Walnut Tart and thoughts about getting dessert proportion right

I'm thought of being a wee bit philosophical today and get back to the roots of dessert.

A quick check on google shows many dictionaries defining dessert as the last course of a meal, normally a sweet dish.

Cuisine Net further explains that it came from the French word "desservir", meaning "to clear the table": "At a Medieval banquet, a table was laid with fantastic dishes, all of which were removed before the arrival of the last course. Dessert was originally quite light, and it was intended to clear the palate -- and the state of mind."

And so the French in Rémi says, we must always have dessert after every meal. Even if it's just a little cup of yoghurt.

What about the Chinese desserts? They are not just served at the end of meals, but also as snacks or with tea during the day.

Wikipedia's entry on Chinese desserts quite aptly classify them into biscuits, candies, rice-based snacks, jellies and soups. So some Chinese desserts are more suited for consumption as tea time snacks than as the last course of a meal.

But French or Chinese desserts, the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility still applies. A light dessert gives a pleasurable conclusion to a hearty meal. Too much of it spoils the state of mind and stomach.

Take the picture of an apple tart on the right by Rémi. He had it on a trip to California a year ago and swore that it tasted horrible. Not a surprise, he didn't finish the overly humongous pastry. And you don't order an apple tart to eat mostly pastry crust.

Just like the Chinese mooncake, to those who complain that it taste horribly sweet, they must have tried to eat the whole biscuit when the right way to eating it is at most a quarter slice with a cup of Chinese tea.

And if you see a fruit tart with super thick crust or too much custard filling, beware. More likely, the chef is trying to get away with having less fruits with more crust.

The Walnut Tart below comes from Camille's classic French cookbook. I had wanted to make walnut tart for a long time since trying it at the Bordeaux Bakery in Wellington. I have adjusted the quantity slightly to make the tart more nutty. And as the tart is quite hearty, a small slice per serving gives a more satisfactory conclusion to a meal.

Walnut and Honey Tart (Tarte au Miel et aux Noix)


about 200g walnuts (more if necessary)
150ml liquid cream
50g butter
50g brown sugar
100g honey (try to use a strongly flavoured honey, such as bush honey, mountain honey or Corsican honey)

Sweet pastry dough (pâte sucrée or pâte sablée)
50g white sugar
1 egg
125g melted unsalted butter
270g flour

To make the dough, mix sugar, egg, butter together. Stir hard with a spoon and add flour. As the egg mixture thickens to a dough, use your hands to knead into a smooth dough. Chill for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 200C.

Press the pastry with your fingers over the base and sides of the greased tin. Poke all over with a fork.

Mix the butter with the sugar. It may be easier to allow the butter to soften sufficiently before you blend them together. Add the walnuts pieces. Follow by the honey and cream. Mix well. You may like to add more walnuts if you find filling too creamy. The idea is to cover the whole tart base with the nuts.

Spread walnut and honey filling on the tart. Recipe says bake for 40 minutes, but my nuts were burning after 20 minutes. So do watch out.

Serve when the tart has cooled.

The tart keeps well for a few days.

Almost given up on croissant

No, I won't attempt to learn how to make croissant, it's something that even professionals in Wellington fail to make it right. Rémi has almost given up on buying croissants here after many disappointments from supermarket shelves and French cafes.

Pictured above is a Pear and Almond Tart I attempted from my favourite Christelle Le Ru's dessert cookbook. It doesn't quite look like tart because I have kept the shape squarish. It's made using ready made frozen puff pastry bought from the supermarket, so the only work needed is to cut the pears, cook it (though my pears were so deliciously ripe that I should have skipped this step on hindsight). The other work is to make the almond cream, which I will share here, because it is so wickedly good, that we used sandwiched the remainder in croissants. The cream managed to transform the dry plain croissants, making a wonderful warm breakfast on a cold autumn morning.

Almond Cream
To go with croissants, or use in pear tart or both

60g yoghurt
70g sugar
70g ground almond
1 egg
70g melted unsalted butter
a few drops of vanilla essence
rind of half a lemon

Mix yoghurt, sugar and ground almonds in a bowl. Add egg, butter, vanilla essence and lemon zest and mix well.

One can reduce amount of butter and sugar accordingly to suit his/her dietary preference. It's quite a lot of butter here especially.

To use with croissant, sandwiched the croissant with cream, top with some almond flakes and bake for about 15 minutes over low heat (160C perhaps).

Steamed Buns and my guide to finding affordable cookbooks on Chinese cooking

Rémi the breadmaker has hijacked my bao project. He loves to eat Chinese steamed buns so much. So he couldn't resist not making them when he heard about my intention to do so.

I have two steamed bun recipes, but eventually chose the one from "Chinese Desserts 100" written by Winnie jie (I trust the Cantonese to be good dim sum makers). I bought it a bookstore in Hong Kong's airport while on transit. Rémi's Mandarin is certainly still as good as my Malay, so he will not be able to read the Chinese instructions. But fret not, like many of my Chinese cookbooks, the recipes are presented in both English and Chinese.

