Earl Grey Pound Cake October 26, 2009

Ever since I started this blog over a year ago, I’ve received lovely comments about how my posts are down-to-earth, unpretentious and self-deprecating.

Well, this is not one of those posts.

Today, I’m going to brag about what an utter genius I am for coming up with this most astounding of butter cakes, the Earl Grey Pound Cake. And get this: I didn’t just follow a recipe from some book that I bought or am reviewing, like I usually do. I pretty much made up this recipe myself.

Okay, so I adapted it from a new cookbook that’s out in the stores. But unlike many sneaky food bloggers out there who adopt published recipes as their own by changing something really small, like the amount of sugar, I changed a lot of this recipe, awright?

Having read Shirley O. Corriher’s BakeWise, I have become so clever that I knew, at one glance, that the stated 1/8 tsp of baking powder is way not enough. So I upped it. I also did away with ingredients A and B, because the cake would be too sweet with them. I also cancelled ingredient C and D because I wanted a finer texture, and I dropped ingredient E because it would overpower the Earl Grey tea flavour.

Please, hold your applause. I’m not done yet.

Last but not least, I increased the butter and cut the sugar so it had the perfect balance that’s super-buttery and not too sweet. And, ta-da, what did I get? A butter cake that is so tender, so moist and fragrant, I believe this is the thing that’s gonna make me my first million.

Call me smug, but I’ve been dreaming about opening a bakery that specialises in all variations of this stupendous butter cake – orange, lemon, green tea, five-spice, you name it – and cake-worshippers from all over the country would descend upon me to beg for a small slice. Like the institutional Lana Cakes shop in Bukit Timah, I would only need to open four days a week to support my two kids through school and my husband through full-time skate-boarding.

And, like Lana bakery (I’ve been allowed inside its bowels before! One of the better privileges of being a food writer), I would have a little air-conditioned room tucked way at the back where I mix my batter and keep my secret ingredient away from view.

Yes, friends, this recipe has a secret ingredient, one that keeps the cake so incredibly moist even after a few days. But I’m not telling. Many of you have asked for recipes in my previous posts, and in the spirit of fraternal goodwill and generosity towards all baker-kind, I have happily obliged. But not this one, folks. This one is mine.

Go ahead. Beg, plead, or appeal to my soft, vulnerable 6-months-pregnant heart for my classified recipe. But I will only have three words for you – Get cher own.

This mamma’s not budging.

Dad’s 80th birthday cake October 8, 2009

I made a two-tier cake for my dad’s 80th birthday last month. But this post isn’t about how much he loved it (which I’m sure he did, even though crusty, conservative Teochew men like him don’t often express their feelings), or how much my relatives loved it, or how my 23-month-old daughter E wolfed down an entire slice all by herself, this being her very first taste of her mother’s baking (we decided that we’ve deprived her the sinful joys of fat and sugar for long enough).

No, this post is about the miracle of how I even managed to make the cake in the first place.

You’ve been fooled if you think that I stopped baking over the past five months because I’m pregnant and that my apartment was under renovation. Friends, there was actually a more sinister, diabolical force at work – my husband Z.

Let me put it this way. I am married to a man who has turned my pregnancy into an oppressive in-house military camp. Much like how life in the army barracks is governed by an inexplicable set of rules that makes sense only to the sergeant who created them, so is my life ever since Z knocked me up.

Here is Z the Pregnancy Nazi’s edict:

I cannot eat instant noodles or canned soup. Zero nutrition.

I cannot eat sausages. You don’t know what goes into them.

I cannot stand near the microwave oven, let alone eat anything that has been microwaved. He gave me the reason but it was so deep it slid right over my head.

I cannot carry my 11-kg daughter. Too taxing.

I cannot reach my arms up to take anything that is taller than me. I could overstretch.

I must flee at the slightest whiff of cigarette smoke, paint, detergent or fumigation (but strangely, his noxious farts are okay).

I cannot shower in the bathtub. I could slip and fall.

Every other day, he will check if I have been faithfully taking my dietary supplements. Every time I eat an apple, or any produce that may have come in contact with pesticides, he asks sternly: “Did you wash it?”

A few weeks ago, in a haze of renovation fever, I returned to my apartment with our maid so she could glue on a piece of laminate in the kitchen. I only supervised; I didn’t do any of the work. But when Z found out that I was actually within sniffing distance of glue for 15 minutes, he refused to talk to me for one full day.

