Creme Brulee

When it comes to bringing food for potluck; or pot bless as we Christians call it, my usual take is to bring desserts. In comparison to main course or dishes that can only be prepared just before serving to ensure food quality is maintained, cold desserts on the other hand can be prepared in advance. Like the Creme Brulee I prepared recently for a get together, not only can they be made in advance but only required a minimum of 5 ingredients. However, the challenge is in ensuring that the custard is not overly baked. The trick is to remove the custard while it is still wobbly.

In the case of Creme Brulee, you can even put on a show by up playing the caramelising of the Creme Brulee in the presence of the host and guests. Like for instance torching them with your eyes blind folded???

Below are some Creme Brulee waiting to be torched.

To caramelised the Creme Brulee, you don't really need an expensive professional blow torch. Any blow torch will do as long as it is handy and save. You don't want to blow up your host's home, right? In the absence of a blow torch, an oven toaster is the next appliance that you can used.

This is the blow torch that I used and it cost only RM25. As to how save this thing is, the host's place was still in tack when I left. Whatever happen after that is not my fault.

Creme Brulee ready to be served.
Ingredients

4 egg yolks
1/4 cup castor sugar
500ml thick cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
brown sugar

1. Scald the cream and vanilla extract over low heat until steaming.
2. Whisk together the egg yolks and sugar until well blended.
3. Whisk in 1/3 of the cream quickly to avoid curdling, then whisk in the balance of cream until well mixed.
4. Run the mixture through a sieve to remove any residue.
5. Pour mixture into oven-safe ramekins and place them in a baking pan.
6. Pour boiling water into the pan about halfway up the sides of the ramekins. (this method is known as water bath or bain-marie)
7. Bake in oven pre-heated to 150 for between 25 to 35 min. Custard is cook when the centre is still wobbly. Chill custard for at least 2 hours before serving.


Topping
1. Sprinkle the top of custard with a thin even layer of brown sugar.
2. Burn the sugar with a blow torch until it begins to caramelise.

Note : If you do not have a blow torch, you can grill it in the oven or oven toaster.

World of Pokemon

School is finally over for the year. The last few days of school saw many parents with kids attending pre-school busy preparing goodies and stuff for their children to share with their school friends.

Same goes for my friend, Marianne whose son was attending final year of pre-school. By the way for those of you who are like me attending 1 year of pre-school was already a bonus, children these days attend up to 3 years of pre-school. It is either the parents are too busy to coach them at home or they are afraid that their children might lose out with the high standard demanded by parents themselves.

Marianne wanted some cupcakes for her son to share with his friends in school before the final term comes to an end. She requested for Pokemon. What are Pokemons?

Since Sydney, my daughter wasn't a great fan of Pokemon during her growing up years I had very little knowledge on what these little monsters are and what they look like. This is what I found from the Internet.

"Pokemon are fictional creatures in another universe that are captured (using a Pokeball of some sort) and raised by humans to battle and protect them. Each Pokemon has a different ability and type (Dark, Electric, Psychic,Water, etc.) and there are over 400 species (Raichu, Jirachi, Charizard, Mew, etc.). Some people use Pokemon to battle while others care for them as pets. A person who uses Pokemon to battle is often referred to as a Pokemon trainer, as Pokemon are creatures which can also grow (in levels), evolve (change form to become stronger) and develop in skills (which transfers to their types of attack).
Many things have come from the creation of Pokemon - including a trading card game, an anime television series and many video games. These have all been very successful and have made Pokemon popular all over the world.
The original idea for the Pokemon game came from a young man (Satoshi Tajiri) who wanted to invent a game that involved trading insects - as was his hobby. "

With these details and the websites provided by Marianne, I made these Pokemon cupcakes for her son.

This is the only pokemon I know; Pikachu.

Cinnamon Kisses

These are the Cinnamon Kisses that I baked after tasting Ginger Kisses from New Zealand. [Edit : These are not cookies, they are sponge cake sandwich together with buttercream). A friend of mine gave us a packet of Ginger Kisses when she came back from her holiday trip to New Zealand. These Kisses has texture like sponge cake instead of usual crispy biscuit. It is soft and full of flavour from the ginger and cinnamon powder with the smoothness of cream sandwiched in between. These Kisses were an instant hit with Sydney.

After much persuasion from Sydney to bake some for her, I decided to comb the Internet for the recipe. Finally, I came across this recipe and decided to give it a go with minor changes. Since I do not have ginger powder, I decided to replace the ginger powder with cinnamon powder and call it Cinnamon Kisses.

Ingredients for Kisses
150g plain flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

110g butter

60g caster sugar

1 egg

2 tsp honey

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tbsp hot water

Ingredients for Filling

30g butter

120g icing sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

2 tbsp boiling water

Method for Kisses

1. Sift together the flour, baking powder, spices and set aside.

2. Cream butter, sugar and honey till light and fluffy, then mix in the egg.

3. Fold in the sifted dry ingredients.

4. Dissolve baking soda in hot water and add to batter.

5. Scoop small teaspoonfuls of the mixture on baking trays.

6. Bake in oven pre-heated to 180C for about 10 minutes or until golden brown.

7. Cool completely before apply filing.

Method for Filing

1. Cream butter, icing sugar and vanilla until smooth.

2. Slowly stir in boiling water a little at a time until mixture is very light and creamy.

3. Pair up the cinnamon kisses and sandwich them with filling.

Note : Remember to make more than required. These are so good that they finish real fast.

New Blog Template

Finally, the 3 columns template that I so desired for my blog is now up and running. I would like to record my thanks to Tracie of Bitter Sweet Flavour who has graciously help by guiding, downloading and sending the XML file to me.

