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.

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.

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.)

Milk Chocolate Malt Ball Cake January 14, 2009

HERE’S a question for all you bakers out there. Who do you blame when a cake turns out badly?

The cookbook author? For having the balls to charge $60 for a book that contains a dud recipe?

The shopkeeper? Because, you know, how could she run out of 65g eggs?! Using 55g eggs will adversely affect your batter’s proportion! Doesn’t she know?

Your oven? Because the thermometer is wonky, and you’re too cheapskate to buy a digital thermometer?

Or yourself? For not being careful because you just had a tiff with your husband and you see his face in the batter and you end up overbeating it?

Or your husband? Because, ditto?

I couldn’t decide whom to blame when I made this cake, taken from Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito’s funky new book, Baked: New Frontiers In Baking. It was a cake I had to make because it contains one of my favourite ingredients, malt (Horlicks, that is. I swore off whisky long ago after it made me hug a toilet bowl for one whole night).

Check out the end product above. Looks pretty good on the outside, yes? Well, wait till I show you a photo of it with a slice cut out. The bottom half of each of the three malt cake layers were completely gummy. (I didn’t have the courage to publish that pic, folks. Alas, my skin is thin.)

Gumminess, in my book, is the second most horrifying thing to see in a cake. It ranks just behind a beautifully risen cake sinking the second you open the oven door. (And, perhaps, watching someone at a party wolf down the last slice of strawberry shortcake from Tampopo Deli).

A quick search on the Net revealed that the gumminess was most possibly due to underbaking. But how could it be? The cakes were pulling away from the sides of the pan when I took them out. Shrinkage is a sure sign that a cake is cooked. Right? Riiiiight? (As you can see, friends, just reliving this is hurting me real bad).

So I can’t blame myself. But I can’t blame the authors either. Maybe the cakes really were underbaked?

I had measured the ingredients and followed the instructions carefully, and my husband wasn’t home during the making of this cake. So I can’t blame them either.

*Thunder clap…* Life is hell when you got no one to blame!!!

But if there’s one good thing about this cake, it is the milk chocolate frosting. Oooo yeah. Dare I say it is the best chocolate coating I’ve ever tasted? It is a typical ganache (chocolate and cream) but with chunks of butter whipped in. So the texture is way smoother and silkier than regular ganache. It was absolutely yumm-meh.

Let’s just dwell on that and not think about the debacle that lies within. Mmmmm… I’m feeling better already.

The great American pound cake January 7, 2009

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt ever since I started this baking thing, it’s this: One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Or shall I say, One man’s perfect pound cake is another man’s putrid pound cake.

Shirley O. Corriher’s latest cookbook BakeWise, which I reviewed last month for the newspaper, opened with this tantalising tale: She reckons she has developed a recipe for the ultimate American pound cake.

Yeah, right. Just about every cookbook I own has a recipe for a “perfect pound cake”. So what. But what sets Corriher’s apart is that she adapted hers from four other perfect pound cake recipes.

She found that recipes taken from a relative, her step-daughter’s friend’s mother, and two from professional bakers – who all proclaim their recipe is “the best” – are essentially the same! Is your heart beating faster now? Mine sure did.

They all have 3 cups flour, about 3 cups sugar, 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 cups fat, 5 or 6 eggs, under a teaspoon of leavening, 2 to 3 teaspoons flavouring, and 1 cup liquid. Each recipe uses a different liquid – sour cream, buttermilk, heavy cream, milk.

So what happened was, she tweaked the recipe here and there – like substituting some butter with veg shortening, substituting some flour with potato starch, adding a bit of canola oil, egg yolks, and whipped cream – to create this suped-up, super-charged pound cake that’s ultra sweet and moist.

Is your jaw on the floor yet? Are you convulsing at the thought of finally sinking your teeth into the ultimate pound cake? Crawling out the door to get a copy of this book?

Well, of course I had to give this recipe a try. And my verdict? It’s okay only lah.

First, Corriher has a notoriously sweet tooth so one bite of this cake could send you straight to NKF (National Kidney Foundation). And, true, it is quite moist. But still, it doesn’t quite hit the spot for me. If this is the great American pound cake, I ain’t going to America. 

My perfect pound cake is one that has big holes in it. It glistens from an unearthly amount of butter added in, it’s not too sweet, and it springs back when I bite.

In short, my perfect pound is the one I grew up eating, brought home by mum from some ching-cheong bakery in the neighbourhood market. Don’t need no fancy-schmantzy canola oil or whipped cream.

I recently had a taste of it when my colleague Pat made her signature butter cake and gave me a slice at work. Believe you me, I begged her for the recipe even if it meant organising the dreaded office party for her for the next 10 years. 