So go ahead, ask me if I’ve been baking. And I’ll roll my eyes and tell you: “And incur the wrath of Lord Z?” No, I have not been baking. Because I don’t want to whisk an egg and have him scold me for potentially breaking my hip, thereby making childbirth more difficult. I have not been baking. Because I don’t want to sift flour only to have him accuse me of triggering premature labour.

But I had a rare reprieve last month as my dad’s birthday approached. He was turning 80, a grand, celebratory milestone by any standard, and I wanted to bake him a cake, something I had never done before. It was a proposition that even Z, a complete softie when it comes to parents and family, could not turn down.

So I baked the butter cakes in my spanking new 90-cm Ariston oven back in my apartment (more about my wonder oven in another post), then completed the frosting (whipped cream with mascarpone cheese) and decorations (strawberries, raspberries and blueberries) at my parents’, where a party for 30 relatives was to be held.

The cake was a hit. Dad’s four grandchildren helped him blow out the candles, and a photo of that moment now serves as wallpaper in his iPod, our birthday gift to him. I’m just glad that Z the Nazi didn’t deny me the pride I now feel for making the cake. Because if he did, I would summon some of this watermelon belly and heavy-artillery papaya boobs to unleash some major Allied forces on him. Ker-pow!

The Worst TV Host On Earth September 9, 2009

When I watch TV these days, I am confronted with a slew of urgent, sobering questions: ‘When will the economy pick up?’, ‘Why so many natural disasters?’, ‘Can climate change be stopped?’.

But perhaps the most disturbing of all, ‘Why the heck is Bobby Chinn hosting a TV show?’

Every time I see his trailer on Discovery Channel, I ask myself: What have we, the TV viewers in Asia, done to deserve such a narcissistic, uncharismatic, and thoroughly insufferable brat thrust upon our consciousness?

Nigella Lawson shows you how you can eat a horse and still be drop-dead gorgeous. Jamie Oliver makes you want to cook. Ian Wright makes you laugh. Anthony Bourdain shows you how to travel the world with a deadpan swagger.

But Bobby Chinn? The only qualification he brings to the lifestyle TV landscape is that he has a pulse and a full head of hair. (I can’t even bear to put his face on my blog, therefore the above picture).

First of all, as a clear case of ill judgment by Discovery Channel, it has decided to put its name behind a show that has zero culinary or entertainment value. In Chinn’s first series, World Cafe Asia, he goes around Asia in search of street food. But do we really want to watch yet another angmoh demonstrate to us the wonders of food that we ourselves had grown up on? You could excuse Kylie Kwong (who cooks just about everything with gin-jah and Shaoxing wine “for depth of flay-vah and charac-tar“) for doing the same, because her faux-Chinese recipes are aimed at Western audiences who don’t know any better. But I was flabbergasted to learn that Chinn’s shows aren’t even aired in the West - they were made for Asia. To me, it’s the equivalent of going to Bologna and showing the people there how to cook spaghetti bolognaise. 

Then, there are his recipes. I’ve never been to his modern Vietnamese restaurant in Hanoi, but from watching one episode of his latest series, Bobby Chinn Cooks Asia, I’m not expecting to hear angels sing if I eat his food. His recipes are neither inventive, enticing nor authentic. Methinks that he is only using the ‘fusion cuisine’ card to get away with slapping together incongruous ingredients and calling it ‘new’.

Still, it is not all grave that his show has poor content and that he is a terrible cook. What’s really unpardonable is that Chinn just seems so obnoxious as a person. In an old episode shot in a Thai wet market, he points to an old plastic container used at a fish stall then says to the fish-seller (who obviously didn’t understand English and was defenceless): “You know we use that for toilets in the States?” In a more recent episode shot in India, he is standing by a chef who was cooking a popular dish. As she poured some oil into the wok, he asks a question that could spark an international incident: “Why do you guys use so much oil?”

Somebody burn his effigy in front of a US embassy already!

In my previous incarnation as a newspaper writer, I interviewed some of the best food/travel hosts on Discovery and found that they all had one thing in common: They have a solid, unwavering respect for people from different cultures and walks of life.

I once made the mistake of asking Ian Wright if bushwomen in Africa had ever proposed to him. “Bushwomen?” he gasped, sounding quite alarmed, and continued to answer my question using a more respectable term for women from primitive cultures. Even Anthony Bourdain, with his famous bad-boy gruffness reeking from his intimidating 1.9m frame, was remarkably polite and thoughtful in person. In one episode of his show shot in Vietnam, he was so formal and genuine in his thanks to his Vietnamese hosts that he risked looking totally uncool.

