13 posts tagged “baked”

Really, what is the difference between an apple pie and an apple crisp? Is it really just that an apple pie has a crust and an apple crisp has a crumble?

Curious.

In ANY case– I finally got around to making apple pie late last month (okay, it was an apple crisp, but it’s almost the same thing). You can find the recipe here at PineappleBread.

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You may have noticed that I've been writing and posting more on PineappleBread as of late. I was planning to migrate completely over to wordpress, but I'm awfully fond of Vox, and so I've been simultaneously posting on both. But I'm not sure what to do. Any suggestions?

Pinapple Bread prepped

Known also as 菠蘿包 (pronounced: bwoh lwoh bao) in Taiwan and other Asian countries, this bread actually does not contain any pineapple. Instead, it derives its name from the criss-cross design on its cookie dough exterior that causes it to look somewhat like the pineapple fruit. In Japan, these breads are known as melon pan (with pan being the Japanese word for bread). For that, I have no explanation.

I got this recipe from Angie’s Recipes, and I used her recipe for Japanese Melon Pan. However, I substituted the chocolate she used as a filling with red azuki beans instead. I love love LOVE azuki. Love. I made a few other modifications to the recipe as well in order to convert it properly to the English system of measurement instead of SI units. So I have posted the recipe at the bottom with my version.

(I won’t rant –too much– about this now, but I would just like to say that Americans are stupid and should have converted to using the metric system of measuring things YEARS ago and making everything easier and more universal rather than having to deal with annoying pounds and ounces and figuring out conversions between grams, weight, etc. Bah HUMBUG! End rant.)

Now, I tried this recipe twice. I thought the first batch was too small with only four pieces, so I doubled the recipe to make eight.

But the first time, as you shall see, was… well…

Pineapple Bread burnt (菠蘿包)

Out of the four of them, the best one looked like this:

Pineapple Bread burnt closeup (菠蘿包)

Not that it didn’t taste fabulous. Inside, the bread and red bean were sweet and fluffy. My parents just scraped off the burnt portions (like any normal, self-respecting parents who often are forced to eat their daughter’s creations), and these four little buns were gone pretty quickly:

Pineapple Bread burnt inside (菠蘿包)

So I tried again!

TRIAL TWO.

This time I made sure I had time to be there the entire time.

Pineapple Bread on the way (菠蘿包)

Almost good enough to eat…

Pineapple Bread success (菠蘿包)

1 comment

Pineapple Bread batch (菠蘿包)

The recipe is at PineappleBread. 

I made bleuberrie moofins (okay, I’m just poking fun– but blueberry muffins ARE fun, right?) a few days ago. It was my first time making them, and I decided to make them healthier by using applesauce in place of much of the sugar. I also used vegetable oil instead of butter– I don’t know if that made too much of a difference. I’ll try making the fatty version of blueberry muffins sometime to see…

As it is, here they are!

Blueberry Muffin

Bleuberrie Moofins

Ingredients

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 cup milk
• 2/3 cup applesauce
• 1 large egg
• 1 1/4 cup blueberries, washed and coated with a thin layer of flour to keep the blueberries from sinking** (you may use frozen ones if you like, just add them directly before putting the muffins in the oven, to keep from staining the batter a deep blue-purplely bruised color)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Combine the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients in separate bowls, leaving the blueberries for later addition. Then slowly whisk the milk/egg/applesauce
   mixture into the dry ingredients.
2. Gently fold in the blueberries so that they do not break and turn the batter strange colors.
3. Spoon the batter into twelve oiled muffin cups.
4. Bake for 20 minutes.

Enjoy!

Blueberry Muffin - Inside

As the weather warms and the days grow longer, I find myself feeling lighter and happier. At least, on the weekends anyway.

Banana Muffins and dried fruit

Extra bananas are a rarity in my household. We buy them green from Costco and then devour them in large quantities as they ripen. My dad always brings one to work for a snack, and I take bunches of them to my volleyball tournaments to keep myself and my teammates from cramping up.

