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| Hi there! Please find me at my new home: www.panda-n-cakes.blogspot.com Jenny | | |
| From my scrapbook of recipes - Banana Fudge Bread
For a fair while now, I've been a collector of recipes. Should you find your Tuesday's Good Living missing or the Sunday Life insert gone, it's probably with me. I'm known to pull apart women's magazines, walk around the supermarket to pick up freebie recipes, Harris Farm, De Costi, the butcher, and on the occasion, hassle customer's for their version of recipes. (Once I had a customer write down a recipe for banana bread for me - turned out that he was a baker and his recipe called for about 20 bananas, 18 eggs and an insane amount of sugar). I've actually tried it out once - after reducing the recipe by a significant percentage; it wasn't a bad one but somehow, I just couldn't get it quite right. I guess that explains why banana bread always looks and tastes different when you get it at cafes. It all depends on the baker but then again, how long the bread has actually been sitting in the shop.
So over the past year, my recipe has been growing (in addition to my recipe books which a lot of people keep reminding me about :P) Of late, I've been on the lazy side and haven't managed to get them organised and stuck into my books. Nonetheless, I'm a proud owner of my Green Book - a spiral bound notebook where it's completely full of recipes I've collected. To date, I've only managed to get through a few of them but I must say, it's probably my favourite of recipe books. It has all my favourite recipes (I tend to only collect ones which I intend to cook - which in most cases, is the majority of recipes I come across) and well, organised in no particular order but still manages to offer a sense of surprise every time you turn its pages. I just love it! I turned it's pages tonight and decided on the Banana Fudge Bread. Quite an in easy recipe and worth trying. I would skip the walnuts and top up on the chocolate.
Ingredients
1.5 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking soda
Pinch of salt
50g dark chocolate
2 ripe bananas
2/3 cup caster sugar
1/3 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 large egg
50ml milk
1 tsp white vinegar
1/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
1 20cmX10cm loaf pan
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Grease the loaf pan.
2. Into a large bowl sift and mix the flour, baking soda and salt.
3. Put the chocolate in a small bowl and heat in the microwave until melted (do this in 20 second slots)
4. Put the peeled bananas in a bowl and mash with a fork.
5. In another bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Stir in the mashed bananas, egg, milk and vinegar. Mix well and pour into the flour mix. Stir in the nuts, if using.
6. For the fudge swirl, mix 150ml of batter with the melted chocolate. Pour the fudge batter into the bowl of banana batter. Stir once to swirl, then pour into the loaf pan.
7. Bake for 55 minutes, or until the loaf is golden and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.Cool completely before unmoulding.
Dinner tonight, I made a Cheat's Green Curry. Cheated a little cause we had cans of Green Curry at home that mum wanted to use up. I looked at the ingredients and it's basically a combination of what you would put into Green Curry if you made it from scratch. Nice and easy; it's awesome what you can get these days! On dinner duty again tomorrow; more later!
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| The Good News!
I've being doing my best to keep it all hush-hush; just in case it didn't work out and all my excitement would boil done to nothing. Come to think of it, it was only just a week ago that I came to a decision and decided to do something about it, and now a week later, it's all happening. No, I'm not opening my own cafe yet (as much I keep talking about it and bore everybody with all the minor details) and no, no one's proposed to me so I'm not getting married yet. Some of you might actually be wondering what the good news could be then if it's neither of the above and I think for some of you, it might be even a little hard to understand. At the moment, I have the biggest beam on my face and the heat of the day doesn't even seem to bother me much because of the good news. So what is the news? Just give me a sec.
It's probably been over a year when I first got the idea to do something like this whilst watching one of those Chinese series. I spoke to a couple of people at the time; I think most people would've thought that the appeal of the series was just rubbing off onto me. (Actually, I think Mandy, you said also that you would love to do something like that too.)Well of course, after watching another big series about working on a plane, I did actually apply for a flight attendant job and actually made it to the interview stage. Although at the last minute I did chicken out and just didn't turn up for the interview. And no, I'm not becoming a flight attendant; I'm talking about another series.
And well, just half a year ago I was speaking to someone about it at an exhibition I went to. By that time, I'd actually done a little bit of research and found out about other things that were on offer and really, I'd already narrowed it down to that one. I had a few reservations at the time and up until the day before yesterday, I still held those same reservations. Thank you to everyone that I've talked to about this and have given me your honest opinions. I assure you that I've taken them all on board to make this decision and tough as it might be, I'm prepared to follow through with it.
