ten

i have to run it alone.

eh there's a rainbow look out

last sunday kenneth and weijie came over to play. and i baked up a very fantastic batch of transitional whole wheat cinnamon buns! really really perfect. and the honey cream cheese frosting gave a very subtle tang to the fragrant, homely and warm buns.
the soaker, biga and final ingredients are mixed into the final dough, which after a long rest (i put in too little yeast, and was worried) turned out very workable. look at how extensible it was, giving in to the rolling pin very willingly. it was absolutely not sticky, and very nice to handle. i could even fold it as in the photo above. definitely easier to work with than the first norwegian cinnamon buns by nigella i made.
sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, and then rolled into a tight coil. then slice with a bench scraper. (the last time i made nigella's cinnamon buns, i used a knife, and failed spectacularly...)
see how much they puffed! well, they weren't supposed to touch each other, but my tray/oven was small. nevertheless, the puffing and squeezing together of the buns looked good to me. so cosy. so gratifyingly warm to look at.
drizzling with the honey cream cheese frosting. hmm the frosting wasn't exactly at the drizzling consistency that i wanted. but it still tasted nice.
tearing into the buns. delicious! very comforting. and i packed one to bring to camp for breakfast the next day =)

i also made some cut-out cookies and iced them with royal icing.
after a while, i ran out of ideas and drew weird things.

it's been raining everyday this week, and it's been so cold that the air-conditioners in the office haven't broken down at all. but my flu hasn't gone away either. on monday i ran 8km with weiyang though, and it felt good, like losing weight. then tuesday was - according to weiyang - shrove tuesday. i didn't get to eat any, though i'm quite sure nigella has a recipe in feast.

yesterday i was sweeping the vehicle shed, and i thought - fondly - of annjiat's markers for us during our long walks. all those 'XOXO' white tapes.

then there was a semi-heavy rain in the late afternoon; i predicted a rainbow. and there was one. on the train i was able to see one end of it dipping into a stadium - i swear! i could see the vegetation behind through the rainbow! and it was a double rainbow too. i suppose it was a lucky thing to see: there happened to be a big rain, and the western sky was a solid dark grey while the eastern sky was clear with a bright setting sun. that set up a very defined, magnificent, majestic arc that spanned across the entire sky when you got off the train at woodlands (and lucky the surrounding buildings were low).

i've often wondered, if we walk into a deserted place and stayed there for a while, maybe when we came out again we would find that time has moved forward ten years, and people thought we went missing ten years ago. like a time passage.

there's a tiny bug inside my monitor. i can see it crawling slowly around on the LCD screen.

just admit it. everybody in primary school has this warped concept of what best friends mean. lol

- auntie ruolin

星星粉碎

i sometimes wonder if we will travel through some time passage when we walk into some deserted place. maybe we spend some time there, walk out, and find that ten years have passed in the outer world; people though we went missing ten years ago.

冻伤

it finally poured today, after such a long period of dry and hot weather, though not as terrible as in australia. i don't quite know weather [sic] to be happy or not.

running nose

i finally finished using up the twelve egg whites that have been in the deep freeze for periods ranging from one week to about four months. i had them packed in twos, so i had six bags: one was used for the wash in the potato rosemary bread; two were leaking, so i threw them away; the rest i used for meringues.

the excess egg whites accumulated because i've been making things like pudding. and the recent challah used up four yolks, leaving behind another four whites. come to think of it, it's really hard to use up excess egg whites unless you make meringues, or macaroons.

almost every recipe that uses egg whites for the foam technique also uses the egg yolks elsewhere, so it's difficult to get rid of excess egg whites. (though i remember there's a recipe for a white tiramisu somewhere in nigella's how to eat that can use up a lot of egg whites.)
these are the white meringues. i love the way the shiny unbaked meringues hold their swirls and peaks so firmly. the baked white meringues came out powdery; their sharp, curly, twisted little tails broke off easily.
the chocolate meringues were less stiff. either i folded the cocoa in too vigorously, or i didn't whip the meringue hard enough. so the chocolate meringues were softer to begin with when they went into the oven and they swelled larger. anyhow, the chocolate meringues broke more easily to reveal a very gummy interior (which isn't that undesirable).

