test drives

It's been quite a busy, busy week for me but I managed to squeeze some baking moments into my schedule thus far.

The first is a chocolate pudding cake which has not failed me thus far and has been immensely successful wherever I bring them to. The photo doesn't do justice to this single bowl of mix and bake and then eat from it cake, but it looks rather like some moon craters or something rather than an intense piece of chocolate goodness with gooey chocolate topping. Mmm.


Following that, I learned a new recipe from a friend for a bread/scone like pastry which has only three basic ingredients as its base. I don't know what they're really called but I think I'm going to dub them Mayo Bread. They're actually quite good plain but to spice things up a bit you can do what I did as follows.

1 cup self-raising flour + 1/2 cup milk (low-fat or no fat is fine) + 2 tbs mayonnaise


After combining the above three ingredients, you can add whatever you like into the mix. I used dried fruits and sultanas in the first one and the other one has cocoa powder mixed into it and I topped the dollops of dough with a huge marshmallow on each of them.


Since they don't have any sugar at all, the dried fruits + sultanas one turned out the better batch while the chocolate + marshmallow one didn't really have much taste to them unless you liked marshmallow. The next day the marshmallow one sort of turned quite sticky and looked quite mushy to me. I don't think I'll try that one again. Perhaps chocolate chips next time.

I just baked this little beauty today and the smell is still wafting in the apartment. Absolutely lovely and I am just in love with bananas this season. They're just too cheap to miss out at my local fresh produce market and I've been stocking up on them.


These are called Monkey Bars because they're denser than the usual banana bread or cake. A bit more like a brownie like cake but with banana and chocolate chips instead. I'm pretty pleased with this, not because of the fantastic aroma and taste though they are really good, but because these don't require too much butter as well. I substituted the butter for margarine and they came out great and also the baking soda for baking powder because I didn't have any soda. I don't think the changes I made affected the bars because they taste wonderful.


Hopefully when I bring some to tomorrow's service, my friends will think that way too about the Monkey Bars. Again, my gratitude to the lovely Baking Bites for the two recipes featured today and here's to more great recipes in future!

birthday

This is going to be more like a two in one blog posts where there's food and actual people involved in this post for once.

Last Sunday night that had come to pass was our dear Selena Tsay belated surprise 21st birthday celebration. We all received invitations to actually dress in our best clothes even though we were only going to be having the shindig in darling Pammie's place who so kindly offered her place for us to crash, dine, and basically mess up. But we love you, Pammie dear so no hard feelings for those carpet food and drink stains.






Anyway, a few of us had already been delegated the elegant duty of preparing the food for the night and everything actually turned out really well and delish. I made an apple and strawberries lattice pie and mini blondies in muffin cases for dessert. Thankfully everyone liked it and I was just glad that most of the food was polished off by the end of the night.


About a total of 15 odd people turned up including the special guest of the night whom actually turned up the last and made a grand entrance full on with snapping cameras flashing away blindly at her while she tried to hide from us.

It was just a really good and fun gathering for this little group of ours and just take a short break for the week from all our daily stresses.

Pray that we can do something like this in the future if not just for the fun and heck of it.









Time to get on with life now and hopefully more baking and culinary discoveries soonish.