Chocolate Chip Cookies - a recipe vs a packet!

For those of you that follow this blog, you would know that I am not really a biscuit/cookie person. Sure, I love to eat them but I dont often have the patience to make them preferring to bake cakes anytime.

That is not to say that I have never baked cookies/biscuits. I have and I will continue to do so. My two darling kids love chocolate chip cookies and they love the ready-mix Betty Crocker Chocolate Chip cookies. I'm usually very against using ready-mixed anything but somehow the Betty Crocker ones turn out really well and are really very tasty. It's getting harder to find the Betty Crocker premixes here but we had two packets on hand not too long ago when some of Michael's friends came over for a school project.

Boozy Cheesy Cherry Cake

Many weeks ago - in January - one of our good friends, Elison, celebrated her birthday and we invited her over for dinner together with another good friend, Lynn. I've mentioned before that Eli is a great cook who also has very high standards so I'm always a bit nervous when baking a cake for her - especially her birthday cake!

The Lovely Wife suggested that I do something different instead of always going down the route of chocolate. I considered making her my Chocolate Trifle that she adores but then decided to try and dazzle her with something new.

Salmon with Cream Cheese rollups

I'm still very late and trying to play catch up! It's a good thing that I haven't been that busy in the kitchen so I don't have a whole lot of backlog as catching up is bad enough as it is!

So, what do you make for an appetiser when you have some smoked salmon in your fridge? I got a package of smoked salmon from my mom. Someone had given it to her and she thought I would put it to better use as well as enjoy it more. The Lovely Wife and the kids enjoyed one package with some Pasta I threw together and then I used the next package for this appetiser when Lynn and Ms Lor Siak Por came over for dinner back in January (Yes, I'm that Late! Late I tell you, Late! )

Ms LSP had heard about the Roast Pork I made for Christmas and 'demanded' that I make her the same. Now Ms LSP makes a wicked Roast Pork herself albeit the Chinese type (Siew Yoke) so I had to make sure that at least the appetiser would be something special. Smoked Salmon is always special in itself but when rolled with cream cheese and dill - ah, even more special!




This appetiser is really easy to do although the rolling can be a little cumbersome. Not that difficult really. This is what I did:

Ingredients
200g Smoked Salmon slices
125g Cream Cheese
75ml Whipping Cream
Two large handfulls Dill
Black Pepper
Capers
Method
Whip Cheese till soft. Add in the whipping cream and continue beating till light and fluffy. Season with dill and black pepper. Spread the salmon with the cheese mix and then roll up. Cut into bit size pieces and place on a plate. Pipe in remaining cheese mixture into the salmon rollups till full. Place a caper on top. Sprinkle with more black pepper and keep in fridge till ready to serve.

Once cut, plated and sprinkled with pepper, the Salmon Rolls actually looked very presentable. They were bite size and very easy to eat and the creamy cheese offset the smoked saltiness of the Salmon.





As I said, a very easy yet delicious dessert and something that tastes as good as it looks!

Almond Choc Chip Chinese New Year Cake

I'm late
I'm late
For a very important date.
No time to say "Hello, Goodbye".
I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.


Yes, Late, Late, Late! Chinese New Year has come and gone and I'm only now posting about the cake I made for Ms Lor Siak Porfor Chinese New Year 2012!

Taking a cake over to Ms LSP's for her Chinese New Year parties has become something of a tradition. It's the least we can do since Ms LSP always feeds us with some awesome food! This year, I fell in love with her Abacus Yam dish. The dish is basically yam shaped into abacus like discs and then cooked with minced meat and all sorts of other stuff. I dont know how to make it nor what goes into the dish but is really yummy. You'll have to ask her how it's made but trust me when I say it's delicious.

I always feel I need to make something different to tantalise Ms LSP's taste buds. She is one person that I really enjoy baking for as she is honest and will tell you if the cake doesn't meet up to her expectations. She also doesn't ooh and ahh for the sake of oohing and aahing but will tell you what she really thinks.

So for this year, I decided I would make a Choc Chip Almond cake topped with my usual Chocolate Ganache. This being the year of the dragon I piped out a dragon on top of the cake.

No, I dont have good piping skills, what I did was to make a royal icing and pipe it over a printed out picture of a dragon. Then I carefully moved it over to the cake. Rather clever of me I thought!



