Petite Fours (23/10)

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 Posted by YY on 11:47 PM comments (0)

What u are seeing is a swiss roll tin, which we use to bake the sponge cake for rolling. And 90% of the class did this TWICE. Why leh? Cos everyone forgot the butter shld be hot..
One grp did it THRICE, becos on the 2nd try ..they forgot to add sugar -_-'''


Painful products..becos its all blood and sweat and pple just POP into their mouth and thats it! Gone..~






Cooking on a Sunday

Posted by YY on 11:19 PM comments (0)

Time to take a break from all these Sunday cooking cos it seems extremely tiring -_-

Main Course: Pork Chops with caramelised carrots.
Dessert: French crepes and vanila ice cream topped with caramel sauce

Making the mango pulp requires getting the meat out, then putting it thru the sieve..which is not shown below...


Mango ice cream in the cooking~~


Put into container for freezing, and you must fluff it with a fork twice in the next 2-3 hrs


Tenderising the pork chops


Making the carrots



Self made caramel sauce, looks like shit eh..pun intended.


French crepes..but still not my ideal crepe yet..wait till i try the japanese crepe recipe.



Cooking Expedition - 20/10

Sunday, October 21, 2007 Posted by YY on 12:13 AM comments (0)

Inspired by Jamie Oliver's Book...

Main Course - Crab meat Aglio Olio with panfried cod fish
Dessert - Baked Red Wine Pear

Let's start with how to kill a crab. These crabs costs $2.50 from Sheng Siong, called 肉蟹, bought 3pcs. These are male crabs... to kill it, open the triangular flap shown at the chopstick point, and stick ur chopstick thru the crab. Its supposed to die an instant death.. >_>'





After the crabs are cooked, pluck out the hands, legs and now what do u do with the body? With the same triangular flap, open it by pulling it downwards and pull the crab shell apart from the bottom. Remove the lungs that reside on the left and right sides (how do u know its the lungs..dun ask me..) , the lungs looks like it has got small holes thru it. And scrub the shells clean with a brush..if u wanna eat the eggs/sperms ewwww~ , then retain that part, however we threw it away.

Cleaned body but still with the eggs/sperms..*pukes*

Mess of bodies, legs, hands...


Tools to remove crab meat: Scissors, hammer, rolling pin, 2 very small forks. Rolling pin is to get flesh out of the legs by rolling over it



Finally finished the manual work..tiring leh


Red wine pears that were soaked for hrs in the fridge, uneven coloring due to insufficient red wine la -_-'


Adding lemon zest, pepper, olive oil.


If you do not want ur lemon to be too sour, pan fry it for awhile.


Crabmeat with spaghetti in Aglio Olio style.



Crab meat aglio olio complete with pan fried cod fish




After baking the red white with pear for 30min, chill before serving.


Looks like 三层肉 eh... -.-' Was expecting it to taste quite "winey", but not really cos I didnt even go red from it. Other added ingredients was cinnamon and sugar, but I didn't really taste cinnamon..or maybe cos I duno how it was supposed to taste like >.>'''



CrabMeat Aglio Oilo - 7.5/10 , good but haven learnt how to combine the noodle with crabmeat properly.

Cod Fish - 7.10 cooked just nice, but haven got sauce with it

Red wine pear - 7/10, pretty ok taste but not colored evenly.

Petite Fours Lesson 1 (16/10)

Saturday, October 20, 2007 Posted by YY on 11:45 PM comments (0)

Registered for another wkday lesson. Eh well, petite fours are worth learning for a few reasons - they look good and sell for high prices -.-'

I had to get a partner to learn..so i dragged poor K who knows nuts abt cakes to learn with me.
There are 4 items to be made today, but only did 3 due to some constraints last minute as cited by Judy (chef).

This is Chocolate Banarama - The base unit which is banana cake. Gotta bake this for longer time than usual, due to silicon mould being used and we placed it on a metal tin and not directly on the oven floor..so we should have left it directly in contact with the oven floor =.='




The sweet pastry that is to be used as base.




