Pierre Herme Viennese Chocolate Sables

It's Christmas season again ..... Time to bake some cookies as gifts for friends. Let's go for one of the recipes in Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme's book - Viennese Chocolate Sables. Everyone (or I would say majority)  loves chocolate. Furthermore, I have leftover egg whites in the fridge. Don't waste them. And this recipe uses egg whites only. What a good timing .....

Chocolate Cappuccino Cake

Just in time to bake a cake for hubby's birthday after getting back from a golfing holiday in Hainan Island, China. Great golf courses, food and fun with a bunch of golfing buddies from the club. Weather this year was extremely hot, unexpected. Last year, all of us were unprepared and caught in an unusually cold weather. So we thought we'd better bring warmer clothing. But weather turned out otherwise .....

I can't remember when was the last time I baked a birthday cake for hubby, not to mention mine as our birthdays coincided with travels. I'm determined to bake one this year. Wanted to make a simple and fuss-free one - chocolate and coffee flavor. That's easy - chocolate genoise sponge cake with coffee-flavored fresh cream frosting, something I've not tried before. The closest one was coffee swiss meringue buttercream.

Devil's Food Cupcakes with assorted cream cheese frosting

 

Pardon me for my tardiness in updating my blog. I baked these cupcakes around the time of baking the Devil's Food Cake with Salted Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting but did not update them into my blog. But better late than never .... Here they are - with two types of frosting - salted caramel cream cheese and strawberry cream cheese. Both frosting are deliciously good and go well with the bitter dark chocolate cupcake. The caramel frosting is sweet and salty while the strawberry frosting has a slight tartness to it and it's refreshing.

Chocolate Addiction - Devil's Food Cake with Salted Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting

How time flies! It seems like just not too long ago that I baked a Royal Chocolate Praline cake for my son's 13th birthday. He's 14 now. It's a chocolate cake again that he requested. Deliberating between a genoise sponge cake, chiffon sponge cake or butter cake, I finally decided upon a Devil's Food Cake by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

Sweet & Salty - Salted Caramel Sauce

Honestly speaking, I've never like caramel, be it in chocolate or ice-cream. In chocolate, I hate the feeling of it being stuck to my teeth other than the sweetness. As for ice-cream, it's one flavour that I will not choose. My favourites are rum and raisin, strawberry, D24 durian and Mao Shan Wang durian. Until one day, I chanced upon sweet and salty caramel sauce ......

Fried Glutinous Rice

Glutinous rice is also known as sticky rice or sweet rice. It is commonly used in asian dishes such as fried glutinous rice as featured here, steam glutinous rice (also known as 'lor mai kai' commonly found in places where different kinds of buns or 'bao' are sold), chinese dumplings, glutinous rice balls, and Thai mango sticky rice. Unlike regular jasmine white rice, its grains are slightly shorter and rounder and of opaque color. It is sticky when cooked, hence the name sticky rice. You cannot eat too much of it at one go as it fills up your stomach pretty quickly. So go easy on it even though it is tasty. You do not want to end up with a bloated stomach.

French Dessert - Creme Brulee

What is creme brulee? It's simply soft and smooth baked egg custard with a burnt, crusty sugar topping. The French called it Creme Brulee. The British called it Cambridge Burnt Cream. The Spanish called it Crema Catalana. All three claimed they were the ones behind this sensuous creation. But I think the French made it famous as we normally associate creme brulee as a french dessert. The Chinese has a similar dessert too - the egg tart. Of course it doesn't have the burnt top but a baked crust pastry holding the egg custard.