It's a paradox, but bilingual cookbooks that require the extra effort of translating recipes are actually cheaper than English ones. Even the Chinese version of cookbooks by celebrity chefs are much cheaper than the original English versions found in the same bookstore.

Anyway, I am not too interested in cookbooks by celebrity chefs nowadays but prefer more affordable ones by seemingly anonymous homecooks. To cater to the growing English market, more and more Chinese and Malaysian cookbooks are bilingual. It doesn't matter if you don't understand a single Chinese word. Just let yourself be guided by the accompanying deliciously shot food photos and be tolerant of the less than perfect English on the recipes. The recipes work!

So for $10-$20, you have a wider range of cookbooks on all kinds of Chinese, Malay/Indonesian and Peranakan cuisines to choose from than if you stick to purely English cookbooks.


Steamed bun (包)
Makes about 16 small or 10 medium buns

Basic bun dough:
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon yeast
2 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon lard or vegetable oil
5/8 cup fresh milk (warm)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon oil for greasing

Filling:
we're less imaginative this time, being our first bun-making experiment, so we use ready-made red bean paste bought from the Asian grocery store. But Rémi is already dreaming of making nutella buns...I prefer traditional fillings, like lotus paste, minced pork, chicken, vegetables...will hope to try egg custard fillings on the recipe someday too.


To make the dough, put flour, yeast, sugar and lard into a bowl. Add warm milk and mix well. Pour onto a countertop and knead for about 5 minutes into a soft dough. If the dough is too dry, add more warm milk or water.

Grease a deep bowl, Put in dough and cover with a damp cloth and set aside to let it prove for about one and half hours, until it has doubled in size.

Beat the dough forcefully with the palm once to squeeze out the air, put it on the countertop and roll flat into a cross shape. Sprinkle baking powder on top and knead for a while. Set aside to ferment for about 30 minutes.

Divide the dough into 16 portions. Do so by rolling it into a sausage and cutting it into equal parts. Roll each portion into a ball, flatten and wrap in the filling. Line each bun with a small square of paper.

Steam for 10 minutes. To prevent water from dripping onto the buns and affecting its look, cover the buns loosely with baking paper. Serve hot.

Sweet Potato Balls

Being not a big fan of sweet potatoes (aka kumara), it took me quite a while before I am again seduced by its abundance at the Sunday market.

I bought two yellow fleshed and one orange fleshed sweet potatoes, having a vague idea of what I am going to do with them.

Although I am not a big fan of sweet potatoes, they deserve credit for being a poor man's marzipan. I used to hear stories from our grandparent generation about how the tubers were their staple during the turbulent second world war years when food was scarcity.

Three simple ways of cooking sweet potatoes are: 1) steamed on its own. having piping hot steam sweet potatoes is perfect on a cold day; 2) cooked with plain rice porridge; 3) boiled in ginger + sugar syrup to make a clear sweet soupy dessert.

So with two of the sweet potatoes I've bought, I've tried (2) and (3). For (3), it is very straightforward. Using two different types of sweet potatoes, diced them into cubes. Boil them together with 2 slices of ginger and enough sugar until soft. Adding a pandan leaf tied into a knot enhances the taste significantly.

My third experiment with sweet potatoes is to make a sweet snack, that I had tried years ago at Maxwell market. The steps for sweet potato balls are like making onde onde, except that the dough is deep fried with a variety of different fillings.

Being lazy to experiment, I had ready-made red bean paste bought from the Asian grocery store, that we had intended to make steamed buns (paos).


Sweet Potato Balls 番薯担

1 sweet potato (both the orange or yellow fleshed variety can be used. In fact, I had mixed both together)
approx. 1 cup glutinous rice flour
white sesame seeds

Filling suggestion:
red bean paste, or roasted crushed peanuts tossed with sugar, or lotus paste or yam paste or black sesame paste etc.


Boil the sweet potato in boiling water until it's soft. Peel and mash the flesh.

When it's cool enough, start to knead the sweet potato into a dough by adding the flour. Add the flour slowly, until you get the consistency you fancy. It may be possible to not use flour at all, if you prefer a full sweet potato texture.

I've seen some recipes adding sugar to the dough, but I find sweet potato sweet enough. Furthermore, the filling is also sweet. So sugar is quite redundant, I feel.

Flour your hands so that the dough doesn't stick to them. Pinch some dough and roll into roughly a ping pong ball size. Flatten and put fillings inside. Roll back into a ball. Repeat until you've finished the dough.

Roll the balls with sesame seeds.

Heat oil for deep frying. Fry them until golden brown. They are very nice when eaten warm, freshly fried. But you can also snack on them when they're cooled.

Tips:
If you're like me and don't like deep frying, make smaller balls. Instead of filling a pan full of oil, use a wok, add about 3mm depth of oil for frying the sweet potato balls, just have to turn them on all sides manually until all sides are cooked and golden brown. Soak up excess oil on kitchen paper.

Fresh Oysters with Vinaigrette of tomatoes and shallots

Yes, we have a lot of fresh food over the weekend.

