Custard Bun

While working on the char siu pao, we also came up with these custard buns inspired by the Canton-i version. Tasty enough but have to work on getting the consistency of the custard just right so that it melts when the bun is split open.

Char Siu Pao (BBQ Pork Buns)

The only char siu pao that I like are those that mum makes because they do not contain much lard yet are flavourful. After much procrastination, we finally got our act together to steam a delicious batch.

The night before, mum cooked the filling of chopped pork with onion and garlic flavoured with loads of sauces. This is kept overnight to settle and cool. On baking day, mum made the dough from scratch and I portioned them out into little balls:

Each piece is then flattened, a small portion of filling placed in the middle, and twist sealed. Steam for 10 mins and voila: Home-made char siu pao

Dumpling Festival

This posting is a few weeks late as Midsummer festival took place a few weeks back but due to popular demand, mum and my aunt made a second batch of their bakchang dumplings.

Mine are custom-made to include only meat and mushroom filling, minus the beans, chestnut and salted egg yolk.

Konnyaku Coconut Jelly

These miserable, hot, monsoon-rain-scarce days, it's nice to cool down by slurping konnyaku jellies. According to a google search, konnyaku is supposed to refer to fat-, calorie-, gluten- and soy-free traditional Japanese food. Don't know where mum picked up the name but hope it is true. Gimme more jellies...(the white bits are coconut strips)...

Blackforest Muffin

Yoikes! It's been ages. Week after week, mum made cheese tarts, egg tarts, cupcakes and chocolate cakes but nothing new until...these blackforest muffins. Delish and garnished with chocolate sprinkles, chopped walnuts and a cheery ol' cherry.

Strawberry Cheesecake

For my aunt's birthday earlier this month, mum tried out this new cheesecake recipe she found in a cookbook. The base is made of crushed digestive biscuits, followed by a layer of melted chocolate. The body is a thick layer of cheese blended with low fat cream and ground strawberries.

The cheese was surprising light (because it is made fluffier by the cream) and refreshing (because of the strawberry flavour). I would have preferred the cheese layer to be thinner but that's not a criticism in itself. Definitely to be included into mum's list of offerings.

Sweetcorn Muffin

Something new was in the oven yesterday and it turned out to be these experimental sweetcorn muffin. I promptly cut one up for tasting.

The verdict? I felt it should be a bit fluffier and sweeter. Also offered a suggestion for mum to add peanut sprinkles to mimic the flavourful crispy pan peanut cake sold at pasar malam food stalls.

Watch out for Sweetcorn Muffin, Part II...

Lemon Peach Cake

These hot and muggy days, no one has much of an appetite for chocolate-y goodies. Mum gets a lot more requests for chilled fruity creations. She baked this lemon peach cake for my cousin who needed something for her mother-in-law's birthday celebrations. 

Here are the thick middling layers of chopped peaches and whipped cream.

And a bit more to top things off.

Chinese Eggtarts

One of my favourite desserts since childhood is the Chinese eggtart. I love it best when they come just out of the oven at dim sum restaurants but failing that option, I always go for the Tong Kee ones. So as a real eggtart fan, I was somewhat sceptical when mum said she was going to make her own.

The batch that you see below was part of her first attempt. The base that she used was not the flaky one but the harder dough variety. These just came out of the oven.

After this, she prepared the egg filling, I think with egg (duh), sugar and milk. The filling was then added to the bases and baked again. And the finished product:

I registered my vote by chomping up two at one ago and bringing one to work the next day. Pass with distinction.

Double Chocolate Muffin

I don't think this one needs too much introduction or description. If this isn't enough chocolate for the chocolate addicts out there, let me add that at the heart of the muffin is a blob of soft chocolate cream.

Butter Sweetcorn Cake

This cake came about because my aunt's mother-in-law loved the taste and smell of corn but could not take too much of it either for digestive of denture reasons. So mum created this butter sweetcorn cake. It is light but fragrant and flavourful. It goes really quickly so she usually bakes them in batches of two like in the photo below.

Coffee Cake

Mum starts with a chocolate cake base then layers each deck with chocolate cream, coffee cream and sprinkled walnuts. Best served chilled with a cuppa hot espresso.

Coconut Jello

Mum made these as dessert for our steam boat Chinese New Year night. It's a light soft jelly speckled with small coconut meat strips - not to sweet, not too hard. Just nice for topping up full bellies.

Chocolate Walnut Cake

This is a quite a simple and light cake. As usual, there is the dough. This is mixed in with a big bowl of chopped walnuts and chocolate chip.

As you can see from the top right corner of the photo below, there were quite a few cakes cooling on the kitchen table.

London Cookies

I can't figure out why these cookies are called London cookies because I have never seen them in London. The best way to describe these cookies is that they are like a cookie-version of Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

Mum starts by making a biscuit dough and weighing them out small portions. She presses a piece of hazelnut into the middle of the each biscuit portion, balls the dough and puts them into a tiny paper cups. The biscuit balls are then baked and cooled. Next, she pours melted chocolate over the biscuit and sprinkles almond bits on top.