The tragic thing is, even she can’t get it right all the time – something about not creaming it too long or the texture will be dense. Well, I’ve tried the recipe three times – by varying oven temperature and amount of baking powder – and they all bombed.

But one day, world, I’m gonna get there. And then I’m gonna call it the great Singapore pound cake.

Mini layer cakes December 31, 2008

Phoon Huat & Company (Pte) Ltd
231A Pandan Loop
Singapore 128419

Dear Sir,

Re: Urgent enrolment into the Wilton Method Cake Decorating Course

I am writing to make an urgent request. Can I be slotted into your Discover Cake Decorating (Course 1) class scheduled in March?

I was very disappointed to learn from your staff that the class is fully booked, and I have to wait to be informed about the next class. But I cannot afford to wait. I need to take the class AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Let me explain.

I am an avid baker who writes a cake blog at crummb.wordpress.com. As you will see on the site, I have not made any cakes with elaborate piping work because, frankly, I don’t know how to. Whenever a cake called for buttercream decoration, I always adopted the “dab-and-fake-it” method. This involves using a spatula and dabbing on buttercream in a random manner to achieve a casual, free-flowing effect.

It is a look that is popularised by many cookbooks today, and it has even earned me a few nice comments from my readers. But deep down in my heart of hearts, I know I am a fake. I can’t do the basketweave or the fleur de lis. I don’t even know how to pipe a ruffle. Not even a damn leaf.

To illustrate my predicament, I have attached a photo of three mini layer cakes I made recently. For the first, I utilised the ‘dab-and-fake-it’ method which, as you can see, I’ve perfected to an artform. For the second, I attempted a more complicated style that required greater upper-arm dexterity - by pulling the spatula upwards to create even, vertical stripes. The result was okay, though not spectacular.

For the third, I decided to bravely confront my demons. I took out my piping tip #16 and created a shell border on top of the cake. But instead of looking like neatly graduating swirls, they resembled the rounded behinds of a bunch of gorillas bending over side by side.

It was such an eye-sore that my husband, who takes the photographs on my blog, relegated the cake right to the back of the picture, where the circle of shiny posteriors could be obscured by soft focus.

As you can see, my piping skills are in URGENT need of improvement. Only you, by immediately putting me in your class, can take me out of this deep, dark abyss. My reputation, my conscience, my very sanity!, are now in your hands.

I await your good news.

Yours most sincerely,

Crummb

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P/S: Happy new year, everyone! Thanks for dropping by this past year

Whipped Cream Layer Cake November 20, 2008

OKAY, it’s confirmed. I’m a cakezilla. And I knew when I started having violent thoughts about Nick Malgieri.

This guy is a revered American baking expert who had written books called How To Bake, Perfect Cakes, and Perfect Pastry. With titles as audacious as these, you’d expect his recipes to be  workable, yes?

Well, no! This is what happened.

My boss asked me to review his latest book, The Modern Baker, for the newspaper. And I was bordering on delirious when I scanned the contents and came across this recipe – Whipped Cream Layer Cake. Regulars to this blog would know by now how much I love whipped cream. And this cake has another ingredient that stirs my loins - caramel. Whipped cream and caramel in one cake! It’s like Christmas every day!

The cake itself went really well. Whipped cream is used in place of butter to provide tenderness and it emerged from the oven firm yet moist. But trouble brewed when I tried making caramel, which is to be whipped into the frosting.

The recipe says 1/2 cup of sugar to 1 teaspoon of water. Mix it up and heat it until it caramelises. Problem is, there’s too little water so instead of caramelising, it crystallised and turned back into coarse sugar.

But this cannot be. We’re talking about Nick Malgieri – graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, pastry chef of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, winner of numerous James Beard Foundation awards, named one of the top 10 pastry chefs in America by Chocolatier magazine, and 1996 inductee into the Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America. How can Nick Malgieri be wrong?

So I tried again. And again. Five times I heated the sugar and water and five times I got the same blood-boiling result. 

With steam shooting out of my ears, I turned to another cookbook for a proper caramel recipe. I whipped up the frosting, covered the cake, and it tasted absolutely divine.

But still I was mad. While washing up, wild thoughts ran amok:

Call yourself an award-winning cookbook author? Can’t even make bloody caramel!

Charge US$35 for that cookbook? Use summa that to hire a recipe tester!

Look at all these sugar I’m throwing away. Those sugar canes died for nothing!

Don’t let me meet you in person, Mr Malgieri, or I’m gonna smear all that rock sugar on your bearded face. Take that for James BEARD!

