Baking with friends - Part 2 Macarons with the Master

On the same Saturday, I had the great pleasure and privilege of baking the afternoon away with Karen, who is an obsessively, obscenely good baker. I love that on the same day, I was fortunate enough to teach and be taught.


I certainly learnt a lot, enough to convince me that my process had been all wrong. I was inspired by Karen's meticulousness and her dedication to detail and aesthetics and truly impressed by her deliberate baking technique. To be honest, after noting all the work and ingredients that go into these little treasures, I'm not at all sure that it is worth her time, nor mine, to craft them!


What I did realize, was that she is such a talented yet earnest baker and it really made me feel that whatever she does, is a labour of love. She was kind enough to bake my favourites, a rich chocolate macaron piped with dark chocolate ganache and hazlenut macarons piped with salted caramel buttercream. If you look carefully into the filling, you can see the beautiful little black dots of fresh vanilla.


To sample some of her sublime work (if you're lucky!) or to inquire about classes, please see Karen's blog Mad Baker.

Baking with friends- Part 1 Sweet lil' cupcakes

Over this past weekend, I had a really intense day of baking. My friend D. had asked whether I could show her a cupcake recipe and I readily agreed. While setting up before her arrival, I realize I had run out of regular sized cupcake cups but had the mini ones that I'd stocked up on before for a children's birthday party.


I actually think they work better, given that these are true bite-sized cupcakes and would be more challenging for her to practice her piping technique. These cupcakes are from the chocolate buttermilk recipe that I'd posted before and I'd whipped up a batch of swiss meringue buttercream, then tinted them half in a pale pink and half in a pale turquoise-sage blue.


After baking, they made a good canvase for the piped icing and sweet little sugar decorations. I delivered a plate of these to a friend's party later that night- they are kind of a sweet antidote to 4am hangovers, I think!


While waiting for lunch, we mixed up a batch of green tea cookies- green tea, azuki beans and pine nuts were mixed into a regular cookie dough. These were a big teatime hit at work and they are very healthy too!

A Seafood Lesson

I'm often asked if I go for cooking lessons and the answer is, perhaps not as often as I should. A few weeks ago, goaded by Ivan from Recent Ruins's great generousity, I did attend one, conducted in the backyard of a chef from a rather popular cooking academy.

This class was a strange experience, according to this guy, let's call him M. he is looking to set up his own school for private classes and local market tours. In fact, he claims, in his rather overwrought and edacious fashion, that he has had many private classes. He repeats stories of his clients through the lesson, while giving instructions to "roll the skin off the squid like a condom".

So suffice to say, I did not quite take to the teacher nor the class, particularly because the dishes were quite ordinary. We made a rampah from grinding de-seeded chillies, tomatoes, cilantro and cilantro root, shallots, garlic and ginger together. Then we made a baked garoupa by smothering it on a fish wrapped in banana leaf and a curry squid dish by stir frying it in a diluted version of the rampah. The third dish was a baked crab with egg and oats, or nestum crab (remember nestum chicken from secondary school home economics?)

I don't mind chopping shallots on a rainy Sunday afternoon but you would have to be an absolute beginner to pay $80-120 for these classes. I'm still waiting on my recipe pack but feel free to contact me for more details if you feel like attending! If you must spend money during these times though, might I suggest the $68 tasting of 15 1994 Bordeaux wines, organized by Crystal Wines for this 21st March weekend as a particularly good value event.

Blueberry Cake

I have lately had a slight madness over layer cakes and old forgotten memories of cake. After hearing my cousin talk about it, I became inspired to make this blueberry cake, which I vividly remember "helping" to make when I was a child. The recipe is for a light optima sponge cake, sandwiched between layers of blueberry filling and fresh whipped cream.


It's a very airy, very ethereal cake which can be a pain to handle because when the sponge is truly well-made, it actually tends to sink in the middle and pull away from the cake tin rims. It's only when overbaked and slightly denser, that this cake actually holds it's shape and is easy to ice.

Instead of blueberry, you can fill the top with other berry fillings or a fresh lemon curd, or you can mix and match lemon curd and blueberry or add, as I do, chocolate rice on the sides. This has actually become one of my favourite recipes becuase it's so easy to make and it assembles easily in one bowl (I like easy-clean recipes, I hate having to wash out the KitchenAid mixer). I particularly like how light it is, how little fat there is in the recipe and how beautifully fluffy the batter looks folded into all that stiff egg white.