So the bottom line is, if you want to be a good lifestyle TV host, you gotta love people.

Bobby Chinn doesn’t appear to love people. Instead, he stamps his condescending, unfunny frat-boy witticisms all over them as he scratches his way to celebrity chefdom. 

He just wants to be famous. And I just want to punch his face in.

The Best Show On TV August 27, 2009

As it is with many foodies, Discovery’s Travel & Living is the centre of my universe.

It’s pretty much the only channel I watch, and I only hop out of it for cursory glimpses of the outside world during commercial breaks (or when that nauseating Bobby Chinn comes on).

Recently, I kept seeing this trailer for a new show called Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory, which looks like a cheap cooking programme fronted by this sweaty, straggly-haired Brit on how to make different types of chocolate desserts.

But just 10 minutes into watching the first episode last Sunday, I turned to my husband Z (who works at Discovery) and firmly chastised him: “Your trailer people did a very lousy job of selling this show.”

Because, instead of some throwaway food programme about chocolate , Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory turned out to be equal-parts documentary, tension-filled reality TV, and delicious cookshow shot to the same degree of gorgeousness as Jamie At Home.

It tells the story of Willie Harcourt-Cooze, a chocolate-obsessed bohemian who sells his house in England in order to buy a plantation in Venezuela to grow his own cacao beans and make his own brand of chocolate (“the best chocolate in the world”). So he transplants his young family to the grimy plantations of Venezuela, and spends 12 (12!) years cultivating his crop.

Thrown into the main narrative are yummy vignettes of Willie cooking a mind-boggling array of dishes using his very own 100% cacao — roasted pepper gazpacho, mushroom risotto, stewed fish in coconut milk, apricot injected roast pig, and a chocolate cake that promises to buckle any woman at the knees.

But his journey from plantation to the glitzy food halls of Selfridges is fraught with peril. In Venezuela, he has to contend with capricious weather, weird insect infestations, poor crop yields and a troop of workers waiting to be paid. Back home in Devonshire, he has three young children to feed, a worried wife to placate, barely enough money to keep the heaters running, and a constant stream of creditors beating down his door. This show is absolutely riveting.

I came out of it with this big question: Is there anything that I’m so passionate about that I’d sell my house for and live on mere subsistence for 12 years to fulfill a dream?

Sigh, no. Not even the pursuit of the world’s most divine strawberry shortcake. I’m the sort who can only sleep at night when I know there’s a nice pile of savings in my bank account, fat enough to cushion me against sudden unemployment or a Morakot-sized typhoon.

Which explains why I’m no headlining star of a totally awesome TV show. Damn.

 

The Mummy Returns July 24, 2009

Look who’s baaaaaaaaaack…

I’ve gone AWOL for a very long three months but it’s not without good reason, folks.

1. I was renovating! Yup. Changed the floors, hacked a wall, relined a bathroom, overhauled my entire kitchen and installed a brand spankin’ new oven which is bigger and meaner! But…

2. I lost my camera. So I can’t take photos of my lean-and-mean oven to show y’all yet. But soon.

3. Last but not least, I have not been blogging because, haha, I have a bun baking in my other oven! Details of that coming up soon, but suffice it to say that I am all pickled and sng-buayed out

Not sure when I’m gonna resume writing. But since there’s maintenance works coming up at my apartment block and the maid is going home for a month, I’m gonna stay put at my parents’ for at least two more months. Which means no baking. By October, though, I’ll be back with a vengeance. See ya then.

W&A’s confetti wedding cake April 15, 2009

This is what I’ve learnt from making the cake for my cousin Ambrose’s wedding last month. No matter what you wear or how stylishly you’re turned out, a wedding cake maker will only emerge from the occasion looking like a drenched chicken.

This is what happened.

Ambrose and his adorable wife, Wendy, had wanted a really pretty, romantic cake similar to the one I did for C&A. I threw them a few ideas and was thrilled when they picked this one — a confetti of small flowers scattered down three tiers — because I’ve been dying to make this design for a long time.

But when the wedding day arrived, I found myself feeling really nervous, because:

1. It’s the first time that all of my family and relatives – including my dad and brothers – saw me making an actual wedding cake. They’ve heard about my bizarre hobby for some time now. But they finally clapped eyes on one such creation — the reason I’ve been neglecting my child and getting my husband to do takeaways this past year.

