Multigrain chocolate chip muffin

I haven’t baked for a long while.  Recently I bought some cake loafs from the local supermarket to satisfy some cravings, but I found that even though they tasted good, they were fairly greasy and I did not feel too well afterwards.  I have decided to resume baking again.

I only stocked the basic ingredients at home, so let’s see what I can whip up… Hum… Chocolate chip… How about some chocolate chip muffins?

Ingredients

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 7/8 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp of salt
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1 tsp of vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup milk (I used skimmed)
• 1/2 cup oil (I used canola)
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400F
2. In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together.
3. Beat the eggs.  Add milk, oil and vanilla extract to the beaten eggs.
4. Make a well with the dry ingredients.  Slowly pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, approximately 1/4 at a time.  Mix well.
5. Add the chocolate chips to the batter.
6. Line the muffin tray with paper liners.  User an ice cream scope to portion the batter into muffin tray.  This recipe yields 12 muffins.
7. Bake for 18-20 minutes.

This recipe is very easy and no mixer is required.  Let me know what you think!

Fluffy Banana Bread

The banana bread recipe I came across are usually moist but dense.  Wanted something fluffier this time, so I decided to try a new recipe.

Ingredients

• 3 extra ripe bananas
• 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• pinch of salt
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp of vanilla extract
• 1/3 cup of melted butter
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 3/4 cup roasted sunflower seeds (optional, or replaced by other nuts of chocolate chips)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350F
2. In a large bowl, mash the bananas with a fork.  This should take no effort as the bananas should be extra ripe and soft.
3. Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar into the mashed banana.  Mix well.
4. Add beaten egg, vanilla extra and melted butter to the mixture.  Make sure the butter is not too hot to cook the batter.
5. Toss in the sunflower seeds to the mixture.
6. Pour batter into loaf pan.  Bake for 45 minutes or until cooked.

This recipe is very easy and no mixer is required.  It tasted light and crispy when fresh.  I hope it tastes equally good overnight.  Enjoy!

Super Easy Chocolate Cookies

Home alone on a weeknight and there’s nothing good on TV, so I figured I would bake something.  However, it was already 9pm, so maybe something quick and easy?  What do I have…  devil’s food cake mix, white chocolate chip, butter…  Let’s try to make some cookies with cake mix!  Or should they be called…  cakies?!

Ingredients

• 1 box of chocolate cake mix (I used Betty Crocker’s Super Moist Devil’s Food)
• 1/2 cup of butter (I didn’t have butter in hand so I used margarine.  Best at room temperature)
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoon of vegetable oil
• 1 cup of white chocolate chunks
• 3-4 tablespoon of milk

Direction

1. Preheat oven at 350F.
2. Pour the cake mix into a large bowl.
3. Incorporate the butter and 2 eggs with the cake mix.  The mixture may appear very dry and not everything will mix together.
4. Add the vegetable oil in to moisten up the mixture.  The mixture may still appear very dry at this point.
5. Add enough milk to the mixture so that everything just incorporated and you no longer see any powder.  For the Betty Crocker mix, I added 4 tablespoon of milk.
6. Stir in the chocolate chunks.
7. Use an ice cream scoop to portion batter onto a greased cookie sheet.  Slightly flatten your batter with your fingers.
8. The cooking time depends on the size and thickness of the cookie dough.  I made my cookie dough about 2 inches diameter.  I cooked them for about 11 minutes.  I leave them on the cookie sheet to cool as the fresh cookies are too soft to be removed immediately.
9. The batter yielded about 24 3-inch cookies.

I gave some cookies to a few coworkers and they all loved it.  My hubby even complained I gave out too many of them and didn’t leave enough for him!  LOL.

Easy Buttermilk

Your recipe calls for buttermilk and you don’t have any?  No problem!

All you need is:

• milk
• white vinegar

Instruction

• add 1 tsp of white vinegar to every 1 cup of milk
• wait for 10 minutes
• stir

You have got yourself some buttermilk!

Buttermilk Blueberry Wholewheat Muffins

Went to Emma Lea Farms located in Ladner last weekend for some blueberry picking fun.  What is best to do with the freshly picked blueberries?  Blueberry muffins of course!

Blueberry muffins are one of the easiest thing to make yet taste delicious.  All you have to do is throw all the ingredients in a bowl, stir, and viola!  You got the perfect muffin batter!  This is another recipe based one from JoyOfBaking, with some slight modification to suit personal tastes.

