Mountain of peanut butter cookies

I can't say peanut butter is my favourite spread. The thickness and richness sometimes feel too heavy and dry to my liking. Yet, there are times when I crave for it. So, although I do not bake cookies often, I had an urge recently to make peanut butter cookies.

What I have learnt from this peanut butter cookie session:
1) As the recipe uses only 1 egg, I can't divide the portion and so ended up with a big heap of cookies;
2) I know why I don't bake cookies often, because although I like to eat cookies, I don't like to eat heaps of cookies;
3) With the amount of butter and peanut butter that goes into making the cookies, it is best that I share them with more friends to distribute the fat sin.

I found the peanut butter cookie recipe from Elise's Simply Recipes, one of the food blogs I frequented.

Improved Blueberry Tart

Certain French food can be extraordinarily seasonal. Or it seems to be the case for Rémi's family. And blueberry tart is made mainly during the blueberry season. While you can probably get frozen blueberries from the supermarket out of season, the pleasure is partially derived from picking wild blueberries in the countryside. And since the season is particularly short, the window for enjoying blueberry tart is particularly short.

Anyway, this is his third attempt at making blueberry tart with frozen blueberries. And it just get nicer and nicer.

The recipe is still the same as the last one we did. The main difference this time:

1. The dough is not pre-cooked;
2. After flattening the dough on the tart mould, sprinkle ground almonds over the base of the tart, followed by sugar;
3. Then you spread generously the blueberries, filling up the tart, and sprinkle more sugar;
4. Bake for 30 minutes or more, until the blueberries just start to wrinkle.

Sup Kambing in slow cooker

My slow cooker has introduced me to an American boxing champion. Even more awesome, my slow cooker actually carries his autograph and has his smiling face gleaming at me from the instruction manual and cookbook. I've never been so up close with the boxing world. Boxer celebrity names are always alien to me, unless he has made a name for himself in some sensational murder or rape trials that hit newspaper headlines so often I can't avoid not reading about them.

So I was quite surprised when Wikipedia told me the namesake of my slow cooker - George Foreman - was a former boxing champ. I know a boxer has lean muscles, but a boxer's lean muscles are not quite alike the lean meat I stew in my slow cooker.

What's even more amazing about this slow cooker is that I am supposed to preheat the device for 20 minutes before I should start using it. That's also new to me.

Nevertheless, I have to live with my choice (though I think next time I will not jump at every boxer endorsed cooking products), and besides the nuisance of having to preheat it, this slow cooker has served me well enough.

My Sup Kambing (mutton soup) recipe comes from "Indonesian Kitchen" by Pancy Seng. I have adapted it to my slow cooker's strange habit and opted to cook everything all in one pot to save on washing, as usual.

Sup Kambing (Mutton Soup)
Serves two

About 500g mutton or lamb (I found this spare ribs cut that was so tender after the slow cooking), chopped into pieces
5-6 shallots
3 cloves garlic
1 inch length of ginger
some 800ml water
cooking oil
1 pandan leaf tied in a knot
salt and black pepper to taste
fried sliced shallots and Chinese coriander leaves or spring onions to garnish

Mixed Spices:
half teaspoon cumin powder
half teaspoon fennel powder
half teaspoon coriander powder
1 cm cinnamon stick
half star anise
2 cloves
2 cardamons

You may like to use a separate pan for browning the meat with the spices first, but what I do is to preheat my celebrity slow cooker for 15 minutes, then throw some oil, cover and wait for the oil to heat up.

While waiting for all the preheating and heating, I slowly chopped the shallots, ginger and garlic, tears leaking all the way such that by the time I finished with the chopping and mixing of spices, the oil is reasonably hot enough for me to throw the shallots, garlic and ginger in.

Fry them briefly, add the mixed spices and fry until fragrant. Toss in the lamb or mutton and fry for a few minutes. If you're using normal pan on normal fire, pour in water and bring to boil before throwing everything into the slow cooker. If using the all in one pot shortcut like me, add the water, salt and pepper and pandan leaf and leave everything to cook slowly for hours until the meat is tender and it is lunch or dinner time.

Before serving, you may like to consider thickening the soup with flour or corn starch. And also to scoop out the sinful layer of oil floating on the surface.

Otherwise, just add the garnishing and serve with plain rice.

Ikea meatballs hack

I found out that there's a group of Ikea hackers out there, who takes pride and pleasure in refurbishing or personalising their Ikea furniture. Like reupholstering their tired sofa with designer fabric, or reconfiguring a LACK shelving unit into a bench.

