玻璃鞋

pet

2012-03-04T22:24:00.002+08:00

will i learn to love a dog?

cinq

2012-01-05T01:14:00.001+08:00

rewatching amelie brings back memories and dreams. she is full of love and hope.

all i want to
say is
i am
not vulnerable

nothing
is nothing
without the oh

she is fond of stratagems.

trill

2012-01-04T01:12:00.001+08:00

riding at 100km/h past the singapore flyer and MBS can be so thrilling. everything looks so much more majestic when you're on a bike than in a car. maybe it was this kind of thrill that bella was seeking when she went to learn to ride. (shudder at the reference to twilight.)

yesterday once more

2011-12-27T00:13:00.001+08:00

a dinner table full of food for christmas. mashed potatoes, pasta, salad, roast turkey, and STRAWBERRY WATER. strawberry water needs a stronger advocate. it is really special because it gives a fruity hint to the water - better than lemon.

the past week has been so stressful because of all the baking schedules for stollen, panettone and the turkey.

the turkey was a massive project, but nigella's recipes turned out a very edible one. first, the sauces:

this was the stock for the turkey gravy. using the giblets, carrot, celery, parsley, bay, bacon, etc. it was boiled for a few hours to reduce to a flavourful soup. it was then beaten into a flour roux, for which i have no photos =(

and then the cranberry sauce. cranberries are so sour. should not have tried one at all. but the recipe boils it with wine and sugar, and the pectin in the fruit sets it naturally into a chunky jam. which was delicious, like ikea's jam for meatballs.

the turkey was soaked in brine overnight. nigella says this makes the turkey foolproof - it is impossible to dry out this one. the brine was made with sugar, salt, honey, maple syrup and lots of different herbs. i thought it was very colourful and smelled very festive.

mummy taught me a new trick. to melt butter, simply place the pan on the hot oven. this saves the trouble of using the stove and avoids possibly burning the butter. so here is the maple syrup-butter for basting the turkey.

the turkey was so heavy that it couldn't go into the oven correctly at first. and then the whole schedule got delayed by half hour. in the end though, it went in, and we had to put a tray beneath to catch all the oil drips.

by the end of the roasting, the oven was splattered all over with oil, because the oil in the bottom tray was sizzling and sputtering all the time.

i think the turkey was really delicious. it was moist, as nigella promised. and tasty, maybe the brine made it salty. the turkey gravy and cranberry sauce went well with the meat.

and so we carved starting from the breast. but as it turned out, the real delicious and juicy parts were the limbs. and after completely dismembering and scraping the turkey of meat, mummy took the big bone structure left to boil into another pot of stock.

and so that was the end of the turkey.

with the passing of christmas 2011, much stress has been released. but i love tonghin. i miss you so much.

spoonful

2011-12-20T00:28:00.004+08:00

i ate a lot of chocolate cream pie today.

priest

2011-12-15T00:12:00.001+08:00

sometimes, someone you know for a year can mean so much more to you than the people you grew up with. (is that love?)

concession

2011-12-08T23:53:00.001+08:00

sometimes, you don't need to be happy. you just need to be happy enough. i think it's magical when you can walk in the clouds. is it silly to have such dreams?

i've written before that when your heart isn't there, nothing turns out right. but sometimes even if you gave all your heart, nothing comes back. yet, you just need to be happy enough, and it will be reason to give all your heart.

deshelled prawns

2011-12-06T23:44:00.000+08:00

when you are on a 7-hour bus ride with a family of crying babies and children, you'll find that children cry for reasons so different from adults.

undeck

2011-10-24T19:15:00.000+08:00

when you watch enough of love actually, you'll find that sitting at the bus stop with someone you love, even if it's just two minutes, and once in two weeks, is enough.

huckel

2011-10-19T20:54:00.000+08:00

转眼间, 一个学期就快要结束了.

no more comparing with the past/analysis of everything/hypothetical questions.

babylon candles

2011-10-17T21:37:00.000+08:00

watched stardust again.

you know, when i said i knew little about love, that wasn't true. i know a lot about love. i've seen it - centuries and centuries of it - and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. all those wars, pain, lies, hate... it made me want to turn away and never look down again. but when i see the way that mankind loves, you could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. so yes, I know that love is unconditional. but i also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and... what I'm trying to say, tristan, is... i think i love you. is this love, tristan? i never imagined i'd know it for myself. my heart - it feels like my chest can barely contain it. like it's trying to escape because it doesn't belong to me any more. it belongs to you. and if you wanted it, i'd wish for nothing in exchange - no gifts, no goods, no demonstrations of devotion - nothing but knowing you loved me too. just your heart, in exchange for mine.

wimbly

2011-10-02T00:35:00.000+08:00

went to a shop called wimbly lu. and that's a place where you'll find that you could really turn a dream into reality. it's hard work, and tiring, but it's worth it.

promises

2011-09-13T21:10:00.000+08:00

so the haze shrouded the moon. but eventually it came through. the past few weeks have been trying. school is just a countdown of the weeks left till the holidays.

and then when the holidays come, it will be the end.

come full circle

2011-09-12T18:55:00.000+08:00

转眼间, it's 中秋节 again. i remember three years ago, a slightly burnt lantern. the moon is full tonight, but the haze might obscure it. nevertheless, it doesn't change the fact that the moon is full.

a perfect circle, and a continuity equation.

another few circles - 太阳饼. these were made 2 weeks ago. the fillings all bubbled out, but the pastry was truly flaky.

renewed

2011-08-09T22:16:00.001+08:00

i have just had the best view of fireworks ever. sitting across the river from the floating platform, and high up on the spectator stand.

there's just something magical about watching lights dancing across the night sky. showering down on everyone.

and, about a brioche, which melanie loved, and wouldn't share with me:

a brioche is a thing of magic. with so much butter in a dough, it is amazing it even comes together at all. by hand, it would take much effort. but of course i use the mixer nowadays.

hamelman scales down the yeast in this formula by a lot, perhaps on purpose, to lengthen the rising and proofing times. so i left the dough out for more than five hours, waiting for them to get puffy.

the smell of baking brioche is heavenly. and the colour the crust takes on is golden. and as soon as the buns are out of the oven, i invert and hang them upside down to prevent them from collapsing back - this is not written by hamelman, but i learnt from making rich panettone, and followed suit.

baking is only meaningful when there are people to give the food away to.