For the cake, I flirted with the idea of making a blondie - the vanilla version of a Brownie. What I did was meld the method of a brownie with my butter cake recipe and this is what I came up with.

Ingredients
250g Butter
230g Brown Sugar
4 Eggs
230g Flour
2.5 tsp Baking Powder
2 tsp Vanilla
100g Choc Chips
100g Almonds (nibs or chopped)

Chocolate Ganache
150g Dark Chocolate
200ml Cream
Sugar to taste

Method
Melt the butter and let cool. Beat in sugar. Add in eggs one at a time till creamy. Sift flour together with baking powder and fold into the mixture. Add in vanilla, nuts and choc chips. Mix well. Spread into a lined baking pan and bake in a preheated 170C oven for about 40 minutes or till done.

For the topping, heat the cream and then pour over the chocolate. Mix well and add sugar to taste. Allow to cool slightly then spread over top and sides of cake.

My kids reckoned that the dragon looked a little bit like a prawn but fortunately Ms LSP and her guests all knew it was a Dragon!




I think the cake turned out pretty well and Ms LSP gave me the thumbs up. Thanks for a great lunch Ms LSP and here's a belated wish to everyone for a Very Happy Chinese New Year! May the year of the Dragon bring you lots of peace, love and prosperity. Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Truffle Torte - Christmas 2011

This post finishes off the Christmas 2011 Meal...

Choosing the dessert for Christmas took quite some time and was a choice between going down the route of a tried and tested or doing something new. As I usually do when deciding on a dessert, I leafed through my numerous cookbooks. My son sat with me as I was rifling through pages and pages when his eyes fell on the Truffle Torte from my Le Cordon Bleu cookbook. "Dads, can you make that for dessert?" he asked as he tapped his finger on the page.

I had often wanted to try out this cake but the amount of chocolate it required coupled with the fact that it required a very thin sponge to be made had always deterred me. Not this time however. I scanned the recipe, smiled up at my boy and promptly declared that this would be dessert for Christmas Eve dinner.






This recipe is interesting in that it calls for a little bit of gelatine and liquid glucose to thicken the chocolate. I decided to substitute Honey for liquid glucose. I also decided that since I was using dark chocolate for the filling, I would use some milk chocolate for the chocolate pieces that would go around the cake. The final modification that I did was to top the cake with caramelised almonds for that extra crunch rather than to dust the top with cocoa as the recipe called for.

The sponge was fairly easy to whip up especially since the eggs are beaten over a pot of simmering water. The eggs fluffed up really nicely and didnt deflate too much once the flour was folded in. The cake was nice and soft and in fact bits of the top stuck to the cooling rack as I left it to cool a tad too long. Next time I should place some non-stick paper over the cooling rack.

This is my modified recipe based on the one from Le Cordon Bleu Home Collection - Chocolate.

Ingredients
2 eggs
2 1/2 Tbsp Caster Sugar
4 Tbsp Plain Flour
1 Tbps Cocoa

30ml rum
330g Good Quality Dark Chocolate
200g bar of milk chocolate
1 tsp gelatine powder
1 Tbsp honey
500ml Whipping Cream

Method
To make the sponge: preheat the oven to 170C. Butter and flour a 8 inch springform pan. Half fill a saucepan with water and bring to the boil. Remove from heat. Put the eggs and sugar into a large heatproof bowl and place over the saucepan making sure it is not touching the water. Using electric beaters, whisk for 5-10 minutes until the mixture is thick and light, has doubled in volume and leaves a trail as it falls from the beaters. The temperature of the mixture should never be hot, only warm. Remove the bowl from the pan of water and continue to beat until cold. Sift the flour and cocoa together and carefully fold into the whisked mixture with a large metal spoon or plastic spatula until just combined. Pour the mixture into the tin and gently smooth the top with the back of the spoon. Bake for about 15 minutes or until springy and shrinking from the sides of the tin. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool. Clean the cake tin so it is ready to use later.

Trim the top crust from the sponge using a long serrated knife. Cut the cake into a disc no more that 1.5cm thick and to just fit inside the tin. Place on a 8 inch cake card inside the tin or directly on the base of the tin. (I used a cake ring placed over a square cake board). Brush the sponge with the rum.

