11 posts tagged “bread”

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. 

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

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 told you that we had already finished eating what I had baked. So what do I do? I bake some MORE!

But first... my lunch from yesterday:

Bento 11152007

Bento 11152007 onigiri

I've gotten more into making my food look slightly more presentable, so here you see how my food looks with a little more effort put into the presentation. Still not as amazing as some of the lunches out there, but... hey, I'm only human. And I'm learning. And using limited means and materials. But my rice (and both of them are rice, by the by-- my mom has just gotten really into this new mixed-grain red-bean-and-other-good-things-for-ya type of rice) is slowly getting that round onigiri shape. Once I learn a little more, I might start mixing things into the rice for flavoring and color. The problem right now is that I heat my food after I get to work, which makes it hard for the rice to retain the characteristic onigiri shape when I'm digging in. If I don't heat it, then I'd have a round onigiri-- minus the nori. I might start getting nori strips too, so I can have "real" onigiri. Haha, my talk is loud, but my actions...? We shall see. I'm still trying to watch what I eat so that I eat healthy and cut down on my carbs (I would be a breadivore if I could be, no joke).

Anyway, I've been digressing. My bento was, once again, leftovers from Wednesday night's dinner, although since I wasn't home (I had dinner with my brother before volleyball practice), I never actually got to eat this particular meal in its dinner form.

----

I mentioned above that I had baked again. I'm slowly working my way through my small stash of recipes. It's one of my goals to bake my way through Baking with Julia, which is going to take a lot of effort, time, and money, considering how I only have basic materials-- none of those fancy madeleine pans or whatever else is necessary to "properly" bake. I am Asian-- I do not need such frivolous things! A 20-year-old hand-held electric mixer that my Dad finally dug out of the basement for me (actually, it might be more like 25 years -  meaning it's older than I am) and a few bowls, pots, and pans are enough!

Sort of, anyway.

Pumpkin Fruit Bread - batter bowl

I made Pumpkin Fruit Bread!!

The second of the recipes my Dad got from a coworker (the first, Very Lemon Bread, was posted with its recipe here), pumpkin seemed like the best idea for something this close to Thanksgiving. It's such a sweet squash-- I wonder why we don't use it more often. The Washington Post had an article in their food section about the usage of actual pumpkin (as opposed to cooked and pureed and poured into millions of cans) which was particularly interesting because of how true it is; how many people actually take the time to cut up a pumpkin and use it to cook something? My mother did last week, but she actually used a butternut squash which, technically, has more of a "pumpkin" flavor than actual pumpkins do.

Anyway, once again if you want the recipe, just leave me a note.

Pumpkin Fruit Bread - Ready to bake (開始!!)

The recipe called for two 9"x5" loaf pans, but since I only have one 9"x5" and one 8.5"x4.5" loaf pan each, I took a third, small Pyrex bowl that I used to use for bentos earlier in the summer and filled it with leftover batter.

Pumpkin Fruit Bread - Two Loaves

The recipe called for 60-70 minutes at 325 degrees F, but for some reason both of my large loaves weren't done at the 60 minute mark, so I left them in there for an extra 15 minutes. They came out all nice and browned! I finished baking at around 11:00pm, and my dad had just finished watching TV and smelled the warm pumpkin-y, spice-y aroma wafting from the oven and came over, hoping for a slice. Mean daughter that I am, I denied him the pleasure of eating them straight from the oven-- sorry, Dad! These are not the healthiest loaves of bread in any sense of the world "healthy." It was late, he was about to go to bed (you shouldn't eat approximately 2-3 hours before going to bed otherwise your digestive cycle will be disrupted and you could end up with digestive issues... indigestion is no fun, especially when it comes from eating good food at the wrong time...)

Anyway, I dumped the loaves out, including my favorite little round thing of a loaf:

Pumpkin Fruit Bread - Mini Loaf

Mm! It took all of my will not to just sink my teeth into it right away! No, it was time for bed, and, after putting the loaves in paper bags to wait it out a few more hours until morning, at which point I could have delicious pumpkin fruit bread for breakfast!

Just to clarify why it's called a pumpkin fruit bread. There is pumpkin, of course, but folded into the mix are chopped dates, chopped walnuts, and raisins. A cupful of each, to be precise.

The next morning, my patience was rewarded:

Pumpkin Fruit Bread - Inside the Paper Bag

I packed a slice to bring as dessert to work as well. So I've been pigging out on pumpkin fruit bread all day, more or less. (And here I am, saying I'm trying to cut down on carbs... ha!)

As my early contribution to Thanksgiving, the bread came out quite delicious. I hope everyone enjoyed the pictures, and if I don't get a chance to post on Vox again before the holiday comes and attacks with the voracious appetite it always seems to possess year after year, I wish you all a...

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Last entry, I posted about the bread I made on Sunday. This time, I shall post the rest of the pictures from that day, as well as a picture of the actual party...