However upon receiving the file, I was still unable to open it. After much research done on the Internet, I realised that I need to download the XML Marker. I am usually very careful in downloading any files from the Internet due to passed virus attack on my notebook. But this time round in desperation, I downloaded the XML Marker without a second thought. Like a kid with a new toy I was try out all the various templates and finally settle for this one.

Though I manged to install the template that I wanted but there were quite a fair bit of administration required to re-organise and re-link all the links that I had. I was ecstatic when my new blog template went live at 2am this morning.

So Tracie, thanks again for your great help.....muak...muak...muak

Soft Baked Eggs

On days that I do not work, I love to have a good breakfast at home with my newspaper next to me. When it comes to breakfast I think I am one person who is easy to please. All I need is soft boiled or baked eggs, toasted bread and a good cup of coffee. With a simple breakfast like this, I will be smilling from ear to ear for the entire day.

This is one of the easiest breakfast that I love to prepare. It is called Soft Baked Egg.

To prepare this breakfast, what you need is a ramekin, 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon of cream, 2 tablespoon of grated cheese of your choice and pepper to taste. No salt is required as the cheese is salty enough. You can either bake this in the oven or oven toaster. I prefer oven toaster as no pre-heating is required. This is what it looks like before going into the oven toaster.

Besides having eggs for breakfast, I also add them to my instant noodles. That is another story all together for another post. But for now, I would like to share this Soft Baked Eggs that I had this morning for breakfast. With a little planning I managed to cook the eggs, ate it and still be in time for work. This is how I did it.

7.10am - get out of bed, brush teeth and shower.

7.30am - prepare the eggs and pop it into the oven toaster set for 7 minutes. Change into working clothes.

7.40am - remove baked eggs from the oven toaster and pop in 2 slices of bread. Put on make-up

7.45am - remove bread from oven toaster. Continue with make-up

7.50am - sliced bread into fingers and make a 3 in 1 coffee. Enjoy breakfast.

8.10am - leave for work

See what I mean when I say this is one of the easiest and now it has been proven to be one of the fastest breakfast as well.

Disaster, Disaster, Disaster.......

Aarrr... I was trying to modify my blog to look better and see what it did to all my links!!! It deleted all my existing links. In trying to recover these lost links I reverted back to the previous template. But damage has already been done beyond repair. Now I will need to painfully re-link all my past posts and also my fellow blogger friends.

This is certainly one motion that I can do without had I been thinking before acting. Sigh....how often I did things in a haste and regret terribly after that.

However, this will not deter me from seeking the 3 columns template that I so wanted for my blog. Guess just need to be more careful and read all instruction before proceeding with the next step.

In life, how often we make mistakes. Some are reversible but most are not.....like THIS ONE.

Non-Bake Oreo Cheesecake

One of the cakes I love to serve on hot sunny days besides icre-cream are non-bake cheesecakes. These type of cheesecakes are chilled before serving instead of the usually baking. It has a layer of crust made usually of crush cookies/biscuits mixed with melted butter. The filling is a combination of cream cheese and whipped cream. With a tinge of lemon juice, the tartness of lemon juice balance off the richness of cream cheese and cream to make this an appertising dessert. Gelatine is usually added to keep the cake firm and holds it shape especially in our hot and humid weather. The amount of gelatin can be adjusted according to your preference. The lesser the gelatin the softer the cake will be.


The above is the Oreo Cheesecake that I made for our home fellowship meeting last Friday.

For crust

120g Oreo biscuit (without the filling), crushed

60g butter, melted

Mix crushed biscuit with butter. Press on the base of a 20cm springform baking pan. Leave to chill in fridge.

For filling
2 tbsp gelatin
1/2 cup water
250g cream cheese
300ml whipping cream, whipped
150g castor sugar
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
4 pieces of Oreo biscuit (without filling), crushed

1. Mix gelatin with water and microwave for 1 minutes, until gelatin dissolved. Leave to cool.
2. Cream cream cheese with castor sugar and lemon juice until smooth.
3. Add in cool gelatin mixture and mix evenly.
4. Stir in crush oreo biscuit.
5. Pour filing on prepared crust.
6. Chill cake till set before serving.

Note : For a softer cake and ice-cream like texture, reduce gelatine to 1 tbsp.

Record Player Cake

I recently made this cake for my father who celebrated his 72th birthday. This design is from the book called Planet Cake.

During my father's era; in the 1960s and 1970s, a record player was the only gadget used to churn out music other telecast from radios. I can still remember the record player that my father had. It looks like a brief case that can be detached into 2 halves. One half is the turntable and the other half is a speaker. To churn out music, a record (know as LP for larger record and EP for smaller record) was placed on the turntable and a stylus with a needle at one end bearing a tip made of diamond was manually placed on the spinning record. Special care must be taken when placing the stylus on the spinning record as any scratches with damage the record.

I can still remembered those nights when my father used to sit in the dark enjoying his music. I often wonder why my father listens to music in the dark. It was only much later that I realised when you utilised all 5 senses the quality of the message received will be compromised as each senses will give you a different perception. However, if you were to only focus on a single sense at a time, the quality of message received is much more intense.

I can see that my father was very pleased with his cake though he isn't one who freely express his feelings. However, my nieces and nephews were at loss as to what gadget is this. Can't blame them as they were all from the era of CDs, MP3 and iPods.

Coming back to the making of the cake; the biggest challenge was to mould the stylus. Initially, I tried by covering a flat piece of fondant over a wooden chopstick. But the stylus looks bulky and clumsy sitting on the record. Eventually, I decided to use a same wooden chopstick but this time I only covered the both ends with fondant. And with that it looks a lot better.