This time, however, the Costco bananas decided to stay green for weeks. Bananas are some of the few fruits that ripen after being picked (most other fruits taste best when picked at their peak growing period-- bananas need no such care), so green ones will yellow and ripen with time. But this time, our bananas took over three weeks of sitting in a basket (and in a cardboard box) to no avail. They finally did turn yellow, but all too late and were already slightly mushy and brown-skinned at that point.

So I made banana muffins!! The recipe was modified from the banana nut muffin recipe at SimplyRecipes, and I added dried "antioxidant fruits" to half the batch just to try it out. You see that one in the picture above. They came out absolutely lovely, and I am eager to try for another batch soon! I'm going to modify the recipe a bit more and post the recipe later.

Kiwi POWER

And I had a kiwi as part of my lunch on Friday. I heart kiwis. Yay.

Honie, my volleyball team captain and surrogate "big sister" on the team (well, they're all my big sisters, since I'm the youngest on the team, hehe) and I made an agreement long ago because we both like cooking and all things food-related that we would cook at her place sometime. I would be able to try new recipes as well as learn new things from her. Two months after our initial decision to do so, we still hadn't gotten around to messing with each other's culinary appetites, so one day last Saturday, after our team did particularly poorly in one tournament (oh sad face!), we decided that I would go over to her place on Sunday night and cook and eat dinner.

Things decided last minute always somehow manage to get accomplished.

But because it was so impromptu, I really had no idea what to cook, and I didn't have time to browse the recipes I have been itching to try, so I just made the simplest thing in the world: roasted vegetables and sauteed broccoli. She prepared the main course of turkey meatloaf.
 

Meatloaf, roasted vegetables, and sauteed broccoli

It was a simple, unassuming dinner, but between me, her, her roommate John, and our friend and her neighbor Will, we had a good meal. For future reference-- I won't roast cucumbers anymore because they don't taste so good when roasted.

And for dessert!

Crepes galore

1 comment

Strawberry crepes and strawberry-banana crepes! No bad for a first time making crepes, although the crepes came out a bit lumpy since my spatula wasn't big enough to spread the batter evenly on the pan before it began to set. I got the recipe at Allrecipes. Not bad, not bad.

All in all, rating for dinner? Success!

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I'm always ready to try easy recipes to have a more fun breakfast, and this past week was no exception. My brioche-lets from my trial last week turned out beautifully and looked like, as May said, popovers, so I decided to take it to the next step and make actual popovers.

Popover!

They came out quite well. Here's the recipe, adapted slightly from the Williams Sonoma recipe for puff popovers:

Puffy Poofy Popovers
makes 12

Ingredients:

• 4 large eggs ** room temperature
  
• 1 1/4 cup milk ** room temperature
  
• 3 tbsp oil
• 1 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp salt

Directions:

1. Preheat an oven to 425 degrees F.
2. Butter every other well of a muffin tin (the leftover wells allow for better circulation of heat and more room for the pastry to puff). Be sure to butter every nook and cranny of the well, otherwise the popover will stick in the pan and refuse to come out after baking!
3. Whisk the four eggs together until well mixed, then add in the milk and oil.
4. Sift the flour and salt into a separate bowl, and then add slowly into the egg mixture.
   
5. Mix well until no lumps are left, then ladle batter into the muffin pan wells until each well is approximately 3/4 full.
6. Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown. Do not open the oven during this time otherwise the popovers may fall.
   
7. Take the popovers out of the oven. Be careful of the steam that may come out of the oven and quickly prick the top with a sharp toothpick or skewer to let out hot air from the top of the popovers. Remove immediately and place on cooling rack.
8. Serve immediately while warm with jam or other condiments.
   