immediately i can think of two uses for the meringues. one is to make mini pavlovas, like the one i made so long ago. the other is to make an eton mess.
to make a pavlova, you top a meringue base with some whipped cream and berries. to make eton mess, you whip the cream and fold in berries and crumbled meringues. (i used blueberries in hopes that their sharpness would counter the tooth-aching sweetness of the meringues; what i usually see for eton mess is strawberries.)

on other news, i got a real steal today. i found this organic waitrose strong white bread flour going at half-price, though that's really because it expires in one month. i do hope keeping it in the refrigerator will extend its life.
now i have two flours to use for bread. one is the above, the other is the waitrose very strong canadian white flour. i have an idea though - recently i've been seeing bread recipes that make a distinction between 'high-gluten flour' and 'strong white flour', and i think this is it: i'll use the very strong canadian flour for the high-gluten, and the organic flour for strong white. saves me some money too - the very strong canadian costs a little more, though both are still very expensive.

and right now i can feel the symptoms of flu coming... i'm having a runny nose that has been running all day. and worse is the dull joint aches that are setting in.

last sunday

this was the dinner we had last sunday. hmm i think the last time we did major cooking at jia en's house was labour day last year.

the cooking:
weiyang and jia en combined makes a lot of noise in the kitchen. this was the first time we got to try weiyang's cooking. and it was scary, as in, you wouldn't know what went into the food.

the eating:
beejuan's dish was the mushroom topped with tomato, bacon and cheese. weiyang's was the 烈火鸡条. jia en cooked the pasta with tomato sauce. i made the creamy potato gratin. and yiyan cut up the fruits for the fruit salad.

the celebrating:
old woman turns 20. and we are all going to turn 20 this year too. while seibu is 21. sigh.

use the keys

as oprah says, if you set yourself expectations, you set yourself up for disappointment. after the wonderful challah by reinhart, i thought the potato rosemary bread that i was making would turn out fantastic, but they are a bit sour.
maybe while it's ok to leave the soaker outside overnight for reinhart, it's not that ok for me, in singapore. maybe that's why my challah turned out ok - i left the soaker in the refrigerator. the soaker turned quite dark after one night, but the rosemary's herby smell was quite nice.
i don't know why the loaves turned out a bit sour, mostly because the ingredients i used might be spoilt =/ there is the potato water, which is almost three months old; the wholemeal flour is in fact expired, but i keep it refrigerated so that should be ok; the potato i bought last night was a little sprouted; the egg white in the wash could be quite old.
the soaker and biga are mixed into the final dough. after some surprisingly easy and non-sticky kneading, the dough is rested.
after dividing the rested dough, i divided it and attempted to make two sandwich loaves. but the tins were too broad, so the loaves became too flat in the end.
potato rosemary bread loaves that are more sour than my sourdough loaves. despite that, the crumb was, as promised, soft from the use of potato water.

parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

oh my i just noticed something i misread long time ago. if you look at the random question in my profile, you might notice the error. i thought it meant that the numbers fell out and were lost, hence the answer. but now i think about it, my answer doesn't address the question. anyhow, i will leave it as that for the time being, until i'm brave enough to change the question and answer something else.

i am very excited about making another whole-grain bread from reinhart. but almost immediately i've spotted a printing error/inconsistency in his recipe. it's an error in either the given measurement for the ingredient, or the bakers' percentage value of that ingredient in the formula.

chui

i am short of 9cm to get silver for IPPT. this means more tests to come. and then my dental appointment got shifted away... oh well, i'm looking forward to going for dinner with weiyang. i do need better sleep (with no mosquitoes).