After acquiring a turntable (best $8 I ever spent!), icing these cakes also became much easier, though I've become slightly fanatic about achieving a really smooth white snow run of cream icing. Good thing Z likes blueberry cakes, apparently they were his default birthday cakes when he was a child, so he happily eats my experiments.

Korean Beef - The Valentines Day Dinner

I had been gifted with a large tray of Korean beef and it was Valentines Day. Back in university, I used to host this annual Lonely Heart's Club, a little tongue-in-cheek (given none of them were actually single) and just for my girlfriends so we could indulge in baking strawberry shortcake and watch Audrey Hepburn movies.


This year, I decided to hold the Lonely Hearts Dinner for friends the day before Valentines and it turned out to be a good Friday night catch-up. My Boston housemate brought me a cast iron skillet pan which makes the loveliest grill marks and I finally got another reason to put it to some use. Not exactly very romantic, as we were all standing around, in the smoke of the outdoor grill but the beef was superb.


It was also a good reason to hunt down the Korean supermarkets in Singapore. I had been to the one in the basement of Cineleisure (I always thought this was a weird location for a Korean supermarket, given the movie mall's young and skvvy looking teenager crowd) but I found that there was one at the back of Amara Hotel in Tanjong Pagar and also another in a shophouse near George Street and Raffles Place.

The proprietors are all none too friendly but finally I managed to walk out with pajeon mix (for seafood or hae-mol-pajeon) and home-made kim chi. Rather than risk making my own short ribs (Gal-bi) marinade, which involves Nashi pear or apple juice, I bought two different bottles of commercial marinade. They were very good. I paired the beef with sushi rice (steamed with sesame seeds), stir-fried spinach, crispy seaweed and frisee lettuce for wraps.

The Yellow Lemon Cake Craze

It all started with a Martha Stewart magazine. It always does. The picture was a gorgeous yellow square-tiered cake. Each layer was checkered in mock-traditional gingham pattern in matching dark yellow hues and festooned with yellow amaryllis.

It coincided with my feeling that I had been baking for awhile with no real purpose, baking to fill time. This surely, was a purpose! The idea that I could construct this modern, fancy work of edible art was a suitably lofty goal and I knew my extended family would be on hand to help eat it as they were coming for a post-CNY dinner. Anyway, I was craving lemon, lemon and more lemon. It happens often. I am a yellow girl at heart.


Thus encouraged, I turned to the lemon pound cake recipe and baked 2 layers of this. To my surprise, the recipe from Martha Stewart successfully yielded two relatively flat layers. Enriched with lemon zest and juice, the layers were dense but tart. (The lemon pound cake layer is the one covered by a circle of wax paper) Then I baked a lemon poppy seed cake, aiming for two but expecting one good layer. As it turned out, the cake rose and peaked in the middle but there was sufficient height for two layers.


While the cakes were baking, I made a bowl of lemon curd and beat some swiss meringue buttercream, then tinted three bowls of it ivory, light yellow and dark yellow. My dark yellow sadly became more like a chrome-orange colour because I was worried the colour didn't show up dark enough. Word to the wise, buttercream darkens in colour as it hardens, so always tint one shade lighter than you intend. I also called M. and luckily, she was available to come over!


This was a rare treat to get quality time with M. and also, she is one of my only friends who has accomplished icing-steady hands (comes from her jewellery making days, I suspect). We stacked up a four layer cake- lemon pound interspersed with lemon poppy seed and basted lemon curd between the layers. Then we iced the whole cake in light yellow and topped it with simple decorations.


This brush with hand-icing a cake convinced me that I must acquire a cake turntable before I start my next layered-cake endeavor. Hopefully the next cake will look more smoothly iced but I really fell love the height of this one. You can't tell in the photos but it was at least a good five inches tall and as high as my little niece's face, when she stood by the cake. We let her blow out candles as her birthday was in the same month. The cake itself was a huge success, everyone loved the variation in the layers, the rich taste and light freshness of the texture. It was a bit of work but I will definitely be making this again!