KookyCulinary

This was probably the most stressful cake that I’ve ever made. It started off really well. I made the marshmallow fondant & sugar paste earlier in the day. So that was all ready. Then by 6 pm I started to bake the cake for the bottom layer. I made a Chocolate Mud Cake and it turned out beautiful. THEN it started to go downhill from there!! This was what happened…..

8 pm - Bake the cake #1 for the top layer. It was a SIMPLE butter cake which I’ve baked before. After 15 mins, I looked at my oven & realized that my cake was overflowing & almost spilling onto the bottom of my oven. So I slided in a cake tray to catch the dripping. My first thought was maybe I overfilled the batter, so that’s why it overflowed. Since it overflowed, the cake ended up with a sinkhole. OK, no problem. I’ll just bake another one.

10 pm - Trial #2. I filled the cake pan with only half the batter before baking it. I checked it a few times through the oven glass door. It was looking fine at first.. THEN the center of the cake started to sink & became a sinkhole!!! I was really feeling stressed out at that moment but the cake still had to be baked, so no time to panic yet.

12 am - Trial #3. I was trying to figure out the problem and I thought it might be the eggs that was the problem. I was using the extra large eggs and that might be a little too much egg, thus causing it to rise too much. So I made another cake with large eggs instead. As usual, it started off well and then it happened AGAIN!!! Another sinkhole in the middle of the cake!! Then I started to panic. I was supposed to be using the time to make all my sugar paste decorations, instead I am wasting time trying to get the cake right. I decided to call it quits and try again the next day.

Next day 7 am - Trial #4. Another cake went into the oven and guess what, tragedy struck again!!! Till now I still have no idea why the cake did not turn out. Previous attempt was successful, so I did not know what was causing the problem. I was not going to try the same recipe again and I was running out of time. The party was at 2 pm and there were still a lot of other things to be done. So I either had to just totally leave out the top layer or go to plan B which was to use a box mix. Luckily I had one in the pantry. 

9 am - Trial #5. That cake did finally turned out nice but since it was from a box mix, the cake was also soft. Soft cake does not work very well with fondant but I didn’t have any choice. It was either that cake or a one layer castle. 

This was what I ended up with  . . . . . . . a pink & purple princess castle cake. Besides the princesses which were inedible figurines and candles, everything else was edible. The towers were made from rice crispies covered in marshmallow fondant, topped with ice-cream cones covered with purple marshmallow fondant then sprinkled with purple sugar.

There were a lot of decorations that I had planned but didn’t materialize due to the time spent on the cake. I also had to cover the top layer with lots of flowers because as predicted, the top layer started sinking under the weight of the fondant. See how Snow White is a litte lopsided!!! :(   So if you ever want to cover a cake with fondant, make sure that it is a sturdier cake like a butter cake or pound cake.

In spite of all the disasters, the important thing was that the birthday girl and her friends loved the cake and that was what matters in the end. They even ate the towers!! : )

Every year I only bake and decorate one big cake and that is Lil’ C’s birthday cake. Her first birthday cake was the first cake I had ever frosted. I think I have come a long way since then but I still have a lot to learn. Hopefully someday I will find the time to take a proper class and learn the proper techniques because whatever I am doing now are all through trial and errors!! : P

1st birthday - Pooh cake: sponge cake with buttercream

2nd birthday - Elmo cake: sponge cake with buttercream and marshmallow fondant

3rd birthday - Princess Doll Cake: Vanilla Chiffon Cake with white chocolate strawberry mousse, buttercream and sugar craft.

4th birthday - Her 4th birthday cake almost did not materialize because I had a major cake disaster. I may have also have been a little too ambitious with the cake. It involved two cakes, rice crispies, sugar cones, marshmallow fondant and sugar craft. Easy guess. eh? : ) Will post my disastrous cake as soon as I can.

Mooncake festival is just one month away. It seems that many food bloggers have started their mooncake making already. I am still debating whether I want to make any this year or not. The one thing that I do not like in making the traditional mooncake is making the filling. Unlike in Malaysia and Singapore where ready-made filling is easily available, here we have to make the filling ourselves. Personally it is very tedious to fry the red bean or lotus seed filling. Lots of stirring and splattering!

In the meantime, here is a review of some of the past mooncakes that I made:

Rainbow Snowskin Mooncake (For recipe, see this post)

Traditional Mooncake with Lotus Seed Paste Filling. For recipe & step-by-step instruction, see this post.

