The local ST newspaper publishes a fashion supplement, Urban, every Thursday. However, my favourite part of the supplement is not remotely clothes or make-up related, rather it is the Posh Nosh page by Tan Hsueh Yun that I turn to first thing. Ms Tan writes about the latest, fanciest food products and events in small bite sized columns, and makes me wish that I have her job, or that I can be her food sampler.
Anyways, one such snippet informed that ready made dulce de leche is available in our supermarkets. For many years I have read with wide-eyed fascination about how daredevil cooks boil cans of condensed milk for hours to caramelise the milk sugars and turn the thick milk into sticky milk jam. When they open the can, the pent-up pressure within the can would cause the boiling caramelised lava milk to shoot out forcefully causing painful damage on skin and kitchen ceilings. Ouch! But there's no need for that now, because when I was at Cold Storage I came across the very stuff, in stout glass jars, available in Original and Banana flavour. I brought home one of each.
They are very sweet, these dark brown gooey jam, a little bit makes toast taste very nice. It is high in calcium too, says the label on the jar. The domestics love it, after all condensed milk is practically a national food for Filipinos. Yesterday when I was making some banana muffins I decided to swirl some of the banana version onto the top of each little piece of cake. The milk jam was even better baked up and mingled with cake crumbs, the sweet sticky caramelised milk-goo melting into the cake satisfyingly rich and voluptuous. And the calcium, surely doing my bones extra good too, no?
I won't bother to write down the recipe for the muffins- the end product were not as tender as it should be. Next time I would also omit the extraneous raisins and cinnamon, maybe add some more oil, and definitely swirl extra dulce de leche into the cake!
