Lollipop Garden Cake November 11, 2009

For my daughter E’s first birthday last year, I came up with the idea of making a mini bundt cake tower. For one whole year since then, I’d had this question niggling at the back of my head: What clever cake can I come up with next year?

In the end, her 2nd birthday came last week and I found myself doing the ultimate loser thing: I copied a design from Martha Stewart. Why? Because this cake is just the cutest darn thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on.

I mean, look at it! It has colourful lollipops stuck all over like little flowers, and even frilly grass creeping up from the sides. Forget about being original, man. This is one copy-cake I wanted to eat.

But mind you, mimicry is an art.

There was a  lot of walking back and forth between kitchen and balcony – where there was direct daylight – before I could colour the buttercream the exact same shade of green as the original.

And I’m a little embarrassed to say that it took quite a few teaspoonfuls of green colouring to achieve it – so much so that I was afraid our guests who ate it would look into their toilet bowls the next morning and wonder if they had overdosed on vegetables.

There was also much fussing over the size and colours of the gummies that were to be skewered with satay sticks and stuck on the cake. I even went out especially to buy the right sized leaf piping tip so that my grass sheaves would look nothing short of perfect.

The verdict? When E’s de factor godmother C first saw the cake, she cried: “It’s just like the real thing!!” And my husband Z, no doubt inspired by the piped-in muzak we always hear in supermarkets, proudly declared to his friends that I am a “cover artiste”.

Me? For someone who has never bought a fake good in her life (never bought a branded good either), I’m totally pleased about my counterfeiting prowess. If I were a city, my name would be Zhen. Shenzhen.

 

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!

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.

 

——————————————————————————-

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.

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.

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!

White chocolate mousse cake with summer berries July 20, 2008

I’VE had it with whipped cream. Why is it so difficult to make? All it takes is one stroke of the whisk to turn what promises to be a luxurious, velvety cream into a grainy puddle.

It happened again today when I made this cake for R’s birthday party.

The white chocolate mousse frosting seemed so easy to make. Just bring double cream (which has a sinful, artery-clogging 48% of butterfat) to a boil, pour over white chocolate chips, stir till smooth, chill and whip.

I was so determined not to overwhip and curdle it that I used a hand-whisk. After every few strokes, I would stop and bring the bowl up my eyes to check for signs of curdling. If it looked okay, I’d carry on whipping, then stop to check again. When the cream formed soft yet firm peaks, I told myself to stop. This is it. Time to slap it on the cake.

But then, it looked just a little too soft. It may not be thick enough to spread on the cake. So, what the heck, I gave the cream one more swirl of the whisk. That should do it.

Suddenly, the cream appeared a little dull. There was no more of that wondrous sheen that was there before. Then, right before my eyes, it started to sprout a million little dots, like confectionery rashes. Dem.

To see if the entire bowl had curdled, I gave it a stir to bring up the bottom, inadvertently whipping it some more. If it wasn’t curdled then, it sure was curdled now. Dem dem.

It was too late (and too expensive) to go out and buy another three tubs of double cream. Since R and almost everyone else at the party were close friends, I went ahead and used the curdled mess. They’d be forgiving.

But what about the photo for this blog entry? I wanna show everyone what happened, but not so explicitly that y’all would stop regarding me as a baking genius in the making.

So when husband/photographer Z came home from his weekly bike ride, I showed him the cake – frosted with the grainy mousse and sitting in the fridge – and asked: “Can you somehow shoot it without showing how grainy it is?”

“Can,” he deadpanned. “I shoot this lah,” he said, randomly pointing to a space outside the fridge.

“Tsk. How about focusing on the berries so the mousse is all fuzzy and no one can see?” I persisted, pointing to the berries drying on the kitchen counter.

“Can. I just shoot the berries lah. The cake stays inside the fridge.”

“Tsk.”

In the end, the graininess was ironed out a little. When the cake was taken out of the fridge, the chilled mousse could thankfully be smoothened slightly with a palette knife. So the final photo turned out quite well.

But graininess was the least of my problems. There were more setbacks to come. By the time we lugged this cake to the party venue, the sides of the cardboard box had dredged two clumps out of the cake. Then, after R blew out the candles, bits of mousse on top melted. And to top it all off, when I removed the berries so the cake could be cut and served, they dragged away chunks of mousse, leaving behind huge potholes.

