vickichowder

RECIPE: PURPLE SWEET POTATO CHIFFON

The Mid-Autumn Festival just passed, and to celebrate we ate lots of food - like any other Chinese holiday.

So soft and fluffy and sweet potato-y

No pictures of the dinner were taken (I believe we were all too eager to get into the braised pork belly, roasted duck, and vinegary potato carrot side dish).
I can't remember the last time I took photos of each step of a cooking/baking process. Usually I start off with taking pictures of the ingredients then I get so engrossed into making it that I completely forget that I had planned to photograph each step for a very visual recipe on my blog.

However, this is a very exceptional recipe in that I planned to photograph each step and actually did *yay*

~ Ingredients ~

A
200 g purple sweet potato, cooked and mashed
200 ml milk

B
8 egg yolks
70 ml oil
40 g sugar
1/4 tsp salt
120 g flour, sifted

C
8 egg whites
60 g sugar

~ Method ~

Separate your eggs. Which may or may not be at room temperature, but they really should be to yield egg whites beaten to the perfect type of peaks.

Oops see an egg yolk cracked. But that's okay. The cake will turn out fine as long as there's no yolk in the white.

Mix the cooked, mashed sweet potato and milk. This Japanese sweet potato is delicious on its own but makes a chiffon taste so much better.

I used coconut milk. You can substitute all/some with cow milk, almond milk...

Add the sugar, oil (an is that more milk I see? Yes I decided to put half the milk in the yolks and the other half in the sweet potato but I really doesn't make a difference) in the yolks and mix.

Voila

Add the sweet potato

And mix until so. Clumps of sweet potato are okay. Unless you don't like clumps of delicious sweet potato scattered throughout the fluffy cake, where at this point, you should proceed to pass this all through a sieve.

Sift the flour in, a third at a time, mixing until incorporated after each third goes in.

It looks like a gray cake but I promise the baked result returns a color otherwise.

Have the 60 g of sugar ready.

Because now you will start whipping on low until it gets really foamy.

Then turn it to medium until soft peaks, where you stop the machine and add the sugar in two separate times.

Beating on high after each addition of sugar, and beating until the peak wilts a little when you lift the beaters out. Don't over beat here or your cake won't be super soft.

Mix a third of the beaten whites into the yolk mixture. Then fold the yolk mixture into the yolks until no streaks of whites remain.

Bake 350F for 35 minutes in an oiled fluted pan, or until toothpick comes out clean.

Flip it upside down when you take it out to cool (30-60 minutes)

Slice and serve

P/S

I don't remember what this building is called already...

They say that after Mid Autumn Festival, the weather starts becoming considerably chillier. This means colder mornings and breezy late afternoons, which I happen to really enjoy.

We had warm bread but forgot to room-temperature the butter beforehand, and had to deal with the cold butter *dilemmas*

To soak up the last of the warmer nights, we had dinner, al fresco (sounds better than outdoors doesn't it), two weeks back, when I made this sweet potato cake.

I cannot tell you what I will post next because I am particularly bad at keeping those kinds of promises.

Dear Readers, hurry and get those wind-breaking jackets out from your closets!

, by vickichowder

and

RECIPE: COOKIES AND CREAM MOUSSE

Three of my girlfriends and I spent a three days two night trip in Washington, DC - where I discovered my love for art galleries and taking lots of pictures. To the point where my friends started to seem rather distressed at my frequent pauses to take pictures.

All of us came to the consensus that the highlight of our trip was the two dinners we had after a long day of walking and sightseeing. But more on those two dinners in another post!

It was my brother's ninth birthday a few weeks ago and he specifically requested an OREO CAKE. He also said he wanted the type of cakes that have pieces of oreos on top, with icing and all. In other words, he wanted the kind of cakes you see in supermarkets, those iced with a thick layer of sweet sugary frosting covering a dense crumbly layer cake.

I used a oreo cookie that is typically used to make icebox (no bake) cake. It is a less dense oreo cookie without the layer of icing. This way the cookie base is less sweet, since I used sweetened shredded coconut.

But that's not the kind of cakes I make. And it's not the kind of cakes we like to eat in our family. I stuck with his Oreo request and made a cake that we would all enjoy:

An oreo-coconut cookie base

A light vanilla bean cream and oreo mousse

And here is a no fuss recipe for the cookie base:

Equal ratios of crushed icing-less oreo cookie and sweetened shredded coconut

Half ratio of melted butter, mixed with the dry crumbs, pressed onto the bottom of any springform pan or lined cake ring.

A mousse recipe will have to wait as it requires many steps and I'm not down for explaining all of that here right now. But you can easily adapt any vanilla mousse recipe and add crushed oreo cookies to make a cookies and cream mousse!

P/S

It's the labour day long weekend! And here I am home on a Saturday morning/afternoon, waiting for my mom to come home so we can do our weekly grocery shopping and replenish the fridge and pantry.

Our first meal in Washington DC was from McDonalds

What else do I have on my long weekend list of things to do? (I just happened to come up with one this moment) Well let me tell you now:

I want to live in a pink castle like this one

1. Upload the many many pictures I need to post up on my blog

2. Bake some more

3. Blog some more

Wishing a happy back to school to those going back this Tuesday!

, by vickichowder

BANANA

HOME SWEET HOME

, by vickichowder

CHOCOLATE

MINI CROQUEMBOUCHE

I would not try to claim that I excel at cooking, but I am rather confident in the kitchen. A particular area in which I can confidently say that I am horrible is my sense of direction.

When one of my girlfriends and I are together, we turn into Dumb and Dumber. In addition to a decreased sense of direction which is already rather absent, our common sense tends to evaporate when the two of us are alone.

Filled with chestnut puree

After leaving our friends house one day to go grocery shopping, I attempted to cross the intersection, but she insisted that the direction Sobeys (the grocery store) was on the current side of the street and to the left. So I listened to her, believing that my sense of direction was incorrect as usual.

But it didn't feel right, and I had us stop and cross the lights because it turns out that both of us were wrong! Not only did we have to cross the lights, we also had to walk towards the right side. Yet in the moment, we were both so sure that ourselves were going the right way...

In the kitchen, I doubt less and become so much surer of my choices. Which is a good thing since the duration of my days are split amongst spending time 1. doing assignments, studying, 2. going to the gym, or 3. cooking in the kitchen.

Well here is a dessert I am sure of. You can make it with just three components:

~ Ingredients ~

Creampuffs
Pastry cream or pudding
Chocolate

~ Method ~

Getting puffier

I
Fill your cream puffs / profiteroles with the pastry cream or pudding using a pastry tip until its full. Put them in the fridge so the filling sets and doesn't soak into the puff (making them soggy you don't want soggy puffs right?)

Alternatively, you can buy frozen pre-filled profiteroles (like the ones that come in a big tub from Costco)

I piped chocolate pudding into raspberries before chocolating them onto the croquembouche

II
Divide your cream puffs into a plate of pretty ones and not so pretty ones (like people, you know that there will always be ones that are less good looking, but you never want to be the first to say it. But now you can discriminate the ugly ones, point them out, and say it out loud.)

Lack of natural lighting in the kitchen

III
Arrange a layer of 6-8 puffs in a circle on a plate, then attach more puffs on top with melted chocolate, using one or two less puffs for each additional layer. Save the nicer looking ones for the top layers.