This is called Amore whereby the pink designed white chocolate is done using Chocolate Transfer Sheet. Raspberry chocolate cream is used to combine the 3 items(strawberry, biscuit, white chocolate) together.




Raspberry chocolate Jewels - The same chocolate mousse used as above, but chilled in mould. Topped with raspberry and sugar powder.



Chef Judy took our bananarama to demo white chocolate design..of cos we didn't manage to replicate it. To make things simpler...we used fruits.






Two more lessons to go...tiring man..~

Lazy Sunday: Claypot rice

Sunday, October 14, 2007 Posted by YY on 11:19 PM comments (0)

It was a lazy sunday afternoon, woke up in a not-so-good mood and the bus had to piss me off..o well, I jolly well know I shouldn't be venting my anger on poor K so..I decided to have lunch alone to cool off my pissed mood -__-

On saturday, we went to this dinner outing at Vil'age @ Heeren's..along with us was hokkaido milk loaves for some of em'



Used hokkaido milk loaf dough to make hotdog bread..1min lesser of baking time wld have been perfect though -.-


Finally decided to try making croissants @ home, this is the dough rolled into a square. This is a disaster because we used Lurpak Butter which contains 80%+ butter unlike what we used in class was 40% margarine, 60% butter (less likely to melt tt soon)


Self made butter sheet. Butter sheet is a block of butter in abt 1cm thickness or so..u can flatten it of course.


OK so failure set in quite early, when we were supposed to put the butter into the dough and seal it up like an envelope. Cos the butter was too cold and the dough was too soft => the butter cut thru the dough, this resulted in butter seeping out of the dough when we were supposed to fold it 2 more times. In the end, we were wondering to throw this failure junk away or not?

No..i decided we should just fold it in somehow somewhat then bake it..and the end result was..edible like a croissant but doesn't look like one, and not flaky cos we didn't fold it correctly.

But Lurpak butter is GD! The end products were buttery enough, much better than Phoon huat's butter sheet.


Dinner was claypot rice by K, this piece of poo like looking thing is - Salted Fish, don't doubt it, although I duno why I am having this mental image of dentures -.-'



Chicken marinated before putting into the pot to be cooked with rice.


Tip: Stir fry the rice with onion to make rice more fragrant before cooking it in the pot. Other ingredients incl. chinese sausage.


Stir fry Bai Cai with oyster sauce.


*Slurp* Not too bad, except maybe broth and more salted fish to be used.




Claypot Rice - 7/10 , taste can be better with broth ^^''

Veggie - 7/10 , too oily >_>

Overall, tasted not bad..esp the frying with onions portion gave it quite alot of flavour.

Cooking Expedition: Beef mushroom swiss burger

Friday, October 12, 2007 Posted by YY on 11:58 PM comments (0)

Remember the fillet o fish burger bread that we were rushing to finish yesterday (saturday?)

Yes, today we are making beef patty with mushroom swiss to go with it. However, this bread goes real hard after 1-2 days, so to eat it like it just came out from the oven, the best way would be steaming it back. After steaming, it tastes really nice...similar to fillet O fish bread except that the browning is not as even.

Starting with marinating the beef

See what happens to the color of the minced beef after 2+hrs? Marination has been absorbed.


Steaming the mochi 'dough', this is some tough sticky dough which hmm is hard to handle..or maybe we haven grasped the technique =.=


Ugly mochi balls...was trying to do this item from Waraku called potato mochi cheese, fried item with melted cheese wrapped up with mochi. Turns out disastrous becos we haven got the right cheese/mochi texture


Frustrated K cooking mushroom swiss..he's frustrated becos of the mochi la.. zzz~


Finished product.


Assembling the burger



Beef is thoroughly cooked cos i like it 100% cooked, and its not chao ta as it seems. Basically, its black at some parts due to adding HP sauce into the marinade.




Burger bread: 7/10

Beef Patty: 7/10

Mushroom swiss: 7/10 , could have been better with beef sauce