Small Celebrations, Big Preparations

The whole week was spending preparing for Aloysius, my eldest boy's birthday. He turns 9 this year. Born on the same year I got married! So it's very easy to know my wedding anniversary and his age. On a lighter note, if you think it's a shotgun marriage, I'll let you guess. I got married in March and he was born 37 weeks in December. Now you tell me...aren't I just lucky? ;)

Ok, back to preparation for his "big" day. Although it was just a small celebrations with my family, lots of preparations were put in place since Monday!?!?! This was my dinner menu:

Starter
Brown Rice with mixed nuts Salad

Main Course
Pasta with cream sauce or tomato sauce

Desserts
1. Choice of Rum & Raisins or Cookies & Cream Ice-Cream
2. Birthday Cake - Chocolate Fudge

Drinks
Lemongrass infused tea

Preparation before the actual day were:
1. Rum & Raisins Ice Creams


Recipe from Camemberu: No-Churn Rum & Raisin Ice Cream.

2. Cookies & Cream Ice Creams


Recipe from The Kwoks-Viewfinder: Cookies & Cream Ice Cream.

3. Lemongrass infused tea


4. "Lightning McQueen"


5. Baking of Chocolate Cake one day before.


Actual Day preparation were:
1. Brown Rice Salad with mixed nuts salad


Recipe from Kitchen Culture Demo.

2. Pastas
Since I used mainly canned sauces and added chicken & minced beef separately, there was nothing much to show. :p

3. Chocolate Fudge Birthday Cake Frosting



Recipe extracted from Kitchen Capers Forum.

4. Rosemary & Garlic Foccacia
Somehow, I might either have killed the yeast by the heat of my mixer, or put in too much water to the dough.:< The dough was so liquid, almost like soup. But I went ahead to bake it anyway. It was still very fragrant, except it doesn't really taste like foccacia.
Recipe from Happy Home Baking.

The Chocolate Fudge Cake was really good. However I think I might have underbaked them slightly. The recipe is here to stay for me!

My New Toys!

I've been disappeared for a week again. :p I didn't manage to bake anything this week was it was almost like a week of preparation for my eldest son's birthday cake. He wanted a "car" cake. I didn't want to buy the car cake mould just for one use. So I had to think of doing something else... Will post it up after Saturday since it's the actual day.

Back to my new toys! I bought myself a set of new toys yesterday, but not for baking use! Heehee... It was for display instead. It's those tiny weeny pastries that are for displayed in a displayed box. Here they are. I've not opened them up to display yet. It'll have to wait till after my preparation for my eldest son's birthday! Ooh...I can't wait to display my "teeny weeny pastries"!!

The display box, measuring 30cm long.

The box containing 10 smaller boxes of mini display pastries.


The supposely range of 10 collections.


Couldn't resist or wait till next few days, so opened one box to view. So "KAWAII"!! The mini cakes were slightly bigger than the size of my pinkie finger nails!

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!

Festive Family Fusion @ Kitchen Culture

Some few weeks ago, my sister asked if I would be interested to attend some food demo organised by Food & Travel magazine in Kitchen Culture. Seeing that it cost only $25/- and include some very healthy goodie bag items, without hesitation, I told her I want to sign up.

For the sake of the goodie bag, she also signed up together with her colleagues, even though she is not into cooking or baking!:p So she signed up on my behalf. So today was "D DAY"! The venue was held in Kitchen Culture at Thye Hong Centre. The place sells VERY expensive kitchen cabinets and kitchen tools. I won't have stepped into it if not for this cooking demo. Today's session is called "Festive Family Fusion", using mostly brown rice and olive oil from Naturel. Isn't that healthy?

The demo was conducted by Chef John See. A regular chef at Kitchen Culture. He used to have a restaurant, but I think he no longer owns a restaurant now, he is free-lancing and teaching cooking & baking as his passion.




Anyway, the food demonstrated today were:
1) Healthy Organic Brown Rice Turkey Salad Apple-Pear and Cranberry


2) Seafood Bouillabaisse (pronouced as bowl-la-base) with Spring Onion Tortilla Bread Toast
This was my favourite! It tasted like lobster bisque, but so much more flavourful!! The tortilla bread toast went very well with the soup! Yummy!!


3) Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting


Not forgetting what I got for my goodie bag- 2kg organic brown rice, 500ml Olive Oil (Cold pressed), 1kg Canola & Sunflower oil and 1L Low Sugar Soya Milk. Very worth the price paid for - $25!


After the demo session, my brother-in-law dropped me off at HV. Without delay, I popped into Shermay's Cooking School to buy my Rose Water! Yippee! And of course, I picked up the vanilla extract again since it was cheaper by $10! Really worth the buys! :) What a fun Saturday, without baking for once!

Orange Centrepiece Cake

With the mood to bake this week, I made chocolate tarts the night before, and last night, it was Orange Centrepiece Cake, as I called it.

It was quite a while since I had oranges at home as there was no promotion at the supermarket for oranges. :p Usually, my hubby buys oranges in tens when there are promotions. However, lately, there wasn't much promotion, so we didn't have them at home. Yesterday, we managed to buy 20 oranges from Giant as they were having promotions for this weekend. As I have always like to bake with oranges, I decided to bake an orange cake. And I suddenly found the passion to do some frosting and the inspiration to decorate the cake.

Initially, I wanted to caramelise the orange slices for decoration. Then I realised they don't solidified in the sugar solution. So I decided to grill the "sugar-coated" orange slices in the oven. Then after a while, I realised they don't browned. So I gave up and took them out of the oven. While I was whisking the whipped cream, I didn't wanted to waste the "orange-sugar syrup" which I used to "caramelise" my oranges. So I poured the syrup into the whipped cream. They really taste good!

Then I got pretty excited about the whole decoration. So I started frosting the cake, layer by layer, bit by bit. In the end, I was quite happy with my own decoration. However, the frosting needs real improvement. It was...er... still not up to standard yet. The overall taste & look of the cake (from far) was pretty good! I'm very happy with this "production"!



These were the chocolate tarts that I made the day before. I made into three different tastes: Chocolate & Almond tartlets, Chocolate & Strawberry tartlets and Irish Creme Caramel Chocolate Tarts.

Rainbow Swiss Rolls

I have been quite slackened in updating my posts this week. Mainly because I have been baking everyday, till I have no time to update. Otherwise, usually I baked alternate days so that the following day, my post will be up. So now, I'm updating for the bakes that I made for this week.

I made the Cookies & Cream Ice cream earlier this week. Unfortunately, I was too eager to mix them up, that I didn't wait for the custard to be cool before I added the whipped cream. Ended up, the mixture was like "curds". Not a good sight to see and have. The texture, of course, was affected by that. My eldest son helped me in the preparation. A good helper to have for simple tasks! ;)


The following day, I made Rainbow Swiss Rolls. I used the emulsifier cake as the base, then separated them into three containers and added colours to two of them. As there was still half of the batter left, I made them into cupcakes and frosted them with chocolate ganache. For the swiss rolls, I filled them with whipped cream and strawberry jam. They were really good! ;) Even I like the rolls.

Rainbow Strawberry Swiss Roll


Rainbow Cupcakes