Brownie suitable for breakfast?

There are nothing for breakfast tomorrow and I am not willing to buy bread today as I am doing marketing tomorrow, so I quickly took out the magazine that I have renewed  a couple of times just because I have not tried out the few recipes in it. There are 3 recipes I wanted to try in this Australian GoodFood Magazine but I only have most of the ingredients in one recipe - Triple Chocolate Fudge brownies.

Look how tempting this recipe is with this picture from the magazine.

I marked down this recipe due to the flaky top. I once baked such a brownie but I lost the recipe. However I did not achieve that and I cannot even explained what happened during the whole baking process when it is such a straight forward recipe. Perhaps I should not have meddle any single bit of the process and ingredients.

First, I replaced some white chocolate with cookie and cream chocolates I got from my Perth trip and I even reduced the amount of white chocolate. Then I used chocolate chips as milk chocolate. As the sugar is added into melted butter so I used normal sugar instead of caster sugar as I guessed they will melt anyway. I also reduced the sugar to 50g since my cookies and cream chocolate is very sweet. I also beat the eggs vigorously instead of lightly as instructed because I was thinking of adding more rising power to the brownie (LOL). Perhaps I am all wrong....

The mixture became like a dough. It did not even stick to the sides of my pot. I felt that if I did not reduce the white chocolate amount, I will get an even firm mass of batter.

I have chosen to try out fan mode again. Actually I am not too sure if the mode called "turbo" on my oven is the same as fan mode. The manual said that "convection makes hot air circulate around the food ..." so doesn't that sounds like fan mode? Anyway, halfway through the baking process, the cooking in process batter turned to this below -

The surface has alot of oil, all bubbling. I am not sure why is that so. When baking time is up, I see that the top did not achieved the flaky look, so I turn on the top heat and wanted to dry up the top. This process went around 3-5 minutes. In the end, the brownie seems kind of dry but I still did not get the flaky top. The kids like it thou. I guess it will go well with vanilla ice cream like my friend suggested. Presenting my dry top brownie :-)

After I settled the "no breakfast tomorrow" problem, now I started to wonder if this bake is suitable for breakfast tomorrow..... *sigh*

Here is sharing the recipe from the magazine (Australian GoodFood April 2011) -

Triple chocolate fudge brownies (Makes 16 Prep 10 mins plus cooling Cook 25mins)

125g cold unsalted butter, chopped

200g dark chocolate, chopped

1/2 cup (110g) caster sugar (I used normal sugar and reduce amount to 50g)

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 1/2 cup (185g) plain flour, sifted
180g white chocolate, chopped ( I think I used around 130g)
100g milk chocolate, chopped

1. Preheat oven to 180dC or 160dC fan. Grease and line a 20cm square cake pan.
2. Place butter and dark chocolate in a small saucepan on low heat and stir until melted. Stir in sugar. Cool for 10 mins.
3. Stir in egg, then flour, and then white and milk chocolate. Spoon mixture into prepared pan. Bake for 20 - 25 mins, until firm to touch, Cook in pan. Cut into 16 squares and serve.

So simple and yet I did not make it. Haiz. I think I will find a time to try this again, follow to the perfect T (but really worried about the sugar and the sweetness).

If there are any health concious readers, the following information that came with the recipe would be helpful to you (but not me :-( ) -

In each brownie 1216 kilojoules, 4g protein, 16g total fat (10g sat fat), 33g carbohydrate (23g sugar), 1g fibre,  31mg sodium.

*phew* I managed to update my blog today with today's bake! :-)

A recipe good to keep - Soy & Ginger Chicken noodles

No, this is not a baking recipe but I have to type this recipe down for easy reference as it is still a new recipe that I have not put into my routine menu. I cooked this for yesterday's dinner and the whole family love it so much. My kids even ask me to cook it again for today's dinner! It is a one dish wonder - Soy & Ginger Chicken Noodles. This is how the dish looks like in the Kitchen Culture - Food & Travel Magazine Dec 2010 issue.

