u m a m i

(Relatively) Healthy Mince Pies

Last week I received an email from the digital marketing agency of Raffles Medical Group. They are running RMG Smart Subs on Facebook, in which participants submit recipes of festive treat with healthy substitutions. I thought it was a worthwhile cause to be involved in, so here is my effort- home made mince pies.

I first made mince pies when I was a student in London. Back then all we had to was to roll out frozen store-bought pastries and fill them with jarred mincemeat and we were perfectly happy to eat them throughout the festive season. These days, perhaps inspired by the marvelous TV series The Great British Bake Off, I prefer making my baked treats from scratch. Home made would also mean a product  free of unnecessary additives and preservatives, so it is a good start. Wherever possible I used organic ingredients, their nutritional values may not be higher than non-organic, but if it means we lessen our exposure to pesticides, fungicides and other nasty chemicals, it is worth the switch.

The recipe for the pastry came straight from the superstar baker Paul Hollywood published this week in the Guardian feature Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood's Christmas baking recipes. I didn't make any substitutions to the pastry as baking requires precision. The almond pastry comes together quite easily but it is extremely soft, and really needed to be properly chilled. The dough was still quite floppy when rolled out, even on a Silpat sheet, so my shells didn't turn out pretty. Still, my daughter and nephew pronounced the pastry as "good". Definitely no soggy bottoms. The almonds gave it a nice crisp texture and nutty finish.

The healthy part came mainly from the mince. I got the rough recipe from my third sister, who bakes them for sale every year.  Put fresh and dried fruit in roughly equal proportions. I peeled and chopped 3 red apples and eye-balled the other half in whatever dried fruit I had at home, which were raisins (green and dark), cranberries, wild blueberries and pineapple. Juice of 6 oranges and their pulp but not the zest as I was using normal oranges. Store-bought orange juice would do as well. For flavouring I put in a stick of cinammon, ground 2 cardamons and grated some nutmeg in as well as threw in 2 teaspoons of candied peel (could have made that myself but I was so short of time). The whole mix was cooked down on a medium fire until the apple softened and the liquid absorbed into all the fruits. To add sweetness to all the tart fruits, I used gula melaka, the caramelly palm sugar rounded the flavours nicely without being cloying, add 2-3 teaspoons to start with, and adjust accordingly.


The mince smelled wonderfully of Christmas as it cooked. When done, scoop into a wide bowl (to cool faster) and add chopped almonds and zest from some organic limes I had in the fridge. Also a generous glug of brandy. This recipe deviates slightly from traditional versions, which calls for suet, or kidney fat, an ingredient that is decidedly unwieldy and quite unhealthy.

To assemble, cut out rings of the rolled dough using 9 cm rings, lay them in a muffin or bun tin. They can be topped with a round of dough and sealed up, or left quite open with just a star-shaped topped, which I prefer as I like more fruit than pastry in each bite. Glaze with milk wash or egg (I prefer milk as there is less wastage), sprinkle with a little castor sugar and bake till golden brown in 180C.

Best served warm, with some coffee or brandy for the adults. My daughter loves these pies, but her cousins did complain of some tartness, which was alleviated by a light dusting of icing sugar. I still have quite a bit of mince in the fridge, might pair that with a sweet crust pastry next time.

Ginger Butter Cake

               

We had rather a lot of candied crystallised ginger left after the CNY so it was timely when I found this recipe in my Williams Sonoma's Essentials of Baking which calls for not only 140g of the stuff, but adds an additional 3 inch worth of its grated self. As if that was not gingery enough, ground ginger was also specified but I didn't have any so I substituted with a good pinch of nutmeg instead.

The baking of a cake was to provide a sweet treat for after dinner but mainly to please V, she was so excited about the project she could hardly wait for me to come home from classes, asking GG again and again when I would return. She ate up her chai-chai (vegetables) dutifully at lunchtime and eagerly put on her kiddie apron. I put her to work sending dirty dishes to the sink and for rewards, she enjoyed licking maple syrup and fluffy sugar-butter bits from the spoon.

               

The recipe below is an adapted version, because I lacked ingredients such as the aforesaid ground ginger, light corn syrup (substituted with maple syrup of which Sui Mai had given me a large tin of the high quality brown gold last year) and almond extract (sub-ed with vanilla extract). I also cut down the sugar, noted also that many of their recipes specify icing/confectioner's sugar rather than fine sugar, because 155g sounded a bit much.

