Merry Christmas with cutout butter cookies!

I have been busy recently with a major spring cleaning to get ready for a repaint in the house in January. So there is not much chance for baking from now till end of January maybe.

But I really want to make use of my new cookie cutters. :P So since it is school holidays now, and my nieces still want to make some Christmas cookies on their own, we make these Christmas butter cookies together for fun.

All these cookies are made by them, with some help from me. I must say they did a great job (they are only 3 years old)! It helps that the cutters are extremely easy to use and the recipe from HHB is also very good as the dough is easy to manage.

Cutout Butter Cookies

Ingredients (about 35 pieces):

100g butter, softened at room temperature
80g caster sugar
1 egg yolk
180g cake flour
20g corn flour

Method:
1. Cream butter and sugar till fluffy.
2. Whisk in egg yolk.
3. Fold in sifted flours. Knead to form a dough, wrap and chill for a while.
4. Roll out the dough and cut out cookies with cookie cutters.
5. Bake at 175 deg C for 15 minutes till light golden brown.

Recipe adapted from: HHB

Here I wish everyone:

Merry Christmas and a great year in 2013!!

Homemade Soymilk with Joyoung

I got my Joyoung soymilk maker finally, with help from someone who went for a trip to China recently. The model we got is DJ11B-D30D. Actually, I'm still quite confused about all the different models. As long as it can make soymilk, I'm quite satisfied. :)

This model belongs to the 植物奶牛 series, a newer model with latest grinding technology and the soy milk produced is extremely thick and appetizing (a reader told me about this). It has functions like dry beans 干豆, soaked beans 湿豆, grains 五谷, juice 果汁, jam 果酱, milk tea 奶茶 and easy washing 轻松洗. It doesn't have rice paste 米糊 but can use grains 五谷 for this. It also doesn't have cream soup 浓汤. I must find out how I can do it.

Before I got my soymilk maker, I saw this book "十三亿人都在喝的神奇养生豆浆" selling at Popular bookstore with discount for members, so I bought it. I will be referring to this book very frequently for recipes using Joyoung maker.

Here's my Homemade Soymilk 黄豆豆浆 using Joyoung for the first time.

Homemade Soymilk 黄豆豆浆
Anti-oxidant, anti-aging 抗氧化，抗衰老

Ingredients:
80g soybeans
15g sugar

Method:
1. Soak soybean overnight, remove membrane/skin, rinse a few times till clean.
2. Add the soybean into the maker, fill water up to 1000ml mark.
3. Select soaked bean function and start. It takes only 25 minutes.
4. When done, filter the soymilk. Add in 15g sugar, stir till dissolved and serve!

Bake King Open House Demo Classes

Bake King had celebrated their 60th anniversary over the last weekend and I attended 2 of their open house demo classes.

I signed up 2 classes that interest me very much. One is the Chocolate Hokkaido Cupcakes, where we learnt how to bake the chiffon cake and make the pastry cream from instructor Gina Tan. You know I'm very much a chiffon cake fan and it's great to learn more about it. The cake is delicious!

The other is the Ribbon Fondant Cake. I have always wanted to learn more about making fondant cakes but very hesitant to try out. Really learnt a lot from the experienced instructor Tricia Tjhin. See how beautiful the cake is!

I also received their 60th anniversary recipe book and an apron. Plus I got to enjoy a few desserts. It was a very fun day! Thank you Bake King!

M&M Cookies - blogging from mobile

This post is entirely created from mobile phone using blogger app, including taking and editing the photo too. I wonder how it will appear on the screen. As I do not have access to a computer now until I get a new one, I'm relying on my phone for everything. Since some things cannot be done using a phone, please forgive if I did not reply here or my fb.

Back to this M&M cookies, they were baked for little kids graduation party for gift exchange. I like them nice, buttery and crunchy.

Ingredients (about 40pcs):
110g butter
70g sugar
50g egg
200g cake flour
4g baking powder
M&M chocolate

Method:
1. Cream butter and sugar till fluffy.
2. Whisk in eggs.
3. Fold in sifted flour and baking powder. Knead to form a dough, wrap and chill for a while.
4. Take 10g of dough. Roll round and flatten slightly. Press in M&M.
5. Bake at 180 deg C for 15 minutes.

Recipe adapted from: Lucky Inn

Guest post: Cartoon Butter Cookies

I have been invited by Dee of PruneNurture to write a guest post for her blog. Dee was my secondary school classmate and we were very good friends then. We lost touch for a few years and found each other on Facebook. She is now married with a very cheerful and active little girl, Dot. She now blogs about her parenting experience and the growing journey of her girl. Her blog is also one of the finalist for the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards 2011 for the Best Parenting Blog.

When she invited me to do a guest post for her, I agreed immediately. Since her blog is about children and parenting, I decide to share a recipe that parent and child can bake and bond together. Baking is a wonderful activity for children. Baking gives children the opportunity to pick up lots of skills, such as identifying ingredients, concept of math - like measuring weight and volume, temperature and time. Different ages of children can also perform simple motor skills like sifting, stirring, pouring, cutting and decorating. What's more they can enjoy the product of their hardwork!

Here's a simple butter cookie recipe. I use natural ingredients to make different coloured doughs. You can use any cookie cutters you like or use your own creativity to make any cookies that you can imagine.

Hop over to the Cartoon Butter Cookies recipe here.

Massive baking order

I just completed my first large baking order last week. It was quite a good experience. I put my maths to good use, preparing and calculating the amount of ingredients and packaging material that I need. Then buying the ingredients, including loads of flour, sugar, butter and eggs. I think I used 100 eggs at least. The egg seller seems to be very happy. Hehe! :)

The most stressful part would be baking within a short time. I took 1 day to prepare the egg tart dough. 2 days of actual baking. As my oven and mixer is small, I had to do several batches and in-between washing and drying took up some time. I was a little late in delivering the orders and luckily the buyer was very understanding. I received very good reviews and hopefully they are happy with my bakes.

Here's what I had baked. I got a huge sense of satisfaction after completing everything! :)

210 mini chocolate chips muffins

119 chiffon cupcakes - cranberry and banana

145 egg tarts

For Children's Day

My first mini order for Children's Day. 

20 bags of Mini Chocolate Chips Muffins.