Dry Ingredients

• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup of yellow sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• lemon zest of half a large lemon
• 1 1/2 cup of fresh blueberries

Wet Ingredients

• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1+ cup of buttermilk
• 1/3 cup of vegetable oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375F
2. Line muffin tin with 12 extra-large paper liners
3. Whisk all wet ingredients together, set aside
4. In a large bowl, combine all dry ingredients except for blueberries.  Gently fold in the blueberries when the dry ingredients are all well mixed together.
5. Make a well with the dry ingredients.  Pour half the wet ingredients into the well.  Gently stir until combine.  Add the remaining of the wet ingredients.  Stir until combine.  Do not overmix.
6. If the batter looked too thick, add extra milk.  I added about an extra 1/8 cup.
7. Fill the muffin tins until almost full.  Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Strawberry Cupcakes

My hubby wanted to invite his 10-year-old niece for sleepover, so I planed to make cupcakes with her since she enjoyed baking.  I found an easy recipe from JoyofBaking, and added a few twist to it to suit the summer.  My cupcake recipe is based on this vanilla cupcake recipe with some slight changes.

Ingredients

Vanilla cupcakes

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup granulated white sugar
• 3 large eggs, room temperature
• 1 tsp of pure vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cup cake flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 skim milk

Strawberry buttercream

• 1 cup confectioners sugar, sifted
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/4 cup strawberry jam
• 2 small cartons of half and half cream (the ones you use for coffee)

Instructions

Vanilla cupcakes

1. Preheat oven to 350F
2. Place 12 paper liners in muffin pan
3. With an electronic mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy.  Add in the eggs, one at a time.  Add the vanilla extract.
4. Sift flour, baking powder and salt.  Alternately fold in the flour mixture and milk.
5. Fill the muffin liners with cake batter.  Bake for 15-20 minutes until a toothpick would come out clean.  The colour of the finish product is a light yellow.  It took around 17 minutes for me.

Strawberry buttercream

1. Cream the bugger until smooth with an electric mixer
2. Add in 1/4 cup of strawberry jam.  If the jam has too many big chucks, puree it with a food processor first
3. Slowly add the sifted confectioners sugar to the mixture.  When the mixture appeared dry, add a bit of cream
4. Adjust the amount of sugar and cream according to personal taste and texture

I found that using all-purpose flour as suggested by the original recipe yielded cupcakes that were too hard and tasted like muffins.  Therefore I used cake flour instead and reduced the amount of flour by 1/4 cup.

As for the buttercream, jam already provided sweetness so I cut down the amount of confectioners sugar by 50%.  Even at 1 cup of confectioners sugar, I found it a bit too sweet for my personal liking.  I am still in search for the perfect buttercream recipe.  Although the above tasted great and easy to make, I found the frosting was a bit too runny and grainy.

Enjoy!

Chocolate Angel Food Cake

So behind in blogging!  I have 5 restaurants I haven’t written the review for…  Oh well!  I guess life is always about catching up!

I made an angel food cake last week and it was a complete failure.  However, I still have another carton of almost expiring egg white in the fridge, so I decided to give angel food cake a second shot.  My chocolate angel food cake is based on a recipe from Joyofbaking.

Ingredients

• 1.5 cup carton egg white
• 1 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder (I used Hershey’s special dark cocoa powder)
• 2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoon cream of tartar
• 2/3 teaspoon of cake flour, sifted
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Mix sifted cake flour, salt and 1/3 cup of granulated sugar together.
3. Add 50ml of hot water to dissolve cocoa powder.  Add vanilla extract to mixture.
4. With electric mixer, beat egg white in a large bowl until foamy/bubbly.
5. Add cream of tartar.  Beat until soft peaks form.  (Mixture starts to stick to the egg beater a little bit.)
6. Add 1 cup of sugar to mixture.  Beat until stiff peaks form, ie: you are confident to flip the bowl upside down on top of your head.  Do not overbeat!
7. Fold two scopes of egg white to chocolate mixture.
8. Sift the flour mixture over the egg white (1/4 at a time) and fold the flour into the egg white.  Fold lightly and only in one direction.  Over-mixing will release all the air built up in the egg white mixture.
9. Add chocolate mixture to batter.
10. Pour batter into angel food cake.
11. Bake for 40 minutes.

Foamy, soft peaks, and stiff peaks!

