i made biscotti! again, i know. i love the sheer crispness of it, and the fact that so little fat is necessary for baking (makes it easier when im just not bothered enough to warm butter, or even buy butter).

the original recipe was meant to make an immensely chunky, nut-speckled cracker with the dough serving more like gravel does to hold bricks in place, but i chose a less chunky version with sweet raisins because sometimes, i just plain like the cracker. toss the flour in a bowl and top with your assortment of goodies: here i chose mixed chopped nuts (always found that these were easier to use in biscotti because you didnt have to risk messing up your cutting when the nuts were just too hard oops i believe that was a sexual innuendo :x), sweet dark currants and poppy seeds. poppy seeds are AMAZING. i love the taste and smell of them, and miss them desperately when i can't get them in singapore.


if you would mix them all up, you get this thick dough. but persevere! halfway through i thought she had missed out adding the oil in with the egg, but if you continue, it does mix up to a very nicely thick dough that's easy to work with.



pat it into logs, or press it into a loaf pan. didnt have the latter, so i made these by hand. the dough was wonderful! i didnt even need to damp my fingers to work with it.


toss them in the oven and cook till done, and remove to a chopping board.



after slicing, toast them in the oven once more, a couple minutes each side, and you get WONDERFUL biscotti.


you can find the original list of ingredients on the link above, but here is what i used.

1 1/3 cups white whole wheat flour
1 cup currants
2 tbsp poppy seeds
2/3 cup chopped nuts
scant 1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup castor sugar

yes, i know the oil is missing from the equation. i didnt have a brush to use, and didnt think it would be necessary for my biscotti to brown, so i plain left it out. to your discretion, dearies.

and just as a treat! here is some castella cake that my housemate bought from japan. it's really a soft, lovely, butter sponge cake. i havent had it before, although i've been reading about it and i thought it would be denser, like a butter cake, and richer. but it really was rather nice and japanese, if that makes sense.

here's trying out a pie crust that i saw online and was intrigued by. david lebovitz's melted and browned butter crust, together with his recipe for a lime meringue tart tweaked to a lemon-orange one.


it's really fun! you mix oil, butter, water, sugar in a bowl, and place it in the preheating oven that you're preparing to bake the crust. after that, dump the flour in its entirety and watch it sizzle away. so exciting that i completely forgot the camera (largely because im a wimp and and didnt dare to leave in case the flour burnt or something drastic like that. rescue's are a no-no, im completely disgusting at them). then you mix it up very easily into a dough that leaves the sides of the bowl, and is malleable and easy to work with.


press the dough into tart pans ( i chose to use mini tart ones). OR you can get someone to do this sort of menial tasks while you get on with the filling.



dont press these in too thickly though, because you want a good mix between the crust and the filling, and because these crusts rise for some reason, although there isnt too much mixing or leavening.


prepare 3 eggs and 3 egg yolks in a bowl and omgosh look so pretty.


mix it in with lemon juice and butter that has been warmed in a saucepan, and whisk it in together.


see they rise and make a puffy biscuit. this was not expected, which is why the crust really was thicker than i might have wanted it. it tasted good though, but the crust was brittle and so cracked and broke a lot easier.


use the filling, and then bake this for another ten minutes to set the top. they look very aesthetically pleasing right now! and so tart and nice.


prepare a stiff meringue (although i didnt do this well enough, and the meringue didnt hold up nor hold onto the grooves when i piped them out). AND THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LEAVE A BOY WITH A PIPING BAG AND LEFTOVER MERINGUE.

dont do it, unless you're absolutely sure you dont want it anymore.


delegate work, and get someone else to do the piping if you're not sure about it yourself. bet you remember when earlier i said you could hence blame someone else this way (:



here's when i say the crust was brittle. tasted very good though! and here i burnt the meringue because i left it under the broiler for far too long ):

here's the recipe for the filling and crust, and just replace the lime juice with a mix of orange and lemon juice for a more interestingly-tasting one. adjust the sugar to taste, of course.

start with a hunk of bread dough. smash down and cut into strips with a pizza cutter (which you would have in your possession), brush one side with butter and dip into cinnamon sugar and bake.


make curly-wurly twists (only because the pan doesnt allow for full length twists).


or make elegant long sticks. that you could probably serve in a tall vase as an elegant starter.

ideas of savory versions with herbs, or sweet ones with other spices and or herbs.
make up your own!

how does that not sound nice to you? the formula is simple, and what's better: this cake is fat-free. which means less-guilt, since it's almost non-fat but for the chocolate, but not guilt-less, since there's quite a bit of sugar in there.


mash up three bananas to a pulpy mix. i dont usually have the patience to wait for them to ripen, so i always end up using just-ripe bananas for the bread. haven't found any problems with moistness in the final dough though.


mix this up with the usual suspects: flour, sugar, cinnamon powder and baking soda. mmmm, a one-bowl operation.


and look: i chopped up my own chocolate. the last time i properly worked with chocolate chips was a long time ago, and i have resolved not to do that unless i absolutely have to. i love having proper chunks of proper chocolate in my baked goods, and especially in cookies, where they swirl around in the dough. plus i find that many chocolate chips have this strange plasticky sort of taste to them. the hershey sort is alright, but i dont even like those. buy proper chocolate people, it's far worth it.


bake it, cool it, unmold it, cut it.

and be a good neighbor.


look at the chocolate in there! and a chunk of banana as well.
LOVE.