聚散分离

2011-07-28T23:20:00.000+08:00

i just realised i left this post unedited and unpublished for a very long time.

so many many days ago i made a burnt sugar ice cream. basically, it's a caramel ice cream.

which turned out tasting like werther's original. which i don't like that much. so it's still stuck in the freezer. slow-moving inventory? inventory obsolescence expense?

and i made a chocolate cream tart again. with beranbaum's chocolate tart dough - it's simply the best i have come across so far, which is not many, but it bakes up fine each time.

the chocolate cream is greenspan's recipe, which has also started to take root in my go-to recipes. i made some tart shells in aluminium molds, but also made some free-form ones by draping them over small cake tins to create ragged-looking shells.

beranbaum also teaches us a few ways to waterproof blind-baked tart and pie crusts. you could use an egg white wash - brush a thin layer of egg white onto the crust when it comes out of the oven; this will harden into a shiny layer that waterproofs the crust. however, a better way is to brush the cooled shell with melted chocolate and stick it briefly in the refrigerator for the chocolate to harden. of course, use chocolate only if the filling is compatible. (and you could use white chocolate as well.)

so melted dark chocolate for chocolate tart shells, to be filled with chocolate pastry cream. and then dollop white, soft, whipped cream on it.

and for a certain movie in 3D, the plan was to potluck dinner and sneak the food in. so i packed a ~~lunch~~dinnerbox with croque monsieur and chocolate tart.

it's still very interesting to think about how the french created all their sauces. from a roux to a bechamel, a family of white sauces, then a family of brown sauces. then oil-based sauces. and butter based sauces.

nash equilibria

2011-07-15T12:48:00.000+08:00

challah is the jewish celebration bread made with lots of eggs and yolks. with white flour, the dough is a bright yellow.

i was using the CIA recipe, which always turned out to be too wet, but this tie i added flour cautiously and decided to stop at a sticky point, hoping that some oil and subsequent folding would correct it.

turns out, it was barely manageable; at some points the dough's sticky insides came out and i had to flour the table often to prevent sticking. but i had fun braiding. i made 3-, 4-, 5- and 6-stranded braids.

the braids puffed and merged together slightly, but they were still pretty. golden and fragrant.

i also made one circular braid. i think traditionally that represents continuity. but in the end the circle is still broken and eaten.

in the middle of ICT, i made some cake.

i made an almond sponge cake batter and spooned it into mini paper cups for little cupcakes. and then i found out that a sponge cake batter is possibly viable for up to 40 minutes after you finish preparing it, that is, while the batter immediately begins to deflate, there is still enough time to work slowly.

i also ladled some batter into bigger tins, and the cakes rose like souffles. so cute!

and then i finally used up the egg whites in the freezer making italian buttercream.

and icing the mini cupcakes, and assembling a cute little tall cake with the buttercream.

but sometimes, when your heart isn't there, nothing turns out right.

sweeten

2011-06-30T17:53:00.000+08:00

turns out, there are some good pierre hermé recipes floating around the internet. so i made these viennois chocolate sables.

piping cookie dough from a pastry bag can be fun, but i think it's only fun now because i have learnt enough not to make a mess. in the end, everything comes from practice and familiarity. the cookies were super crumbly, as sables should be, and shattered too easily.

nothing moved

2011-06-25T23:11:00.000+08:00

tried an online recipe for cinnamon leaves.

the dough used all-purpose flour instead of bread flour, so it was slightly sticky, but the mixer settled it well. the dough is probably a brioche, and i like how the dough stretches thin under its own weight in the windowpane test.

after rolling out the dough into a big rectangle, brush it with browned butter, or beurre noir. you just melt butter, and continue heating it gently until it starts to turn a darker colour. then, there will be bits that start to turn brown, but you can just decanter the browned butter and discard the brown bits.

then scatter with a thick, thick layer of cinnamon sugar. slice lengthwise into 6 long strips, stack them up, and chop into 6 mini stacks. a lot of sugar would have spilled out, but just throw it all into the loaf pan, then squeeze the mini stacks in and let them get duly puffy.

the caramel the forms from the extra sugar at the bottom of the pan is so wonderfully thick. after the loaf cools it becomes a glazy layer like glazed donuts. the recipe is called 'cinnamon leaves' because the laof is supposed to be peeled piece by piece and eaten, but i just cut through it into slices.

finally tried a ciabatta.

this recipe began with a biga that was left to ferment overnight.

the dough was really wet. but because it is not a foccacia, i couldn't use too much oil to handle it.

in place of oil is a lot of flour. the flour prevents sticking, but the dough still readily absorbed the flour that it was placed on.

ciabatta is a flat bread made from lean dough, so a lot of the final product depends on whether you can trap the air in the slack and soft dough. this means very minimal handling after the loaf has been preshaped and shaped. in the end, i think my loaf was not airy enough; the crumb was not very open. for thin 1cm slices, the bread was open-crumbed enough for dipping in olive oil and eating straight. but when i tried a bigger slab for a sandwich, it got tiring to chew.

and finally, a simply tossed salad.

so tired now.

compartmentalise

2011-06-16T20:44:00.000+08:00

nigella's garlic-parsley hearthbread is like a foccacia, with indian flavours. it's like a naan, but thicker and breadier.

pulsing parsley with oven roasted garlic cloves and olive oil to get a runny, pungent paste.

here's a trick i discovered. foccacia-type dough is wet, and begins like a ciabatta dough. but since you know it is intended that the final bread is drenched and anointed in oil, just go ahead and use oil to handle the dough throughout the baking process - oil the bench, oil the bowl, oil your hands. it makes wet dough a lot more manageable. and all the oil just goes to enrich the dough eventually. i like to slice up a bread like this into squares, wrap them up in parchment, and give them away.

then one day i found peanut butter and nutella sitting around in the cupboard: opened, neglected, and never going to be finished.

so i scooped them out, dumped them with chocolate buttons, a dash of cayenne pepper, and melted everything together to make a truffle fillling. thankfully, i didn't overdo the cayenne pepper - the truffle leaves a rather spicy aftertaste.

i tempered the last batch of chocolate sitting in the refrigerator. the weather has been hot, so the chocolate didn't seem to set, though i was sure it was at temper.

lining the chocolate molds with a base coat, then filling with the truffle, and sealing with chocolate again. and popping the chocolates out of the molds. i like my square mold; it gives more beautiful chocolates.

i also made bertinet's pain de mie by hand.

at 70% hydration, the french slapping way works just fine to bring the dough together. the following is a series of photos of the dough, each after 100 slaps on the bench.

so, 1000 slaps in total. and the gluten window.

the dough became super smooth after a simple shaping!

dividing and shaping the dough to fit into two pullman loaf tins. i was glad that finally there was enough dough to rise and fill up the tins just right.

true to the name, pain de mie is all about the crumb. there is not much crust to it, but the crumb was closely knit (but not in the brick-like way) and delicious.

immediately, i set about preparing to make croque monsieur with the pain de mie.

croque monsieur uses sauce bechamel. this begins as a white roux, into which milk is beaten in, cooked till thickened, and then seasoned with pepper, nutmeg and salt.

assembling the sandwiches. two slices of bread, spread with bechamel, sandwiching a slice of ham. then, more bechamel on top, followed by a thick sprinkling of cheese.

into the oven, until the cheese is all melted and bubbling. slicing through the sandwiches was so exciting!

i tossed together a simple salad: butterhead with garlicky diced tomatoes. assembled onto a plate, and it felt like a perfect dinner at a diner.

never present

2011-06-09T20:21:00.000+08:00

i had some scrap pie dough, and some cream cheese and sour cream that was sitting around. so i made an impromptu cheesecake pie

i lined a bread tin with pie dough and made a rectangular case. then i spread strawberry jam on the base; don't know if that waterproofs the crust. i was thinking of how to make the cheesecake filling - a no-bake one. i was thinking i might cook a custard and then beat in the cheese. but then that felt too troublesome. still, i thought i needed some whipped cream, which i didn't have on hand. then i realised that sour cream probably would have lightened it. so i sweetened the cream cheese with some sugar, then beat in the sour cream, and it was just right! it wasn't light and airy, but it wasn't so thick and dense. it was just creamy and voluptuous.

