the missing party

time to use up egg whites in julia child's soufflé aux blancs d'oeuf.
this starts off as a roux, and is made into a thick sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper. it almost tasted cheesy already, without the cheese.
the egg whites are beaten separately, and then folded into the thick sauce base mixed with cheese.
i couldn't find any breadcrumbs to coat the sides of the ramekins, so i don't know if that was the reason the soufflés puffed oddly. but still tasty and cheesy.

walking me through

yesterday i made another decisive move, and i finally got my honeydew snow shake after so long. so this year, it'll be tuition tuition tuition i guess. just tuitions to earn money. i hope i can get enough to hit about $1000 a month.

futuristic retro

tonight was the second time i stepped foot into hard rock cafe. it reminded me of 2003, of syf, and of joel.

but what the hell, it's 2010 now.

if the fates allow

look at this recipe and see how fatty you think the cake is.
honestly, the only reason i made this cake was to use up frozen cookie crumbs which resulted from many failed sables. i know, making a cheesecake just to use up cookie crumbs sounds extravagant, but, the only use i have for cookie crumbs is indeed cheesecake. (or to just spoon out and eat.) and if i'm going to make a cheesecake, then i might as well go all the way and make it a decadent one. and i think by its very nature a sable crust makes it even more decadent than a chocolate cookie one, though in a non-dark way.
the one-bowl brownies were indeed easy enough, and turned out very evenly cooked. i still ended up with a lot of surplus even though i reduced the recipe by one-third.
i baked the crust to let it brown slightly first. then i cut up the brownies into small squares and made the cheesecake batter. finally, i dotted the crust with brownie squares, ladled in some batter, dotted with more brownies, ladled in more batter, and so on until all the batter went in.
i baked the cheesecake and removed it when the centre was still a little wobbly, trusting the residual heat in the cake to finish baking the custard. as a result, i think the cake was just barely baked and at its most creamy state, because the top only cracked ever so slightly. (i was baking without a water bath, so i think to manage to bake the cake without the top splitting up was already quite a feat.) after the complete cooldown, i unmolded the cake.
and the final touch: a chocolate glaze. here i did not follow the smitten kitchen recipe, because i didn't have the correct ingredients. so i melted unsweetened chocolate with some butter, added a little icing sugar, and used some golden syrup to further sweeten and give it shine (something i learnt from nigella). then, with the scant amount of glaze, i wasn't going to be able to cover the entire cake, so i dribbled it randomly over the top. nigella would approve, and would let the glaze dribble freely off the sides too.
every mouthful of this cake is like a huge calorie-intake though. but it's yummy, and pretty. you get brownie, and you get cheesecake, and you get a chocolate glaze that is a little smoky from the unsweetened chocolate, and you get freaking sable crust. how much fatter do you want to get? i like the last photo; it shows the crust that i pressed so perfectly evenly into the cake tin, though the brownie cubes look a little too big and unevenly distributed.

i went back to camp tonight with the cheesecake. sam helped me tighten my cube, and improved my permutation of the last layer corners. i also had a chance encounter with PS lau.

when i was on the train home someone sat on my ipod wire, so i was wondering how i would ask her to move away when i had to get off the train. but, seriously, what are the chances someone sitting on your ipod wire stands up and gets off at the same stop as you?

cookie slave

these are the photos chronicling the entire cookie-making process that spanned over more than two weeks his month, from preparing the dough to getting the cookies mailed out.
two recipes: nigella's butter cut-out biscuits, and dorie's sables. the chocolate ganache was a bonus. i broke out the good butter, organic flour and nielsen-massey vanilla on these cookies, and with my care and constant vigilance around the oven, you can be sure that they were good. nigella's biscuits behaved well in the oven, but dorie's sables just had to be slightly burnt on the edges before the centres were cooked.

merry christmas, still.

