Birthday cupcakes!

Hey y'all! My baby brother's and youngest sister's birthdays happen to fall on consecutive weekends in April, which means my parents are always super hasselled during that time trying to get their parties organised (because kids these days simply have to have birthday parties *rolls eyes*) , and calling up every. single. patisserie in Sydney in an attempt to find the perfect cake for the event.

I exaggerate, but only by a little bit. Seriously, ordering a cake can be quite stressful business! And so very expensive these days. I would of course love to make the cake for each sibling's birthday (I have another younger sister), but somehow I am always the busiest with uni assignments and exams during the period they have their parties.

This year, I was determined to offer at least something to the party table, even if I didn't have the time to make the centrepiece. For my brother's birthday, I whipped up four dozen chocolate cupcakes (devil's food, to be exact), all topped with a luxurious swiss meringue buttercream frosting. The colours of the frosting were chosen to accompany his birthday cake, which was made by the talented Rochelle of Candystar Cakes & Candy Bar. It was a very impressive fondant-covered 3D cake, modelled after Lightning McQueen, of Cars fame.

Unfortunately, the prettiest cakes aren't always the tastiest ones to eat. I'm talking fondant-covered cakes in general here. And it always seems an awful waste when it comes time to chuck out the fondant (which most people don't eat because of its tooth-ache inducing sweetness). Hmm, maybe one day someone will come up with a sort of rolled icing that actually tastes good. Buddy Valastro, owner of Carlos' Bakery and star of Cake Boss, seem to use a lot of modelling chocolate in his cakes. I wonder if that tastes better than fondant.

Anyway, the cake and cupcakes were still a hit with all the children and adults at the party :D

For my sister's birthday the following week, I made cupcakes that were less flashy than the ones for my brother, but (in my opinion) had the upper hand taste-wise.

I made two types: in front, we have the infamous chocolate chip cookie dough cupcake (the recipe or which I got from The Doctor's Dishes), and in the second row are oreo cupcakes with a cream cheese frosting (an adapted recipe of the one at Annie's Eats).

For the sake of parity, we also ordered her a 3D cake from Rochelle, this time in the shape of a designer handbag! Kids these days...my 10th birthday cake was in the shape of Snoopy!

Stylish, eh?

The birthday girl and her friends had a great time eating cake. Lots of it :D

(Kidney) Bean Brownies

Just so we're clear on this: there are no actual kidneys in these "brownies". It was simply a matter of having to use canned red kidney beans instead of the ubiquitous black beans called for in all the bean brownie recipes I found. Here in Australia, black beans, canned or not, don't seem to be nearly as easily found in grocery stores as they are in the States.

A caveat: Although they're called brownies and indeed look like brownies, they're...not brownies. They don't taste like your traditional brownies, and if you're looking for a sugar/butter/chocolate hit, you're probably better off whipping up a batch of real ones (or getting your keen baker friend to do it for you :D)

Having said that, these are still quite tasty, and strangely addictive once you get used to the taste. The texture kinda reminds me of the bean cakes you can get in Japan.

Without further ado, I present you with...red bean brownies!

 

INGREDIENTS (Makes 9 servings)

• 427g canned Red Kidney Beans (no added salt)
• 200g Banana (without peel)
• 50g Dark Agave Nectar
• 30g Traditional Rolled Oats
• 21g Nestle Baking Cocoa
• 1g Cinnamon, ground
• 4g Vanilla Extract

METHOD

Preheat oven to 180 degrees, or 160 degrees for fan-forced oven.

1) First, you gotta get those kidney beans mashed! I used my newly acquired blender for this part, but you could go at it the hard way with a fork.

 

You're done with the mashing once the beans reach the consistency of a smooth paste:

 

2) Next, mash up your bananas! My new blender once again came in handy.

I find that whipping it with some sort of electrical appliance gives the bananas a more aerated, marshmallowy texture than mashing it up with a fork, which in turn translates into a more fudgey finished product. But as long as there aren't any visible chunks of banana, you're doing fine :D

3) Add whipped banana to the red bean paste. Add in the cocoa powder, agave nectar, ground cinnamon and vanilla essence. Incorporate thoroughly.

 
 

4) Add the rolled oats, and mix again.

5) At this stage, I put the whole mixture back into the blender in order to not have visible oat flakes in the final brownie batter. In hind sight, I realised that I could have just blitzed the oats into a fine powder instead, and mixed that in with the batter by hand. In fact, that would have been the smarter (and safer) thing to do, because my blender was smoking slightly from getting all over-heated.

