At dinner last night, my friend ttc asked me why I have been slow in updating my blog. It turned out he was curious to know whether we made it to Madam Kwan's. Yes we did, it has become a sort of farewell ritual before driving back to Singapore. Nothing like a good hit of Malaysian cooking before returning to this (relatively) desolate culinary wasteland. Oops, get ready for the assault of ping-pong fishballs from outraged Singaporeans.
A little weirdness happened over the holidays too. After the usual Kong Hei Fatt Choy greetings, one or two cousins, relatives-in-law and even old schoolmates came up to tell me that they read my little old blog. This revelation never failed to promp a mental gulp in me, and a quick rehash of the more histrionic and cringe-making posts in my mind. It felt weird. I mean, I know my makan friends read this, but otherwise I haven't met any other readers who actually knows the real-life me. When I first started this blog and informed the siblings and email contacts most of them took no notice, so I thought I could remain in my semi-anonymous state. The ones I didn't inform somehow found out, and now it is weird, they know me, now they are privy to more of my silly self-absorption and food-fussiness. Weird. But hey, if any of you are reading this, let me state that despite the weirdness I still love it that you read my blog.
Readers also mean I feel a responsibility to publish. But after two years of blogging, what else is there to write about? I hardly cook. I eat out at the most uncool places. I have no wine vocabulary and honestly I am running out of topics.
Ah, but I still have one thing, my attention-deficit disorder. This syndrome is actually a good thing, because it usually manifests in my taking on far too many projects to handle. This year I aim to finish the king-size blue-on-blue quilt, master the power sun salutation poses, read the complete PD James collection and, bake. Yes, bake. The last project stemmed from a long-standing guilt- see, I have amassed quite a collection, i.e. two big white Ikea boxes worth, of baking paraphernalia these past few years, but only managed to bake twice, and both were bad cakes at that. It was time I acquired me some baking skills so I enrolled in a basic course. It is cakes first, if it goes well, maybe some bread and pastries. Which will give me enough material to blog about.
I came across Creative Culinaire in Sunday Times last November, and was prompted to sign up because it offers hands-on classes and the prices and hours seemed more reasonable than BITC. Our first class began last Saturday afternoon. There are 20 of us, and we are broken up into 10 groups. I teamed myself with R, our domestic helper, we are group 8. The class starts at 1 pm and ends about 5 hours later or whenever we finished the baking.
The first two hours the voluble and generous instructor Chef Judy Koh lectured at length about butter cakes, creaming methods, flour strength, size of bubbles, then she demonstrated the methods. After the demo it was our turn to make three types of butter cakes. The next three hours was spent in a lot of frenzy, as R and I figured out how to do so many 'firsts' -handle the cake mixer, save my curdled batter (the eggs 'plopped' in, honest), calibrate the weighing machine, unmould the cooked cake etc. When the baking activities were over, we sat down again for a debrief and then Judy went around to all the teams to look at our cakes and critiqued our efforts.
The first cake, made using a variation of the creaming method, i.e. beat the egg whites separately before folding into the creamed butter. It was supposed to be a Butter Walnut Cake, but after tasting the demo version I thought the walnuts were rather stale so I decided to omit them. It didn't rise as high as Judy's, on the plus side the sides were not caved in and the cross section revealed a fine even-textured crumb. It tasted really good the next day when I slathered it with loads of marmalade.
Next, Sunflower Cupcakes. These do not contain sunflower seeds, rather they are chocolate cupcakes decorated to look like sunflowers with chocolate sprinkles and a vivid orange icing. This cake was meant to be made as a joint effort with our table mates Team 9, but Team 9 has a more experienced baker so we were happy to let her handle most of the work. My contribution was sifting the flour with cocoa powder. Our cake turned out, again, a little low, and tastewise I found it a tad dry.
Finally, butter cakes baked in fancy silicon moulds. Is it me or am I imagining that silicon moulds do not yield a more attractive golden brown than traditional cake pans? But the good quality orange essence really made a difference in the taste. This was the cake which I inadvertently curdled, it became a little lumpy inside but the external appearance was fine.
It was a good thing my friend G joined us for dinner that night, she helped us eat some cakes and I gave her some more to take home. The class was very enjoyable and the hands-on experience made for quite effective learning. We are so looking forward to the next class the following Saturday.
Of course, what would a hobby be like without its accompanying tools and gadgets, wouldn't you say? Thinking that I don't possess a fancy Kenwood or Kitchenaid mixer, I rationalised myself into getting a really kick-ass professional mixer that now stands a little sheepishly on my kitchen counter. It would be tempting fate too much to post the picture of it before making a real cake with it first, so this weekend we will attempt to make our homework cakes. Wish us luck!
