Since dropping DoTA my new passion is casual games. Now all of you gamers out there will groan and say that's boring, but hey, that's what rocks my boat. I don't complain about you guys DoTAing every night, you don't complain about me playing point-and-click games, capische?
Now that I have my own kitchen, I'm constantly going through food/baking blogs for recipes. I prefer it when a blogger has tried the recipes before, as they give feedback on the results and such. So I've been browsing through some of my favourite baking blogs and bookmarking whatever that took my fancy. To be honest, I've never baked much before, and whatever recipes I've tried before mostly ended in failure.
Like the cookies that melted into one huge cookie.
Like the cakes that never rose or burnt.
Like the time I used self-raising flour and the tarts ended up tasting funny.
This year, I started off with a banana cake and some chocolate truffles. No pictures, sadly. I baked it on the last Friday in February with the help of a eager-but-inexperienced friend. The banana cake did not rise and the cream cheese icing turned out wrong. The chocolate truffles came out right, but since I decided to forgo the normal "rolling in cocoa powder" and instead decided to coat it with melted chocolate, some turned out to look like shit. Still, it tasted pretty good, and my boyfriend appreciated it (since it's every otaku's dream to receive Valentine chocolate, late as they may be).
After that, I decided to make a cake for a friend's birthday. Now, after the banana cake fiasco, I was quite scared that something wrong would happen, so I tried to follow the recipe as accurately as I could. I decided on a chocolate strawberry cake as the said friend loves strawberries. Now, the recipe called for the chocolate cake to be cut into two and for the middle to be layered with white ganache, whipped cream and strawberries. The ganache tasted funny, I ended up using more whipped cream than the recipe called for. Thank goodness I had 4-5 bottles of cream on hand, and I ended up using 3 bottles to make the cake...goodness.
Guess which is mine?Despite not looking fancy at all, the birthday girl was happy. Guess half a kilo of strawberry goodness will do that to you =) I even got complimented on the taste. Apparently it was better than the sticky-date pudding one of the other girls at the table had the night before.
Flushed with success, I decided to make a chocolate molten cake for dessert the next day. I had invited my boyfriend for dinner - just chicken soup with rice - and I decided to finish with something fancy. Now, the recipe called for 10 minutes of baking (overbaking will cause it to just be a chocolate pudding cake, not molten), the last time I did that, it ended up becoming said pudding. I changed the settings on the oven, and this time... one of the cakes turned out right, another turned out to be pudding. The reason was because I poured more batter into one ramekin, so the cake in that ramekin was only partially cooked, and the other was mostly cooked, resulting in a pudding.
As I knocked the cakes out onto dessert plates to be served with boysenberry ice-cream, my inquisitive boyfriend was standing there. The first cake popped out and immediately molten chocolate oozed out of the cake. The second smaller and more cooked cake came out dry.
"Ok, that's mine." He pointed to the cake resting in the pool of chocolate.
"Of course it's.... Hey!"
That's how it's supposed to look like. I failed.
Flushed with success, I decided to make a chocolate molten cake for dessert the next day. I had invited my boyfriend for dinner - just chicken soup with rice - and I decided to finish with something fancy. Now, the recipe called for 10 minutes of baking (overbaking will cause it to just be a chocolate pudding cake, not molten), the last time I did that, it ended up becoming said pudding. I changed the settings on the oven, and this time... one of the cakes turned out right, another turned out to be pudding. The reason was because I poured more batter into one ramekin, so the cake in that ramekin was only partially cooked, and the other was mostly cooked, resulting in a pudding.
As I knocked the cakes out onto dessert plates to be served with boysenberry ice-cream, my inquisitive boyfriend was standing there. The first cake popped out and immediately molten chocolate oozed out of the cake. The second smaller and more cooked cake came out dry.
"Ok, that's mine." He pointed to the cake resting in the pool of chocolate.
"Of course it's.... Hey!"
That's how it's supposed to look like. I failed.
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