and then i picked up a recipe online; it's pierre herme's viennois sables. the recipe used egg whites, so i was happy to try it. (i have about 10 egg whites still in the freezer.)

the recipe makes a soft dough that goes into a piping bag, which is then piped into various shapes on the baking sheet. in the oven, the piped patterns held their shapes well, even the intricate ridges. and the cookies were buttery and delicious, speckled with vanilla seeds.

pours

2011-06-05T14:48:00.000+08:00

you know how on a rainy day when you walk beside a field, you sometimes hear frogs croaking? but you can never spot them. today, thanks to a little kid and his parents who had time to stop and look, i managed to see one - my first time ever. when the frog croaks its chin swells and becomes bulbous, and it looks like a balloon with a thin membrane; almost see-through.

save a life

2011-06-03T01:04:00.000+08:00

in 2007, i received the CIA book as a birthday present. it was my first baking book, and the very first recipe i attemped was the cherry pie, because i wanted to make it for the class christmas dinner.

i made the pie so many times, and this time i decided to do it again.

from fresh cherries, cute open, split apart and the seeds pulled out. gently simmered in a thick sauce until soft and nutmeggy fumes pervade. that's homemade butter there being stirred into the filling.

filling the pie shell with the cherries, and then weaving a lattice over the pie. i remember the first few times i made pie i was so inexperienced and the kitchen was often so hot that the dough always softened and turned mushy and it was so frustrating that i let the lattice weave go haywire. in some way that was very homey and pretty.

but now i know the refrigerator is a friend in piedom, and i chill the pie as and when the dough becomes too unmanageable. now the lattice weaves are always nicely done. i also tried to place a cherry design in the centre. can you see it? it's a pair of cherries with their stalks!

the pie filling boils and bubbles. this is crucial - the boiling ensures that subsequently the filling will thicken and set up when it cools. i tried to use beranbaum's method of placing the pie directly on the oven floor. but this pie turned out a soggy bottom, which was disappointing, but tonghin says the cherries were nice. and i like the top crust.

and, a dorie greenspan vanilla pound cake.

the batter is highly lickable and delicious. i used both vanilla seeds and vanilla extract for a full vanilla punch.

midway through the bake, used a bench scraper to score the centre line and help the cake to split along the middle perfectly. or you could really let it split haphazardly. the cake was soft and moist and the crumb was very fine. but i still miss the sara lee pound cakes.

something missing

2011-05-27T22:29:00.000+08:00

i got back the smell of butter in my fingers. the exact way they smelled when i first started baking pie. i think it's the anchor butter. and the CIA recipe uses more butter than the 2:1 formula.

using a pastry blender to cut and rub the butter into the flour. for mealy pie crust, make the butter evenly small. for flaky pie crust, leave some butter in larger pieces.

ice water is added by the tablespoon and the mixture is tossed and tossed. near the end, i used my fingers to pinch and press the dough together. that's where i got the smell in my fingers again.

the CIA pie dough uses a lot of butter, and so it was very much tender. and humidity these few days is like shit, and so it was so hard to roll and fit the dough into the pan; i had to refrigerate it so many times.

blind baking the pie crust until doneness. then brushed with egg white so that a thin film waterproofs the crust.

but alas, i was making the strawberry pie from beranbaum's pie and pastry bible. yes, the book has many pie crust recipes, but i wasn't up to making those; i just wanted to go back to my first pie dough.

the first filling is a white-chocolate-cream-cheese layer, which further waterproofs the crust. the second filling was a cooked strawberry filling thickened with cornstarch: this was supposed to accentuate the taste of the fresh strawberries later.

the strawberries were so pretty, and the pie was simply stunning after the glaze was brushed onto the strawberries.

and so delicious. there's something just so satisfying about making, looking, and eating this pie.

gorgeous

2011-05-21T23:53:00.069+08:00

i wanted ice cream. so i thought of making dorie greenspan's chocolate ganache ice cream. but then i realised that i've neglected beranbaum's pie and pastry bible for too long, so i flipped to the ice cream pies section and chose one of the ice creams to make. didn't make it into a pie though.

i chose the peanut butter ice cream, which was a dream to make. just a cooked egg custard whisked with peanut butter. it was so thick and creamy and tasty and so dangerously edible even before churning.

what to go with peanut butter ice cream? chocolate bread pudding!

i picked a dorie greenspan recipe for the chocolate custard. the bread was the very old, refrigerated, failed wassant. the warm pudding was so delicious with the ice cream!

and then i went back to the first bread i attempted. nigella's norwegian cinnamon buns! the first time i made the buns i failed so terribly because i hand-kneaded the dough. then i tried cutting the dough using a knife. it was horrible, but the bread was tasty. but that was in 2008.

so i thought, after 3 years, and knowing that bread is truly best kneaded with a mixer, i could reattempt the bread. but, the dough was really horible; it didn't come together no matter what even with a mixer. but i refrigerated it and the next day i worked it while it was cold, so i suppose that solved part of the problem.

somehow, the cinnamon sugar-butter mixture was firmer than i remembered. maybe i didn't soften the butter entirely. but i used butter handwhipped from cream, and it felt really homemade.

i love how the buns start off flat, and then during baking, the centres swell and rise up slightly so it looks like a mountainous road. i think it's because the cinnamon swirl is so rich in butter that in the hot oven the butter melts and lubricates and helps the centres to slide upwards.

so pretty, and so tasty!

in the deep

2011-05-16T14:43:00.017+08:00

recently my oven was heated to the highest again. it creates this smell that feels so familiar, because i haven't made hearth breads in a long time.

decided to use hamelman's book again to further develop skills and test the recipes there. this one is focaccia, which starts from a ciabatta dough.i wanted onion toppings, so i cooked onions in butter first, like julia child does for her onion soup.ciabatta dough was very wet and sticky to handle. but since this was going to become focaccia, i used much olive oil to handle the dough, which made the job a lot easier.the onions became a bit too scorched, but they were still sweet. and the bread was crusty and delicious, though there was much oil at the bottom of the pan that still didn't get absorbed. so i used parchment paper to wrap and keep the bread.

on another occasion i tried to whisk a tiramisu entirely by hand. of course, the ladyfingers were store-bought.the first is the zabaglione, which is mostly yolks and sugar, whisked over a double boiler until light, and then whisked off the heat until cooled and tripled in volume.
then mascarpone is folded in. i know, it's supposed to be done with a spatula, but i was lazy to wash out another utensil. so i just did it with the whisk.the next one is the meringue. the recipe i have doesn't cook the meringue. but i whisked the whites in a double boiler, and it was much more stable and easier to whisk into a meringue than i had ever attempted.folding the meringue into the mascarpone-zabaglione. the mixture becomes very voluptuous and silky.and then the assembly, and the eating. the recipe was still too sweet. but it was nice to be eating an entirely handwhisked tiramisu.

