The Great Granola Bar Adventure

Well, as you've probably guessed from the title of this post, this weekend's baking venture was making homemade granola bars. And, as you've probably guessed, it was something of a fiasco. Or adventure. I got the original recipe (and idea) from here, but when I got to the supermarket and saw flax seeds, I was rather turned off by the way they looked—for some reason, they reminded me of insects... Also, I couldn't find any puffed brown rice cereal—cereals in Singapore aren't so healthy, I guess—so I got rice crispies instead. To make up for the lack of flax seeds, I got a pack of dessicated coconut too. Plus, I'm not a big pecan fan, so I got slivered almonds instead.
Then, I got home and discovered that all the oats in the house would only make 2 cups. oh well, I thought, just...multiply the recipe by......two-thirds? Right. I can do that.

Not so, really...I kept forgetting to, so the mixture ended up being a study in chuck-it-in-any-old-how. As a result, there was waaay too much sesame seeds, so muuch so that it almost overpowers everything. plus, you can hardly taste the coconut. and the dried fruits were maybe a little too dried, because by the time they came out of the oven and cooled, they were quiiite hard.

Oh and then there was the issue of my granola not sticking.
This was because I added the honey mixture in a few additions, and after about 3/4 of the mixture had gone in, I tasted it, and it was extreememly sweet. So I stopped adding, since the mixture was quite wet already. Alas, it just. refused. to. stick. I got maybe 5 (precarious) bars out of the mix and a good-sized Tupperware full of loose granola.

This was on Thursday. Over the past few days, I'd been scooping out the granola and eating it as cereal, but the mix was just not sweet enough. So today, I was finally fed up enough to try again. I mixed up some honey, butter, brown sugar and salt, and re-mixed the loose granola, then baked it again.
Success!
Or, almost.
This batch held much better than the previous (not saying much, really), although some pieces needed to be pressed into bars. All in all, this was a really good learning experience, since now I know how the different ingredients work in the bigger picture of the granola bar, so in future I'll be able to play around more with ingredients. I'll probably use two different kinds of nuts next time, more rice crispies, definitely less sesame, and I'll prolly skip the vanilla and replace it with some cinnamon powder. If I'm feeling particularly rich, I might use maple syrup too, instead of honey and cinnamon. Or mix in some jam with the honey to make it less sweet..
whee, I'm already excited.

I wonder if a dried-mango (or some other Chinese dried fruit) granola bar would be nice..?

Here's "my recipe", all figures adjusted as they should be.

Ingredients:
2 cups rolled oats (old-fashioned or instant)
1 cup slivered almonds
¼ cup desiccated coconut
1/3 cup sesame seeds

1 1/2 generous cups rice crispies
1 1/2 cups dried fruit, chopped (I used apricots, cranberries and cherries)

2/3 cup honey
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Toast the nuts, coconut, seeds and oats by spreading it out on two baking sheets at 180ºC, or by tossing in a dry frying pan on low heat.

Add the toasted mixture to the nuts and crispies in a large bowl.

Mix the honey, saly, butter and sugar together in a saucepan and heat, stirring til dissolved.

Take off the heat and add the vanilla.

Toss the dry ingredients with the honey mixture, then spread onto well-oiled baking sheets and bake, at 180ºC till toasty and golden.

Let cool for a few minutes, then cut the bars, but wait till fully cool before removing from pan.

Eggy in a Basket ROCKS!

Well, I said i'd go back and make myself an Eggy in a Basket breakfast, and so I did. and boy was it gooooood. buttery, crisp bread surrounding a delicious fried-in-butter egg: so simple, but so, so, so good. this is a fanstastic way to use up old, going-stale bread, even better than toasting, because the butter prevents it from becoming dry. This is so good, it might even over take pancakes as my breakfast-craving number 1.
but maybe not. but that's really not the point.

the point is, well, that this is such a decadently delicious, easy-peasy thing to throw together, that everyone should try it.
Ingredients:
Egg: 1
Slice of bread: 1
Butter
Serves one.
First, take out a slice of bread and place in on a flat, dry surface—i used the plate i was going to put my toast on, so i wouldn't have to wash another thing.
Then, take a drinking glass and cut a hole in the middle of the bread, making sure the glass is the right size to give you a border of bread around the hole.
Next, melt some butter in a small pan, spreading it out. when the butter starts to foam, place the bread into the pan, pressing down slightly with the spatula. Flip and repeat until the bread looks a little crisp/toasty.
Add a little butter into the hole, let it melt, then crack the egg into the hole. let the egg fry, making sure the fire is not so big that it burns the bread. if some egg white seeps out of the hole, cut it away with the spatula.
When the egg looks rather set flip the eggy over.