The brioche dough sitting in my refrigerator was beginning to call to me from beyond the freezing point. Come bake me, it called, the sticky-sweetness of its doughy voice stumbling me in my tracks. I will be much tastier and moist this time, so come and knead me, mold me, and shape me into soft, fluffy goodness. Days passed, and as its voice grew more and more insistent, I started stumbling in my tracks. You want to eat me, so come bake me, it cried.

And not surprisingly, I willingly complied.

Brioche rounds

I had two portions of dough leftover from my last attempt at making brioche, and I decided to make them both in one go. I wanted to get fluted brioche pans to make them in, but the fear of making bad brioche stalled my wallet, and I opted to use my muffin pan (which gets little enough usage as it is) to make one batch of six breadlets, and then I made another loaf.

Popped brioche

Warm Brioche

Can you see the steam rising out of this brioche? Mm. The texture was much better this time, with a soft and moist fluffiness that was missing from the last time I made brioche.

Excellent.

Brioche and weird muffinlets

Do you ever wonder what a lifetime of science and math and computer science can do to the brain of a *relatively* sane person? Well, for one thing, one develops is an ingrained love of all things dorky, obscure, and just plain weird. Me to a tee. And of course, when things tasty come around, I can't help but pounce upon them, especially when it combines the wacky with the oh-so-cool and tasty.

Hold up. What I'm trying to say is.... Remember trigonometry? Circles with their radii, tangents, and diameters? What about irrational numbers? Yea, it's all coming back now, isn't it? I'm talking about Pi (π), that mysterious number that is a mathematical constant and has children all over the world competing to memorize as many of its characters as possible (My brother could remember up to fifty-two-- 52!-- of them).

So, what does pi have to do with a food blog? Pi(e) Day, of course! Since March 14 is also written as 3.14, and 3.14 are the first few numbers used when calculating all the circles and all their related parts. It is a great, mathematical holiday during which dorks and geeks and dweebs alike all band together to partake in the great consumption of round, sweet pastries!

In previous years, I would just buy a slice of pie or buy a McD's apple pie (two-for-a-buck deal) to commemorate the unofficial holiday.This year, however, I wanted to do something different.

I made my own PIE!

Lynne, my lab's grad student, and I, being the bakers and foodies that we are, decided to celebrate our insanity (and yes, everyone in our lab is quite insane, especially since we remain working there) and giddiness for the excuse to eat pie by bringing some in on the Pie Day. And so on Friday, we did.

I made the pie on Wednesday because I had too many things going on Thursday.

Pie Crust

To start off with, I made my own crust (recipe taken from Williams-Sonoma)! I took over the dining room table, and my father proceeded to laugh at my silliness (since the table was literally completely covered in bits of dough and flour. It was a pain in the butt to make, although I suppose it was worth it in the end. It did taste pretty doggone yummy.

Blueberry Jungle

Prebaked

A dough-lined pie pan filled with well-mixed blueberries topped with mini-dollops of butter.

Waiting for oventime

Once it was capped, sealed, we could BAKE!

Steaming, delicious blueberry PI(E)

And here it is! Happy PI(e) DAY, everyone~!!! (Maybe just a leeettle bit belated at this point, heh heh.)

And lastly, I took the extra pie crust and made "cookies" out of them. See?

Starry starry night

Good evening (afternoon? morning?) ladies and gentlemen! My mother left for Taiwan on Sunday to take care of her older sister, who had just gotten surgery to remove a tumor from a liver, so the past week has been extremely busy as my father and I take over the various duties my mother usually performs.

Thankfully, she'll be home next week and things will be back to normal.

Before she left, however, I had been assembling the materials for making brioche. Taken from Baking with Julia, the book I bought at the public library for $0.50 (a steal, I'd say), this brioche recipe was something that I really wanted to make and yet it scared the bejeezus out of me-- mainly because it called for using a stand mixer, something I've been coveting for years but never found good enough of a reason to buy, meaning that I would be mixing and kneading the dough by hand.