This recipe has very simple ingredients and very easy to cook. It uses yellow noodles but I am afraid my kids cannot accept the yellow noodles "alkaline" taste so I change the noodle to spagetti. I am so happy that the whole family likes it.  I know I will be cooking it again real soon but will add in more ingredients like button mushrooms.

The recipe is as follows (extracted from Kitchen Culture - Food & Travel Dec 2010) :-

2 chicken thighs fillets, skinned
1/2 cup light soy sauce (I converted to 2 tablespoon soy sauce)
1/4 cup mirin (I converted to 1 tablespoon)
2 tbsp sake or white wine (I use chinese cooking wine)
1 tbsp sugar
2 thumb sized pieces of ginger (about 40g)
2 tbsp canola oil
250g fresh yellow noodles
A large handful of kailan or chye sim, sliced
Red chillies, spring onions or coriander leaves to garnish

1) Cut chicken into large dices and place in a bowl with light soy sauce, mirin, sake or white wine, sugar and ginger. Leave to marinate for about 10 minutes.

2) Heat oil in a wok or large frying pan.

3) Remove chicken from marinade (reserve the marinade) and fry over high heat until half cooked, about 2 minutes.

4) Add noodles and 2 tbsp of marinade mixture, and stir fry till evenly mixed. If it looks dry, add a little water.

5) Add vegetables and fry for a further minute, adding more water or marinade of the mixture looks dry.

6) Once the vegetables turn dark green and are cooked through, transfer to a plate and serve, garnished with red chillies and spring onions or corriander leaves.

Mine doesn't look that nice without the chilli and spring onion garnish. Perhaps I should try using dice red bell pepper as a replacement. I must remind myself to go easy on the oil too, cos the last portion of noodles from the bottom of the wok is rather oily. Perhaps due to the extra half tablespoon of sesame oil I put inside the marinate. I have intended to reduce the 2 tablespoon canola to 1.5 tbsp and to change the 0.5 tbsp (of the 1.5 tbsp) of canola into sesame oil for that extra fragrance.
I made a mistake by adding the sesame oil into marinating the chicken meat, so the end product is rather oily as I did not reduce the canola portion. Anyway, there will still be second time to make amendments.

My kids super love this dish. I hope yours too.

First try on Mooncakes

*This post has to supercede the older bakes and makes cos I need to ride on this post to show some pictures of a plant for a forum purpose.

Mooncakes ah mooncakes ... this item always in my to do list .. just like any others and the CNY cookies. I casually mentioned during my visit to my in law that I wanted to try make snowskin this Sept holiday but has not purchase the powder yet then one of my sister in law promptly gave me a packet of snowskin powder. I declined as I am afraid I will not be able to find the time to purchase the rest of the ingredients but she insisted so I roped in my mother to help (got extra push factor mah).

We have decided that yesterday morning will be D day. It is not her first as she has done it many years ago but it certainly is my first and my kids' first. She came over after my hubby left for work and when we are about to start, I noticed that my laundry hanging outside has been "attacked"!

So we have to spent some time tidying up the mess, rinse the laundry again and it is noontime. I have to cook lunch while my mother go ahead to make the skin for the mooncake. She also taught my kids how to wrap the mooncake but my boy gave up halfway. I managed to make 4 pieces and am quite satisfied with my kungfu. Hee hee. See below and you will not be able to tell which is done by me, my mother or my girl. (ya so my girl is the smartest lah :->)

The designs are not very clear. Not sure if it is due to the insufficient mooncake to fill up the mould (but the mooncake did come to the brim) or the mould is not good (LOL) but I am satisfied that they look pretty decent. We did not try any fancy favour as it is the first time after all. Not too difficult to wrap in my opinion. It is after some read up that there are certain ratio to follow for certain weight of the mooncake. This time it is 20g skin with 28g filling. I must go research more and perhaps try our HHB's strawberry flavour (using strawberry milk).