1. Mix the ginger and liquer. Measure the milk and set aside, it's turn comes round in step 5.

140 g crystallised ginger, minced.

80ml Grand Marnier

125ml whole milk

2. Butter a loaf pan,  9 X 5 inch is best or a fairly large one. Line bottom with parchment paper, butter it and then dust the whole pan with flour.

3. Sift together:

250g cake flour

2tsp baking powder

Big pinch ground nutmeg

4. Whisk until light in colour and fluffy. Book says 5 minutes, it felt more like 12 to me.

185g butter

130g icing sugar

1 tbsp maple syrup

5. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Then whisk in the orange zest, grated ginger and vanilla extract. Actually I dumped the last three items in the bowl of eggs and kind of plopped the eggy mix in, a yolk at a time. At one point the mixing must have liquefied the ginger a bit and the batter turned liquidy but no worries, it all came together in the end. The cake will rise!

4 large eggs

Grated zest of 1 orange

3 inch fresh ginger, peeled and grated

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

6. Fold in one third of the sifted flour mixture, then half the milk. Repeat with another third of flour, then milk. Add the marinating crystallised ginger, fold lightly and finish off with a final fold in of the remaining flour. Use a light hand, the batter will come together easy-peasy.

7. Bake 50-60 mins at 180 C. Test for doneness. Cool in pan for 5 minutes, then invert it with a wire rack and remove from pan, peeling away the parchment paper. Turn the cake domed side up and let cool, placing a damp kitchen towel over it to prevent drying out.

               

The book recommends dusting it with more icing sugar but I reckoned it looks mighty fine without. The cake was moist with a melting crumb yet had a pleasing bounce to the bite. The ginger bits were evenly distributed all the way from bottom to top. The flavour, in spite of the ginger layers, was not so spicy even a 2 year old will gladly eat it, and it wasn't too sweet, it is perfect with tea or coffee. The book mentions that it tastes even better after several days; well it'd better, we have a hefty chunk left.

Cheesecake Factory

                   

Last Monday my friend chh invited me and rojak to her house for a cheesecake-making session. It was our novice attempt but the results turned out well. No credits to me as I was distracted by our chatting, gossiping, and chh's lovable dogs, in turn I exasperated my girlfriends with my lousy zesting technique and equally hesitant egg-separating methods. Real bakers simply break the egg into the bowl and scoop the yolk up in one confident motion, they don't have time to fiddle with egg shell halves and the back-and-forth pouring thing I like to do. I did a better job reading the instructions on the recipes, though we nearly forgot the lime juice. We used up a gigantic brick of cream cheese! And we ate up her watermelon which was looking too inviting in the fridge, indeed it was very sweet and juicy.

                     

Here's a cool tool. It looks like a cement layerer but is more commonly used in making the layers in kueh lapis. This time we used it to pat the biscuit base evenly.

The final products were a New York cheesecake and a chocolate espresso cheesecake, in addition there was also a chilled version of lime and coconut. All three cakes needed to rest and chill for about two days, when they were ready chh very kindly delivered them to my home. It was a lot of cake, fortunately they freeze well.

                   

The husbands liked the chocolate cheesecakes whilst I preferred the lime and coconut version because citrus and coconuts are my favourite dessert ingredients. chh also made lemon curd, its tart creaminess accompanied the New York cheesecake perfectly. I still have  the lime and coconut cake in my freezer, every now and then I scoop out a bit and eat it like ice cream, replaying lazily in my mind the events of the afternoon- the laughter and teasings, putting up with the heat and curious dogs, various other minor catastrophes, the triumph (and relief) of pulling out the evenly baked cake with no crack lines on the top. The cheesecakes tasted great, the making of them was just as enjoyable and fun.

Banana dulce de leche muffins

                  

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!

Vanilla Salt Cookies

                     

These cookies were made using from the recipe for Vanilla Wafers in the "Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking". Instead of sugar crystals as suggested in the book, which I did not have on hand, I pressed some pink Himalayan salt crystals on the top just before baking. The salt accentuated the sweet vanila butteriness of the cookies, intriguing those who tasted with its familiar yet novel sensation.

The recipe calls for one whole block of butter, and makes over 60 cookies. For a small household like mine it makes sense to freeze part of the dough. The ones above were from one of the frozen portions, slightly overbaked and crumbly, but still really rather scrumptious. Next time I might increase the quantity of flour.

