Baby cakes January 26, 2010

There were no words.

The first thing I ate after giving birth to Kate on January 15 was a bar of Snickers. It tasted so indescribably good, so toe-curlingly divine that I seriously would’ve bitten off my husband Z’s head if he dared utter a word to interrupt.

I had been a gestational diabetic for three months and was making up for lost time. After the Snickers, I scoffed down Polar sugar rolls, curry puffs, sardine puffs, beancurd with syrup and kueh pie tee in quick succession. Every time the menu card came around, I made sure every beverage choice was either apple juice or sweetened soy milk, things I couldn’t even have a sip of pre-birth.

For three long months, I was a grumpy, embittered old hag because I couldn’t eat what I wanted. It wasn’t until Kate was born that I realised it held a greater purpose. After just three hours of labour and 15 minutes of pushing, she emerged so cute with chubby cheeks and a full head of hair — but with a deadly umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.

Because of my gestational diabetes, Kate had to be induced one week early before she grows too big to be delivered naturally. I shudder to think what could’ve happened if I wasn’t diabetic and had waited for another week to full term. And no wonder I had such a fast labour, compared to the epic 10 hours it took for my first child, E, to arrive.

Every mother thinks her child is special. But there is something about Kate that makes her exceptionally so. She was born on the same date as my mother on the Western calendar, and the same date as Z’s mother on the Chinese calendar. Perhaps a tribute to the women who came before her? And perhaps as a sign of her great appetite for life, she drinks twice the amount of milk prescribed as average by the doctor. This mama is gonna be chained to the breastpump for quite a long time to come 🙂

I find myself lapsing into fear when I think about what could’ve been. But Z has a far more positive take on things: God is in control, often turning what is bad into something miraculously good. For that I am in awe. Thank God. Praise You. 

Sugar Underload January 7, 2010

This is what I made for Christmas:

Trifle with strawberries, peaches and an avalanche of mascarpone cream…

Creamy cheesecake topped with chocolate ganache and chopped Snickers…

Rice crispies bars with gooey peanut butter and chocolate ganache…

And finally, petite cheesecakes made with condensed milk on a crust of digestive biscuits.

Don’t ask me what was going through my head. But there I was, 9 months pregnant, and the night before Christmas, I was whipping up a tornado in my kitchen making all these things that I cannot eat.

I was definitely (over)compensating for the fact that I had gestational diabetes. Or I was trying to make my friends, whom the cakes were intended for on Christmas Day, really fat so I won’t be the only Michelin Man post-delivery.

Either way, I cannot say enough how much I’m looking forward to popping next weekend, when I can go back to eating like a normal pig again. I have already decided. The first thing I’m gonna plunge my teeth into, right there in the delivery suite when the doc is sewing me back up, is a bar of Snickers.

Kinako chiffon cake with red bean whipped cream December 17, 2009

This is shaping up to be a sucky Christmas.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been put on a low-carb, high-fibre, no-joy diet because I’ve been diagnosed with gestational diabetes — a (hopefully) temporary condition that afflicts pregnant women on the wrong side of 35. (Nawww, really? You always thought I was 28? Gee, thanks!)

I feel like blaming my husband Z for this. If he had appeared sooner in my life, I would’ve married him earlier, gotten pregnant younger, and not have to suffer this indignity of not being able to eat anything sweet for three excruciatingly long months.

Hello? I’m a baker! How do you expect me to live when I can’t eat my cakes? To make things worse, I still have one baking cookbook to review for the paper before I go on maternity leave. I have to test at least six recipes from it to see if it’s a worthy buy, and this is where I am convinced that the stars are all lined up against me. Because, for so long, I’ve been scouring the bookstores for an English-translated book on Japanese cakes but to no avail. And now that Keiko Ishida’s Okashi has landed on my lap, and I am paid to try out its recipes, I cannot bloody taste them!

Like when I made her delicious Japanese milk madeleines. I took a smidgen of a bite (about 20 molecules in my rough estimation), just enough to register that it was light, fluffy and buttery, then quickly shoved the rest aside before I gobble up the whole thing.

Or this chiffon cake you see before you. Made with kinako, or Japanese soybean powder, and covered with red bean whipped cream (both my favourite ingredients), it was one of the first recipes I wanted to try when I first laid eyes on this gorgeous book.

The cake turned out really well, although it could’ve risen taller (which my Pa, the chiffon-cake-guru Chris said could be because there wasn’t enough baking powder). But instead of using my God-given tastebuds to see just how moist and soft it was, I was like a blind foot reflexologist — tapping the sides of the cake to see how much it bounced back. Tragic but true.

But I knew the cake was a triumph because when I gave my mother a slice, she polished it off in 10 seconds flat. “So light and not too sweet,” she raved, before rattling off a list of friends she wanted to give the cake to. I managed to wrangle a minuscule piece to taste before the cake was whisked away forever. She was right. It was super light, and the heady kinako flavour was offset by the delicate, sweet frosting. So delicious, so cannot-be-eaten.

Don’t even dare ask me for the recipe. Go buy the book and leave me alone in my misery.

