Weekend Baking

Lately, I stumbled into some blogs on how to bake purple sweet potato chiffon cake so I decided to arrange with Li to try the recipe. The sweet potatoes that we usually tasted were yellow-flesh in color but these sweet potatoes from Okinawa were purple-flesh in color and tasted sweeter. A little information to share here (which I read online) ~ these potatoes are fat-free, low in calories, high in fiber and antioxidants.You can use them to make puree for your desserts, snacks or soup.

3 pieces cost $6.60 ~ Hmm, quite ex :( but they were yummy!

To make the puree, we steamed the sweet potatoes till soft and smashed into paste.

Then, add milk to the sweet potato paste and put into the blender.

The puree was done and would put to our cake mixture.

We had successfully baked the chiffon cake

The color was beautiful ~ purplish in color with the sweet potato bits ~ Yummy!

The cake texture was soft and moist

Couldn't wait to serve a piece of the cake with a cup of piping hot coffee or tea

We had leftover kuro-goma (black sesame) spread so we decided to
bake another chiffon cake with it. This was fragrant and saved the
trouble of roasting and grinding the sesame seeds.

We got the right color this time
~ slightly darker and could taste the goma flavor

We love Hershey's Chocolates so we decided to get this
for baking our Chocolate Yogurt Cupcakes.

Ready to get into the hot oven.

Freshly baked ~ Hmmm, the surface cracked due to the oven was too hot
and we didn't control the temperature well.

Nice strong cocoa flavor of our cupcakes.

"C" = Cupcakes ^0^

Great way to de-stress through BAKING!

Baking Day

Lately, I have interest in baking and my friend, Li has offered her place for me to bake. Well, she can bake very well and can guide me along :) For 2 consecutive weeks, we had baked 10 chiffon cakes and more than 60 pieces of cookies. What a great attempt and effort! Luckily, Li assisted and helped me along the way ~ especially all the washing was done by her..haha! Thanks Li ^0^ Here are the photos taken during our baking process.

Here are the ingredients for our chiffon cakes ~ The oranges and lemons for our Golden Citrus Chiffon Cakes are missing in the photos as we keep in the refrigerator.

These stuff are for our cookies.

Phew! This egg separator is really a helpful tool as it makes
less messy job for separating the eggs.

Just a note to all, the eggs must be fresh or else the yolk
just leaks in together with the egg white.

Ta ta! Finally we have the egg white and yolks separated ^0^

We are preparing the mocha coffee mixture for our chiffon cake. However, we do not really like this packet of mocha coffee powder that we bought. There's creamer in it so the cake is not very fragrant. We recommend to use Robert Timms Granulated Coffee / UCC / Nescafe.

Here I put the corn oil to the mocha coffee mixture. The cake which we baked
using corn oil does not taste as good as the one using vegetable oil.

Next putting the egg yolks into the mixture bowl.

Electric Hand Mixer to beat the egg white till it's fluffy and stiff

I must get the correct texture and my hand is tiring :(

Mixing the mocha coffee mixture with the flour.

After that, mix it with the foamy egg white mixture (meringue)

The mixture is all done up and we can now carefully pour into the cake molds.

Hehe! a cracked cake ~ that is the bottom of the cake..we will just slice it off.

Letting the cake cool down...can't wait to see the texture @.@

TA-TA ~~ That's our mocha coffee chiffon cake ^.~

I am so anxious to taste my cake ^0^

Same baking steps for this Golden Citrus Chiffon Cake ~
except the ingredient changed to oranges and lemons.

A zesty flavor chiffon cake :)

This one for my parents ~ they love it :P

Black Sesame Chiffon Cake ~ Not very fragrant as we do not have time to ground the black sesame seeds into fine powder form. Or else, I guess it will turn out tastier.

Cocoa White Chocolate Chips Chiffon Cake
~ my colleagues like this ^.^

My 1st time baking cookies ~
Organic Wheatgerm Cranberry Blueberry White Chocolate Chips Cookies.

These healthy cookies turn out very big pieces and yummy too :)
Texture ~ Crispy outside and Soft inside.

These nicer cookies made by Li as the other batches of the cookies that
we earlier baked were badly done but they are still EDIBLE ^0^
~ I would not post the bad cookies shapes here :P

Well well, anyone interested to order for our chiffon cakes now ~ hehe!