Japanese Cheesecake

As D loves cheesecakes, I decided to do my due diligence as gf and revisited this Japanese cheesecake recipe. Plus I wanted a red-and-white (okay this is more like yellow) cake to commemorate National Day. I've made this recipe once, baked it in a water bath and with other changes I cannot recall. It turned out creamy- more like a New York Cheesecake than a fluffy Japanese version that D prefers. This time I baked it without a water bath; it turned out more airy but had folds like a fat tummy:

It rose really high in the oven, up to the top of the cake pan, and then receded, causing the folds. I'm not sure why- but my best guess is that I shouldn't have lowered the temperature to 150 deg c. 180 deg c as stipulated by the recipe may have been too hot because the top started to crack 3 minutes into baking, but perhaps 150 is too low (total baking time: 56 min). Next time I'll try baking this at 170 deg c; hopefully it wouldn't recede and so give a more fluffy texture.. let me know if you have solutions to receding cakes! Future amendments: reduce the sugar (65g for half the recipe is still too much) and corn flour (slightly powdery mouthfeel). Adding the full amount of lemon juice, though it seemed a lot at the time, actually gave just the right amount of sourness.

It was a yummy cake that was polished off.  Next time it'll be better when it counts- when D is actually around it eat it!

 Majulah Singapura!  

Milo cake

Necessity Nostalgia is the mother of invention?
This cake is similar to D's Valentine Cake, but tastes more malty like milo does.

Ingredients for a 6cm high cake in a loaf pan

40g milo powder, plus extra for sprinkling
42g dutch processed cocoa
147g hot water
5 yolks
220g egg whites
135g canola/vegetable oil
30g corn syrup
2 tsp vanilla
141g plain flour
110g sugar
21/4 tsp baking powder
11/2 tsp baking soda
a pinch of salt

1. In a large bowl, whisk together milo and cocoa in water till smooth. Leave to cool.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together yolks, oil and corn syrup.

3. In a yet another bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar.
4. Add yolk mixture into the milo mixture. Whisk for 1 min. It should look like buttercream. Mix in vanilla.

5. Add half the flour mixture till all flour is moistened. Repeat with remaining half of the flour then beat for 1 min. It should be very thick.
6. Add the egg whites in 4 batches while folding in figure of eights with your whisk. When all the whites have been added, beat for 11/2 min. The batter should look like a thick soup.
7. Scrape batter into pan lined with parchment. Sprinkle a thick layer of milo on top. Bake at 175 deg c, 25 min on lowest oven rung.

Banana Bread

This is the story of the banana cake that was not. You see, this recipe misleads you into thinking you are going to bake a cake, but by the time you dump all the flour in, you realise the batter is so thick (but fluffy) that it's actually more like a bread.

Adapted from here

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
110g unsalted butter plus 2 tbsp, melted and cooled
1/2 cup of sugar, divided into two
2 eggs
5 small bananas (the kind used to make goreng pisang)
100g plain whole-milk yogurt
3 tsp vanilla extract
About 10 milk chocolate squares
75g walnuts, toasted
1/2 tsp cinnamon

1. Whisk together the flour, salt and baking soda.
2. Mash bananas.
3. Cream butter with 1/4 cup of sugar. Dump in eggs, mashed bananas, yogurt, vanilla. Stir to combine. It will look like weird corn soup.

Weird corn soup. Or shark's fin soup?

4. Fold in flour in 3 batches: Add the next batch when the current batch has just disappeared into the mixture.

Ready to enter the pan

5. Spread half the mixture into 9inch round pan (bottom lined with parchment)
6. Toss together the 2 tbsp melted butter, walnut pieces, cinnamon, 1/4 cup sugar. Spread on top of cake batter.
7. Top off the pan with second half of the cake batter.
8. Bake at 190 deg c, about 30 min or until the cake's centre springs back when pressed gently. Note: I removed the cake from the oven after 25 min as a cake tester inserted in the centre came out clean. However, the centre was still slightly raw and could have spent a little more time browning in the oven.

Cadbury! You can still see the words after baking.

