Birthday Cake For My Cousin

Baked a pandan kaya cake at the request of my godma (my aunt) last sat. It was meant for her daughter (my cousin) whose birthday is around the corner. When she mentioned that my cousin love pandan cakes, the pandan kaya cake from aunty yochana's blog immediately came to my mind. I have made it twice previously and it was well received by my friends.

Things did not proceed smoothly at first. My handy electric handheld mixer was down a few days back and I thought it would be alright to use a balloon whisk. To my dismay, I was proved outright wrong. I had to use tremendous strength to beat the sponge mix and eggs and the end result was far from satisfactory. It seemed that the volume obtained using manual effort was much lesser compared to using the electric mixer. Nevertheless, I finished up the cake batter and popped the pan into the oven. The baked sponge was only two-thirds of what it should have been. I was rather disappointed because I knew I could do it better if my electric beater was working.

Casting my disappointment aside, I worked the remaining of the cake. As the height of the cake is less than desired, I adjusted the amount of pandan kaya fudge to balance up.

Everything worked out fine in the end. The fudge turned out slightly soft though, perhaps due to insufficient setting time. For the wording, I planned to use white chocolate initially. However, the white chocolate would not melt. After 3 attempts, I changed to using dark chocolate instead. It has been such a long time since I have written any chinese characters manually. I have almost returned all of it to my chinese teachers. My mum was beside to guide me when I was questioning whether the strokes were correct, especially for the word "快".

When I sampled a slice of the cake, it was not as dense as I thought it would be even though the sponge cake did not rise as much due to insufficient beating. On the contrary, I received raving reviews for it from my family members.

I learnt a lesson from this - never attempt to bake without the use of my trusty electric mixer again.

Pandan Kaya Cake (Recipe from Aunty Yochana's blog)
Recipe

When the Tastes Combine

Sometimes, it would be nice to combine two of your favourite flavours. What I did was to dig out this Chocolate Rum and Raisin Cupcakes recipe from Tempt: Cupcakes to Excite by Betty Saw. This is the 2nd time I have done this recipe. The 1st time I tried it out after borrowing the book from the library, I knew I had to re-cake this recipe once again.

Thankfully, I got hold of a copy of the book on offer at more than 60% off from the original price. What a great bargain man! And to think that I would actually find it to be in a place like NTUC Fairprice Extra..

This time round, I increased the proportion and added more raisins which is to my liking. I also upped the amount of rum to give it a stronger kick. The alterations did not fail me and there it was - moist chocolatey cupcakes with a the right blend of rum - not too subtle not too overpowering. When the tastes of rum and chocolate combines, it is just amazing!

The cupcakes are so moist that the top layer remains slightly fudgy, as can be seen in the pictures above.

Chocolate Rum and Raisins Cupcakes ( Recipe adapted from Tempt: Cupcakes to Excite by Betty Saw)

Equipment: Muffin tin with holes 5cm in diamter measured from the base, cupcake liners/paper

Ingredients:

105g raisins, chopped

60ml dark rum

130g unsalted butter, softened

110g caster sugar

3 eggs (60g each) , separated and at room temperature

150g dark chocolate ( I used 60%), melted

110g self raising flour, sifted

1 tbs dark rum

Method:

1) Preheat oven to 160 degrees C and line muffin tin with cupcake liners/paper.

2) Combine rum and raisins and allow to soak for 3 hours.

3) Cream butter and 55g sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg yolks one by one until combined

4) Add one tbs rum to the rum soaked raisins. The rum should have evapoarated after 3 hours. Stir in rum raisins mixture and melted chocolate to combine. Next fold in the flour until well combined.

5) In a separate clean bowl, beat egg whites until foamy. Add remaining 55g sugar gradually and beat until egg whites are almost stiff. The egg whites should be moist and creamy and not chunky.

6) Fold one third of beaten egg white to the mixture in 3) to lighten. Fold in remaining egg whites until combined using a whisk.

7) Scoop batter into cupcake liners and bake for 20minutes or until toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Notes:

1) Recipe makes about 14 cupcakes

2) Taste of cupcake matures as day passes

3) Use a clean metal (preferably) bowl and beater to beat egg whites.

Sugarless Loaf of Honey Goodness

My baking repertoire has always consists of round shaped cakes or square shaped bars. Seldom have I bake my goods in a loaf tin. After browsing through my newly bought Rachel Allen - Bake, I decided upon a recipe that caught my attention - honey loaf cake.

The recipe is pretty straightforward without fancy ingredients. Just the usual flour, butter and eggs. Wait a minute... Where has the sugar gone to? Here is the catch. This honey loaf cake uses purely honey as a sweetener. Sounds like a good deal~

After 10 minutes into baking, I could sniff the smell of honey slowing making its way out of the oven.  When the cake was done, it has light golden hue. The loaf domed but splitted widely at the top. That did not affect the appearance too much though. Afterall, the cake is to be sliced and the split would not have been noticeable.