Now there's no Ikea in New Zealand to turn me into another Ikea hack, but I have half a dozen Ikea's cheapo pine photo frames bought from Singapore, those that has filmsy cardboard backing such that they won't stand properly. So I was inspired by the hackers' DIY spirit to modify my photo frames into something like what you see on the right. Just as in cooking when I try to use as few utensils as possible to reduce washing, my reborn photo frames minimises the number of hooks used. That's important, since staying in a rented apartment restricts your freedom in hammering hooks onto the wall.

Besides modifying Ikea products, I also managed to 'hack' the famous Ikea meatball recipe. Or rather, improvised it according to whatever ingredients my fridge was able to cough out, plus incorporating ideas from other Swedish meatball recipes.

Of course, Swedish meatballs would not be complete without the all important lingonberry jam. Similarly, my jar of lingonberry jam given with love by my bro and carried with due care by yours truly all the way from Sweden would never be satisfied until I eat them with the meatballs.

Ikea meatballs hack
Serves two

After buying only minced beef, I found out that Swedish meatballs actually uses a mixture of beef and pork, and the proportion of beef to pork varies from region to region. As for amount of meat used, I reckoned each person shall have about 10 meatballs, hence apportioning 20 heap teaspoons of minced meat.
1 onion, chopped finely
about 5 tablespoons of breadcrumbs
enough milk for soaking the breadcrumbs so it just covers
about 1 tablespoon chopped parsley (I like to jump at all opportunities to pluck parsley from my pot of herbs)
1 egg to bind everything together
salt and black pepper for seasoning
Butter for frying

For the cream sauce:
about 50ml cream, don't have to be precise about exactly how much. same with stock
about 100ml chicken stock (or beef stock) - made quickly with ready stock cube
1 teaspoon corn starch or flour to thicken
salt and pepper to season

Soak breadcrumbs in milk so it softens.

Heat a little butter and stir fry the onions until soften but not brown. Mix all ingredients for meatballs together.

Using your hands or 2 spoons, shape the meat mixture into balls about the size of a ping pong.

Heat some more butter. Fry the meatlballs in batches if necessary until cooked on all sides.

Prepare the sauce by boiling the stock. Add cream, thicken with the flour and season to taste.

Serve meatballs with the cream sauce, uncooked lingonberry jam and a salad (or boiled vegetables like what I did). It seems Common traditional to serve with potatoes (mashed, baked or fried) but I have no potatoes. What the heck.

Not slacking on desserts

After one week of dessert deprivation in Tonga, followed by another week of after dinner yoghurt due to post holiday rest, we're back to our rigourous dessert régime.

Saturday's lunch dessert was rhubarb tart, with lots of butter going into the crust, and tablespoons of sugar dumped into the rhubarb. Dinner's dessert was some leftover Chinese sago layered cake with red bean paste filling, not quite a success but not to be wasted.



On Sunday night, Rémi made choux pastry for the first time (for the record, I've tried making choux pastry several times years ago with mixed results) while I busied myself with cooking assam fish for dinner. So we're having profiteroles for 3 consecutive meals and still counting.

Have we put on weight? Thankfully not. I'm still a comfortable distance from 50kg and Rémi is still way below 70kg. And no, we don't pump irons in gyms to maintain our waistline as well.

Despite having enjoyed more desserts than I ever had in Singapore, I seem to have an easier time keeping my weight constant. I think eating more homecooked meals really helps.

I do a fair bit of Chinese cooking at home every week, simply because it requires less research for me, less hassle and also healthier. Well, Chinese food in takeaways are very oily and often deep fried. But homecooked Chinese food is more about soups, steamed fish, stir fried meat or vegetables with plain rice.

And of course, portion control every meal, so that we can always have space left for dessert.

How about snacking? That's kept to minimum, and I'm now resolved to snack only on fruits. Mandarins make a fine snack by the way.

Onion pasta

I've found a good way to use up cooked onions leftover from making Onions and Olive Tart. It's easy, fast (since it's already cooked) and yummy.

Here's my improvised recipe, if you're making this from scratch without making the onion tart first.

Onion pasta
Serves 2

about 3 onions, thinly sliced
plenty of extra virgin olive oil
1 bay leaf
chopped thyme
chopped rosemary
1 clove garlic
salt and black pepper

2 slices of bacon
some olives, green or black
pasta for 2

Heat oil. Be as generous with olive oil as you think your waistline can tolerate. Combine the onions and bay leaf. Cover and simmer over low heat for about 20 minutes until it is soft but not brown. Stir occasionally. Add garlic and the herbs and season to taste, cook uncovered for another 10 minutes over slightly increased heat. Set aside.