250g butter

1/4 tsp salt (or if you are like me, omit this and use slightly salted butter)

125g sugar

2 large egg yolks

1 tbsp vanilla extract

315g plain flour

Beat the butter, salt and sugar at medium speed untill smooth.

Add egg yolks and vanilla and beat at low speed until blended.

Add flour and mix until a dough forms.

Divide dough into three or four equal portions. Roll each portion into logs about 1.5 inches in diameter. Wrap logs in plastic wrap and freeze or refridgerate till firm.

Before baking, unwrap log and cut into 1/4 inch thick slices. At this point you can op to sprinkle crystal sugar, crystal salt or chopped nuts on the surface. Bake at 180 C for 12-15 minutes. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes then transfer them to wire racks to cool completely before storing in an airtight container.

Coconut cake

                           

I am still very much in love with fresh coconut, so this afternoon we baked one. The cake recipe from Carole Clements' Best Ever Baking seemed quite simple- whole eggs whisked with sugar until ribbon stage before the flour and flavourings are added. No butter, no baking powder, so bicarbonate. Also not much in the way of tenderiser, not surprisingly the cake turned out rather dry.

Which may have been the intention as we then had to layer it with a lovely lemon custard (can I call it a curd?) and slather more lemony buttercream frosting on it before covering the top and sides with fresh grated coconut, all of which gave the cake much needed flavour and elevated it into a luxuriant tea-time treat.

We packed a fair-sized wedge for our Saturday evening at Botanical Gardens where Rufus not only managed to steal a lick, when we weren't expecting it, he stole the leftovers, swallowing it faster than we could scream our futile protest.

Going coconuts

                        

I am going through a coconut phase. Everytime I pass by the coconut sellers at Tekka I am intrigued by the customers who buy just the grated white coconut meat. One of the sellers told me the white meat is more tender and sweeter, and is commonly used for making sweets and kuehs.

By coincidence husband was complaining about the lack of cookies at home. Naturally I thought of making coconut biscuits. There's plenty of raisins and chocolate in the pantry so these were thrown in too. The coconut made the cookies delightfully chewy, MIL and husband loved them especially when accompanied with some good coffee.

Coconut, Raisin and Chocolate cookies

200g flour- sifted

100g sugar

100g butter

Pinch salt

2 egg yolks

1 lightly beaten egg for glazing

80g raisins- optional dousing with alcohol of choice. I used Cointreau and rum.

1 cup dessicated coconut

1/2 cup chocolate- chopped

1. Mix the coconut with 1/2 tbsp sugar. Set aside

2. Rub in butter and flour till it looks like breadcrumbs

3. Add the sugar and egg yolks. Mix and knead till everything comes together.

4. Add the rest of the ingredients. The dough is now very sticky- put in the freezer for 15 minutes before any further handling.

5. Roll out little balls onto a greased baking sheet and flatten with thumb. Glaze. Bake at 190 C for 15 minutes.

Sour Cream Coffee Cake

                                              

I first heard of Rose Levy Beranbaum when I was on holiday in San Francisco two years ago. She was making brioches on telly and watching her, I was struck by her manner of demonstrating, very detailed and reassuring, I almost believed it is really that easy to make the heavenly buttery bread. Being a novice baker, I have also started to read more on the subject, an activity that led me to the very belated discovery that her book The Cake Bible is a highly respected and compulsory reference for many bakers, amateurs and professionals alike.

This afternoon I made her Sour Cream Coffee Cake. It is one of her simpler recipes, and truly, it was not difficult to make at all. Once everything is measured out it gets mixed in the mixer,  assembled and baked. She even details how many minute for each mixing, so exact and frequent were these timing instructions that my digital Tanita timer got a really good workout.

Her method too, was completely different from what I learnt in baking class. The butter is added to the flour, not creamed first with sugar. The resultant batter was quite thick yet has a stretchy feel but still, I was worried whether it would rise. Rose it did, to a respectable height almost 1.5 times more, despite the weight of sliced apples, streusel filling of chopped walnuts, white and brown sugars and streusel topping (same as filling but with added butter, flour and vanilla) on top of it.

Before I studied the recipe I thought I was making a coffee cake, like the recipe title said, you know, with coffee as an ingredient. But no, there isn't any coffee anything inside, no paste, no essence, no expresso, no liquers, nothing. Since she couldn't possibly have left out this ingredient, it must be that this is a cake for drinking coffee with. The streusel, which was also something novel to me, was composed mainly of walnuts, brown sugar and butter, all good friends of coffee and cake. Caffeine-free coffee cake, heh.