I could not resist the urge and took one slice of it. The cake is dense yet soft and it exudes a very light sweetness of honey. It would be perfect by adding a thin layer of jam or butter it. I tried topping with raspberry jam and peach jam on 2 separate slices and very much prefferred the later.

Honey Loaf Cake ( recipe adapted from Rachel Allen - Bake )
Equipment: 9 x 5 inch loaf tin

Ingredients:
275g flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
120g butter, softened
175g runny honey
75ml milk
2 eggs (60g each), beaten
1 tbs warm honey ( for brushing)

Method:
1) Preheat oven to 170 degrees C
2) In a big bowl, sift the dry ingredients together. Whisk them well to distribute the ingredients uniformly.
3) Beat butter till soft. Add the honey and cream it with the butter till light and fluffy on medium speed.
4) Add in eggs gradually and beat till combined.
5) Fold in the flour mixture until smooth. It will be dough-like.
6) Finally, add in the milk and fold untill a soft dough-like batter is obtained
7) Pour batter into lined loaf tin and bake for 45 -55 minutes. Check for doneness using a wooden skewer. Insert skewer in the middle and it should come out clean with no wet dough.
8) Remove cake from tin and brush with warm honey

Supremely Fudgy Brownies

Whoever came up with Brownies is truly a genious. How could anyone possibly resist this tempting rich piece of chocolate goodness? Brownies come in different texture. There is the cakey version, the fudgy version and the cross between the fudgy and cake-like. I like my brownies to be fudgy and gooey most of the time. When paired with ice-cream, I will prefer it to be cake-like but warm and very moist, almost slightly gooey.

 

This time round, I attempted my first recipe from Lisa Yockelson's Chocolate Chocolate. The book comes with a pretty hefty price of  78 SGD. Luckily I picked it up as a book bargain at Harris at just 30 bucks. As with other brownie recipes, this one was easy to execute, except that the recipe called for unsweetened chocolate. Unsweetened chocolate is one ingredient that is hard to come by and most supermarkets do not carry it.

I have only come across 2 brands of unsweetened chocolate so far - Baker's unsweetened chocolate and Hershey's unsweetened chocolate. I used the earlier as it was recommended by the book as one that is of superior quality. Unsweetened chocolate bars can be found in Cold storage, Ntuc fairprice extra outlets and Sheng Shiong.

As the name suggests, the brownies turned out dense and fudgy with a crunchy crust, exactly like the ones in the book. I have tried several different brownie recipes and this recipe is definitely one of the better ones.

Supremely fudgy brownies ( recipe adapted from Lisa Yockelson's Chocolate Chocolate )
Equipment: 9 inch square pan

Ingredients:
130g plain flour
30g cake flour
2 tbs akalized cocoa powder ( Hershey's cocoa is not akalized)
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
225g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
120g unsweentened chocolate, melted and cooled ( 4 individually wrapped squares)
4 eggs, 60g each
280g granulated sugar (I cut down on 120g of sugar on my 2nd attempt)
1 1/2tsp vanilla extract

Method:
1) Preheat oven to 160 degrees C.
2) Sift all dry ingredients into a large bowl and whisk them together to distribute evenly.
3) Mix melted butter and melted chocolate until well combined.
4) Whisk eggs to combine egg whites and yolks, about 30 seconds. Add in sugar and whisk another 30 seconds.
5) Add the vanilla extract and chocolate butter mixture to the egg-sugar mixture. Stir till combined
6) Add in combined dry ingredients and stir to form a batter. The final batter is smooth and gooey, possibly with some air bubbles.
7) Bake at 160 degrees C for 25 to 35 minutes. If the middle part is still shiny and lava like whereas the perimeter is dull and dry, return it to the oven and bake a further 5 minutes.The colour of the crust should be uniformly dull and the middle part should be slightly squidy as compared to the sides which have a firmer feel.
8) Allow the brownie to cool in the pan, for about 2 to 3 hours before refrigerating for 1 hour.

Butter Rum Cake

After some hesitation on which recipe to try, I decided on a butter rum cake from All cakes considered. I am glad I found another recipe that can put my Myer's dark rum to good use. One litre bottle of rum is enough to last me a year I think, considering that most recipes only require one tablespoon use of rum.  

Having read through the recipe, I converted the measurements from cups to grams. It was somewhat troublesome to do so and I would have preferred recipes to list weight of ingredients instead. The recipe asked for nearly 400grams of sugar. Thats a whooping lot! I cut down some of the sugar and added 2 another tablespoons of rum. I also substituted buttermilk using milk and lemon juice.

With the amount of sugar outweighing that of the flour and butter, the high-ratio method of mixing was employed. The dry ingredients were added to the batter alternating with the liquid.

The cake was then baked in a tube tin and when it was done, the top splitted quite badly. It did not affect the appearance much though since the cake would be flipped upside-down. In the picture above, the butter rum cake looked almost like a chiffon cake. 

When the cake was done, I made the glaze and spooned some of it over a slice. This is the first time I am doing a syrup glaze and I found it was way too sugary sweet without much presence of rum, afterwhich I decided to do without the glaze. Haiz..There goes my butter again... I think next time I will do a taste test whenever I am baking a syrup cake.

