In the mood of baking ^_^.....

It's a long weekend this week and I'm in the mood of baking ^.~

I have tried out the popular Hokkaido Chiffon Cupcakes recipe today. It's quite a simple bake and the cake texture turns out soft.  I have omitted piping the cream into the cakes and just eat it plain.  Yummy to go with my cuppa Kopi C ^_^

Since my friend has pandan leaves, we decide to pound the leaves and extract the juice for baking our pandan muffins.



Still not enough of baking, here we go for sponge cupcakes.  We also decide to whisk the whipping cream and sugar into thick creamy form.  Thereafter, we pipe on the cupcakes and top up with blueberries.

MORE bakes....Double Chocolate Muffins ~ rich & chocolatey!

Gosh! Overbake today ^0^

Weekend Baking ^.~

Recently, I got the avocado cheesecake recipe from http://www.avocado.org.au/ and decided to bake one. Again, thanks to Li who always willingly to offer her kitchen for baking ^.~

Here are the main ingredients ~ avocado (get those ripe ones), digestive biscuits for the cake base and 2 blocks of cream cheese.

Instead of crushing up the biscuits with our bare hands, we use the food processor which is faster and less messy.

Mix the melted butter into the crushed digestive biscuits. Then firmly tapped and pressed the mixture in the tray. Li has a baking tool which I think it is for smoothing cream on a cake. She bought it for pressing the crust and it really worked as it was much easier than using the back of a spoon. Smashing up the riped avocado ~ so creamy & yummy! The centre photo is the lemon juice.

2 blocks of cream cheese ~ beat with sugar till it's thick, smooth & creamy!
Thereafter, follow to mix in the eggs, cornflour, lemon juice and avocado mixutre.

Pour the avocado cream cheese mixture into the trays and then into the hot oven.

This was my first time baking a cheesecake. Li thought me the waterbath baking method. I went online to read about this baking method. Just realised that this technique helped the cake to bake gently, without cracking. The french term is known as Bain-Marie.

Still a little crack as perhaps the oven is little too hot but the color and texture were good.

PHEW!~ successful baking of our avocado cheesecake ^.^

The avocado taste was strong as we used 3 avocados.

I brought to office for my colleagues and friends to try it ~ they commented good ~ happy!

As there were time for other baking so we went on to bake lemon ginger drop cookies and muffins.

Baking is indeed fun and fulfilling ~ my weekend was well-spent Wo0OHoo0OO!

Another Baking Session o(^V^)o

Another baking fun time with Li. She had specially taught me how to bake pineapple tarts which she usually only bakes them during the Chinese Lunar New Year. In addition, we also decided to bake cookies and muffins again as we felt that we did not get the right textures and colors previously.

Cooking the pineapple paste fillings can be tedious so we bought the ready-made paste from Phoon Huat. However, Li told me that the ready-made paste is usually very sweet and she would buy fresh pineapples, grate and add into the paste to less sweeten it. Anyway, it is still the best to cook your own pineapple paste fillings so that you can control the sweetness and flavor. Hmm, it will take take hours for me to prepare the paste.

Thereafter, we rolled the paste into small balls for the open-faced pineapple tarts and oval shapes for the closed ones.

Li prefers the closed filling pineapples and I like the open-faced ones. Looks nicer (^.^) So I was assigned to mold the tarts base. Well, it was indeed a challenging task as I thought it was easy since I had the mold. But stamping the dough out from the mold was not easy leh! I had to re-do as I did not get the perfect shapes ~ either too thick or too thin; or the edges came out with extra dough or torn as I pressed too hard ~ (T___T)

The closed filling pineapple tarts were much easier to do. Li actually weighed each tart dough to get a consistent shape and right proportion.

Woohoo ~ my 1st time baking pineapple tarts ~ not too bad lah ^0^ except the pineapple fillings were too much ~ haha!

Wow ~ the shapes were quite the same ~ for those were not so, they were actually done by me hehe ^0^!

We must praise ourselves for baking these coffee chocolate chips cookies ~ we managed to get the correct cookies texture ~ crispy and tasted yummy! Of course, the cookies cutter was nice too ~ Hearty shapes ^.~

Another successful bake was the blueberries muffins ~ moist texture-neither soggy nor too dry ^.~ not over burnt on the surface ~ nice golden brown 0^.^0 We are going to use the same recipe and do with other flavors such as banana walnut, carrot, pumpkin, orange and many more.

Surprisingly, we took quite a short time to finish baking all the above recipes and all turned out beautifully good and tasty. Successful baking ~ it completely made my day H-A-P-P-Y ~