oh no she cried

the cute song

enough

at some point in time i sat in the park, sitting in the breeze, listening to songs, waiting. waiting and waiting, and at some point in time the breeze became a chilly wind, as two stars moved across the narrow sky outlined by two flats.

there were bodies lying around, and things were growing out of them - out of their stomachs, out of their necks. the hardest part is figuring out what happened in between.

密码: 1314168

piccolo

i just managed to do eight times of 30-60 in the hot, hot sun. i am suddenly reminded of running the last 60-120 with niklas, whom i just found on the OA.

i actually skipped breakfast and lunch without feeling hungry, because from morning we were all busy with the mass *urine* screening. and then i went shopping at the emart, followed by stopping by the medical centre to get some cream.

today happens to be jackson pollock's birthday. celebrate it! jackson pollock your cheesecake!

because every guy always has an excuse.

身在梦中

yes it's the year of moomoo now. thats mean my sister is 24 and my mother is 48. and the whole morning people have been telling me my butt is big. i actually bumped into auntie ruolin in the cinema today, and her sister is my cousin's friend, and they bumped into each other too. it's a small (gv) world.

the movie was dumb.

today i suddenly turned on this song 最后一课 again. the first time i listened to it, i cried (even though i didn't know what it meant).

離開都要考我 怎麼去做我
誰都知分開 比相處更多
(遲早都會復原 誰都清楚)
明白戲夢人生苦短 也可得到最大結果
何必這麼教我

扭转

i just set myself a mammoth task: to create an entire contact list for all my contacts. and i so aim to finish it by 081109.

midlife crises

this is the torte i made yesterday. i took the recipe from 9th november 2008's sunday times, and it comes from a michael lau. it's a torte with three elements: a flourless chocolate sponge cake, chantilly cream, coffee ganache.

since there wasn't a proper name for the assembled product in the newspaper report, i'll just call this a chocolate chantilly torte. (a cake is slightly different from a torte in terms of what you expect. in a cake, you just have cake - filled and iced. in a torte, there are more elements in the layers - maybe a sabayon, or a bavarian cream.)

i made the cake layer first. the recipe given is a flourless sponge cake which uses no ground almond to add bulk, just more meringue, so as to keep the sponge cake soft.
a meringue is first made, then egg yolks are whisked into it. then a chocolate-milk-butter emulsion is folded into the eggy mixture to form the batter. and that's all there is to the batter. the hardest part is keeping as much air in the batter as possible before sending it into the oven.
the cake rises a lot in the oven, but deflates after baking, causing the top crusty layer to break and peel away from the cake. but after assembling and icing, it won't be seen.
this is the chantilly cream. it's just a whipped cream flavoured with vanilla and whisked with more sugar to a firmer texture that allows better slicing when assembled into the torte.
and the coffee ganache made by heating cream with coffee powder, then poured over chocolate until everything melts. stir in a knob of butter to make the ganache shiny.

then on to assembling the torte. i seriously do a bad job at icing and decorating cakes/tortes/cupcakes. and it's not as though i keep making the same mistake. it's like every time i assemble/decorate a cake, something different goes wrong.

once it was the lack of a piping bag. then once i used the wrong sugar in the icing and it became gritty. then once the cake layers came out uneven and difficult to ice. then once the buttercream was too oily. and this time the palette knifes refused to slide out from under the cake.
i had a perfect sponge layer at the base, then i spread the chantilly cream on. then the shit hit the fan and the second circle of sponge meant for the top broke. so in the end the top layer was a patchwork of broken cake pieces.
nevertheless, the coffee ganache spread on top could cover the flaws below. i then froze the entire thing for an hour, as directed by the recipe. after unmoulding, you can see the layers in the almost-complete torte.
and then i finished icing the entire torte with the ganache. then the shittiest thing happened: after transferring the torte from wire rack to cake board using the palette knifes, they refused to come out from under the torte. and when they finally did, i had major restorative work to do on the icing.

i want to bathe

i actually - by chance - looked up at the night sky when i reached the parade square last sunday, and saw a very clear sky with many stars. well, not the entire sky was clear; i could see a puff of cloud, but the other part of the sky, the part outside the outline of that puff of cloud, was very clear, and studded with stars. i could roughly see the small cluster of faint ones near the orion's belt. (don't know their names, but they form part of orion.) and i bet if i used the night vision thingy that we used outfield i would be able to see them much clearer.

the morningth call

this is the processor-danish-pastry-turned-croissants. other writers give croissant recipes and use the same dough to make danish pastries, so i thought maybe i could use nigella's danish pastry recipe and make it into croissants.
the butter, flour and yeast are first blitzed in the food processor to break up the butter. then the liquids are added to make a sticky dough, which is wrapped and chilled over night.
this is then the hardest part: the rolling out and folding. the elastic dough kept stretching back as i rolled it out, so by the time i got it big enough, the butter was warming up to much, and the dough was turning sticky, so i folded and chilled it before rolling out again. this was done another two times, and spanned almost an hour.

but after the laborious rolling out and folding three times, everything became easier. after that, it's just dividing the dough and resting it in the refrigerator again.
and then rolling each portion became much easier on a floured surface. next, the long piece of dough is then cut into triangles. i'm still not getting the dimensions right. i know now that the base must be quite wide so that the croissant has some length.
roll each triangle into the croissant shape, brush on the egg wash, and leave to proof. i think only the top left corner one is correct, because there are enough turns to show five 'segments', while the rest only have three. and the bottom right corner one is a mish-mash of leftover scrap dough.
after 1.5 hours of proofing, the croissants are puffy and feel like marshmallow. i gave them another egg wash before sending them into the oven.
they poofed even more in the oven, and slowly the distinct rolling pattern melds into one ridged croissant.
and see the inside of the croissant. it's quite tasty, quite nice. i think until i'm brave enough to laminate, i'll continue making croissants the processor way.

