Having an unwilling model who dropped everything in the middle of the photo shoot (duh, like real!) to go poo poo is soooo .. frustrating!

But nothing beats an unwilling model who keeps fidgeting and shows monkey faces. Hey, I’d love to change my model, after all, i’ve another 2 to pick from but the thing is, this particular model, the mischievous one of all, refused to let me replace him! -_-

Anywaaaay, yesterday was Teacher’s Day.

This year, to show my gratitude for their patience and kindness, i baked some yogurt cakes instead of the usual cupcakes. Why?

Because the teachers are a bunch of health conscious people who would scrap my poor frosting off. *sniffs*

To make up for the less fancy fanfare (compares to the cuppies), i decided to pack the teachers 2 slices of yogurt cakes in 2 flavors using 2 different recipes!

Picture left, I have Matcha Chocolate Yogurt Cake, using Alice Medrich‘s low fat recipe and on the right picture, I have Orange Yogurt Cake with Grand Marnier, using Donna Hay‘s recipe – one that i’d tweaked ;)

Honestly, both are good.

psstt : otherwise, i wouldn’t have baked them again and again and again! *wink*

But somehow, i prefer Donna Hay’s recipe more.

Personally, i find the matcha part in Alice Medrich’s recipe tastes rather flour-y and i dislike the taste of flour, immensely. Perhaps.. it’s my matcha powder. Not strong enough? *shrugs*

However, the same cannot be said for the chocolate part – which has no flour taste at all! Once you swirl the 2 flavors together, i bet you’d just go, wow instead of wrinkling your nose and exclaim, tastes like flour! :P

As for Donna Hay’s recipe… well.. what can i say?

No complains!! I love this recipe to bitssssssssss, but make sure u are not using low fat yogurt ok?

Chocolate Matcha Marble Cake
by Alice Medrich

2 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon instant espresso or coffee powder
1/3 cup dutch-process cocoa powder
1 1/3 cups sugar
1 whole egg
1 egg white
6 Tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup full-fat yogurt
1 teaspoons vanilla extract
1.5 teaspoons matcha powder

Have all ingredients at room temp. Preheat oven to 350 degrees with rack in the lower third of the oven. Spray 8-10 cup tube pan with cooking spray.

Use a whisk to combine four, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Sift together. Set aside. In a small bowl combine the espresso powder, cocoa and 1/3 cup of the sugar with 1/4 cup of water. Whisk until smooth. Set aside. In another small bowl, whisk whole egg with egg white. Set aside.

Cut the butter into pieces and place in an electric mixing bowl. Beat for 1 minute to soften. Gradually add remaining 1 cup of sugar and beat at high speed for about 3 minutes. Dribble eggs in slowly, about 1 T at a time, beating constantly for about 2 minutes. On low speed, beat in a third of the flour mixture. On medium-high speed, beat in half of the yogurt. On low speed, beat in half of the remaining flour. On high speed, beat in the rest of the yogurt and the vanilla. On low speed, beat in the remaining flour.

Measure out 1 1/2 cups of yogurt batter and mix into the cocoa mixture. Set aside. Add matcha powder to the rest of the yogurt batter in the mixing bowl.

Use a large spoon to fill the bottom of the pan with about three quarters of the green batter placed in dollops. Cover the green batter with dollops of chocolate batter. Top the chocolate batter with small dollops of green batter spaced so that the chocolate batter shows through. Use a table knife to marble the batters together with a circular or zigzag motion; be careful not to blend them too much.

Bake for 45-50 minutes for cake, (20-25 minutes for cupcakes) or until the cake starts to pull away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted in comes out clean.

Cool for 10-15 minutes on a rack. Unmold the cake. Cool completely before serving or storing.

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To pack the cakes :

You will need : small paper bags, serviettes or tissues and pegs/stickers/clips.

Wrap both cakes in tissue or serviette.

Place the cake into the a small paper bag, in my case.. a brown bag :)

Fold the paper bag 2-3 times. Then place a cute looking sticker/peg/clip to secure and voila! A pretty looking gift-away for teachers!

ps : of course, it’d be much cuter if your child were to scribble some greetings and notes! ;)

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Of course, apart from teachers.. u can give them to anyone u fancy! Friends.. family… collegues.. well, basically anyone and everyone actually ,because i don’t think anyone would not love to receive this! :D

When i got to know about Babe in the City – KL‘s Merdeka Open House yesterday, i knew i gotta participate even though the closing date was yesterday! :P

Not that i’m so dang patriotic or anything like that but you know, just for fun!