Pandan Coffee Jelly Mooncake ((*sorry for the blurry photos. This was done pre-blog days! )
I am still trying to find the recipe for this. I made this a few years ago. Will update it when I find it. But I do know that I made it following this recipe with a little modification.

I have something different that i want to try out this year but my only problem is time. We’ll be going off on another vacation next week. So hopefully I will be able to either squeeze in a little time either before or after the trip.

Ok, I promise this is the last of my Chinese New Year bakes. How can it be Chinese New Year without pineapple tarts, right?

I actually made the fillings a week ago but have never gotten around the make the tarts. Actually I also could not decide which recipe to try since there are so many different recipes out on the internet! Then on Saturday, I went to a Chinese New Year potluck with my bible study group. There I met a new friend A who generously shared her easy recipe for the pineapple tart. A, thanks for a great and easy recipe. It’s delicious!! Hope you’ll be coming back here for vacation again soon.

I wasn’t planning to bake any Chinese New Year cookies this year but after drooling at this talented mommy’s yummy Chinese New Year bakes, I couldn’t resist the temptation anymore. So I ended up baking this super easy and one of my favorite cookie, the Chinese Peanut Cookie.

Recipe:
500 gm roasted peanuts - finely ground
500 gm flour
250 gm icing sugar
3 cups oil (approximately)

Method:
1. Mix peanuts, flour and sugar together till well-mixed.
2. Drizzle in oil and mix till you can form a ball with the dough. Do not add in all the oil at one time. Just add enough for the dough to be formed.
3. Either use a mini cookie scoop or shape by hand into little balls.
4. Apply eggwash before baking at 325 for 20 minutes or till golden brown.

Chinese New Year is approaching next week. Majority of the Chinese in the world will have a big celebration. I always feel that I am one of those rare minority who don’t really celebrate New Year. I left home at the age of 13 for further education and since then, I rarely go home for New Year. One of the reason was because the New Year season was always the busiest for my family since we were in the tourism business. So we never had the time to celebrate CNY. However even though we don’t really celebrate as a family, we would always receive lots of yummy goodies from relatives and friends. That is probably the only “New Year tradition” that I know - the food.

For this New Year, I haven’t made any cookies yet but I did make this sticky cake. It’s one of my favorite New Year food. I love to pan fry this with either egg or sandwich between 2 slices of yam (taro) or sweet potato. I know some people like it soft and coated with shredded coconut. How do you like to eat your sticky cake?

It was truly a food fest over the Thanksgiving holidays. I think I gain a few pounds just over those few days! Help!! How do I lose weight fast???
Anyway, for Thanksgiving day, we went to a potluck. I made Yong Tau Foo but was in such a hurry that I forgot to take photos. It’s the same as the one that I made before here.

The next day, we did a Thanksgiving dinner. We had turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce & bread.

Day 3 was another potluck. DH made Hokkien Mee. Since it was a last minute decision to cook this, we didn’t have the fat noodle, so we had to use another noodle that I had in my freezer. That’s why it doesn’t look the original but it definitely did taste like it.  

After last year’s attempt at making snowskin (ping pei) mooncake, I decided that for this year I wanted to try making baked mooncake instead. After all I did lug back the heavy mooncake mold from Malaysia, so I better make full use of it. But as the mooncake festival draws closer, the lazy bug in me kicked in & I really was not in the mood to make it. But this weekend, 2 days to mooncake festival with my 2nd batch of salted egg just screaming to be used, I finally got off my lazy behind & made mooncakes.

Many many hours later………….. Mooncakes, anyone???

Look at how my salted egg yolk turned out! They look so nice & orange.
Just what I needed for mooncakes.

Before baking

After it has been cut. Lotus paste mooncake with 1 egg yolk. In case you are wondering about the black spots, those are sunflower seeds. I couldn’t find “kuaci” so thought that sunflower seeds were a good substitute. Unfortunately, I don’t really like it. I guess I should have just used all lotus paste. But overall, I still need to do some minor tweaking but still pretty happy the way they turned out.

For mooncake recipes & step-by-step instructions, check out Jo’s Deli .  

What would Thanksgiving be without a traditional Thanksgiving meal?? This year, we had 2!! One at a friend’s house and another at home. This is what we ate at home. Turkey, ham, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce & dinner roll. Yummy!