back to hamelman, there was some biga left over from making the focaccia, and so i used that as the pate fermentee to add into a fougasse dough. if you save some old dough, you can incorporate that dough into a fresh one to improve the flavour.the fougasse is a flatbread, shaped into an oval, and then stretched into a triangle. 'leaf veins' are etched right through and the holes are spread opened. the shape was so pretty; as the dough transformed from wet to crusty it puffed slightly - oven spring.i hung the fougasse up to cool, but more because it was pretty for photo-taking. and when cut open, the insides revealed small random air bubbles - a good sign for crusty hearth breads. and as is the case with all lean crusty breads, the moment they leave the oven, their quality starts deteriorating as moisture moves from the crumb to the crust, drying out the interior and softening the exterior.

couldn't

2011-05-15T22:04:00.002+08:00

do you remember splinters? once when i was very young one got into my finger and we couldn't get it out. and mummy poked a needle in the other way to push it out.

after another

2011-05-09T23:22:00.003+08:00

when the holidays come, life settles into some sort of domestic routine. sweep the floor, clean the fans, bake something, eat anything. i recently tried to make wassants, which failed spectacularly during the laminating process. so i turned them into loaves.
as it turns out, the bread wasn't that nice to eat either. it was supposed to be a brioche dough, but it wasn't soft and tasty.
so i turned it into bread pudding. i used nigella's caramel croissant pudding recipe, replacing the croissants with this failed bread. because when the bread fails, you can always save it by turning it into bread pudding.
it turned out great, especially with some homemade philadelphia-style vanilla ice cream - ice cream that is uncooked and made without eggs.

1800th

2011-05-07T23:20:00.001+08:00

at a certain starbucks today, it was mentioned that my birthday had 'expired'. and it made me feel like i was expiring.

close to the end

2011-04-29T22:07:00.004+08:00

i think we are all very happy that Chemical Engineering Principles CN1111 is finally over. then again, our module covered far less than what previous semesters covered. the semester is finally ending; just one more paper. i feel like i need to start learning to bake all over again - rusty skills need polishing.

anyhow, i started listening to all the joey yung songs again, and began feeling how it felt to be 17/18 years old. i think this blog is being neglected, but, who reads this nowadays anyway?

nevertheless, it is time to take a break, and notice that the roadside trees are in blossom again. the time of the year is back, right?

忽然情人

2011-03-29T22:48:00.002+08:00

there was a korean drama that i liked so much, called 忽然情人. it was a 金喜善 show about a lawyer and a girl who wanted to be a shoe designer. i think the english title was 'tomato'.

because 'tomato' sounds the same when you reverse the syllables. just like 'yoyo'. and when a yoyo leaves your hand it comes back soon enough.

midterm

2011-02-27T23:51:00.000+08:00

delete a person. like in the matrix, where they delete the keymaker.

inventive

2011-02-25T14:45:00.013+08:00

recently it was all about cinnamon.

whole-wheat cinnamon buns, peter reinhart.
in order to get more swirling per bun, i rolled the dough much bigger than specified. but i didn't up the filling, and so the result was not sweet enough =( but i like the icing; i used vanilla seeds in them.

chocolate cream puffs, dorie greenspan and rose levy beranbaum.
i like using beranbaum's cordon rose choux pastry, because it clears up more egg whites than yolks. and there are always whites lying around. and i like using greenspan's chocolate pastry cream because it's very no-fuss. i'm starting to enjoy using the icing set that sonya/clara/tiffany sent a few years ago.

schnecken, nigella lawson.
pecans can be so hard to find. and then the supermarket fails you further by not stocking walnuts even. so i tried macadamias. and they turned out scrumptious anyway. i lke this recipe a lot because the bread is easy to handle. it doesn't stick, and you can really roll it out big if you have patience. sprinking the cinnamon sugar over it, then rolling it up. slicing it is like a dream, and then the rest is just waiting for the puffing and the baking and the eating.

on time

2011-02-15T01:00:00.003+08:00

on valentines' day, when you are trying to find a place for dinner, that's when you realise that couples are all cheaping out. which couple queues for swensen's, manhattan, din tai fung etc. on valentines' day?!

and then age becomes just a number. hopefully the number doesn't change anymore.

告白

2011-02-10T23:28:00.003+08:00

we're always looking for the perfect couple. the couple that falls in love at first sight. but does it really happen like that?

i think, it's like two molecules trying to collide in the correct orientation, out of the million possible orientations.

more pertinently, a wrong confession at a wrong time seems to end everything.

no resolution

2011-02-01T09:40:00.002+08:00

and just like that, one month of 2011 has passed. i am loving differential equations, but not so much managerial accounting. i guess once varsity life starts it's the end of a disordered, haphazard one. (overall entropy decreases. so it is very unspontaneous and thus requires a lot of energy to carry out the process.) time passes in blocks of seven days. and before you know it 52 blocks have passed and you're yet another year older.

last burst

2011-01-09T18:47:00.006+08:00

this is the last round of baking before term starts again.
chocolate ganache ice cream. the cream/milk was boiled with orange zest before making the custard base so that it gets infused with orange flavour. this recipe is a keeper for me.
bought the cinnamon swirl loaf from cedele, and made french toast from it! it was so delicious.
made an onion quiche with xt. this is my first julia child recipe of the year (though i used the CIA pie dough recipe). haven't made pie dough in such a long time!

a new cake

2010-12-30T00:12:00.008+08:00

xt and i made a cake for boonleng's birthday.

every time a new cake is to be made, i learn something new. something new about the proportions of cake to filling. the textures that go well, the textures that don't. new methods to do old things.
the layers of the cake from bottom up are: a hazelnut 'feuilletine' base, a layer of dark chocolate mousse with strawberries, vanilla sponge, dark chocolate ganache, and vanilla sponge.

we discovered the secret to a cheap and easy way to create a hazelnut 'feuilletine' base like the one u find in chocolate royale from sweet secrets! the trick is to use loacker hazelnut wafers, crush them up and bind them with just enough nutella. after pressing them into the base of the cake ring, we used a thin layer of melted chocolate brushed on to waterproof the crushed wafers.

then we put strawberries in a poured mousse over it. this mousse recipe is really a chemistry feat! it uses only water and chocolate. we all know a little moisture will make melted chocolate seize, but a lot of water will mix with chocolate to make a thin sauce. this recipe comes from french physical chemist Hervé This. the idea is to thin out melted chocolate with water, then whisk while chilling so that the water breaks up into small globules and disperses into the chocolate, forming a stable emulsion that is thick and moussey, and retains the pure flavour of the couverture chocolate, because only water was added to it.

the vanilla sponges were made using the CIA recipe. i think i did this before, but now i've made a new note to the recipe: sift the flour twice, and sift it over the whipped eggs, otherwise they will easily sink into the eggs without getting folded in properly, leading to lumps of dry flour in the cake.

the dark ganache was a dorie greenspan recipe - the one in her tarte noire. just chocolate, cream, and butter. so simple and tasty.
the icing was an italian buttercream dotted with vanilla seeds. the recipe is from the CIA book too.

italian buttercream refers to buttercream where you first make an italian meringue, then beat butter into it. i suppose there you could make swiss buttercream, but the book doesn't have such a recipe. swiss might be easier because you just have to warm the whites with sugar before whisking; italian requires cooking sugar to a 240F syrup, and then streaming it into medium-peak whites to create the meringue.