Kuih Lapis

It is about time that mum cooks up another local favourite. This is the popular kuih lapis or layered sticky cake in the making. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to cut up the kuih for a cross-section shot as the whole tray was her contribution to a temple festival.

Kuih lapis is made of flour, sugar and coconut milk. It's sweet and sticky and looks like Christmas candy as it is layered red and white. First, mum sets up a large tray over a big wok of boiling water. A measured amount of coconut milk mixture is poured into the tray. The tray is covered then with a wok hood so that steam can solidify the mix. Then it is layer after layer of alternately red and white milk until the tray is filled. You have to always plan to end with the red layer on top or your kuih lapis would look mighty strange.

Return of the Fruit Cake

Mum has really gone all out on the fruit cake this CNY. She ran a mini cottage industry slicing and wrapping candy-sized pieces and repacking them into gift boxes for friends and family. I alternated as a wrapper and packer.

Step 1: Slice

Step 2: Portion

Step 3: Wrap

Step 4: Box & Ribbon 'Em

Chocolate Chip Peanut Cookies

This is a slight variation of the Chocolate Chip Cookies in the last posting. My brother bought a bag of Reese's peanut chips from somewhere so we substituted half the chocolate chips with these. Unlike chocolate chips peanut chips tend to melt into the cookie so compared with the earlier batch, these are sweeter but definitely more fragrant.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I got tired of going out of my way to buy fresh Famous Amos cookies so convince my mum to bake a few batches this year. I find out for the first time that it is actually a two day process.

Day 1: She makes the dough with chocolate chips and chopped walnuts. Then, she divides the dough into long rolls wrapped in grease paper. The rolls go into the fridge overnight.

Day 2: It's really easy for here. Just cut up little chunks with a knife and put them on a baking tray. Wait for the wonderful smells...

Cornflake Cookies

It has been a little quiet not because my mum hasn't been baking. Far from it. She has only been making a lot of things that have already been featured mostly fuit cake, muffins and cupcakes.

But seeing as it is drawing close to Chinese New Year. I managed to get her to make some of my favourite cornflake cookies. She first makes the dough with raisins, scoops out dollops into a big bowl of cornflakes, roll the dough around, scoop them up again onto an oven dish, then they go into the oven.

 This is what comes out in the end. Golden brown cookies which are light and crumbly on the inside but crunchy on the outside.

Black Forest Cake

I've been offline a little longer than I intended no thanks to some work commitments but to make up for lost time, I am featuring this most famous of cakes. Next to chocolate and strawberry, I think this must be one of the most well known names.

In my mum's version, she starts with a chocolate sponge cake. Cuts it into 3 slices and each inner layer is coated with cherry juice and kirsch (a clear liquor). Then, she slaps on thick slabs on whipped cream, piles on the cherries and thick chocolate shavings.

Very Bavarian and wholesome.

Kuih Talam

One of my mum's lesser known talents is in making local dessert. Once in a while, she comes up with something like this large tray of kuih talam. I am not sure who it is meant for but for the benefit of those who have no idea what this is, it is a type of sticky Malay cake. The white layer on top is savoury while the green bottom section is sweet (or is it the other way round?). It's kind of a Malaysian speciality.

Marble Cheese Cake

Just read in the Star yesterday that Gordon Ramsey may do a feature on Malaysian cuisine. Pssh! what does that foul-mouthed boor know about food? A London paper recently did a review of 'celebrity chef' restaurants and Ramsey's sat at the bottom of the rankings of a miserable, overpriced lot.

While I was grumbling about the pretensions of poor English cooks, mum was baking this little creation. It's basically chocolate cake with a large swirl of cheese and moist chocolate. I really like the crater top. The side view shows the 'marbling'.

Chocolate Cake

You can't resist this if you are remotedly a chocolate lover. It is not just any chocolate cake but more correctly a double chocolate cake. As I was growing up, mum always had a tub of leftover cream in the fridge - which was why I was kind of a fat kid.

The cake body is baked in such a way that it retains quite a bit of moisture and is not too crumbly. A thick layer of chocolate cream is sandwiched in between two cake layers and covers the entire edifice. The cream itself is something to shout about. It is freshly made from thick slabs of pure chocolate, butter and sugar.

Pandan Custard Cake

This cake has been around for almost 30 years but believe it or not, people still ask for it. As a kid I used to help my mum stir the mixture until one day, when I was about 7, I churned the mixture so fast that everything flew out of the bowl and hit the walls. That ended my baking career.

The key ingredient is freshly squeezed pandan juice - from the plants in our garden (and sometimes my grandma's). Under the thick layer of custard is pandan sponge cake. It is garnished with dried coconut sprinkles.

Raisin Cupcake

Butter cupcakes with raisins are always popular with my kid cousins. Very good when mum wants to bribe them into doing chores. The sprinkles make the cupcakes look kinda cute.