Cookie-topped Cream Puffs (and a little rant)

I feel guilty. I feel ashamed. I feel uncommitted to my blog, because it's been more than a month since I've opened up this post editor and written something. After watching 'Julie & Julia' two weeks ago (yes, it finally is screening in Hong Kong! And Meryl Streep is awesome), it reminded me that I was a food blogger too. Not that I totally forgot the fact that I had a blog, but I felt that I had neglected it. And I felt real bad.

Baking was meant to be a passion. It is still, but sometimes I simply do not have any time or energy left after school work. But trust me, after spending hours and hours working on an Extended Essay in the library, and trooping back home heaving a boulder-weighing school bag, the welcoming hot shower and cozy bed is way more attractive than say, the butter in the fridge. Which is why I've completely abstained from baking, and blogging, for so long.

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Alright, enough ranting. I feel so much happier after I've vented out my frustration, and I'm sure you all understand! Thank you for the patience in reading the un-baking-related words above :)

Back to this post's main intention, which is to present some delectable cream puffs I made, the moment I threw down my school bag after EE deadline day. My first attempt at choux pastry was nearly half a year ago. The cream puffs from that attempt were good, but real ugly in appearance! Quoting myself from that time - "can't wait to recreate a cream puff that tastes as good as, or better, than the ones from beard papa!", I was indeed determined to get the hang of making a neat cream puff.

And I sort of succeeded! On this second attempt, I chose to make Cookie-topped Cream Puffs, a replication of the same flavour they sell at Beard Papa. It's a classic choux pastry shell, filled with vanilla pastry cream and a cookie topping.


My rendition turned out to be pretty identical to the store bought ones, as all my friends from fellowship (where I bought them to) were squealing "Oh!! They taste just like the ones from Beard Papa!!". Which is when I decided to grab one myself before the were all gone and bit into it. The choux shell's flavour was enhanced with the chocolatey cookies sablee-like crumbs on top and the rich, vanilla bean-speckled pastry cream helped meld the whole thing together perfectly.


So if you, like me, have a special affinity for cream puffs, please do try this twist on it! I'm sure you'll love it these scrumptious little sweets!

Cookie-topped Cream Puffs
Adapted from Chou Cream No Hon by Junko Iida (Original recipe in Chinese)

For the choux pastry
30g cake flour, sifted
30g bread flour, sifted (If you don't have cake and bread flours, I'd suggest just using 60g all-purpose)
40g unsalted butter, cut into cubes
100ml water
5g sugar
1g salt
2 eggs (around 100g)

1. Preheat oven to 200C. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment.
2. Place water, butter, sugar and salt into a small saucepan and heat over medium flame until butter is all melted and water is at a rolling boil.
3. Remove from heat, and add in the flours in one go. Mix together with a heatproof spatula until a dough forms.
4. Back on the heat, stir the dough continously until a thin layer of dough coats the base of the pan.
5. Transfer dough into a large metal bowl. Slowly add in the egg whilst mixing with a spatula until the egg is absorbed and formes a soft dough. An indicator is the formation of a 'triangle' when you lift the dough up using a spatula. Set aside the left over egg if not all of it was added.
6. Using a piping bag with a 1-cm tip (I just snipped off the end of a plastic bag), pipe around 10 mounds of dough, each around 4cm in diameter.
7. Brush over the left over egg, and with a wet finger, lightly press down any peaks on the dough.
8. Bake at 200 C for 30 minutes until golden brown.

For the chocolate cookie topping
20g cake flour
5g cocoa powder
25g unsalted butter, softened
25g sugar

1. In a small bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.
2. Fold on the flour and cocoa powder.
3. Press together the dough, and shape it into a log with 2-cm diameter. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes.
4. Slice into 10 portions (or enough slices for the number of puffs you got using the recipe above). Place them on each mound of dough, and bake as per instructions above.

