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This simple raisin bread is made from the challah dough recipe that can be found here. The result is a soft and fragrant sweet breakfast or teatime bread. I especially enjoy it when it’s lightly toasted, with a little extra butter spread on top. The bread may look complex but I assure you that this dough is really quite easy to handle and shape.
Raisin Challah Loaf Makes 1 Loaf Adapted from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
Ingredients: 1 pound of challah dough (recipe found here) 1/3 cup raisins Butter for greasing cookie sheet Egg wash (1 egg mixed with 1 tbsp water) White sesame seeds
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Challah is the bread served traditionally in Jewish cultures. It is very fragrant thanks to the addition of butter and eggs, and is also mildly sweet from the added honey. Challah is versatile enough to be substituted in most recipes requiring brioche dough and it contains half the amount of eggs so why not try baking some?
The recipe below is adapted from one of my favourite bread books – Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I think the brilliant part about their recipes is that one does not need to knead the dough nor punch it down after it rises. Also, a larger batch of dough [...]
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I salute those housewives who cook dinner everyday and not run out of inspiration of what to cook. Because after just two weeks or so of doing so, I am fast running out of ideas and with the growing bump, energy. Yes, since I’m the one who’s at home these days while the hubby is studying, the responsibility of cooking dinner every night seems to have fallen on my shoulders – at least for a week or so more before I pop. Most of the nights it’s Chinese food, but there are days when you do not want to do another stir-fry or see another bowl of rice. [...]
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My rose bundt pan finally arrived in the mail and I simply had to make something with it. Since I had leftover buttermilk, I decided to try making red velvet cakes. Yes, RED velvet cakes. How did they end up brown then? Simply when you don’t add enough red food colouring, which was what happened. Sigh, the problem with gel food colourings and liquid food colourings is that you don’t quite know how much to substitute each for when the recipe calls for one or the other. Estimation does not always yield the best results. Oh well, the next time I try this again, I would know better.
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Many would agree that there are few foods as seductive as good, dark chocolate. Combine that with ice cream and it can become an almost out-of-the-world treat. I especially enjoy dark chocolate ice cream when I am feeling down, or am in a pensive mood. I like it served on its own, as that allows me to fully appreciate the full flavours of the dark chocolate. Not that it does not go well with waffles, souffles, cakes and other desserts.
The ice cream recipe I used is adapted from Pierre Herme’s Chocolate Desserts. He wrote about how good chocolate ice cream should never be made with cocoa powder, [...]
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I made this for a dinner party on Christmas eve, but I think it works well as an everyday cake. The cake has three distinct textures – First, you bite into the crunchy and sugary shortbread. Next, your teeth sinks into the moist jam layer before finishing at the cake layer at the bottom. The tartness of the cranberry jam perfectly balances the sugary crust of the shortbread. I served this with vanilla ice cream but it’s perfect on its own too.
Cranberry Shortbread Cake Serves 8 to 10 Adapted from Baking from my home to yours
Ingredients for cranberry jam: 1 large orange 1/4 cup orange juice [...]
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My dear husband bought me an ice-cream maker for my birthday in November and since then, we’ve been making our own ice-cream rather than buying them. Our old ice-cream maker required us to pre-freeze the bowl for 24 hours before using it, and the products that it yielded weren’t quite smooth and satisfying. This new one came with a chiller and I no longer have to pre-freeze the bowl. Definitely a welcomed improvement. Moreover, it yields smooth and creamy ice-creams!
The recipe below for vanilla bean ice-cream is adapted from “The Perfect Scoop”, one of my favourite ice-cream recipe books. The rich flavour of this ice-cream goes well [...]
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Cranberry and pistachio are two common ingredients. I suspect this is more to do with their colours than their flavours. Meaning to do something Christmasy, I decided to make cranberry pistachio biscotti by modifying a basic recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s book – Baking, from my home to yours. This recipe is interesting in that it incorporated cornmeal which added a surprising fragrance and crunch to the biscotti.
So did the cranberry and pistachio combination work? Definitely. The biscotti received raving reviews from all who tried it. I even had requests for orders for it for Chinese New Year! I had to explain that it was a Christmas flavour, [...]
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Pecan candy, pecan fudge, pecan rolls, honeyed pecans… somehow pecans always seem to be associated with Thanksgiving or Christmas, though I not quite know why. I tried searching around for information on it, but could not seem to find any. Nonetheless, in the spirit of Christmas, I decided to bake a maple pecan tart for the pizza gathering I wrote about in an earlier post. If you had read that post, you’d know that the attempt to make the dough for the tart went quite wrong, with it being blended into a paste form accidentally, when it was supposed to have bits of butter in it to ensure [...]
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J’s family were coming over for dinner and I wanted something simple and quick, yet tasty. I decided on chicken cacciatora, an Italian classic favourite. It is simply put. chicken cooked in a rich tomato gravy, served over mash or boiled potatoes. Definitely heartwarming if served on a cool evening. Though the dish made from the original recipe was tasty and flavourful, I felt it could do with more heat. Hence, in the recipe below, I upped the original amount of crushed red peppers. If you prefer less heat, you can decrease the amount to suit your palate.
One thing we realized when cooking this dish is that [...]
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