Put the chocolate into a bowl. Half fill a saucepan with water and bring the the boil. Remove from the heat and place the bowl of chocolate over the pan making sure the bottom of the bowl is not touching the water. Leave the chocolate to melt slowly, then remove the bowl from the pan. Stir the gelatine powder and 1 Tbsp water over a pan of simmering water until dissolved. Add in the honey and stir well. Pour onto the melted chocolate mixing thoroughly. If mixture turns lumpy, heat very gently over a pan of simmering water until smooth. Let cool.

Whip the cream till soft peaks form and then fold into the cooled chocolate mixture. Do not overmix. Fill the tin to the top with the truffle mixture and level with a pallete knife. Refrigerate for a few hours, preferable overnight.

For the sides, melt the bar of milk chocolate and spread onto a sheet of non-stick paper and spread to a thickness of 2mm. Refrigerate until set then break off large pieces and stick on the side of the torte. Dust the torte with cocoa powder (I used caramelised almonds instead)

So yes, a rather long and tedious recipe but when you actually make it, it really doesn't seem that long nor tedious.

After brushing the cake with rum I used my dessert ring to surround the cake rather than a springform as I wanted the cake to sit on a cake board instead of the springform base. Making the truffle filling was very easy too. As I mentioned, I substituted the Liquid glucose for honey and I'm still wondering why there was a need for gelatine as I am sure the truffle filling would have held up on its own. I think I scrimped a bit on the chocolate for the pieces surrounding the cake as I didnt get a large enough bar! So when I tried sticking the pieces on, they were rather thin and the heat of the kitchen and my hands started to melt the pieces rather quickly.

I think the addition of the caramelised almonds really made a difference as the crunchy, nutty, sweetness complemented the taste of the dark chocolate really well. The truffle filling actually resembled a really thick mousse and it was very chocolatey and flavourful. The thin layer of cake offset the creaminess of the truffle filling and provided a nice change in texture. The cake practcally melts in your mouth and my son came running up to me for seconds even before I had finished serving the rest of the guests! I told him to wait his turn while everone else had a slice first then proceeded to give him a larger piece that he devoured just as quickly!



I was actually a little surprised at how easy this cake is to make especially since it produces such sensational results. My darling boy certainly loved this cake and my little Princess quickly agreed. I would have to agree with them that the cake was really pretty amazing. Definitely something I want to make again and I'm so glad my son spotted this and asked me to make it as I would probably have just left it as one of my 'want to makes' instead of actually making it!

Caramel & Chocolate Double Mousse Cake - A Princess Birthday Cake

My little princess turned 8 on the 17th of February and both The Lovely Wife and I too the day off. As usual, we woke her up early in the morning and she looked under the bed for her presents. She got quite a stack of pressies that included a 'sew by yourself' Teddy Bear kit, Paint It Magnetic Fridge Tiles, a Lego Mini Figure display box, a small zipper chain that says 'Little Princess', a Lego Mini Figure and a Magic Twisty - a small furry worm like thing that you pull along with a string, also known as a Squirmle. She also got a tiny mini stapler and a set of coloured staples. She likes these kind of things my princess does! We also got her a set of batteries as both she and her brother always run out of batteries for their toy cars and other battery operated toys. I always joke that they'll make me bankrupt from the number of batteries I need to buy!


Like her brother, she has decided she wants dessert cakes for her birthday cake instead of the traditional decorated cakes. She also asked if I could make something new, something that I had never done before and something that would be special. Ah, children these days are so demanding!





Although her birthday fell on a Friday and even though we had taken the day off to celebrate with her, we only held her party on Sunday evening. The reason for this was that her brother, Michael, had to go for a school prefects camp at some place near Morib by the sea. He would be away for two nights and would only be back on Sunday evening. We couldn't very well hold a party for our little princess without Michael could we? So that's why we held the party on Sunday.

Each birthday, for each child, we try and outdo our menu - or at least match the previous year's menu. That simply means that you are always assured of lots of food! This year, we tried to tone it down a little but as usual went slightly overboard.

The menu this year was Barbequed Chicken using the BBQ Ribs recipe, Savoury glutinous rice - otherwise known as Lo Ma Kai, Vegetable Pasties, Spicy Fried Sausages with Anchovies as well as a Guacamole dip with corn chips. I also whipped up a batch of my Brownies which everyone always loves.






