东炎烤鸡 （Tom Yam Chicken）

Tried out this chicken recipe.
Not too bad. It is adopted from butter, flour and me blog

东炎烤鸡（Tom Yam Chicken）

食谱取自 ： Cass ，Cooking Crave

材料：大鸡腿 - 6个 （去皮和脂肪）

酱料：

东炎酱 2汤匙
小葱头 10个（去皮）
蒜瓣  1个（去皮）
辣椒  2个（去籽，切细）
指天椒  2个
柠檬叶  4-6片（Kaffir leaves）（切细碎片）
蜜糖  2汤匙

盐 （少许）



做法：

1）把所有酱料打碎（不可加水）。

2）把锡纸打开备用。把tom yum酱料涂抹在鸡的表层，把鸡肉放在锡纸上，把它抱起来。腌最少2个小时或者腌一个晚上。更加入味。

3）烤箱预热后，把包着锡纸的tom yam鸡肉放入烤箱里，以220度烘烤大约45分钟或至熟为止。

*温度和时间只供于参考。因每架烤箱的温度都不一样*

*娘子比较喜欢有点口感，所以没把酱料搅到很碎。不喜欢粗粒的朋友，可以把材料搅拌到更细才使用*

I changed a little as I couldn't get a blender in time, so I just chopped up/mixed all the ingredients. I marinated the chicken overnight and only managed to put onions and garlic the next day. I put more than 2 spoonful of the tom yam paste and it tasted quite good!



My Version:

Macaroons

This macaroon failed miserably. Initially I was so happy when I saw the "feet" or "skirts" around the macaroons. But then, the feet/skirts rose higher and higher and it was very alarming! I believe the cause could be the raise in temperature in the oven. Didn't know why the oven shot up to 16C. It is really very difficult to control the temp via oven thermometer.

Feets coming up!

The feet seems worrying

that's very alarming!

Seems ok when stacked up... Didn't do any cream filling for it

The ground almond was very coarse and therefore the macaroons didn't have a smooth top.

Almond Cake

This cake recipe is from the library.

250g unsalted butter
300g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 large eggs
200g self-raising flour
50g ground almonds
2 just ripe peaches, stoned, halved, then each half cut into 3
100g raspberries
handful of flaked almonds
1 tbsp icing sugar, to dust

Butter and line a traybake or small roasting tin about 20x30cm
Heat the oven to 180C/160c fan. Gently melt the butter in a large pan, cool for 5 mins, add the sugar, vanilla and eggs, then beat until smooth with a wooden spoon. Stir in the flour, almonds and a pinch of salt.

Tip the mix into the tin, then lay the peach slices evenly on top-that way each square of cake will have a bite of fruit. Scatter the raspberries and almonds over, then bake for 1 hr-1hr10 mins, covering with foil after 40 mins. Test with a skewer; the middle should have just a tiny hint of squidginess, which will firm up once the cake cools. Cool in the tin for 20 mins, then lift out on to a wire cooling rack. Once cold, dredge with icing sugar, then cut into squares.

Per sq 385 kcals, protein 5g, carbs 43g, fat 23g, sat fat 12g, fibre 2 g, sugar 31 g, salt 0.22g.

Didn't follow the recipe as I did only 2 eggs. The recipe calls far to much butter and it was oily. I think the fat portion can be reduced. Didn't put peaches and replaced the raspberries with dried cranberries. The taste is good and I love it. However, it was still very sweet even though I have reduced the sugar a lot. Maybe this is due to the sweet dried cranberries. Shall tweak the recipe so as to reduce the butter portion and sugar level.

Blueberry Yogurt Muffins

Used cake flour instead of top flour. Baked at 170c for 25 mins instead of 180c for 25-30mins. Verdict? Oven too hot for these small little muffins, maybe partly because the pan I used is dark in colour, and thus affected the temperature. However, simply love the brown top and brown muffins! I wouldn't have achieve this without my saviour, the oven thermometer!

