Home-made Pineapple Tarts...

I am not going to write any introduction about this because you just HAVE to try it for yourself and surprise yourself!

FILLING

Ingredients

• 2 medium-sized pineapples, skinned & cut into small pieces
• 120g sugar

Method

1. Put pieces of pineapple into food processor and blitz until it becomes mushy.
2. Put the mushy pineapple on a clean cloth and squeeze out all the juice.
3. Cook the remains (not the juice!) of pineapple in a saucepan over low heat (keep stirring).
4. After 5 minutes, add sugar to it gradually. Mix well.
5. Continue stirring over low heat for about 30 minutes or until the mixture looks dry.
6. Cool the filling before putting it into the fridge for 20 minutes.
7. Remove from fridge, take a teaspoon of it and form a ball with your palms. 
8. Set them aside.

TART

Ingredients

• 250g butter, room temperature
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
• 1 egg yolk
• 440g plain flour 
• 1 tablespoon milk
• 1 egg, beaten (for glazing)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 165 Degree Celsius.
2. Cream butter and vanilla essence on medium speed for 4 minutes.
3. Add egg yolk and continue mixing until well incorporated.
4. Mix in dry ingredients on low speed until a coarse, crumbly texture forms.
5. Add in the milk.
6. Place dough on a surface and knead for 2 minutes.
7. Seal it with cling wrap and chill it for 30 minutes.
8. Remove from fridge and pull out some to form 2.5 cm diameter ball.
9. Flatten ball and put pineapple filling in.
10. Wrap the dough around filling and make it into a ball.
11. Brush pineapple tarts with egg wash.
12. Bake for 15 minutes.

Makes about 40.

P.S. While waiting for the filling to cool, you can start with the tart. Just put both the filling ad the tart in at the same time and after 20 minutes, take out the filling and start rolling. By the time you finish, the tart will be ready to be taken out.

P.S. Brush as much egg wash on them as possible, it will give them a very nice golden-brown colour. 

For Those Cookies Lovers...

I was making this yesterday using the "Professional Chef" book. It was called "Chocolate Chunk Cookies". However, I was out of chocolate chips, so I decided to change it to almonds. And I added a twist to the recipe. Hope you guys like it.

Ingredients

• 163g flour
• 3 teaspoon of cocoa powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 pinch of salt
• 100g butter, SOFT
• 35g sugar
• 25g light brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract/ essence 
• 7 - 10 pieces of almonds

Method

1. Cream butter and sugars on medium speed, until smooth and light in colour (5 minutes).
2. Mix eggs and vanilla essence in a small bowl.
3. Chop almonds to tiny pieces.
4. Add to butter-sugar mixture in 5 additions, until fully mixed (scrape down if needed)
5. Measure dry ingredients.
6. On low speed, mix in dry ingredients and chopped almonds.
7. Mix till just incorporated.
8. Prepare a sheet of cling wrap. Scoop the batter and put on cling wrap, wrap up, put in the freezer. Freeze for 30 minutes (or until it is hard enough to roll on your palms)
9. Chop any chocolate into 1.5 cm wide, roll each chocolate into a ball of cookie batter.
10. Flatten cookies with a fork (that will create a pattern for the cookies also).
11. Put into oven for 12 - 14 minutes, 190 Degree Celsius.

Makes 25 (depends on the size of each cookies)

P.S. Adding the egg-vanilla mixture to butter-sugar mixture in 5 additions will help the eggs incorporate better. Mix till it looks a bit fluffy.

P.S. If the cookies are still a bit soft on the underside after cooling, don't scream! Just flip them over and bake for another 6 minutes in the same temperature.

Two Birds With One Stone...

It has been such a hectic weekend and hectic monday also. We (group members) stayed in Changi Airport from friday night all the way to saturday afternoon just to complete the HT Marketing report. And I must say, it has really paid off BIG time. 

We had 2 presentations today. One is Food Hygiene and Safety, the other one is Marketing in Hospitality and Tourism. So had to go through both of the presentations and familiarise myself with them in just one night! Just too rush, but I managed to familiarise 85% of both of the presentations. 

For the Food Hygiene presentation, we have not gotten back any comments from our teacher yet because there was one group who has yet to present to the class due to the lack of time. For the HT Marketing, although we exceeded the time limit which is 15 minutes per group, we received excellent remarks from our teacher. "Very detailed and good research and the promotional ways were really interesting and that is the main focus of the report, Well Done!" We were SO proud of ourselves. 