jeffrey cookies, made the ice-box way. after endless sawing at the frozen dough with a small knife and breaking many slices up into shards, the right knife came along, and the slices became better.
i'm still not getting it perfect.

same name game

i am testing out the feasibility of using nigella's processor danish pastry dough for croissants. today's results were not bad, but the shapes of the croissants were a bit off. never mind, i have the other have waiting in the refrigerator for me to test tomorrow. photos to come soon.

and i'm also going back to making jeffrey cookies. i want to create cookies that are exactly the same as those on 7th december 2007, but like i said before, i can't/don't produce consistent results for jeffrey cookies.

when i took out the cello to play today, one of the strings was broken. 断了的弦. and the instrument can't be played anymore until it's replaced. maybe there's a reason why heartstrings and called 'heartstrings'.

we all know the scenario. two people on the phone, and they both don't want to be the first to put it down. and so they go on counting down (again and again) after agreeing to put the phone down at the same time. but neither would do it. is it very superficial to judge someone's affection based on whether they let you put down the phone first?

would have bring home the banana pie

today's dinner was for my father's birthday. all nigella recipes, all done by myself. singlehandedly. i should have been quite proud of it, but everything was just not good enough.

the slow-roasted garlic and lemon chicken was easy enough to make.
you just have to mix everything together in the roasting pan and slowly cook it in the oven. sure enough, the smells that come out were very nice. very lemony, very citrusy, very refreshing. but the weird thing was there was so much liquid in the end, which i think was all the lemon juice that came out. the result was some dry chicken and bitter-sour tasting juices in the pan.

on a side note, i made a big discovery that one clove of garlic is actually the small segment of the entire lump. and i kept using the entire lump in making pasta sauces (and on the way die trying to peel and chop the garlic) when the recipe called for one clove.

anyway, for the 'veggies', i cooked the mushroom stroganoff from feast.
lots of mushrooms, lots of chopping. but they cook down so much that they barely fill a plate. this was the only passable item that i made today.

dessert was another bread pudding, because there was leftover wholemeal bread. i used the same recipe as the previous one, but changed to all-milk, so the pudding didn't set up as well.
it was also very bland, because i didn't use enough jam i think.

i feel a bit tired, a bit off-form.

oh, and the pineapple tarts i made with weijie last sunday. i'm afraid the ones i brought home have already been eaten, even though it's not even new year yet.
wrapping the pineapple balls in the pastry. the pastry leaked a lot of oil as the balls sat on the waiting baking sheet. i think it's the margarine.
there was no pastry brush, so the egg wash was manually put on, and i overdid for one tray; the egg wash flowed and collected at the bases of the balls, and they all had a fried egg crust at the bottom. but i did it so that the tops would have a nicer golden colour!
the pastry skin cracked as the tarts baked, but they were still sturdy enough to hold themselves together. when pulled apart, you can see the filling is still moist (and it was nice, because it was cooked by mummy). we decided to call them '破天黄' because they were cracked and they were yellow. anyway, they also look like 旺旺小馒头.
and move one stick to form a square.

爱依旧那么美

i've started running again this week, but i've also started having unusual and varied dreams - and remembering them - every night. it's so fast, cinderella is ending so soon, it's already mid-jan, my essential brew voucher is expiring, and the rambutan season is over. most notedly the rambutan season; no one in platoon 6 is plucking them down to eat this time.

the dinner last night put everything on again.

manning

it's time to use some wholemeal flour...
i was going to use my bertinet book for his brown dough recipe, but then i decided to enrich it with milk and butter to achieve a soft bread. so it became quite my own recipe.

i used the first batch of dough to make sesame plaits, which are quite like the mini-version of the challah loaves that i made with tiffany last week.
dividing the dough and cutting out the strands to weave.
so pretty! they came out soft like enriched doughs should, so that's good. i can't stand dry wholemeal breads that come from lean doughs. but there was a blankness in the taste of the bread; i think it's because i omitted salt (because i used salted butter).

i used the second batch of dough to make three bigger loaves, just to keep myself familiar with shaping techniques for the three shapes i like to use: bâtarde, baguette, boule.
lovely golden. i made a mistake of scoring perpendicularly again for the boule. after the first five slahes, i was quite sure i rotated the dough enough to make another five at a slight angle, but they apparently came out perpendicular again...

oh and i recently gave my nigella starter a new home. in a tub! i even wrote all the feeding and baking instructions around the tub.
in one hour it doubled in height and then i immediately refrigerated it, hoping to slow down the growth, but it still reached the lid and
became like that when i pulled the lid off. eew all the stretchy strands and holey pits.

broke week

i finally got my first $5 from USMS. and harry potter is finally at $10. some things are just worth the wait.

bitter touch

after the very nice lemon-syrup loaf cake, i wanted to try the orange variation of it. so here is the 'seville' orange-syrup loaf cake. it's 'seville' because i don't think singapore gets seville oranges; the way to evoke the taste, suggested by nigella, is to use a normal orange with a lime.
anticlines and synclines. i made the lemon-syrup loaf cake using all-purpose (with baking powder) in place of self-rising flour, even though the recipe called for self-rising. but today i found gold medal self-rising on discount and used it. and i suppose the sinking in the centre is the intended effect, although i can't understand why the self-rising version results in more sinking than the all-purpose one. the most sunken part of the cake is also the most sodden, so while there is less cake, there will be more syrup there.