Loved the sourish taste from the blueberries, and the muffins taste good! :)))

one egg could make so many mini muffins

Muffins are a little burnt

Nice.... and they taste good :)

Green Tea Chiffon Cake, for the last time

Today marks the expiry date for the green tea powder, so here's my last attempt at making it.
Baked longer than the previous time using 170c. However, the longer I bake, the middle started to pull away and it's scary! It is because when it shrink, it won't be a nice flat cake definitely......

Rising a little too high for comfort.

dunno why there's a hole on top

Looks a lot better than the previous time!

new plate with new mat from daiso

Green Tea Chiffon Cake, again

This green tea chiffon is another failure.
Partly because I believe I under bake it, or should I say I didn't bake long enough.
The recipe calls for 180 deg C for 30 mins, or 170 Deg C for 40 mins but I baked it for 20 mins at 170 deg C.
However, I did the following
1. followed the 2 mins egg white beating time (to achieve soft peak)
2. having slightly more than an inch or so space in the pan with batter for baking (the batter didn't over flow)
3. omitted sugar for the egg yolk batter (the cake is not so sweet)
4. increased the matcha tea powder from 6g to 11g (still not much taste, maybe should get from phoon huat)
4. mixed the egg white more thorough than the last time (no egg white can be seen this time round)
5. placed the pan on lowest baking rack (the top temp is not so hot, so no more chao tah top)

The taste is good but overall quite disappointing....

inside the oven

the bottom is a little dense by looking

not in a very good shape

Green Tea Chiffon Cake

Again, I did this cake just to see if the sides and top will be brown. I did a pandan cake once and the problem I had was I couldn't get a brown top and brown sides. 

Well, the cake did have a brown top but no brown sides. Not only that, it nearly burned! Needless to say, this cake was a failure. Firstly, the egg whites weren't properly mixed into the egg yolk batter. I didn't want to over mixed it so I only mixed them a few times after each additions. 

Secondly, the pan is too small. I had prepared some baking cups as I have anticipated that the batter will be too much for this 6" pan since the batter I did was for a 7" pan. As I was pouring in the batter, the pan seems to be able to accommodate all the batter. Since I thought the pan could accommodate, I might as well pour everything in. As a result, the pan only have about 1 inch room for raising. The cake rose so high that it cracked and nearly burned. I took out the cake around 25 mins when it was cooked. I believe if I continued to bake the cake for another 5 mins I'll get the brown sides. But I can't do that as the top was already starting to burn. I did think of doing a tentage but decided to take out the cake in the end.

As for the taste, there was only a slight tinge of matcha taste. I increased the amount of matcha powder but I didn't want to increase it further as I'm afraid that it will alter the cake proportion. The cake was sweet too. I shall use lesser sugar for the egg yolk batter.

The top cracked like crazy!

See the egg whites?

Decorated Swiss Roll

Trying out the swiss rolls. What I have been doing now is to re-do all the cakes or bakes which had failed me. I want to try whether they'll be successful now that the oven thermometer is in place and the oven temperature is of the right degree.

Initially, I wanted to do a normal roll but later changed my mind and tried to do some heart shapes designs. Some hearts turned into polka dots as it was not easy drawing out the hearts with a spoon. For the hearts batter, I wasn't sure if the egg white was beated the correct way, but it seems ok as I was looking at the end results. For the roll batter, I feel that the whites were not mixed properly and therefore I still see some whites in the finished cake. For the filling, I wanted to do butter cream filling but didn't. In the end, I just spread peanut butter on it.

The end result of the roll was satisfactory as a whole. It rose up quite nicely in the oven and everything seems ok. However, when the roll was cooled, it kinda cracked. I realized that I should have roll it while the swiss roll was warm. Nevertheless, I have no problem rolling it and I stored it in the fridge all wrapped up with the baking paper.

Butter Cake

Tried to do a simple butter cake just to see if the cake will turn brown naturally at the sides and on the top. Well, it did! No words can describe how I feel about that oven thermometer! My life saviour!!!