Start cooking pasta.

Meanwhile, cook the bacon until it is slightly crispy. Add onions and olive. Mix everything with cooked pasta and serve.

Caramelised Apples in Coffee Syrup

Apples are probably my favourite dessert ingredients because they are so easy and versatile, and as legend goes, helps keep the doctor away. Plus apples are easily available all year round.

Besides the elusive French apple tart and our specialty apple crumble, we also like to cooked diced apples with cinnamon over low fire. The warm soft apples with some raisins added goes extremely well vanilla ice-cream. It's not necessary to add sugar or butter when cooking the apples, as some recipes suggested.

I've been wanting to try this caramelised apples recipe I got in my Chocolate and Coffee Bible cookbook published by Hermes House. Although it was Rémi who made it in the end, I'm still satisfied and already looking forward to trying it again.

Caramelised Apples with Coffee Syrup
Proportion based on 2 apples, one apple per serving.

2 eating apples, peeled but left whole
Approx. 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted (don't have to be precise, just need enough butter to coat around the apples
Approx. 30g sugar
sprinkle of ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons strong brewed coffee

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Cut a thin slice off the base of the apple to make them stable if necessary.

Using a pastry brush, coat each apple with the melted butter. Mix sugar and cinnamon in a shallow dish, and roll the apple in the dish to coat it all over with the sugar mixture.

Arrange the apples on a shallow baking dish that just fit, so that they can stand upright. Pour the coffee into the dish and sprinkle the remaining sugar mixture over the apples.

Bake for 40 minutes. In between, brush the coffee over the apples two or three times during the baking. During the last basting, pour out the juices into a small pan, but continue keeping the apples in the oven.

Boil the juices rapidly until it reduces to a thick syrup. Pour over the apples and bake for about 10 more minutes or until the apples are tender. Serve hot with a spoon of cream or ice-cream.

Super Sinful Kouign Amann

There are some foods where just by eating one serving will fulfill your monthly quota of calories intake. Duck confit is one of them. Kouign Amann is the dessert equivalent of duck confit, except that instead of the letting the duck drumstick swim in duck fat, you drown the cake dough in a sea of butter and sugar. Don't be deceived by the harmless looking crust of the picture I took.

Kouign-amann (pronounced ku-nya-marn) is a celtic specialty from Brittany. The name comes from the Breton words for cake ("kouign") and butter ("amann"). It's quite like bread (think croissant), made by folding bread dough several times so that you achieve a multilayer cake/bread. Like croissant, it is oily, as you have to spread 10 times more butter on it than on kaya toast (assuming you use 1 tablespoon butter for kaya toast). It is more sinful than croissant, in the sense that after pouring 10 big tablespoons of butter, you dump yet another 10 big tablespoons of sugar onto it.

The result is a bread-like crusty cake that has a deceptively light but oily layered texture, with crispy sugar that caramelise in between the layers.

Thankfully, we shared our sin with M (who decided to work doubly hard at the gym for the week after the dessert).

Rémi did everything, I just provided eye power. No recipe sharing here since I have no idea how he did it, except that he took the recipe proportions from Camille's cookbook, and followed the steps from the following video clip.

Apricot Clafoutis

Nothing new, but here's a variation of Clafoutis that I did last week.

I did the same thing twice, first with just half an apricot. There was too much crust and not enough fruits, so I tried by putting more than one apricot, all diced up, into each muffin round.

Making individual servings of clafoutis is useful for bringing them out on, say a picnic, no messiness with cutting the cake up.

I wish spring and summer to come soon. Right now, everyday fruits is always apples, pears, kiwis and oranges. I'm already looking forward to cherries, peaches, apricots and all kinds of berries.

What we've been up to + Pear and chocolate Cake

The spread of desserts here partly explain the absence from blogging. I've been cooking, eating, then more cooking and eating. Above picture courtesy of M, whom we had the pleasure of attending the party celebrating his engagement with LC.

Our contributions include the peachy Charlotte, the tangy Lemon Tart, and Camille's Fondant au Chocolat.

And here's a useful tip, for those who wants to make heart shaped cake like me, but couldn't find a heart shaped tin after visiting some 6 stores in the city.



