dorothy will save you!

啜泣

誰明白我想 想一覺熟睡
誰料我竟 參加這派對
期待你 陪著我 不登對都有趣

就趁你 快樂問 你喜歡誰
你卻說 是否指 戀愛伴侶
若是那種 自問怕累
然後我 咬著唇 勒住眼淚

如若我肯 撫心去自問
其實我想 得到你一吻
然後你 承認我 我是誰的候任

就算我 已鑑定 你非好人
也至少 換得到 一個烙印
但是我想　並沒有問
其實你 這壞人
從來未 為女生 虔誠認真

我愛你 這秘密 誰願意 去証實
得到這 憂鬱症 也不委屈
將燈光 關上後 便放心 懷念你
只可惜 只夠力 啜泣

我對你 再老實 難令你 變老實
單戀者 都可以 勇敢呼吸
趁你我 還未消失
寧願別 公開秘密 直到末日

如若我肯 撫心去自問
其實我想 得到你一吻
然後你 承認我 我是誰的候任

就算我 已鑑定 你非好人
也至少 換得到 一個烙印
但是我想　並沒有問
其實你 這壞人
從來未 為女生 虔誠認真

我愛你 這秘密 誰願意 去証實
得到這 憂鬱症 也不委屈
將燈光 關上後 便放心 懷念你
只可惜 只夠力 啜泣

我對你 再老實 難令你 變老實
單戀者 都可以 勇敢呼吸
趁你我 還未消失
寧願別 公開秘密 直到末日

我愛你 這秘密 誰願意 去証實
得到這 憂鬱症 也不委屈
將燈光 關上後 便放心 懷念你
只可惜 只夠力 啜泣

我對你 再老實 難令你 變老實
單戀者 都可以 勇敢呼吸
趁你我 還未消失
明日就 公開秘密 直到末日

其實我想 躲於你附近
其實我想 賭賭我命運 然後我想

just ate a bowl of mashed potatoes that i cooked for tomorrow. i wonder why i do that sometimes. talk about trying to lose weight and pimples. but what to do? after adding full-fat milk and butter to soft potatoes and whipping it to utter creaminess, how could i resist leaving it till tomorrow.

keppel island

oh the strawberry cupcake hides a secret.

kill wakefield

sunday was shopping day, and weiyang asked the question of the year: when is christmas this year?

this week, i learnt the value of actually working hard to get what you want - and i'm talking about the mangoes! oh my the mangoes, we got so many of them down in one evening. we cut up some, placed them in a mess tin and poured over instant jelly mixture. chilling overnight, we got a nice raspberry jelly full of mango chunks.

may is actually coming to an end. it's been about six months since platoon 6 ORDed.

五指山

today i made a banana cream pie, just to use up some very old pie dough and lemon curd, and some old pastry cream.
hmm, something red developed in my lime curd...

this is joey's new song, which is quite nice. the video, however, is a bit dumb.

eulerian sonata

last sunday i watched star trek with sunshine. i ate a chocolate souffle at late night. i just moved bunk - in five trips - and got a few mangoes of the trees. on other news, i got this book for a real steal at harris.

i also saw a squirrel munching on stuff, and everyday, someone finds a new way of plucking the mangoes. i fear by the end of two weeks there are none left for me. youth and beauty - ephemeral - fading away all the time.

fatt mulan - speaking without permission...

theory

there is a very good case for eating bread. you know the law of conservation of mass? when you eat, there is no way you can gain more weight than that of the food you eat. this means, for example, when you eat 1kg of fat, you can't gain more than 1kg in weight.

so, the theory is, you could eat something that weighs little, and yet makes you full easily. case in point: bread.

hmm, a lot of the food blogs i follow aren't being updated.

was it venice?

just made cream puffs today.
this is the cooked pastry cream, which is the easier part, i think.
this is the pâte à choux. first, butter, sugar and sugar are boiled together. the flour is added, and soon enough a dough forms. this dough is beaten until it cools down, then a lot of eggs are added until the pâte à choux is smooth and sticky.

i think it's shocking how the pastry puffs up so much. i thought it would be a quick process, but turns out the pastry puffed up very slowly. slowly but surely. (but they deflate a little on cooling.)

i also learnt a trick from mummy regarding egg washes. after beating the egg, strain it through a wire mesh, and then discard residue. this gives an egg wash that is free of those lumps of egg white that refuse to break up. the resulting baked good has a very golden crust that is so 幼.
then a new problem came up: the puffs revealed a hollowed base! i don't know why.
anyhow, just slice them open on top and dollop with the pastry cream (which i found too bodiless), and replace the top.

the wedding issue

oh i played with my baby cousin today. she tries to take my spectacles. hands me her napkin. babbles for a while. shakes her head. holds on to my finger. presses on a few piano keys. walks a few steps on her bed. tries to chew her book.

maybe perfect just looks a little different than you imagined.

cast/uncast

plan: shop

target: bag, spectacles

weather: gloomy

shopping partner: none

report: epic fail

okidoki

i'm trying, i'm trying to finalise the recipe for jeffrey cookies. but just to play with the recipe, i included some white chocolate chips this time. you can see it in the dough, but not quite in the baked cookie.
i'm feeling my way into getting the right amount of salt in the recipe. (i only recently realised that my recipe didn't use salt; either i accidentally deleted it along the way, or i never used it.) still, the butter to sugar to flour proportion seems to be correct now.

