Macarons Finally!

2 more days to 2015! Happy new year to all in advance!

It's been a looooong time since we've updated, sorry about that! The kitchen was under renovation for some time and we stopped baking, but we're back again! :)

Last year, me and Oink had tried baking macarons but failed miserably. Cracked shells, feetless, brown, etc etc. We had almost every problem that a macaron can have. We kept trying though that time, 'upgrading' from the small packet of almond powder to the 1kg packet. We somehow forgot all about it and left the almond powder there sitting in the cupboard. When we were going through our ingredients last week, we realised that we had almost 2kg of almond powder and they were expiring at the end of this year! (omg) We then set a year-end resolution for ourselves, which is to successfully bake macarons! Every single night we tried to bake them at least twice. We failed every single time but we did not give up! We went to many websites, looked through their recipes and troubleshooting guides, tried different ways to salvage our macarons and we finally succeeded!

Below is the recipe that we put together from a few websites and it worked for us! Hopefully it will work for you too (:

Ingredients for Macaron Shells

• 70g egg whites
• A pinch of cream of tartar
• 35g caster sugar
• 115g pure icing sugar
• 60g almond meal
• gel/powdered food colouring (optional)**
  * We halved the recipe from How To Cook That.
  ** We personally prefer using powdered food colouring (:

Method for Macaron Shells

1. Sift almond meal and icing sugar at least 1-2 times.
2. Beat egg whites on medium speed until foamy.
3. Add in a pinch of cream of tartar. Continue to beat egg whites on medium speed until soft peak.
4. Change mixer to high speed and add in caster sugar, one tablespoon at a time. 
5. Gently fold the almond mixture into the egg white mixture. Lift from the bottom, up around the sides, and toward the middle, being careful to not overagitate the meringue and lose too much air.
6. When there are no traces of almond mixture left, use the flat side of the spatula and press the batter down, pushing them to the sides of the bowl. Scrape more batter from the sides to the center and push them to the sides of the bowl again. Keep repeating this until you get the right consistency. 
7. Pipe onto trays lined with baking paper, rap trays on bench firmly.
   [Many other recipes will ask to let the macarons sit and let them dry. However, as Singapore is really humid, we adapted the steps from The Baking Biatch and modified it slightly to dry the macarons without having to wait for hours!]
8. Preheat oven for 5 minutes at 200 degree Celsius. 
9. Turn off the oven and open the oven door, leaving a small gap of about 5cm. Leave it this way for about 3 minutes.
   [We tried to put the tray in immediately without waiting as indicated from the site and it ended up "over-drying" the macarons and started baking them instead.]
10. Place the baking tray into the oven with the oven still turned off and leaving the oven door open with a small gap of 5cm. Allow the macarons to dry for 5 minutes. Check the drying of the macaron shell by touching the surface. If it is still sticky, remove the tray from the oven and repeat from step 9 to 11 again.
11. Preheat oven to 150°C. (We try to go slightly below 150°C)
12. Place tray into the oven and bake for ~13-15 minutes. Halfway through, rotate the tray for even baking. If your macarons brown, place another tray above after rotating the tray to prevent browning. 
13. Check if the macarons are done by removing them from the baking sheet. If they come off cleanly, they're done. If they still stick to the baking sheet, they're underbaked. If they are browning, they may be overbaked.
14. Once they are done, remove them from the oven and cool them on baking sheet placed on a wire rack.
15. When fully cooked, assemble them with your choice of filling.

Recipe adapted from:

How To Cook That

The Proper Pinwheel

The Baking Biatch

Some useful links:

How To Cook That (Troubleshooting)

FoodNouveau (Troubleshooting)

Pictures!

Foamy egg whites.

After beating the egg whites to stiff peak.

Adding in of icing sugar and almond meal to the egg whites.

Waiting to go into the oven~

Feet feet feet feet!

Our final product!
Baby blue macarons with blueberry buttercream.

Blueberry Vanilla Cupcakes Again!