2. A lot of the finishing touches had to be done on-site. The tiers can’t be fully adorned with the flowers until they’re at the venue or they’ll be damaged when they’re stacked up.

3. Finally, this design requires the ultimate in creative artistry — how to make like the flowers were scattered naturally? Like the wind did it?

Pineapple and coconut crunch cake April 9, 2009

Dear all, since the last time I wrote about cake decorating, my piping skills still suck so bad it could frighten small children. But! *cymbal clash!* I have found a solution to my dismal handicap. And it’s really quite simple.

Don’t know how to pipe? Don’t pipe!

There are other types of cakes in this world that don’t need buttercream rosettes to look good. And, as in the case of this cake, they can even taste better.

Tired of Western cookbooks that don’t work, I’ve been turning to Asian titles for a change. One of the first cookbooks that landed on my desk when I was a food writer was Asian High Tea Favourites by Malaysian author Betty Saw. I remember making her Chocolate Crinkle cookies that came out smelling and tasting like Famous Amos (no joke). So surely her cakes wouldn’t be too far off.

Mysteriously named Surprise Cake, this cake is basically butter cake covered with a moan-inducing topping of minced pineapple, dessicated coconut and crushed cornflakes. Yeah yeah, so it uses canned pineapple, which is loaded with sugar, preservatives and other life-threatening stuff. But I love how it’s so Malaysian/Singaporean/Thai. I mean, South-east Asia is serious about their fake fruit. I can’t think of another region in the world (oh, okay, there’s also China) that has entire industries that peel, deseed, sweeten and basically falsify fruits like longans and lychees to resemble flawless fishballs.

(I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, the best thing about Chinese wedding banquets was dessert – I’d wolf down the canned longans in double-quick time and leave the pukey almond jelly untouched.)

Consider the mutated marvel called stuffed rambutans. How on earth do they remove the seed and present the flesh as if the seed never happened? As if such technical wizardry isn’t impressive enough, they then proceed to stuff them with delicious chunks of pineapple. I love!

So anyway. When you bite into this cake, there is the expected moistness and softness of the butter cake. But then, there’s also a crunch of cornflakes here, and bits of coconut and pineapple there. If pina coladas are to be reborn as cake, this is it.

Easy cream puffs March 25, 2009

The other day, I was at the Malay stall in my office canteen when I saw something that made me snigger in the way movie villains do — with eyes squinted to a slit as I smiled a slow, evil smile.

But first, a bit of background. This Malay stall has been the reason that I’m known to be a bit of a weirdo in my workplace: I actually quite like the canteen food. Every lunchtime, my colleagues would dive across the road to eat at the foodcourt or coffeeshop opposite, or hop into a cab towards a nearby shopping mall — basically to flee in terror of the culinary offerings on our 7th floor. But not me.

I love the nasi padang at the Malay stall. I love its yummy sambal goreng, beef rendang, potato wedges with ikan bilis, sambal sotong, stir-fried green beans, tahu goreng, and a mee rebus that just can’t be beat. In fact, I credit my daughter E’s ruddy birthweight of 3.66kg to this sumptuous Malay spread, which I ate practically every day when I was pregnant with her.

That’s not all. Every day at around 3pm, the super illustrious stall pours forth a whole different spread for tea time: curry puff, roti john, kueh kueh, hamburgers, samosas, just to name a few. In my mind, the cooks behind this stall are virtual geniuses. Everything they make is just pure gold — until, that is, the day when I cracked that villainous smile.

The stall had just served up cream puffs. And there, on the counter, was a platter of puffs that should be more accurately described as “poofs”. Instead of looking perky and round, they were so flat they looked like they got sat on by an elephant.

Now, I’m not normally the sort who would dance all over other people’s shortcomings. But I had just recently come out of a grand, ego-bruising series of baking disasters, and seeing how even this stellar food stall could create such comical duds not only brought me some relief, I felt downright victorious.

Okay, one of the secrets to making good puffs is using bread flour because, according to Shirley Corriher’s BakeWise, its higher protein content creates a better puff that won’t collapse. This recipe for cream puffs, which I found in a Hong Kong cookbook called Everyday Treats, turned out really well and, yup, it uses bread flour.

