Cookies Weekend

It was a cookie-baking weekend. It wasn't planned, just happened that the mood and the flow was just there! Well, I guess for cookies, you can still bake and keep it till Chinese New Year (CNY). Therefore, it wasn't considered too early too!

The cookies which I baked, weren't the usual recipes which I normally used. Why? Because I wanted to try new cookies and new recipes. Frankly, if you ask me, I'm not a great fan of cookies, except Subway's soft and chewy cookies. Even so, how many can you eat?

Anyway, back to my cookies baking spree. In one and half day, I baked four types of cookies - Peanut Cookies, Pineapple Tarts, Chocolate Chips Cookies and Rose Cookies.

Pineapple tarts were baked using a friend's recipe, which is not convenient for me to share the recipe. However, I do find that there are a lot of very good recipes which anyone can use. Like A Baker's Videoblog, The Little Teochew and from Kitchen Capers Forum and many more! The reason why I still stick to my current recipe is because it only has three ingredients and is able to create the melt-in-the-mouth taste. Also, I knew that many people who made pineapple tarts swear by their SCS salted butter, and so do I. I only use SCS salted butter for making pineapple tart pastry, if not, it won't be found in my chiller!

In order to expedite my baking process, I usually roll up the pineapple paste first and keep them in the fridge. I also made the pastry the day before and stored them in the fridge. So that when I'm ready to bake, I can just take them out from the fridge, mould them and baked. It really saved me a lot of time by doing so. The enclosed pineapple tarts which I made, consist of very little pineapple paste, and lots of pastry, just the way myself and my family members like it!

It was the first time I tried Peanut cookies. This was using Wendy's recipe. However, after mixing, my dough was very unmanageable. Therefore, it was very very difficult to mould. It took me more than 2 hours to mould and bake them! Gosh! I think it was my mis-calculation of the ingredients since I reduced the quatities. It was supposed to be "melt in the mouth", mine was crispy and crunchy (due to my kneading and kneading). However, the comments given was good too! At least my siblings like the fragrance of the peanut!

The first time I tried Bakertan's Chocolate chip cookies, I like it very much. I had wanted to try his recipe since then, but I didn't have the time to bake them. So this time, I decided to bake it as part of the CNY cookies. As I didn't want to wait for the dough to harden, I dropped the very very soft and creamy dough onto the tray immediately. There were two batches which I baked. For the first batch, I baked it immediately when the tray was full. For the second batch, I placed the tray into the chiller while waiting for the first batch to be baked.

The conclusion was, the batch which was baked from the chiller spreaded less. Nevertheless, they are equally good. My siblings loved this chocolate chip cookies. They said it tasted exactly like Famous Amos cookies sans the aroma! They were snacking on this cookies non-stop! I was glad they loved it too!

Finally, the very last cookies I baked was the Rose Cookies from Gina's blog. I recalled trying some rose cookies last year, which was really nice with melt-in-the-mouth texture. However, I knew this recipe wouldn't have that kind of texture. Since I still have my Rose Water and some roses, I decided to try this cookies.

I didn't follow the instructions completely. Instead of melting the butter, I creamed the butter with sugar instead. The dough was really easy to handle. I was able to mould it round nicely. Even though SRF was used, the shape didn't change much. It only become firmer after baking, with very little increase in size. The cookies were really fragrant, crispy and crunchy!

After trying out so many different cookie recipes, I had a feel of the various dough texture. Even though the texture were different, they all churned out fragrant crispy and crunchy cookies. Somehow, I enjoyed baking these cookies after I received positive feedback from my family.

Recipe for Rose Cookies, with slight modification from Taste of Time.
(Makes about 170 one-inch cookies)

Ingredients
250g Salted butter, room temp
400g Self Raising Flour, sift
150g Icing sugar, sift
4 tsp Rose water (I used 5 tsp, which I think can be reduced to 4)
10g Dried mini rose buds

Method
1. Remove leaves, stalks from rose buds, peel and separate rose petals.
2. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
3. Add rose water, mix well.
4. Add in flour, followed by rose petals and mix till it forms a smooth dough.
5. Mould the dough into rounds place on a baking tray.
6. Bake in preheated oven 180C for 15 mins.
7. Remove to cool before storing.

I'm submitting this Rose Cookies to the Aspiring Bakers #3: My Favorite CNY Cookie (Jan 2011) hosted by Jess.

Roses Decoration Workshops

One way to contantly sharpen your skills is to conduct a workshops so that you ensure that you don't forget the techniques. That was what I did lately. So far, I've had two Roses Decoration Workshops conducted at the comfort of my place. I had the youngest participant at 18, and a more senior lady who is a retiree. How nice it was to know them.