 

6) Line a pan with baking paper, and pour batter in. I had to improvise and make my rectangular pan into a square one, since I didn't want the batter to spread too thinly.

 
 

7) Pop it into the oven and bake for around 25-30 minutes. Brownies are done when the top is nicely cracked like this:

8) Allow to cool, cut into pieces and then enjoy! Some say they're better after a few hours of refrigeration, but I found they taste really yummy either way.

 

One friend has said to me on many occasions that there are foods that you just know are doing you all sorts of good as they're going down the gullet. This is one of them. It doesn't taste like decadence in a square, but at only (roughly) 116 calories per serving, it's a 'brownie' that one can eat on a day to day basis :D

Cinnamon (sc)rolls with cream cheese frosting

Cinnamon bun, cinnamon roll, cinnamon scroll...whatever you choose to call them, they're all permutations of one and the same -

This was my first time working with yeasted breads, and I was delighted with the results. The recipe I used was one which Bridget over at The Way the Cookie Crumbles "hobbled together" (her own words :D) from a variety of sources in addition to her own previous experiences. The dough was all Bridget's, but I modified the filling and the cream cheese frosting slightly to suit my own tastes.

I also inadvertantly made what I consider to be a "lucky" mistake. Bridget's instructions calls for the dough to be pressed down and rolled out immediately after the first rising, after which it is filled with the cinnamon mixture, then cut into individual cinnamon rolls and allowed to to rise, or proof, for the second time before baking. I, on the other hand, punched down my dough after the first rising and then kneaded it again, before following the rest of the instructions as written. Upon discovering my error, I did a second batch without kneading the dough again after the first rising, and saw that the rolls did not proof as much as the kneaded rolls, and that the baked rolls were not as fluffy or round-looking, for lack of a better adjective, as their kneaded counterparts.

The kneaded rolls are shown on the left, and the not kneaded ones on the right:

The baked products - kneaded (left) and unkneaded (right):

In my opinion, the slightly shrivelled ones on the right would be perfect for drowning in syrup and liquidy cream cheese frosting, to be eaten like pudding with a spoon. Am I inventive or what? :D

I ended up with more cinnamon sc(rolls) than I knew what do with. Good thing my family loved them as much as I did!

An edible Basket of Flowers

It was my cousin's 21st birthday a few weeks back. Unfortunately, we missed out on his party because of some other engagement :-( But we did have an awesome celebratory dinner the night before, at the Iron Chef restaurant in Cabramatta!

I must have been so busy enjoying the food that I forgot to take pictures. But what I do have heaps of pictures of is the cake that I made for my cousin:

They side that excessive pride in oneself is an unattractive trait, but I have to admit that I had some serious self-pride going on after I saw how the cake turned out.

Okay, I realise it's definitely not going to take home any prizes at the Royal Easter Show or anything like that, but the very fact that I, the girl who hated Art classes in school and couldn't draw to save her life, managed to pull off something like this just gave me an indescribable sense of satisfaction.

But like I said - it's certainly not the most skillfully or perfectly decorated cake in the world. I decorated the whole of the outside of the cake using a vanilla-flavoured swiss meringue buttercream. This was honestly the first time I have used buttercream for decorative piping of this sort, and it definitely shows if you look closely at the pictures. I don't even know what kind of flowers those are. I was trying to do roses, based on what I've seen in video tutorials and all the books I've read on piping flowers, but somehow they turned out looking like some sort of botanical hybrid. The leaves were added at the last moment to hide the many gaps and imperfections showing through between the flowers.

Hopefully, you can see (despite the poor quality of my photos) that I've attempted a basket-weave pattern around the side of the cake. Again, this was the first time I've tried doing this, so please pardon the wonkiness :D I have a feeling that achieving the degree of muscle control necessary for flawless piping can only come with practice, practice, and more practice. My future cakes involving basket-weave piping will look better, I just know it!

For the cake itself, I did three layers of a simple vanilla butter cake, the recipe for which I found on the lovely Sweetapolita's blog. I don't know if it was because I got the settings on my oven wrong, or because I simply had so much cake batter, but the cakes took forever to bake. And, of course, they then had to cool down and chill in the fridge before I started decorating. Let's just say there was a great deal of waiting around. But once I actually started the decorating process, it was all smooth sailing, and I had myself a jolly good time :D

 

The layers were filled with a thin layer of buttercream, and a generous amount of crabapple jelly. Why crabapple jelly? Well, I figured that everyone loves crabapple jelly...okay, the truth was, I was getting sick of eating the same jam on my morning crumpet day in, day out, so using this jar up would free me up to go buy some new kinds.