For the pastry cream
1/2 vanilla pod
250ml milk
40g sugar
3 egg yolks
25g cake flour
20g unsalted butter, cut into chunks

1. Split the vanilla pod lengthwise and scrape out the seeds.
2. Place the vanilla seens and pod into the milk in a small saucepan, along with half the sugar. Heat until the mill is just about to boil.
3. Whisk together the egg yolks and remaining sugar in a large bowl. Sift in the cake flour and whisk until well incorporated.
4. Remove the vanilla pod from the milk. Add the milk into the egg yolks in portions, stirring well after each addition.
5. Strain the mixture back into the saucepan. Cook mixture over low heat, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens into the consistency of thick cream and bubbles start to form.
6. Remove from heat and beat in the butter chunks.
7. Let cool completely before chilling and filling the cream puffs.

Alfajores

It seems like my excuses to bake are getting more and more ridiculous. This time, it's something along the lines of "I made two cans of dulce de leche and I can't go on eating it on toast every morning for a month even though it tastes great. Therefore I must bake alfajores." I'm glad that I decided to bake them, but another baking glitched occured!

On a whim, I decided to make dulce de leche again, using the boiling can method. I've tried the oven method, but I think that it's a more waste of energy as the oven has to be on for a long time, whilst the boiling method allows you to make a few cans at once AND I can actually do homework whilst it cooks by itself! Win-win! Yes, some say that boiling the cans are prone to explosion - but fortunately it hasn't happened to me yet, so I'm sticking to the pot method.

But the first time I made dulce de leche, I was so anxious for the result I forgot to let the cans cool before opening them, so the moment my can opener cut through the top, a squirt of hot, sweet, sticky caramelised milk spewed out. Thank God it hit the wall and not my face.


So one day, me being a less-than-attentive student during English class, I got distracted and typed in 'alfajores' into food blog search, spending a a good 15minutes sifting through the pages until I found a recipe that sounded like my imagination of an alfajor - a slightly crunchy shortbread with a tender crumb, melding into the lovely sweet, caramelly filling.


The components of my dream alfajor were made without any problems. The cookies were perfectly fine - buttery, tender and all. The dulce de leche was heavenly - I ate a good portion of a can just by the spoon or on saltine crackers. But my final product was a bit disastrous.


I have no idea why, but after I sandwiched the cookies together, the filling seemed to 'melt' and a few seconds later, the cookies were sliding off each other! I frantically tried adjust them properly, and used much less filling in my remaining ones - but they still slipped off. I have no idea why, maybe my cookies weren't completely cool yet. Or maybe because I store my dulce de leche in fridge, the temperature difference was too big so it softened quickly. Aghh - I was a bit annoyed at that point as my dream alfajores have been ruined, not to mention that there was dulce de leche dripping everywhere :(

But despite their ugly appearance, the alfajores were really delicious! It was everything I imagined it to taste like. To make them more easy to handle and eat (as by now, the filling has leaked to coat the sides sticky), I placed each alfajor into a paper muffin case to give out at school.


Some friends asked what the filling was, and I think I answered a tad too enthusiastically as I started to babble on about how good dulce de leche is, how easy it is to make, and urging everyone to make it. I also had a very intersting conversation in Biology class where I insisted on the correct pronounciation of 'alfajores' (ah-faa-ho-res) and 'dulce de leche' (dul-chay-de-lay-chay), as well as asking my friend who studies Spanish how to say "Ugly But Tasty Alfajores"...if I had remembered what she said, it would have been the title of this post!