Making Brioche - Sponge

Making Brioche - Mixing

And since I am poor and have no stand mixer to call my own, I started on the long and tedious process of mixing by hand. With a rice (pooper) scooper. It was really sticky.

Making Brioche - Rising

But it came together *relatively* well after much mixing and extra flour added.

Making Brioche - First Rise

And look at it rise! So poofy! ...and sticky.

Making Brioche - Ready to be baked

After an overnight rest-slash-rise in the fridge (per la book), I divided the dough into three equal parts and put two in the freezer, leaving the last third to be my first experiment (thus the title naming this as attempt number one). I made nanterre, which is to say, a loaf rather than the kind baked in a fluted brioche pan with a cute little topknot. I don't have the fluted pans, and although my parents offered to buy them for me, I declined their offer, fearing that the bread would come out badly and I would be too scared to make brioche again and thus have brioche pans sitting around collecting dust. After this trial, I would decide what to do.

Finally, it was time to begin baking!

Making Brioche - The Finished Product

Let's all take a moment to Ooh and Aah, shall we?

It's pretty, isn't it? I put the final egg wash on top and it was quite pretty as a result.

But the problem with this loaf was that it was extremely dry and tasteless inside, without any of the moistness that everyone loves in brioche. After going over what I did in my head, the end conclusion was that I had let the brioche rise a bit longer than I meant to, thus causing the brioche to be too dry. It is possible that I added too much extra flour in an attempt to make the dough firmer, but I don't think I added so much to the point of this kind of dryness.

Future experiments (I have two more chances, right?): (1) Less rise time, and (2) Try to make the tete-formed brioche (?)

**as a side note, I got a blister on my right pinky from stirring too hard. My dad helped a bit, but in the end, my hand is just too weak! I need a stand mixer! Rawr!

I know, I know, the Chinese New Year was February 7, and I know I know I am SO far behind. But I have good reason (sort of)!! On top of my slackerish personality, the past three weeks have been rife with sickness (I got the three week flu or whatever crap has been floating around attacking innocent bystanders like myself) and craziness at work. In fact, the work-craziness hasn't stopped yet. My boss has a conference in a little over a week and needs the data that I'm running asap... but I can only work so fast, and I'm seriously doing double time right now: two days' worth of work compressed into one day. It's not very fun. It's very stressful. It's very tiring. I go home, eat dinner, pass out, and start it all over again. Not fun at all.

But today was supposed to be the last day of sprinting and then I discovered that we didn't have enough sample to run the experiment, so I only have to do one day's work instead of two. How exciting! So what do I do? Update! Update update update! Especially because I have made quite a few things since Chinese New Year hit.

So just about everyone knows what Chinese New Year (aka the Lunar New Year) is. It's also known as 春節, which is literally translated as Spring Festival. I really do like the concept of celebrating the coming of spring as the new year, as opposed to celebrating during the cold nothingness that is winter. It is a time for lots of eating, visiting family, and giving of 紅包, or the red envelopes that children always get that is filled with money. Ah, and in my family, you're a child until you're married... and have children of your own. Until then, I will be expecting 紅包! No... I'm not greedy at all....

Haha.

As I mentioned earlier, this time of celebration is usually a week and is a time for friends and family to get together to partake in the consumption of many delicious foods. We feast on foods that have a significance or meaning. In other words, there are phrases that are said during the new year that are puns with foods like a whole fish (年年有餘), or things that represent actual, non-edible items (dumplings that look like gold ingots, oranges to represent gold/wealth), etc. Good times, yeah?

Anyway, this year we went to the annual Hakka New Year's banquet (客家同鄉會的春節聯歡晚會) at New Fortune Restaurant (新財神), and since my entire family minus my dad were actually helping out for the entire event (we had to be there at 3pm, and we left at 11pm while my dad.... lucky bum got to just sit and eat). I don't even have pictures because we were too busy. Oh well. The food was... normal. Nothing special. But since the banquet was on February 2, we spent the actual New Year at home.