It was seriously the ugliest cake I ever saw.

Our friends, as always, still had nice things to say about the cake. But I just sat glumly in one corner and thought, Not only have I made what is possibly the fattiest cake on earth, it looked a right Quasimodo too. Unhealthy and unappetizing.

I am so not making this again. Hmph.

Strawberry Shortcake June 19, 2008

I never thought I’d say this, but could making a genoise be this easy?

I’m currently reviewing four baking cookbooks for the newspaper, and – since I have time – I’m trying out one recipe from each title to value-add.

Just Desserts by Bakerzin’s founder Daniel Tay has a recipe for strawberry shortcake that I just had to try. It appeared to be the least complicated recipe in the cake section and, besides, strawberry shortcake is my favourite cake. But there is a snag: I’d have to revisit the genoise, a word that sets me trembling to my very foundations.

Genoise, which is the French style of sponge cake, is notoriously hard to make. Like all sponges, it gets its aeration and volume not from baking powder, but from whipping the hell out of eggs. Then, you’d have to fold in flour and melted butter with the dexterity and speed of a kungfu pugilist. A heavy hand or a few seconds too long and you’d end up with a rubber mat of a cake.

I tried to master the genoise last year after I bought Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. And, I tell you, that lady made me go through hell and high water to attain her vision of the perfect genoise.

To make her genoise, I had to prepare my own beurre noisette (snooty term for clarified butter) by heating butter to boiling point then straining the burnt milk solids. I had to balance a bowl of eggs over a pot of boiling water, then, risking life and limb, beat the eggs for 10 full minutes with a hand-held electric mixer. Then, to effectively fold in the flour without upsetting too much of the testy air bubbles, I bought the biggest whisk there is, at 16 inches long – all at Beranbaum’s behest.

And what did I get after at least five attempts? Greasy countertops, egg foam everywhere, a bloody baseball-bat of a whisk that cannot fit in any of my drawers, and sunken-in cakes.

So when I tried Tay’s recipe, I half-expected it not the work. He didn’t call for the heating up of eggs to achieve maximum volume, which was unusual. Instead, a helluva lot of egg yolks were needed – at least six, plus another three whole eggs – which were beaten for a good 20 minutes. Presumably, this is to stabilise the air bubbles so the batter becomes more tolerant of rough handling.

At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I took the cake out of the oven. It didn’t sink. I gave it another 15 minutes on the counter, and still it stayed put. Then, I bent down and peered at it at eye-level – the top was perfectly level. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe I have a miracle.

Making the chantilly cream was even easier. I only had to whisk together whipped cream, mascarpone cheese and sugar, and I was soon licking this utterly delicious concoction off my fingers.

Okay, so the finishing was a little rough. I unmolded the cake a little too soon (the book didn’t specify how long it should be refrigerated – their fault!) so it didn’t look as polished as the photo in the book. But it tasted so good. It wasn’t quite like my Holy Grail, the unrivalled Scoop Cake from Tampopo Deli in Liang Court. But it was pretty dem good for a first try. And so easy too.

Yay, Mr Tay.

Even Better Than The Real Thing May 22, 2008

STRIPES, babies, buttons – I thought I had exhausted the whole chocolate-cake-with-fondant-cut-outs design. But then D wanted a birthday cake for her mum and sis (who share the same birthday) and showed me a website with a chocolate cake with cute, retro circles on it. She wanted me to copy it and have the circles in ivory and rose.

And whaddya know. In my humblestest opinion, I think my version kicked the original’s ass (C’mon D, back me up here. Just click on Comments. See it? Good).

Say It Ain’t Sew May 19, 2008

I had grand intentions for S’s birthday cake. It was to be a two-tier chocolate ganache cake with pink and aqua fondant buttons attached to the sides. She is, after all, co-owner du jour of Swirl, a gorgeous boutique of very pretty clothes.

But I was lazy and decided not to cut off the dome of the upper tier. And the whole cake ended up looking like some sad, inverted, asymmetrical mushroom. I had no choice but to chuck the top tier and present just the bottom one – a small, 7-inch cake – to S the next day.

As if it wasn’t bad enough, the buttons melted in my car as I drove to the office. But S, ever appreciative S, was still thrilled by it. If my lurve is happy, I’m happy.