But you can bet I won’t share this secret with the Malay stall. Sometimes, you gotta keep things down in order to feel up. *Evil smile*

A not-so Happy Birthday March 11, 2009

I could lie and say that the above is a fancy update of roti prata, but I won’t. In truth, it’s a no good piece-of-crap choux pastry I ended up making for my husband Z’s birthday last month.

Ever heard of Paris-Brest? It’s a French pastry in a shape of a wheel that was created in 1891 to celebrate some historic bike race from Paris to Brest. So how come my wheel looked like it ran over a bed of nails and emerged flatter than Gwyneth Paltrow?

I got the recipe from Young Mo Kim’s A Fine Collection Of Baking (yes, that book again, which I’m seriously thinking of burning and sending the ashes back to Korea). In the book, the wheel is perfectly round, puffed up, cut in half and filled with whipped cream, whole bananas and a hazelnut praline mousse. Sounds like heaven right?

Well, I never got to taste the divine combo because I didn’t go as far as peeling the bananas. Before I could even start work on the filling, the blurdy pastry broke into three segments while rising in the oven. Not only that, it rose so unevenly it looked like a miniature roller coaster. Then when I took it out, it fell dead flat.

What’s even more tragic, I made this damn thing three times — using choux recipes from Young Mo Kim, Martha Stewart and Pichet Ong — and they all failed. Nope, practice didn’t make perfect, folks.

So I thought, maybe choux pastry cannot sustain such a long, continuous structure – the most it could go is short logs like eclairs. So I used the leftover batter to make eclairs (which was actually Z’s original choice as his birthday treat).

Check out the end result above. Pretty nice, eh? The pastry remained puffed up, the chocolate topping was rich and glossy. Woulda been perfect if you didn’t actually have to bite into it. See below.

The pastry cream inside — recipe taken from the until-now very reliable BakeWise by Shirley Corriher — was so stiff I couldn’t pipe it into the puffs. For the sake of photography and some semblance to a real eclair, I had to spread it onto the cavity like it was a jam.

Still, I was down but not out. Z was to have a belated birthday party last weekend so I had one more chance to redeem myself. So I decided to make something totally fool-proof, and nothing is more so than an English trifle.

First, you make a sponge cake (I used the fail-proof recipe by my beloved Chef Alex Goh), cut it into cubes and line a glass dish.

Then, you cut up strawberries and canned peaches and jam-pack them on top.

Next, you spoon over a layer of custard but, sorry, I don’t have a photo to show it. I was too traumatised to take any photos when my custard REFUSED, and I mean, absolutely SAID NO to setting. I think I used the wrong recipe. I used Rose Levy Beranbaum’s creme anglaise, which might have been a custard sauce that wasn’t supposed to set. Desperate, I added gelatin — twice — and still it was completely liquid. Never mind, I poured it into the dish anyway and hoped that the final topping of whipped cream would obscure it.

No such luck. The whipping cream conspired with the custard to utterly humiliate me because it, too, refused to set properly. By the time we blew out the candle, the cream melted into a disastrous puddle that looked like this.

Cake soup, anyone?

Remember, all this played out in front of about 10 guests — a few of whom read this blog and had been under the illusion that I can bake. If I weren’t so well brought up by my parents, I would’ve locked myself up in my room and refused to come out.

Z wolfed down a spoonful and said “Quite nice, what.” But it didn’t comfort me. This is a man who eats fried rice with Maggi chilli sauce — hardly an arbiter of good taste. I just wanted to wail.

The next morning, I was still smarting from the debacle as we headed out for lunch with my family. As it turned out, my brother suggested that we eat at Tampopo, the birthplace of my favourite strawberry shortcake — which I consider the best in the world. I was quite willing to abstain from this treat on this sad occasion. But my sis-in-law innocently ordered a portion for me.

So there it stood, in front of me, like a cosmic taunt. The sponge cake was miraculously soft, the strawberries were glisteningly fresh, and the whipped cream was thick, glossy, spongy and perfectly set.

Utterly defeated, I dug in. The pain was exquisite.

 

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P/S: Z wants me to put on record that the ugly photos of the English trifle were all taken by me. He’s got a rep to protect wor.

Pear Tart March 4, 2009

Something very disturbing is happening. The other day, I had nothing to blog about and mused aloud to my husband Z that I might stop blogging altogether.

He didn’t toss back his usual tart reply, which used to always sound something like, “Wow? Really? And I get back my wife?”.  Instead, his eyes were the size of saucers. A look of genuine alarm spread across his face as he gasped: “Har? Why?”