Besides Camille's fondant, Rémi has also started the first experiment to find the right way to make a volcanic like French melted chocolate cake. Meaning when you use your dessertspoon to break the little warm cake, the chocolate just oozes out like hot lava.

The idea is to bake the chocolate cake for a short time in a hot oven, so that the inside doesn't cook completely and hence it's still moist. We hope to try a few variations of recipes Rémi found on French websites. By the way, the white patches on the cake is my lame attempt at dusting icing sugar on the cake, they are not the results of a mouldy cake.



And finally, the ugliest looking cake of this whole lot, because me and Rémi are too busy with savouring it while it's still piping hot from the oven and only bother to take photo after the second day.

The recipe comes from Christelle Le Ru. First time we made it for the Chinese New Year reunion dinner, it was sooooo good that despite having a 101% full stomach, I went on for a second and possibly third slice. Second time, we couldn't repeat the success but not too bad still. Third time, yum yum. So I've decided to post the recipe, for my bro who have tried the first yummy attempt. The precious highly recommended recipe book was from them afterall.

Pear and Chocolate Cake
Serves 5? I've halved the proportion and the cake last us 3 desserts for 2.

2 eggs
100g sugar
a few drops of vanilla essence
85g melted butter
135g flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 sweet pears
100g dark chocolate
sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease a loaf tin.

Beat eggs, sugar and vanilla essenee together. Add the melted butter and mix until everything is well combined. Fold the flour and baking powder into the cake mixture.

Peel and cut the pears into slices or cubes. Break the chocolate into small pieces. Stir the pears and chocolate pieces into the cake mixture. Do not worry if you find that there seems to be more pear than cake. The juiciness of the pears gives a moist sweet texture to the cake.

Pour into the tin and scattered sliced almonds over the top. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes. The cake is especially nice when it's warm, with the chocolate partially melted inside.

Breast of Duck with Cepes Mushrooms

One more French duck recipe from Camille, but it is not duck confit. We have considered trying to make our own duck confit, but after checking on youtube, we saw, horrors of all horrors, that you need almost one pot of fat to cook that already very fatty duck meat. Oh no, no way we're going to make cassoulet.

A friend once asked, after enjoying a hearty meal of fatty cassoulet in France, how do French ladies stay slim on a rich French diet.

I'm afraid I have no perfect answer since I'm not French, never lived in France, don't survive on a purely French diet and have not read the book French Women Don't Get fat.

I think it's because French value the quality of their food more than quantity. They eat for pleasure, preferring to enjoy their food slowly rather than gobbling them just to fill their stomach. And portion control. But that's still too generalising.

Rémi thinks that typical French eat a lot of boiled vegetables at home. As well as yoghurt for breakfast, and as desserts. French gourmet cuisine like duck confit and foi gras are for tourists who dine in restaurants while French people tend to eat home-cooked food everyday. The 3-hour lunch and 4-hour dinner marathon feasts we're being fed by the parents whenever we go back to France are not normal everyday fare, but more homecoming reunion treats.

Other reasons I found when googling this topic include: French women are slender but thinks they are fat (while British women are fat but believe they are slim); intense pressure from French men to stay slim (AGREE!!!); stay clear of fast food (eat REAL food); maintain active lifestyle (even the French great grandmother may be doing more sports than me)...

Breast of Duck with Cèpes Mushrooms (Magrets de Canard aux Cèpes)
Serves two

2 nice fillets of duck breast
2 or more handfuls cépes mushrooms (they are very flavoursome. use porcini if you can't find cépes. or mix forest mushrooms. as they are more expensive, I mixed with fresh button mushrooms)
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 teaspoon chopped parsley
olive oil
salt and pepper

Clean the cèpes. Heat some olive oil and cook the mushrooms for a few minutes until they start rejecting water. Drain and set aside.

Put half of the chopped garlic and parsley under the skin of the duck breast.

On a frying pan, using medium heat, cook the duck breast, skin side first. As the duck is very fatty, you do not have to add oil to the frying pan. Rather, the duck fat will ooze out. Cook for about 7 minutes, discard the extra oil, turn the fillet and cook for 5 minutes. Now, duck breast cooked this way is like steak, so adjust the cooking time if you like the meat more rare, or more cooked.

When the duck is done, remove and cover.

Heat olive oil, throw in the mushrooms, add garlic, parsley, salt and pepper and brown for a few minutes.

Slice the duck breast fillet and serve with the mushrooms.

As a side, try roasting potatoes with duck fat.