A&R’s Tiffany blue wedding cake November 26, 2009

Here’s the thing about making wedding cakes. Baking and decorating a 9/7/5-inch three-tier is like tackling Mount Everest right there at your kitchen table. But once it’s conquered and displayed at a big venue, it can suddenly shrink into a blink-and-you-miss backside pimple.

Case in point: the cake I made for my cousin Ricky’s wedding last week. The venue was One 15 Marina Club in Sentosa Cove, and it was the first time my cake was to be cut on stage in a grand ballroom.

Ricky’s fiancee Amy said it was a “small” stage so the cake wouldn’t look out of place. And as I was hauling my cakes out the front door to the car, it sure had the heft that befitted the occasion: The thick bottom tier, which itself was made up of two tiers to reach 6 inches in height, was so heavy that I had to stop twice to take breathers.

But once I got to the ballroom, the cakes instantly shrivelled up to look like last week’s muffins. It wasn’t because the stage was huge. It was because there was a cake-cutting table there, and sitting on it, a gargantuan, skyscraping fake cake covered in fake fondant and fake roses. To complete the blinding visual assault, it was topped with an enormous nest made of fake twigs and fake birds.

I asked the banquet manager to remove it so I can place my cake in its place. And he went blank for 5 long seconds.

“Take the fake cake away?” he said, looking at my shrivelled muffin, then looking back at his aviarius masterpiece. What he was really saying was, What? You want me to replace this magnum opus with that zit of a cake??!

“Ya,” I said, defending myself meekly, “I have three tiers.”

“Oh,” he said, and, with a slight frown still attached to his face, removed the jacuzzi-sized foam monstrosity.

I proceeded to assemble my cake. Once completed and placed on the table, it was only one-tenth the size of the ginormous tweeting wonder. If you’ve ever wondered what it felt like for David to face the mighty Goliath, just ask my cake.

But when it was cake-cutting time, at least Amy and Ricky were able to run the knife down a real cake, with real buttercream and real fondant — and not some insipid slit pre-cut into a foam block.

Call me old-fashioned. But when it comes to wedding cakes, nothing beats the real thing — backside pimple or not.

Cheesecake pops November 18, 2009

I admit. When I first learnt I was pregnant earlier this year, I sent a few upward missives that went: “Lord, please give me a son this time round.” My firstborn E is a girl, so out of the purely selfish reason of wanting one of each, I wanted my second to be a boy.

Just think of it. I will have a daughter to dress up and bake pretty cakes with, and husband Z will have a son to skateboard with and do all those smelly things that boys do. And at first, all signs suggested that we would enjoy this idyllic, life-insurance ad configuration.

My aunt, who has a track record of accurately predicting the sex of a foetus by using some mystical formula involving the mother’s age, month of conception, etc, swore it was a boy. We have friends who “just have a feeling” that it was a boy. Even the wonton noodles auntie in my office canteen, with just one glance at my front-tilting bump, was sure of it too.

Then we found out the baby is actually a girl. And, wow, nothing prepared me for the tide of disappointment verging on disapproval that followed when we broke the news. My aunt, looking like she had just bitten into something rotten, told me I should “bok” (gamble) again and hopefully hit jackpot the third time round. When I told the wonton noodles auntie that I actually quite like having another girl, she said, with her back turned towards me: “As long as you’re happy lorhh. It’s okay lorhhhh.”

Everywhere I turned, people above the age of 45 would console me, saying “It’s okay lah. These days, boys and girls are all the same”. But, funny huh? If boys and girls are really the same, you never hear anyone saying this when you’re expecting a boy.

I, for one, have totally embraced and am loving the fact that I’ll be having two girls. First, you save lots of money by recycling the clothes. Second, if our new baby is anything like her older sister, we will have a pair of mild-mannered, well-behaved, neat and tidy kids who will not turn our home into a crime scene on a daily basis.

Third, and on to the real point of this post, I will have twice the opportunity to make the cutest, prettiest cakes all year round.

I mean, check out these adorable cheesecake pops I made as goodie bag takeaways for E’s birthday party two weeks ago. Would a birthday boy have appreciated the heart-shaped sprinkles or the pastel-coloured non-pareils? I don’t think so. When he becomes a teenager, he will look back on the birthday photos and accuse me of instilling in him an unmanly penchant for pink and polka dots.

If I had a son, every special occasion cake I make will have to factor in boy colours and emblems. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think a cake shaped like a blue tractor looks all that appetising. A dinosaur cake? Sure, I can make one. Just don’t make me eat it.

But with two girls, I will have at least two birthday cakes to make a year, festooned with flowers, flounces, ruffles in all manner of lemon-yellows and rosebud pinks. Already, I am having soul-lifting visions of my two girls in cute little aprons, helping me in the kitchen with the whipping, kneading and washing. What absolute bliss.

Having said all this, I’ll wait till I pop in January before I celebrate. Imagine the back-paddling I’ll have to do if the ultrasound scans turn out all wrong.

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 facto 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.

 

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.