Below is the cross section of one that I made. I like that the skin thickness is balance all round. Not sure if that is the only one out of the four thou. I don't think I will be able to submit this post to AB challenge since I do not have any recipe. The skin is from premix powder that has shortening packaged together and my mother has threw away the packaging before I can see the amount of ingredients. I hope I can try again soon.

Snowskin mooncake with black sesame filling

Before I go off, I have to use this post to show the plant that fell from the "sky". I need to ask experts how to take care of the plant as I am hopping to adopt it. The rest of my plants died cos I gave them overdose of fertiliser. :-(

 

I hope I can complete the other post sometime soon, very soon.

Playing with the same recipe

No one to be blame but myself. I have not been able to stay up late lately. Used to the early rest routine. Not able to motivate myself to try new recipes too, with lack of time I dare not buy new ingredients while trying to finish the old expiring ones. PC has been collecting dust when all I did was to post what I baked and cooked and made to Facebook using the phone.

Today deliberately drank another cup of coffee so that I can stay up to transfer my scribblings (the experiences I had on my bakes) on the pieces of papers stucked on my strong room door to the blog. It really helps when I can just come into my blog on my phone and refer to the recipes that I have tried before. I even told myself that I should do "last out (from oven), first in (to blog)" but now that I am staring at the scribblings, some just did not make sense. I still have to try my best.

I am still busy as ever with "do not know what", but has to use up the expiring ingredients and to provide variety of snack choices for kids to bring for recess, so I did a few rounds of muffins with oat, and chocolate. I had combined the recipe 1 from the banana muffin trial with Nigella's chocolate chocolate-chip muffin (NOTE : this link brings you to Small Small Baker's blog since I refer to the recipe from her site). My "recipe" goes something like this since I half the portions :-

125 g SR flour
37.5 instant oatmeal (Quaker brand - red packaging)
92g sugar
30g butter, melted
92g milk
1 egg
1 tbsp cocoa powder
75g chocolate chips (save 1/4 for topping)

I did worry if the lack of banana and addition of the cocoa powder will make the muffin dry. I cannot remember what is the outcome as this batch is baked in Aug 15th. I vaguely remember it is rather hard and they could be overbaked. However, they were still tasty as the kids protested when my mother took quite a few pieces.

The 2nd time I used the same recipe is on Aug 24th. I had the time, so i tried out fan mode with two trays of mini ones (minis are easier for them to bring to school). I remembered I read that using fan mode, one must turn down the temperature roughly by 20 dC, so I used 190dC this time for 15 minutes. I had a hard time deciding if the muffins were cooked because I was not sure the stick (testing doneness) turns out chocolately due to it being uncooked or that I had poked into a chocolate chip, so I added 3 more minutes. The top tray had hard crust while the bottom try was fine. It is school holiday week now, so let me see if I still have the chance to try this recipe again. This time I must make sure I update the blog asap.

Initially I thought that things will not get burn in fan mode as there is no direct heat, but I was wrong. Some of the chips in the top tray got burnt but the rest are all just nice. The chips inside the muffins are still darker in colour (towards the colour of being burnt) rather than the nice brown on the outside of the cupcake. I still have not solve the mystery of "inside darker colour chololate chip". Haiz.

I am dozing off (at 4am!) so will leave the other items till the next time (hopefully tomorrow night). I hope I talked sense at 4am.

Here's a picture to share that depicts all my "complaints".

The burnt chips on top and those inside

hobby vs "job"

It has been (almost) another month since I last wrote. I missed the Aspiring Baker Challenge on Swiss Roll! It is really fun to have an aim to work towards but pity, baking is just one of my hobby and my job is housewife. So, I got to manage the kids, the house as well as cook meals (but I love cooking too!). It is not helping that I have to sleep early most of the time since I got to wake up at 6am (tonight not counted as I really want to write something before stuff I want to record down get lost).

