good woods

eee i just had a terrible haircut at the $10/10-minute kind of place. it was quite high-tech though. now i look like they placed a bowl on my head and cut all around it >.<

chthonic

today i finally got to try the apple pie recipe in full, because i made the full-size pie with weijie.
that's the dough nicely made, rolled out, and lined onto the pan. i like the way today's dough came together with just about the right amount of water.
that's weijie cutting the apples. omg he cuts them so evenly in sonya fashion. i just cut chunks of random shapes and sizes.
pie assembled and baked. we're getting better at handling dough. didn't need to refrigerate the dough as we worked through the lattice weaving. but the pie came out a bit soupy; the juices didn't set up. i think the juices thicken only when we make the smaller pies. and the apple design on top didn't turn out nice.

but the pie was nice with ben and jerry's ice cream!

today has also been a day of surprise buys. i happened to find every burger, which was almost like my favourite childhood snack.
weijie and i also went to le bon marche and bought that excellent walnut and honey loaf. played about one hour of cello today, and got some good blisters forming.

pain is pleasure.

restoration for the souls

wow, i feel much better - i weighed 60kg only on the scale at the old house. nevertheless, the goal is 57.5kg. i had a good 1.5 hours of practising cello; haven't touched a string instrument in ages! i think i want to try getting the calluses back, but right now my fingertips are already in pain, red, and showing white streaks (think it's the blisters coming first).

so, these are the pieces i practised, without the piano/orchestra accompaniment of course:









must. be. able. to. play. again.

then i visited le bon marche to buy a sourdough loaf. i chose the honey and walnut loaf. i don't know how they do it, but you order the bread, then they go to the back of the store as though to retrieve the dough and bake it on the spot for you. except that it takes only ten minutes to get the bread done. i think maybe the bread is flown in half-baked, and then when you order it they finish the baking process in the store.
the loaf cost $7.50. expensive, but worth it. it had a really crunchy and thick crust, and a soft interior dotted randomly with walnut pieces of small blobs of honey. really nice.

pat bing soo

omg. tired.

we wore the fugly bumblebee shirts and carried barricades, put up sign boards. wearing white shoes was the first mistake; the rains just made all the soil turn into mud. we ate at the gluttons bay late at night. i only slept for only one hour, and from 4am onwards i was standing on the road holding a placard.

it was just swarming with people. luckily kahchun was beside me, otherwise i would be overwhelmed. it was an interesting few hours of speaking to people of all accents, trying different ways of describing the route to baggage deposit and the flag-off point.

i also saw many familiar faces. all the BMT people! bed buddy joosiong! i guess at next year's marathon i'll see them again.

it had been raining and raining. drizzling, then pouring. and then i recalled, as i was standing near victoria concert hall, the new year's countdown of 2006. the midnight on which boonping and i made a resolution.

anyway, i caught a glimpse of the fireworks show last night. caught the finale.

splays

it's been such a cold, rainy and gloomy day. my sandal strap broke.

还未等到的烛光晚餐
穷尽一生等你还

hobson's choices

ah, the thing with baking dates is, you get another pair of hands to do everything for you! so today's maid of honour is weijie!

first, we made the double whammy chocolate pudding from the desperate housewives cookbook. i think it's 'double whammy' because there is cocoa powder added, and then chopped chocolate stirred in.
cooking the pudding. weijie is so much gentler than me, which is almost quite impossible. anyway, i really don't know what kind of consistency i'm supposed to get for the pudding. i don't suppose it's the mango pudding kind of pudding at chinese restaurants - it's something more creamy, less structured in form. but still, i don't think i should be getting something as fluid as this:
maybe we should have cooked the pudding more, towards the curdled stage. but i didn't dare to. so now it's just like a creamy chocolate custard sauce; good to go with fruits though.

then, biscotti. i took the recipe from 500 cookies, and substituted half the plain flour with wholemeal flour that sonya gave me. and dumped in some raisins. so, effectively it's another wholemeal almond raisin biscotti - just with another recipe.
with the substitution of wholemeal flour, the dough become so dry that we had to use another egg to bind it, by which time it became a bit mushy to handle. thank goodness the dough still became firm after the first bake in the oven.
again, sliced and put into the oven for the second bake. these came out tasting just nice. not too sweet. feels healthy too, because there's absolutely no butter in them.

and then i took out the betty crocker cookie book to make the giant honey and oat cookies. (this was yet another chance to use up the instant oatmeal that no one is eating; i still have another big packet on top of the big tin that is half empty.)
actually, much of the hard work was done by weijie, not me. all the cooking, whisking, tempering, stirring. haha that's the good thing about having a baking date!
nigella's brick-laying method: it's absolute childhood fun. when you have children around in the kitchen asking for something to do, this is the one thing you must ask them to help you with.
ok, these came out so extremely, cloyingly sweet. probably won't be making them again anytime soon. maybe i'll reduce the sugar next time. (and weijie exclaimed at the huge amount of sugar used when he measured it out.)