but it supposedly creates the most stable meringue. and after all that butter went in, the buttercream just became so heavenly. then i added in vanilla paste and it went speckled.
icing the cake was so much better this time, compared to all my previous attempts. the buttercream was just so smooth and easy to use. did the crumb coat first, then the icing proper. i also used the icing set that sonya/tiffany/clara previously sent over to pipe borders. arranged raspberries over the top, and then piped some tiny rosettes. (need more practice for piping.)
and the cake cut! the 'feuilletine' felt like a real feuilletine, crunchy and so satisfying; with full hazelnut flavour from the nutella too! the mousse layer needs to be thinner, more subtle, instead of being a thick wodge; this implies that instead of a layer of whole strawberries, they should be halved. cake layers were still quite hard after hours out of the refrigerator (for some unknown reason).

but i loved the cake. a small slice would be very pleasing. sometimes, maybe single is better than double. but maybe we just got used to single.

christmas is coming

2010-12-23T22:35:00.001+08:00

the end of the year is coming yet again.

made panettone for christmas! and this was a recipe that used a sourdough starter. so i spawned it out of my nigella sourdough.
starter and yolks going into the first dough. then with lots of butter, and left overnight to ferment.
more yolks go into the first dough. and then sugar, and then a lot more butter, and then honey. amazingly, the weird order of these ingredients going in still yielded a strong dough. intially, it kept sticking to my hands, though it was really strong and stretchy. but i tried slathering butter on my hands, and managed to handle the dough perfectly!
the dough was so silky and satiny. i used some vanilla paste in the sweet glaze, so it looked really pretty, dotted with vanilla seeds.
and into the oven. the recipe says panettone tends to collapse on itself after coming out of the oven. so the solution is to skewer the molds and then hang the breads upside down as they cool. these turned out so soft and fluffy, i think because they are rich in yolks, like challah; and rich in butter, like brioche.

and a painting project, from start to end:

is there something wrong if initially when you watch a show, you cry, but when you rewatch it you don't feel anything anymore.

butter affair

2010-12-12T20:51:00.013+08:00

the past few days were characterised by a lot of butter. there was croissant and then there was brioche.

i attempted beranbaum's croissant recipe; still didn't succeed completely, but it was a lot better than the previous america's test kitchen attempts.
beranbaum's recipe was scaled quite nicely so that it was a lot more manageable to roll the dough. she doesn't do double turns. instead, she instructs you to roll smaller and then do just one turn each time. during my second turn, though, the dough began to tear and release the butter. by the fourth turn, the edges were getting gummy.
it really takes practice to get used to making laminated doughs. now i know that during the rolling process, i should chill the dough as and when it gets warm. during the final rolling to get the largest size, i kept chilling it intermittently, and it was so much easier.
i made some plain crescents, some chocolate crescents, and chocolate oblongs. they looked ugly though, because the outer layer was beginning to crust and crack.
there was significantly less butter leaching out during the baking this time, compared to previous attempts. i think it means the lamination was a lot butter.
they looked so amazing! look at the lines on the side of the pain au chocolat; there are so many it looked like a successful lamination. the croissants turned out super crispy on the outside, though the insides might also have been baked close to the point of crispness. there wasn't enough soft bread in the interior. but the insides looked correct this time, with no visible striations. so very delicious!

then there was brioche. i used a dorie greenspan recipe.
the recipe used plain flour instead of bread flour, and so the dough was really, really soft. and then i discovered that the butter was 72% of the flour, which was really, really high. by the time the mixer was done, there was so much butter leaching out of the dough, like that time i made nigella's brioche.
this was the debut of the silicon mold! i made a grand tête. was a bit disappointed with the nub that seemed to deflate after baking. i think this might be the same as panettone; the high butter content will make the bread collapse on itself after baking, so it might be prudent to hang the loaf upside down when it emerges from the oven. the bread was really tasty eventually, probably because of the 72% butter. it was super soft too, but made my fingers greasy after touching it.

made some brioche snails with xt too. the original recipe was for brioche dough rolled up with vanilla pastry cream and rum-soaked raisins, but we changed it completely.
we used chocolate pastry cream instead. and for texture, finely chopped pistachios! i really love dorie's pastry cream recipe. it's a lot less fuss than CIA's recipe.
the next steps were to roll out the dough, spread with pastry cream, and scatter with pistachios. xt did all of that, so that i could take photos! i love the silkiness of the cream, and the jade green of the pistachios just looked so pretty on the chocolate cream.
this photo is so, so nice! you can see the brioche dough is leaching butter out. and the chocolate cream is so very shiny!
slicing it up was very messy work though. even harder was transferring it to the baking sheet while trying to keep it looking clean. in the end, some of the rolls had chocolate cream spilling all over. but where the roll was clean, the chocolate spiral was so pretty.
the rolls puffed and puffed. and then we topped them with more pistachios, which really completed the look. they look like donut factory donuts!
and so delicious too. the bread was soft and the cream was baked firm. omg so much butter to eat.

pistachio ice cream

2010-12-07T12:23:00.002+08:00

a random recipe plucked from the internet for pistachio ice cream. i did something so wrong in the first step. supposed to process the nuts with the sugar, and i went to process them with the milk, which led to much spilling.
though i can't describe the colour of the ice cream, i like to believe that it is jade green. which it isn't exactly. but it tastes nice, and the nuts are waxy.

started to change

2010-12-05T01:34:00.007+08:00

haven't had a long post in a long time. made tiramisu today with weiyang and jia en. (yiyan came for the dusting of the cocoa.)
the tiramisu mixture begins with a sabayon, cooked over simmering water, whipped till cool and mixed with mascarpone. a lot of mascarpone. the recipe requires meringue too, but it was an uncooked one, which i didn't want. so i adapted and made the meringue swiss.

(learnt something new today: swiss meringue mixes sugar with whites over heat before whipping; italian meringue boils the sugar and adds it to whipping whites.)
then the lady fingers are dipped in bitter coffee (we did without alcohol), and then layered with the delicious mascarpone mixture. and finally the cocoa powder coating.

then i spent three hours making chocolates.
setting up: i prepared the orange truffle filling first, and put it into the piping bag. arranged all the equipment out side by side.
tempering chocolate can be so tedious. but i realised that once we get it in temper, keeping it at working temperature is easy in a singapore kitchen because it is just that warm enough. (tonight was a cooler night though, so i had to keep the fire on.)
filled the molds with chocolate, then tapped out the excess, chilled them. then piped the truffle filling in, chilled them again. then sealed with the remaining chocolate.
such messy work. but half the time i'm licking my fingers. at the end, excess chocolate sets by itself. (because i tempered it well!) scraping it off the trays etc, they become shavings perfect for yet more eating. cook's treat.

one evening the setting sun cast a glow onto a building far away. and it shone like gold.

concluding

2010-12-04T00:36:00.002+08:00

now comes the time of the year where i flip through all my things (again) and decide what to throw away. when i hold an item and it does not hold any memories anymore, then it's thrown away.

secret

2010-11-12T22:20:00.004+08:00

today was a perfect day. in such a vast space-time continuum, how two people can cross paths at the most unexpected place and time is simply amazing.

being able to do all those maths questions, cash flow statements, getting through a whole hellish semester of critical thinking and writing, marketing, zoe, making brioches, pulling off the most fiendish soufflé - all that means nothing. nothing, after you have lost everything, or everyone.

