Fid's New 2008 Minis

Fid wanted some mini New Year Cupcakes. A hundred of them, an assortment of Vanilla Minis and Oreo Minis. These were them.

Colours for the cake toppers were based on the colours of rainbow. So, Happy New Year, Fid!

Welcome 2008.

Neyna's Meet The Parents

I have been crazy busy. But as usual, there were nothing new with busy. I made about 6 more of those Oreo Cheesecakes and more chocolate cupcakes with regular designs over the past few weeks.

However, just last week, Neyna came down to KL all the way from Kuching to have her first taste of my cupcakes. So these were made for her. Even though they were the regular chocolate cakes, the design was something not in my history of cupcakes yet.

I was glad that she loves it.

Having A Ball!

I had two pairs of boob cakes ordered by my sister's colleague last two days. After making those two pairs, I had four extra semi circle mini cakes.

This was what I did. I put two semi circles together and iced them with buttercream into the shape of a beach ball. With the four semi circles, I made two. Ah, ain't life a beach ball!

Tryouts

My sister's colleague wanted to give a shot at my cupcakes. Well..., not really 'a' shot but more like triple shots. These were a week ago.

These white frosted cupcakes with sandy sugar are pineapple cupcakes. A new flavour request and I was so happy to experiment.

Another new flavour, here's the pumpkin spice cupcakes decorated with basket weave.

Both the pineapple and pumpkin flavoured cupcakes tasted fine. But it was quite impossible to actually differentiate those two flavour since I used cinnamon on both. Only the texture was somewhat distinctive. The pineapple cupcakes were moist with pineapple chunks and the pumpkin cupcakes were very dense inside.

These chocolate cupcakes had so much decos than they could handle. Those were the tiniest chocolate ball I could find. But those chocolate raisins were so yummy that most of them ended in my mouth than on the cupcakes. :D

Ennie@Work

These chocolate cupcakes with custom topping were made for Ennie. A close friend of mine since school days.

The designs were a mixture of male and female elements.

Micro Cupcakes

These micro cupcakes were also from my weekend job. Thanks to Wanie, this micro cupcakes was her idea many months ago. And yet, I couldn't attend to her order this week because of the overflooding of cake job at hand. I am truly sorry, my dear. I should have received your order earlier. I hate turning down request, but this week, I had to.

Anyways, these micro cupcakes were the usual chocolate cakes baked in tiny, tiny cups. With just a dollop of icing, because that is all these micros need or they will have too much icing for a tiny cake to handle. I finished them off with sugarpaste alphabets, and then they're done. Easy as ABC!

Birthday Cookies

Last weekend was a busy one and the week ahead will still be very busy. These cookies were made for a child who just turned one.

I made simple butter cookies into the shape of gingerbread boy. Only, they're not ginger flavoured. The cookies were decorated very simply as shown above.

I also made some into the shape of gowns and iced them according to the birthday theme colour.

The not-a-gingerbread boy cookies were packed into gift bags for children and the dress cookies and other extras were placed in a big basket attached to thank you tags for the adults to grab.

My Traditional Quiche Lorraine

This, I made about a week ago. Quiche is a good way to use up leftovers and most importantly, it's economical.

To make it you will need :

1 1/4 cups plain flour
90 g butter, chopped
2-3 tablespoons iced water

For the filling :

3 smoked chicken slices, chopped
6 button mushrooms. sliced
1 teaspoon oil
60 g grated gruyere cheese (you can use mozarella if you can't find gruyere)
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1. First of all, sift the flour and add the butter to it. Rub butter into the flour until the mixture is fine and crumbly. Add almost all the water and mix it to a firm dough (add more water if necessary). Then, roll the dough out and line a medium size tart tin. Cover it with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 20 minutes.

2. Prepare the oven and cut a sheet of greaseproof paper, big enough to cover the pastry-lined tin. Take out the pastry and line it with the paper and spread a layer of dried beans or rice over it. Bake for 10 minutes and then remove the paper and grains. Put the pastry back in the oven and bake for a further 10 minutes.

3. For the fillings, lightly cook the chicken slices and mushrooms in a tablespoon of oil. Drain them and spread over the pastry. Sprinkle with the cheese.

4. Combine the eggs, cream and milk and pour into the base. Finish it with a sprinkle of nutmeg.

5. Bake for 30 minutes, until the whole quiche is set and golden.

So here's the quiche. You can serve it hot or cold.

Boyz N Girlz Tea Party

These were from last Thursday. Made it for a friend's friend, for a tea party. There were five flavours altogether. Those above are simply chocolate cupcakes.

These are orange cupcakes...

And these here are cookies and cream cupcakes...

Strawberry swirls also made a comeback.

And my favourite, lemon and coconut cupcakes.

Here's all the cupcakes in their boxes, ready to be transported. I only hope that my customer is as happy as I am.

Last Call for Eid

For the weekend, I had cupcake orders for an Eid open house event. I had to keep things simple since I was notified at the last minute. I had only 8 hours to complete 3 different types of cupcakes, with 3 different designs.