After the first flip: the bread isn't very toasty yet

Don't do this too early or the whole thing might wobble/slip all over the bread, and whilst it will still taste good, it won't look like an eggy in a basket.

If the pan looks too dry, add some butter and move the eggy around in the butter. when the egg is done to your preference—some like the yolk hard and cooked through, but i like it runny—and the bread is nice and brown and toasty, remove to a plate and eat. YUM. my favourite part.

Almost out of the pan: nice, brown toasty bread

Cravings

Am currently experiencing terrible food cravings. severe and terrible.

1) Japanese food!!!! this is all the fault of that Lonely Planet Japan book. all that talk about tofu, abura-age, miso paste, green tea and all that. oh god. i want to get my hands (and mouth) on some:
a) Sashimi from that Japanese restaurant at Chijmes—seriously the best sashimi I've ever eaten, ever. especially the swordfish. oh. my. god. firm, chewy/bouncy, juicy and creamy, and oh so fresh. mmm. the green tea here tastes excellent—the sort that has roasted rice mixed into it to give it an earthy, roasty fragrance. mmmm.
b) yakitori from Shin Kushiya at VivoCity. They serve a type of yakitori that is not dipped in the sauce when they grill it. Instead, it's seasoned with salt, so that the outsides are dry and crispy, and the insides are just bursting with juice. They also grill their skewers with real charcoal (and apparently a special sort of charcoal too, for prolonged high temp), so there is a very nice hot-coal sort of fragrance to the skewers.
c) the scallops with miso paste from Megumi at Siglap. the best baked scallops ever. really. it's lightyears better than the whole cheese sauce baked shellfish. the miso paste is salty, creamy, a litte sweet, and has this fantastic flavour that is totally out-of-this-world good. ohh boy.
d) reverse California Maki roll from that Japanese restaurant at Paragon—i just can't remember the name. this is a really really good maki roll, rolled with the rice outside instead of inside and then rolled in crushed salted seaweed and toasted white and black sesame seeds. then topped with those little orange egg roes. totally divine. the sushi chef here is very skilled, because the sushi is well rolled and doesn't fall apart, and the rice is deliciously flavoured with that vinegary taste: just right, not actually sour, but fragrant. the green tea here is also good.

2) Breakfast food!!!
a) the pancakes from New York New York: need i say more?
b) sticky cinnamon buns—chewy, sweetandsalty, cinnammony goodness. mmm.
c) scrambled eggs—the kind i make: creamy, cheesy, with lots of 'juice' because of extra milk and butter. also heart-attack inducing.
d) grilled tomatoes. the ones in my pesto pasta at the Wine Garage were fantastic. halved cherry tomatoes griled til soft inside so that they just burst into a flood of warm tomatoe-y goodness in your mouth. mmm-good.
e) chocolate chip cookies. this i am totally going to bake this weekend.

3) Cremé bruleé: for some reason i am totally craving this, completely out of the blue.

okay, i think i'd better stop here before i drive myself insane.

Cherry Chocolate Muffins

Bought about 250g of cherries at Carrefour the other day whilst I was shopping for my lunch-ingredients, without even knowing what i was going to do with them. they just looked so gorgeous that i had to get them.




On the way home, I decided to make muffins with them, and decided to add dark chocolate to the mix. So I pitted and halved about 3/4 of them, and grated the rest into a pulp, and chopped up about 3/4 of a small bar of Cadbury's Old Gold Dark Chocolate—which was the only thing 7-11 had. the muffins came out well enough, even though they seemed too wet at first. When i broke the first one apart, I thought I was doomed never to make successful fruit cupcakes. However, after sitting for awhile, they became pretty damn good.

So good, in fact, that they were all gone by this morning—I made them last night. And so good that my mother called me to tell me she'd ordered cherries, and that I should get the rest of the ingredients needed for more cupcakes. haha. this from my mother, who doesn't even like cakes and stuff very much.

