Swiss Roll

Okies, I’ve tried and failed on one of Jamie’s chocolate swiss roll recipe – even though we made it twice with my sister in law. This time, I’ve taken this recipe from Carol’s food blog. I decided to give it a shot. The thing I like about Carol’s recipe book is there’s a step by step photo of each process that way you sort or know whether you are doing right or wrong. So the mixture is very similar to a sponge mixture where there’s loads of eggs and it’s a matter of whisking the egg whites to meringue form and mixing it into the flour mixture. I made sure no air bubbles exist so I gave the tray a tap and smooth the flour mixture..

When it came out of the oven – it looked promising the surface was a little sandy – exactly what the recipe says..for the filling I decided to make a custard/whipped cream mixture and put in some fruits – following the recipe.. I think my custard was a little lumpy – might have split so when I combined with the whipped cream it had little tiny lumps. For the fruits I decided to use golden kiwi fruits and strawberries – the colours were beautiful…

I think I put way too much of the custard/whipped cream mixture and had a feeling when I roll it up it was going to overfill 😦 I’m finding that the sponge is sticking to the baking paper I had on. But eventually I managed to roll it up with a few skins peeling off hehehehe…not sure why it did that maybe I didn’t cool it down completely and there was steam moisture…but I was still happy I managed to roll it up into a swiss roll shape..

as you can see bits and pieces of skin peel off….now it was time to cut a slice of end bits to see the inside of it…

turned out really well..was pretty proud of myself consider I failed on Jamie’s chocolate swiss roll recipe..this one is a winner – I just need to master the skills of not letting the skin peel off from baking paper…

The cake was nice and moist – everybody enjoyed it. Make sure you chill it in the fridge so that the custard/whipped cream mixture hardens up and that the swiss roll shape is set.

Almond cake from Santiago…

Okies, I continue searching through thermomix recipes for more easy desserts to make. This time I found a flourless cake – which I believe is more healthier option I suppose. The ingredients are pretty simple – blanched almonds, sugar, lemon peel, eggs and milk. So I didn’t have any blanched almonds so went to coles and could only locate them in the organic section – quite expensive for a little packet of blanched almonds. Oh well, hopefully it’s worth it. So I whip out my thermie and started grinding the blanched the almonds..

Then it is time to mill the sugar into icing sugar – I love this step – it all become smokey and it’s something that you will see from Heston’s show – Pandabear shouted ‘what’s that coming out from thermie!!” I said icing sugar smoke hehehehe…

Then it was time to mix the lemon peel with the icing sugar – and the recipe asks me to save some for dusting later on…I love the smell of lemon – so fresh and tangy..

Then it was time to mix all the other ingredients together (the so called wet ingredients)

The mixture looks pretty liquidy I was start to wonder whether the mixture will actually work consider there’s no flour…

Thankfully the whole liquidy mixture fits right into my shallow pie pan. It looks rather pale so I chucked it into the oven for around 25 minutes. When I took the almond cake out I noticed the top was rather soft and brown in colour…

It was time to wait for the almond cake to cool down…to be honest it looks nothing like the picture in the recipe book…

It was time to slice the almond cake to see what it looks like inside…and dust it with some icing sugar

The insides looks crumbly but it was a little pale in colour. Time to try a slice..it was still slightly warm..

To be honest the flavour of the almond cake tasted quite nice – you could taste the lemon peel and almond. But I must admit – it’s very crumbly if I was to make it next time I’ll mill the almonds a little finer. Pandabear said it’s nice but too much nuts…I told him that’s because it’s a flourless cake (no flour just blanched almonds)..Mum took some home cos she quite like the cake..

Hazelnut Torte

Hi Guys,

As I’ve mentioned earlier that over the weekends I have baked two desserts – one is the hazelnut torte and the other one is apple pie. So the hazelnut torte is made from thermomix recipe so it’s time to use my thermie. The recipe seemed simple enough consists of packet of hazelnuts, corn flour, plain flour, sugar, baking powder and eggs. There’s no butter! So it’s got to be relatively healthy (you would hope so). The recipe also mentioned once you’ve made the torte you can make the coppadel nonno (coffee or vanilla cream) sounds nice. So I chuck everything into thermie and insert the butterfly into thermie to whip up the egg whites. I’ve had instances where the egg whites didn’t work out when I was using thermie but I forgot to insert the butterfly. Here it is..

