Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Fruit Tarts With Custard

we had a mini gathering on christmas eve at cblc. haha a really mini one - i think there were only less than ten of us...bean, chingman, kengboon, lungkwan, me, him, caine, violet, tengyong. anyway it was potluck so each of us had to prepare something!

initially i was given the task of baking a x'mas log cake but then i realised it's really quite ma fan and i wasn't really confident of doing it myself! haha never tried it before...so i should experiment with it myself some other day!

with that, i flipped the recipe books for a suitable cake/pastry to bake. and ta-da i found one on strawberry tart with custard and another one - mango tart. decided on the one with custard since he prefers that. but i modified the recipe a bit, used the sweet pastry for smaller tarts and i used mangoes and longans instead of strawberries.

as i was flipping thru the food blogs again(!) haha i found so many other interesting recipes which i so wanted to try! but had to think about time constraint and budget so i decided on the mua chee and waffles which were both simple to prepare.

wahhhh the fruit tart was ALOT of work! i think i spent almost half a day preparing it! from the sweet pastry to the custard to the fruits and then the glazing, everything took time! it was fun making the pastry though. my first time doing it but i'm glad it was successful and nice according to those who tried it! and it was a good experience making it!

preparing the moulds

Sweet pastry in the making...




yay done! these could have been more 'baked' i think!

Then the custard...
you add this to a custard powder and egg mixture to get a rather gluey-like custard


apply the glaze and ta-da...ermm not very pretty fruits tarts hahaha!

Part II - Mua Chee!

the healthier mua chee made with lesser oil so the texture wasn't that smooth. but it's as good as those you find at pasar malam okaes! looks good right :)

Part III - Waffles

hot waffles made on the spot! then topped with vanilla and raspberry ice-cream :)

Thursday, December 20, 2007

my first bake of the holidays

i actually have a list of items i wanna bake this hols. but sadly...i've only baked this and wholemeal muffins for papa so far. now that cyberia camp's over, it's christmas! and it means dec is coming to an end. looks like i dun have much chances to bake le.

anyway, these are called peanut butter filled chocolate cookies. what a long name right haha. it's actually quite simple but you need to wrap some peanut butter into the choc dough then rolling them up and pressing them down with a fork to have those nice nice designs on the cookie:)

i found it too sweet though. but he thinks it's ok. his mama says it looks like it bought! and his family thinks he's a lucky man haha.

first time trying to take pictures of the entire process. and i just wished i had more hands to help me with it!


preparing the choc dough

little dough bits to be filled with peanut butter!

ready to be baked
haha there was this extra BIG cookie i prepared for him. which was filled with alot alot of peanut butter. but his brother ate it! somemore i put special marking on it - dun have the criss-cross lines one!

the 2nd batch to be baked.

it was quite difficult to see when the cookies were ready cos the choc itself was dark brown in colour. so just follow recipe's timing lor. just slightly more than ten minutes would be fine if u want a moist and soft cookie:)

yay! it's ready :)

crack it open and you see brown peanut butter filling in it. this one's quite a special cookie recipe.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

finally!

yay! i've finally gotten myself a blog for my baking escapades. been thinking of setting up a blog for a long time but never really got down to doing it. but today as i was looking through my daily dosage of food blogs with envy (again!), i just thought today shall be it!

it's the school holidays and i've already started baking. and i've captured a few photos too. can't wait to post them up :)

i guess having a blog to see what i've baked and the process of it makes it all the more memorable when i look back at it. bake-me-happy - featuring my baby steps in my baking journey.

and perhaps one day...mugger's inn? haha a dream come true.