So for this batch, I added more sugar, since my mother complained that they weren't sweet enough, and quartered the cherries instead of halving them, since my mother said that there needed to be cherries in every bite, instead of a big chunk or three here and there and none elsewhere. Also added a few drops of almond essence, since I thought that that would complement the cherries and the chocolate. But, as I was leery of adding too much, I ended up putting too little, and the almond-y scent I'd been aiming for was pretty much nonexistent. But, all in all, am quite happy with these muffins: they're sweet and buttery, with a nice, springy texture, creamy and darkly sweet from the chocolate, juicy and tart from the cherries. the only thing is, the batter itself has no cherry flavour or fruitiness, despite the almost half a kilo of cherries i grated in. but, they are nice and moist. plus, the fruit chunks give them a really nice look.



Drizzled with dark chocolate on the top—yumm.

Chocolate-Hazelnut Chunk Muffins

Aand the muffin saga continues, with today's foray into chocolate-hazelnut studded muffins.



Aren't they pretty? okay, maybe not pretty per se, but they look pretty inviting. haha. i think it's just chocolate in general that has the ability to make everything look inviting/enticing.
So why chocolate-hazelnut chunk? basically because i bought a square of riter-sport milk chocolate hazelnut and didn't feel like eating it like that. it was actually a toss-up between daim-studded muffins and choc-hazelnut, but i figured those hard caramel pieces in daim wouldn't taste very good after being baked. so, chocolate hazelnut it was.

the muffin recipe is basically the same as the jam one, with some changes

Ingredients:
75g butter, melted
3/4 cup (plus a bit) milk
1 egg
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
1 1/4 cup self-raising flour
a bit less than 1/4 cup caster sugar (the smallest measurement my cup has is 1/4, but less than that, cos of the chocolate..somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 cup)
1 slab of Riter-Sport Milk Chocolate and Hazelnut, room temperature

Preheat oven to 180°C.
-Cut up the chocolate into smallish chunks, and place aside.
-Whisk together milk, egg and vanilla essence.
-Sift SRFlour into bowl, and mix the sugar in, then make a well in the middle.
-Pour the melted butter and the milk mixture in and mix. Whilst still lumpy, add in the chocolate and continue to mix, but be careful not to overmix.
-Ladle into muffin tins, almost to the top, then bake until they rise and turn golden brown.
(I can't really give you very detailed/specific instructions for baking time, since i use a microwave oven, but it's pretty obvious when they're done).
-Remove and place onto cooling rack, drizzle with tempered chocolate if desired. (or if, unlike me, you have extra plain chocolate to melt)

i suggest eating one whilst it's still fresh from the oven, or toasting it when you want to eat it, because when the chocolate is all nice and melty, mmmmm-mmmm-good. haha.

yumm.

Surprise Muffins

My latest baking expedition has been to make these funky jam-filled muffins. Making them was pretty fun and easy too. got the recipe from here, and it's basically a prep, prep, prep, pour, mix to get the batter, then a dollop of batter, jam, and more batter. quick and easy in terms of making them, but I am less than pleased with the end result.

Even if they are pretty, they don't taste all that good, especially the day after, and the day after that. After they've cooled, they taste pretty good, springy, moist, fragrant and yummy, with a slight crispy shell on the outside. So, that night, I was pretty happy. Then, I ate one for breakfast the next day, and it was kind of a shock when i realised that the cake had somehow become a lot more dense and dry/oily overnight, not moist and all like the previous night. it wasn't horrid, but it definitely wasn't as good as it had been the night before. M seemed to like them though, so that's something. Then, i ate one for breakfast today, and it was like yesterday, but worse. sigh. tomorrow i'll try toasting them, see what happens.
Maybe i'll make them again, but substitute some of the butter out for water or milk. or maybe it's the microwaves—cooking from inside out instead of outside in. dunno. it'd be tragic if i had to stick to cookies ONLY. sometimes you just want to stir stuff together and chuck it in and get a nice end product, not cream, stir, roll, refrigerate, cut roll, refrigerate cut etc etc etc until you are so darn tired. ah well. maybe shall try another muffin recipe sometime soon. god knows i need the 'therapy' after staring at virtuallly METRES of microfilm for six and a half hours a day.

The best breakfasts are in the pm.