D's Valentine Cake

D loves the Sticky Chewy Chocolate Cake from Old School Delights at Upper Thomson Road, so I've tried to recreate it for Valentine's Day this year. According to him, it has that (said with emphasis) taste. At first bite, a friend exclaimed, "tastes like Betty Crocker!" And so, against my savvy pride, I stooped to the level of buying a box of Betty Crocker premix, convincing myself it was all in the name of science. The humble effort paid off, for that taste was found in Betty Crocker! I studied the ingredients on the box and came up with my version, with the help of The Cake Bible. This shiny chocolate cake doesn't have that taste; it tastes better. I've provided the recipes for cake and glaze below- they are really easy. By far the cake the gives the most impressed gasps for the (little) effort required.

I can see the towel in the cake- shiny!

D's Valentine Cake (Makes a double layered 10 x 20 cm cake)

55g dutch processed cocoa

98g hot water

50g egg yolks (3 yolks)

90g canola oil

20g light corn syrup (1 tbsp)

94g plain flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

120g sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

150g egg whites

A 24 x 24 cm square pan lined with parchment/baking paper, with an overhang around the mouth of the pan. No fancy cake mixer required, just use a hand whisk so it's all your love and none of the machine's.

1. In a large bowl, whisk together cocoa and water till smooth. Cover with cling wrap to prevent evaporation. Leave to cool.

2. In another bowl, whisk together yolks, oil, corn syrup.

3. In yet another bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, salt.

4. By now the cocoa mixture should have cooled to room temperature. Go ahead and add the yolk mixture to the large bowl, whisk for 1 min. It should look like buttercream.

5. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the vanilla. Mix it in for a few seconds.

6. Add half the flour mixture and mix till dry ingredients are moistened. Repeat with the remaining half.

7. With a whisk, beat for 1 min. The batter should be very thick.

8. Add the egg whites in 4 batches while folding them in with figure of eights, still using the whisk. When all the whites are in, beat for 1.5 min. It should look like a thick soup.

9. Scrape batter into prepared pan, bake 175 deg c, 25 min, on lowest oven rung. When done, a cake tester inserted in centre should come out clean and centre will spring back slightly when gently pressed.

Good ol' days chocolate glaze (makes enough for above portion of cake)

34g dutch processed cocoa

90g water

36g gula melaka (palm sugar)

30g unsalted butter

3/4 tbsp light corn syrup

3/4 tbsp honey

1 1/2 tbsp sugar

1. Throw all ingredients into a pot and cook, constantly stirring, till thick. Let cool before using. (see I told you it was easy-only 1 step!)

Assemble the cake!

Trim off edges of the cooled cake. Cut into 2 equal pieces. Spread a layer of glaze on one piece and stack the other piece on top. Spread the glaze evenly over the outside, or simply pour it over each slice when serving. It's an easy glaze to impress with- not only is it super shiny, any knife marks made while spreading also disappear to give way to a smooth surface.

The cake layers are easy to transport. I lifted one end with a palette knife and slipped my hand under the layer to carry it to its destination. The layers will turn out moist and a little bendy, so they don't crumble easily. As extra insurance, refrigerate the layers before assembling so they are a little bit stiffer.

Pumpkin Cake

Dad's a health conscious guy whose breakfast comprises multigrain oats cooked in water, with Goji berries and basil leaves thrown in (don't try; it does not taste good). So for his birthday, I needed to make something healthy, yet good tasting so he wouldn't be the only one eating his cake. Well, reason with yourself all you want, but there isn't such a thing as a healthy cake... But I suppose pumpkin cake falls in the "healthier" category!

Dad: "Why is there a hole in my cake?"

Me: "Do you want some cream on your cake?"
Dad: "Yes, some non-fat cream."

Of course, there's no such thing as non-fat cream. Cream requires fat to be cream. Cream is fat that rises to the top of unhomogenized milk (thank you wikipedia). So, to make the cream cheese frosting, I used cream cheese and UHT whipping cream. I've discovered 2 benefits of using UHT whipping cream over pure cream:

1. It has 35% fat, compared to 45% of pure cream
2. The lower fat content means UHT whipping cream requires more whisking to become stiff, which is good when combining with cream cheese, which requires some whisking to get rid of lumps. If you whisk cream cheese together with pure cream, the pure cream will be overbeaten and grainy in the time it takes to break up the cream cheese lumps.

The pumpkin gave the cake a tender, sticky texture without being mucky. Like the texture in a chocolate lava cake where the cake just meets the lava.