in a bid to use up sonya's good wholemeal flour (with expiry date), i adapted the recipe from my weekend white bread to make this 50% wholemeal bread. that is, the percentage of wholemeal flour relative to the total amount of flour is 50%.
yes, my mixer is back in action. i was so worried throughout the kneading that it would die again, but nothing happened. so i proceeded with the dough as per normal. folding a few times, with long periods of resting in between. shaping, scoring a big cross on top.
i think the loaf was not too bad. the bread was not hard, but just a bit soft, though not as soft as gardenia wholemeal loaves. tight crumb like the white wheat breads. still, i don't like wholemeal bread, regardless of the percentage of wholemeal flour.

act 一个 cute.

i'm so tired i gave the fireworks show a miss. i keep being tested with lines that i can't/am not supposed to cross.

philter

a short and simple week. the only terrible thing was the long walk last night, of which the only things i want to remember are the pandan and 芝麻糊 smells. during my guard duty on monday, i heard many songs i recognised on the radio. and since then the elegie from tchaikovsky's serenade for strings has been playing in my head. also, i've finally finished the kite runner.

last sunday i made apple pies and managed to make one with a lattice top correctly done. (see the haphazard weaving here.) somehow, the pie dough i had that day was much more elastic than before, and i worried if it developed too much gluten. it made handling the dough become easier - there was less tendency for the dough to tear. at the same time, however, it felt like it was way too tough. still, i think the crust came out flaky and nice.
ah so pretty. the dough was very cooperative; it didn't tear or break as i bent the strips over and over again as i weaved out the lattice. looks very much like 板面 right? and then i crimped the edges with a fork, so the strips blended with the border of the pie so smoothly.
my best-looking pie to date, though i must say the dough shrank quite a bit as it baked. anyhow, i was delighted to find out that i could lift the whole pie out of the pan easily, and even more delighted to know that the pie didn't break as i transferred it from the pan to the parchment sheet. may i just add that kahchun exclaimed 'oh my god it looks damn nice' when he saw it.

by the way, a damned weighing machine told me that i weigh 62kg now. only if you say 'thank you'.

queens

it rained unexpectedly the past two days, so it's been quite gloomy. and the flowers on the trees have been knocked down. it's cold lonely, but that means apple pies.

working asses off

just came back from a long day. i had class lunch with the few people who turned up. saw paul at the shokudo pasta shop. everyone's starting school again! ate three j.co donuts in a row. i can (probably) take the carbs.

i did two hours of non-stop talking on a chemistry topic that would have spanned five lectures =/

get some benchwarmers

it’s the time of the year again: the trees downstairs are in full bloom. the past week was quite a break from the outfield the week before; there was much sleeping/resting and playing ball games, but i cut myself accidentally with the SOG =/

i just came back from a very satisfying dinner at food for thought, where i tried the vanilla caramel crème brûlée, and bought home the very chocolatey brownie. just look at the black plateau of a dark beauty:
anyway, i used up the bailey's sugar cookie dough today. you know ravioli? it's the italian stuffed pasta. i call these ravioli biscuits. haha, there were some (very) old chocolate mints lying around in the refrigerator, so i decided to use them in these biscuits.
not very successful; the dough spread around the chocolate mints too much. and the flavours didn't seem to match. oh well, it was fun afterall, and i've finally unloaded my refrigerator of some chocolate.
then i went back to making some simple cut-out cookies. again, the irregularity in the sizes tells of the home-made-ness of the cookies.

quadruple bake

woke up early in the morning for a whole half-day of baking with sonya!

first, we made the pain viennois from bertinet. this was my first time seeing the sweet dough from the book.
a lot of rubbing of ingredients into the flour. this dough comes together faster than the white dough, but it was very hard to work it. nevertheless, we formed it to ball, left it to rise, divided and shaped it. i shaped one of them, and it was quite ugly.
into the oven. the little baguettes were supposed to be scored deeply, but you can see that the one on the right has a barely superficial scoring; it's the one i made - i didn't read the recipe beforehand, and hance scored it like a normal baguette.
one on top of the other for you to see the difference. mine actually looks not bad on the photo. it's like a shiny and fake baguette - those used for displays. anyhow, the bread came out much less sweet than i imagined it to be. this pain viennois should be sliced length-wise in half, served with a thin chocolate bar sandwiched inside.

next, we made a wholemeal almond raisin biscotti. i biscotti is a cookie that is twice-baked. you first bake a log of biscotti dough in a moderate oven to give the dough form. after it's completely cooled, you slice it up and then return it to a low oven for drying out.
the log, and the biscotti slices. this tasted really nice. not sweet like other cookies, but with a nutty and fruity flavour from the almonds and raisins. very healthy. i think it's something 姑姑 will like. if you want to know, the biscotti is adapted from martha's recipe.

then, we made white wheat bread.
yes, my electric mixer is down, but i managed. manually kneaded the dough to get a somewhat acceptable smoothness.
leaving the dough to rise, fold, rise again, fold, divide, preshape, shape, yada yada. i glazed the loaves with the egg wash leftover from the pain viennois, as an experiment. the scoring was very pretty, and it revealed an interior with quite some airiness. maybe it has to do with resting the dough for longer than the recipe instructed.
i've found a new way to slide the loaves onto the 'baking stone' in a much easier way: fold the parchment over and get two layers before placing the dough on it. being able to slide the loaves on in a shorter time prevents excessive heat loss from the oven. with the egg wash, the loaves looked better as they baked.
omg i love the sunny golden of the loaves. for some reason neither of us could think of, the loaves had a buttery smell. again, the bread was as good as a sunday bread could be.