For the past few weeks, NLB has this DEAR program where one can borrow up to 12 books! So I spent most of my evening infront of the TV, ears with the Chinese news and eyes over food magazines. Nowadays I use my phone to snap down pictures of recipes that I want to try and of tips that are useful to me. I need to "record" the tips here so that I can easily refer to them when I needed them. I do have alot (of recipes) stored in the harddisk but the "find file" function sometimes is not as trustworthy as the search engine here.

This is one which I find quite interesting. There was a time where steel soap is an in-thing that can remove odor. This tip highlights to us that we had that "soap" all along!

 Isn't this interesting?

So I said I have to cook meals right and trying out different/new recipes is really one of my favourite too.  I was reading HHB's blog and noticed her crispy skin roasted chicken.  I knew I had to try it but I have to do it with wings/drum sticks/ chicken legs. After I have bought required ingredients, and has read her blog in details umpteen times before I set on cooking, I realised that I borrowed that very same magazine home too! Anyway I still refer to her steps since it is tested by someone I knew and can be trusted. I really ended up with crispy skin chicken wings. HHB advised that I try the whole chicken, so that the meat will be more moist but I think to cater for my kids, drumsticks/wings are still the way to go. Here is the proof of the crispy skin.

I also tried my hands on garlic bread, with homemade garlic spread on the free hotdog buns that came with the Gardenia white bread every weekend and were very well received by my family members. Just a few days ago, I made pancake for breakfast too and had a go with making mickey mouse and mickey's hand shape pancake. Not a success thou. I used the stainless cookie cutter dipped in butter but the batter still stuck to the cutters. So I had to remove the whole cutter thing and push out the half cooked pancakes and return them to pan. Due to this trouble, I only made one each, haha.

 

It is 1am now. Got to wrap up. I need to write my experience on baking HHB's banana walnut streusel pound cake another day.

Here's sharing this investment strategy that I find interesting, also from a food magazine.

Good night.

Something new from Down Under

It has been a month since I last post. I thought I will have more time to bake during the school holiday and perhaps also to engage the kids in baking, but no, I was wrong. The holiday flew pass.

The first weekend was spent on board Royal Carribean and there are housework to be done when we came back. After that, I have to go searching for cheap winter wear for the kids in preparation for the Perth trip on the last week of the school holiday. Top that with alot of last minute research, planning, booking and finally flew off.

We came back right before school starts, so besides kicking in the routine, I have housework and this is the first time I touch the PC at night as I did not stay past 12 midnight previously.

I have no bake to share, but I knew Aspiring bakers are on swiss roll this month .. I hope I can have time to  join.

This post will then be dedicated to new fruits that I got to know during the Perth Trip.

This is called Tamarillo. I found this in the farm we stayed. The owner say this is a delicacy. The market there sells one for around AUZ70cents. The owner of the farm has warned me that he did not like the taste and it is like passionfruit and has also advised me to sprinkle sugar on top before I eat it.
I finally got a chance to try it on the next night after we are back. The inside does look like passionfruit with little seeds. The taste is a little sour and a little mild sweet but I can take it. No one else in my family wants it. Here are the pictures of the insides.

Besides the above fruit of the size of an egg, I got to taste another fruit from the "wild". We are touring the Caversham Wildlife Park when I see the Park's staff picking up fruits from the ground and the tree into a basket. More daring overseas, so I went over to KPO. The staff told me (of course upon me asking), those are called Irish Strawberries. She is collecting them for feeds to the birds in the park. I asked if they can be consume by human (silly question?) and she said yes, but not those on the floor. So I pluck one out from the short tree (or should I say shrub) and I munched it. It was sweet. Let me show you how it looked.

The berry

With this, I leave you to goggle more about the fruits I talked about if you are interested.

Two recipes of Banana muffin

Purposely bought a bigger bunch of banana so that I can try out these two recipes in the library books. However,  I am busy with "not sure what" that I have to fridge my spotty banana in the fridge till the skin turn black. That forces me to find a time to do it.