Some more progress pics!

When it came time for dessert, we all sort of realised at the same time that we couldn't possibly fit a slice of rich, buttery cake in after everything else we'd consumed. We were therefore happy to make do with a few slices of watermelon, and let the birthday boy take home the cake and share it at his birthday party.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that my cousin is a guy. A great, big, tall guy who loves cars, aircraft carriers, and something called 'Warhammer 40,000'. Maybe a basket of flowers wasn't the most appropriate theme for his birthday cake, but he seemed genuinely touched by my gift. And that, really, is all that matters in the end!

The proud decorator with her cake :D

Happy Mother's Day, 2011!

It's Mother's Day here in Australia today! We held our celebrations last night with a sumptuous feast at Sunny Harbour Seafood Restaurant in Hurstville. There were so many dishes to eat that we ended up taking home more than half of what we ordered. Which is really saying something, since we had the whole family + extended family there :D

I made a cake to celebrate the occasion. It was the least I could do to thank all wonderful mothers in our family. My mum has sacrificed so much so that we kids can have the best of everything, and all the opportunities that we would ever need to grow into confident and capable individuals. And our grandmothers basically raised us along with our mother from birth, as Chinese grandmothers do. Our aunty is like a second mother to us, and someone who we can always depend on for support and guidance.

All in all, a cake is nothing compared with all that they have given us. But it is very tasty! And looked quite impressive too :D

My mum is always complaining about how sweet the stuff I make is. "Put less sugar in!", she'd say when she saw how much icing sugar went into a batch of buttercream frosting. I try to explain that the proportions have been set by people with much more baking experience and knowledge than I have, and any less would interfere with the various chemical processes going on. Her response? "I don't care! Make it less sweet!"

So for this cake, I went with a Japanese cheesecake as the basis of my cake. For those who have never tried Japanese cheesecake before - you've been missing out. Big time! It's nowhere near as cloying and rich as a New York-style cheesecake (which I'm not dissing in any way, shape or form; I do love my NY cheesecake), but it still retains the aroma of cream cheese beautifully, while only using half the amount of cream cheese than would normally go into a cheesecake. The addition of a minimal amount of flour and corn flour gives it that sponge cake texture, but it'll never end up dry (unless you burn it in the oven). And did I mention it's not too sweet? Simply put - the perfect dessert for my mummy dearest.

For the filling, I was inspired by the birthday cakes we've ordered from Chinese bakeries. You know, the ones made with eggy sponge cake and filled with fresh cream and fruits. I prepared a strawberry mousse using pureed fresh strawberries, whipped double cream and gelatin leaves, and simply spread it on between the layers of cheesecake after the mousse had some time to set, as you would with a buttercream. I added a bit of sugar because I found it slightly too tart without.

I had enough mousse to fill three layers of cake, and to roughly crumb-coat the whole thing. And believe me, it was a very rough crumb-coat. I'm afraid that I didn't take much care aesthetics-wise with the inside of the cake (although all the flavours were there!) because I knew it would be covered anyway with the decorations on the outside. The only thing that suffered was the cross-sectional presentation. Oh well.

To decorate, I used chocolate-filled wafer rolls to form a sort of 'basket' around the side (something I had seen done through Foodgawker), and filled the inside of this delectable basket with grapes, banana slices and STRAWBERRIES. Great, big, juicy fresh ones. I love fresh fruit decorations. Nowhere near as time-consuming as preparing and piping buttercream, and so much healthier too :D

And, just for good measure, I made a whole heap of Chinese almond cookies. My siblings are always clamouring for them when they're served for dessert at a Chinese restaurant, to the point where there's embarrassingly very little left for the adults to have some. Not that they would ever think to deprive those greedy, little ones of their sweets :D Well, there was enough this time round for everyone to go back for seconds...and thirds!

So, on this Mother's Day, make sure to give your mum (or any other mother-figures in your life) a great big hug!

(And a piece of cake too).

Sources

Japanese-style Cheesecake: For ingredients, method and tips on baking the perfect Japanese-style cheesecake, please refer to this wonderfully-detailed post by The Little Teochew.

Fresh strawberry mousse filling: I adapted the recipe provided here by Academia Barilla, halving the quantities listed.

Chinese almond cookies: I used the recipe from Bel's blog, Ooh, Look.... I love the vibrancy of her pictures, and she posts the most delicious-looking recipes, not to mention the occasional review of Adriano Zumbo's latest cake creations :D