Lemon and Berry Cheesecake with Marzipan Mice

November 11, 2015

This cheesecake got lost between posts as I had taken pictures with my dad's camera, having forgotten my own. This was one of the many many desserts available for my niece's 5th birthday party.

The cheesecake itself was made in a manner that was similar to the reunion cheesecake, except with lemon, as I did not have any limes around. The last of the frozen berries I had used then to make the topping, so I watered down some red fruits jam.

The base is the usual shortbread pastry.

The focus point this time are these little family of mice I made to run on the serving plate that I borrowed from my cousin. They are made of plain marzipan, a bit of which I kneaded with chocolate powder to turn it brown. The eyes just have less chocolate. I made a baby one with inverted colors for some variety. Maybe one day, I'll post a tutorial how to make these, as I learned it from a book my brother has.

Christmas '15: Pumpkin Yule Log Cake

Christmas desserts this year were split between my cousin B and myself. B made little choux and éclairs, and I dealt with the egg-free stuff for those among us that don't eat eggs. Having seen a recipe on Dash of (Vegan) Butter for a vegan pumpkin cream roll, and seeing how I still had a pumpkin sitting around, I jumped on the opportunity.

First, I roasted the pumpkin in the oven, puréed it in a food processor, then drained it in a colander with paper towels in the fridge to remove all excess moisture. Then I whipped up about 6 tbs of aquafaba (the liquid from a can of chickpeas), and proceeded with the rest of the recipe.

For the filling, I folded some whipped cream into the leftover cream cheese mix from the brownie topping. I also added a little more sugar. Then I cut a small section at the end to make a stump on top, which was glued on with more of the cream cheese mix.

The whole cake was covered with whipped cream that was mixed with chocolate powder. At first, I just dragged a fork over the whipped cream to make it seem like bark, but then opted instead to shave some chocolate off large choc chips (the only chocolate I had) to dust over the top.

In the end, the cake was well liked, but the cake batter was a little tough. Either I had overbaked it a bit, or the amount of dry ingredients should have been reduced.

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PUMPKIN CAKE ROLL RECIPE

  Ingredients

• 3/4 cup flour
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 6 tbs aquafaba
• 1/4 cup applesauce
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2/3 cup puréed pumpkin
• 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
• icing sugar

  Procedure

1. Preheat oven 180°C.
2. In a bowl, combine dry ingredients. Set aside.
3. Whip aquafaba on high until soft peaks. 
4. On medium speed, add in applesauce, the progressively add sugar.
5. Mix in pumpkin and vinegar.
6. Fold in dry ingredients.
7. Pour into a prepared pan, then bake for 15 min or until it springs back when lightly pressed.
8. After removing from oven, immediately put on a clean dishtowel dusted with icing sugar.
9. Roll it up with the towel and set to cool.
10. Once cooled, unroll, fill with desired cream, and roll again.
11. Ice as desired, and chill until eaten.

Christmas '15: Brownie with Cream Cheese Pattern

This year for Christmas presents, I decided to bake a big batch of brownie and cut it up into squares to pack up. I had originally planned to have 2 different brownies and some kind of gingerbread-like bars in there as well, but due to time constraints, I had to settle with just the one.

For the brownie, I used a double batch of the classic egg-free recipe I have been using. To make it a little more interesting, at least to the eye, I topped it with a pattern of cream cheese, quark, and icing sugar mix. The quark helped make the cream cheese more fluid, and I had some left from before that needed using up. The pattern was made by drawing lines of cream cheese mix over the top of the batter, then running a chopstick in opposite directions.

The wonderful image I had in mind for nice, even squares went out the window the moment I cut into it after cooling and refrigerating it a couple of hours. The no-crust parts were crumbling and falling every which way. Luckily, I managed to somehow cut 30 squares that were more or less intact, and to package them in little bags, each piece sitting on its own square of baking paper. Unfortunately, in some cases, the pattern did not really survive the cutting and packaging.

Lime Pistachio Shortbread Cookies

December 18, 2015

A friend had requested that I bake something for her (anything was fine). I also needed more cookies to give away as there was not enough mint chocolate cookies. This time I was extremely fed up with studying for exams, so I figured I could go and deal with a lime.