This was done before I went away for a weekend cruise. I have no time to update then so I cannot remember much about the experience, or any hiccups (Haiz, so old already) but the only thing that I remember was, the muffins are not oily, both types. After I eat them, I do not even need to wash hands with soap!

The kids helped with the mixing and scooping. They are as excited as me because these are done with the new oven. As the muffins are of the ever popular flavour, there was no problem of "excess stocks". I have to type down these two tried recipes before the books are to be returned to the library. Wish I will be able to find them again, because there are still quite a few recipes I would like to try out.


Recipe 1, taken from Great Tastes Little Cakes published by Bay Books

Banana Muffins (Makes 12) 
250 g (9 oz / 2 cups) self-raising flour
75 g (2 1/2 oz / 1 cup) oat bran
185 g (6 1/2 oz / 3/4 cup) caster sugar
60 g (2 1/4 oz) unsalted butter, melted
185 ml (6 fl oz / 3/4 cup) milk
2 eggs, lightly beaten
240 g (8 1/2 oz / 1 cup) mashed, ripe banana (2 medium bananas)

1. Preheat the oven to 210 dC (415F / Gas 6-7). Lightly grease a 12 hole standard muffin tin. Sift the flour into a large bowl and add the oat bran and the sugar. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients.

2. Combine the butter, milk, eggs and banana in a separate mixing bowl and add to the flour mixture all at once. Using a wooden spoon, stir until just mixed. Do not overmix - the batter should remain lumpy.

3. Spoon mixture into the prepared tin. Bake for 15 minutes, or until puffed and brown. Leave in tin for 5 minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Note : For an extra treat, beat 100g ( 3 1/2 oz) cream cheese, 2 tablespoons icing sugar and 2 teaspoons lemon juice with electric beaters until light and creamy. Spread over muffins and top with dried banana slices.

Recipe 2, taken from healthy lunchboxes for kids by Amanda Grant

muffins (makes 12)
50 g butter (or sunflower oil)
300 g self raising flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
80 g golden caster sugar
2 eggs
110 ml natural yogurt (if you don't have yogurt, you could use milk)
110 ml milk
a few drops of vanilla extract
2 big handfuls of berries (e.g. blueberries or raspberries) - I replaced it with mash banana

1. Preheat the oven 200dC (400F) gas 6. Line the 12 muffin holes with paper cases - if you don't have any, just grease the muffin holes really well with butter.

2. Melt the butter in the microwave or in a small pan. Leave to cool slightly. Sift the flour and baking powder in a large bowl. Add the sugar to the flour.

3. In a small bowl, whisk the eggs with a fork, add the yoghurt, milk, vanilla extract and melted butter.

4. Quickly and gently mix everything together in the large bowl. Don't over-mix or your muffins will not be light. Quick fold in the fruit, and then spoon the mixture into the cases.

5. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until well risen and golden brown. Take the muffins out of the tin and leave to cool on a wire rack. When they have completely cooled, place in an airtight container, or you could bag, label, and freeze half for another time.



I halved both the recipes. I like the first recipe as it uses oat. I like the second recipe as it is very versatile. The author said that the muffins can be freeze and she encourages experimenting with different fruit. That is why I use banana. Here's sharing with you the products - product of recipe 1 in ikea paper case, product of recipe 2 in white cup.

I think handmix mufins are really good for my kids' bento. Easy to make and best do them in mini cases so that the muffins can fit into their bento boxes. However, in my case, baking is a troublesome process, because my oven is also a storage place. Not only do I need to move away the stuff I put on the counter top infront of the oven, I also have to move out the baking trays in the oven, as well as a oven toaster on top of my oven before I can start a baking session. If only I had more counter top space.

This is the new oven at work, now with lights so that baking can also be done at night. ;-)


p/s : Anyone has idea how to enter fractions that are used in dictating the measurement of ingredients? I hope the recipes are understandable.