The order was for Vanilla Butter Cupcakes, Carrot Cupcakes and Apple Spice Cupcakes. In this post, depicted are the Vanilla Butter Cupcakes (top image) and Apple Spice Cupcakes (bottom image).

My Ugly Gateau

I had a can of dark chery in syrup sitting in the pantry for quite some time. So few days ago I decided to put it to good use by making a gateau. This gateau was made from chocolate cake, layered with white chocolate cream and cherries. The outside frosting was simply vanilla flavoured whip cream.

The cake tasted good enough for me, though I would probably not use the same recipe for the cake next time. The recipe resulted in a pretty dry cake.

For a gateau, this cake was a terrible one. A gateau is supposedly a cake with its best dress on and this here, is definitely a dress down gateau.

Potato, Onion and Tomato Bake

Also, I was alone not so many days ago and because of that, I took the chance not to have rice and made myself a meal from the oven. So I used as much leftover materials as I could find from the fridge and made this bake.

4 large potatoes (extras I had from the gnocchi project), peeled and thinly sliced
2 tomatoes, thinly sliced
1 onion, thinly sliced
30 g butter, cut into smaller pieces
freshly ground pepper to taste
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup chicken stock
1 cup grated Cheddar cheese (I used parmesan instead because I had some left from the previous work)

1. Preheat oven to 180C and brush an ovenproof dish with melted butter.
2. Layer the potato, tomato and onion alternately in the dish, finishing with the potato layer. Between each layer, dot some butter and sprinkle with pepper.
3. Combine the milk, cream and stock. Pour over the layered potato and top the assembly with cheese. Dot with any remaining butter.
4. Bake for 1 hour 30 minutes or until the potato is tender and golden brown.

Because I used Parmesan instead of Cheddar, the finished product doesn't look that good. Parmesan generally does not melt when baked. Unlike Cheddar, Parmesan browned. Nevertheless, the whole thing still tasted great!

Creamy Blue Cheese Gnocchi

Last week I made these gnocchi with creamy blue cheese sauce for dinner. It was pretty easy since I wasn't in the mood to cook the usual full course Malay meal that day. Here's how..

For the gnocchi :

3 really huge potatoes, peeled
2 cups plain flour (I used superfine because that's what I had)
30 g butter, melted
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
some freshly ground pepper to suit your taste

1. Cook potato in large pan of boiling water until just tender; drain and then mash.
2. Add flour, butter, Parmesan cheese and pepper. mix until well combined and knead until smooth.
3. Form dough into small 2.5 cm rounds and indent each one of them with fork prongs to shape.
4. Heat a pan of water until boiling and lower batches of gnocchi into the boiling water. Gnocchi are cooked when they float to the top. Drain and keep them warm.

For the creamy sauce :

60 g butter
2 tablespoons plain flour
2 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
freshly ground pepper
125 g blue cheese, crumbled
3 spring onions (here I used parsley because the mart was out of spring onions)

1. Heat the butter in a medium pan; add flour. Stir over low heat until flour mixture is lightly golden.
2. Add milk gradually to pan, stirring until mixture is smooth. Continue stirring over medium heat until mixture boils and thickens.
3. Add mustard, pepper to taste, cheese and spring onions, stirring until cheese has melted.


Well, lastly of course, pour the sauce over the gnocchi and serve at once.

P/s : Blue cheese smells really strong so u might wanna reduce the amount if you are not a fan of stinky smell. ;)

Eid Cakes!

Eid was slightly different this year because I opted not to make any cookies. I baked cakes instead.

This was the coffee sponge cake I made the day before Eid. The cake was torted into two and I layered them with coffee buttercream in between. The outer part is also coffee buttercream and I plastered some chunky peanuts onto it sides. The piled up truffles were simply Ferrero Rocher, The white truffles are actually coffee flavoured truffles which I made earlier in the morning and were then covered with melted white chocolate and left to set in the fridge. The coffee buttercream was wonderful, I have to say. Eheh..

And this one is my Oreo cheesecake. This was easy to whipped up. Doesn't require any baking and i got it all done in less than half an hour. Easy peasy. It doesn't taste too cheesy (which is perfect to me.., I don't like cheesecake that is too cheesy to the throat) because I used gelatine powder to make it firm instead of just cheese.

So that's for Eid. I'll have birthdays to deal with next month and I hope I'll be able to make more whole cakes.

Here I Go Again...

Last week, I had another quest of making three types of cupcakes in a day. They were Carrot Cupcakes, Lemon and Coconut Cupcakes and the Strawberry Swirl, again.

My sister insisted on me doing this lucky ball theme for the Lemon and Coconut Cupcakes. So, yatta! I did it..

The Carrot Cupcakes went with the standard garnishing for any carrot cakes globally. The frosting was cream cheese and the tiny carrots were made from sugarpaste.

Here's the Strawberry Swirl with a different look.