So first thing in the morning today, i rushed down to the wet market to get what i needed for the dish that i wanna cook, something really easy with least ingredients and work because everything is too last minute! Alas, wet market doesn’t sell meats on Monday!! :(

In the end, i had no choice but to go ahead to braise my fei yuk (pork belly) without much brouhaha… pig’s ears and chu cheong (intestines) just to name a few – i know i might have grossed quite many of you with internal parts like these! :P

For some strange reason, pork belly excites me. Even (pork) trotter can’t beat this. The many layers  – when done right, is really quite beautiful. Roasting, braising, even in the soup, pork belly is not only awesome to eat, it is actually quite pleasing to look at too!

But!

Truth be told… pork belly was never the highlight whenever my mother cooked us this dish when we were little. What the sisters and i really look forward to were actually the eggs and chu cheong! Fei yuk??!? Ewwwww… hahahaahaa!

I remember very clearly how the sisters and i would fight over the last piece of chu cheong — grrr.. still sulking over the fact that i couldn’t get any chu cheong today :( — . It was never enough to go around where as the fei yuk will always be there in the serving plate. Grin. I think the only person who ate up those fei yuk would be my daddy!

Of course, the eggs … needless to say, they usually disappeared before we even finished greeting our parents! Yes, in my family, it’s a must to greet the parents and my older siblings before eating. Because i have a huge family, the greeting can go on and on and on. ppsstt : i have 2 elder sisters, 1 brother and 2 younger sisters. Sometimes, out of courtesy and for the fun of it, i’d even greet my younger sisters! Heee. Guess that pretty much explains why the eggs can disappear aye? ^_^

Back home, we used to eat this with a bowl of plain porridge with stir fried long beans. It’s really quite something when we had it during the year end – cold and raining, under the dim lights with the rain went pitter patter pitter patter over our zinc roof – well, just some parts anyway, which my dad fixed up.

Aaahh..

How time flies. Sigh.

It’s funny how happy we were despite not owning anything fancy, no fancy books, no fancy toys, no fancy holidays, no fancy gadgets… but we were truly happy. We had dog(s), cats, hamsters, batu seremban (5 stones), our house gate which doubled as badminton net, foreign pen pals (mine were from UK and Greece) and our very own stamp books – huge collection too(!) to keep us occupied.

Then, happyness was going to the swimming pool on the weekend evening with my parents and siblings who can’t swim for nuts. All we did was pee wade around, splash and laugh whilst pretending to swim. :)

Lou Fei Yuk (Braised Pork Belly)

400-500g pork belly
4 pieces non-salted taukwa (bean curd)
6 hard-boiled eggs, peeled
2 star anise
4-5 cloves of garlic
3-4 tbsp dark soya sauce
3-4 tbsp light soya sauce
a pinch of salt
2-3 cups of pork-bone stock

1. In a pot of boiling water, throw in the whole chunk of pork belly for at least 10 seconds, this is to get rid of the unpleasant porky smell. Drain.
2. Using high heat, sautee pork belly all over to seal the juices. Stir in garlic till golden.
3. Add in taukwa, followed by star anise, dark soya sauce and light soya sauce, the stock and salt.
4. The eggs can be added in anytime now. Once the dish looks pretty much edible, you can taste and see if the seasoning is to your liking. Adjustments to be made here.
5. Cover and simmer for at least 45 minutes before serving.

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Hopefully the babe will be kind enough to accept my entry despite being 1 day late! *keeping both my fingers and toes crossed!*

* fei yuk = fatty meats but usually it refers pork belly

Instead of the usual loaf, i decided to turn the red bean bun bread into something more fun looking..  a flower-like bun!

Because i make bread and buns so often, i believe this needs no introduction anymore. It’s our weekly staple but in different shape. I love how fragrant this milk bread is, good to eat even if it’s good ol’ plain!

