Happy Mothers Day: Lemon Madeleines, Caramel Cookies, Creme Caramel & Jap Chae

Today, I want to dedicate this post to my mum and all the mothers out there who have tirelessly worked to raise their kids and try to give them everything they possibly can- especially unconditional love.

Because it's Mothers Day, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen cooking  Korean vegetarian Jap Chae recipe from Alice at Savoury Sweet Life (image above), Korean bulgogi from Katherine Joy at Food.com and from the Women's Weekly Biscuits book, lemon madeleines and chocolate caramel cookies. Also tried another creme caramel recipe as well but unfortunately that didn't go to plan sigh...I accidentally bought fat free skim milk and I think that affected the richness of the creme caramel.

I've cooked the Korean vegetarian Jap Chae recipe a few times because my family likes the noodles. The bulgogi, I've tried a few recipes trying to find an authentic one.

The lemon madeleines are really yummy although they are best out of the oven and doesn't keep very well during cold days:

Lemon Madeleines

2 eggs
2 tbsp caster sugar sifted
2 tbsp icing sugar sifted
1/4 C self raising flour
1/4 C plain flour
75g melted unsalted butter
1 tbsp water

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees celsius or 180 degrees fan forced. Grease two 12-hole madeleine pans if you like them petite and only 1 tray if you'd like them large and supersized
2. Beat egg and sifted sugars together until thick and creamy
3. Triple sift flours and then sift over egg mixture and fold to combine
4. Pour combined butter and water down the side of the bowl and fold mixture together
4. Drop mixture into madeleine pans and bake approx 10 mins. Tap hot pan on bench to release madeleines and turn onto cooling racks. Serve dusted with icing sugar


Variation for lemon or orange madeleines: Add zest from either 2 lemons or 2 oranges into eggs before beating. Omit the water and replace with 1 tbsp of lemon or orange juice.

Chocolate Caramel Cookies

125g softened butter
1/2 C caster sugar (110g)
1 egg
1 C plain flour (150g)
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 x 60g Chokito bars, chopped finely

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees or 160 degrees fan-forced. Line baking trays with baking paper
2. Beat butter, sugar and eggs until smooth. Do not overbeat
3. Stir in sifted flour and cocoa, then chopped chocolate bar
4. Drop tablespoons of mixture about 5cm apart onto trays and bake for 15 minutes

The madeleines are yummy. Very quick and easy to make with no need to soften any butter beforehand unlike other baking recipes. The cookies are just your average caramel cookies and very chocolatey- the original recipe recommends cooling on the trays but I think that dries them out just a bit as they continue cooking until the tray is cool.

Happy Mothers Day to my mums and all mothers out there!

x

Cooking Again

Just so you know I haven't forgotten the PF slant of this blog- cooking saves money, riiiighhht?!!

The marathon kitchen efforts over the Easter long weekend had me prostrated on the sofa on Easter Monday. It's been a while since I've spent that much time chopping, blendering, roasting and frying. I don't think the topic of personal finance was on my mind though...far from it...

Having said all that, I'm in a buttermilk state of mind and have been fantasising about how the word buttermilk can convey danger and temptation so simply.

I still have a few recipes that I'm dying to try out from Smitten Kitchen, cinnamon brown butter breakfast puffs and buttermilk roast chicken and they both use... buttermilk...

Me thinks another marathon kitchen effort is coming up again this weekend, filled with fatty goodness:

Bill Granger's Chicken and Sweet Potato Curry

We are entertaining tonight. So after cooking last night's dinner, I prepped and cooked part of tonight's dinner. At 11pm I finally called it quits in the kitchen.

The curry is now in the fridge, ready to heat up after work. It has all the south east Asian flavours with ingredients like lemongrass, fish sauce, ginger and sweet potatoes. Those are ingredients that I grew up with. It was surprisingly easy and quick to make. I had all the ingredients and loads of lemongrass in the freezer from my parents' farm.

I've yet to make the dough for the corriander and onion flatbread, the cucumber relish and roll the gyoza's(little Japanese pork dumplings). So tonight will find me frantically working in the kitchen again.

The Age and SMH published the recipe and you can find it online but if you want to try it, I'll provide a copy of it here:










Bill Granger's Chicken and Sweet Potato Curry

I've split the recipe up into four sections because it's prepped and cooked in four distinct steps.