This recipe is adapted from Cooking Channel, although I did not use cardamom. I chopped the pistachio into stick-like slivers instead of crushing them or putting them through a blender.

I glazed them with the same lime glaze I have used before. As a last minute decoration, I slivered some lime zests and dropped them on top. The squares I had originally scored in the dough were a little big, so instead of re-drawing the lines, I split each in half to get triangles. I think these were the most fragile shortbreads I have made.

These were also packaged into little bags to give away, and served as snacks to go with tea for an end-of-semester get-together with friends.

Mint Chocolate Cookies

December 15, 2015

As the end of the semester approached, I wanted to give little packs of cookies to my professors, as thanks for teaching. I also felt that some of them had been particularly helpful to me this semester.

I looked around in my stash of baking ingredients, to see what kinds of cookies I could make with what I had. I had thought about chocolate chip cookies, but I didn't have anymore choc chips... No more cranberries either, and at the time I was starting to dig in my boxes, I was not up for zesting a lime. Then I saw a box of mint-filled chocolates I had gotten before but that was just sitting there. I figured I could try and put that on or in a cookie somehow.

My first test attempt was a flop and almost left a chunk of charcoal at the bottom of the oven. The cookie had fallen through the grill despite the baking paper (I neglected to put a pan between the paper and the grill), and had spread like crazy. Some flour and chilling later, I finally managed to get something decent.

The mint chocolates were cut into small rectangles/triangles depending on the part of the chocolate. I then stabbed them through the top of each cookie formed. Some pieces melted and caramelized on the sides of the cookies.  It might have been better if I had just stuck a bigger slab in the middle of each cookie, but I settled with what was done.

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RECIPE

  Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1/2 cup golden sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp Orgran egg replacer
• 4 tbs water
• 3 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp hot water
• mint chocolate (or sub in 1 cup chocolate chips)

  Procedure

1. Preheat oven 175°C.
2. Cream butter and all sugar until fluffy.
3. Mix the egg replacer and the 4 tbs water (proportions ~2 eggs) and beat them into the mixture.
4. Dissolve baking soda into the hot water before adding.
5. Stir in flour and chocolate chips.
6. Put on baking sheet by large spoonfuls.
7. Bake for 10-15 mins.

Homemade Gyoza (Potstickers)

Whew, lots of December things to catch up on here on the blog! Despite a crazy few weeks of exams and papers and presentations, I still managed to squeeze in some baking to get rid of some stress.

December 11, 2015

For a long time now, I've been wanting to make my own gyoza (Japanese potstickers), as they are a little hard to find in my corner of the world when I am at college. I found the gyoza skin recipe on La Fuji Mama and had it bookmarked for about a year before I finally got to it and made these.

First I made a pan of filling. To keep it relatively simple, I just stir-fried chopped Chinese cabbage, shiitake mushroom (dried and rehydrated), carrots, and ginger, which I seasoned with vegetarian oyster sauce. On hindsight, adding something to try and make it hold together more easily would have made wrapping the gyoza easier, but I was out of tofu and patience.

Then I made the skins, and rolled them out flat. As I am not proficient at making nice circles with just the rolling pin, I cheated by using a circle cutter to cut them out with.

Everything was kept under a wet towel while L and I wrapped them (she helped me to speed up the process). I think we made about 33 of them, though the dough was a bit too thickly rolled, and the thicknesses were uneven.

Then L helped me fry them on a nonstick pan until the bottom was nicely browned, before adding hot water to the pan and covering it, to steam the tops of the gyoza.

We ate these dipped in a mix of veg ponzu sauce (mix of soy sauce and citrus) and chili.

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GYOZA SKIN RECIPE

  Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup boiling water
• flour for dusting

  Procedure

1. In a bowl, mix flour and salt. Make a well in the middle.
2. With chopsticks or another utensil, add hot water in the well and mix in flour progressively until a dough is formed.
3. Roll into a ball. Some more water may be required.
4. Cover with a damp cloth and let site for 1 hour.
5. Knead on a floured surface for about 5 mins.
6. Form into a log and cut into about 40 slices.
7. Roll into round skins (or use round cookie cutter to make circles), dusting both sides with flour.
8. Fill and cook, or wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate until use.

