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.