A Wedding Gift

I saw a recipe in the book, 'Essentials of Baking' by Williams-Sonoma and I've been wanting to try it... and I found a perfect occasion to bake these lovely cookies.... and so I tried....

These were simply butter cookies, cut out with cookies cutter and filled with jam. Don't they look lovely? But... I did not succeed in making them. This is only a picture of the book illustration. The dough turned out to be too soft & impossible to work with. Difficulties working with a dough again... Grr...

In the end, I settled for a simple chocolate chip cookies from my most trusted blogger, Happy Homebaker. And fortunately, they taste quite good... or at least my sisters thought so. Have not heard from the wedding couple yet.

This was what went inside the lovely container...

And the recipe which was adapted from Happy homebaker (Original source: The Cookie & Biscuit Bible) is as follow:

Ingredients (makes about 28 cookies)
115g butter, softened
115g caster sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
175g plain flour
110g semisweet chocolate chips
65g chopped hazelnut (toasted)

Method
Preheat oven to 180degC. Line baking trays with parchment paper.

With a wooden spoon or electric mixer, cream butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until the mixture turns pale and fluffy.

Beat in the egg gradually. Mix well after each addition. Add in vanilla extract, mix well.

Sift the flour over the mixture, fold in with wooden spoon or a spatula. Fold in the chocolate chips & hazelnuts.

Drop tablespoonfuls of the cookie dough onto the prepared baking tray. Leave some space between the cookies to allow for spreading. Flatten each cookie dough slightly with the back of a fork, keeping the shape as even as possible.

Bake for 10 mins or until golden (My oven took 20 mins). Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Home cooked Chicken Rice

I seriously think I can follow recipes and cook better than I bake.... Cooked these for my family and they taste quite good.

Of course, I did not cook these from scratch. We had a premix from our CNY hamper and it was expiring at the end of this yr.... so... decided to use it.

The instruction was pretty easy to follow. And the packed seasoning made cooking much easier too... what's more, it came with yummy chilli sauce, dark soya sauce & ginger sauce!

Chicken was soft, tender & juicy. Rice was a little weird in taste though... not as nice as the chicken rice sold outside. Maybe because it was a 'healthier choice' product afterall...

I don't think you would even want a bite of this. Haha...Blur me somehow made a blunder of the ingredients again. This always happens when I am reducing the recipe. Grr.... First, the cupcake itself was way too sweet and crumbly. Then, the cream topping was too watery.. probably because I whipped for too long. I absolutely cannot see myself baking cupcakes again anytime soon. Haha....

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Muffins

With one big packet of buttermilk in my fridge which was going to expire soon, I had to bake something and this was it. Chocolate Chocolate Chip Muffins. A recipe which I copied down from some website donkey years ago.

I baked these before and the colour was much darker and nicer. Guess what happened? I put in the wrong quantity of chocolate! Haha... I think the colour of these muffins look like 'huat kueh'. Fortunately, they still taste quite good... just that the texture is not really like a muffin.

When will I ever be able to have a perfect bake?

On a side note, I threw away one big bag of flour and other miscellaneous ingredients a few weeks back. I need to stop myself from buying things unless I have time to bake. My baking cupboard is so full that I can hardly squeeze in more things. Stealing space from my mum slowly... Lol... No more lunch time shopping at the baking shop!

Jap Food again!

I was cheated into cooking this meal. Sis said we shall cook together on Sunday so that my mum can rest. Ended up... she only helped with the vegetables.

I wanted to cook Oyaku Don from the Jap Recipe book initially but mum said she has pork chop so I decided to make do with it and made Katsu Don. I took the recipe for the Japanese Pork Cutlet and used the sauce for Oyaku Don. And tada... I have.....

The end product was a bit too dry... I cooked the "egg sauce" for too long... But overall, it still taste good. Could have seasoned the pork more too. Along with this, I made tofu teriyaki again. Oya, n I cooked the rice using the same process... but... my mum recently used the rice cooker to cook it and I must say it tastes the same. Shall ask her how she does it to save my time the next time. Haha...

Loving the golden brown fried pork cutlets here! :D