Besides the duck liver (which is still sitting in the fridge and no longer fresh by now) and freshly grated coconut, I finally satisfied my craving for fresh oysters without the exorbitant price tag that comes with eating them at restaurants.

For people like Rémi who are less tolerant of the taste of raw oysters with just lemon juice (strange, since raw oysters feature very much in the French traditional Christmas feast, much to my delight), I made a vinaigrette to kind of mask the rawness of the oyster taste. At least, there's something to crunch on besides the jelly soft oyster meat.

The vinaigrette draws inspiration from what we recently had at a restaurant (it cost $4 per oyster, so we had only 1 each), as well as a quick browse of some google results.

Fresh Oysters with Vinaigrette
1 dozen fresh oysters

2-3 cherry tomatoes, chopped
1 shallot, chopped
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
pinch of salt and pepper
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
juice of half a lemon

Mixed ingredients for vinaigrette altogether. Serve with the fresh oysters.

Fresh Coconut Indulgence

Despite the absence of new entries for over a week, I am still cooking diligently to fill our stomachs, albeit with less fresh inspirations.

The week has been punctuated by a mix of successes and failures. The highlight being Rémi's attempt at making foie gras paté after chancing upon fresh duck liver at the supermarket over the weekend.

I'm not a big fan of anything to do with liver (except pig's liver mee sua soup without the liver itself). But goose liver became an exception for me after tasting the Fontan's famously delicious foie gras. French are particular about how they eat their prized foie gras and you're not supposed to spread the pâté thinly on the bread, but rather, eat as a whole chunky slice on it. Yet, the freshly made foie gras is so smooth (read fat) you instantly forget you're eating liver.

But the conclusion of our expensive (having bought 1kg of duck liver and 1 bottle of brandy) foie gras adventure in New Zealand: leave the ducks alone here. The key to good foie gras is as much about birds' oversized French diet as it is about how it is cooked.

On the same weekend, we also tediously attempted to make Malay kuehs. Tedious because we used FRESH coconut. As in, bought a whole coconut, used a hammer to hack it open, and painstakingly grated the flesh inside (to Rémi's credit, he did all of these). Unlike in Singapore, where we can easily buy freshly grated coconut off supermarket shelves or at the wet market, we find only whole coconuts (presumably from the nearby Pacific Islands).

I can say for certain on behalf of Rémi, we're not going to grate coconut ourselves too often, so with this precious lot of grated coconut, we cooked them with gula melaka (palm sugar) to make sweet coconut fillings for kueh dadar (pancakes with sweet coconut ), pulut inti (glutinous rice with sweet coconut) and kueh koci (sweet coconut in glutinous rice flour dough). Whatever remains of the sweet coconut, we sandwiched them in sesame burger bun for breakfast today.

My kueh dadar recipe comes from "Authentic recipes from Indonesia". In Singapore and Malaysia, green colouring is commonly added to the pancake, but not in this cookbook. Anyway, I didn't quite fancy artificial colouring, and although I had also painstakingly pounded some pandan leaves to squeeze out some green juice out of it, it wasn't intense enough dye the batter.

Similarly, the rice in Pulut Inti is traditionally blue but I had left it as white. Also lacking in banana leaves to wrap the rice and coconut, I made them sushi style. The recipe comes from my Food & Nutrition textbook that I had for my O levels.

Kueh Dadar
makes about 6-8 pancakes

75g flour
1 egg
250ml thick coconut milk
pinch of salt
1 tablespoon oil

Coconut filling
50g gula melaka (palm sugar)
30ml water
50g freshly grated coconut
pinch of salt
1 pandan leaf, tied into a knot

Make coconut filling by bringing the sugar and water to boil in a saucepan. Over low heat, simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes until the sugar is dissolved. Add all other ingredients and stir continuously until the mixture is well mixed and dries up. Discard the pandan leaves.

To make the pancakes, combine flour, egg, coconut milk and salt in a mixing bowl. Whisk into a smooth batter.

Grease a frying pan and heat over low heat. When the pan is heated, scoop 1 ladle of the batter onto the pan and quickly turn to obtain a thin round layer. Cook until the pancake sets and begins to brown, then flip over the cook the other side for a few seconds. Remove and continue doing the same until the batter is finished.

To serve, place pancake on flat surface, top with coconut fillings and roll up tightly into a cylinder shape.

Pulut Inti

1 cup glutinous rice (wash and soak in water for at least half an hour)
125ml coconut milk (meaning for 250ml cup of rice, you halve the amount of coconut milk)
pinch of salt
blue colouring, optional

Coconut filling, same as for kueh dadar


Drain the soaked rice and pour into a greased shallow cake tin. Mix in the salt, coconut milk and blue colouring.

Steam until the rice is cooked (about half an hour).

Make the coconut fillings, like you do for the kueh dadar.

To assemble, put 2 tablespoons of the cooked glutinous rice onto a greased banana leaf and a spoonful of coconut filling on top. Wrap up nicely for serving. Or do it sushi style, roll the rice into a ball and top with coconut filling.