the last christmas supper

i made the christmas plaited ring. if there's one thing i learnt, it's that raisins aren't always the answer when you need dried fruit.
this is the dough before butter was added. i was aiming for the gluten window, and got it after quite some while kneading in the mixer.
as always, when butter is added to the dough, it breaks down into mush, and after a while the butter gets absorbed, and the side of the bowl gets cleaned again, and the dough comes together smooth and silky. and look at the gluten window again!
this is when i discovered that raisins were totally wrong for this dough. the recipe called for chopped apricots, but i didn't want to buy them just for 10g, so i used leftover raisins. but the big lumps of raisins seeped so much liquid into the dough, and were so big they interfered with the gluten strands in the dough, which made rolling the dough into long ropes very difficult.
the ring still rose quite nicely, though i was so afraid that my hand-chopped walnuts were cutting through the dough and making it lose precious air. so after an egg wash, i sprinkled almond slices all over, and studded the ring with the glace cherries.
once out of the oven, i brushed melted butter all over, and it was perfectly pretty.

and for supper, cream of mushroom soup from mastering the art of french cooking.
minced onions were braised gently in butter, then flour was added to form a roux, after which broth was beaten in with mushroom stems. then everything was simmered for some time to form the mushroom soup base, and then strained.
the sliced mushroom caps were pan-fried separately in butter and lemon juice until soft and juice-releasing, then added to the strained soup base for another simmer.
egg yolks and cream served as the final enrichment to the soup. the soup base was heated to a simmer, then ladled slowly into the cream and yolks to temper, and finally everything came together. and it was a 'fine, rich, mushroom soup either for grand occasions or as the main course for a sunday supper'.

christmas is stollen

i actually worked from 9am to 5pm making these stollens today. the entire day. it kind of makes me wonder if that's what it's like to work as a baker. just non-stop kneading, checking dough, following schedules, checking the oven, etc.

this is peter reinhart's whole-wheat stollen.
the fruit soaker, the soaker, and the starter. (i used up yet some more of my nigella starter for this starter.) though there was butter in the soaker, i don't think it was a lot, so the final dough came out not very greasy, unlike the brioches.
the shaping technique for this stollen is to roll it out into an oval, leaving the ends more plump, and then folding it so that you form an S-shaped cross-section. it's supposed to resemble the infant jesus wrapped in a blanket.
the dough used a hefty one tablespoon of yeast, so in a short time the stollens puffed very big, and after baking they looked quite pretty.
this was my 'finishing station', where i laid out a sheet of sifted icing sugar and a rack set over another sheet for brushing the stollens with melted butter. after the butter bath, the stollens were rolled in the sugar for the final snowy look.
i don't really like the smell of these stollens because almond essence was used. but the butter brushed on them made them smell quite rich and nice. i felt there wasn't enough butter in the dough though, which was probably why the bread was not as soft as i would have liked it to be.

i also attempted the stollen recipe i got from the baking class at creative culinaire.
this is the fruit soaker for the stollens. i really don't like those glace cherries, but somehow, in a christmas bread, they become much more acceptable.
the recipe began with a sponge made of flour, yeast and milk. i made and left it to ferment for one hour before more flour, milk, eggs, lemon zest, sugar and vanilla were added. following chef judy's instructions, i let the machine knead the dough until it could form the gluten window before adding the butter. surprisingly, i managed to achieve the window! the gluten window you see above is the second one, the one after a lot of butter was kneaded into the dough. i was so amazed that i could do it at home, though i still feel the flour we used at the baking class was a special blend. this one felt a lot more delicate, like the window would break anytime.
kneading the fruits and nuts into the rich dough was difficult because there were a lot of fruits and nuts, because the fruits were loaded with orange juice, and because they kept flying out of the dough. surprisingly, without using the stollen spice, my dough today smelled like the one we made in class.
these stollens were shaped more simply. i just rolled them into ovals and folded them in half, leaving the base sticking out a little more. and they each got a little egg wash before going into the oven.
as with the whole-wheat stollens, i brushed these with melted butter once they were out of the oven, and rolled them in the sugar.
i like these stollens more than the whole-wheat ones because they are richer in butter, a lot softer, and loaded with more juicy fruits and nuts.

christmas is coming again!