For the cake, I made an original Dharm creation. I recently stumbled on to the recipe for a sponge cake from Cakeboss and I had really liked how that turned out. Very spongy and airy and yet fairly dense without holes. This is probably the best sponge cake recipe that I have ever come across and its really quite easy too. I decided I would use a sponge as the base and sandwhich chocolate mousse and caramel mousse in between. Since there were two types of mousse and also double layers of mousse, I decided to call the cake a Chocolate and Caramel Double Mousse Cake!






As I said earlier, the cake itself was quite easy to whip up. The only issue I have with this recipe is that they dont specify the timing. I put it to about 40mins but this would depend a lot on the size of your eggs and well as the pans. This time I baked it in two 9" pans so that I could use my cake ring mould. One of the pans was slightly smaller though so two of the cake layers were smaller. After baking the cakes, I used my cake leveller to cut the cakes into layers but I didn't quite get equal layers as I trimmed the top off the cake too.

The caramel mousse was a first for me but it turned out just as I wanted. Slightly burned flavour of the caramel enhanced with a little dark chocolate to thicken it and then emulsified with cream. The cream was then whipped up to a nice moussey texture.

For the chocolate, I added in a little gelatine to thicken it together with some honey. I usually add egg yolks into my mousse but since I didnt want to have any leftover egg whites, I did it this way instead.

After layering the cake and mousse, I found that I had enough chocolate mousse to cover the sides as well and the mousse seemed to hold enough to swirl round the sides so thats what I did. In total there were 8 layers of cake and mousse!

Ingredients
Cake Base
4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup whole milk
1/4 cup butter (lightly salted)
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Caramel Mousse
1/2 cup granulated sugar
50 g salted butter
300ml whipping cream
2oz Dark Chocolate


Chocolate Mousse
300g Whipping Cream
250g Dark Chocolate
1 Tbsp Honey
1 tsp Gelatine
1Tbsp water

Method
Sponge Cake
1. Beat eggs in large mixing bowl with paddle attachment for 4 minutes. Do not skip this step!
2. Add sugar, and continue beating for another 4-5 minutes until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and stir on low until just combined.
3. In a separate bowl, sift together dry ingredients. Add to eggs and sugar on low speed until just combined.
4. In a saucepan, heat milk and butter on low heat just until butter is melted. Add to batter, beat just until combined.
5. Pour into two greased and floured 8" round cake pans.
6. Bake at 160C for about 40mins until the middle springs back when touched, or a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and let stand in pans for 10 minutes. Then turn out onto wire cooling racks and cool completely.

Hint: Cakes are close to being done when you start to smell them.

Caramel Mousse
Melt sugar to make caramel (either dry method or wet method). Add in butter. Then add in the cream a little at a time. Mixture will splatter. Cook till fully incorporate with the cream. Let cool. Whip cream till stiff.

Chocolate Mousse
Heat cream till almost to the boil. Pour over chocolate and mix well till incorporated. Mix Gelatine with 1 Tbsp Water and hydrate. Place over a bowl of simmering water and dissolve. Add into the cream mixture together with the honey and allow to cool a little. Whip till thick and creamy.

Assembly
Using a cake leveller, cut each cake into two layers. Place the bottom into a ring mould. Cover with half the caramel mousse. Place another layer of cake over the caramel mousse and then place in freezer for a short while to firm up. Spread with half the chocolate mousse then cover with another layer of cake. Repeat so that you have cake - caramel mousse-cake - chocolate mousse - cake - caramel mousse - cake chocolate mousse. Remove cake from ring mould and use remaining mousse to cover sides as well. Chill for at least 6 hours but preferably overnight.

Garnish with sliced almonds.

The results were pretty damned astounding! The flavour of the caramel complemented the chocolate really, really well. The cake was soft and light and I think if I were to improve on this, I would soak the cake with either a sugar syrup or maybe some alcohol or even some coffee.

Most of the guests had two helpings as did my Little Princess. She gave the cake a super rating and claimed it as one of my finest. The best review however came from The Lovely Wife. She's normally not a mousse cake kind of gal but she simply Loved this cake! She had the leftovers two nights in a row and each time she kept saying how much she enjoyed the cake. My Darling Boy also gave it a thumbs up and proclaimed it one of his favourites!

Not bad at all for an original Dharm creation and for a first try. As I said, the sponge recipe is really my favourite sponge base and I will now use this most of the time for any recipe requiring a sponge cake.

So, another succesful birthday party and another delicious cake to add to my repertoire!



My little Princess was really happy and whenever she is happy, I am happy!
Happy Birthday my Darling Princess!