Custard Cream Puff 吉士 (卡士达) 泡芙

Pâte à choux

Hubby is not a sweet-toothed person as he does not favour most pastries except for cream puff.  For him to appreciate my baking, I reckoned it was time for me to learn his favourite pastry – Cream Puff.

Cream puff was originated from French pastry name Choux Pastry or Pâte à choux with butter, water, flour, and eggs as main ingredients. I had a cook book from Agnes Chang illustrating Choux Pastry recipe and I was preparing to give it a go. Later, I had the idea to check out some video demonstrations before attempting it. After watching a few Choux pastry videos on youtube , I dived straight into it.  

Result? I was glad the pastry turned out nicely, however I was a bit disappointed with the custard fillings as the custard was not thick enough. I guess I should have stirred and cooked the custard a bit longer to thicken its consistency. Either sweet fillings or savoury fillings can be used.

Since I found visual demostration was much more informative and easy to follow, here I’m showing a clip featuring my Choux pastry making experience.

Pandan Bread 班兰香草面包

Since I resumed my baking hobby, I gave myself a target to explore at least one new baking recipe a week. Below is another bread recipe I adapted from a new local bread making cook book I bought recently.

This recipe used one of the local plants, Pandan to enhance the bread flavour. Pandan a.k.a. Screwpine, is a common tropical plant widely used in Southeast Asian cooking. The natural green coloring extracted from Pandan leaves and the characteristic of its aroma is especially useful for enhancing the color and flavour in cooking especially in dessert making.  Other than as a flavour, the pandan leaves can be used to wrap savory dishes and weaved into handicrafts. Visit my previous dessert recipe Kuih Talam and Kaya posts, which featured the use of pandan leaves as one of the ingredients.

While in New Zealand, the cold weather wasn’t conducive for growing Pandan plant and I could only go for frozen pandan leaves or Pandan essence/paste to get its flavor in cooking. Now in Malaysia, I can easily find this plant grown in my neighbourhood garden.  They grow so easily and wildly in this country. Whenever I wish to use a piece or two, I just need to ask from my neighbour and they would generously share with me. 

For this Pandan bread recipe, I again hand kneaded the bread dough. If you are a follower of my blog, you would know I hand kneaded all my bread dough. This time, I reckon it would be much more effective to show a video clip of my hand kneading process.

I must admit hand kneading is quite a tiring process. In fact, I’ve been considering getting a good stand mixer but held back by the low frequency of my usage as a branded mixer such as Kitchen Aids can be really expensive in Malaysia. On the other hand a cheaper mixer is not powerful enough for dough mixing. L

If you have any good mid budget range mixers to recommend (powerful enough for dough mixing), please drop me a line. Thanks.

Wholemeal Chocolate Marble Toast Bread 可可双色土司

My new Oven is in action!

It has been a while since I last baked. Part of the reason was work while another was the condition of our house that underwent a major renovation for an extended period of time.
I was waiting to get the new kitchen ready with a new oven before I could start to try out new baking recipes. However, it took us more than 4 months to get the house ready before I could put on an apron to try out a new oven in a whole new revamped kitchen.

I was quite excited waiting to play with this kitchen new toy, thinking that I could finally retire my little desktop oven and shelved it in a storage room.  However, to my disappointment the very moment I switched on the oven, it tripped the power supply to the entire house! It took another few weeks for us to arrange for warranty claim and technical support to fix and reinstall the oven before I got to use it again.
Finally, we had a pilot by baking Vanilla muffins last month; Ming Ray was the main master chef in coming up with a successful batch of baking from the oven.

Subsequently, that night I used it for my signature roast pork.  The pork was a bit burnt out, as I was still trying to play around with the oven temperature. This new oven was a bit more sophisticated than the one I used in Auckland.  It had more heating functions, more choices of heating elements and if desired the option to turn on a fan to help circulate the heat inside the oven. I was not familiar with it initially, definitely far more complicated than my little desktop oven! J

Last weekend, I finally made my 1^st loaf of bread in 2012.  This was another recipe adapted from Tangzhong (water-roux) bread from Taiwan famous baker 孟老师的100道面包. If you’ve been following my blog you would know Tangzhong was one of my favourite bread baking method which guaranteed a soft and fluffy bread texture.

Actually this was not a new recipe to me, I did try this recipe back in Auckland in 2010, however it was a failure back then. (Read the post mortem report here).
This time, I didn’t follow the recipe exactly; I had made minor adjustments because some of the ingredients required was not available in my pantry. I left out cheddar cheese while making Tangzhong, I didn’t mix in chocolate chips and also replaced a portion of high protein flour with wholemeal flour. I wanted to get rid of the balance of 30g wholemeal flour which I had on hand.
Nevertheless, when I saw the dough rise nicely, I knew these minor adjustments wouldn’t matter much. True enough, the bread came out nicely, soft and fluffy and the brown and white swirl of marble look effect gave great color combination.