Japanese Cotton Cheesecake

Japanese Cotton cheesecake from little teochew blog

-only used 5.5g of corn flour cos not enough
-didn't really beat the egg white for a long time, but achieving soft peak
-placed a tentage in the oven but when taking it out to brown the top, the top heat is too much (1-2 min only @160c) and resulting in near burning. So quickly switched the temp to very low and it dropped very fast, plus with door opening ajar. So the cake shrunk. (maybe the main reason...?)

But the end result is a good fluffy and soft cake.

Too bad, didn't manage to take any photos....

Choux Puffs

Did some choux puffs. A baking blog once said it's the easiest of them all. Yes, the puffs are really easy to make. I did the puffs simply because there are left over durians.

Hoildays

It's the holidays again! No one believed that I'm not going anywhere this dec haha...
Well, I have a long list of things to do. But most importantly, leg exercise and finger exercise will be top of the list. I really need to spend at least an hour to do my finger exercise if not I won't be able to make it on time next July.

Talking abt finger exercise. I can't do Scrabin properly. But then it's Russian Scrabin so I can't expect much. Well, I guess I just need to spend more time....

Air Fryer

Bought an airfryer and did some frying. Indeed you don't have to use any oil. I'm not sure if it is due to the fact that I fried the food for too long, the food is a little hard. But come to think of it, it uses no oil, therefore it will not be "juicy" isn't it?

Teachers' Day

From this year onwards Teachers' Day will not fall on 1 Sept but the first friday of every September. Therefore this year's Teachers' Day is on 2nd of Sept instead. Due to various events, the school has decided to celebrate Teachers' Day on 31st Aug instead and had our Teachers' Day dinner on 1 Sept. Quite a few pupils came back on the 1st, but due to the fact that I need to go home to get prepared for the dinner which was at Expo, I didn't manage to meet up with a whole lot of them. This was also the first year where my Joy 6 (2003) didn't come to visit me. Of course, I wouldn't mind a bit cos they were busy with either NS or teritary studies. Those who came back are mostly from my Pe 6. I'm also grateful that I get some Teachers' Day presents despite the fact that I had told them not to buy anything, but if they want, cards or red pens will be good. And I did get many red pens that can last me for a year, I think. :)

This year's Teachers' Day dinner was rather sad as well, as Ms K will be gone from next year onwards. We had a great time joking and laughing during the dinner and I know I'll certainly miss her laughers.

My lovely Kite!

I finally bought a kite! I have always wanted to get a simple and nice kite so that I can fly it at the Marina Barrage. I still remembered we saw some kites at Changi Village some time ago. Even though I kept saying I wanted to buy one but somehow I just didn't get it then. The chance came when we went expo and saw someone selling kites at the bazaar sale. I wanted a simple kite, so I choose a pink ghost kite. I bought the strings and LED as well. The kite cost $20 but after getting the strings and LED, it's around $50! As I didn't bring enough cash, part of it was sponsored by dearer than dearest. ^^

On the same day we bought the kite, we decided to go and test it out. We went to an open field that is near his house and we began trying. The wind wasn't strong and sometimes we can get the kite up, sometimes we couldn't. It's alright. However, one problem which I encountered was that the string was entangled whenever it was in my hands. I felt quite bad for having to cut the strings away and also having him untying the knots for me each and everytime.

Last week, we went town and so we decided to go Marina Barrage to fly our kite! It was around 930pm and wow, there were so many beautiful and colorful kites up in the sky! I kinda regret buying a simple ghost kite! We took out our kite and clipped the LEDs on. Due to the strong wind, our kite was up in the sky in no time. It was fun!

It was a great night. However, it'll be good too, if we could sit down, picnic, have a drink, chit-chat while looking at our kite..... Well, hope there's a next time and we shall do that!

Swimming

Started to learn swimming last week. It was quite fun! Had been wanting to learn swimming but was too lazy to get an instructor. It was when I was at Phuket and I fell in love with beach resorts, I began to feel that I should start learning swimming. Another reason would be while we were island hopping in Phuket, lee and chia went open sea snorkeling and I was alone at the beach. I did enjoy myself at the beach but somehow it would be fun if I could snorkel with them as well. It was especially so when I did kinda snorkel in shallow water along the beach and it was really fun seeing the fishes swimming around you.