on other news, i managed to find the peter reinhart book for whole-grain breads in the library! i'm contemplating 'losing' the book and paying the library the acquiring price. hmm but i don't know how much they bought it for...

must sleep

the past three days have been a blur, mostly because i was trying to cram too many things into an incredibly shortened weekend. first, there was guard duty taking out my entire saturday, then there was the clique dinner and beejuan's birthday cake to be done. at the same time i was trying to get started on peter reinhart's transitional challah, which i did with tiffany last month, because i had a big pack of whole-wheat flour to use up soon.

so here i am now, just back from the clique dinner at jia en's house, after saturday guard duty (with very broken sleep), and after last friday's pre-bakes. and this is the smug housewife moment: the clever use of time and the refrigerator to start the baking in advance.

last friday i baked the cake for beejuan's birthday and wrapped it up in the refrigerator. the idea was to just take it out today morning and get on with the icing as soon as the chill went off, as opposed to baking the cake today and waiting endlessly for the cool-down. also, last friday i started the soaker and biga for the challah.

i think my baking mojo is back.

the cake for beejuan's birthday was nigella's honey chocolate cake. i was actually very excited to make the marzipan bees for the decoration, though i must say that i hate marzipan itself.
making the cake batter. sometimes i find nigella's cake recipe a bit interesting. her cake recipes are the first (and only) that i've seen which call for boiling water as the liquid ingredient to make the batter.
this was where i stopped on friday. after the cake was cooled, i wrapped it up and stored in the refrigerator until today morning. luckily the cake had some form and structure to it; it didn't break or crumble when being handled during the wrapping and unwrapping.
glazing the cake with the shiny honey chocolate glaze. it was a shame that the side of the cake was not smooth, resulting in a ragged glazing surface instead of a smooth one.
the rejected marzipan bees: either mutilated with glaze, or drowned in the centre of the glaze pool.
after carefully sliding away the parchment paper strips lining the base, the cake is complete. the three surviving marzipan bees perch at the edge of the pool of honey chocolate glaze.

and the transitional challah that i started last friday. it's 'transitional' because it mixes white flour with wholemeal flour. (the recipe comes from a book that advocates the complete conversion to whole-grain baking.
the one on top is the soaker, which is just a mixture of wholemeal flour, water and salt. the one below is the biga, which has the egg, yolks, white flour, water and some yeast. i haven't read reinhart's book yet, but i think the point of making the soaker is to fully hydrate the wholemeal flour, so as to make the resulting dough lighter or something.

and this was where i stopped last friday. the biga and soaker were given a long rest in the refrigerator until today morning. mixing the biga was quite nice; i liked the yolky smell left on my hands after mixing it.
after the long rest, the soaker didn't change much: it just looked darker, and was less sticky. the biga, however, had already doubled in volume, and after scraping some of it out onto the table, you can see the webby interior! it made me feel a bit sick, actually, because it looked like some freaky lair if you zoomed into the deeper holes.
this is the final dough after the biga and soaker have been incorporated into the other ingredients.
braiding the strands together. i like doing this a lot: the repetitive chanting of the sequence of the braiding is somewhat calming.
the one on top is the 4-braid loaf. the one below is the 6-braid loaf. the 4-braid grew very huge during proofing, making the strands look excessively fat. the 6-braid was made with poorly formed strands, resulting in a very unclear braiding pattern at both ends =( also, because of the limitation of my oven, i couldn't bake the 6-braid until the 4-braid was done, by which time i think it over-proofed, causing some unsightly air bubbles on the surface.
the 4- and 6-braid challah loaves baked! but i left the 6-braid in the oven a little too long/overexposed to the heating element; it almost got burnt.
the same fluffy result as last time. this is one wholemeal bread i can like.

sleep-deprived now, and i'm going to hit the bed, which looks all too unfamiliar. like it isn't mine.