Alfajores
Adapted from Desert Candy

Makes around 16 sandwich cookies

115g butter, room temperature
55g sugar
1 egg
1tbsp dark rum
1/2tsp vanilla essence
140g all-purpose flour
65g cornstarch
1tsp baking powder
1/4tsp salt

around 1/2 cup dulce de leche, for filling (see below)

1. In a large bowl, with a mixer on medium speed, beat the butter and sugar until smooth. Add the egg, rum and vanilla and beat until well blended.
2. In a medium bowl, mix the flour, cornstarch, salt and baking powder. Beat into butter mixture until well blended. Press the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and chill until firm, about 30 minutes.
3. Preheat oven to 170º C. Unwrap dough. On a lightly floured surface, with a floured rolling pin, roll out dough to about 1/8 inch thick. With a floured, 2- to 3-inch round cutter, cut out cookies. Place about 1 inch apart on greased or lined baking sheets. Gather excess dough into a ball, re-roll, and cut out remaining cookies. Chill cookies in the freezer for around 5 minutes until dough is firm.
4. Bake until cookie edges just begin to brown, about 10-15 minutes. Let the cookies cool on sheets for 5 minutes, then use a spatula to transfer them to racks to cool completely.
5. Turn half the cooled cookies bottom side up and spread each with around a teaspoon dulce de leche. Top with remaining cookies. Cookies are best on the second day, they keep well for 2 weeks in an air-tight container at room temperature.

Dulce de Leche
Place one can of condensed milk (or any number of cans you can fit in your pot) into a large pot and fill with water until the cans are completely submerged. Turn on the stove and let the water boil. After water has boiled, turn down to low heat and let the heat work its magic - remove after 2.5 hours. Make sure the cans are always completely submerged during cooking.

Let the cans cool completely before opening to avoid hot sticky caramel landing on yourself or anywhere else. Then, take a spoon and eat a spoonful of bliss before transferring the rest into a jar to keep in the fridge.

Spider Cupcakes

This may be a bit late for Halloween - it's still the 31st here, so maybe just in time! Halloween's not a huge thing here in Hong Kong - I've never even dressed up before for Halloween! Usually my friends and I would go to the annual Halloween Bash at Ocean Park (a theme park), but this year we're just all too busy, so I baked a batch of Spider Cupcakes to mark the occasion.

Of course, the last thing I'd like to dress up as, or see during Halloween are spiders. But I wouldn't mind having a spider morphed from a chocolate cupcake, with a generous slather of chocolate frosting, and sprinkled with more chocolate. I think they look cute, no?

The chocolate cupcake recipe I used was from Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours, and the idea for decorations were from Bakerella. I was a bit disappointed with the cupcake because the crumb was very loose and the chocolate flavour was not deep enough. I defiantly going to stick to my favourite chocolate cupcake recipe in the future. The glaze, however, was nice and hassle-free to make. Made up of simply 3 ingredients - melted chocolate, butter and icing sugar - it tasted wonderful and had a lovely sheen to it.
To transform the cupcakes into scary, chilling arthropods, I used chocolate shavings or Varlhona crunchy pearls as the 'exo-skeleton', strawberry licorice for the legs and M&Ms for the eyes. I know that the heart-studded cupcake liners are hardly Halloween-ish, but that's all I had at home!

So after the transformation, I preserved them in a box in the fridge over night, and bought them to school for my friends to catch and devour. (In fact, some of my friends actually ate REAL spiders in Cambodia during Challenge Week! Cool, right?)

And finally as a Biology student, I do actually know that spiders have 8 legs (...but not without asking a friend first!), but I couldn't fit on 4 pairs - so theoretically all my spiders were disabled spiders!

I'm amazed by some of the Halloween creations other food bloggers have created. Here are some of my favourites: Brain Clot Cupcakes from Annie's Eats, Sugar Cookies from Sweetopia and Coffin Cookeis from Bake at 350. I'd love to try out some of those next year!

Here's me being a 'ghost', taken by myself using the self timer on my camera. If you're out for Halloween, it'd be something fun to do! Check out Photojojo for the tutorial. Aaand, Happy Halloween to you all!

(I'm not writing this post at home, so I do not have the cookbook with me - I'll update the recipe later. If you would like to see my favourite chocolate cupcake recipe, see my old post.)

