quiche for a cloudy day

With almost nothing much to occupy my time with except for books and movies, sometimes you just need to liven things up a bit with some haberdashing of ingredients and throwing them together to see what you can get out of them.

Thinking of what I should eat for lunch I scrounged my refridgerator and the pantry and procured these items:

Last two sheets of puff pastry
Soy milk
Half a package of shredded tasty cheese
Eggs
Garlic
Onion


Then just for sheer fun and the heck of it, I decided to try my hand at a quiche dish with these few ingredients. I have never even looked a quiche recipe before but I think just at that time I figured out not too hard that a quiche was basically just beaten eggs combined with whatever other items you liked in it.


Mini Me Quiche

5-6 eggs
2 tbs milk (soy or light will work fine)
Finely diced 2 cloves of garlic and a small onion
1/2 cup shredded cheese (tasty, parmesan, mozarella will likely work fine)
2 rolled out and thawed puff pastry sheets

1. Cut the sheets into shapes that will fit into a 12 muffin case tray. Ensure that the sheets cover the base and around the sides of the holes so that the pastry dough reaches the lip of the hole.
2. Crack the eggs into a medium sized mixing bowl and beat together with the garlic and onion.
3. Add the cheese and milk and continue beating the mixture till it looks a shade lighter than when you started. Don't overmix till it becomes pale or fluffy.
4. Divide the mixture evenly among the 12 holes trying not to overfill them.
5. Bake in preheated oven at 200 C for 20 minutes turning the tray halfway through to ensure the heat is distributed evenly.
6. Let cool for few minutes as it will deflate a little when cooling down.

I had mine accompanied by some warmed up baked beans sprinkled with paprika and pepper and barbecue sauce goes well with this as well.


I'm still contemplating on my next foray back into the world of sweet pastries and confections. But with my ever expanding waistline that could be put on hold for a while.

muffin tops

Whee! Hooray for muffin season! Well at least for me that is. It's more like exam season but yeah whatever. I've been on a muffin streak this past week even though it's been quite a stressful and trying time for myself because of the exams and all. However, baking is the only thing I know to de-stress myself from the hectic week of holing myself in the library and coming out for light and food every now and then in five minute breaks.


The first batch of muffins for the week, which I made last Tuesday was adapted from Culinary in the Desert's Doughnut Muffin recipe. They came out pretty good and smelled awesome and my friends liked them but I think I sort of grew out of chocolate chip muffins and thought it was rather plain and lacked something more substantial to spice it up. I should have added some sort of roasted almonds or walnuts for that nutty flavour to round the muffin up. The texture was good and rather like a scone slash bread. I think I prefer more complex flavours which combined citrus, nutty, salty and something sweet in my muffins.


The following is my altered version from the original:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup canola oil (I used vegetable oil.)
1 egg
3/4 cup skim milk

In a large bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.
In a medium bowl, mix sugar, oil, egg, and milk.
Stir into dry ingredients just until moistened or stop when there's no traces of flour left. Be careful not to over-mix.
Fill greased or paper-lined muffin tin to about 3/4 full.
Bake at 180°C for 20-25 minutes or until muffins test done.


Today's freshly baked batch is my take on Elise's banana nut muffin, which I tweaked a little by substituting the walnuts with some leftover milk chocolate chips. These gave out the most sensuous and delicious aroma or bananas and chocolate chips I've ever had the pleasure of smelling and tasted even better! Love the texture of the muffin and the flavourful taste with every mouthful of it. I always love the combination of bananas and chocolate chip as previously I had made also with a banana and chocolate chip "Monkey" bar. I'm definitely keeping this recipe in mind for any special occasions coming up.


This is my slightly altered version:

3 ripe bananas (mashed)
1/3 cup melted butter
1/2 cup brown sugar (I reduced it from 3/4 to compensate for the chocolate chips.)
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp baking soda (I used baking powder. Maybe that's why my muffins didn't expand and crown as much.)
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 cup plain flour
1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 180°C.
Mix melted butter with the mashed bananas in a large bowl.
Mix in the sugar, egg and vanilla.
Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl. Transfer the banana mixture and combine them together until no traces of flour is seen.
Fold in the chocolate chips. Do not over-mix.
Divide mixture into prepared muffin tin.
Bake for 20-25 minutes.
Check for doneness with a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin. If it comes out clean, it's done.


Both recipes for today yield a dozen muffins each.

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.