请

2010-11-01T21:21:00.001+08:00

after twelve weeks, we have covered over 700 pages of the accounting textbook.

after all this ends, i will take a break.

没着落

2010-10-24T13:45:00.003+08:00

rain or no rain, the sky outside still looks grey. but at least the rain will wash the haze down.

pound cake

2010-10-15T10:51:00.004+08:00

made the perfection pound cake from dorie's book.
i used vanilla paste in the batter, and so it was dotted with vanilla seeds. with gentle scents of vanilla. the batter was very silky and voluminous.
looking at the cake all the time while it was in the oven. mummy always said that the cake will be shy if you keep looking at it, and it won't rise.
the cake split a little down the middle, which was pretty. and cutting open, the crumb was so fine and delicate. don't know if there should be bubbles inside though. but the vanilla dots were pretty too. but sara lee pound cake is still nicer.

(from the beginning you just don't fit. literally. so then you don't.)

说了再见

2010-09-21T23:33:00.003+08:00

the past 72 hours have been crazy. i have almost lost my sense of time and space. working on case, then going night cycling, supper, more cycling, and more case. i got burnt cooking a breakfast, slept only at 4am one night (for 5 hours).

now the only thing left is some rough papers and strands of long hair lying around the floor. and le petit prince ready for reading, finally. maybe the little prince eats ice cream very slowly too.

i was looking at my own cryptic posts in the past. i can't actually remember what i was hiding anymore.

i love sleep.

hatter

2010-09-08T23:52:00.001+08:00

sometimes we are too busy to sit down and feel.

calculus

2010-09-07T11:16:00.002+08:00

when you use your bag to reserve a seat, you probably think that nothing in your bag is valuable enough to be stolen. and yes, the things in your bag probably have no value to anyone - precisely because you take out your wallet and handphone when you leave your bag there.

but it's when you really lose the bag that you realise how important those worthless things are to you.

losing a diary book may have been the scariest thing ever. it jolts you so deeply, but when you get your book back it's like hugging a teddy bear all over again.

cut love

2010-09-01T16:44:00.004+08:00

chocolate and orange is an old combination which i never believed in. but last sunday i decided to throw orange zest into the milk/cream i was boiling for this ice cream. the recipe is dorie's bittersweet ganache ice cream.
orange zest in the milk/cream made it taste really bitter, and the smell was only just faint, so i didn't know if adding the zest was the right thing to do. but after tempering with the sabayon, the eggs seemed to tone down the bitterness and rounded out the orange flavour.
the ganache was leftover, frozen for almost a month. i had to do much scaling of the original ice cream recipe to suit it for the amount of ganache i had.
i just like to watch the ice cream maker churn away. from thick gloppy custard, it freezes slowly to light and fine-grained texture. the ice cream this time was super success. texture and taste all up there.

learnings

2010-08-26T22:33:00.001+08:00

do we repeat the stories? no. so why should we repeat the wardrobe?

不晓得

2010-08-25T01:01:00.001+08:00

today i stood waiting to cross an impossible road.

and asked for non-chunky ice cream flavours.

wakeup

2010-08-20T00:49:00.004+08:00

are the big house dreams unrealistic?

suddenly at 12am a smart, thinking, rational mind jolts a sleepy, wishful mind out of years of dreams. (as christensen said, you might apply a model you learnt 2 or 3 times a year, but when you know what you want in life, you apply it everyday.) it's like a wakeup(youridea) call.

everyday i feel as though if i am awake and not studying, i should be studying.

theme

2010-08-18T16:25:00.001+08:00

when i looked up, i noticed that the canopies of trees dun intersect each other. eliminating the height dimension, it's as though they fit like a jigsaw to form a plane.

chocolate peanut butter mousse tart

2010-08-04T17:32:00.007+08:00

this is a rose levy beranbaum recipe. and i never doubt her bible.

option

2010-08-01T00:12:00.002+08:00

about two months ago i weighed 63.7kg at changi terminal 3. yesterday i weighed 62.9kg.

it is cold everywhere nowadays. in the malls. out on the streets.

name into being

2010-07-26T22:38:00.001+08:00

'fuzzy' is the new feeling.

回忆过去

2010-07-19T11:39:00.003+08:00

this blog is so on it's way downhill. i miss the time when i had something to write everyday. but now life has just settled into a pattern of waking up and going to sleep. i just finished five days of ICT. and that would be the first of ten. finally seeing platoon 6 again after so long, like 20 months.

then again, it has only been eight months since ORD for me.

this song recently came back to me.

回忆过去痛苦的相思忘不了
为何你还来拨动我心跳
爱你怎么能了
今夜的你应该明了
缘难了情难了

a mere sight is enough to trigger all the past memories and emotions. everything that was boxed up and stowed away can come tumbling out in the blink of an eye. and then we're back to square one.

samsonite

2010-07-07T14:31:00.000+08:00

i just came back from a KFC lunch with sam, and an unfruitful trip to the computer shop for desktop repair. after lugging the entire desktop over, they told me to bring it home and call for on-site service.

anyway these are some long overdue things.

jia en and i made these two tarts some week ago. the week i was having flu. one is a french lemon cream tart, and the other is a chocolate cream tart.

then i made nutella ice cream.
and threw in macadamias and chocolate chunks.

then i made rose levy beranbaum's cream puffs. the recipe was good because it used up egg whites without yolks. finally something other than meringue or macaroons.
they were good with the strawberries and peaches that weiyang brought over, and hand-whipped cream, and the highly expired hershey's chocolate syrup.

rapt

2010-07-03T16:39:00.001+08:00

i am eating too much indian food.

on other news, i managed to clear driving license in exactly four months.

leaves on a pie

2010-06-18T21:43:00.005+08:00

i made rose's designer cherry pie, which used a flaky cream cheese pie dough. it is quite tasty, but the dough seemed to leach out a lot of oil; maybe from the cream cheese? my pie crust shrank and slid down the sides a lot, but it was ok because my pie filling was (horrendously) scant. but i love the idea of cutting leaf shapes from the pastry to distribute over the open-faced pie.

blue flash

2010-06-17T00:48:00.002+08:00

tonight's the first night in a long time that i'm opening the windows in my bedroom. it's just so cold now that there's no need for air-conditioning. so tonight is a celebration of december atmosphere, of fresh night air.

how time passes

2010-06-16T11:45:00.002+08:00

waking up at 10am to the sound of a storm is almost desirable. the cars on the road are going swoosh over and over again.

time seems to have decide to move incredibly fast now, because it has already been two weeks since seibu stopped by, and then it has been almost just as long since i fell down and cut myself all over.

it's quite scary how july is comng so quickly. i think it has to do with living a life in chunks of seven days.

and that is how time passes.

