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Like I said in an earlier post, Christmas is a season where people start baking crazily. I didn’t quite go crazy baking - it’s just that my gingerbread recipe yields A LOT of gingerbread. So one gets tired of snowflakes and has to think of alternatives. Gingerbread man (and woman) and Christmas trees would be great, if only I had the cutters. That’s right. I only discovered that I did not own any gingerbread or Christmas tree cutters after I’ve made the gingerbread dough. Another reason why one should categorise his/her cutters.
Anyway, I discovered the versatility of the simple circle cutter. A circle cutter and a large [...]
Read More Christmas gingerbread – santas, hollies, ornaments and presents
And so it’s that time of the year again, where everyone starts baking crazily. Gingerbread is usually on the baking list, and so are iced cookies. So gingerbread iced cookies it will be. I did a series of snowflakes of different sizes, mostly small ones though simply because they are cuter and easier to manage. I like this particular gingerbread recipe because the cookies don’t rise much, leaving a nice flat surface for decorations. Gingerbread softens very quickly, especially with a layer of icing on top. Big ones become very fragile. The above is the plain design – white lemon icing on gingerbread. I like the effect of the [...]
Read More Christmas gingerbread – snowflake series
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 [...]
Read More Maple Pecan Tart
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 [...]
Read More Chicken Cacciatora
I had attempted something similar awhile back, but didn’t have squid ink linguine then. After acquiring some lately, I decided to give it another shot, and document the recipe if it tastes good. Even though I would not attempt to compare it with my favourite crab meat squid ink pasta from Valentinos, I do think that my attempt to reproduce the very popular pasta dish was a rather good one. Perhaps the next time, I will try using crushed tomatoes instead, and see if that improves the flavour. For now, here’s version 1.
Crab Meat Squid Ink Linguine Serves 2
Ingredients: 4 oz dried squid ink linguine 3 [...]
Read More Crab Meat Squid Ink Linguine
Yesterday night. That was the night. Well you see, my husband, J had invited his colleagues over for a pizza party this afternoon. Pizza party meaning that he was going to make pizzas, from scratch, for them. I was tasked to prepare dessert. After giving it some thought, I decided to make Maple Pecan Tart. It’s almost Christmas, and pecans make me feel christmasy. It wouldn’t be tough anyway, just prepare the tough, throw it into the fridge and bake the tart shell the next morning. How difficult could that be?
Not difficult, if nothing went wrong. Well, to start things off, the food processor was not quite cooperative. [...]
Read More The night where things went wrong…
My mother surprised me a couple of weeks back by requesting that I bake her a fruitcake this year. She does not have a very sweet tooth, and hardly ever requests for any baked goods and so this was indeed surprising. I didn’t even think she liked fruitcakes! Anyway, it was too late to start soaking fruits in brandy then, so I decided to make one that didn’t involve any soaking of fruits. The cake however, should be stored for a couple of weeks before eating. As I type this, my loaf of fruitcake is sitting in the refrigerator, nicely wrapped in plastic and foil. I know that fruitcakes [...]
Read More Tis the season for the fruitcake…
It was one of those days where we had potatoes to spare after making mash potatoes for dinner the previous night. We wanted something simple – a one dish meal paired with perhaps a salad, and so a gratin seemed like a good choice. When making potato gratins, I find that boiling the potatoes in milk or cream gives them a melt-in-your-mouth texture, and also improves the flavour of the entire dish. For gratins or baked rice/pastas, Swiss cheese (Gruyere especially) is the preferred choice as they yield a creamier result. I couldn’t find any Swiss cheese in that particular supermarket and chose to substitute it with Gouda, which [...]
Read More Potato Mushroom Gratin
Yes yes, so we’ve all sworn off buying more cookbooks because we simply have too many or that we’ve run out of shelf space or that we don’t use the existing ones enough. But once I start surfing around Amazon.com, I always find cookbooks that I “simply must have”. Afterall, I’ve used at least one recipe from each of my cookbooks thus far. Some justification eh?
And so this is my latest haul from Amazon.com, with one more book due to arrive soon. They somehow split the shipment into a few smaller shipments, and these ones that shipped later actually arrived first. Kinda weird. Ever since I did a [...]
Read More Joy is when your cookbook haul from Amazon arrives
Ever had those days where you needed a dessert but had too little time? Well, yesterday was one of those days. Hubby and I had a wedding to attend in the afternoon but were also invited to dinner at a lovely couple’s place. Determined to bring along something home-baked for dessert and so started browsing through my collection of recipe books in the morning. I decided to try something from Nigella Express, a cookbook I rarely used. I had but one “small” problem. The recipe called for canned pears and we had none. Canned pears are not very common around here and I knew that I could probably only [...]
Read More Chocolate Pear Pudding Cake
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