finally we made some bailey's sugar cookies, because sonya had to make cookies with liqour. this one was a cut-out cookie. that is, the dough is made, chilled, rolled and cut out for baking.
spot patrick on the baking sheet haha. i twisted the arms of one of the cookies to make it look like patrick. but in the oven, these spread a little, unlike nigella's butter cut-out biscuits, which don't spread at all.
the recipe for these cookies comes from here. the problem is that the recipe doesn't specify oven temperature. but no matter, the recipe makes up a batch of dough so huge that i still have half of it in my freezer for me to use next week, in testing out the required oven temperature and timing.

and an arrangement of the four things we made today:
after this i'm watching the stepford wives.

oh my

just came back from a dinner with the guys at essential brew at holland village. i think the food was very nice, especially the dessert. omg, ultimate sins of chocolate, ice cream and cheesecakes.

tomorrow i'm waking up early for a morning of baking with sonya.

delay missions

ok i'm writing this after finishing a whole night of baking with only one hour of sleep. the nature of the baking process simply prevented me from being able to get a long rest.

first, i took out a page from the desperate housewives cookbook i borrowed last time, and made the mrs o'leary's spiked baked custards. it's really easy - because there is no cooking involved in the custard-making process - and you should try it too!
simply whisk together a few ingredients: 2.5 cups mixture of heavy cream and milk, 2 eggs, 2 yolks, 1/3 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 2 tablespoons bailey's irish cream liqueur. well, when i was making this, i was so happy at the fact that i could separate two eggs (by hand) without breaking the yolk that i forgot to use two more eggs, but used one instead. but never mind, this gave my custard an even more ethereal form.
the recipe calls for you to divide the custard into four ramekins, but i didn't have the real ramekins, neither did i have small pudding moulds. so i settled with two bigger ones. bake the four ramekins of custard in a bain marie at 160°C for about 35 minutes, by which time only a one-inch circle in the centre of each ramekin jiggles slightly when gently shaken. turn off the oven, take out the bain marie and leave the ramkens in it until completely cool. then refrigerate for at least four hours, or up to two weeks.
unmould and serve the custard. the end result is a voluptuously smooth cream, with a delicate form that falls apart immediately in your mouth, and with a mellow flavour from the bailey's. just look at the shiny smoothness/smooth shine of the baked custard.

then i did the brioche from nigella's forever summer, which was the thing that stopped me from sleeping last night. having eaten a brioche à tête at dempsey, i was quite excited to try making this bread.
plain white bread doughs contain just yeast, flour, salt and water, but the brioche is a bread enriched with eggs and butter. this gives the bread a very rich flavour and soft/moist texture, to the point that we can't really classify it: it's not like other breads, but it's not a pastry, nor a cake.
the idea is to use cold ingredients, because once the dough is formed, you begin tossing the butter in cube by cube. you don't want the dough to be so warm that the butter melts and turns the dough oily (and using an electric mixer generates a lot of friction that heats up the dough). at this point in time, my bloody mixer died on me. omg there was a loud 'click' and suddenly there were black fumes coming out. maybe it's time to buy a kitchenaid!
so i took the dough out onto the table, and manually worked in the rest of the butter. naturally, this was much slower than using the machine. and more and more of the butter melted as i worked the dough.
this resulted in a very oily dough. you can see the oil around the perimeter of the dough. nevertheless, i went on with the baking to see what i would get.
after one folding and a three-hour rest in the refrigerator, the dough grew nicely, and the greasiness seemed to disappear.
i divided and shaped the dough. nigella's instructions were to divide the dough into fourteen pieces to make small rolls, but i wanted to try making some brioche à têtes, and a brioche loaf, so i estimated the portions of the dough. the thing is, as you would see later, my dough pieces were way too big.
after one hour of proving. you can already see how much they have swollen. wait till you see how much they swelled in the oven.
these are the brioche à têtes. in case you don't know, 'tête' means 'head' in french, refering to the shape of this brioche roll: a flower base with a bob (head) on top. anyway, i didn't seal the têtes on properly, so they kind of slid to the sides. and i didn't bake the bread long enough; the insides were a bit doughy still. and i couldn't remove the roll completely from the mould, because the centre was too tender and tore easily. well, my first time working with a brioche dough!
i tried to do better with the loaf. (actually a brioche in loaf form should have an additional ridge on top.) as you can see, the dough rose way out of the pan. i baked this one substantially longer to make sure the insides were cooked. again, i had trouble removing it from the dough pan. next time, i'll need to line it with parchment. but i don't know how to overcome the problem for the brioche à têtes. i love the shine of the brown crust.
and so this is it: a brioche loaf. a shiny crust that hides under it a soft, moist and tender interior. eat this plain or with jam. or with ice cream, as suggested by nigella.