Happy Birthday Dad, not many people can have their (healthier) cake and eat it :)

PB Banana Chocolate Cake

I got to know Alex and Othilia through teaching them Sunday School when they were 13. Now 16, I've really seen them mature into loving, down to earth people. I pray that they will grow to love God more and live in a way that reflects Him as their perfectly loving and righteous creator. Othilia likes banana and chocolate; Alex eats just about anything. This cake comprises 2 layers of chocolate fudge, a banana oreo filling and peanut butter ganache. Not to forget honeycomb chunks around the side!

The dense chocolate fudge layers complemented the rich ganache, made super smooth by the peanut butter. The banana oreo filling lifted the whole cake, providing a fresh flavour. I can't reveal the recipes for the fudge layers and ganache because they're copyright of Rose Beranbaum's the Cake Bible and Rose's Heavenly Cakes, respectively. But I'm giving the recipes for banana oreo filling and honeycomb below. Extremely easy stuff that will give your cake that extra ommph. Enjoy!

Banana Oreo filling (enough for 1cm layer in a 9 inch cake)

200ml Pure cream

7 oreos, white frosting removed and biscuits roughly crushed

2 large bananas, chopped into chunks

In a chilled bowl with a chilled hand whisk, whip the cream till soft peaks just form.

Fold in oreos and bananas with a rubber spatula. The oreos will get even more crushed here so don't crush them too fine to begin with, if not the cream will appear blackish.

Honeycomb

Ingredients

6 tbsp white sugar

2 tbsp honey

2 tsp water

pinch of salt

1.5 tsp baking soda

1. Line a small baking sheet/pan/bowl with parchment. The honey comb will roughly take the shape of the container you choose, so let your creativity run free, but make sure the container can withstand heat! I used a loaf tin to achieve a 1cm high honeycomb.

2. Put all ingredients except the baking soda into a pot, mix to combine. 

3. Let boil on medium-low heat, till mixture reaches 150 deg c, about 10 min. If you don't have a candy thermometer, the colour changes below will help you gauge.

4. Remove from heat, and immediately add in the baking soda. Stir quickly to combine. Immediately pour into prepared container.

 5. Let cool completely. Store in airtight container till ready to use. Have fun smashing up the honeycomb!

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Love on The Rocks

I've known N since our secondary school days at MGS, and her hen's night was a bittersweet celebration- sweet because she's getting married to Junior College sweetheart Ry, and bitter because marriage signals the beginning of her settling down away from Singapore. Love on the Rocks is my tribute to N and Ry- may their new life together be built on the Rock that is God's word.

The outer shell is composed of 4 sheets of tempered chocolate: 3 to surround the sides and 1 to slice up and stick into the gaps on top of the cake to resemble shards. Because my baking trays are small, I made the sheets in 2 batches.

Here is how to temper chocolate for the outer shell; use it on any cake for the "wow, you made that?" effect.

Adapted from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible

Ingredients:

About 140g Varlhorna Guanaja chocolate (70% cocoa)

Equipment:

3 baking trays

A metal offset spatula

A plastic spatula

A plastic bench scraper 

Chocolate tempering sheets (bought a stack from Tools of The Trade)

Optional but good to have: An infrared thermometer. Based on my observations during the tempering process, I've included instructions below for those who don't have one.

My Infrared thermometer. Purchased for $82 at Mustafa; sounds expensive but it's considered quite a steal!

1. Set a bowl over a pot of water and turn on the heat medium-low. Break into small pieces half the chocolate (70g) and place them in the bowl.

2. Let chocolate melt. Stir the chocolate around with a plastic spatula every 20 seconds or so to ensure even heat distribution. When about 3/4 of the chocolate has melted, start to stir constantly.

3. When the chocolate reaches 46-49 deg C, remove the bowl and turn off the heat. Wipe the bowl's bottom dry. If you don't have an infrared thermometer, turn off the heat when there are still one or two pea-sized clumps of unmelted chocolate. When all the chocolate has just melted, the temperature should be just right.

4. Quickly pour the chocolate onto the bottom of a baking tray.

5. Using an offset spatula, repeatedly spread the chocolate from left to right all over the baking tray.

6. Using the plastic bench scraper, sweep the chocolate back into the centre of the tray and repeat the spreading process in step 5. Occasionally use the plastic bench scraper to do a cleaning sweep on the offset spatula.

