Cupcakes Galore

Seeing as how I spend many moments during work clicking around looking at food-related things, it isn't really surprising that I plan my baking/cooking schedule during work-time. Sadly, it isn't often that I get to bake two days in a row, since it does take time for the stuff to get eaten. This week, however, has been different.

On Sunday I made the One-Bowl Buttermilk Chocolate Cupcakes that I've been eyeing for a few weeks—I finally got around to buying buttermilk. They tasted okaay, if a little on the slightly dry side. I left them alone, but I was not very happy with them, since they were not "light and moist" as described. When I woke up on Monday, however, I woke up thinking that something on the top would take care of the dry problem. So I found a vanilla buttercream recipe and added cocoa powder to it, ending up with a reallly good, yummy, chocolatey cream to top my cupcakes with. yum.

Then, yesterday were pretty, fun Confetti Cupcakes made for M and my cousins. rather funny that the same thing can make both an almost-20-year old and two preschoolers so happy. Yes, M is rather perplexingly enamoured with coloured sprinkles and 100s-and-1000s. go figure. but well, whatever makes a person happy, right?

The recipe calls for vanilla and almond essences, but I know M doesn't like almond essence, so I put lemon zest instead, and topped them with lemon buttercream. The two elements tasted pretty good on their own, but together, somehow, it didn't quite work. They were a little better the next day, but still, they didn't taste as good as they looked.

I don't have a picture of the inside, because I finished one before I realised why I even picked it up to eat in the first place. Not that they were that good, I was just preoccupied with other things. For both a picture of the inside, and the recipe, check here.

When I gave them to M today, we both agreed that the chocolate ones were better. She even asked me for more, making me a very happy girl. I came home, with only one cupcake left after giving them to the various people, and a very good excuse to bake more cupcakes.

So here are the yummy chocolate cupcakes, complete with that mmmm-mmmm chocolate frosting. It's a testament to how good it is that my mother, who usually hates frostings and such, was scraping the bowl with her finger and eating the last bits.

Another happy thing: I tried the 'cone' method of filling cupcakes today, and wow, it's really fun. and cool.
and a really nice plus point is that, for people like me, who sometimes only get to eat one out of 12 of the cupcakes i bake, there's lots of soft cake to eat. :)

rich, chocolatey frosting topped with 100s and 1000s

pretty swirl!

happy yy.

New Food Sensations

Today's post shall be dedicated to the strange and wonderful foods i've eaten in the recent past, dishes that i've never heard of, things that seem normal and mundane but are just so cool i have to blog about them.

1. Bittergourd slivers with honey.
Sounds pretty gross, right? bittergourd? pfft, not my thing. but this is really different and cool. it's strips of raw bittergourd, verrry paper thin, chilled, served with a dish of not-quite-honey, something like what you get when you eat guilinggao. sweet, gold syrup that's a little more watery than honey, and without that distinctive scent of honey. it sounds a little iffy at first, but it's totally excellent. and so easy to do at home too. just a bittergourd and a vegetable peeler, no cooking required. yumm. had this at a place that serves really good crab bee hoon soup, which is a milky soup similar to the sliced fish sort, but with crab, so that the soup tastes of that roasty crab-shell fragrance. yummm. it's somewhere along outram road.

2. "Indonesian Chicken".
They serve this at the cze char place outside my house, Sin Hoi Sai. it's pieces of chicken, deep fried, then stir-fried in this seriously fantastic sauce that will totally rock you socks (assuming, of course, that you wear footwear which requires socks to a cze char place....). it's seriously a flavour explosion in your mouth. sweet, salty, a little spicy, tasting of curry leaves and onions, and something else that defies description or identification. suffice it to say that this dish is fan-freaking-tastic.

3. Cereal Sotong.
Again, a dish from Sin Hoi Sai. Now, i'd heard of and eaten cereal prawns before, but sotong?? but boy does it work. i don't particularly like the prawn part of cereal prawns, mainly because by the time you've peeled the shell off, the prawn doesn't have much added flavour. plus, peeling prawns is messy business in a cze char place or hawker centre. but the sotong...the sotong were fantastic. tender and juicy, with a wonderfully fragrant heap of cereal crumbs, mmmmmmmmmmm. sooo good.

4. Soyabean ice cream.
yes, i've rhapsodised over this already; suffice it to say that a) this is REALLY good, b) i'm totally addicted to the point where i'm willing to travel out of my way to get to it, and c) i've made another convert, and i'm making it my goal to make MORE. hee. spreading the soya-lurve.

5. Hot-plate pork and onion.
E and i stumbled upon this after a movie uhm..slackathon at VQ's house one Saturday, and life has never been the same. okay, maybe that's overdramatic, but it doesn't change the fact that this is good, and cheap to boot. it's basically, pork and onion, stir fried then dumped onto a smoulderingly-hot hot plate atop a layer of raw shredded cabbage. mmm-mm! $3.50, at the Novena Square foodcourt. totally delish. so good that E and i were already planning another movie day the next week so we could eat it again, even before we had finished our dinner. haha.

hmm, can't think of much more. of course, this is not a comprehensive list of surprising good food to be had around Singapore, but it is pretty complete a list of things that i've just discovered.