Black and White Chocolate Birthday Cake

What's a birthday without a cake, right? Usually, if time permits, I'd try my best to bake cakes or other treats for my friends when their birthday comes. Hmm, let's count. The last one was a chocolate chiffon cake. Then it was a chocolate cheesecake. Oh, and the chocolate espresso mousse cake. Two of those, in fact. Chocolate cupcakes, chocolate tarts...Can we sense a theme here? :D

But for A., whom this cake was for, of course it had to be chocolate too - only both Black and White chocolate. As this year is the last time I'm going to celebrate my friends' birthdays with them before we go our own ways for uni, I promised myself that I have to bake them each a big, special birthday cake.

But making it special is not as easy as it sounds. This is the first time I've ever made a birthday cake with mulitple layers and fillings and frostings. Heck, I only bought my first offset spatula two days before! Even with my planning beforehand, I still encountered some problems, partly due to my clumsiness but mainly because I've never made such a cake before, I totally did not know what to expect and I panicked alot when...

...I was slicing the cake layers. I held the knife in one hand, and stared at the cake layer that was barely an inch high. How on earth do I slice that in half without accidentally slashing in the wrong direction? I took a deep breath, and gently sawed through the cake later. Phew. Although the layers were not particularly even, at least they held up! As the cake layers are quite soft and fluffy, I quickly stuffed them into the freezer to make sure they didn't snap in half of something. So the first scare was over.

...I frosted the layers. I'm not sure why, but I had a huge problem with the white chocolate whipped cream. See that ugly white layer in the photo above? Yeah, that. It was perfectly fine after I initially whipped it up - it was smooth and just firm enough to spread, but as per the recipe's instructions, I chilled it for around 2 hours. And after that, I took it out. I prodded it through the plastic wrap. The surface was firm. Not good.

It turned out that somehow, the cream had curdled in fridge, and I didn't have a backup plan. So I went ahead and used it for the middle layer, but it just looked too way bad and unappealing to be the frosting. So I sprinted down to the supermarket, grabbed another carton of whipped cream, ran back and whipped up some lightly sweetened cream and used it to frost the cake instead. It took me ages to get the frosting right, as I've never frosted a big cake before and it was hard to get the crumb coat right, to get the top and sides smooth.

But finally, the cake was done. The top was simply decorated with homemade white chocolate curls and some store bought dark chocolate shavings. I quickly photographed it, and went to sleep - tired, yet happy that I found an alternative to the white chocolate cream disaster. But I was anxious too, as I was very very scared that the white chocolate cream I used for the filling would separate over the night, and mess up the whole cake.

But the next night, after our long day of Challenge Week golfing, 9 holes, a barebeque... it was cake time! We took the photos, sang the song, the birthday girl made her wishes...and finally it was time for me to slice and serve the cake. I took a deep breath in my brain, and cut the cake into slices. All was well. I simply cannot describe how relieved I was to see that the slices came out nicely and the white chocolate cream filling was perfectly fine! And it was actually somewhat symmetrical with the layers looking fairly intact!

So everyone had their slice, and everyone said it was goooood. I felt satisfied and bubbly and excited and happy to see that everyone enjoying it, and that my first layered cake was successful, that everything turned out fine eventually albeit the glitches in the process. So I rightfully dug into my slice to taste the fruit of my labour.

Well, since the cake was made with a fluffy buttermilk white cake, a rich dark chocolate pastry cream, real white chocolate cream and well, more sweetened whipped cream (and of course the love and effort I put in too), it was just simply decadent. The smooth creams complemented the cake well, and the sweetness was just right so the flavours of both chocolates came through. In fact, I was glad that I used whipped cream for the frosting, as it helped round all the layers together nicely and so the cake is not too heavy and cloying.

If you're a chocoholic for both chocolates that's looking for a cake to bake, why not this? The recipe is from Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours. The recipe can be found on this site. (Sorry, I'm too tired to type it all up :P In fact, A. was the person who helped me order this book from Amazon, so what's better to bake a cake from that book for her?)