Celebrating Chinese New Year at home:

春節火鍋

Ah. 火鍋. 我超愛吃火鍋的.... My mother decided that to save on trouble and still have an amazing meal on the table, we would have hot pot! Besides, since New Year's was in the middle of the week this year, my brother couldn't be home, so there wasn't too much of a point in having a totally extravagant dinner without the whole family at home. Besides, this was good enough already.

春節火鍋 (closeup)

I helped to fry the 芋頭 (taro) that went into the pot. I love hot pot-- I could eat it all week... although the problem is, when we have company over to eat 火鍋, we usually end up eating the leftovers for an entire week... or two. It's easy to do, since we just use the same stock liquid and just add new ingredients.

Have you noticed the shiny pot we use? It's currently my mother's favorite pot-- everything we need a pot for, she says, ooh, use the 火鍋 pot! Haha, we got two of them on sale from Macy's a while ago; they're actually Martha Stewart chili pots, but my mom purchased them specifically for hot pot.

Chinese New Year-- 年糕!!

年糕

It wouldn't be Chinese New Year without the quintessential 年糕 (nian gao). My mother always buys a cake or two of steamed nian gao, and I always make my version of 年糕-- baked! Contrary to popular belief, the baked one is not necessarily a Westernized version of the cake; a neighbor used to bake 年糕 and send over pieces of it when I was younger.

I found the original recipe at About.com, and then I tweaked it to better suit the tastebuds of Asians who aren't used to things that are too sweet or oily. A note about the comment listed at the site-- The person gave the recipe one star out of five, and I disagree with his (or her) verdict. Why? Because the idiot decided that the consistency of the batter "resembled a thin milkshake" so he added regular flour to the mix, thinking that the batter was supposed to be thicker. Then he goes on to say "I still wonder what Nian Gao is supposed to taste like." Well perhaps if he had followed the directions, instead of adding regular flour to the mix... And then, if the end product came out badly, then comment. But to give a recipe a one star rating after changing the recipe is just unfair to the recipe. I followed the recipe to the tee when I first tried it and I found it too oily. That's why I changed the amount of oil I added to the mix. Ah well.

Here's how I made it:

How to make nian gao

I gathered all my ingredients together and had a large mixing bowl to put everything in. This was the first time I had access to an electric mixer, which was a pleasant addition to my tools, since it made life a little bit easier (although the glutinous rice flour is so fine that it doesn't matter if you mix it with an electric mixer or do it by hand like I used to).

年糕 Ingredients

The ingredients are as follows (and as picture above):

- One 16 oz. package of Mochiko glutinous/sweet rice flour
- 1 cup of sugar (I actually used more like 3/4 cup sugar, since the adzuki beans are so sweet already)
- 1 tbsp baking soda
- 3 large eggs
- 2 1/2 cups milk
- 1/3 cup vegetable oil
- 1 can adzuki/sweet red beans (already cooked and sweetened)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Mix together the eggs, milk, and oil. Add the flour, tbsp, and sugar in slowly. Leave the red beans for later. This recipe isn't too dependent on how everything goes into the mixture, so long as it is well mixed once it's in there. It'll be a smooth, ribbon-y texture (it's supposed to be the texture of a thin milkshake, by the way).
3. Pour half the mixture into a 9"x13" oiled/buttered and floured pan. Drop spoonfuls of the adzuki beans over the mix in the pan, covering as much area as possible. I'm still having problems with the adzuki beans dropping to the bottom of the pan-- so I'm still experimenting with this stage. You can mix the adzuki with a little bit of the cake batter if you're having problems with the viscosity of the adzuki beans.
4. Pour the rest of the batter in the pan, covering the beans that were dropped in before.
5. Bake for 40-50 minutes, or until a toothpick/chopstick comes out clean.
   

年糕好吃

 The top should be a golden color upon coming out of the oven.

開始吃了!

Eat up and enjoy!

Happy New Year! 新年快樂!