My swimming instructor is a very nice lady. She has been a swimming instructor for more than 10 years and she is very patient. I'm glad to have Mdm Foo with me to learn swimming as well, so lessons are more fun and not so scary. So far, we learnt how to breathe in water and also floating. I can float now! :DDD I really look hope to master swimming soon so that I could go swimming in the pool with my kakis some day! :)

Chopin waltz Op. 34 No. 2 in A Minor

I have started to learn Chopin's Waltz Op. 34 No. 2 in A Minor two weeks ago. It's not that difficult as it is in A minor (i.e no key signature heh) and the piece is very nice! I heard it endless times on my mp3 and at a point of time I think I was quite sick of it. However, when I started to do it, I fell in love with it all over again :)



It seems like I do not have much affiliation with 2011-2012's Grade 7 pieces. I just don't seem to be able to get pass my A piece and C piece. The worst part would be I don't have a B piece to choose from. All the Classical and Romantic choices were deem to be too difficult for my small hands. I really wish I can go beyond an octave.... So, will I be continuing with my exams pieces? I don't know, really. I wasn't that keen on them and I know it sounds silly but I think I might need more than a year to prepare. Meanwhile, I'm glad that sensei suggests that I should do something else for a break and I'm happy to do my beloved Chopin. I hope Waltz Op. 34 No. 2 will be my repertoire!

Koh Samui

First time going to Koh Samui. Been to Phuket 2 yrs ago and that trip made me fell in love with beach resorts. Therefore this time round, I chose Koh Samui as I have not been there. The island is nice and quiet. The airport, though small gave me a holiday kinda feeling as its structure is so "tropical".

The hotel I stayed is quite ok, it's up on the mountain but rather near to Chaweng beach, the main beach on the island. The hotel room has a jacuzzi and a small balcony. The swimming pool is somewhat small but quiet. I love to look at the nice scenery which is opp of the hotel lift just outside the hotel room. They provide good breakfast but hardly see anyone eating except for the last day stay there. Maybe I was too early for breakfast everyday. Due to the fact that the hotel is up on the mountain, they provide a little ride up to the hotel from the main road and down. The staffs in the hotel are really very friendly.

Chaweng beach is located near the hotel and there are lots of people sun-tanning and doing water sports. I loved the big waves and it was so fun going into the water and "冲浪" lol. The sea wasn't that deep and I really like to walk in the water and play with the water and waves.

It's good to go for some island hopping and I wanted to go Koh Tao. However, the trip was cancelled and therefore had to join the Ang Thong Island tour instead. The snorkeling was somewhat disappointing but I had fun and now I know how to make use of the life jacket and it wasn't that scary actually. Kayaking was fun too, cos I had not done it before. I really enjoyed it even though I thought I might have difficulty cos I don't know how to swim. The boat ride was really bumpy when we return to the main lsland, just like taking a roller coaster. And I zzzz when the ride was not so bumpy.

The motor-cycle ride was fun too. It wasn't as scary as the rides in S'pore partly because the road was narrow and there wasn't many vehicles. But having strong wind blowing towards you while riding was indeed nice.

Had several Phat Thai but I'm not sure why it didn't taste as good as those in s'pore. Green curry was good. Not to mention papaya salad (or was it mango?), Tom Yam soup and beer. I do miss the food there.

Tried out Magnolia Spa which is opp the hotel and enjoyed every moment. I think partly because I wasn't sun burn so I could enjoy the massage which was perfect.

One strange thing, most of the tourists are angmohs and I hardly see any asian tourists, let alone s'poreans. I think maybe the season for going beach resort is not here yet.

Koh Samui is so much quieter as compared to Phuket. Life there is rather laid back. Looking at the happy faces of the staffs in the hotel, I so much wanted to go there to work. I think I'll be very happy working in the hotel.

There's a high chance that I might not go Koh Samui again but this was a good trip. I was glad to be away from the concrete jungle for a few days and had a nice and relaxation time there. Hopefully I will be able to go to another beach resort soon!