8 skinless chicken thigh fillets, cut into quarters
2 tbsp curry powder
sea salt
_____________
1 tbsp olive oil
1 red onion, sliced
1 red chilli, finely chopped
_____________
1 stalk lemongrass, crushed with the back of a knife and split
5cm piece ginger, peeled and sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp caster sugar
500g sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
400ml chicken stock
______________
250ml coconut milk
fresh lemon juice
small handful fresh coriander leaves
steamed rice

Place chicken and curry powder in a bowl and toss to coat well. Season with sea salt.
Heat oil in a large heavy-based pan with a lid over medium heat. Add onion and chilli and fry for 2 minutes.
Add chicken and cook until sealed and browned all over.
Add lemongrass, ginger, garlic, fish sauce, caster sugar, sweet potatoes and stock to the pan. Bring to boil, cover, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until sweet potato is tender but still holds its shape.
Stir in coconut milk, cover and simmer for another 5 minutes. Season with lemon juice to taste. Scatter with coriander leaves and serve with steamed rice.

Coriander and onion flatbreads

150g wholemeal flour
2 tsp baking powder
150g yoghurt
3 tbsp chopped fresh coriander
2 green (spring) onions, finely chopped
1/2 tsp sea salt
olive oil

Place flour, baking powder, yoghurt, coriander, green onions and salt in a bowl and mix well. Knead for a couple of minutes until dough is smooth. Place in a bowl, cover with a clean tea towel and set aside to rest for 1 hour.
Divide dough into 4 equal pieces and roll out each piece into a rough circle about 20cm wide and 2mm thick.
Place a frying pan over a medium-high heat. Brush with a little olive oil. Fry each bread 1-2 minutes on each side until lightly coloured and cooked. Serve warm.

Cucumber relish

Granger's cucumber relish really looks like my mum's Khmer (Cambodian) cucumber pickle/salad. Even the ingredients and method of cooking are very similar. I can't wait to try this recipe to see whether is more Thai or more Khmer.
125ml rice or white vinegar
115g caster sugar
1 Lebanese cucumber, quartered lengthways and finely sliced
2 red Asian shallots or 1/2 red onion, peeled and finely sliced
2 red chillies, seeded (if desired) and julienned

Place vinegar and sugar in a small saucepan over a medium heat and stir until sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Pour into a bowl, add cucumber, shallots and chilli and stir to combine.

Makes 1 Cup.


(Photo credits: Marina Oliphant)

Books and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Found myself making a trip to the library last night. I ended up borrowing so many heavy books that I could barely even carry them back to the car. I needed a luggage or shopping trolley to cart them back! With the library closing at 9pm, I really didn't have much time to slowly deliberate, so randomly grabbed piles of books from different sections. The top ones are romance novels by Jude Deveraux, one of my favourite authors along with James Patterson. James Herbert is probably a better writer but I didn't see any of Herbert's books. The Ten Trillion Dollar Gamble is a book about the downfall of Wall Street and hypothesising about America's future. The Barefoot Investor is rather popular in Australia so I thought I'd have a read to see what the fuss is all about. Find It, Buy It, Fix It is a real estate book about renovating because I'll probably be doing some renovations in the near future. Female Entrepreneurs sounded interesting. Grow Herbs...well I've always loved gardening and am always looking to learn more about everything. Sunday Roast, The Country Table and The Food and Cooking of Vietnam and Cambodia are cookbooks.

With a name like mine, there's no disguising my Asian background. Although I've never mentioned it before, I'm an Australian Cambodian. My family migrated to Australia as refugees. Maybe someday soon I'll write about that part and how we can to be Australian citizens instead of French citizens. That's why I was excited to finally see a Cambodian cookbook that has pictures of food that my beautiful mum cooks. It was only earlier in the week that I stumbled across an American Cambodian blogger, blogging about Khmer/Cambodian food recipes.

Much as I love finance/accounting/economics, I also love food, cooking, gardening, outdoorsy stuff, snowboarding and plenty of other stuff and can only blog regularly if I make blogging detours. Anyhoo, whilst on the subjects of books and cooking, this is the cookbook section of the cupboard:

Recipes from friends, newspaper or magazines are filed into the ring binder folders in plastic sleeves as Entrees, Mains, Desserts and Favourites. With the books and magazines, I tag the recipes I plan to try so that I don't have to keep flicking through all the time. It's more inspiring to pick one up and see which one was on your to-try-cooking-wish-list.

