you know you are bored when...

blondies!

Moving back to London after summer in Singapore was fun. That's right. No more crappy cramped places to move into, no more shared rooms and no more of the joke of kitchen I had last year. Everything this year just seems 10000000 times better then the 2 previous years, I just can't help but feel happy even just sitting on the floor (yes, I can now sit on my floor without worrying about that unknown suspicious looking stain).

And so with my welfare and well-being exponentially increased, and with school being rather blah at the moment I just feel like baking yesterday. My exploits in the kitchen have been rather varied, from baking cakes, cookies to Chinese dinners. And even though I have a presentation due next week on top of two of essays due in the next 3 weeks, I'm successfully pretending that I'll get through everything.

So, you know you are bored when you bake a banana walnut loaf cake, 2 hummingbird cakes, chocolate chip cookies, dinner twice a week (elaborate ones), fry up doughnuts and yogurt cake (in 4 variations) over two weeks. The yogurt cake is my new favourite cake - as can be seen from my various attempts at creating a different flavour: blueberry, orange poppyseed, lemon poppyseed and lemon-raspberry. The amazing thing about this is that it tastes incredibly healthy and the yogurt through some miraculous chemical way induces the most wonderful velvety texture of the cake. I live with 3 boys this year, and all of them unanimously vote for the blueberry one, just coz of the crazy explosions of blue within the cake. yumm. I only manage to take a photo of the lemon poppyseed cake as I either forgot to take pictures, or I brought them out and they were gone. :D
















lemon poppyseed yogurt cake
















Chocolate Chunk Butter Cookies
















Banana Walnut (Molasses) Loaf





















"Kung Po" Chicken


I can cook Chinese Food! My first attempt at the "kung po" chicken served in almost every chinese restaurant in its glorious variations, and apart from the taste, which wasn't quite the same, it was still 90% there. the same fiery kick, the same tender chicken meat (although my regular 'zi char' stall doesn't use tender meat. damn) and the delish gravy. Now, i dare you to eat all the dried chili. That's my dad's favourite part of the dish. Seeing him eat it with relish once made me thought it was really cool to eat that (i was young), and it was HOT HOT HOT. but of course, pride comes at any age, and I pretended with whatever acting skills I had that it was alright. Silly me, and duh, i never made the same mistake again.

so here's too, boring lazy afternoons, and lazy evenings, and to more yogurt cake! yay!

of family heirlooms and miniatures

we all know life throws curveballs at you from time to time, to test your mettle, or your worth- or whatever really. but i guess curveballs then need decisions, and decisions taken or followed, need time to be readjusted to. summer this year was my curveball, by my decision, marking a new turning point in my life. and though it will be very bittersweet, i can say now (that summer and autumn has came and gone) that its going to be okay.

I will stick by the decision i made, i will probably waver in my (new) love interests, but i will remain forever faithful to my one and only real love- baking.

Over summer, i made a myraid of cakes and cookies- with my most successful being the Devil's Food Cake that i made for my grandma's birthday. but due to the non-presence of a really-good-digital-camera till september, i didn't take any photos of that.

With more indecision and tango-ing in my life, i decided to take two steps back to enter into a world where i could be alone, a world where i escape to. As irritatingly corny this sounds, baking was perhaps my one and only outlet. And so, i grew increasingly fixated on a generation-passed down cheesecake recipe. yumm.

The picture above was first attempt, and might i say it really was an easy cake! Being a family heirloom and all, it wouldn't be nice at all (to say the least) for me to announce it out. But tweaking the methods of preparation, tweaking the ingredients, and the discovery of a blender in my house (seriously, i had no idea we had one) that put the 'cheesecake workout' of the mortar&grinder-meets-digestives away (yay), was great fun. And the results were even better! I also love how people ooh-and-ahh at the marbled effect, and I love it even more when I see their disbelief when I tell them how simple it is to achieve that effect :)





















my summer being one train-wreck after another really needed something else to make it worthwhile. so lemons. i've mentioned before, and i'll mention it again. lemons really do make the world go round. their tart, tangy lilt on the tongue just never fails to make me happy. And together with the marshmallow-textured meringues just equates to delish heaven.

Unfortunately, i'm the only one in the family who really likes lemon. And because i live in Singapore, where half of the people really look anorexic (i'm not saying this because i'm bigger than the norm), i made them miniature. This way, it'll be perfect for both fussy categories - not too much lemon and not too much calories.