and then i made some whole-wheat brioche, because i found some good butter on sale and bought lots of it to store. the recipe for these comes from peter reinhart. brioche refers to rich, buttery white bread, so this whole-wheat version almost doesn't make sense. still, it's nice to eat a fatty bread that's whole-wheat.
the biga and the soaker. one is whole-wheat flour with lots of eggs. the other is whole-wheat flour with lots of melted butter. so much that it makes you scared.
getting the fridge-cold pre-doughs to mix into the final dough was quite difficult. the cold pre-doughs were quite hard, especially the one with all the butter. but after a while everything came together.
divided the dough and preshaped the pieces into balls. reinhart's method of shaping the brioches à tête ensures that the head stays in the centre all the time. first you roll the ball into a cone shape, then make a hole in the fatter end. then, you push the cone end through the hole to form the nub of dough in the centre. then pan them in (my newly bought!) brioche à tête molds. i think the size of the dough was a little too big for the mold though. but i'm very excited about these molds because it took me so long to find them. now i can finally make perfect brioches à tête with fluted sides.
puff, puff, puff. the brioches grew (and outgrew the molds). so they sagged a little on the edges. but overall, very pretty, very buttery-smelling, very golden, very crusty.
i have a dilemma. i don't know if i should be eating the $2.50 breakfast set at mcdonald's anymore. you see, it was a $2 set initially: sausage mcmuffin and coffee. to change the drink to milo, you have to add 35 cents. now, it's a $2.50 set: sausage mcmuffin and premium brew coffee. (correct me if i'm wrong,) it still costs 35 cents to change the drink to milo. isn't there a problem here? it's like saying the milo has also been upgraded to premium brew milo or something, such that to change the drink to this 'new' milo you have to make the some amount of payment (when in fact the milo has been salient in this change of menu and cost).

the fake captain rank

apparently, people say the sourdough chocolate cake was nice. for me, the more i ate it, the more it reminded me of the sourdough starter in it. i suppose - as with all things sourdough - the cake needs to rest for some time for the flavours to emerge, meld together.

a mug of hot chocolate, a classic sociological cliché. bruch violin concerto, or elgar cello concerto?

reliably unreliable

it is at this moment that i believe my life has come to a standstill. that whilst time is moving - a never-ending, ever-flowing, river - my life has just paused here. here and now: like the person who stands at the bank and watches the water in the river continue its endless - relentless - journey forward, (ironically) back to where it came from.

and it becomes a cycle, much like seibu's theory of love.

by the way, i take back the comments about the beauty of the mango trees bearing fruit. now they're shedding the mangoes, which lay fallen and rotting on the ground.

怎么放弃

i made some brioches à tête from the american book. compared to the previous nigella brioches, these had a lesser proportion of butter.
butter, milk and eggs: these are the ingredients that tenderize the otherwise lean dough. the butter is a lot, but instead of weighing down the dough, you get this light feathery product.
the dough is formed first before the butter is added. adding the butter seemed to overwhelm the dough initially, as you can see in the photo; the butter was outside the dough for quite long. i think brioche dough is going to be very hard to knead by hand, so do it by machine.
after a sufficiently long knead, the butter becomes all incorporated, and it pulls away from the bowl easily. i think i might have overdone it and heated it up too much: there was butter beginning to leach out.
after a long overnight rest in the refrigerator, i divided the dough into 12 pieces and preshaped them into rounds. it was surprisingly easy to combine the scraps of dough into cohesive balls, and they weren't sticky.
after a quick refrigeration to firm up the dough again, i did the final shaping, which wasn't that easy. first create a head - the tête - and then make a dent in the main body to sit the head inside. initially, the shaped rolls were quite promising, but as they were proofing, it wasn't easy to keep the head centred; many of them slipped to the sides. during baking, even the nicest ones lost alignment.
uncentred brioches à tête, but nevertheless pretty. i'll probably be making this recipe time and again, because who can resist a nice, rich, buttery bread roll. so, i'll be practising shaping them again.
brioche, the bread behind the brouhaha. it's so light and fluffy inside, and so rich it'll give me pimples again.

i also made a sourdough chocolate cake for mothers' day. the recipe comes from here. yes, it involves sourdough. my starter has been sitting dormant for a long time. even when i took out a pinch to make the vermont sourdough, i didn't feed it. the thing is, i've accumulated too much of it now. but still, i had to feed it for this recipe. luckily, then, the recipe used up a lot of it too.
so, there are two parts: the sourdough mixture, which has milk and flour; and the cocoa mixture, which has fat, sugar and eggs. folding the two together, i might have left the mixture not combined well enough. some whitish bits turned up in the cake eventually, and these were the remnants of the white sourdough - but no more live yeast!
so i overfilled the cake tins and ended up getting big domed cakes, which i had to slice and level. they smelled very richly chocolate though.
cooked the espresso icing, which set up too quickly, and was too sweet. i think i'm just not fated to decorate and ice cakes. every attempt just fails.
so i quickly spooned the icing over the cakes, but still got very fugly-looking stuff. oh well. the taste test? the icing was cloying. but the cake had this interesting flavour dimension which i think no one would be able to tell what unless they knew it had sourdough in it. but yes, a hint of bread in the cake.