Obtaining the walnuts was another minor hurdle. Maybe it is just me, but I have difficulty finding fresh walnuts in Singapore, most of the time the ones available are old and rancid, or goes stale quite quickly. It can also be quite expensive, Cold Storage was selling 150g bags for $6.20 each. But the Victoria Wholesale Market came through for me. An old lady in one of the shops just happened to be repacking a big bag and I asked her for a sample. It was fresh, I bought 200g and to my delight, it only cost me $2.80.

The baking time was quite long, 55-65 minutes, at 175 C or 350 F. Mine needed all 65 minutes but the result was indeed worth every minute's wait. The cake was welcomingly soft and moist, not overtly buttery  like other butter cakes or stolid as butter cakes can get. The streusel fillings and toppings were nutty and warmly spicy, crunchy yet melting, I could easily imagine getting addicted to it. The optional apple layer was cooked till tender but not soft, its mellow tang contrasted and complimented the cake and streusel components in perfect symphony. Everyone agreed it was delicious. This was definitely the most sophisticated cake I have ever baked (even though it is supposed to be 'easy').

It is also one of the richest. I resisted from finishing an entire slice, knowing how rich it was, and friends who know me know that I am not one to hold back where food is concerned. But see, just by eating it, one could not have guessed that the ingredients included almost an entire 250g block of butter, an equally heart-stopping wodge of 35% fat sour cream,  298g sugars, 200g flour, 4 egg yolks and 125g of walnuts. Well, more walnuts than the recipe called for, boy was I daring.

I could always eat a whole slice for breakfast tomorrow. It is not unusual for people here to eat cake for breakfast. After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Lemon Yoghurt Cake

                   

Our baking adventure for this week was to make a Lemon Yoghurt Cake, using the recipe from my trusty "Best Ever Baking" by Carole Clements. The only modification I made was to add a capful of orange oil and double the amount of lemon zest, aye, I love my citrus flavours.

An indecent amount of butter was creamed with an equally obscene amount of sugar until pale. Egg yolks went in next, slowly, followed by lemon juice, yoghurt and lemon zest- the lemon juice initially made the batter look a bit curdled and got me a little worried but it didn't affect the end result. Sifted flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda was incorporated and finally stiff egg whites beaten with a little salt was folded in. Bake at 180 C. A light frosting made with lemon juice, icing sugar and yoghurt was drizzled over the cakes when they cooled.

Everyone agreed that this has to be the best tasting cake to have emerged from our oven so far. Just the right sweet-sour balance. The yoghurt seems to be the magic ingredient that made the rich butter cake less cloying and also gave it a very soft, tender crumb. Simple and good, which means that I'll probably make it again soon.   

Orange and Bananas

                         

As a novice baker I find that it is generally a good idea to bake more than one item at a time as there will be a good chance that at least one product will be edible. The odds improve further if one is making cookies or biscuits, which are easy to make and less prone to disasters. Such as the Orange Biscuits above, made from a recipe I adapted from the Best Ever Baking book by Carole Clements. It was buttery and redolent with the gorgeous aromas of orange oils and zests. I cut down the amount of sugar from 200g to 150g, which in itself is already a shocking amount, and this resulted in a just-sweet-enough biscuit that did not overpower its oranginess.

Ingredients

115g butter

150g sugar

2 egg yolks

1 tbsp fresh orange juice

grated rind of 2 oranges

200g plain flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp orange oil (optional)

1. Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Add yolks, orange juice and rind and continue to blend.

2. Sift flour, salt and baking powder. Add to the butter mixture and stir until it forms a dough.

3. Wrap dough in greaseproof paper and refrigerate for 2 hours. Or if you are impatient like me, you stick it in the freezer for 25 minutes while you make your next product.

4. Set oven to 190 degrees C and prepare cookie pan. Take out dough, roll spoonfuls of it into balls and place on cookie pan. Press down with fork to flatten.

5. Bake 8-10 minutes.

                        

While cookie dough was getting a chilling, I made banana muffins with some ripened bananas, muscovado sugar and raisins. Recipe came from the same book as the cookies but it failed to tell me I should not overmix. As a result my muffin turned out quite breadlike. Still, it rose quite respectably and made for a fine breakfast food the following day.