Category: Desserts

Cakes and Cookies, Desserts

Cinnamon Blueberry Muffins

7shasha7

I think I will axe Nigella’s muffin recipe. I have found a gorgeous simple recipe from my favourite ipad recipe search app. This was delicious. I brought some to work and they love it. A good recipe, no matter how bad the cook is, always works.

Recipe

1. 100g (I used more than the 85g recommended) melted butter

2. 1 cup brown sugar

3. 1 cup milk

4. 1 egg

5. 1 cup flour

6. 11/2 tsp baking powder

7. 1/2 tsp salt

8. 2 tsp cinnamon (powder)

Method

1. Whisk all the dry ingredients.

2. Whisk the milk, egg, sugar and melted butter together.

3. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and then whisk till well incorporated.

4. Fold in fresh blueberries.

This makes a good breakfast. Simple and delicious. Try it!

Bread and Batter, Desserts

Cinnamon French Toast with Strawberry Sauce

7shasha7

I’ve been making breakfast for two or three colleagues nowadays. Last Friday, I decided to make French toast. This time round, I wanted to make it the real Western way. Well, almost. The real way to make French toast is to make a custard out of eggs, cream, sugar and seasoning. The Singaporean way, and the way I’ve been making for years, is just to use beaten egg. I believe I had an earlier post on cinnamon french toast. Anyway, as I didn’t have cream, I used Carnation milk instead. And then, because I had a boxful of strawberries, I decided to make strawberry sauce.

Four eggs, carnation milk, one vanilla bean, cinnamon, sugar.
I fried purely in butter and I used wholemeal bread,.
Sliced strawberries, with sugar and 1 tsp of lemon juice. Boil till it becomes syrupy. Chill in the fridge.
I cut the bread into half, and when cooled dust powdered sugar on top, a quarter teaspoon of honey and put the strawberry sauce on the side with a few mint leaves.
Desserts, Malay

Bubur Pulut Hitam

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For some inexplicable reason, I felt compelled to make this local dessert that firstly, I hardly eat and secondly, I have never made before. Last Sunday then, after a visit to my in-laws, I stopped by local grocer and asked for this ‘pulut hitam’ rice. The Chinese man nodded and led me to the fridge. Puzzled, I then started spluttering in Singlish and Malay thinking he didn’t understand what I wanted. He just coolly took out this big basin, opened the lid and lo and behold, I saw lots and lots of black rice. Then, I asked the stupidest question, “Is this real one or fake?” That cracked him and The Hubby. The reason I asked was that my MIL had told me that there are poor quality of rice and that if you buy the ‘fake’ version, the rice will not turn black but just white. And so my other silly question to the shop owner was, “This one when cooked will turn black, right?” He answered, “No. Purple.” Hahahahaha. I mean, I know bubur pulut hitam when cooked can’t be black. Oh, well. Tentative, I bought 200g and made this the minute I got home.

After washing the rice thoroughly, toast them till the rice starts to 'dance' in a pan.
Meanwhile, heat water in a pot. When water is boiled, add the rice and then add some palm sugar (gula melaka) and about 10 tbsp of sugar. Boil till the rice is done. Oh, add a few pieces of pandan leaves when boiling. Boil, boil, boil.
When the rice is done, it should be a nice thick watery consistency. In a separate bowl, mix some coconut milk with salt and then drizzle over the bowl of rice.
This is actually a very healthy dessert. And its delicious. Give local desserts a try one day!
Desserts

Plum Pie

7shasha7

I’ve always always wanted to bake a sweet pie. But I wasn’t daring enough to make the pastry from scratch. Not now anyway. So I bought a ready-mixed pie crust from Betty Crocker. It was fantastic. Since it was fantastic, now I wonder if I ought to learn how to make the pie crust from scratch after all. It was so easy. All you do is pour half of the mixture into a bowl, add a few teaspoons of cold water (follow instructions on the box) and then form into a ball. Like magic.

Now, the filling on the other hand, wasn’t so easy to make. I wanted to use plums because they were on sale at NTUC. I mean, 11 for 1.99…come on. I had to make a pie from all them beautiful purple plums. NOT! The first spoonful my unfortunate brother put in his mouth made him wince like crazy. So I put a teaspoon into my mouth and immediately I was brought back to the days of Super Lemon back in secondary school. Goodness Gracious Me! Luckily, not every mouthful turned out to be a fight with acid. Other spoonfuls turned out pretty OK. My mother then said, “I don’t think when they said plums in the recipe, they meant our kind of plums. There is such a thing as ‘sugar plums’.” And then it clicked. Oh, yeah…sugar plums…. What a dope. Anyway, the recipe for the filling is super easy and I would use it again to make my Plum Pie version 2 using SUGAR PLUMS.

FILLING

1. Plums, quartered

2. 2/3 cups of sugar

3. 11/2 tbs corn flour

4. cinnamon powder

5. s spritz of lemon juice

Mix all the ingredients well.

Before baking, brush the top with milk and sprinkle sugar.

 

I think the slits I cut were too big so the sauce spilled over.

 

It would have been better if I had served this with vanilla ice-cream. Interestingly, there were no leftovers!
Cakes and Cookies, Desserts

Brainy Brownies

7shasha7

I miss you dear food blog. Sigh. As you may have noticed, I have been extremely busy. It’s the exam season and I don’t even have enough time to rest what more cook. The first weekend of school, however, I managed to whip up these healthy brownies that I actually made before at school during one of those Staff bonding sessions. I actually bought the book – The Sneaky Chef-in order to,well, sneak veggies into my picky son’s meals. It worked! He ate those brownies without realising that there were broccoli and blueberries in them. HA to you my boy! (Wait till he’s old enough to read this blog… 😦 )

Anyway, I also learnt a super healthy way to incorporate healthy ingredient even when baking. Mix equal portions of white flour, wholemeal flour and wheatgerm. The Sneaky Chef calls this “Flour Blend”. You can use this to bake cookies, cakes etc… I’m even going to use wheatgerm in place of breadcrumbs when coating meat etc. Anyway, for these brainy brownies, the dry ingredients are the flour blend, cocoa powder …erm, I can’t exactly remember the recipe. Ooooo…maybe I’ll put a link: Click here. For the purple puree: mine was blueberries + broccoli. I didn’t use spinach because we can’t really get spinach here, you know. The bayam which we are used to is not really spinach but amaranth.

They turned out great! Except for my in-laws who have a very discerning palette, the rest of us won’t even know there are veggies in them. Try it! For Home Ec kids (I know some of you still read 🙂 ) you can try this for a healthy dessert (in case your teacher calls for one!)