The beaten egg white turned out really well..then it’s a matter of mixing the hazel nut mixture with the egg whites with folding action.

Then it’s time to bake the torte…

Surprisingly the cake turned out really well very moist and tall – good enough for me to layer it in 3 layers. At least when I took the skewers to poke it to make sure it’s cooked, it wasn’t completely cooked I had it in the oven for 45 minutes and then left it in for a further 5 minutes.. and it was perfect!

Then it was time to make the coppadel nonno coffee cream – I’m not really a coffee person but I suppose coffee goes well with hazelnut. So yeah I thought I’ll try it anyways..

Even though there wasn’t any butter in the cake but there was lots of fresh cream in the coppadel nnonno coffee cream. It was time to slice the cake in layers and fill them with the coffee cream goodness.

after layering all the coffee cream it was time to cover the whole cake with coffee cream – I still had so much coffee cream left….so I kept a small container worth of it for waffles..

The coffee cream makes the cake look really shiny and the recipe ask to put desiccated coconuts around the whole cake. I thought to myself why coconut? Oh well…

moment of truth to slice it in half and see whether there are layers or not…

I didn’t go super crazy with layering the cream in the centre just enough so it doesn’t explode. Anyways…gave half of the cake to mum and some to dad and others…

overall, the cake was nice and moist full of hazelnut taste and the taste of dessicated coconut goes really well with the cake. But yeah, when Pandabear had it he said it would have been 10/10 except for the dessicated coconut which sort of ruin the taste – or overpowering…anyways, he decorated the cake with some peanut chocolate m&ms..

The cake was a success..I’ll probably bake it again some other time…

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Dessert Recipe – Kiwi Pastry Cake

Hello, after a nightmare of baking Jamie Oliver’s carrot cake – I was kind of scared to bake again…but I’ve since borrowed extra kitchen utensils from my sister in law – thanks! So I thought I must try baking again and I’m still trying to adjust to our new oven’s temperature as well..so came across this recipe on a food blog, the recipe was for a Strawberry Pastry Cake – I didn’t have strawberries but I had lots of kiwis so I thought I’ll substitute that and also the recipe asks for cake flour? What is cake flour? I was curious to find out what is cake flour, so I went online and found that you can combine cornflour and plain flour to form cake flour, with ratio of 1:3 seems easy enough…

Kiwi Pastry Cake

Ingredients

100g butter
150g sugar
50g sour cream
3 eggs
1tsp Lemon zest
210g cake flour
1tsp baking powder

enough fresh kiwis, or other type of fruits of your choice to decorate the top of cake

1. Wash and cut kiwis into small sizes
2. Grease (with butter) and line the base of cake tin with baking paper.
3. Beat butter, sugar till pale and fluffy.
4. Add in yogurt and mix well.
5. Add egg one at a time, combine well.
6. Fold in flour and baking powder and lemon zest slowly combine and mix well.
7. Pour cake batter into prepared pan and smooth out the top.
8. Arrange kiwis on top of the cake batter – decorate this to make it nice and pretty
9. Bake at preheated oven at 180c for 60-80mins or until a skewer comes out clean.
10. Dust the cooled cake with some icing sugar.

Here it is…

Ingredients

cake decorated with lots of kiwis

Cake straight out of the oven

Kiwi Pastry Cake

My slice of cake

Look, I really like the flavour of the cake it kind of reminds me of butter cake except it’s not too buttery and not too sweet. The only thing I find is that the cake is a little dry…not sure whether it’s meant to be this way or I haven’t master my oven temperature yet! Otherwise, it’s quite yummy….

Dessert Recipe – My Strawberry Cake & Muffin

Hello Bloggy Friends, hope this post finds everyone very well. Sorry I haven’t been posting lately. Been busy with various things. Anyways, last night we had a early birthday celebration for my younger sister. She is turning 23. Last night wasn’t really her birthday, cos Pandabear and I will be at USA when it’s her birthday so we opt to celebrate it earlier while we’re still in Perth.