Several weeks ago, when we went to the supermarket, we saw that the blueberries were on offer soooooo, we bought it! It's been a long time since we last used blueberry to bake. We wanted to try out different recipes, but we ended up baking the same one that we did the last time -- Blueberry Vanilla Cupcakes. I think that the cupcakes was better than the previous time though! We improved~~ :D

Ingredients for Vanilla Cupcake Batter

• 85g self-raising flour
  * (Can be made using I85g plain flour + 1 1/4tsp baking powder + 1/8 tsp salt)
• 70g all-purpose plain flour
• 113g unsalted butter, softened
• 170g caster sugar
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract (or vanilla bean for even more intensity)

Method for Vanilla Cupcake Batter

1. Preheat oven to 170°C (350°F).
2. Line muffin tins with cupcake papers.
3. In a small bowl, combine the flours. Set aside.
4. In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth. Add the sugar gradually and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition.
5. Add the dry ingredients in 3 parts, alternating with the milk and vanilla. With each addition, beat until the ingredients are incorporated but do not over beat. Using a rubber spatula, scrape down the batter in the bowl to make sure the ingredients are well blended.

Ingredients for Blueberry Sauce

• 2 tbsp sugar 
• 2 tsp cornstarch
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 cup blueberries
• 1 tbsp lemon juice*

*We used orange juice as we didn't have lemon and it turned out pretty good too.

Method for Blueberry Sauce

Cook all these ingredients in a saucepan over a low flame, stirring constantly. Cook for as long as you want your blueberries to be mushy.

Method for combining sauce and batter

1. Prepare both the blueberry sauce and the cupcake batter.
2. Spoon the cupcake batter into the cupcake liners to about 1/3, then spoon the blueberry sauce into the cupcake liners (up to you to decide how generous you want to be). Spoon the cupcake batter to fill the cupcake liners about 2/3 or 3/4* full.
   * 2/3 will be preferred to 3/4 as the batter will rise quite a bit.
3. Swirl the mixture of blueberry sauce and cupcake batter in the cupcake liners.
   * Note: Do not swirl it too much!!! The cupcake will bake to a mouldy colour instead of a nicer shade of dark purple if it is being swirled to a light purple (close to lavender). 
4. Bake for 20 to 25* minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center of the cupcake comes out clean.
   * At the 20-minute mark, reduce heat to 160°C (325°F). The tops of the cupcakes should be lightly golden.
5. Cool the cupcakes in tins for 15 minutes. Remove from the tins and cool completely on a wire rack before icing.

Recipe adapted from: The Little Teochew

Look at the blueberries exploding~

Victoria Sponge Cake

I shall try to update as much as I can since I'm updating now! :D

In early Jan, Big Sis was sooo generous and she bought us a Kenwood Chef Titanium mixer for us!
*Yay to Big Sis!*

With this mixer, our baking sessions became much less tedious as we do not need to use the handheld mixer anymore! We became so dependent on the mixer and even leave the folding step for the mixer to do it for us. Most of our baking sessions are a success now thanks to the mixer (: However, we are still unable to bake macarons successfully T.T

We borrowed this book which includes detailed step-by-step instructions and also pictures and it is one of our favourite baking book! This Victoria Sponge Cake recipe is from this book and it is superrr yummy. It tasted really like the old-fashioned kind of butter cake that our parents used to buy for us and we really loved it! It has been ages since we last ate it. We loved it so much and baked it once a week for at least 3 consecutive weeks!!

Equipment for Victoria Sponge Cake

• 20cm (8inch) round/square sandwich tins
• Baking paper
• Electric hand-held whisk or food mixer

Ingredients for Victoria Sponge Cake

• 250g very soft butter, plus a little extra for grasing
• 250g caster sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 4 eggs, large
• 250g self-raising flour
• 2 tbsp milk

