33 posts tagged “homemade”

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. 

[Note: Disney pictures will be up soon-- I just have to sort through all 500+ of them first...]

Because the maternal head of household was busy carting the youngest brother to volunteer work last night, dinner was prepared by yours truly. I decided to make a pasta as the main course of our dinner menu, and after briefly searching online and through my various cookbooks for a simple, easy-to-prepare recipe, I settled one from Williams Sonoma: Farfalle with Peas and Prosciutto.

Farfalle with Peas and Ham

I modified the recipe and replaced the prosciutto with ham because my mother doesn’t particularly like the taste of prosciutto. It came out well and was perfect for a summer dinner—light and savory without too much fuss. Plus, my youngest brother gave it the a-okay for taste! Hurrah, I have succeeded!

The rest of the meal was quite straightforward – staples at our dinner table, really.

There was the ever present broccoli and the chinese cabbage:

And Hakka-styled stir fried tofu strips and sweet white corn:

To see the recipe for the farfalle, please visit my wordpress, 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.

The lemon syrup cake I make is something that almost never fails to please. I've been making it for years, and it has happily obliged me each time. So when I decided to have a nice food-fest this past Sunday, my lemon syrup cakes made their usual appearance. Except this time, I decided to try something a bit different.

Lemon Syrup Cupcakes

I made cakelets! Cupcakes, cakelets, whatever one might call them-- they were small and cute and totally yummy. I wasn't sure on the bake time, and I was a little pressed for time because I wanted to go outside to play tennis with my dad, which meant finishing these in record time.

Lemony syrupy goodness

The tops weren't as browned as I usually like it, but it kind of reminded me of soft, doughy cookies. It wasn't that they were underbaked though, and the tops of my lemon syrup cakes are almost never very dark (very dark = very burnt), and they were moist inside, so it doesn't really matter. I'm going to have to try this recipe again though, and see how a second, more properly regulated batch will turn out.

Plus, I want to ice the next batch after I glaze it.

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Sunday night was BURGER night. My dad had ordered a bunch of stuff from Omaha Steaks a couple of months back, and my mom tends to forget about the stuff in the freezer when she cooks dinner (we go grocery shopping every day, so our freezer is usually only stocked with ice cream, frozen dumplings, and frozen shrimp-- all our meat and vegetables are bought fresh daily), and we still had burgers, baked potatoes, and franks left.

Never one to let food go to waste, I decided to do something about it and announced to my dad in the morning that we were going to have burgers for dinner. And so it was. I went out and bought the things that normally go with burgers (ketchup, relish, lettuce, tomato, onions, and the like) and prepared our dinner that night.

Messy but yummy Omaha burgers

Actually, I lied. My dad made the burgers. I was busy with everything else, and he wanted to try out the new iron skillet my mom bought recently. It worked out pretty well.

Basil-parmigiano-reggiano baked fries

And I baked some fries to go with our meal. Hey, on the rare occasion that my family eats an American-styled dinner, we need to have some side dishes that are "American" as well, right? I need to keep these fries from sticking to the pan, however. I'll have to add more oil to the pan next time before I put them in the oven, I guess.

All-American meal

And... voila! My Omaha Steaks cheeseburgur with American cheese, lettuce and tomato, coupled with a large batch of baked fries! Hurrah!

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

In light of the fact that my last blueberry pie was so enthusiastically devoured by my coworkers, I decided to bake a new pie. This time, the crust took only about half an hour to make, which was nice. The dough came together pretty well, and I had less trouble rolling it out. However, I had a lot of dough leftover, so next time I plan to make a thicker dough for both the base and for the top crust. Perhaps I'll try baking it slightly beforehand as well.

Blueberry Pie Blueberry

2 comments

The time I made my first blueberry pie, I bought the blueberries from Trader Joe's. They were wild and organic. This time, I found bags of blueberries on sale at my local supermarket. This time, they were non-wild and non-organic (I do like to stick with organic foods, but unfortunately with my current salary, it is probably most wise for me to be frugal where possible). The surprising thing to me was the size of the berries. Call me ignorant, perhaps, but I was a bit startled at the difference between organic and conventional berry size.

Starry Starry Pie

Nevertheless, I continued making my pie. And this pie is dedicated to my cousin, Ruby, because today is her birthday! To my oldest friend (she is one of the few people of whom I can truly say I have known my entire life) Happy birthday dear girl, and I hope all your wishes come true. Haha, is that too sappy?

Slice a la Pie

Blueberry Muffins

I also made blueberry muffins for my friends Caroline and Anna when I went to visit them at their work at Georgetown University. It was the week of spring break at the school where my lab is, and I took three extra days off from the two allotted to staff members so that I could have the full week off.

The muffins were made from a mix I had picked up on sale from the supermarket a long time ago, and while there was nothing wrong with the muffins, I did realize while making them the difference between making desserts from scratch and from a box mix; there is a distinct aroma from the muffin mix that was so surprisingly ...commercial. I could not pinpoint it directly, but I have decided that all of my future endeavors in the baking realm shall be from scratch. At least, all the ones that I can help, anyway.

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In other news, I recently cut my hair.

Short and sweet

2 comments

My hair hasn't been this short since I was five, and it's a welcome change. Now the only problem is to figure out how I'm going to tie it up for when I need it out of my face...