Monday, March 16, 2009

Baked Tapioca Kueh


baked tapioca kueh today! mama bought 3 large pieces of tapioca from the market yesterday. yea so this morning she told me to use them all up by baking something.

so i found this recipe from Hugbear's blog. she has 2 variations of this tapioca kueh, one with just white sugar added, another one in which she adds gula melaka (palm sugar).

of course the gula melaka one caught my eye. she mentioned that replacing some of the white sugar with gula melaka gave a more fragrant kueh which was indeed true. in fact i replaced all of the sugar with gula melaka!

grating the tapioca was real hard work. haha my arms were aching halfway through ;p and all that hard work didn't even give me enough tapioca for a full recipe. i had only about 700g of grated tapioca ( after draining off the juice). the recipe calls for 1 kg!

this was hard work!

in a bid to make this healthier, i replaced all the coconut milk with fresh milk. and also cut down a little on the sugar. i guess it would have turned out more fragrant if i used coconut milk instead. but oh well, shall save the calories and cholesterol on this one! afterall tapioca itself is a healthy treat :) i think mine turned out pretty good too!


Monday, March 2, 2009

Chocolate Pie Topped With Fresh Fruits


it has been a long while since i last baked! the last post was on chinese new year goodies in fact - a month of baking hiatus :( i'm telling myself to bear with this last lap of my fyp. before i stop going to lab, i need to get some decent results. most days are spent at lab, otherwise at lectures or tutorials and weekends are when i catch up on lectures...that explains the lack of posts and energy to bake.

this weekend, however, i made an exception! which i'm glad i did :)

this recipe is adapted from Williams Sonoma's book, titled Pie and Tart. my auntie gave us the entire series of his cookbooks and i think they are awesome. very clear instructions and easy to follow steps, plus many helpful tips!


the original recipe actually omits the fresh fruits and it calls for a whopping 5 egg yolks! which turned me off a little, imagine the cholesterol in there~

in the end i used Godiva hazelnut chocolate spread as the choc filling. since it was a little thick i placed it over a double boiler and added some butter and milk to it to get a smooth consistent texture :D

i spreaded some raspberry jam on the base of the tart


added some macadamia nuts into the choc filling

i had a hard time peeling of the layer of skin off the tangerines, and gave up at some point haha

it's the bday month and this cake has been specially made for the 3 bday babies - shuyun, ben and kenny! happy birthday to all! and not forgeting aaron and jeanbean, happy birthday to you guys too ;p