“Cos I’ve run out of things to say,” I said.

Then, with lips almost a-quivering, he launched into a list of reasons why I shouldn’t quit this blog, because he had spent $X buying the reflector, the flash, the zoom lens and whatever else to shoot my cakes.

“But you can use them for your other photography stuff what,” I retorted, unmoved.

Then he blurted out the REAL reason why I shouldn’t end this blog. “Because your blog is my blog!” he cried.

Oh really. Is that so?  No wonder he’s been so annoying lately. Every time he’s shot my cakes, he would sit in front of his computer for absolute ages, tweaking the resolution, the tone, the contrast and what-have-you (for example, this so-so-tasting pear tart, taken from Young Mo Kim’s A Fine Collection Of Baking). Then, when I am already half-way into dreamland in bed, he’d suddenly shout, “How about this?” And I would have to pry open my eyes, wrench myself out of bed and look at his photo.

“No difference to the other one what,” I’d say, bleary-eyed, and plonk myself back to bed.

Right when I’m just inches away from re-entering snooze-topia, he’d suddenly command again, “How about this?” And this could go on several times a night.

He doesn’t leave me alone in the day either. He would call me from work just to find out if my latest post received any comments — about his photos. On other days, he would announce quite brazenly that he intends to spend the afternoon checking out the competition in other food blogs. And by the time he’s through, “they’re toast”.

My husband, whom I married because he is one cool, laid-back, peace-loving dude, has suddenly turned into a competitive, pixel-picking monster. I started having terrifying visions that very soon, I’ll be hand-cuffed to my kitchen counter as he forces me to bake every day so that he’d have something to shoot and post on my blog.

The horror!

But this morning, as he drove me to work, he came up with a new reason why I shouldn’t stop this blog.

“Because it’s your hobby, it makes you happy, and it has given you new friends,” he said.

He’s probably just sayin’ it. But I’m sold

Galette des Rois February 26, 2009

Like, what happened? How did I manage to make a pastry that grew tumours?

This is supposed to be a Galette des Rois, an almond-cream-filled pastry the French traditionally eat around Christmas. Taken from Young Mo Kim’s A Collection Of Fine Baking, this recipe had me making the puff pastry by hand to achieve a monumental 144 layers. But after the absolute torment I went through, I couldn’t care less how many layers it had. I just wanted to run away and never see it again.

I’ll spare you the details (like how the dough was so rubbery, trying to roll it out was harder than getting my husband Z to change the bedsheets).

Because the highlight of this experience was how, after popping it in the oven for 5 minutes, the butter in the dough melted and gathered into a pool on the baking tray – thereafter  frying the pastry.

Then, after another 10 minutes, the almond filling followed suit, growing, bubbling, mutating into three menacing globs – like unwanted, out-of-control appendages. In fact, if aliens were taking over Earth, I’ll call Will Smith and tell him that ground-zero is the oven in my kitchen.

Even more infuriating, the damn thing refused to be cooked. After baking for one whole hour, only the outer layers were turned a crisp golden yellow. The inside remained disgustingly gummy. Then again, it didn’t matter either way because the texture was so hard I could barely cut through it.

It may not look it in the photo (left, because my Z is a wizard with his lenses), but this thing nearly took out a tooth.

I felt like whipping out my mobile and putting it next to the baking tray. I want this E.T. to phone and go home.

25 Random Things About Food February 19, 2009

For four long years, I asked this question every week for a Sunday food column I used to write: What would your last meal be? Invariably, the personalities I interviewed would give some blah answer, like Teochew porridge or their mother’s steamed egg or some such boring throwaway.

If I were asked this question, oh-ho-ho, I would say: A ginormous strawberry shortcake that I could jump into and eat from the inside out. When I’m done, I’d throw myself into a bath-tub filled with Thai chilli-and-lemon dried cuttlefish, Kettle’s honey and dijon potato chips, honey cashew nuts and sticky barbecue fish sticks. Then, I would lock myself up in a Nonya buffet.

I could go on and on. Which is why I’ve always secretly wished that someone, anyone, would ask me this question for a change, so I could unleash my long pent-up list.

Well, since we’re in the season for lists (you know,  the pandemic spread of self-love in Facebook known as ”25″) , I thought I’d just help myself and publish it for all to peruse.