So mum said to me don’t worry about buying a birthday cake for her cos it’s not really her birthday anyways. But what’s a birthday celebration without a cake. So I decided to bake a cake for my sister. I was thinking to myself I’m not really good with baking, so it’s safer just to buy a packet of already mixed cake mixture that way nothing will go wrong….here are my ingredients

So as it turned out, when I pop over to the oven to see how’s my cake going – I bought this butter cake mixture. They didn’t have any sponge cake mixture. So When I took it out of the oven, it was beautifully smooth and I was quite happy with it. Then I allowed it to cool down for 5 minutes before taking out of the tin. To my surprise the cake seemed a little bit flat nothing like the cover of the box where the cake was rather puffed up high.

My flat cake

So I was rather disappointed thinking of ways to make the cake stack higher with my strawberries. Pandabear said “why don’t you go and buy another box of cake mixture and make a 2nd cake and stack them together” I’m like there’s not enough time, plus I couldn’t be bothered baking another cake…hehehe I’m lazy. So I managed to cut all the strawberries, whipped some cream – now I started pouring some sugar into the whipping cream mixture then I realised oh no maybe I shouldn’t have mix the sugar in first but it was too taste. As my breville cake mixer starts to whip the cream, I stared at it hoping it will become thicker! And Yay! It did turned out ok.

Now in order to compensate for my flat cake, I decided to bake some cup cakes – now I’m confident with baking some cup cakes so I baked it from scratch just plain cup cakes and later on I was gonna decorate it.

My cup cakes

Now it was decorating time, I got home from work and I have 1 hour to decorate my cake and my cup cakes. So I have no time to waste. Started by cutting the strawberries in 1/2. I have sliced the cake in 1/2 and started spreading lots of cream on the cake as well and started piling those strawberries to stack the cake higher.

Piling my strawberries on to the cake

It didn’t look too bad, so it was time to spread more cream onto the other 1/2 of the cake and just tip it over to cover the cake. Now it was beginning to feel the whole cake was packed with whipped cream hehehehe but it was my way of making the cake taller.

My cake full of cream

The cake was starting to look 1/2 decent and bit taller yay!! So next thing was to chop up my chocolate blocks to add some chocolate pieces to the cake to make it pretty and taste better. After madly chopping up chocolate into pieces, some bits started to melt on my hands..heheh here comes the best part licking my fingers..mmm..chocolate…

My chopped up chocolate pieces

I managed to decorate the chocolate pieces without it melting. It was starting to make my cake look quite pretty 🙂 and it was time to start piping some cream onto the cake…

I was amazed that my cake is starting to look like a cake…hehehe then it was time to stack some strawberries onto my twirly cream. Wow it looks great..

My final cake

I also bought some pink icing to write some words..so I drew a Large M onto the chocolate pieces and wrote happy birthday onto the cake.

My cake is done, so I quickly put it into the fridge so that the cream doesn’t melt and my next task was to decorate the cup cakes. My idea is to used up my left over strawberries and cream. So I piled some cream on top and pop strawberry on top and wrote in pink icing the letters for each muffin – ‘M’ ‘A’ ‘U’ ‘R’ ‘E’ ‘E’ ‘N’ ‘Y’
which is my younger sister’s nick name and it turned out quite well..

I was very happy with the turn out of my strawberry cake & muffin 🙂

Dessert Recipe – Butterfly Muffins with Cream & Jam

Hello again, it’s time for some sweet dessert recipe. This particular is so simple and the presentation is fantastic that people would think you spend ages making them… So here it is…

Butterfly Muffins with Cream & Jam

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
3/4 cup milk
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup melted shortening

1 little carton of whipping cream
some strawberry jam

Instructions

1. Sift together the flour, salt, baking powder and sugar. Combine the remaining ingredients and add this to the dry ingredients. Mix it together until it still has some lumpy bits. Don’t over mix it.

