Chaos, Be Gone! (or How I’ve Been Spending My Afternoons).

My index of recipes to try from magazines, newspaper clippings and everything in between

Finally, no more rummaging through bags and bags of flour trying to find the right one and spilling the flour all over on the counter top

Unadorned Simplicity.

One of the things i look forward to most on our annual trip to Bangkok is getting my greedy hands on S&P butter cakes. S&P, for the unintiated, is a chain of restaurants and bakeries in Thailand. While they do serve really good Thai food, the butter cakes always have us scrambling to the bakery corner and snapping up slices of their unadorned butter cake. Of course, no matter how many we buy, we always end up having to make another trip to the store to stock up on the butter cake slices. All this within our usual five day stay in Thailand, i might add.

While I make butter cakes fairly regularly, I tend to lean towards several variations of this simple, modest cake, often dressing them up with frosting of some sort. So when I came across this recipe for a white butter cake, i was more than happy to give it a shot and kill two birds with one stone- use up the couple of egg whites i had leftover after churning a batch of vanilla ice cream (so good with hot chocolate fudge!) and having freshly baked unadorned butter cake slices for tea.

There were two things about the recipe that struck me as being really different from the usual butter cake recipes- firstly, the recipe used only egg whites and no yolks at all and also the recipe called for a rather long beating time, supposedly to aerate the batter. Suppressing my baking instinct (and it wasn’t easy, trust me) that was screaming I was gonna end up with a fallen cake from overbeating the batter, i took a leap of faith and did exactly as instructed.

As it turns out, i was duly rewarded- with a light gorgeous butter cake with a smooth, velvety crumb. While the cake was still surprisingly rich in spite of the omission of egg yolks, it was certainly less rich than your typical butter cake. You could barely even tell the cake was made solely with egg whites aside from its slightly pale hue.

The cake, a little on the sweet side, went perfectly with a cup of black tea. I polished two slices off rather easily.

While i’m raving about the cake, can i just say how much I adore the book the recipe’s from. It was a very belated birthday gift from my little sister- and a very nifty way of getting round my self imposed Amazon ban, i might add

I love how the author has both metric and volume measurements included in the recipe and explains why she calls for certain steps- kind of like a condensed and modern version of the Cake Bible. I’m just dying to make everything from it, especially after the success of this butter cake.

Excuse me now while i go make custards and churn buckets of ice cream to stock up on egg whites.

White Butter Cake [Taken from Flo Braker's The Simple Art of Perfect Baking]

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups sifted cake flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
150g egg whites, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup milk, at room temperature
225g unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups + 1 tsp castor sugar

1. Preheat oven at 175C. Grease and flour two 8″ springform pans*. Line the bottoms of the pan with baking paper and set aside.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a medium bowl and set aside. Cream butter using an electric mixer till it’s light and fluffy. Add 1 1/2 cups of sugar in gradually, beating on medium speed till mixture is almost white and really fluffy. Lightly whisk 60g of the egg whites and pour gradually into the batter. When mixture looks like whipped cream cheese and has increased in volume, remove mixing bowl from the electric mixer.
3. In a separate bowl, beat remaining egg whites till frothy. Add in sugar gradually and beat till stiff, shiny peaks form. Fold egg whites into cake batter in two batches.
4. Divide cake batter equally between the prepared pans, using a spatula to smoothen the batter. Bake the cakes at the lower third of the oven for 30 to 35 minutes till the top of the cake springs back lightly when pressed with a fingertip. Serves 12

*I used an 12″ by 5″ loaf pan and a 7″ round pan; perfect for the amount of batter the recipe makes

Of Pizzas, Best Friends and Lazy Afternoons.

Rather than aimlessly roam around our little island like we seem to have a particular knack of doing, I coerced invited J to come over to make pizzas and laze the rest of our afternoon away.

Getting our ingredients together wasn’t really too much work although i think i went a little overzealous at the supermarket that morning. We had quite the range of ingredients with sliced onions, anchovies, salami, ham, capsicums, mushrooms and barbecued chicken, especially considering it was gonna be just the two of it.