mouth full

2010-06-13T21:32:00.007+08:00

sometimes some stories are so perfect until the last minute, where something changes and everything falls apart. then again, only that would make a really great story; why else would a story be good, if everything went as planned?

true organic

2010-06-12T23:02:00.002+08:00

i am suddenly thinking of the mangoes we ate in camp. the ones that came from the trees which no one waters or feeds. they just grow from the rain and sunlight everyday, and maybe all that vehicle exhaust.

in her moods

2010-06-08T12:34:00.002+08:00

when it rains at night, the view outside becomes brighter. not because the sky is a bright orange, but because the water on the streets reflect the lights more.

when it rains in the day, all i hear is the swoosh of vehicles driving on the road.

french dinner

2010-06-03T23:35:00.014+08:00

another entire day of french cooking a la julia child.

aïgo bouïdo:
this is the garlic soup which didn't taste very much like garlic. i tasted the olive oil a lot more instead. maybe it's becuase i halved the recipe directly, and half the amount of garlic just doesn't give the kick needed. the soup use yolk-oil emulsion enrichment which i've never tried before. but tended to separate into layers upon sitting.

sourdough:
ok this is not a julia child recipe. but there was soup, and there must be crusty bread, so i made the nigella sourdough again. anyway, the starter has been dormant for a long time. i have managed to work the dough the french way (slapping instead of kneading) and i was quite happy with it. one of the tricks is to reduce the amount of water slightly. (i have been trying the past few times to reduce the water until it was easy to work the dough and still have the bread remain edible.) and i managed to achieve gluten window! i also like scoring it with a 'claw' pattern.

épinards étuvées au beurre:
there was so much work involved for this, because the recipe used only the leaves. and i had to rip the leaves from 1kg of the spinach to obtain those little clumps of spinach (though it is a lot to stomach). rip, wash, drain, wash, drain (because there was a lot of sand in them). then boil, refresh, drain and squeeze dry. squeezing the clumps of leaves dry was quite comforting, but not as comforting as chopping them. these felt so soft/firm when i minced them up.

purée de pommes de terre à l'ail:
this is a mash potato dish that is so unusual because it is not served with sauce drenched over it, but beaten into it. the potatoes were mashed plainly, while a garlic butter sauce was cooked separately. there was a lot of garlic in the sauce, but the long cooking in the butter mellowed it; flou and milk was added to turn it into a roux, then a sauce. after beating it into the mashed potatoes, it felt like they developed some gluten strength, and the potatoes remained in one soft piece that refused to break apart.

tarte aux fraises:
i didn't quite follow the julia child recipe all the way. but the pâte sablée and the crème pâtissière were her recipes. i finally got to use some old shortening for the pâte sablée. and it was the debut of my square tart pan which i recently bought when jinquan and i went out. the crème pâtissière was odd because it used flour as the thickening agent. it felt a little like eating unbaked choux paste. but the strawberries were pretty and the tart turned out well. i employed beranbaum's technique of egg-white-glazing to waterproof the crust, and it worked well.

final pictures:
this entire dinner took me from 10am to 630pm. and i skipped lunch; i ate sugar cookies that i baked from the excess pâte sablée.

putting in effort

2010-05-31T01:00:00.003+08:00

tonight was a spontaneous night. from dinner to airport, because seibu had a last-minute extended stopover in singapore. rushing in weiyang's car from boonlay across the country to changi; the moon was actually perfect.

haha then we were trying so hard to use up the voucher which seibu got for compensation for the delay.

sadly, i weighed 63.7kg at changi airport today.

resemblance

2010-05-24T20:57:00.004+08:00

ugly.

milk tea ice cream

2010-05-23T16:36:00.004+08:00

ice cream is becoming a permanent fixture in my freezer. this time it was milk tea ice cream.
this is an eggless ice cream, which is good, because i've started accumulating more and more egg whites again. i just steeped tea leaves in milk, thickened it with cornstarch, strained, chilled, and lightened it with cream. then churn it with the ice cream maker!
i particularly like this photo; it's so olden.

chocolate fiend

2010-05-17T22:06:00.004+08:00

today's baking with jinquan was all about chocolate. it was a disaster initially though, because i had planned on making bread but we had no yeast! but dorie and chocolate saved the day.
both recipes were from baking: from my home to yours. one was the bittersweet brownies, the other was the chocolate cream tart. didn't get to taste the tart, but i ate quite a bit of the excess chocolate pastry cream. (yummy!)

be now

2010-05-13T22:18:00.005+08:00

these are my contributions to 奶奶's birthday potluck, which just ended. the biscotti were relatively untouched primarily because it didn't fit in well to the dinner. (not appetiser, not finger food, not really dessert.) but the goma ice cream was excellent, except my sister still doesn't like black sesame.
the chocolate biscotti recipe comes from dorie greenspan. the dough was a lot stickier than she described, but other than that, not much problems, because sonya taught me to make biscotti before, so it went quite smoothly. they were chocolatey and crunchy.

i reduced the sugar amount from the original recipe by a lot, so this time it was a lot less sweet. i also re-adjusted the milk/cream ratio and it set into a very desirable texture for ice cream, which also didn't melt very quickly.

on a side note, melanie likes to run to me.

grateful

2010-05-08T21:54:00.002+08:00

oddly, there was a fireworks display outside my window. i don't know if it was even legal. but it was coming out from a patch of foresty hill some distance away. bursts of colour, like an ORD party.

slated

2010-05-02T23:04:00.000+08:00

i am hungry and all i had for dinner was hello panda and an orange muffin.

i am going to eat my way to losing weight.

goma

2010-04-26T17:57:00.004+08:00

i have an ice cream maker now, and sesame ice cream was what i wanted to make first.
the cheating ingredient: instant sesame paste.
the sabayon is whisked up first, tempered with hot milk/cream, cooked until the custad thickens, cooled and whisked into the sesame paste, and finally cooled over an ice bath.
the last touch: ground and toasted sesame seeds.
the ice cream maker did it's magic! the custard base lightened and turned fluffy quickly enough in one hour. no more need to churm it myself every half-hour for fve hours.
i packed it into an island creamery tub and froze it overnight. and today i've been sneaking small scoops.

miss for the world

2010-04-25T00:02:00.002+08:00

i cannot believe that it has really been almost three weeks since i wrote here. the weeks are passing very fast now, because on sundays it's west coast-choa chukang-harbourfront, mondays it's clementi, tuesdays it's harbourfront-redhill, wednesdays it's harbourfront-yew tee-redhill, thursdays it's commonwealth-kovan, fridays it's kembangan-marymount, saturdays it's bishan-yew tee-hillview, and then it's sunday all over again.

there's nothing much to write about.

bread and pudding

2010-04-06T13:57:00.008+08:00

last weekend i made the challah from baking with julia. is it just me or do challah doughs seem to require more flour than what recipes usually say? because my past experience with challah has always been overly wet dough.
the result of overly wet dough? too much flour added. the bread was quite heavy, though it didn't feel that heavy when it was warm.

so, too much un-ideal bread means bread pudding! because soaking 'bad' bread in sweet custard then baking it makes it utterly soft and delicious.
i finally got down to using the vanilla paste that sonya sent over almost half a year ago. but i didn't use enough of it, so it was hard to see the speckles of vanilla by the end of the baking.