The texture of the cake was great.  However, I ended with a layer of cocoa oil in the bottom of my cake pan.  I think I will cut down the cocoa to 3 tablespoon and sugar to 1 1/4 or even 1 1/8 cup next time.  I will also reduce the vanilla extract to 1.5 teaspoon.

Shang Noodle House

My coworkers and I went to Shang Noodle House for Friday lunch.  This restaurant is located in New Westminster near the Starlight Casino, next to Kirin New Westminster.  It is owned by the same owners as Kirin.

They offer a-la-cart as well as combos.  Their combos consist of an appetizer (steamed prawn dumplings or deep fried wonton), a bowl of noodles and a drink (passion fruit juice or soy milk).  The appetizer and drink seemed to be interchangeable between combos.  I ordered Special A without any substitution.

The steamed prawn dumpling are made by the same chefs as Kirin and they are very tasty.  The BBQ port was tender and flavorful.  The pork broth is not oily at all and the flavor is very natural (little MSG).  The spinach noodle is green, but I could not taste any spinach in it.  The noodle overall was a bit bland, but I like it since I enjoy low-sodium food.  The passion fruit juice is a bit too sweet for me, but it has a very refreshing taste.  I enjoyed the juice a bit more when the ice all melted.  Overall I enjoyed my lunch.

Some other people ordered Special B.  I tried one of the deep fried wontons and I didn’t like it at all.  There was barely any shrimp/meat in that wonton.  It did not come with any dipping sauce either.  All I could taste was flour and oil from the deep fried wonton wrap.  I would definitely substitute it with the steamed prawn dumplings.

Someone at our table highly recommended the xiaolongbao (steam pork dumpling) here.  It is $2.68 for 3 pieces.  I was too full to try it though.

The combos were $9.50 each, which came to about $12 after tax and tips.  The portions were quite big and I was unable to finish mine.  Since there is no definite ethnicity in this place (they served both Southern and Northern Chinese food, as well as Japanese ramen), it is hard to guess what they specialize in and the food quality seemed to be a hit-and-miss.  I may return if I am around the neighbourhood, but I would not deliberately drive here to have noodles as nothing was particularly memorable.

Name: Shang Noodle House
Address: 350 Gifford St, New Westminster
Website: http://www.shangnoodlehouse.com/

Food: 3.5
Service: 3.5
Value: 3
Ambiance: 3.5

 

Cooking Tips: Fish Paste

Do you ever find that cooking fish paste is a pain since it sticks to everything that it touches?  I found this method easy and hopefully you find it useful too.  (Pardon the burnt mark on my pan…  Had a hard time cleaning those off!)

1. Heat up a frying pan at medium heat.  Make sure you put generous amount of oil.  Wait till the oil heats up.  Turn the heat to low.
2. Scrap some fish paste with a knife.  Use a chopstick to scrape the fish paste off the knife into the frying pan.
3. Flip the fish paste over in a minute or so.  Push onto the cooked surface of the fish paste flat with a spatula.  Now the fish paste is flat and can be cooked evenly easily!
4. Flip the fish paste over a few times until both sides are golden.  Optionally, cover the frying pan with a lid to make sure the insides are cooked.
5. Serve!  To have crispier fish paste, pan fry them a second time after they are slightly cooled.

Tonight I made soup with the fried fish paste.  Deelicious!

Easy Honey Glazed Wings

I obtained this recipe at my husband’s co-worker house party.  The wings were so good that we couldn’t stop eating them, and they turned out to be really easy to make!

Ingredients

• wings!
• honey
• soy sauce
• brown sugar (optional)
• salt (optional)
• garlic

Directions

1. Wash the wings and drain.  Dab dry with kitchen towel.  Place them in an oven-safe container.
2. Mix honey and soy sauce together.  The ratio of honey and soy sauce is 2 to 1 (2 part honey, 1 part soy sauce).  The solution should be enough to cover a bit over half of the wings.  Optionally, add a teaspoon or two of brown sugar and a pinch of salt for extra flavoring.  Pour the marinating sauce into the wings.
3. Insert cloves of garlic around the chicken wings.  The amount of garlic depends on your own liking.
4. Let the wings marinate for 30 minutes
5. Preheat oven to 350F.  Cook the wings for 45 minutes total.  Flip half way so the flavor is more even.
6. Turn off the oven.  Have a small opening at the oven.  Let the wings sit for another half an hour.

Bon appetit!