Thank you Dorie Greenspan!

For Baking From My Home to Yours. For in your book, I found the recipe for 'My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies', and with a name like that, who can help trying out the recipe? And they are really THE BEST chocolate chip cookies ever.

They are chewy and soft (even on the third day of gloriously sinful eating) and just nicely chocolatey and not too sweet. In other words, chocolate chip cookie heaven! Or more specifically cocoa chocolate chip cookie and coffee chocolate chip cookie heaven, because I headed straight for two of your variations.

And thank you also for writing a book with recipes that are easy to read and that come with great tips and hints. If not for those, I might've gone ahead and baked two trays at once to save time, and the cookies probably wouldn't have turned out that well.

So thank you Dorie Greenspan for 'My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies'!

Chocolate Lava Muffins

While googling a recipe for chocolate muffins, I came across this one for Chocolate Lava Muffins by Alton Brown. And it looked easy enough, plus I had all the ingredients (and a new silicone 6-muffin pan) at hand. So I gave it a shot and boy, was it a good one.

However, I failed to notice the part which said "Beat at high until batter is creamy and lightens in color, approximately 4 minutes." And without a mixer, it is quite a chore to beat the batter by hand. The recipe also didn't say how long to chill it for, but I guess the point of it is to cool the batter so it results in that molten centre. (The batter actually keeps for a couple of days in the fridge perfectly fine, which I did as 12 muffins are way too much for 2 people - we waited till 2 more guinea pigs came to the apartment for dinner on Presidents Day, where we started off with a chunky vegetable soup, garlic bread, and a tomato, mozzarella, cilantro salad. And ended with six chocolate lava muffins with vanilla ice-cream).

I also found that (at least for my oven) it required longer than the stated 10-11 minutes. At 11 minutes, the top of the muffin was still quite liquid, and I left it for another minute or so before removing it. However, removal was also not easy, especially with the second batch, which I had taken out after an extra minute (the first batch had two extra minutes and had a not-so-oozy centre). Looks like there needs to be some in-between time here - enough to get you a cake-like exterior and an oozy centre. Perhaps an extra 1 min 30 secs would do it?

I'll have to give it a try another day.

PS. Although Alton Brown says to use a semi-sweet chocolate chip, I used bittersweet, 60% cocoa chocolate chips from Ghiradelli.

In the mood for baking

On a day like this, where the sun has been tucked away in its bed of clouds, not to be seen the whole day, it is perfect for baking. Because there's nothing like the smell of some yummy baked goods to brighten up the kitchen - and the rest of the apartment.

I've never been that big a fan of the fruity baked goods. I am addicted to dark chocolate and it tends to feature in a lot of the things that emerge from my oven. So this here is one that lacks that specific ingredient, yet it tastes pretty damn good (if I may say so myself). It's my first try at making a banana walnut bread and the recipe came from R's mom. Afternoon tea with a slice of banana walnut bread - what could be better?

In the Kitchen: Choc Oatmeal Cookies

It's taking me a while to get used to this oven. My family home in Singapore doesn't have a proper oven like this, but rather a combined microwave-convection oven, and I was used to how that operated. The one here in SSF is gas-powered I think, and the heat comes from the bottom. So I have to be extra careful with timings, as I didn't realise with my first batch of choc oatmeal cookies (thanks Bill Granger!), which had slightly overcooked undersides - I like them chewy and not too crispy, and these were too crisp. I had left them in for the stipulated 20 minutes, but nope, 18 in this oven is perfect, as my second lot demonstrated.

And cooking in a non-humid climate is just brilliant.

(Btw I quite like the new Picasa for Mac and its idiot-proof collage-making abilities).

mothers day

As I'm not much of a fan of cheesecake, it's something I've never made. But my mum does. So here's a lemon orange non-bake cheesecake. Happy Mothers' Day!

Choc Muesli Cookie, adapted (accidentally)

Making Bill Granger's Choc Oatmeal cookies is a snap. That is, if you were smart enough to check for all your ingredients beforehand. I wasn't.

It's simple enough. You start off preheating the oven at 180 degrees.

