visions of clarity...do as infinity

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Baking & Cleaning

Hello

Yesterday, Brenda and Calissa came over to Bake and Clean! xD So! Now part of my room is neat thanks to Calissa's fabulous skills and we've tons of baked products thanks to Brenda's urmmmm encouragement.^_^

First, I would like to apologise for the mostly very dark photos.X__x

I spent most of the morning and evening baking the Korova Cookies for my aunt in Vietnam.=D Batch after batch of chocolate cookies came out of the oven after I laboriously cut up the cookie dough to place neatly on the baking sheet like so:

Of course, these cookies are already baked. The unbaked ones are truly a horror to look at.X__x

I had 2 batches: One with merely chocolate chips another with chocolate chips and almond slices. And of course, because it's for my aunt, I used my darling and very precious Valrhona cocoa powder.xD Hehe. Great stuff! *thumbs up* Also, I ran out of brown sugar so I topped it up with maple sugar.=) I wouldn't use maple sugar next time though. The cocoa taste masks any delicate maple flavours.

The one with merely chocolate chips is quite sweet in my opinion. But the one with almonds is GREAT because the almonds cut through the sweetness quite a bit.^_^ Hooray! I'll definitely be making these with just almonds next time.

The cookie dough is a breeze to make, the only hard part being having to roll up the dough to let it rest in the fridge [for a couple of days] or freeze [up to 2 weeks]. Preparing the dough to bake is a whole different story on the other hand.

Because I usually freeze the dough [it's easier to make all the dough at once then bake over a weekday or something], it is a HORROR to cut. My poor hand has all the marks of the blunt side of the knife blade from pressing down while trying to cut through the dough. You CAN let it defrost a bit before cutting which makes it a little easier but on the whole, it's not that much easier. Haha.=P And it is a horror to cut and place on the baking sheet when completely defrosted.

In any case! I made 3 batches of cookie dough which turned out to be JUST NICE. I was only going to make 2 at first but decided that extras never hurt anyone. Thank goodness I made 3.O__o

Our makeshift cookie packing factory.xD My mom had the job of sealing the containers tightly. [So liu-yi! If it's tough to open, blame my mom. Haha.=P]

Besides the Korova cookies, I tried making the choux pastry from the Paris Sweets cookbook.

It looks fabulous before going into the oven and puffed up nicely but fell almost immediately after taking them out of the oven.X__x And they are extremely eggy and heavy, without the lightness of chouquettes that I was hoping for. (T_T)

I am sticking to Clotilde's [of Chocolate & Zucchini] recipe or my aunt's from now on...-_-"

We did have a chocolate fondue at night though, and the failed chouquettes tasted very good indeed when dipped into the chocolate.=)

Another 2 other cakes were baked! ^_^

We have here "Grandmother's Creamy Chocolate Cake" batter from Paris Sweets. To be honest, it is not so much a cake as a flourless chocolate cake and even that doesn't adequately describe this. It's most like fudge. Really yummy fudge.=D =D =D Mmm. Great stuff! I used the Premium Hershey's Baking Chocolate for this and it tasted great.. Can you imagine if I had used Valrhona? *_*!!!

It's definitely a dark chocolate fudge/creamy chocolate cake. Brenda found it a bit bitter but very nice.=) I thought it was a good attempt at fudge even if I hadn't been expecting fudge.

This recipe also let me try out a method I haven't done before: a bain-marie! ^_^ That is baking the cake which is sitting in a bigger pan filled halfway with water. The main purpose is so that the pan doesn't get all the direct heat but instead gets "gentle" heat that has to go through the water before it reaches the actual cake pan. Another thing is that it allows the baking environment to remain moist so you're cooking with "wet heat". It's kinda like steaming I guess, but doesn't rely ONLY on the heat of the steam to cook. It was a HORROR to remove from the oven and took some manouvering to get the pan out of the boiling hot water.X__x

Another recipe we tried was the Chocolate Almond Cake from Paris Sweets as well. I had great fun mixing it vigorously with a whisk.=) And I've also realised that my mixer isn't powerful enough to make fantastic stiff-peaked egg whites.(T_T) WEEPS. It took me almost 30-45 minutes to do it by hand which is a very bad thing to do in my opinion.

The end result is definitely full of almond flavour [no almond essence needed, just ground almond] and my mom really liked it. She did mention that the cake is a little dry though. Maybe I should bake it for a shorter period of time next time?

In between baking, packing cookies and eating [my happy companions ate up every last ugly cookie.-_-"], Calissa and I attacked the mess in my room with great gusto. Until the end at least, she was bursting with happiness that part of my room is finally neat while I was slowly withering onto the floor.O__o Well. At least my books are nicely lined up, my jrock preciousness is safely in a cupboard, away from sun and rain and half the crap that was on my shelves is safely in bags meant for recycling.

Brenda found wonderful examples of how you should NEVER write a Chinese essay among the junk.X__x I am beyond mortified to say the very least.

Unfortunately for me, most of my room is still covered in utter messiness so I think it'll take a few more attacks before it'll be clean and [mostly] dust-free.^_^ I have to learn to be more vicious with my stuff though and throw EVERYTHING that I know I will never need or miss out [and that's most of the stuff].

I love Calissa and her neatness! ^_^ Thank you my dear! And thanks Brenda for... helping! ^_^ And for documenting the mess in my room with Calissa's camera.-_-"

I would love to say that I'm going back to cleaning my room but that would be outright lying so... I'll just hope everything will be cleaned by next week.^_^

cheers
*[-witchstone-]*

[music : a little pain OLIVIA inspi'REIRA (TRAPNEST)]
[mood : Darker Than Black withdrawals]
[food : --]

Labels: Chocolate Almond Cake, chouquettes, cleaning, Creamy Chocolate Cake, edibles, Korova cookies, misc, Paris Sweets

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visions of clarity...do as infinity
by witchstone

My Emotible!
starry-eyed: filled with such youthful hope and optimism that one's eyes twinkle even when it's dark

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ie: motivation to save money!
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1 The Gift The Sixth Day & Seventh Night Tour Document (2004)
2 Crescent Photobook (out of print)
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1 Thomas Keller The French Laundry Cookbook
2 The Nobu Cookbook
3 Emily Luchetti A Passion for Desserts
4 Alice Medrich Pure Dessert
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2 xxxHOLiC
3 Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-
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