Husband-photographer Z came home and told me about his day at work. Mmph, I responded. He told me a joke. Mmph, I attempted a laugh. My baby daughter could have launched into a Riverdance routine, executed a 2-half somersault in pike position and a perfect landing, and I would’ve just said, Mmph. I was that grumpy.

I am cakezilla. Hear me roar.

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P/S: On a completely separate note, can somebody please drop a comment about how gorgeous this photo looks? I mean, it is pretty damn good, right? I think husband-photographer Z did a great job. But hardly anyone ever paid any attention to his photos. And he is sad. Every time I check in for stats and comments, he’d go, “No one say anything about my photo?” I’d look at him in silence,  he’d look back, and we’d hear crickets chirping from a faraway distance.

C’mon guys, show him some lerv.

Noelle’s mini bundt cake tower November 5, 2008

I’VE been stewing in this conundrum for months: What cake should I make for En En’s first birthday? It should be special enough to befit her very first birthday cake, yet not so spectacular that it couldn’t be topped. After all, since I’ll be insisting on making all her birthday cakes until I croak, there’d better be some room for improvement.

How about a two-tier fondant-covered pink cake with polka dots and flowers? Or a retro cake baked in the shape of numeral 1? Or an over-the-top strawberry shortcake – which is my favourite – since it’s as much a mother’s day as it is a baby’s day?

Then last week, I was surfing the net for cake ideas when I came across a mini bundt cake. Then I thought, why not make a lot, then pile them up into a tower? So I promptly went out to buy a mini bundt cake pan, which is made of silicone and cost a hefty $27.60 at Pantry Magic (it’s daylight robbery, but like I always say – Just gotta have it).

The cakes were basic brown sugar butter cakes drizzled over with mandarin orange icing (The oranges, which A’s father gave my husband Z as thanks for his services at C&A’s wedding, were just lying around, haha).

For an extra lashing of love, I broke out my brand new Nigella Lawson cakestand from its box and used it for the first time. Now En En will have no doubt that Mamma loves her.

The tower was easy to make and assemble. Not so easy was taking a photo with En En in it.

The idea was to get her to sit by the table so only her eyes can be seen peering at the cake.  But she insisted on standing, and grabbing the knife box nearby, and swinging it around like a bat, and aiming at the cake.

Therefore the look of slight terror on my face (I wasn’t supposed to be in the shot but husband/photogragher Z doesn’t always follow instructions).

Anyway, one year ago, I produced the best thing I’ve ever set my heart – and lost my waistline – to. Happy birthday, Mamma’s mini bundt cake!

The perfect sponge cake October 1, 2008

Over the past year, my quest to master the sponge cake has led me to do innumerable weird things.

Like buying just about any cookbook that has the words “perfect sponge cake” in it. Like slapping down $700 to buy a KitchenAid mixer because, I was told, you need proper equipment to make a proper sponge. And, at my most desperate, joining baking forums to ask complete strangers what went wrong with my genoise (and checking in every 5 minutes for an entire day to see if anyone responded).

I’ve tried over 10 different recipes and all of them sucked. Either they sank, no matter how much I varied oven temperature or folding-in techniques, or the texture just wasn’t as cottony soft as I want it to be.

The closest I got to a perfect sponge was with my auntie’s recipe, but, alas, it is artificially powered by stabilisers. Read sob story here.

Annoyed, I was beginning to think that it’s not me - but them. The one thing all these recipes have in common is that they are written by Westerners using Western manufactured ingredients. Could it be possible that the local ingredients I use, like flour and baking powder, are different in composition – for example, in protein strength? If not, then could it be that Westerners simply like their sponges to be coarser in texture?

Guess what? I could well be right on both counts. Last week, I bought my first Asian cake book which yielded the most perfect sponge I’ve ever made. And you won’t believe where I found it – in the unglamorous, ramshackle shopping aisles of Giant supermarket.

The book, written by a certain Chef Alex Goh, is called Fruity Cakes. It’s possibly the most inappropriately named book in the history of publishing because apart from cakes made with fruit, the book also has all manner of cakes made with herbs, spices and nuts. Strange.

In fact, the book is so badly edited that it doesn’t say what nationality this Chef Goh is (although it does mention that he had worked in Kuala Lumpur, and from his surname, I figure he is either Malaysian or Singaporean).

But no matter. Because his recipe for “French-style sponge cake” (what snootier books would term “genoise”) is brain-dead easy and utterly delicious. The texture was gorgeously soft and moist, and it didn’t sink. And, get this, it contains no artificial additives. Yup, it’s all natural. And it’s even better than the Daniel Tay recipe I wrote about here.