2. Grease the muffin trays with some oil and pour the muffin mixture into the trays and pop it in the oven on 180 degrees for about 20-25 minutes or until it rises and are golden brown. This mixture will make 12 muffins

3. Whip the cream until it becomes fluffy and add some sugar to it so that its sweet, but not too much as you’ll be adding some jam to it.

4. Once the muffin is cooked, take it out of the oven allow it to sit in the tray for about 5 minutes to cool down and pop it on to the wire rack to cool down further.

5. Once the muffin is cooled down, now is the tricky part use a sharp knife and cut a circular hole in the centre of the muffin and then you will get a similar cone shaped pieces of muffin now cut this into 1/2

6. Fill up the hole in the muffin with some whipped cream, use a teaspoon of strawberry jam and pour it into the centre. You might wanna heat up the jam slightly for few seconds in the microwave to make it runny. And pop the cone shaped muffin pieces that you have cut into 1/2 on top and there you have it a butterfly Muffin with Cream & Jam

Enjoy…

Buttefly Muffins with Cream & Jam

Close Up

Dessert Recipe – Two-Tone Biscuits

Hello again, well this recipe is particularly fun because I baked it with a few of my friends and we had great fun at this baking session – lots of playing around and taking photos of the biscuits and the satisfaction of tasting them too and wrapping them up 🙂 this recipe is a little harder than the jam drops but it’s doable and the contrast of the two tone colour is fantastic you can use any cookie cutters to make any shape for it. We made christmas tree with star inside it cos it was for christmas last year…

Here it is…

Two-Tone Biscuits

Ingredients

125g butter
3/4 cup icing sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 tablespoon of cornflour
2 tablespoon of cocoa powder
50g of dark cooking chocolate, melted

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Line two baking trays with baking paper. Using electric beaters, beat the butter and icing sugar in a large mixing bowl until light and creamy. Add the egg and beat until smooth. Add the sifted plan flour and cornflour and mix with a flat-bladed knife until well combined.

2. Divide the mixture evenly between the two bowls. Only add the cocoa powder and melted chocolate to one portion, then mix both until well combined. Wrap the dough portions separately in glad wrap and refrigerate for 20 minutes or until firm.

3. Roll the dough portions separately between sheets of baking paper until 5mm thick. Use two sizes of biscuit cutter of the same shape. Cut large shapes from each sheet of dough. then take the small cutter and cut a shape from each sheet of the dough. Then the tricky part is trying to fit the smaller shape into larger shape of the dough without breaking it.

4. Bake the biscuits for about 10-12 minutes or until golden brown and cool on wire rack.

There you have it Two-Tone biscuits…

Enjoy…

Two-Tone Biscuits

Dessert Recipe – Jam Drops

Evening everyone, hope everyone is having a great weekend so far. Well, as I’ve said before I’m not very good with baking so I’m always after really quick and simple dessert recipes and I find biscuits are easier to make than cakes. So this recipe is so simple that anyone can do it 🙂

Here it is…

Jam Drops

Ingredients

80g unsalted butter, softned
1/3 cup of caster sugar
2 tablespoon of milk
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla essence
1 cup of self-raising flour
1/3 cup of custard powder
1/3 cup of raspberry/strawberry jam

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Line two baking trays with baking paper.

2. Cream the butter and sugar in a small mixing bowl with electric beaters until light and fluffy. Add the milk and vanilla essence and beat until well combined. Add the sifted flour and custard powder and mix to form a soft dough. Roll heaped teaspoon of the mixture into balls and place on the baking tray.

3. make an indentation in each ball using the end of a spoon. Fill each hole with a little jam.

4. Bake for 15 minutes, cool slightly on the trays, then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Jam drops are my little sister’s favourite, she use to love it when I say I’m dropping some freshly baked jam drops. So yeah, you can impress people with these biscuits and it only takes you 30 min to make them 🙂 You’re laughing…

Enjoy…

Jam Drops

Dessert Recipe – Profiterole with Custard Filling

Morning Everyone, I’m so glad today is saturday – I love the weekends 🙂 I must have a lot on my mind cos I woke up around 6am this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep 😦 So what did I do? I got up and started doing the laundry and made my IRobot Roomba do the vacumming… I stared at Pandabear, he’s still in deep sleep fortunately he didn’t wake up early on a saturday like me. Usually I’ll sleep in on a Saturday and wake up around 9am or 10am.