Here is my “25 Random Things About Food”.

1. The best strawberry shortcake in the world can be found in Tampopo Deli in Liang Court.

2. The best French fries in the world can be found in your neighbourhood McDonald’s.

3. Nothing, nothing, is worse than undercooked red beans in ice kacang.

4. I can eat raw oysters, raw fish, raw prawns and raw beef, but never raw beansprouts.

5. If my house were on fire, the first thing I’ll grab (other than husband Z and baby E) is my Ruffles cakestand, which Z ordered from the States as my Christmas present last year. (See photos – ain’t it pwetty?)

6. If I were the Prime Minister of Singapore, I would decree that the annoyingly floppy thick noodles in laksa be replaced by beehoon. No more stains!

7. In an ideal world, all grapes and watermelons are seedless.

8. Cornflakes are best eaten at night.

9. If I were stranded on an island, I could live on canned sweet corn alone - yummy, fibrous, and no need to cook. 

10. I bear no shame for cooking with Lee Kum Kee oyster sauce. It really does make everything taste better.

11. Yes, there is something even better than Maggi chilli sauce. Its name is Lingham’s.

12. If I could choose which country I could be born in to enjoy the national cuisine, it would be Thailand, Indonesia or Japan (in this order).

13. If I can have only one accompaniment to rice, it would be sambal fishcake.

14. The Japanese do everything better – the best ribeye steak (Angus Steakhouse), the best curry rice (Tampopo), the best pasta (mentaiko spaghetti), and the ultimate best salad dressing (sesame flavour by We Love Salad! brand).

15. But if there’s one thing the Koreans do better than the Japanese, it is instant noodles (spicy mushroom flavour).

16. I have a secret weapon when it comes to stir-frying kangkong. It is called Cantonese XO sauce.

17. Three things I must always have in my fridge: Eggs, cold water, Nestle’s mango lassi drink.

18. Things I eat because of the dipping sauce: chicken rice, oh luak (oyster omelette), yong tau foo.

19. When I was on a 7-day detox fast a few years ago, the first thing I hallucinated about was nasi padang.

20. To me, the holy trinity of fruits is Mountain King durians, ‘harumanis’ mangoes from Indonesia, and ‘lor mai chee’ lychees from China.

21. Of the tiresome appetiser platter that’s served at ALL Chinese wedding banquets, I actually quite like the prawns in mayo sauce.

22. If the secret to good skin is not water, but Ribena, I could run for Miss Universe.

23. I’ve taken the dump in the toilet of Phoon Huat (bakery supplies store) in Holland Village four times – more than in any retail shop on earth – because I’m always very excited when I’m there.

24. Bovril in rice porridge is totally underrated.

25. I always wanted to marry someone who can cook. Z can’t cook. But he can dance. So that makes up for it.

PS: Okay, now it’s your turn. I’ve always wondered who you people jacking up my hit counter are. So drop a comment about your last meal (or anything at all). Just don’t say it’s Teochew porridge.

Green Tea Chiffon Cake February 17, 2009

Go ahead, laugh at my chiffon cake. Say that it looks like an Egyptian pyramid that’s been chopped off and pried open for easier access to King Tut. Because once you’ve had a taste of this cake - complete with that  glob of unmixed egg white on the inside *see it?* – you’re not gonna be laughing, but crying from sheer joy and admiration. It tasted that good.

Okay, so it’s a little on the wet side. After all, it was underbaked by about 15 minutes. But when I inserted a skewer into the centre, it came out clean what. And when I touched the surface, it bounced back… (okay, maybe not bounce back hard enough.)

But still I’d say this fine specimen of structural collapse is a triumph for my first attempt at chiffon cakes. The texture was springy and soft, it wasn’t too sweet, and it had just the right whiff of smoky green tea.

This recipe is taken from Korean pastry chef Young Mo Kim’s cookbook A Collection Of Fine Baking. Its delicate, beautiful taste just adds to my case that I should just forget about angmoh recipe books – what with their diabetes-inducing sweetness and overall unreliability – and just go with Asian cookbooks for the rest of my life.

To be doubly sure, I actually made this cake a second time to see how much better it’d be if it were given its full baking time. Result? Just perfect.

But I didn’t take a picture of it though. It looked like any other perfectly made chiffon cake. This undercooked specimen, in all its downtrodden glory, looks a lot more interesting. No?

P/S: Message me if you want the recipe. I’m too lazy to type it out now. Zzzzzz.