Last weekend, I baked Salted Chocolate Chip Cookies from Stonesoup's recipe. I failed to salt them haha ..but they still tasted wickedly, deliciously good even without the salt. Good quality dark chocolate is KEY. I used 50% cocoa Lindt dark chocolate. The higher the cocoa content, the bitterer the chocolate. My baking efforts yielded GINORMOUS cookies about 9cm in diameter ;p~~

 

Decadently sublime recipe for coconut and butter cake with passionfruit icing

 If you love butter cakes like I do then you'll love this cake. It is wickedly creamy and the passionfruit icing is *SO* good! I've adapted a Karen Martini recipe. Of the few recipes that I've tried from Martini, every single one of them has been spot on and because of that, I'm sure that she's tested them.

It's so simple to make as well so if you love butter cakes and you love passionfruit then you have to try this. Unfortunately I had the cravings for this passionfruit butter cake when each passionfruit is $1.30 each! Doh...

Ingredients:

125ml milk

80g plain yoghurt

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

250g plain flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate soda

1/4 tsp salt

120g dessicated coconut

130g unsalted butter

200g caster sugar

3 large eggs

Passionfruit icing:

150g unsalted butter, softened

350g pure icing sugar, sifted

5 passionfruit, strain the juice from the pulp to separate into two bowls

Steps for cake:

1. Preheat oven to 180C fan forced (200C conventional). Grease and line a 25cm round cake tin
2. In a bowl, combine milk, yoghurt and vanilla.
3. In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking powder, bicarbonate soda and salt together then add coconut
4. Using an electric mixer with a whisk attachment, beat butter and caster sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time. Then in alternating small batches, add milk mixture and flour mixture, blending well after each addition
5. Pour batter into tin and bake for 35-40 mins until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. 
6. Allow cake to cool in the tin on a wire rack for 20 minutes

Steps for icing:

1. Beat butter with whisk attachment in an electric mixer, add icing sugar and beat to combine, add the passionfruit juice and mix thoroughly
2. Cut the cooled cake in half and spread some of the icing in the center and icing on the top
3. Garnish the top icing with the passionfruit pulp

Autumn gardening

We planted some carnation seeds back in Spring last year and have been reaping flowers for the past two months. The carnation plants just keeps blooming every single week : ) Ideally you should cut the blooms from the plant so that they keep flowering. Check to see if there are any new shoots on the stems and cut the bloom just above the new shoots so that the plant can keep growing and blooming.

My favourite colour out of my limited range would be the egg yolk coloured carnation with the pink edging. Although I do love the white one as well with the streaks of vivid red. Then the light pink and the deep pink. If you love gardening and plants, then Autumn and Winter is a great time for planting bulbs so that they can bloom for Spring.

I have gorgeous irises and daffodil bulbs which I've got to plant soon. See how beautiful the carnations are in my clear vase: 

 

Best Orange Cake Recipe

I love citrus fruits. Oranges, limes and lemons. When it's orange season and there's plenty around, you can squeeze a fresh glass of orange juice or you can bake a cake. Same with lemons. Or you can candy the orange and make scrumptious snacks. The following recipe is for an orange cake that I've made plenty of times because it's and easy, soft and very yummy. I love icing but will usually omit the icing to cut back on the sugar... gotta cut back somewhere! ;)

Cake Ingredients:
140g butter softened
1 cup sugar
3 eggs room temperature
2 cups self raising flour
3/4 cup milk
juice and rind of 1 orange (if you want the intense orangey taste, use the zest of 3 oranges)

Orange Icing Ingredients:
2 cups icing sugar
2 tbsp butter softened
juice of 1/2 orange
zest of 2 oranges or you can candy some zest and garnish on top

For Cake:
Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease a 20cm tin.
Cream butter with sugar. Add eggs one at a time beating well after each one.
Fold in flour alternately with milk.
Fold in orange juice and rind/zest
Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. At 35 minutes, insert skewer in to the centre of the cake and if it comes out cleanly, remove from oven and cool in tin for a few minutes before cooling on a cake rack.

For Icing:
Combine icing sugar and butter and add enough orange juice to make a soft past
Mix well
Spread on cake and you can garnish with extra zest on top or candied zest/rind