Showing posts with label Baking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baking. Show all posts

Baking Mood

Figured that my blog has not been updated with much fancy colours lately.

Here is a little throwback to some delish Pavlovas that I baked a few weeks ago. Time flies so fast, it could even be from last month!

I like my Pavlova with lots of whipped cream, chocolate sauce and some berries, just like how I tried it for the very first time.



The Pavs are super duper easy to make, although baking them may take more than an hour or so.
All of your patience and hard work will be worth it, though.

Can't wait for a well-deserved break from University so that I can start baking all day long.

A Whole Lot Of Cookies!

Brought back some brown sugar to Medan, which is pretty much a weird thing to do. I mean, who'd buy a packet of brown sugar weighed +- 1 kg all the way to Indonesia from Malaysia? Me.
So the reason of me going through all the trouble was to try out some cookies recipes and because brown sugar is pretty much expensive in my favourite supermarkets.

I do believe that brown sugar is an essential component when making cookies as I've tried making some using only white sugar and the cookies didn't seem to hold its shape. Anyway,this is a recipe that I found a few days ago from an online blog, I pretty much halved the recipe because the original recipe itself would yield more than a hundred cookies, which is too much! This recipe will produce slightly crunchy but mostly soft and chewy cookies, they're really delicious especially when eaten freshly out of the oven!  (of course you have to wait for a few minutes cause you're definitely gonna burn your tongue if you don't)

The ingredients that you need are:

1 cup of Blueband butter-margarine (or any other butter/margarine brands, a combination of both is preferable)
2 cups of all-purpose flour
1 cup of brown sugar
1 cup of white sugar
2 eggs
2.5 cups of instant oatmeal, blended
1 tsp of vanilla
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp of baking soda

chocolate chip cookies (as much as you want!)

How to make them:

1) The first step is to preheat your oven into 190 degrees celsius and beat your butter/margarine with both brown sugar for a few minutes until the butter is soft. 


I personally use Blue Band's Cake and Cookie butter flavored margarine because they taste oh-so-divine! I've always loved the unique flavour of butter but I'm also crazy in love with the distinct kick that margarine always give to baked goods. So I really think that this margarine is the best for this cookie recipe because it gives the best of both worlds! Trust me, at this point, even the butter-sugar mixture is absolutely delicious! Don't hesitate to steal a few licks off the spoon :p


2) The next thing to do is to add the eggs, one at a time and beat at a low-medium speed until they are incorporated. Don't forget to scrape off the sides of the mixing bowl to ensure that the ingredients are beaten thoroughly.


3) After the eggs have incorporated into the batter, add vanilla and other dry ingredients, which are flour, blended instant oatmeal, baking powder and baking soda. Start with vanilla and then add three additions of flour followed by oatmeal and baking/soda powder. Beat until they are well incorporated on low-medium speed and scrape off the sides of the bowl, too!


4) The next step is the most fun part of all! Yes, you've guessed it right.. it's the 'add as much chocolate chip as you want' part! At this point, I caved into one of the most irresistible temptations...yeah, I ate the cookie dough. Raw. But even the cookie dough itself was really good! When I first ate the cookie dough, I realized why people all around the world have been having this obsession with eating raw cookie dough and unbaked cake batter;  they're simply too good!


The last thing to do is to roll those tempting cookie dough into small balls and arrange them neatly with 2 inches space between each cookie in a baking pan lined with aluminium foil or non-stick baking cookie sheet. After that, just pop them into the oven for 10-15 minutes until they turn a little bit brownish for that extra crunch!


There you go, your very own homemade cookies is finally done! Enjoy :)

Macaroons Goodness!

It's the start of my long-awaited holiday! A big yay for that!

As someone who just can't sit around like me, however, I've found the first week of my semester break to be rather boring so I started to do whatever it takes to spend my day as productive as possible. So, being me, I start baking desserts or cakes almost everyday! 
This time I tried making salted caramel macaroons for the nth time and finally succeeded. I have to say that I'm quite proud of myself for not giving up easily in making them because macaroons can be one hell of treat to make. It's extremely important to take precise note of the meringue consistency and to ensure that you are folding just enough during the macaronage. Macaroons are perhaps one of the fussiest things I've ever made at first but after a few trial and errors, you'll learn from the previous experiments and you'll definitely end up with some decent macaroons.


Here, I was pouring my homemade salted caramel into a glass jug for easy handling. Caramel sauce can also be one hell of a mess. I was involved in a little accident when making caramel sauce a couple of years ago and burnt myself, this sweet mess left me a scar on my left hand that is still noticeable until today! However, I've definitely gotten better in making caramel sauce now. To be honest, I really do prefer homemade caramel sauce as you can adjust the sweetness, thickness and saltiness of the sauce to your liking. Personally, I prefer my sauce to be thick, salty and has that slightly burnt aftertaste! YUM.


Tadaaa! This is the end product! Not bad for my first successful attempt, right? I filled the macaroons with caramel buttercream and gooey caramel sauce for that extra 'oomph!'. 
I'll be trying chocolate and nutella macaroons in the future and will let you know more about it :)

Chocolate Cupcakes!

Mom said she's craving for some cupcakes and told me to bake some yesterday for buka puasa. Initially, she wanted peanut butter-chocolate cupcakes but we ran out of peanut butter! Therefore, I decided to change the frosting into chocolate frosting. To be honest, I have never tried to make chocolate frosted cupcakes so it was really like a gamble for me. On top of that, I was fasting yesterday so I couldn't taste the frosting's sweetness, consistency and adjust it to my liking!
My all-time favorite baking website is Joy Of Baking. They have dozens of simple dessert recipes worth trying!
So here's how I baked the chocolate cupcakes yesterday:

The basic cake ingredients: butter/margarine, white sugar, eggs and flour (sifted with salt and baking powder). If you mix these ingredients together, you'll be able to make a basic butter cake!

Another key ingredient for a chocolate cake is of course cocoa powder. Normally, I'd use the pure 100% cocoa powder
When you have all of the ingredients ready, you can start mixing them all together. But remember to preheat the oven first and there's an order/sequence that must be followed when mixing these ingredients:

1st. Butter and sugar together
2nd. Eggs 
3rd. Flour and liquid 
(in this case it's the dissolved cocoa powder) in turn, ending with the flour

After the batter has been mixed thoroughly, pour them into paper lined muffin tins and bake them in the pre-heated oven for approximately 15-20 minutes. When you're cake is ready, cool them down before frosting them! If your cake is still hot, the frosting will melt into butter!

And for the frosting, I followed Joy of Baking's recipe, which is basically just a mixture of butter, icing sugar and molten chocolate.

Chop the chocolate compound into small pieces and melt them. Be extra careful if you're melting them in a microwave instead of a saucepan because your chocolate might get a disturbing burnt taste! Furthermore, make sure that you're using a heat-proof bowl!


Grate some chocolate using a cheese grater above your frosted cake as a finishing touch and for an extra chocolatey goodness!
:)