So today is quite a stressful day but very VERY enjoyable!!!

Incredibly Stupid...

This week is just a horrible week. All the papers from mid-semester tests have been given back to us and I must say, I am terribly disappointed in myself. Nothing more I could say.

I really need to study hard and study smart from now on. No more distractions or what-so-ever. Just go go go until the end.

Family Fish...

I had to translate this recipe into English so that I could upload it here and it took so long! This is because I got this recipe from my mom and she had everything in Chinese. This, again, is really simple. Nothing will burn, nothing will go bad. This is so easy that you could cook it with your eyes closed (I know I am exaggerating a little, but its just to show you how simple it is).

Ingredients

• 3 - 5 spanish mackerel (depends on how many people you are serving)
• 4 - 6 garlics (depends on your liking)
• 1 teaspoon fermented black beans
• 1 teaspoon light soy sauce
• 3 sticks lemongrass
• 4 pieces asam skin
• 1 cup water
• 2 - 3 tablespoon oil (depends on your liking also)

Method

1. Chop garlic finely.
2. Fry chopped onions and fermented back beans in oil until fragrant.
3. Add soy sauce.
4. Immediately after adding soy sauce, add water, lemongrass and asam skin.
5. Mix well and bring it to a boil.
6. When its boiling, put in the mackerels.
7. Simmer for at least 30 minutes. At most 45 minutes.

PS. You can just cook until all the sauce dries up. However, I like it with some sauce so I could dip the fish with some sauce before devouring it. 

PS. You can also use other fishes that you like, as long as you can fit it in whatever you are cooking them with. 

PS. Do not cut the fish into pieces as the fish will be very fragile after cooking.

Banana Chocolate Muffins

This recipe is so easy and fast that I succeeded with the first attempt. A banana muffin recipe of course requires banana. If you have those really REALLY ripe bananas which can't be easily eaten raw, fred not. You can just throw those in this recipe and it will turn out like heaven! As this recipe uses vegetable oil instead of butter or regular oil, it is a lot healthier. So for those health-conscious people, this will be your eating-spree! Enjoy!

Ingredients

• 3 very ripe bananas
  
• 125ml vegetable oil
  
• 2 eggs
  
• 250g flour
  
• 50g caster sugar
  
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
  
• 150g chocolate/ raisins (optional)
  

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200 degree celsius and line a 12-bun muffin tin with muffin papers
2. Pour the oil into a measuring cup and beat in the eggs
3. Measure dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder) and out them in to a large bowl
4. Mash the bananas
5. Mix in the beaten-egg-and-oil mixture, followed by the mashed bananas
6. Fold in your chocolates/ raisins
7. Place equal quantities into prepared muffin tins. Fill them up to 3/4 of each muffin paper, not more. Bake for 20 minutes.

Makes 12

PS. I have already reduced the sugar content by half from its original recipe because I don't like food to be too sweet.

A Whole New Everything...

After hours and hours of mind-draining Marketing in Hospitality and Tourism project, it was finally here! Time to celebrate and enjoy!

Met E. at Tampines MRT as usual then we went to VivoCity and guess what? It was so packed that it became SO noisy (luckily the bookstore was quiet, if not I would have gone crazy). We had dinner at Le Marché. It was quite expensive but the food was quite nice so it balanced out a little. Still, I think its quite expensive. 

We decided to go for a movie since we had a lot of time to spare (we finished dinner at about 8 pm). So we went to get seats for a movie called "The Duchess". It was a good film as it related a lot of emotions and feelings with the audience which was great. However, it totally ruined my mood for the day because I was so sad after the film. When we came out, there were even more people and they were most probably queuing to get to the rooftop for the countdown. 

Well, we had our plans and that is to go to the bars (either Tantric or DYMK). We decided to get to Tantric first to see the crowd there. And guess what again? There were not many people there, sad to say. PLUS, the crowd there were all not really my type so we just went on to check DYMK out and it was SO MUCH better than Tantric. Although there were not as many people as Tantric, it was just such a relaxing place with the bar feeling still there. The crowd there were not as bitchy and arrogant as those in Tantric. It was just nice. I had a sprite (as I was not feeling like drinking anything alcoholic that night) and a mocktail and the mocktail was on one of E.'s friend who is working there! How fabulous! The employees there were really friendly and polite (and of course, cute).

We left around 1.30 pm and caught a train back home. The train people has extended their working hours since it was New Year's Eve and New Year. Oh well, all in all, it was such a great day.