Baking

Has been watching parents cooking and baking since young and therefore I have developed a liking for cooking and baking. I have been trying to bake muffins but sadly all my muffins turned out bad. So I tried baking cake and I really enjoy it especially when I use the right recipe and people said they are nice :)

Recently I did a cake. I tried to make a choco cake with choco drops, dried cranberries and almond. It's really a "greedy" cake! I tried doing what oka-san has told me, that is to beat the butter and sugar for at least 20 mins to achieve a smoother texture and the end result was good! (But 20 mins arm aching heh!) I used to beat the butter for only 5 mins or so. Next, I'm thinking of trying out pandan cake and fruit cake. Maybe I'm going to venture into Chinese desserts too. Things like egg tarts. I love egg tarts! :D 拭目以待吧！:)

A pair of new eyes : )
Eagle eyes! : )

Bought Oscar Wilde's play at borders and I'm quite thrilled. Cos I have been going to kino and borders all this while and I couldn't find a decent book by Oscar Wilde. And when I found this book on plays which includes 5 of Oscar Wilde's plays, I'm simply very happy and grabbed it almost immediately.

I wanted very much to read the book almost immediately especially the two plays that were being made into movies which I enjoyed it so much. However, strange enough, whenever I started to read, I couldn't prgress more than a page, just dunno why. It is as if I couldn't read it, afraid I might finished the book and there'll be nothing for me to look forward to. At least for now, I'm anticipating and longing for the book, as if there's a hope or something at the end to keep you going.

“因此与其让我看郎朗演奏萧邦，我宁愿欣赏傅聪演奏莫扎特；尽管傅聪脸上无风无雨亦无晴，可是他让你想到的不只是音乐，而是一种境界。 ”


早报副刊24-07-2007 胡文雁《真正的炫技》


接下来，将会去听“七情上面”的郎朗演奏萧邦，回想起去年的傅聪，好怀念啊！

I'm writing about Fu Ts'ong. Cos I just read an article about him on the papers, regarding a recital he had two weeks ago and I'm excited about it. I was so glad that I went for the recital, cos I supposed it's really a once in a life time thingy. Cos he's already 72 years old. But age doesn't seem to be catching up on him! Though the pic on the program notes look way younger than he is now, maybe around 20 years younger, his fingers are just like what it would have been 20 years ago, though I never really have a chance to hear anything from him prior to the concert. The program was not the expected (I expected) Chopin program, he played Mozart instead. Later, I was then told the Mozart program was to mark the start of the Mozart 250th anniversary by SSO.

So, how's his interpretation of Mozart since he's the recipient for the International Chopin Compeition in the 50s? Though he only got 3rd, but he could have been the only Chinese pianist who has been presented with an award in that prestigious competition if not for Li Yundi who got 1st 5 years ago. I'm no expert in the field of criticism, so I can only quote from the program, which vaguely goes like this "his Mozart is always played with much articulation, so remotely close to the original and yet with a touch of orientisim...." (Oh yeah, not to mention, he's the son of Fu Lei, a renowned Chinese literary critic and French scholar)

So in conclusion, I totally enjoyed myself and I'm glad that I was there. Having attended a good concert makes my day, or week. It's better than getting anything else on earth, if there's anything worth that price.

spiders are here again!

spiders are here again!

Fingers flying in the air, in speed of lightning, like spiders crawing sideways as if panicking......
It's fun to watch spiders crawing so fast, I wonder how long did they get everything nicely done? 5 years? That's how long one have to wait for the next competition, so to speak. My days are gone, I don't think I have the time and energy to do what those people out there are doing. But 5 years later, City W, wait for me, I'll be there, watching spiders flying and jumping all around me.....I have this sercret wish.... to have bigger palms and longer fingers. Yeah, she said long fingers wouldn't do you good if you have small palms....but I'm short! how can I have big hands? Wouldn't I look weird? Well, I'm weird sometimes.....
Lightning strikes again, the electricity is making those spiders jumping up and down. Another showdown, and I'm not going to miss it!Ciao!