Overall, the bread tasted not as sweet as expected as I didn’t place any chocolate chips. The sweetness of the bread depends on the kind of chocolate chips added in and the coco powder used. If milk chocolate chips or sweet coco powder is used, it will be sweeter. I found even if it was not sweet it was still good to eat on its own. J

Teochew Style Steam Fish 潮州式蒸鱼

年年有余(鱼) To be abundant, to be plentiful year after year

I know this post comes a bit late since Chinese New year was over for 2 weeks now, better late than never I guess. J

It is customary for Chinese to have a feast of symbolic dishes to welcome the Lunar New Year. There are a few “must serve” auspicious-sounding dishes during the Chinese New Year Eve "Family Reunion Dinner". Other than the usual chicken, duck and pork, fish is one of them that plays major role in festive celebrations.

Fish in Mandarin 鱼 is pronounced as “Yu".  A homonym of fish, is the word abundance/surplus (余). Hence it is a Chinese ritual to serve fish during the reunion dinner to signify a wish for abundance and plentiful harvest year after year年年有余 (nian nian you yu). In addition, the fish is to be served whole, with head and tail attached, symbolizing a good beginning and ending for the coming year.

For this dragon New Year, it was our first CNY since we got back from Auckland. We were delighted to have a bigger group of 30 family members in celebrating reunion dinner. We joined my dad along with all my brothers and sister and her in-law Lee’s families’ to dine at Red Rock Hotel, Tian Tian Restaurant.

The following were some of the signature New Year dishes we had from our 8 course sumptuous reunion dinner.

Prosperity salmon Yee Sang

Braised abalone, sea cucumber, mushroom and broccoli

Last but not least the FISH!

Soya sauce steamed grouper

For the 2^nd day of CNY, my 2^nd sister-in-law suggested to have simple homemade family lunch at home.  In view of the fact that during the first few days of Chinese New Year, dining out was very difficult because many restaurants were close for the New Year break, I gladly supported her idea and contributed my help in the kitchen.

The following was one of the dishes that I helped my sister-in-law to prepare. Steamed fish in Teochew Style, a favourite steam menu I often cook at home.

Teochew Style Steam Fish 潮州式蒸鱼

Assam Sambal Seafood Curry 亚参三巴海鲜咖哩

Wanna a bowl of Nyonya curry to spice you up?

As promised, here is the recipe that will spice you up using the Sambal Belacan Chili paste prepared in my previous post.

The following version of seafood curry is more like the Nyonya style where Assam was used instead of coconut milk. Assam in English means tamarind. With tamarind as one of the ingredients, you can expect this is a sour and spicy curry. J

Once you have this ready homemade sambal chili paste stocked up in your pantry, whenever you yearn for curry, you can have it in less than 30 minutes and without the concern of unhealthy preservative in the food.

This round of seafood curry, we used squids and prawns.  Basically you can use any seafood to your liking. For fish you can check out my previous curry recipe Assam Stingray which also used the same homemade chili paste.

Let’s cook healthily and eat healthily!

Sambal Belacan Chili paste三巴峇拉煎辣椒酱

Sambal is one of the most popular spicy condiments used in Southeast-Asian-influenced cuisine. Belacan is a Malay word.  It means dried shrimp paste. Sambal Belacan is dried shrimp chili paste. For Malaysian, Indonesian and Singaporean spicy food lover, sambal is one of the common spices easily found in their pantry. Due to the modern lifestyle many people opt to buy pre-packed readymade spices.  However considering the side effects of food preservatives, why not spend a little effort to make our own healthy Sambal Belacan paste?

Sambal Belacan Chili  Paste - Featured in Group Recipes 28th January 2012

The following is a recipe from Auntie Lan.  Again I’m only sharing the main ingredients.  Apologies for not giving detailed measurement as I didn’t manage to weigh the ingredients before she started to grind the paste. You can roughly adjust to your own liking. The following photo showed the measurement of half portion of the ingredients.  To get fine texture, we grind the ingredients in two batches.
We used blender to grind the chili ingredients. It may be too much of asking to follow the traditional custom using stone mortar to pound the chili into paste. However, sambal made using stone mortar is supposed to taste much better.  

If you wish to know how to use this chili paste, stay tune for my next post, coming soon! J

Happy 2012 Chinese New Year 龙年行大运

Wishing You and Your Family A Happy, Healthy & Prosperous Dragon Year!

开心迎春庆团圆

心想事成万事利

乐业安居步步升

龙马精神朝气旺

龙运财运齐亨通