One thing though, if you’re looking for super soft bread texture after keeping it for a day, this bread won’t do. However, if you were to eat it on the day it is baked, then no problemo!

BUT!

Nothing a microwave cannot do. If the buns are not as soft as you like them to be, all you need to do is zap them in the mircowave for 10 seconds and voila! – Super soft + warm bun again! ;)

After eating bread on a almost daily basis, my personal preference now leans towards breads that are not-overly-soft. In fact, i like my breads a little chewy. Super soft bread that stays soft after dayssss gives me goosebumps! :P Having said that, let me just try water roux the next time round and i’ll see if it stays super soft even after a day. If it does, well.. that might change my perception again on super soft bread.

Milk Loaf
from Happy Home Baking

143g fresh milk (I used HL low-fat fresh milk)
35g egg
25g caster sugar
5g salt
250g bread flour
4g Instant yeast
38g butter (unsalted)

Method

1. Place milk, egg, followed by caster sugar, salt, bread flour and yeast into the pan of the bread machine. Set to Dough function. Add in the butter after 8 ~ 10 mins into the kneading cycle. Continue to let the bread machine do the kneading. Stop the machine after the kneading cycle. Re-start the machine and let the dough knead for another 10mins before stopping the machine.
2. Remove dough from the bread pan, let it proof in room temperature in a mixing bowl, covered with cling wrap. Let proof for 60mins.
3. Remove dough and punch out the gas. Divide dough into 3 equal portion. Roll and shape into balls. Let the doughs rest and relax for 15 mins. (this ‘relaxing’ time is needed so that the dough will be easier to roll out and shaped).
4. On a lightly floured surface, flatten one dough and roll out into a longish shape. Roll up the dough swiss-roll style. Do the same for the two remaining doughs.
5. Flatten the rolled-up dough and roll out again into a long rectangular shape. Roll up tightly, and make as many rolls you can, swiss-roll style for the second time. Do the same for the two remaining doughs.
6. Place doughs in lightly greased bread tin/pan. Let the doughs proof for the second time, until it fills up 80% of the tin/pan. Cover with cling wrap.
7. Bake at pre-heated oven at 180 ~ 190 deg C for 30 to 35mins.
8. Unmould the bread immediately when removed from the oven. Let cool completely before slicing.

If you are gonna shape the bread into individual buns, skip step 4 and 5.

Instead, divide the dough to roughly 60g each and roll them into a ball. Flatten it, put in the red bean filling and conceal nicely. Again, flatten the ball down and using a very sharp knife, make deep cuts all the way down around the dough. This will give the bread the flower shape. Resume method 6-8 but if you don’t cover up using cling wrap, it’s fine too :)

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Can’t resist putting this up!

Look who was around when i was photographing? ^_^

Beep, who simply can’t help it but loveeeees being in my photos! He kinda know i am rather taken by the silly stuff he pulls off just to get into the pictures :)

Many times, i whip up dishes based on, well… what i have in pantry!

For our daily dinner, i hardly cook using recipe book. Most of the time, i’ll just stare at the fridge and ideas come. This squid dish was created during one of those times. It’s really quite anyhow but we love it!

On another note, have you wondered how in the world the squid dishes outside taste so wonderfully tender? For sometime, i never knew and the family had to make do with some very chewy squid. :P Well, now i do and i’d love to share this s-called insider secret with ya! ;)

No Recipe Squid

2 medium size squid, cleaned and cut
1 tomato, into 4
fish gravy, to taste
4 tbsp olive oil
2 limes, halved, for juice

To blend :

2 tbsp dried prawns
6 dried chili
3 cloves garlic
4 shallots

1. Heat oil.  Using high heat, stir in the blended ingredients. Fry till golden and fragrant. Palm off the tomatoes into the wok.
2. Right before adding the squid in, turn down the fire to rather low heat (yes, this is the secret! :P) and stir fry till the squid curls and no longer translucent.  Add in fish gravy, roughly just 1-2 tsp.
3. Squeeze some lime juice all over the squid dish just before serving.

ps : if u like it spicy, just chop up 2 chili padi and throw it in ;)

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Submitting this to Muhibbah Malaysian Monday, hosted by 3 Hungry Tummies and Test with Skewer.