Went to New York, New York for dinner yesterday with E and M, and it was gooood. the best thing about NYNY is that they serve breakfast ALL DAY. yes, all day! no dinky 'until 11 am' shit here, no siree! *chortles*

So whilst E went for the alfredo—or was it carbonara?—with chicken, I went for the Big! Big! Breakfast. Two eggs sunny side up, half a fried/grilled tomato, two sausages, bacon, a side of sauteed mushrooms and two of the fluffiest pancakes i have ever eaten in my life.
everything was pretty good, but the pancakes were simply fantastic. thick—about 2-3 cm—and fluffy and tasting faintly of sugar and eggs, and the slightest bit cakey, they were really really excellent. mm. i'd be over the moon if i could make pancakes like those. yummyummmmmmyumm.

Banana Macadamia Pancakes

Well, after packing up the room today, came home and decided to make pancakes. Alas, there were still no apples, so I decided to make Banana Macadamia Pancakes. The basic pancake recipe
I got from here, go click recipe file, and the "inspiration" for the rather weird-sounding banana-macadamia combination was from 101cookbooks.com. The original recipe from 101 required way too many ingredients that i don't have at home, stuff like buttermilk and desicated coconut, which i don't like to eat much anyways, but i did have some leftover macadamias (from that trip to Pat's Oven..?) and we did have bananas, so i took the easy bits of the two recipes and mixed them together.
The end product(s) were toooo delicious–yes, I'm bragging, but credit doesn't really go to me, la—but boy were they ugly. but well. (which is why there're no pictures, hee)

so, i ended up making 4 variations of the banana/macadamia thing.
firstly, cos i'd eaten soo many of those yummy nuts, i figured there just was not going to be enough for the whole bowl of batter. so i poured about a third into a separate bowl and added mushed bananas to it and made plain banana pancakes.

then, in the other two-thirds of the batter, i added the crushed honey-roasted macadamias.the 101 recipe calls for the macadamias to be added to the batter, and after pouring the batter onto the pan, to add three thin slices on top, so they get nice and carmelised. sounds workable—and yummy—in theory, but the slices don't quite stick on the batter, so when you flip, they kida get scraped away. plus, they get burnt/browned before the rest of the pancake does, so after a few of those on-top kind of pancakes, i decided to stop with that.

so i made a few macadamia pancakes with the plain macadamia batter. also not bad. it's also quite cool the way the pancakes leave smudges of oil on the pan—it's the macadamias! cool, eh? haha

then, i added chopped bananas to the macadamia batter, since i was determined to get some improved banana-macadamia pancakes. this batter was by far the chunkiest, and the pancakes were shaped the oddest, cos they don't spread out to form circles, they kinda just plop down the way you poured them.

so taste-wise? i definitely liked the last version best, although the 101 ones were not bad, just..not banana-y enough, and visually the worst. the plain macadamia ones were a rather interesting pancake, crunchy, very pang; not bad at all.
so all in all, it's been a great pancake experience, and yy is happy. here's the recipe for those of you who want to try it.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup plain flour
3 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp melted butter
1 1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
2 bananas
about 40g honey roasted macadamias, crushed (I have no real idea about the weight, it's just a guess. just gauge for yourself)

Mix the first four ingredients together in a bowl. Mix the next three in a separate bowl.
Get out your non-stick frying pan and heat it up, oiling it slightly. Just grease it like you would a cake pan—use kitchen towel to rub with a bit of oil.
Mix the wet ingredients with the dry, along with the nuts and bananas. Be careful not to overmix, or your pancakes will not be fluffy and nice. Don't worry even if there're some lumps.
Pour into the pan and cook them, then eat with butter and honey/golden syrup.
yumm.

Makes many many small pancakes. I usually halve the recipe. Half would get you about..17-19 small pancakes.

milk

I know I've said this a million times, but I just had to say it once more: Meiji milk is the best. Sometimes I think it's even better than chocolate as a pms food. chocolate has a tendency to make one feel all gelat and guilty, and if taken in too great a quantity, could give you the beginnings of a sore throat. but meiji milk, now, doesn't. spoke with her on the phone just now, a sort of extension from yesterday's conversation, and hung up totally pissed off. as usual. then i opened my fridge and took out a bottle of milk, mainly cos I've eaten my freddo ration for the day. wasn't expecting any sort of happy effect, but well, meiji makes me happy. :)

yum.