random rant..

gah, it's been a stressful two weeks, and when the stress levels rachet up, i start craving my microwave oven. there are tons of recipes i want to try, and ever since i saw a stack of gorgeous mini tart moulds, i've been wanting to bake tartlettes.

These Lime Curd Tarts and Butterscotch Tart, for one (or two), look darned tempting and delish, and these Butter Tarts look soooo sinfuly good, and come with the added benefit that they can be made with a muffin tin.
and speaking of muffins....
These Carrot Cupcakes look totally delicious, and i've already earmarked a orange-almond cake recipe my mum clipped from the newspapers to make into cupcakes. Add to that the fact that there were soooo many cool and exciting recipes that I've seen this week bloghopping, I just wish i knew more people, so that I could keep baking and giving away the food so that I can keep baking and giving and baking....

raar. I want my kitchen!

Cinnamon Chocolate Cupcakes

So this weekend I made cupcakes. There wasn't much in the house to play around with, and I wasn't feeling particularly inspired by any one recipe anyway, but I just wanted to bake something. So, after looking through countless cupcake recipes that all looked delish, and rejecting them because they called for sour cream, yoghurt, buttermilk and etc, I finally found a recipe that called for basic, simple ingredients that I had at home. Got the basic cupcake recipe here, and, was inspired by a bar of expensive but absolutely delish Green and Black's Maya Gold Dark Chocolate, to add a little something to the recipe. The bar is 55% cocoa, so it's not extremely dark, which is nice, and its scented with a light spice mix of nutmeg and cinammon, and a hint of orange flavour. Check out their gorgeous website here. So I added about a tablespoon of ground cinnamon to the recipe, and the hint of spice in the cake was just totally excellent. I topped them with a dark chocolate frosting of butter, cocoa powder and icing sugar, with a half-tablespoon of cinnamon for good measure, and it was just yummy. I really love the way these turned out. :)

a few of my 'favourite' things

Oh my gosh.
I went to Spotlight today, and I saw the most gorgeous plates and such! Not the kind for serving dinner on, but random pretty pieces that I an seriously lusting over.


First there were these nice stripey long plate-things: so pretty! these were really what caught my eye first, simply because they are so colourful. I'm not generally a pastels person, but these are nice. I think they're about $30 though. Whoever said that Spotlight was cheap.

Then there were these pretty, swirly-designed plates; I really like the black one. It's not very clear in the picture, but the pattern is in light blue and light olive, against the black and white it's terribly nice and sophisticated. The white and blue one's not bad either, but I do like the black one better. The only thing is that they're both much too big.

BUT! What I really, really, REALLY fell in love with were these 'frilly' plates:

I can't decide which of them i prefer: the cake stand or the long frilly-edged plate. siigh. I want them! but they cost tooo much for my impoverished wallet to afford.

there were also other really cool cake stands and stuff:

like this cupcake tree...

and this cake stand, decorated with tiny cakes:

And then there were these cool retro-esque colanders, in all the coolest colours. I think they'd go pretty well with whatever kitchenaid you happen to have...


I want some money to go kitchen applicance-shopping!

Instant food

Tonight's dinner was a complete case of cooking-improv, which is what I do most often at home, when I'm hungry for real food, but tdidn't plan to cook so there's not much ready to cook in the fridge (seeing as how my mother is the Queen of Fridge Minimalists). In the past, I've made such self-explanatory dishes as Onion-Cheese Spaghetti (one colour, weird-sounding, but surprisingly ok-tasting), Potato Spinach 'Omelette', Random Vegetable and Tuna-Mayo Omelette "Crepe" and so on. The food was always made from whatever I could scavenge from the fridge, and while no one is likely to ask me for any recipes, they were tasty (to me) miracles. However, tonight's dinner was pretty unbelieveable, even by my super-improv standards.

Behold: Mushroom-and Cheese Soup Pasta, with Garlic Croutons!

yes, instant Campbell's soup powder (Mushroom and Cheese), a slice of processed cheese, water, and Carrefour brand Croutons, with $2 Daiso special pasta (special in because it's about half the length of usual pasta, making it small-pot-friendly).

I'd planned to make mushroom pasta with real mushrooms, sliced and sauteéd with butter, tossed with pasta and a some of the cooking water, but I had sadly kept my mushrooms too long and they were all wet and sticky. Not a good sign.
So, I made pasta with powdered soup.
Surprisingly, it was actually pretty good.

I "parboiled" the pasta for awhile, about 2 minutes, since the package says it takes 4 mins to cook, then drained away the water until there was about 4 cm or so of water covering the pasta. Then, I added the soup powder, and stirred in one individual sized package of butter (probably unneccesary, but I was afraid the sauce'd taste too much like soup), one slice of cheese, and stirred some more. Cooking the 'sauce' with the pasta this way made the sauce 'seep' into the pasta, flavouring it with a nice, mushroom-soup-y taste.

The finished product looked kinda boring, which is why I added the croutons. This is the only thing I wouldn't do the next time, as it made the sauce waaay too salty. I forgot to factor in the fact that the sauce was really a super-concentrated soup, which was nice in terms of texture, but rather salty. So, whilst the croutons added a nice crunch to the whole dish, they made it way too salty.