Steps for Victoria Sponge Cake

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Prepare the cake tin by greasing it well and lining the base with a piece of baking paper.
2. Before creaming the butter and sugar together, the butter needs to be really softened. You should be able to easily push a knife right through the block of butter with little to no resistance. Dice and put it into microwave proof bowl and heat for 30s in the microwave on half power if it's not soft enough - but don't let it melt!
3. Place the butter in a large bowl and add the caster sugar. Cream them together until the mixture has gone very pale. It should almost double in volume and you should no longer feel the texture of the sugar within the butter. This will take about 5-6 min.
4. Add the vanilla extract to the creamed butter and sugar and stir together. Crack the eggs into a jug and beat them with a fork so that they are less likely to curdle when added to the creamed butter and sugar.
5. Add a small amount of the beaten eggs, just a little drop and whisk them in fully. Add another drop and beat again. As you add more and more egg, the mixture will slip about as you whisk it - but keep whisking until the egg and creamed butter and sugar come together. It is important to do it step by step and whisk the air back into the mixture before adding the next drop of egg. Keep working this way until all of the egg is incorporated and you have a light and fluffy mixture - still packed with the air bubbles you've been working in (and not a sign of curdling!). If the air isn't worked back in after each addition, the mix will be very liquidy.
6. Sift the flour if it is looking lumpy, otherwise it is ok not to sift it. Add the flour to the butter, sugar and egg mixture in the bowl. Using a thin edged spatula or metal spoon, fold in the flour, cutting through the mixture, lifting and turning it until all of the flour is incorporated.
7. Add the milk and stir through.
8. Pour the mixture into the 8 inch square tin and roughly level with the back of spoon. Try to avoid getting mixture up the sides of the tin if you can as this can give the finished cakes a little raised lips.
9. Bake in the oven for 25-30 min until golden brown and when pressed lightly on top, the cake springs back up. Allow to cool in the tin for 5 min before removing and cooling fully on a wire rack. If left in the tin to cool complete, the cake will sweat and become soggy. It is fine to leave the paper on the bases as it cools.

Recipe adapted from: The Pink Whisk guide to cake making / Ruth Clemens.

Total Time Spent: 1 hour + 1 hour of cooling

Japanese Cheesecake

Sorry for the lack of updates! We are still baking from time to time, just that we're a bit lazy on updating this blog :P

Our most recent baking session was to bake a Japanese cheesecake! We're always kind of scared to bake anything that requires 'cream cheese' as the taste would be overpowering and we couldn't really accept it. For this Japanese cheesecake, we changed the brand of the cream cheese we used to SCS and the taste was acceptable and we found the cake really yummy! Oink finished almost half of the cake in one day~ Our cake is more dense than airy though, so we're looking forward to baking it again to improve on it!

Ingredients for Japanese Cheesecake

• 140g fine granulated sugar
• 6 egg whites
• 6 egg yolks
• 1/4 tsp cream of tartar
• 50g butter
• 250g cream cheese (we used 200g)
• 100ml fresh milk (we used 150ml)
• 60g cake flour (can also use plain flour)*
• 20g corn flour
• 1/4 tsp salt

*We used plain flour.

Steps for Japanese Cheesecake

1. Preheat the oven at 160°C. Melt cream cheese, butter and milk over a double boiler. Cool the mixture. Fold in the flour, the cornflour, salt, egg yolks and mix well.
2. Whisk egg whites with cream of tartar until foamy on high speed. Add in the sugar and whisk until soft peaks form on low speed. (about 5-6min)
3. Sieve the cheese mixture. (mentioned in the link below, tip #2)
4. Add the egg whites to the sieved cheese mixture to and fold well. Pour into a 8-inch round springform cake pan or removable-bottom cake pan (lightly grease and line the bottom and sides of the pan* with greaseproof baking paper or parchment paper). Wrap the base of your cake tin with aluminium foil, to prevent seepage. (We did not do this!)
5. Bake cheesecake in a water bath** for 1 hour 10 mins or until set and golden brown at 160°C.*** Use a sheet of aluminium foil and place it loosely above the tin. Remove the aluminium foil only at the last 1-2 minutes of baking for the cake to brown.
6. Leave to cool in oven with door ajar, about 30mins to 1 hour. Sudden changes in temperature may cause the cake to cool too quickly and collapse.

* Line the bottom and sides of your cake tin. Make sure the baking paper extends higher than the cake tin by about 1.5 inches. (mentioned in the link below, tip #4)
** For the water bath, place 4 tart moulds filled with water in the 4 corners of the oven at the lowest rack of the oven. Place a wire rack one level above the lowest rack and place your cake tin on this wire rack. (mentioned in the link below, tip #3)
*** We baked for 1hour 10min and the cake came out to be slightly uncooked, so we are planning to bake it longer the next time ( (mentioned in the link below, tip #6)

Recipe adapted from: The Little Teochew

Do visit the link to the original recipe as there are tips given there!