Upon my first bite, I found that the cake is similar to a banana cake in texture. Dense, yet soft and moist. Most of the flavour came from the brown sugar and there was a subtle presence of rum, most of which I think was burned off in the oven. The taste is however slightly on the sweet side. I shall cut down more on white sugar the next time.

Butter rum cake ( recipe adapted from All cakes considered)

Equipment: 10 inch tube tin

Ingredients:

225g butter, softerned at room temperature

200g caster sugar ( try cutting down on this as cake is quite sweet) 

165g light brown sugar

4 large eggs, 60g each and at room temperature

3 tbs dark rum

330g cake flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

240ml milk combined with 1 tbs lemon juice

Method:

1) Preheat oven to 160 degrees C and grease a 10 inch tube pan with butter or oil.

2) Cream butter with both sugars on medium high speed until fluffy.

3) Add in eggs one by one into the creamed butter on medium speed, beating for 20 seconds after each egg is incoporated.

4) Add rum to batter and beat in to incoporate.

5) Sift flour into a large bowl. Add in the salt and baking soda. Stir using a whisk to combine and evenly distribute the dry ingredients.

6) Add one quarter of the flour mixture to the batter. Beat until just incoporated on low speed. Next, add in one third of the milk mixture and beat until just combined. Repeat this process, alternating dry and wet ingredients. You should start and end with the flour mixture.

7) After all the ingredients are combined, beat the batter on medium speed for about 30 seconds to ensure it is well incoporated. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl with a spatula once in a while, during the beating process from steps 2 to 6.

8) Pour batter into cake pan and bake at 160 degrees C for 1 hour 10 minutes. Check for doneness after 1 hour by inserting a wooden skewer halfway between the sides and middle. The cake is done when the skewer pulls out clean. If not, return the pan to the oven and check for doneness every 5 minutes.

Notes:

1) This cake has a nice flavour but it is quite sweet. Try cutting down on the castor sugar.

Book Review - All Cakes Considered

I bought this book along with two other books at 30% off from Borders bookstore. Bakebooks in Singapore certainly do not come cheap. The better well-known ones can easily cost SGD 45 - 60. Very often, the price is enough to make me think twice before buying. After the discount, it was at a more affordable price of SGD 31.

All cakes considered is one book that is distinctively different from other cake books. It is structured in such a way that it feels like a baking journey, filled with anticipation and adventure. The author Melissa Gray narrates her experience of baking and bringing cakes to her colleagues at NPR - National Public Radio, and how her colleagues are wowed by her baked goods.

At the start of the bakng journey, she guides the reader meticulously into baking a sour cream pound cake. Every single step of the instruction is well explained - steps on preparing the pan, creaming butter and how to check when the cake is done. The book starts off with simple cake recipes that require simple techniques. Slowly, the difficulty of the recipes steps up and new baking terms are introduced.

I really like the way she varies her repertoire of recipes. As Melissa mentions, every colleague has different taste buds. Therefore, she tries to bring a different cake each time to satisfy them. To me, her recipes seemed so fascinating that I am at a lost of what to bake for a start. Among the recipes, there is the tunnel of fudge cake baked in a tube pan with oozing cake batter in the middle, somewhat a bigger version of a chocolate lava cake; the Heaven and hell cake - a cake with layers of peanut butter mousse, angel food cake and devil's food cake glazed with a layer of chocolate ganache ; the Agroves manor coffe cake - a yoghurt flavoured pound cake with stewed blueberries and apples and a layer of streusel in the middle, all baked in a tube pan.

Amidst the variety of recipes, detailed explanations and mouth- watering pictures, there is something that I feel is lacking. Regrettably, there is no sight of cheesecakes or cupcakes to make the book more complete. On the whole, it is an enjoyable experience reading All cakes considered - yes,  this book is actually a cake book that one can read. I would recommend it to amateur bakers who will have a much easier time baking cakes for the first time.  

*(Added on 31st Aug 2010) I have tried one of the recipe, a butter rum cake. The taste is good, however, it is very much on the sweet side. After browsing through the book and analyzing the cake recipes, I realised that most of them tend to be very generous with sugar. Perhaps it might be a good idea to cut down on part of it.

Crazy About Bakebooks

It is hard for me to resist the urge to browse at bakebooks whenever I am near a bookstore or a library. Somehow, I can hear the books calling out to me. Reading was never my hobby. The only publications I was willing to read are magazines and comics. Things changed when I took up baking. Ever since then, I enjoyed reading up bakebooks and online baking articles.

Being a self-taught baker, books and online sources are my best reference materials. There is an endless library of publications for me to refer to. Nowadays, collecting bakebooks is fast becoming one of my hobby. Whenever there is a book sale, I will very much look forward to getting a good bargain at the cookbook corner. Well, there is one coming up soon, the Borders sale at Expo. Hopefully it will not disappoint. One day, I am going to stuff my bookshelves full with purely bakebooks. When that day comes, I think my room will become.. hmm...what shall i call it - a baking library.