The Ultimate Butter Cake February 4, 2009

Some people eat lots of bread. Some people load up on rice. Yet others just stuff themselves full and hope something sticks. What am I talking about? I’m talking about what food to eat prior to a night of drinking so you won’t get so drunk that you wake up the next morning with your kidneys missing.

But I’ve discovered something that’s 100% resistant to the effects of alcohol and it tastes way better than rice or bread – Amy Scherber’s Simply Delicious Yellow Cake. It is buttery, eggy, moist and fluffy, easily the best butter cake I’ve ever made.

Apart from some leftover rice and steamed egg, this cake was the only thing I ate last Saturday before I went out on the town with 5 of my girlfriends.

Ostensibly, it was to celebrate 3 of our birthdays. It was also for us to catch up, now that new jobs/marriage/children have set us on different paths over the past few years.

But seriously, we just wanted to get sloshed.

We wanted to dump our husbands/boyfriends for just one night, and relive the same stupid antics we were up to years ago – you know, the kind of foggy revelry that makes dancing the conga thoroughly fashionable.

And boy did we max out our night. We started off at Overeasy, walked over to One On The Bund, popped by Bellini Grande and revisited our old haunt, Zouk. It was non-stop partying action from 9pm to 3am.

I was expected to be the first to succumb. After all, even in my partying prime 5 years ago, I was a self-proclaimed “cheap date”. I was proud of it too, because I was cost-efficient – just buy me two lychee martinis and I’ll be thinking I’m Beyonce.

And now that two years of abstinence has reduced my alcohol tolerance to almost zero, I was positively a “free date”. I could probably attempt her Single Ladies dance routine on the strength of one whiff of champagne.

So this is what I drank that night:

3 Sex On The Beach shots, 1 sundried tomato and raspberry margerita, 1 Bellini, 2 apple vodka shots, part of a Flaming Lamborghini, 2 Cowboy S*** D*** shots, and 1 Tequila shot.

How drunk was I? Let’s put it this way. I was even more sober than Obama’s bodyguards on Inauguration Day when he and Michelle were walking unshielded down the parade path.

My girlfriends? Oh, they drifted onto a higher realm. They were bear-hugging each other, happily doing the bitch-slap atop the podium in Velvet, and making up a new hybrid dance move that’s part-Vogue and part-Walk Like An Egyptian.

And what was I doing? I was doing what losers always do at parties: I was guarding the bags.

All because I ate a big slice of that cake. Hmmm.

The ultimate chocolate cake January 27, 2009

I read in a cookbook that some American auntie has this saying: “A sad cake is a happy cake.”

Say what?

Like how an ugly cake is also a beautiful cake? Or a sunken mess is also a risen sponge? These Americans are crazy.

But I take back my words. Now I fully understand what she meant after I made this cake, taken from Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito’s cookbook, Baked: New Frontiers In Baking.

It was meant to be the Salty And Sweet Cake, their signature item in their funky New York bakery. But, I tell you, their recipe for the salty caramel frosting was a complete farce.  Already, I wanted to kick Nick Malgieri’s rotund behind for making me make rock sugar instead of caramel a few weeks ago (read diatribe here). What should I do to these two jokers who told me to make caramel by heating the sugar up to the Hades-like 350 deg Fahrenheit? The caramel was so burnt it smelled of putrified rodents. It’s supposed to be Salty and Sweet, dudes, not Rabid and Radioactive!

But I’m relinquishing my right to shove the vile sludge down their throats: They are saved by their recipe for the chocolate cake layers. I’m not a fan of chocolate, but even I totally swooned when I sank my teeth into the cake. It was moist, it was tender, it was super chocolatey. It was possibly the best chocolate cake I’ve ever made.

But here’s the “sad cake is a happy cake” part. The three layers have to be baked individually, and while each rises to a grand 1-1/2 inches, it sinks by 1/2 inch with 10 minutes to go before it is done.

They emerge with slight ridges around the sides. But still, stacked together, they make a tall, delicious cake with a slight bounce. There was no salty caramel frosting so I piled on some leftover buttercream from the freezer. It worked just as well.

I cut a slice for myself and gave the rest to my husband to share with his colleagues in the office. I am proud to report that, ahem, the cake was a bona fide hit.

Don’t believe me? Read comments below.  (C’mon, people of Discovery Inc, show me some love!)

(….)

(Or no more cake for you.)