Happy Birthday for the nth time A.! I'm really really glad you liked the cake!

Although layered cakes are probably a no-brainer for practically everyone but me, to myself, it seems like I've reached a mini baking milestone. And honestly? I can't wait to bake the next big-special-birthday cake!

P.S. Actually I had my 17th birthday a few weeks ago too, in case anyone wondered why the 'About Me' section has changed :)

My Favourite YouTube Channel - Cooking with Dog

Apart from baking, I enjoy cooking very much too. One thing I like the most that you do in cooking but not baking is chopping. I feel empowered with a nice, sharp kitchen knife - for example, there's a sense of satisfaction I get when I manage to chop up an onion into a neat mince, despite having tears rolling down my face! Another important thing is that I get to learn a lot from my mum when we're working together in the kitchen. The tips and tricks that are passed down the family from daughter to daughter is always valuable, as you probably won't be able to find them anywhere else.

Occasionally I'd be in charge of making dinner, using the opportunity to try dishes that made my mouth water the instant I saw them on the Internet, or say, practice cooking more so I don't have to survive on just instant noodles when I get to uni! This is what I made for dinner last night:


So, back to my favourite YouTube channel. I stumbled across it a few months ago, and after watching my first video - I was hooked. Literally. I have been known to procrastinate by watching video after video on Cooking with Dog. In short, the videos teach you how to make everyday Japanese dishes, demonstrated by a lovely Japanese woman, and hosted by a dog called Francis.In this post I'd like to introduce you to this wonderful channel and show you some of the dishes I've made:

Hamburg Steak, also known as Hanbagu - my latest dish. It's a Japanese recreation of the American Hamburger, but it's a little thicker and very juicy, and is served as a main dish.


I think my go at it was pretty good - the patty was indeed very juicy and the onion gravy was absolutely delicious - it smelled great with the addition of butter, but wasn't very oily or heavy. The potato wedges were also pan fried, but the potato was parboiled, cooled slightly then cut. I was surprised that even by cooking them in a pan, the exterior was still very crispy and it's much quicker than roasting them in an oven. However, a glitch did occur - I severely over salted the broccoli, so it was inedible. Oops!

Yaki Gyoza (Pan fried dumplings). My sister and mum helped out a bit with this as we wrapped them together one afternoon. Frying them in sesame oil gives a lovely, enticing fragrance to the gyozas and by using the method, the skin crisped up very nicely. Hard to resist eating a whole plateful! I like to dip them in some soya sauce mixed with Chinese black vinegar and a dash of sesame oil.


Omurice, which was my first attempt at making something from CWD. Okay, the ketchup blob was a fail, because I was pouring from the bottle, not from a squeeze bottle. But apart from that, I remember that the tomato fried rice was delicious even on its own. I was so glad that the omurice came together well - i.e. I didn't tear the egg or overly brown the surface. The lady makes it seem so easy on the video, but in fact, it's actually really hard to control the size of the egg sheet, how much rice to put in, and keeping it intact when flipping it over is actually very hard!


Technically, a dessert: Shiratama (chewy glutinous rice balls). There isn't an actual video on it, but one day I had a huge urge to try make shiratama, and I followed the instructions on their video on Tofu Dango. I simply mixed roughly equal amounts of Japanese glutinous flour (shiratamako) and water, shaped them into balls and boiled them until they floated and were cooked.

These little balls are chewy, the perfect accompaniment with ice cream as it provides a great textural contrast. Here, I ate them with Goma (black sesame) ice cream that was scooped with a mini ice cream scoop so they are around the same size as the shiratama, and with a sprinkling of ground black sesame seeds. An alternative to the normal wafers or cookies, adding a nice twist to your otherwise plain bowl of ice cream!

So, I hope that you will watch some of the videos from that channel too and try your hand it some of the dishes!

Do tell me if you have any other favourite cooking channels that you would recommend! I'm never tired of watching videos on cooking or baking :)