So back to dessert recipes, this recipe is a little bit hard compared to the other dessert recipes I have posted up so far however, if I can make it you definitely can do it 🙂

Here it is…

Profiterole with Custard Filling

Ingredients

Choux Pastry
50g unsalted butter
3/4 cup plain flour, sifted twice
3 eggs, lightly beaten

Filling
1 1/2 cups milk
4 egg yolks
1/3 cup caster sugar
3 tablespoons plain flour
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

110g good-quality dark/white chocolate
2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 210 degrees, put the butter in a large pan with 3/4 cup water and stir over medium heat until it comes to boil. Remove from the heat and quickly beat in the flour. Return tot he heat and continue beating until the mixture comes together and leaves the side of the pan. Allow it to cool slightly.

2. Transfer to a bowl and beat to release any heat. Gradually add the beaten egg about 3 teaspoon at a time, beating well until all the eggs has been added and the mixture is thick and glossy – a wooden spoon should stand upright in it if it doesn’t keep beating. Spoon the mixture onto two baking trays and leave room for spreading. A teaspoon of mixture will make a small profiterole, more larger profiterole you can upsize to a tablespoon 🙂

3. Sprinkle the tray with water this creates steam and helps the profiteroles to rise. Bake for 20-30 minutes and remove and make a small hole in the base of each profiterol – you can use a sharp knife and in circular motion justcut a tiny hole. Return to the oven for another 5 minutes to dry out. Cool on a wire rack.

4. To make the filling. Put the milk into a small pan and bring to boil. Set aside while quickly whisking the yolks and sugar in a bowl, until light and creamy. Whisk in the flour. Pour the hot milk slowly onto the egg mixture, whisking mixture and bring to boil. You can stir the mixture using a whisk. Boil for 2 minutes, stiring often. Transfer to a bowl, stir in the vanila essence, cover the surface of the custard with gald wrap toe prevent skin forming, then refrigerate until cold.

5. This is the difficult part – piping the filling into the profiterols through the hole in the base (you can buy piping bags and it comes with the nozzles – from any baking shops). Spoon the custard mixture into the piping bag and squeeze the custard into the profiterol you will feel it gets filled up and stop there and onto the next one.

6. The fun part – melt the chocolate and oil gently, stir until smooth and dip the profiterole on top and after you finish – don’t forget to lick your fingers 🙂

Enjoy…

profiterole

Dessert Recipe – Tiramisu

Hello again…yes, I’ve decided to post another dessert recipe that’s so simple even a 10 year old can make it…so it’s one of the popular dessert that I order when I go out for coffee yup that’s right it’s Tiramisu…with no baking so you can’t hurt yourself….anyways, as I was saying before I’m not very good at baking so I’m always after something that’s quick and easy to make for dessert so I went through my piles and piles of dessert cook book and located the most simple tiramisu recipe and I made it for our christmas dinner and it’s delicious.. here it is…

Tiramisu

Ingredients
500g mascarpone cheese
2 table spoon of caster sugar
400mls freshly brewed strong coffee, cooled
2 table spoon of either kahlua or brandy
1 packet of sponge fingers biscuits

Instructions
1. Beat the mascarpone and caster sugar in a medium mixing bowl with electric beaters until it forms a soft peak
2. Combine the coffee and Kahlua or brandy in a large bowl. Dip 1/2 of the sponge biscuits quickly into the coffee mixture and then arrange over the base of a deep serving dish. Spread 1/2 of the mascarpone mixture evenly over the sponge fingers.
3. Dip the remaining sponge fingers into the coffee mixture and then arrange in a single layer over the mascarpone layer. Finish with a layer of the remaining mascarpone mixutre. cover with a plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 6 hours or overnight
4. When you serve the tiramisu you can garnish with some cherries on top or some grated dark chocolates or if you are lazy like me sift some cocoa powder on it… 🙂

Enjoy…