White Bread Open

I forgot to post a picture of the inside of my bread-- so here it is. I think we finished eating it already, so I'm going to have to bake some more bread soon... Maybe I'll make whole wheat sometime ^__^ Or bagels. Or... Haha, I'm so eager to make as much bread as possible! Any suggestions as to what kind of bread to try next? I'm definitely going to make white bread again so that I can perfect it-- I also have been suggested to take a shot at Asian breads (I really do want to try to make anko-pan, also known as 紅豆包... Mmm! Scrumptious!)

NOW TO the CAKE!!!

Pumpkin Spice Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Let me take you through the individual steps.

After mixing the cake batter, I poured three equal amounts into separate, parchment-lined 9"-round baking pans and put them into the oven, like so:

In the oven

After each one was done, I took them out for them to cool:

Freshly baked

I had extra batter left, so I poured it into a Pyrex glass bowl and made a little pumpkin-face of my own so that my parents could try it:

Smiling Pumpkin Spice Cake

This one actually took longer to bake than the other dishes-- I think the batter was thicker, so I just left it in for an extra ten minutes.

Since I was making the cake for a Halloween party for work and I didn't want to not be able to try it, I cut a piece of cake for myself and my parents to try from this slice.

Pumpkin Spice Cake mini slice

I should learn to make petit fours sometime. Little slices of cake are adorable, don't you think? By the time I got home the next day, my little pumpkin-man was gone... Aww. Poor thing.

After baking three separate cakes, I let them cool on racks, and since it was late Sunday night at that point, I left the cakes in the fridge overnight separated by parchment paper so that I could ice and decorate them the next day.

Pumpkin Spice Cake - Frosting crumb coat

On Monday, I put a light layer of frosting as the crumb coat, which catches any crumbs and keeps them from ruining the outermost layer of icing. I had the hardest time first finding a plate in my house big enough to put the cake on, and then finding another container to put both the plate and the cake into to transport it to work! Somehow I think that a girl carrying an uncovered cake into the chemistry building amongst a bunch of college students just MIGHT attract some attention... Just maayybee...

Pumpkin Spice Cake - completed

Voila! I was done! I added some more confectioner's sugar to the decorative icing on the edges so that they would be a little stiffer and set easier. I wish I had done the same thing with the regular icing, since I realized later that it was still a bit too soft. Oops. Next time?

Pumpkin Spice Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting - Sliced

Success!! I brought it to work, and they liked it! I feel like a hero! Haha... I personally thought it was a bit too sweet (the icing, that is) for my liking, but I guess my tastes are different than everyone else's? Haha... I'm glad they enjoyed it. We needed the break, to say the least.

I also made cookies that day, so here you see them before they have been baked:

Seven Dwarves

Haha! I always have to make several batches, and while I wait for one batch to finish, I begin shaping the cookies for the next batch to streamline the entire process. My goodness, it's fun.

Bento 10302007

I made a bento for the next day, and here you see the cookies in the corner of the picture. It cracks me up how much Min loves my cookies. Every time he hears that I'm making cookies, his eyes light up and he gets all excited. Yay... baking makes me (and other people) happy!

Halloween Party- Lab Style

And at my lab-- here's our party! I bought the Halloween Jack-o-Lantern plates the night before at Giant Supermarket. And the cake you see that's half-eaten on the left is the Pumpkin Dump cake that Lynne made. Oh my, that was delicious. I will have to get the recipe from her sometime...

As usual, recipes of the above may be requested, and I will post.

I have been meaning to have a full-fledged bake-fest in which I would bake bread, cookies, cake, pastries, and other assorted edible food items. And this Sunday, I did it!

So planned for the day was the following:
- Plain White Bread (from Julia Child's Baking book that I picked up for $0.50 at the library-- BEST deal ever!)
- Washington Post's Pumpkin Spice Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting (it's a three layer cake...)
- Funfetti Cookies

I planned this day for several reasons:
1. My mom had been bugging me to make bread for a LONG time, especially after I brought a large, heavily illustrated with beautiful photographs baking book home from the library. So I finally caved and told her I'd make whichever bread she wanted, so long as she provided me with the ingredients. So on Saturday we went to our local Safeway Supermarket and bought bread flour (aka unbleached all-purpose). She chose the simplest recipe, so -thankfully- the ingredients were fairly simple. Sunday was my first time making actual loaves of bread; the most bread-like thing I had ever made before was pan de muerto, also known as the bread of the dead, which the Spanish use in their festival El Dia de los Muertos. Simply put, it's to celebrate the Day of the Dead, and the bread is accordingly shaped in little buns that take on the form of bones and skulls, etc. Rather appropriate for Halloween, I suppose, which leads me to reason number 2...
2. Halloween is on Wednesday, aka tomorrow. As my grad student and I have been stressing the past four weeks (ever since before I started, for various reasons that I won't go into here) we decided to have a mini lab Halloween party for the three grad students and one technician in the lab (the technician being me) to loosen ourselves up and try to forget our worries, even if only for a short, blissfully sugary second.
3. I like to bake. In fact, I love to bake. I love the warmth that an oven emanates, and the feeling of knowing something you created with your own hands is going to provide joy and satisfy hunger to many others and yourself is just so warm and fuzzy. Maybe I am too much of a chemist-- I truly enjoy the creations and the precise measurements (my eyes automatically go to the meniscus of the water when I use a measuring cup, for instance) that create the final product. Somehow within that oven, the catalyst within the materials mixed accordingly together cause magical wonders to occur. It's a good feeling. Besides, that yeasty, bread-y smell that wafts from the oven as the bread or tart or cookies are being pulled out of the oven just spreads and lingers, leaving the house smelling warm.