What the participants learned during the three hours workshop was to pipe roses using royal icing. According to the participants, that was the most challenging as skills and precision is required to get a pretty rose. Next up was moulding the roses with fondant. By adding colours to the fondant, you'll get coloured roses. If you have theme cake, then coloured roses can fit well in the decoration. It was rather easy for them to pick up the moulding of the roses. The participants were really good (in both sessions)!

Being someone who loves to entertain, I made some snacks for my participants to go with Rose tea. I thought they might like to have a short break in between to 'digest' what they had learn.


Finally, it was moulding chocolate roses. We made the moulding chocolates from scratch. Not sure if there are ready made ones, but it was easy to start from basic ingredients. The participants got a "taste" of how the moulding chocolate was like after mixing. Lots of kneading were required before the moulding chocolate was ready. It was...quite a challenge. Nonetheless, all the participants had equipped themselves with the know-how and the skills of moulding roses. I'm very happy when I see them leaving my place, happy with what they have learnt, and what they brought back. Most importantly, I am happy that I am able to impart my skills to them.

Rose Rose...

It's Rose again! I promised myself I'll make the Rose Chiffon Cake again after I have bought my Rose Water. And here is my own promise! Without hesitation, I tried that Rose Chiffon recipe again. This time, I was very very happy with the result. The taste of the chiffon was really good, especially with the rose petals. Even I've adjusted the temperature of the oven. I realised the temperature should have been reduced since I was using the fan oven.




Recipe modified from "Chiffon cake is done" by Kevin Chai.

Rose Chiffon Cakes

Ingredients:

6 egg yolks
50g sugar
1/4 tsp salt
4 tbsp cooking oil
8g mini rose, washed and mix with hot water
60g rose tea water (extracted from above)
1 tsp rose water (extract/essence)
110g self-raising flour
7 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
110g sugar

Method:

1. Lightly wash the mini roses, then place them in hot water and leave it to cool. Pluck out the rose petals after measuring enough rose tea water.
2. Combine egg yolks, sugar, salt, cooking oil, rose petals, rose tea water and rose water in a mixing bowl.
3. Fold in flour and mix together to form batter.
4. Beat egg whites and cream of tartar until soft peaks. Gradually add in sugar, beating at high speed until frothy and stiff peaks form.
5. Scoop 1/3 of the beaten egg white foam into the yolk batter and gently mix them.
6. Then pour the mixture back into the egg whites and fold until blended (no more white streaks).
7. Pour batter into ungreased 9" tube pan and 6" tube pan/or 3 3" tube pans. (Combination is 9" with 6" or 9" with 3 3" tube pans).
8. Bake in preheat oven at 160C for 45mins for 9", 35mins for 6" and 25mins for 3" pans, or until cooked.
9. Remove from oven, invert cake on a wire rack until completely cooled before removing from the tube pans.

You can purchase the mini rose from bigger Fairprice. They are under the dried goods section. I also noticed Sheng Siong carries dried roses too!

玫瑰,玫瑰, 我愛你 (Rose Rose I luv u)

"Rose rose I luv u, with your almond eyes!" Oh, Rose is actually the name of a lady. The rose for me, is the mini rose that I used for my Rose Chiffon Cake.

I saw this packet of mini rose in Fairprice one fine day. Somehow, it was so pretty I just had to buy it. I had hesitated for so long before I bought. After I bought, I made Rose Tea with it, and it was very fragrant. I told myself, I just have to use it to bake. Finally last evening, I use the Orange Chiffon Cake recipe by Kevin Chai to convert it into my Rose Chiffon Cake! It was quite exciting though. I was hoping the rose taste will somehow be there since I torn up the petals and add it into the batter. Luckily I added some vanilla essence.

In the end, the cake turned out to be quite "flavourless"! Hahaha... I really don't know how to describe the taste. It doesn't has any distinct flavour like pandan or orange. However, it also doesn't taste like eggs only. It wasn't very sweet, was just alright for me. There wasn't much vanilla taste also. It still taste quite nice because of its softness and fluffiness!

This Kevin Chai, use 7 eggs but for 9" pan! Aiyo, my 9" overflowed with the batter! Finally, I had to use one 9" pan and one 6" pan. For the 9" pan, I baked first in my Delonghi oven while the 6" pan, I put it into my Sharp 3-in-1 convection oven. I haven't been using Sharp since I had my Delonghi. Sharp was my "ex". In the end, the chiffon cake baked by Sharp looked much nicer than the one from Delonghi. I wondered if I had filled up too much batter in the 9" tube pan to cause it to expand so much and cracked!

I've decided to go to Shermay's to buy the Rose Water. I'll be trying this recipe again, this time with the Rose Water mixed with the rose "tea" water and rose petals. I supposed it will be nicer looking and taste better too!