You get your butter, softened, and cream it with the brown sugar.
- Here's where I messed up and only brought out one stick of butter to soften, totally forgetting I wanted to make a double batch, which calls for 300g of butter, and not the 227g that the one stick provided.
Solution: Use margarine. Yeah, people will say, but margarine's not butter! Yes, I know that too. But what to do.

So I creamed my butter/margarine and brown sugar, beat my eggs and vanilla essence.
Then sifted flour (I had foreseen the need to actually buy plain flour, although in the end I didn't use the new packet I bought, and finished the remainder of an open packet), baking powder and salt together.

Then, dang! I forget to check if there were enough rolled oats. I poured it out onto the kitchen scales, realising already when I picked it up that it wouldn't be enough. It was short, by about half. I had oatmeal, but I didn't want Choc Oatmeal Porridge. B
Solution: I used the lovely Swiss muesli i'd picked up a few weeks ago. It has oats (and barley and raisins and apple bits and cornflakes). So in it went, along with a whole bag of chocolate chips.

Spoon the dough out onto a greased tray. Although Granger's recipe calls for the mound of dough to be pressed down with a fork, I skipped that and left it as a little mound, figuring the heat would flatten out anyway. And popped it into the oven. The recipe also calls for about 20 minutes, but by about 18 minutes, it had turned a lovely colour and was ready to be taken out of the oven.




And I must say, despite the addition of margarine and muesli, it was a pretty yummy cookie. I might even add that having some bits of raisins and apple in it actually added to the cookie. So this is instead a Choc Muesli Cookie, adapted (accidentally) from Bill Granger's fantastic Bills Food. The book is chockful of great simple recipes that I not only salivate over but once I read it go, hey that sounds easy enough, and actually go out and do it. So in addition to the best brownie recipe ever, I now have a best chocolate chip oatmeal cookie recipe ever.

Leiths' Gingerbread Cookies

Gingerbread Cookies (from the Leiths Baking Bible)

225g butter, softened
170g light muscovado sugar
1 tbsp molasses
1 egg, beaten
340g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsps ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground cloves

1. Beat the butter, sugar and molasses in a bowl until fluffy. Gradually add the egg, beating well between each other addition.
2. Sift together all the remaining ingredients, except the icing sugar, into a bowl. Stir into the butter mixture.
3. Press the dough into a flat layer between 2 sheets of greaseproof paper. Chill for about an hour until firm.
4. Heat the oven to 190 deg.
5. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough to 5mm thick for slightly soft cookies, or thinner for very crisp cookies. Cut out cookie shapes and place on a lightly greased baking sheet, leaving 4 cm between each cookie. Chill until firm.
6. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 8-10 min or until the edges of the cookies are lightly browned. Cool for 1 min, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

gingerbread things

I made gingerbread people - a man a woman and a brat. Oh and some trees, a couple of ugly hearts and a blob.

This year I used the recipe from Leiths Baking Bible (which is going on my 'to buy' list), which was a bit harder to roll out than the recipe I used two Christmases ago. But it is also more buttery and a bit more tasty. The old recipe (which my mum had been using for ages) required golden syrup, which tends to result in a crunchy biscuit - I prefer softer, slightly chewy biscuits so this new recipe does it for me. I'll have to figure out how to roll it out better next time though. I'll try to put up a recipe soon. But my cookie cutters are still the same as before so in the meantime, please revisit the suicide family.

Next up from Leiths - cinnamon biscuits perhaps?

And in other cooking adventures, I churned out a sangria and a Bill Granger Brownie on Saturday morning, hopped out to Au Petit Salut at Dempsey for a set lunch (snails, salty duck confit, chocolate and hazelnut custard), meandered my way through the puddles back home to cook mussels (For 1.5kg of mussels, use 250ml white wine, chopped garlic, chopped tomatoes and fresh basil, and a bit of pepper. Chuck into a pot, steam till the mussels open), and a chickpea/bacon/spinach warm salad, and a cold salad of butterhead lettuce and cherry tomatoes. My mom made her seafood paella, and when the guests arrived, we poured out the rather strong sangria, offered two types of olives, sliced bread and tada, a Spanish-inspired dinner for a Saturday night.

Listening: Tina Dico - One (from In The Red)