I took one bite and declared at once that my search is over. Time to open shop.

To illustrate the magnitude of this seismic discovery, I’ll recount the hellish things I used to do  to achieve the perfect sponge:

- use cake flour, and make sure it is unbleached (whatever that means)

- triple sieve the flour

- fold in the flour gently with your bare hands

- fold in the flour with a slotted skimmer (I had to look up what this is), or large 16-inch whisk 

- put your life in danger by whisking eggs over boiling water for at least 5 minutes

- use an deplorably huge number of egg yolks

- do not talk or even breathe heavily throughout the mixing process (I am not making this up).

Well, this recipe by Alex Goh has this to say to all these pesky procedures: NO NEED LAH. Its ingredients and method are so simple it’s almost immoral not to share. So here it is, world.

The only ingredients needed:

4 eggs, separated (each egg to weigh 60g without shells)

120g castor sugar

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

110g plain flour

70g melted butter (must be hot when added to batter)

And all you have to do is:

1. Using a hand-held mixer, whisk egg yolks till smooth. Add 20g of the sugar and vanilla and continue whisking until yolks puff up and the colour turns very pale - like the lightest shade of peach – and doesn’t turn any paler (about 2 mins).

2. In another bowl, whisk egg whites until soft peaks form. Add the remaining 100g of sugar and whisk until stiff peaks form.

3. Fold egg whites into egg yolks until just combined. Just use a rubber spatula.

4. Sieve in flour and fold in gently. Add in hot melted butter (to be safe, pour down the side of the bowl so it won’t agitate too many air bubbles) and fold in gently and quickly.

5. Pour into 8-inch round pan and bake at 190 deg C for 30 minutes. When done, cake will shrink by a few mm but still stand at a beautiful 2 inches.

6. Then look up Chef Alex Goh, wherever he is, whomever he is, and thank him.

Banana Caramel Cake September 11, 2008

AFTER that catastrophic brush with banana cake in my last entry, you’d think that I’ve sworn off bananas for life, yah? You’d expect me to ban the fruit from my kitchen, withhold it from my 10-month-old baby even though it’s her favourite, and forbid anyone to utter those three damned syllables in my presence, yes?

Well, no!

For my next cake, I’d gone right ahead to make another banana cake, this time from the hallowed recipe troves of Martha Stewart.

I had to review her Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook for work and, after a quick skim, I thought, Hoi! how come no one told me about this? The baking compendium has recipes and photos that look so unspeakably gorgeous I could lick the pages. It’s the only cookbook I’ve ever come across that made me wanna make every single one of its recipes. Yes, even blueberry muffins – and I hate muffins.

I couldn’t wait to make her banana cake because this recipe is (a) frosted with whipped cream, and y’all know I’ll eat a toy tractor if it comes with whipped cream; and (b) filled with bananas cooked in caramel, which is unusual.

Making the various components took an entire afternoon, but when it was ready, it rocked. The whipped cream, made deeper and more stable by an addition of mascapone cheese, cut through the richness of the cake. And the mushy banana filling gave an added texture to the overall taste. After one bite, I moaned and thought, This is not just cake. This is dessert.

I was not alone in my adulation. My mum loved the cake. Even my husband Z, who pretty much doesn’t enjoy food full-stop, said it was “very good”.

So, Martha, allow me to express my newfound devotion to you. I don’t care how your TV shows are so darn boring, how you should really lighten up about cutlery placements, or how, beneath that very proper The Hamptons exterior, you are – according to that unauthorised biography - really a sex fiend.

I salute you because you helped me overcome a rabid fear of banana cakes. You are, as you often say, a ver-rry Good Thing.

Banana cake with white chocolate and cream cheese frosting September 4, 2008

Good morning, boys and girls. For today’s lesson in confectionery arts 101, I shall expound on this very important principle: DO NOT bake when you are in a hurry.

Take a look at Exhibit A. It is a standard two-layer banana cake filled and coated with cream cheese and white chocolate frosting. It looks perfectly fine, yes? All that soft-focus camera angling even makes it cookbook-worthy, yes? But no. It could have been much better.

Look closely at the cake layers. Each one could’ve been at least 1cm taller, had the baker - a certain Ms Crummb – bothered to wait until the butter had softened properly before creaming it with sugar. See how the cake texture looks horribly compacted and dense? It would’ve been avoided if Ms Crummb had remembered to take the buttermilk out of the fridge and let it to come down to room temperature. Room temperature! It is essential that liquids like milk, buttermilk, sour cream and the like be at room temperature when they are added to a cake batter. This is a basic cake-making principle.