7. When the temperature has reached 31 deg F, stop. If you don't have an infrared thermometer, observe the chocolate thickening as you do steps 5 & 6. The chocolate will keep thickening and feel more sticky under the spatula until a point where it doesn't seem to become any thicker. Stop at this point.

8. Set a chocolate tempering sheet onto the back of a clean baking tray. Pour half the tempered chocolate onto the sheet and spread an even coat. Don't spread too big a layer or it'll be hard to manage. 

9. Pop the sheet, still on the baking tray, into the fridge for 5 min. In the meantime, repeat step 8 on another sheet with the remaining half of chocolate.

Foreground: chocolate spread onto tempering sheet, ready to go into fridge
Background: the baking sheet I used to temper the chocolate, the offset spatula and bench scraper

10. After 5 min, remove the sheet from the fridge. It should be quite hard. Let stand for a little 1 min till it softens slightly and is a little more flexible. 

11. Press the chocolate sheet against the sides of the cake then peel away the tempering sheet.

The first out of three chocolate sheets around the sides

12. Using a hairdryer, gently blow the sheets from the outer side and watch them curve lazily downward. Don't over blow- stop when you spot the slightest curve in the chocolate. If need be, gently tease the chocolate with a chopstick.

After a short blast with the hairdryer

13. Repeat steps 1 to 11 with the remaining 70g of chocolate. However, slice up the last sheet into different sized pieces, sticking them into the gaps to resemble shards.

Shards!

Note:

The temperatures given are for tempering dark chocolate.

While the usual process of tempering chocolate is heat, cool, and heat again, I find that Singapore's warm climate means that the chocolate has to cool to the ideal temperature (31 deg c) instead of heat up to it. Thus, I used only a heat-then-cool method, omitting the final heating stage. The warm climate also means that the final ideal temperature of the chocolate is just about room temperature! Which is excellent for those without infrared thermometers.

Feel free to post questions in the comment box!

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D left today for another semester in Adelaide. I can't wait for my own hen's night; till then, at least we've got love on the rocks.

Hot Weather Cupcakes

A call from D's mother asking where she could find inexpensive cupcakes for the next day's corporate BBQ sent 2 alarm bells off in my head:

1. "This is your golden opportunity to pretend you have your own baking business! Churn out cupcakes for the masses! Fulfill your desire to perform meticulous costings!"
2. "Cupcakes, at a BBQ? No buttercream is going to stand up to that kind of heat!"

I refused to consider Icing because putting that much sugar into something just so it keeps a pretty shape a) reinforces the notion that outside beauty is more important than internal substance; b) forces people to consume more sugar than they are happy to; c) tastes horrible.

After much agony over what kind of cupcake to bake- is chocolate too kiddish? do most people like lemony tanginess as much as I do? are yellow cupcakes weird? should I just do muffins instead?-
I followed Rose Beranbaum's suggestion to use lemon curd for as a topping for warm occasions, and decided a neutral white velvet cake will be a good base.

Shiny, are we?

All 14 were gone by the end of the party. Product Testing #1: A success! My meticulous costing system revealed that D's mum got 3 times the number of cupcakes than she would have if she bought them commercially. It was so gratifying getting cash for my efforts, even if it only covered costs! Alarms 1 and 2 resolved :)

Hippie carrot cake

Sure looks like some hippie love circle doesn't it? That really wasn't my intention!

There were other things that were intentional, though.

This time the crumb's more coarse, because in my opinion carrot cake is quite masculine and needs to be strong to stand up against the rich creamy cheese frosting. It was also more dry and less soft because I used less oil than last time (baking with a conscience for middle-aged relatives!).

I'm still not perfectly happy with the cake body, but the frosting is bliss. Here's the recipe adapted from "Rose's Heavenly Cakes" by Rose Levy Beranbaum:

300g cream cheese 

170g white chocolate (I used cadbury, which is really sweet so no extra sugar needed)

56g unsalted butter

1.5 tbsp sour cream

juice of 1 small lime (plucked from my garden! always so nice to pick what you need from the garden)

Put everything in a food processor and process till smooth :) 

Beating by hand is not a good idea as it'll end up lumpy. Use a processor!