some free time

2010-03-26T17:45:00.009+08:00

this is the debut of rose levy beranbaum's pie and pastry bible in my kitchen.
her flaky pie pastry is interesting enough. the butter to flour ratio is quite high, but not 4:5 yet. her method portions out the butter 2:1, using the larger portion to rub into the flour, moisture-proofing it, and the smaller portion for whacking into flat pieces. she uses cider vinegar (which i happen to have) and ice water to bind the dough, and because of the initial moisture-proofing, the gluten cannot overdevelop. but a lack of practice caused some ugly looking pie shell.
it was a quiche lorraine, with some onion for more taste. rose had a whacky technique of moisture-proofing the shell from the custard mixture: the moment the blind-baked shell comes out of the oven, brush it was egg white, which will quickly cook to form a thin crisp glaze layer over the crust, thereby moisture-proofing it.

today i woke up to make some over the top version of cinnamon buns. this one is nigella's schnecken. other versions include pastry cream in the swirl, and some use brioche for the bread. i wanted to use dorie's recipe for pecan honey sticky buns, but there were no pecans, and the brioche dough required overnight chilling. so i made the schnecken.
this dough contained butter, milk and eggs as the liquids - no water - so it was almost like a brioche already. ever since judy's class, i am careful to check for the gluten window.
the syrup was a mixture of butter, demerara, golden and corn syrups. at first it looked like a creamed mixture, but in the oven it would caramelise. after smearing it over the base of the pan, i dotted it with walnuts.
the dough took a long time to roll into the required size. i had to keep letting it rest. but it was able to go quite thin without tearing.
the dough rolled up very nicely. the underside was just a little tacky to feel like it was stuck on the tabletop, yet still able to lift away when i pulled it up to roll. i managed to make quite a tight roll and it looked like a popiah after slicing.
the buns were placed over the walnuts and proofed, then baked. i think i didn't bake long enough, because the syrup at the base didn't thicken/darken quite enough. anyhow, when i flipped it over to let it unmold onto the wire rack, some of the syrup came out and splattered onto my legs and it was HOT.
these definitely took up half the day. but that's how long bread baking takes; it's a lot of waiting time. and then some breads just require a bit more effort, a bit more fiddling with.

i like my sugar and butter in bread rather than cake. so brioche, cinnamon buns, shnecken, and sticky buns are all delicious.

the fifth moon

2010-03-20T21:33:00.002+08:00

my dreams the past few nights can't end because i get woken up by the alarm. my recent dreams have somehow involved driving, or riding. (last night i was riding through a flood.) indeed, when schools have holidays, tuition teachers get a lot more work. in the course of this week, i've become very close to three dogs. and i found a prata place which serves an incredible butter prata.

the past week has really passed very slowly.

when i was very young, i once found a very thick dictionary in a cupboard. now if i were to find it again, i don't know it’s still going to be as big.

after a whole day of rain and cloudy skies, the crescent moon still came out tonight.

silly crushes

2010-03-16T23:39:00.004+08:00

sometimes i sit at the bus stop and just watch the vehicles go by. but today i was suddenly thinking of the world in 100 years. and then it gets even harder to imagine what it'll be like in 2500? presumably, we'd be gone by then. and presumably, there will still be people around. (right?) but then that sparked something: where will we be after we are gone? and more importantly, what will it be like when i'm old?

i just finished reading alice sebold's the lovely bones, and i think that triggered something. sometimes it feels like everyone else has moved on, like the vehicles driving past, like time - the river - itself flowing past. moved on with university, boyfriends, girlfriends, work, Life. and yet here is where i am: the bus stop.

i found my beautiful post of almost a year ago.

sometimes our timing is just bad; our paths just miss each others' by a few seconds, a phone call, a lunch. but a heavy rain can coop everyone together, and a mug of hot chocolate warm the heart.

something is just missing. it's like i'm stuck, and watching everyone move on. it shouldn't be happening. i'm doing what i wanted to be doing. almost. i'm spending 82 hours a month giving tuition and earning enough (to make myself happy), and spending the remainder of the time shuttling between homes, preparing lesson plans, getting not enough sleep, and being stuck in time.

yet i have no time to tend to my sourdough, and though i just stocked up on flours and hope to get nice chocolate buttons, i don't even think baking is going to get my life going again. day after day, it's waking up late and rushing from home to home, hesitating on what to eat for breakfast/lunch/dinner, facebooking endlessly and waiting for non-replies, trying to uprank on startutor (totally pointless), getting new assignments and getting even more frustrated over nothing yet again.

so, moving on.

not telling

2010-03-11T21:32:00.003+08:00

i'm starting to grow the crystal again. and it's amazing how fast the marred face was healed overnight; now all the sides are smooth.
forgot about the coffee ice cream. it came out too creamy, not icy. i think that's because i used all cream and not cream with milk; so there was not enough water to form the ice.

抽空

2010-03-10T12:39:00.002+08:00

the long awaited rain finally came this morning. and it was indeed a wretched rain. but i stepped into a japanese home, and there was a bundle of sunshine. it was a wide, empty, clear hall, a long table and a wall mirror. it's like you could just sit at the end of the long table and look at yourself in the mirror all day.

like komatsu nana.

the beginning of good

2010-03-04T23:39:00.002+08:00

today, mummy brought me to chinatown to look at the shops selling kitchenware for commercial scale. the cooking vats are so huge that you can sit inside and be boiled alive. and the mixers too - you can sit in the bowl and let the paddle attachment mash you up.

four days ago something fell into place. (and actually now i can't remember what it was.) but today two more things fell into place. and maybe it really will get better now.

hot and cold cream

2010-03-02T23:28:00.006+08:00

weiyang finally puts in his effort and sweat at making the caramel croissant pudding. with a shot of bailey's, this pudding is immediately transformed into an even creamier, richer, fatty piece of thing.
but so worth the effort.

i am currently churning a tub of coffee ice cream. this one uses no eggs. it's just cream boiled with sugar and ground coffee. steeped and strained, chilled then churned.
results to be revealed tomorrow.

right now i'm thinking of the first day at BMT. the ferry ride. the TV show on the ferry - some teacher trying to teach a choir of boys how to sing. the coastal route. the daily tides coming in and out. the planes flying overhead frequently.

and then the cold wind blows.

stretching on

2010-02-28T20:36:00.005+08:00

in a recent nightmare, i was taking the motorbike test again, and the roads changed somehow, so i didn't know where to go.

it is indeed the end of february already. the payslip this month is $1362.25. and all of it will be gone soon. i felt quite awful these few days, but something fell into place today, and hopefully everything will turn better.

tant pour tant

2010-02-23T20:22:00.004+08:00

in a bid to finish using up the glace cherries, butter and almonds in the refrigerator, i made stollen again. so not christmas, but what the hell.
the butter makes the dough so silky and smooth. i seems to threaten to break, but if well-kneaded, the dough is quite elastic.
making some in the cups, i actually managed to finish using up the liners that were bought way back in 2007! the remaining dough i put into a savarin mold. there was too much dough, so it rose way over the top, but whatever; still edible.

i fear now that i've lost the ability to make pie; i haven't practised in so long.