Marbled Banana Brownie Wannabe

The original title for this post was going to be "marbled peanut butter and chocolate banana brownie wannabe," but since that is very long-winded, let's settle for the short version.

A week or two ago, my cousin L bought a bunch of bananas. As usual, they sat in the fruit basket getting riper and riper, until there was nothing left to do with them but to bake them. I am still not in the mood for banana bread (don't ask me why), so I thought I'd make another banana brownie. Then L saw the Facebook post from someone in the building saying they had leftover peanut butter brownie, and so she asked me if I could make it peanut butter this time.

To make things more difficult for myself, I thought I'd tackle a marbled peanut butter chocolate one. I simply made half of a batch of chocolate brownie batter (using half of the recipe in the link above), and half of a batch of an experimental peanut butter variant, which simply used 100 g of creamy peanut butter instead of the chocolate. Then I dolloped it progressively, alternating batters, into my loaf pan, and swirled it all with a knife.

Although the texture was amazingly soft and great to eat, it made it very difficult to cut the loaf and get decent slices that didn't collapse and break every which way. I'm still debating whether it's worth trying to fix that and possibly sacrifice the texture. To be determined in the future, I guess.

Lime Glazed Cranberry Shortbread Cookies

Remember these cranberry shortbread cookies I made last summer? Well I made them again, this time for a friend's birthday gift. I wasn't really up for rolling out the dough, however, so the dough was rolled into a log, then refrigerated. I then sliced the log into fairly irregular (I don't have much experience in cooking log cutting) slices, then baked them. Since I only made half a batch, my log was short enough that I could wrap it in cling film, and tie one end to the rack in the fridge, so that the surfaces didn't leave any flat side to my log.

Just like for the oatmeal cookies, I soaked the dried up cranberries in a bit of hot water before chopping them and throwing them into the mix. Instead of leaving them plain, I made a quick glaze with some icing sugar and lime juice, which I spread on half of the top surface of each cookie. The recipe for this glaze was from Cakecrumbs. The cookie recipe can be found in the link above.

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LIME GLAZE

  Ingredients

• 1 cup icing sugar
• 1 tbs lime juice

  Procedure

1. Mix together sugar and lime into a paste in a heat-proof bowl.
2. Set the bowl into a pot of simmering water and heat until mix is runny.
3. Glaze cookies, and let dry.

Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

 

With all the academic deadlines flying around at this time of the semester, I needed to get rid of some stress. I had pulled an all-nighter the night before, and was trying to stay awake long enough to go to bed at a reasonably normal time.

I gave in to the temptation that had been gnawing at me for the past few days, but that I had to push away due to the aforementioned deadlines: BAKING.

Trying to think of what I wanted to make, I remembered the last of the dried cranberries sitting in one of the kitchen drawers. I used some for other cookies I will post in a few days, that I plan to give to a friend for her birthday. Then my cousin L (who is also my roommate) complained that I hadn't made normal cookies in a while for her to eat. I think she actually had chocolate chip in mind, but my stash of chocolate chips is long gone. I hit up Google, and came up with these cranberry oatmeal cookies.

The recipe is from Eggless Cooking, and makes more than the pictured 20 as plenty disappeared into L's stomach as I baked tiny batch after tiny batch of 6-7 in our tiny oven. The pack of cranberries had somehow ripped at some point, and wasn't closed properly, so the cranberries were dried up. I attempted to slightly rehydrate them in hot water before using them. I also subbed walnuts for the pecans.

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RECIPE

  Ingredients

• 3/4 cup (70 g) butter, softened; margarine makes this vegan
• 1/4 cup cane sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• vanilla or 1 packet vanilla sugar
• 1/2 cup non-dairy milk
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1 pinch nutmeg
• 3 cups quick cooking oats
• 1 cup cranberries
• 1 cup walnuts (optional)

  Procedure

1. Preheat oven at 180°C.
2. Cream sugars and butter until well combined.
3. Add in milk, and mix.
4. In a bowl, mix spices, flour, and baking soda. Add to the butter mix.
5. Fold in oats, cranberries, and pecans.
6. Spoon tablespoons of mix onto a lined baking tray. Flatten with a fork.
7. Bake for 12-15 minutes.