Breads

I love baking over the weekends when i'm at home. It started out with doing cakes but then i figured that they are too sweet to take too often.. I always like those bread that you slice and put butter on unlike the white bread commonly sold in stores. However, breads require patience and the ingredients are not commonly found in stores. You really have to go to specialty stores to get them. Good thing I found a couple stores near my place in Bukit Mertajam. I know there's a lot more choice in Kuala Lumpur, but I don't have the time to visit them whenever I'm in KL.

There's this one store that sells all the different type of grains.. wholemeal, rye, multigrain, etc. And they come with recipes too!.. so I bought a couple of them to try out. Here's one of them.. I added additional filling in; red bean paste and kaya. If I have time, I'll post the recipe later..








Wholemeal Bread Mix:

Ingredients:
A.
Wholemeal Flour New Zealand - 100 gm
High protein flour - 400 gm
salt - 5 gm
milk powder - 20 gm
brown sugar - 45 gm
bread improver - (1 tsp) 4 gm
yeast - (1 tbsp) 11 gm
cold water - 280 gm

B. Butter - 45 gm

Instructions:
1. Mixa ll (A) ingredients until even at low speed. Add (B), mix for 15 min until elastic. Rest 45-60 min or until double in size. Press out the air, round into ball, rest for 15 min.
2. Then, cut it into 60 gm pieces, round into ball, rest for 10 min. Make into shape
3. Proof the dough for 45 min or double the size
4. Preheat oven at 190 degree celcius and bake for around 15 min

note: I added the filling in step 2 before shaping them

Green Grapes!


I like seeing trees grow from seeds till the stage that the flowers/fruits come out. However, I don't have that much knowledge of gardening. On the other hand, my husband loves gardening and woodworking.. We have a small piece of land that he would use to grow his fruit trees. We have a lot of fruits and veggie plants at home and no flowers at all.. His rationale was to get the benefits from this plants.. example.. for food.. :) Some of the plants grew well (with this I mean, the fruits really came out).. while some did not.. maybe because of the insects and no pesticides..

Anyhow, this is one of them that we have at home.. a sweet green grape tree (vineyard??) It's not really big but can u still call it a vineyard?? This is the third time that it produces fruits (still growing).. but this is the first time that it mass produced the fruits.. previously only one bunch came out at a time..




I guess if you are interested in growing your own green grapes, you can buy them (keratan batang.. dunno what it's called in english and too lazy to search..haha..;D ) from us in Seberang Perai, Penang.

Chocolate ice cream cake



In most recipes that i've seen, the use of ice cream machine is required to make an ice cream cake, which is for making the ice cream itself... i tried making one a few years back, putting the cake as a base and some ready made ice cream from the shop and freeze them. But the cake couldn't last long after taking it out from the freezer..

After attending a baking demo class, i found out that it's not really necessary to use ice cream machine and there's a way to ensure that your ice cream doesn't melt that fast. You need to make sure that you cover all sides of the pan with the sponge cake and fill it with the ice cream that is made out of fresh cream mix at high speed with some chocolate (for chocolate ice cream cake).

I made one recently but the cream didn't mix that well with the chocolate which resulted in some white spot seen when the cake was cut.. I covered the cake with some fresh cream frosting and grated chocolate..so here goes the pictures...!




see the white spots above.. those are some lumped cream that didn't manage to get evenly mixed.

final result.. didn't bother to decorate it nicely.. they are bound to be eaten.. by my 2 sweet lover kids..


This was before it got decorated.. This was after it was frozen for > 24 hours. The ice cream is inside.

Recipe was obtained from one of the baking demo class I attended at EZBake, Bukit Mertajam.