Orange Duck and Orange Cake

At 18 degrees Celsius, I was told that my rented apartment's internal temperature before switching on heater is warm. It is afterall the standard temperature recommended by the World Health Organisation. The average indoor temperature of a Kiwi home in winter is 16 degrees Celsius. And according to my classmate in French class, she can even blow fog out of her breath in her lounge, if the curtains over the huge floor-to-ceiling windows are not drawn in time.

Despite being a developed country, it is universally acknowledged that Kiwi homes' insulation and heating are third world standards. I read that the country has the worst winter mortality rates in the developed world, and high pneumonia, asthma or whatever rates due to damp cold houses.

If you think that these cold hard truths will make them wake up and improve their home insulation, you're wrong. The standard Kiwi response is to ask complaining foreigners to "toughen up" or otherwise "go home". They sure are a tough species, when I see children wearing shorts and walking barefooted outside, while I am huddled up with scarf, gloves, 3-4 layers of warm clothes and a thick jacket.

Being of tropical breed, I definitely desire to have warmer house. Especially after staying one week in my brother's warm apartment in Sweden when it's minus five outside. So warm that you can walk around barefooted, wear tees and shorts indoor. Well, in my Kiwi home, I wear a jumper even in summer.

So cooking stews and baking will become a favourite winter pastime of mine to warm the house further. Just don't show me the electricity bill.

And yes, I finally found duck meat being sold in a gourmet supermarket. So I was determined to make a French duck dish. My original plan was to cook duck confit, but after discovering the horrendous amount of fats used (basically, you need enough fat to cover your meat), I opted to cook the more modestly oiled "Carnard à l'orange". Dessert came in the form of "Gateau à l'orange", an orange caked soaked in orange juice.

The duck recipe was adjusted from Camille's French classic cookbook. Cake recipe was recited by Rémi's mother from her memory.

Duck of Orange (Canard à l'orange)
Serves 6 (Serves 2)
Note: Original recipe used one whole duck, whereas I used only 2 drumsticks, enough for 2 persons. Quantity quoted in brackets are my very rough guestimations.

1 big duck about 2.5kg (2 duck drumsticks)
20g butter (1 spoonful, you decide how less sinful you want your dish to be)
1 carrot (1 small, more veg is always healthy)
1 onion (1 too, since onions has so many health benefits)
200ml white wine (about 80ml, I just poured randomly actually)
3 oranges (1 orange)
1 glass of chicken stock (less than half a glass)
salt and pepper

Slice onion and carrot thinly. In a casserole or pan, heat butter, add onion and carrot. Brown the duck on all sides. Add salt and pepper.

When the duck is well coloured on all sides, moisten with white wine. Cook for about 10 minutes and pour over the chicken stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Remove the zest of one orange (or half) coarsely. Blanch for 1 minute in boiling water (a step that I skipped conveniently). Squeeze the juice off the orange (or half) and cut the other 2 oranges (or the other half) into thin slices.

After one hour of simmering, pour orange juice, zest and slices into the casserole. Stir gently. Remove cover and turn up the heat to reduce the juice, caramelise the orange and duck skin.

My resulting duck drumstick was fat and juicy, and the orange slices so soft it's almost like marmalade.

Serve with rosemary roasted potato cubes, or salad.

Orange Cake (Gateau à l'orange)

The recipe was given from memory, so not very precise. I will try making it again another way for improvements.

4 eggs, yolks and whites separated
120g plain flour + 1 teaspoon baking powder
120g sugar
60g butter, melted
4 oranges, extract zest from 2 oranges, and juice from all 4

Preheat oven at 180 degrees Celsius. Prepare a cake tin, lined with greaseproof paper (I was too lazy to do that, and almost couldn't unmould my cake)

Beat egg yolks and sugar together. Add flour and melted butter and zests.

Beat egg whites until it becomes stiff and firm (make sure the eggs are at room temperature before beating). I find that after adding the flour, the mixture becomes rather dry. So a tip from Nigella, the celebrity chef who likes to fling her hair is to take a big spoon of the egg white meringue mixture, stir strongly into the flour batter to smoothen the texture. Then fold the rest of the stiff egg whites gently.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden brown and a skewer poked into the centre comes out clean.

Pour orange juice onto the cake, let it soak through. You may like to unmould the cake first.

Serve cold.

Crumble of Lemon Curd

The first dish that Rémi tried to impress me with was homemade lemon curd. Or rather, a 2-week old lemon curd on bread. Errr...well, I can say that I wasn't too impressed. Moreover, it was a tad too sour for me.

