Friday 25 April 2014
vanilla chiffon cake
Life hasn't been all that sweet lately. Literally. Just when I thought I had put the morning sickness behind me and started enjoying food again, I found out I had developed gestational diabetes. Devastating news, really, for someone who loves carbs. I was under strict orders to stay away from white bread, chocolate and desserts...basically all the good things worth living for. Seriously, if you thought dentists were evil, wait till you meet a dietician. At least we never tell our patients to lay off the sweets completely.
Needless to say, my kitchenaid has once again gone back into storage. Deprived of chocolate and my favourite past time, I think it was the first time I felt upset about being pregnant. (Morning sickness is a piece of cake compared to this.)
This chiffon was done back in happier times. It was my first attempt at a chiffon cake and I was a little disappointed that it didn't rise as much as I had expected. Eventually figured out it was because the sugar amount listed in the recipe was wrong which led to a wonky meringue. I've corrected it in the recipe below.
Please excuse the uneven bubble size. Like I said, this was my first attempt.
Vanilla Chiffon Cake
(adapted from Keiko Ishida's Okashi: Sweet Treats Made with Love)
Ingredients
80g top flour (sifted twice)
5 egg yolks
20g caster sugar
60g water
60g canola oil
seeds scraped from 1 vanilla bean or 1 tsp vanilla extract
(for the meringue)
90g caster sugar
10g corn flour
5 egg whites
Directions
- Preheat oven to 160°C.
- Beat egg yolks and sugar together in a mixing bowl.
- Add in water, canola oil and vanilla and continue mixing.
- Add flour and mix until well combined and batter is sticky. Set aside this egg yolk mixture.
- Combine sugar and corn flour in a bowl.
- In a separate mixing bowl fitted with whisk attachment, beat egg whites until foamy.
- Add half of the sugar-corn flour mixture and continue whisking for a few minutes.
- Add remaining sugar-corn flour mixture and whisk until glossy, stiff peaks are formed.
- Gently fold in 1/3 of meringue into egg yolk mixture first, then add in the remaining 2/3 meringue and fold to incorporate completely. Do this gently to avoid destroying the meringue bubbles.
- Pour batter into ungreased 21cm chiffon pan and bake in the oven for 40-50min.
- When cake is done, remove from oven and turn the pan over, leaving to cool on a wire rack upside down.
- Once cooled completely, run a knife or spatula around the edges to loosen the cake from the pan before inverting onto wire rack.
*I coated my chiffon cake with crème pâtissière because I love the stuff but you can opt to leave it out.
Thursday 23 January 2014
mexican coffee buns
And we're back! What was supposed to be a short break from the kitchen to prepare for my wedding ended up getting extended by another 3 months thanks to an unexpected (but not unwelcome!) pregnancy. If you ask me, it should be called all-day sickness rather than morning sickness. I must have memorised my toilet bowl's every contour in those few weeks. The only thing that got me through was knowing that my suffering meant my baby's continued survival.
Well, thankfully, I've since reached the 2nd trimester and while I'm horrified to see my weighing scale flash numbers I've never seen before in all my life, I'm glad that the nausea has mostly abated and that I'm back to loving food again--particularly the sweet kind, to the dismay of my elf who jokingly predicted that our child is going to be born with dental caries. (As if it dares.) And so, in honour of my bun in the oven, I hauled out my dusty kitchenaid and activated my oven (the real one) to make these coffee buns.
We locals know them as Rotiboy/PappaRoti/MammaRoti, whichever is still in business currently. (I should probably call mine RotiGirl. hurhurhur.) I distinctly remember the first time I had one of these back in 2005. It was love at first bite, which is surprising for a non-coffee-lover. The recipe I used churned out buns that are more cinnamon-y than coffee-ish which I actually prefer. This is again surprising because I usually hate cinnamon. My little kicker apparently doesn't share my taste preferences.
Mexican Coffee Buns (makes 10 buns)
(adapted from Kitchen Corner)
Ingredients
(for the dough)
250g bread flour
38g caster sugar
3g salt
4g instant yeast
1/2 beaten egg
135g fresh milk
30g unsalted butter, softened
(for the filling)
140g salted butter, cold (cut into 10 cubes, each weighing 14g)
(for the topping)
50g unsalted butter, softened
40g icing sugar
38g beaten egg (slightly less than 1 egg)
1 tsp granulated coffee dissolved in 1 tsp of water (I used decaffeinated coffee)
1/4 tsp cinnamon powder
50g plain flour
Directions
- (for the topping)
- Beat the butter and the icing sugar until fluffy.
- Gradually add in the beaten egg, and then the coffee, mixing well in between.
- Add in the flour and cinnamon powder and mix until well combined.
- Place mixture in a small piping bag and refrigerate.
- (for the dough)
- In a mixing bowl fitted with a dough hook attachment, add the bread flour, sugar, salt, yeast, egg and milk and knead on slow speed.
- When ingredients are well-incorporated, add in the butter and continue mixing for about 30min until dough is smooth and elastic and not sticky.
- Divide the dough into 10 portions (by weight) and let it rest on a baking tray for 15min.
- Roll out each dough portion into a flat disc, place a cube of salted butter (the filling) in the centre. Seal it up tightly. (Make sure the edges of the dough are properly sealed otherwise the filling will ooze out, as some of mine did.)
- Place the filled dough balls back onto the baking tray, shaping them to be as round as possible, and spacing them at least 2-3inches apart Lightly cover with clingwrap and allow to rise for about 50-60min.
- Remove piping bag filled with topping from refrigerator. Snip off the end of the piping bag and pipe out the topping in a spiral pattern onto the dough. (As in the picture above.)
- Preheat oven to 200°C in the meantime.
- Bake buns for about 12-15min.
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