one more for the archives!

last week of school and somebody's birthday so i guess i've been roped in to do my part. what better way to try out recipes that are too extravagant for day-to-day usage?

this time, i made a brownie mosaic cheesecake that i saw on smitten kitchen. that's one amazing blog and i can't get pictures of htat clarity, im afraid. what i can do is attempt to replicate what she does in her kitchen.

this cake is one calorific expedition down the road to cholesterol-filled guilt-ridden obesity and yet i swear that once you have this you WILL not want to stop eating. but that's my opinion. it's really up to you to decide if you still put this in your mouth after you see what's gone in it.

i say: load up on veggies, skip a meal and take a slice.

i used chocolate bourbon creams for my biscuit crust. i ordinarily would use teddy grahams, but those newfangled americanish things aren't quite available here in the uk. not easily anyway, so i used the creams. my helpers for the night were totally lax about removing the cream between the creams HAHAHA so what i did was break them all together, kept the sugar and butter constants the same so texture wouldn't be affected, but added cocoa powder just to up the bitterness and bring it one step away from being far too cloying.

the brownie was later made and baked, left to cool and cubed perfectly. me being me, i placed the brownie cubes in the pan OVER the cocokie crumb in a checkered fashion, only to realise later on that the cheese would cover it all and you can't quite see how it turned out.

a chocolate ganache covered the top and finished the look: mainly by covering the cracks left from not baking the cheesecake in a water bath. but it's perfectly fine. walnuts about the side and that's about it.

a chocolate-cream-cookie-crust with chopped-brownie-cubes covered in creamy-cheesecake.

how does that not sound appealing at all?

unfortunately, i dont have a picture of the inside of the cake, but i swear that can only be a good thing if the description above and the lack of a picture tempts you to bake one yourself jst to see what it can be.

this is adapted from smittenkitchen: you can tell i love this website.


one bowl brownies:
4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 1/4-1/2cups sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour

crumb crust:
1 1/2 cups finely ground cookies (I used bourbon creams. WITH the creams)
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/3 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
about 1 tbsp non-Dutch cocoa (just add to your taste. i left the cream in so it was sweeter than i wanted it to be)

cheesecake batter:
3 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sugar

i halved the brownie and cheesecake batter since my pans are so smalll. for the top i merely used a simple chocolate ganache, nothing too fancy, and set a couple walnuts in just for the pretty.

ok LOONG absence but school's been putting me down SERIOUSLY.
i baked alex a chocolate cake for his birthday just 2 days ago, hence donating about 3.5hours of my life devoting myself to mixing, baking and washing up just so he could get this chocolate cake.

its not too much, just a layered cake with chocolate pastry cream but i was really pleased with it. i fancy it's because the chocolate cake's not too sweet or cloying: the sponge layer was quite nice and airy and provided a nice contrast to the richer pastry cream. i've made this pastry cream twice now, and i have to say i loved it. it's easy to work with and just about tastes fantastic out of the bowl. not that i would know too much about that though.

ok i cant lie. you have to taste the filling before you put it in the cake! im keeping that as my excuse. just a couple of pictures, although i forgot to take one of the inside :(
here's the sponge cake i made for the layers. was a bit worried because the cake kept sinking as it cooled, and the sides weren't straight, but sunk a little in the middle. when i tried to cut it so it was perfectly square and levelled the top of the cake, it seemed a little dry but lightly cocoa-flavored which i liked so that almost convinced me to make a sugar syrup for the layers. i didnt have time to do that though.

so what i did was i layered the pastry cream between the layer. 2 layers of pastry cream between 3 sponge layers, clingwrapped the whole thing and refrigerated it, thinking that the moist pastry cream would help to tie everything together. the next morning, i took the cake out and iced it with the pastry cream (really ought to have made a ganache of some sort so it'd be shiny and pretty, but i had remaining cream and the cream did taste nice so i thought wth let's just do it.)

here's the finished product:the plate's a little messy but this was done before class and i really couldnt do much about being neat. the top are just chocolate slabs that i made and cut up into triangles to do a sort of decoration about it. i thought it was pretty, and alex and i thought the chocolate tasted good, so there.

here's a picture of the chocolate slabs setting on my kitchentop:just some marbled white and dark chocolate. but it was oh-so-satisfying cutting it up into squares and triangles :D

alex liked the cake, enough that he had 2 slices just before we were due to go for lunch so i guess that's good enough.

What I've been up to:

It's the holy grail of bread! SOURDOUGH... I was so excited and happy to receive this batch of starter, because to me sourdough is a bread that all true bakers tackle at some point or other. My personal goal is to start my own starter from a batch of flour, but I'll only have time to do that over summer. For now, I'll practise feeding and maintaining this batch of starter!

I transferred this over to my own tupperware container. Following instructions, I converted this culture into a firm mother starter. I didn't take any pictures, but the starter is basically almost like a dough, the soft pliable kind you get when you make french bread. You leave that out for as long as it's necessary for the starter to double in size, then you degas it and leave it in the fridge to hibernate.

This starter basically replaces the biga you need in baking bread. I halved the recipe for the bread since this was just a sample. It took 5h for the final dough to double in size and after shaping, 3h rising time. I think I probably need to wake up the starter more, it's so sleepy :( I hate wasting flour though, so the thought of discarding everything but for 1 ounce and then rebuilding from that is so painful. Thankfully, I'll be doing that with cheap Gold Medal flour and not my prized KAF (o-so-painful on the wallet).

I left it to rise a bit too much, as you can see from the huge air bubble near the top of the bread. The recipe was meant for a free standing boule or baguette but I just put it in my baking tin like a sandwich loaf, and even baked it at 375F.

It's certainly a start, but nothing much. I'm just glad it didn't turn out to be a brick of dough! I was so worried because the initial 3 hours didn't produce any activity in the final dough... Oh well, I'll keep working at it!

Spring break's almost here, so happy holidays to all! Have a wonderful restful break. :)

Kamosuzo!

I baked them again! They are so fun to make and pretty easy. I have some left over dough, need to use it up somehow. Wonder what I can make with them. Hm. If I get some chocolate spread... maybe I can make some wassants.

I used KAF and butter this time round, and the bread turned out to be the extremely fluffy and tissue-y Hokkaido Milk loaf kind of bread. Delicious! And I didn't burn the tips of the raisins this time. The bottom parchment also doesn't really stick any more. Hooray, hooray.

Why are you reading this? Get baking too!

All I need to complete this weekend is a loaf of whole wheat struan... but I'm still eating the one I made. Sigh.