Well, if he had known or seen this Lemon Curd Crumble recipe, he would have scored more points then.

The recipe came from the Crumble cookbook by Martine Lizambard, published by Solar Editions. I had decided to made it as I had some leftover crumbles from making an apple crumble.

Sometimes, one dish lead to another. From the first apple crumble late last week, we went on to have a second one, and now the lemon curd crumble. But because of a mistake I made when mixing cream and eggs together, I was left with an extra portion of cream and eggs mixture. So I made a quiche out of that earlier today. This will leave me with extra tart dough, so the apple crumble misjudgment is going to end with a pear tart tonight.

Lemon Curd Crumble (Crumble de Citron)
Serves 4 (I've divided the quantity, wanting to make just 2 cups, but still having enough lemon curd for 4 small ramekins)

100ml lemon juice (from about 2 lemons)
70g sugar
2 teaspoon cornflour
2 eggs
100ml liquid cream
1 branch of lemon verbena (it's something new to me, I tried replacing this with mint leaves)
Butter for greasing the ramekins

Crumble
60g flour
35g butter
40g sugar

According to the recipe, you may replace cream with whole milk yoghurt or white cheese. But I stuck to the cream.

Beat the cold cream with a hand beater until it becomes creamy (do not overbeat until it becomes chantilly cream). Mix the eggs in.

Boil the lemon juice with sugar for 2-3 minutes until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and add the verbena leaves. Cover and let the leaves infuse for a while. I had used 6 small mint leaves, but probably didn't use enough to make much of an impression. Anyway, discard the leaves and let the lemon syrup cool down.

Mix the lemon syrup with cornflour. Add the cream and egg mixture to it. Cook the mixture over low heat (or bain marie), stirring non-stop until it thickens. It took quite a while for the mixture to thicken (until it almost become like lemon curd), but do not be tempted to increase the heat, as you will end up with scramble eggs.

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease 4 ramekins and pour the lemon curd mixture into it.

Prepare the crumble. Using your fingertips, rub the cold butter into the flour until it resembles crumbles. Add sugar and mix well.

Bake the lemon mixture for 15 minutes, or more, until you see the surface browning and solidifying. Sprinkle the crumbles very gently on the surface and return to over for another 15-20 minutes, until the crumbles are golden brown.

Serve cold or just warm.

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.

The beautiful Charlotte

With a name as beautiful as its taste, it is still debatable how this classic French moulded dessert or its name come about.

Besides sponge biscuits, bread, sponge bread or biscuits are also used to line the mould, which is then filled with a fruits and whipped cream or custard.

The below Charlotte recipe was done with canned peach, making it very straightforward to make. Just make sure you give yourself plenty of time to set in the fridge.

Recipe source: unknown. It was a recipe Rémi found on some French website long ago and untraceable.


Charlotte with canned peach
serves 4-6

2 packets of sponge fingers biscuits
1 big can of peaches in syrup
250ml fresh cream
pinch of sugar (icing or castor)
pinch of salt
a few drops of vanilla essence

Before starting to whip fresh cream, leave the mixing bowl in freezer for 15 minutes. The fresh cream has to be cold (if you're using packet long-life cream, put into fridge an hour earlier).

Whip the cream until thick. Add the sugar, salt and vanilla essence.

To achieve the above look, you need to have a loose-based round baking tin. Although I didn't think of that when I made it yesterday, place the ring of the tin onto a serving dish.

Next is to start lining the tin with sponge fingers. Each time you do that, dip the biscuit BRIEFLY in the peach syrup.

Cut one end of the sponge fingers, and place them cut-end down to line round side of the tin. Use the leftover pieces and more biscuits if needed to line the bottom until the bottom is tightly packed.

Spread a generous layer of whipped cream over the sponge fingers base. Follow by a layer of sliced peaches. And then follow by another layer of sponge fingers (remember to dip in syrup first).

Top with another layer of whipped cream. And then cover with diced peaches.

Refrigerate for 4-6 hours before serving.

My charlotte didn't collapse when I remove the ring around it. If yours do, tie up with a thick ribbon, that should do the trick in keeping the biscuits in place.

Tips:
1. A big jelly mould can be used instead of ring tin. In this case, end the last layer with the sponge finger biscuits, cover with a plate, and unmould be inverting it.
2. Fruits like strawberries can be used in place of canned peach. In this case, make your own sweet syrup. Like making a syrup out of strawberry jam.
3. Custard can be used in place of whipped cream, though we've never tried that.