The dough though was entirely a different issue. Having done my usual search on Google to see how the recipe has worked for others before i attempt any recipe and read all good things, i was pretty confident the recipe would work. Besides it’s a Donna Hay recipe- how much more reassurance could i ask for?

After two failed attempts at getting my newly purchased yeast to do its thing in lukewarm water, i decided to wing it and combine the dry ingredients, whisking the water and oil in as i went along. But that was only the start of our dough trouble. After a good twenty minutes of waiting around, the dough had only risen slightly when the recipe indicated that it was supposed to almost double its size in that time. So again, we went with winging it and hoping it’ll sort itself out with the heat in the oven, got on with it.

We managed to get about 4 pizzas out of the tiny quantity the recipe makes. As you can tell from the picture, we weren’t too concerned with winning any beauty pageants- just getting some greasy, loaded with good stuff chow. Thankfully, the dough did rise about an inch in the oven, forming a solid pizza base with a gorgeous browned crust. I must say they turned out pretty well considering all the winging we did.

It was such a good afternoon spent. We sat in the patio, eating our slices of pizzas and orange wedges and chatting with my little sister who decided to join us- pretty much the kind of stuff good days are made up of

Pizza Dough [adapted from Donna Hay's Modern Classics 1]

Ingredients
1 tsp instant dry yeast
2 cups plain flour
2/3 cup + 2 tbsp warm water
A pinch of sugar
1 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp olive oil

1. Whisk flour, yeast, sea salt and sugar together. Gradually whisk water and oil in till a dough forms. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for about 10 minutes till dough is smooth and elastic.
2. Place the dough in a clean, oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Leave the dough to rise in a warmsih place for 20 minutes or till doubled in size. Makes about 4 smallish pizzas

Japanese Comfort Food.

It has been a while since i’ve last had Japanese food and my little sister’s sudden interest in the cuisine and investments in a couple of Japanese cookbooks had me longing to make something from my ever faithful Feast of Flavours from the Japanese Kitchen cookbook.

Oyako don has always been one of my ’safe options’ at Japanese restaurants whenever i order a main course. It’s one of those dishes that calls for such few ingredients- mainly chicken, eggs and onions- that you assume it’ll be hard to mess up. You wouldn’t believe how many dry, bland- or worse still both- oyako dons i’ve had that made me wonder why the dish is even still on my safe list. But you know what they say about people who keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

This, this glorious bowl of comfort food, is why i keep ordering the dish at Japanese restaurants time and time again, in hopes each time that this bowl of tasty just set eggs and bite sized chicken cooked in a slightly sweet and salty sauce and served with warm steamed rice will appear before me.

Perhaps it’s time i start making these at home and just stick to having sashimi and sushis at restaurants.

Oyako Don (Chicken and Eggs on Rice) [adapted from Feast of Flavours from the Japanese Kitchen]

Ingredients
400g chicken fillets, cut into bite sized pieces
1 white onion, halved and sliced across the grain thinly
5 eggs, lightly whisked
100 ml mirin
4 tbsp Japanese light soy sauce
150ml water
2 cm piece of dried kelp
10g bonito flakes
Cooked white rice, to serve
Japanese seven spice seasoning, to serve

1. To make dashi Combine dried kelp and water in a saucepan. Let stand at room temperature for at least 30 minutes. Bring water to boil and remove kelp just as water starts boiling. Add bonito flakes in, boil for a couple of seconds before removing saucepan for heat and letting mixture stand till bonito flakes sink to the bottom. Strain dashi and discard the bonito flakes.
2. Combine dashi, mirin and light soy sauce in a medium pan. Bring mixture to boil and add chickens and onions in. Turn heat down and let mixture simmer for about 3 minutes, covered, till chicken pieces turns white.
3. Bring mixture back to boil again and pour three-quarter of egg mixture in, stirring it in slightly. Reduce heat, cover and allow to simmer for 30 seconds till just set. Pour in the rest of the egg mixture and cook for a couple more seconds till just set. Serve warm with white rice and seasoning, if desired. Serves 4