So boys and girls, after a frantic week of getting my application in (even the admissions officer remarked on the speed at which we got it all done), I'll be starting Basic Patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu next week! Godi, I hope you remember that conversation I had with you at Leo & Jenk's party. I got myself together and I'm really doing it now. Hopefully, when I visit you in Ulladulla, I'll be bringing you my best selection of baked goodies :D
In all the excitement, I've still managed to keep my head together and manage myself professionally. Today, I had to cancel a job interview because of the course. Something which I hoped I would've have to do. But honest to say, the year ahead is actually looking brighter than before and I'm really looking forward to soaking up every bit of it. And you know what, I'm actually that one step closer to my dream cafe! Thanks for the encouragement everyone; I look forward to sharing my experiences this year with you all. Yay! *jenny continues her jumping up and down around the house* :D
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| Lots of cooking and baking
Since coming back from holidays (armed with a wonderous collection of cookbooks!), I've actually had the chance to be in the kitchen to cook up a bit of a storm. As I mentioned before, I ended up making the Green Tea Mousse Cake. It actually turned out to be more like a tart cause my cake mould was a bit too big. Does anyone know where to get a small springform cake tin (preferrably around 15-20cm in diameter)? All the ones in the shops in my area are massive! As much as I would like to bake big cakes, I figured that a lot of it actually goes to waste cause there aren't enough people in my household to eat it and the other thing is, I do need to watch my waistline :(
The next thing I had in mind were the Banana Muffins from the recipe book by Cindy Au. I ended up baking a dozen and they were basically gone in a day. I had one myself but to me, they didn't seem that fantastic. I'm a believer of muffins to have a nice, crunchy top and these ones exploded whilst they were in the oven and somehow collapsed a bit once they were out. You get a nice banana taste to it but I don't think it fulfills the muffin criteria for my liking. Maybe banana is just best for making banana bread? Will probably make chocolate banana bread next.
So en route to getting the butter for the banana muffins at the supermarket, I was actually waiting in line at the express queue to pay when I decided to duck back into the baking aisle (cause the express queue was taking forever!). And well, a minute later I was back in the express cause with an armful of other baking goodies; all the ingredients I needed to make rocky road. When I went home to look for the recipe which I remembered, I'd bought everything in exactly the right proportions :D So something I tried for the first time was rocky road and these have been passed on as gifts to family and friends. I've been assured that they are good...phew!
Aside from baking, I've also taken charge of dinner a couple of nights a week now. There's been days this week where I've just woken up and cooked for most of the day. And you know what, I'm really enjoying it. Fortunately, there've been very few stuff ups lately. I didn't have fun getting splattered with duck fat the other night but my cooking repetoire has definitely grown in the past couple of weeks. Thai curry is on the agenda for tomorrow night.
Bit too tedious to put up all the recipes but for those interested, let me know and I'll pass on any tips.There should be some good news towards the end of this week tied in with food so I hope to bring that news to everyone in my next post!
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| Butter Cookies Over the weekend, I seemed to have enlisted 2 assistant bakers who helped me make a most yummy batch of butter cookies. So thanks to Joyce and Estee for a recipe for cookies that worked very well. Without you girls, I would've never seen the end of that blob of dough. (Actually I still have a small portion of dough in the fridge - does anyone know if dough goes off really easily? The other question is, can I defrost the dough simply by leaving it at room temperature?) For those wanting to try some, pop by my place soon cause they're running out quickly. Seriously, these cookies taste as good as store-bought ones if not better! Just to give you an update, we probably baked over 100 little cookies and there's only about 10 left now. hehe...seriously, everyone keeps eating them and they disappear. For those interested in the recipe, here it is; it was actually the backing to a set of teddy bear shaped cookie cutters that I bought awhile ago. I somehow found the cardboad piece of paper tucked in a few things as I cleared my room out last week.    
Ingredients 250g butter, softened 1.25 cups icing sugar, sifted 2.5 cups flour, sifted 1 tsp vanilla essence 0.5 tsp almond essence 1 egg 1/2 tsp salt Method 1. In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar with a mixer until well blended. Beat in egg and add the vanilla and almond essence. 2. Combine the flour and salt; gradually add to creamed mixture. 3. Roll out the dough and press the dough with cookie cutters. Place apart on a baking tray (you'll find that these don't expand much but still leave a bit of gap in between each cookie) 4. Preheat oven to 190 degrees and bake for 10 minutes or till golden brown. Remove to wire rack to cool for 5-10 minutes. 5. Eat! Haha...there's this cute little warning at the end of the recipe which says 'Always wear the oven mitt to prevent the hot object'. Extremely chinglish but hey, it's understandable. Really, really recommend this recipe. For those who like a bit of colour, top each unbaked cookie with hundreds and thousands before you place in the oven (tip courtesy of Estee). I'm thinking if you add about 10ml of green tea powder to the batter, you can bake green tea butter cookies. Whoever tries this out, let me know how it goes. Remember also to place uneaten cookies in an airtight container. At the moment the cookies have kept its texture for 3 days. | | |
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