 What I packed for lunch this week: using leftover quiche and more yummy veggies from the farm.

I bought a beautiful lame from a quaint little cookery shop in Toronto, and obviously the first thing I had to try was basic pain a l'ancienne with it. Unfortunately, my inexperience with hearth breads shows.

This is a basic quiche recipe, following the recipe for basic pie dough and quiche. What's in it? A tablespoon of marmite, 3 eggs, local veggies including tomato and kale, plus onions from the supermarket.

Fresh, local vegetables that are organic and in season. In short, precisely the base ingredients you need to develop skill in melding tastes and natural flavors together. I haven't posted in a while, for good reason. So this is a mega summary of how I feel my relationship to food has changed.

To start off this post, I must begin by saying that I read Pollan's books. Then, after researching on sustainable agriculture and discovering so much about the food industry that supplies what we purchase from supermarkets and convenience shops, I felt motivated to do my part to support local agriculture. I've signed up for a local CSA in the region, and I've been living mostly on what they provide me weekly (along with my stores of grains, flours and additional, judicious purchases of soy products and seasonings).

An astute reader would notice immediately that there is no meat in my weekly groceries. Yes, I am trying to reduce my consumption of meat. It's been approximately a month since I started this drive towards a meatless diet. Personally, I couldn't be happier, because of the delicious veggies I've been getting, but I get mixed reactions from people.


Anyway, I am very happy with my subscription and I'm not looking forward to the end of October, which is when it gets too cold for veggies to grow here :( I feel like the last few weeks have been a huge learning curve for me, and I have begun to question a lot of the assumptions I've had about the food I buy and eat.

In my subsequent posts, I'll be striking more of a balance between baking and cooking, especially dishes that are primarily vegetarian (or even maybe vegan). Meanwhile, enjoy the pictures of fresh veg!

Postscript: Sadly, the gorgeous tomatoes that were so ripe and sweet would be the only two this year from my CSA, due to the heinous late blight that attacked their crop.

an auntie's favorite coconut macaroons.

nothing but egg white as binder, a bit of sweetener and coconut, these are easy and wonderfully coco-nutty.

guest-starring weiliang liew, who roped me in on his effort to build a multi-million-dollar pineapple-tart enterprise. soon to take london by storm, look out for it.


so the entire idea of pineapple tarts is simple. barely sweet pineapple jam baked in, or on, a crumbly buttery crust. they appear as covered up cookies, or thumbprint ones and can be as elaborate as you would suppose. only 2 parts to the cookies ultimately, pineapples and butter and as with most things this simple, it's very difficult to get it right, as you'll soon find out.


our pièce de résistance, homemade pineapple jam. a family recipes, so unuploadable. if you go search online though, you'll probably find a couple variations on sugar and pineapple quantities. just experiment! he made about three pineapples worth, and that's a huge (and very tiring!) batch of cookies. i would think start small.



our first try at the cookie dough. this turned out very crumbly, and difficult to work with because the dough didn't clump together. wl, oh master baker, mentioned that the unbaked dough could reflect the texture of the product after baking, but im not too sure. this worked out into a very nicely crumbly AND INCREDIBLY tasty dough, but with the quantity of pineapple paste we had to deal with, it just wasnt practical.

being of greater perseverance than i could ever aspire to be, he managed to gather it into a soft dough to wrap around pineapple jam. see how soft the dough is! it flops over the paste. dear lord i gave up on this while he went on.


oh great warrior, be strong.


subsequent scoring, and even that was difficult. this first experiment was very tumultous, but it really should teach me some patience. or teach me that i have none.
i think the latter, that's easier.

but i moved on! i made a different dough in order to test out recipes as well. this one turned out so pretty and easily worked into a dough.

time to highlight something else! there are two schools of thought on rolling these pastries out. WEILIANG LIEW'S involves rolling out the dough into a rectangle and laying out a strip of pineapple jam in the middle before rolling them all together, cutting and then smoothing the dough over the ends to seal.

mine involves (and this is embarrassing): make balls from the dough, roll that out into a rectangle, place jam in the middle, roll that up into a cylinder and then cut that into smaller pieces, before rolling the dough into a ball again with the jam in the middle, then gently mould it into a cylinder, before reaching the same results as you would get with weiliang liew's. here is a pictorial:

male vs female methods, if one could be so shameless as to stereotype all women with my impracticality. choose the one that best suits you, but if you pick my method, make sure you're baking ALONE or with someone that indulges your eccentricities.


but look, they turned out so pretty!


but this is what is also known as a disaster. not mine. i love being able to shift the blame to someone else! (delegation of mistakes is what baking with someone else was meant to be like.) it looks positively tumor-like. young kids, if you ever see something like this be sure to tell your parents. it's a monster.

as you can see, the dough could not contain the pineapple and THEY MERGED INTO A MUTANT MIX.




our finished tarts and cookies. sho pwetty, really. they made quite a few and took us about 5 hours total perhaps to use up the jam, but they were worth it. bear in mind that i was playing with the dough while he was hard at work, so that probably added to the time.

goodness, i want one of these now.