Nonetheless, I am quite proud of tonight's dinner, and I forsee many such "pasta nights". It's quite a quick way to make dinner; the longest period of waiting was for the water to boil. The sauce could have used a good dose of rough-ground black pepper to add another taste dimension, but overall, no complaints. And, I made this with absolutely no condiments: no salt, no pepper, nothing but indiviually packaged fridge-staples like butter and cheese, and powdered soup. Is it kind of sick that I'm really proud of that?

Well, this weekend was quite a food-filled one, I made Dark Chocolate-Orange Muffins, Cinnamon Oatmeal Cookies, and I tasted a reallllly good cheesecake/brownie thing, and I discovered the greatest thing to snack on. All in just three days. This was one goood weekend, food/kitchen-wise.

The muffins, sadly, could have been better. Taste-wise they were really good; the orange flavour really strong, and the dark chocolate providing a rich but not too sweet foil to the zestiness. They were, however, a little tough, which I at first thought was because I'd mixed them too much, because I'd doubled the recipe to make enough for all the people my mother had "pre-allocated" them to, but then, when I made another half-batch, being careful to not overmix them, they were still tough. sigh. i don't know why. they taste good if you microwave them, though.

The chocolate bits inside get all nice and melty, and yummy. Or, if you don't have a microwave (or are too lazy to put them on a plate that you will have to wash, and walk down one floor and up again), you can blast them with a hairdryer. It works, really!

So, I guess, overall they weren't a complete failure.


The next thing I did were Cinammon Oatmeal Cookies, whilst waiting for the football match to start. These were a bigger success, although it really didn't seem so at first. The recipe called for coconut and oatmeal, but I didn't want coconutty cookies, so I omitted them, which I didn't think would be an issue. Then, the recipe said to drop rounded teaspoons on the sheet, but they expanded to a huuuge size, then flattened to wafer-thinness. I thought it might be because the lack of coconut might have made the dough too thin, so I added two tablespoons more of flour, and reduced the size of the dough balls to half a teaspoon. They didnt get so big (duh), but they were still quite thin, and they were a tad too sweet yesterday night. but today, they taste really good. buttery and chewy, and fragrant with cinnamon and butter. yumm.


So, those were what I made this weekend. what I ate, though, will be another post, because I just have to move on to my work now. buggers.

Shortbread Cookies

When I first saw this recipe for shortbread, I was extreeemely excited, firstly because they looked sooo delicious, and, more importantly, because the recipe was so simple. most shortbread recipes i'd encountered before that had called for chilled butter and rice flour and whatnot, but this one, was basically just butter, sugar, and flour. and boy, is it good. i totally lurrrve this cookie, even though some people have not seemed very impressed to me. this is totally a keeper, to me. i love the way the texture of the cookie is dense and almost velvety, because of the use of icing sugar instead of caster, i think. and although the recipe called for unsalted butter and a pinch of salt, i went ahead with my salted butter, omitting the salt. i think the shortbread might be saltier than if one were to use unsalted butter, but i love the saltiness! not that the cookie is salty per se, but it is faintly salty, which contributes to the buttery fragrance and flavour of the cookie, a deeeelish counterpoint to the sweetness. the only thing about this recipe is the huuge amount of butter used. more than 400g ok! think that's little? it's almost two blocks of butter. yeah. yes, the yield is fairly large, but, seriously, this cookie makes it unable for you to tell yourself that the butter is divided among many many cookies, so each cookie doesn't really have that much butter. this cookie is seriously BUTTERY.
which is partly why it tastes so good with fruit, and even jam. it's delicious with cherries, and plums, and i think it'd go fantastically with strawberries! and oranges. the juicy tartness of both the strawberries and the orange would be a great way to balance the richness of the shortbread. it also makes me crave hot earl grey tea, or really hot black coffee, the kind with no sugar. it's also great with a smear of apricot jam. and raspberry too, i'd bet. mm. i love it, love it, love it.
the next time i make these, i'm going to cut down on the sugar, and roll them out very thin, cut them out in fluted circles, and drizzle/dip them in chocolate. maybe if i ever decide to sell (or rather, if people ever decide to pay me
for my baked goods), or give these as gifts. i think they make verry presentable gifts. and they're fun to make. and your kitchen smells delightfully of butter and vanilla when they're baking. yay. i love this recipe.
and yes, i know that the picture of the cherries is rather random, but i was very happily taking pictures of my yummy cherries just now, and i took some very nice shots, if i do say so myself.

Sweet simplicity

Was browsing through Daiso at Vivo on Monday, and stumbled upon these:


"Sugar Crystal" candy! also known as Rock Sugar, really. Yes, I know, I paid $2 for 120g of rock sugar that costs $0.25 per 100g. But really, this rock sugar isn't totally like those you buy at Chinese shops or the 'herb' section of supermarkets. Each piece of candy is a single, large sugar crystal, not many small ones clustered together, so it doesn't disintegrate halfway in your mouth. Since it's one big crystal, it also doesn't melt as fast, and is hence less sweet than normal, granulated sugar—but this comparison doesn't, of course, mean that I, like, eat sugar. Because I don't. But whatever. The point is, I love my rock sugar sweets!
:)