Now, I quizzed Ms Crummb about the cake’s texture as I noticed a rather hard, plasticky sheen on the smaller slice. And lo! She admitted that she had taken the cake out of the fridge just moments before she frosted it. So it was still unpalatably chilled at the time of photography. Now, I don’t want to go into the importance of realism in cake photography, since I’ve already covered that a few lectures ago. But let me stress at least this: Your cakes must be completely consumable even at the photoshoot! Do not lie to your audience by skimping on butter or sugar or presenting it at some odd temperature. Unlike ads for KFC and Pizza Hut where dry ice and hairspray are used with mindless abandon, every bit of fakery shows up in cakes!

I managed to get to the bottom of Ms Crummb’s lacklustre effort. Between sniffles and sobs, she confessed that she had made the cake in a hurry. She said she had only one hour to bake this cake because her 10-month-old was awake, her babysitting mother couldn’t stop the baby from crawling all over the walls, and she had to get everything done before her husband/photographer got home from work. Her husband, she cried, is a very busy man. He can only set aside one night a week, and only two hours each time, to shoot her cakes. Which was why she didn’t have time to thaw the butter, the buttermilk and the cake. She had to do everything chop-chop.

Well. That would explain why the frosting was slapped on in such a sloppy, haphazard manner, wouldn’t it? Look at how messy the strokes are. They look like wet cement dabbed on by a  construction worker who has a broken wrist and a blindfold on.

Boys and girls, cake-making is an art! It requires time, care and your full attention! Did Da Vinci rush through Mona Lisa so he could attend to the Sunday roast? Did Rodin take breaks from sculpting The Thinker so he could do some leisurely loin-cloth weaving? No! They were fully and unwaveringly committed to the cause!

So if you don’t have the time, don’t bake at all! Or you’d end up with this monstrosity of a cake.

Tomorrow, I’ll expect all of you to hand in your essays on sifting mechanics. I will punish latecomers by force-feeding them a piece of this cake.

Okay, class dismissed.

Honey and buttermilk cheesecake August 27, 2008

THERE’S a saying about cookbooks which I realise is quite true – the fewer the pictures, the better it is. 

You’ve been there before. You buy this gorgeous cookbook that has a photo for every one of its recipes. Each picture is meticulously styled, right down to the soft-focused, artful flicks of frosting. It makes you pronounce, “I, too, can be Nigella!” That’s until you actually try out the recipe. It doesn’t tell you when to stop whipping. A listed ingredient isn’t mentioned in the method. Or the oven temperature is wrong.  When the cake emerges, looking like it was trampled over by your dog, you realise: You’ve just been suckered by another Bimbo Cookbook.

It hardly ever happens with plain, no-nonsense books like Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible or my fave, Allysa Torey’s More From Magnolia. Maybe their recipes are so fail-proof, they don’t need photos to sell the books. Possible, yes?

Anyway, may I suggest another dictum in predicting the efficacy of cookbooks: The scarier-looking the author, the better it is.

I am currently testing out recipes from this book I’m reviewing for the newspaper, Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake Book. It’s one of three cookbooks I’m covering under the theme: baking books by famous kitchen doyennes. The other two are by Martha Stewart and Julia Child. And, believe me, I wouldn’t have picked Mary Berry if not for the fact that I really couldn’t find another household-name doyenne to complete the package.

Look at the book cover and you’d know what I mean. There’s a small photo of her on it and she’s not smiling. Berry, a British food writer who hosted a few TV series on the BBC in the 1980s, has silver hair and the thin, sculpted face of a disciplinary mistress. Her lips are stretched into an uneven arc that is part-sneer, part-taunt. It is a Clint-Eastwood look that says, “Go ahead, buy my book.”

There is a bigger profile photo of her inside and it’s no better. Her facial expression is the same one I have after I’ve spent three hours stirring up a whirlwind in my kitchen and still the cake came out like a crater. It’s a look that channels exhaustion, disorientation and “I wanna kill somebody”.

Why the glum face, I don’t know. Maybe she’s got bad teeth. But one thing’s for sure, her recipes work. I tried her honey and buttermilk cheesecake – because I love anything with honey in it – and it turned out like a dream. The cheesecake is so smooth and light it was almost like a mousse. Unlike many Western recipes, this one wasn’t too sweet. In fact, her recommended drizzle of honey over the cake wasn’t just for show or a better photo op - the jolt of sweetness lifts the taste from pleasant to  decadent.

After this experience, I am a sucker no more. No book with mere megawatt styling and photography is gonna fool me. And if Salman Rushdie were to write a cookbook, I’ll be the first in line.