Ah, I could go on for hours about it...

But I won't.

Time for the PICTURES.

Rise, baby, Rise!

Toasty!

Very Lemon Bread- YUM

3 comments

As requested, I am posting this recipe.

Very Lemon Bread
Bread portion:
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 cup sugar
3 tbsp lemon extract (I basically used up an entire small bottle of it)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp freshly grated lemon peel (approximately one lemon)
1/2 cup chopped pecans
Lemon glaze:
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (from previously used grated lemon)
1/2 cup sugar

1 loaf
In a large bowl, mix butter with sugar, lemon extract, and eggs. In a separate bowl, sift flour with baking powder and salt. To butter the mixture, add the flour mixture alternately with milk, stirring just enough to blend. Fold in the lemon peel and pecans. Pour batter into greased and floured 9x5 inch loaf pan and bake at 350°F one hour until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean.

To make the glaze, combine the lemon juice and sugar in a small saucepan and simmer at medium heat until all the sugar has been dissolved.

Remove the bread from the pan and with a wooden pick, poke holes at 1-inch intervals on all sides. While the loaf is still warm, drizzle the lemon glaze mixture over top and sides. Wrap in foil and store for one day before slicing to serve.

A distinctive lemon flavor perfect for coffee, a morning meeting, or an afternoon tea.

So for some reason the recipe didn't include the section on how to make the glaze-- I guess they just assume everyone knows how-- so I added that part in myself. If you try this recipe, please let me know~!!!

** hmm... on a side note, wouldn't it be interesting if I could one day improve my Chinese to the point at which I could just post recipes both in English and Chinese? Maybe I will... one day...

My dad brought home two recipes from one of his coworkers who said that the bread made from them was delicious. And so it was. I was feeling too poor to make the pumpkin bread recipe (although since I got paid yesterday, I might feel slightly better about all the money I'd have to fork over for the various spices and nuts that I don't usually have lying around the house), but the Very Lemon Bread didn't require much material-wise, so I tried it out!

It came out delicious, as expected. I don't have a fine grater to zest the lemon with, so I just chopped and minced the rind by hand. Annoying, but I think it was worth it, in the end. The little pieces of zest in the bread were delicious. I also opted to keep the chopped pecans in the recipe-- I usually take out the nuts from any recipe I do just because I don't really like nuts. I was making the bread for my mom and dad, and since they like nuts...

Very Lemon Bread

Very Lemon Bread slice

1 comment

It came out extremely well, albeit more like a cake than bread. We (read: my mother) finished it within a day and a half. It was sweet and tangy, and the nuts were perfect little bits of texture added in to the rest of the loaf.

I have a question:

What is the difference between bread and cake?

*note to self: I need to learn how to take better pictures of my food....*

With this entry, I shall conclude my wanderings through Asia (for the time being, anyway). I returned to the States on August 22, much to my chagrin. But it was a great two months, to say the least, and I do not regret any of it. I hope that in the future I may have as much fun and meet as many new friends in my travels abroad as I did this time around. To those of you whom I met-- I miss you! I hope to see you soon!

On our last day in Japan, we only had enough time to grab breakfast and then head over to the Narita Airport. Because there were a lot of people in line, we didn't even get the chance to take a look around the Narita Airport mall, which meant no crepes for us... I was sorely disappointed, and, as my brother can attest, cranky for some time (being hungry and deprived of the food I was looking forward to makes me a grouchy old hag).

Since breakfast our previous day was quite delicious, we explored some more and ended up getting breakfast at a Japanese Vie de France place.

Breakfast - Vie de France Apple creme bread

This is one of the breads they are "known" for, so I tried it. Yummy, warm and creamy inside, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Breakfast - Vie de France Chocolate bread

My brother is our family's resident chocoholic (makes up for my abstinence from chocolate, I suppose), so this was for him.

Breakfast - Vie de France Curry Kurokke (croquette)

Breakfast - Vie de France Curry Kurokke (croquette) - inside

As we sped off to the airport, we didn't eat anything else. Inside the airport, however, several hours and security checkpoints later, we finally bought the only food they actually had. If you can call it food, that is...

McDonald's Shrimp Sandwich

Okay, to be honest, it was pretty good (maybe because I was hungry). It was like a southern shrimp po'boy, but with the shrimp all in one large patty. I liked it well enough.

And then we boarded the airplane and... well, what's next? Airplane food!

Jon's Airplane dinner

I don't know whose was better. His, or mine...

My Airplane dinner

Not great, but what am I expecting? Airplane economy food is... what it is. I am not complaining particularly much.

Breakfast on the Airplane

Oh yeah, and our breakfast. Omelet and sausage and fruit. I liked the fruit...

And then we were HOME.

O__O

Next: I will be posting some pics from home and California (I spent a week there after arriving home in Maryland).