux pastry, but have been putting them off. Still in my mind about making choux, I finally got to bake it today.

Before I rattled on with my choux pastry, I did a cream cheese pound cake from Litte Corner of Mine. It was supposed to be "awesomely delicious" but mine turned out "awesomely awful"! *Sigh* I still need to practice more on such simple & classic cakes. It's weird how sometimes I can bake nice beautiful cheesecake, but can't bake a pound cake well. I must be very lucky in my previous bake then! :> I suspected it was because I creamed the butter too long, resulting in some parts of the cake "unbaked".


I had meat dumpling for dinner last night. It was made by my auntie. I'm a lover of dumplings, especially my mum's! However, my mum has stopped making dumplings since my grandmother passed away. So now, no more mum's dumplings. My auntie's dumpling is somewhere close to hers, and it's nice. I'll have to pay for it outside should I craved for one then!


Tonight, I prepared tuna sandwich with Gardenia Foccacia. I toasted the Foccacia with cheese slice, added romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, then topped with tuna with mayo. Yummy! But my twins DIDN'T like them! *faint* My eldest was opposite. He have two servings! *Haiz* Difficult to please all... I just have to please myself and eat them can already! What a mother I am!!


Back to my choux. I used the recipe from Alex Goh's "Irresistable Pastry" and found that the choux pastry was dense inside. I prefer them to be lighter inside. But I didn't bother to scrap them out. I prefer Aunt Yochana's recipe compared to this.


I filled the insides with cream cheese, mixed with butter, icing sugar and orange zest. The cream cheese frosting was a recipe by Anna. Equal amount of cream cheese with butter, add 75% of icing sugar. I added orange zest to make it more refreshing. But realised can't really taste it. Then topped them with chocolate ganache. My children loved the fillings very much. And I think it goes very well with the chocolate. Of course, the fillings cannot be too much as there is butter taste in it, unlike whipping creams.

Vanilla Bean Cheesecake

The bbq on Saturday was partially to celebrate my brother-in-law's birthday and also to have some bbq fun. The stuff that they bought for bbq are pretty good - lamb chops, satay, chicken wings, sotong balls, sausages and MARSHMALLOWS! How can we have bbq without marshmallows? That was actually requested by my daughter.


Anyway, my brother-in-law requested for cheesecake for his birthday. He is a cheesecake person. Last year, I baked him a New York Cheesecake. This year, he asked me to surprise him. I went surf through the web, looking for "exotic" or "special" cheesecakes, but just don't know what is suitable. Finally, I found a very special cheesecake recipe - Vanilla Bean Cheesecake. It looks simple enough to follow and special enough to make as it has real vanilla seeds. However, instead of baking the sponge cake from the recipe by Mandy, I use the usual biscuits crumbs. As I crushed more crumbs, I decided to have the crumbs at the sides too. It turns out, the cheesecake was really really nice. Not too sweet, as I cut down the sugar, a mild vanilla taste, not too cheesy, and the biscuit crumbs lighten the cheese taste. Everyone said it was really really nice and special. I'm glad I made the right choice...again!

Cheese Earthquake Loaves

It's cheesy cheese again. I was wondering what I should make on Saturday to bring over for my family. As we are having a bbq at my youngest sister's house, many food were already prepared for by us separately. Since I have some time to spare in the morning, I decided to make my cheese earthquake bread as I felt like having them.


Luckily I left it to proof for a long long time (almost 2 hours) after I had wrapped them up with cheese. Previously, I didn't proof so long, so the bread was rather tough. This time, I left it to proof while I went out to buy some food stuff. It turned out to be soft and much nicer! I made three loaves - one for myself, one to be shared by my sisters and parents, and the other mini loaf for my auntie. I'm happy with the "over-proof" bread loaves.

Orange Cinnamon Cake

I realised I really have been lapsing in my posts! There were just so many activities going on, and so many things to blog. But so little time to do the "edits" and the postings!


I made two orange cinnamon cakes-one for my father-in-law and another for my colleague's birthday. The recipe was from Anna's class last week. I simply love this cake. I did without the cream cheese frostings. For my colleague, I put it in a box as a gift. Though the picture looked like it's drawn by a kindergarten child, I thought it was the thought that counts! Hahaha... Looks like I really need a drawing lesson.



Talking about birthdays, last Friday, my dear colleagues and I celebrated our birthdays together. One of my good friend was one day different from me and another friend. So the three of us usually have our yearly birthday bash together. This year, another dear friend (colleague) decided to buy us lunch together! It was really generous and nice of her to do that. We had our "early" birthday bash at Bakerzin as we liked the food and I had their discount card. It was really a wonderful lunch, catching up with one another. Though we are in the same organisation, one of the girl is in in another location. I'll have more birthday celebrations to go! Heehee...;)

Lessons Continue

The last two lessons were on piping of royal icings. The stiff consistency required your "bull" strength. Whatever you have taken for dinner, were "purged" out piping the laces using the stiff royal icing consistency. Fortunately, Amy (our instructor) was really very nice. She asked if we wanted some chiffon cakes, left over from the advance cake module classes, and we said yes as we need more strength. She brought over three chiffons for us-Orange, Pandan and Chocolate. We liked the chiffons, and for me, Pandan Chiffon as I was thinking about it just a couple of days ago! Hahaha...what a coincidence!


The following lesson was on flooding pictures. Amy gave us a pictures to practice our floodings. The outline was made using a rather stiff consistency while the flooding was made by using runny consistency. The result of the look was supposed to be like "embossed" effect, which can be really nice. The rest of my coursemates chose pictures with colours added, while I chose a pair of doves with bells, like a wedding decoration, which required no addition of colours. As the flooding takes about three days to dry up, we left it in the class, and will get to see the results only next week! That evening, Amy brought over some mixed grain breads and some olive oil for us to eat. We took a break in between class to snack and enjoy. I really look forward to the classes every week, to learn and to enjoy the "free" food (as food is not supposed to be part of the curriculum!!) Not only do we have some food from Amy, one of our coursemate (Margaret) also baked some snacks for us to try. So far, she has made chocolate cheesecake, brownie and fruit tarts for us on different days. So, how not to put on weight?? :p