Patisserie Love

I visited a newly opened dessert place recently. It's the 2nd branch of Passion Food Cafe but with different concept. PF is a cafe which serve meals while PL is more like Starbucks concept but the main attractions are the cakes and cupcakes. 

The environment is quite relaxing with minimal but sufficient decorations. However I think they can provide more sofa seats instead of the wooden chairs. The background music is soothing. The selections of cakes and cupcakes are quite a lot. The drinks menu is quite good too. The staffs are very friendly and helpful, very good customer services.

As I am full when I was there, I only ordered a coffee and sit there with my bf reading the free magazines provided. We managed to get the sofa seats so no complaints haha. 

Speed of serving is normal. Not particularly fast but they do make some effort on the latte I ordered haha. Love the bear lol. I ordered hazelnut latte and it taste good. I notice the syrups they use are same as the one in Starbucks/ coffeebean, not sure which one though lol.

I bought 4 cakes for takeaway as they having the opening offer, which I get 50% off the 2nd cake I bought. So I paid for the price of 3 cakes for 4 haha. 

Bailey's misu. Their original version by twisting the tiramisu recipe by adding bailey liquor instead. It's the most expensive cake I bought, cost RM9.90. The taste was alright with sufficient generous amount of mascarpone cheese. However I don't like the container of the cake as I can't really dig out the cheese at the corners. 

Tiramisu. Again the container lol. However the taste was good. My bf complain about the chocolate powder on top as its v easy to get choked when eating. Maybe they can put little bit less of that. 

Strawberry cake. This is my favorite among 3 as the sponge cake is really soft with cream in between with strawberry chunks. I think they can put more strawberry chunks. The flower icing thing taste good too. 

The last cake I bought was Black Forest but it was eaten by my mum so can't comment on that really haha. My mum said it was good as it's not too sweet for her. 

That's all for the review and hopefully I get to visit PF soon as I'm really interested in the cheese burger they selling haha. Until next time :)

Chocolate Molten Cake

Fresh from the oven people! Just made the chocolate molten cake and here I am sharing with you guys how I made it :)

Anyway I used the recipe from bbc good food but varied a little based on the ingredients I had at home. Also i prefer less sweet so i reduce the amount of sugar and substitute with cocoa powder. So I will share my recipe here:

50g butter

50g cooking chocolate 

2 medium eggs

40g sugar

25-30g unsweetened cocoa powder

20g all purpose flour

The steps were same as the recipe. Melt and mix the butter and chocolate. Then mix with other ingredient until smooth. Be careful not to cook the eggs so i add the sugar with eggs and other ingredient before mixing with the hot mixture. Then before the chocolate start to solidify, equally pour the mixture into ramekins or other oven proof material. I would suggest to use baking paper to line the container so that it won't stick. Alternatively you can spread some butter in the container. Oven at 200 degree Celsius for 10 minutes in my case. Then just invertly push out the cake onto a plate. Serve with whipped cream will be heaven!

If you want something from fridge you can also put the mixture into the fridge and make chocolate mousse instead. Which is equally nice. 

 

 This is the chocolate mousse. Smooth and thick, the way I like it.

Da-dang!! Chocolate molten cake. Look just like the way I want it. Liquid chocolate bursting out from inside. Coolest successful dessert I baked to date haha.

Hope you guys like it:)

Brownies From Ready-mix Pack

Well well well, it's Monday again! Always feel so lack of energy on Monday and i think everyone knows why haha.

Anyway, brownies!

I used the ready-mix brownies pack i bought ages ago with 2 eggs, 1/4 cup of water and 1/2 cup of oil as directed. Everything is accurately measured this time. It took me like 10 minutes top to start and put the tray into the oven. Extremely easy this time haha. The key point was to follow everything accurately and you'll get exactly what the box said you'll get. It is definitely easier than making brownies from scratch. However, if looking at the money aspect, ready-mix pack is expensive compared to buying all the ingredients by urself.

The final product. Big love for the crispy top!

Surprisingly thick texture. Just to be clear i didn't put any extra chocolate to make it looks like molten chocolate cake.

The brownies taste really nice, not too sweet except for the crispy layer. Might actually get the ready-mix pack again if i need to haha.

Half-baked Nagasaki Cake

Weekends are too good yet too short every single time isn't it? Just found out that i have a surprisingly good number of views yesterday for my recent post, which makes my day =)

Today i'm going to talk about the Half-baked Nagasaki cake i attempted to bake few weeks ago lol. Last Monday i spent time talking about the General election thingy and left this out. Anyway, it was a up-level challenge as people who always bake cakes would know, without an automatic blender, it is quite hard to make something fluffy and soft. And me, was determined to break this myth and bake some spongy cake.

I managed to beat the eggs and sugar mixture into a foamy texture but only the surface is foamy. The bottom part of the mixture still remain as fluid, i'm guessing it is not easy to incorporate the egg yolks with the egg whites which are easier to foam the meringue. Anyway, i got tired of exercising my hand muscles and therefore continue with the steps despite the incomplete meringue and send it to be baked.

Doesn't look too bad when i pull it out from the oven. The only problem is that regardless i followed the full recipe this time, the mixture is too little to fill the mould therefore it turns out pretty flat.

This is how it looks like after a few seconds/minutes. This is not a failure though because it is meant to look this way. Tried it and realised it's totally not spongy and below that nice thin brown surface the texture actually look and taste like Malay's kuih (kueh) especially the layered kueh (as shown below).

Oh well, i'm sure i'll try to bake it again when i get the blender from my bf's place. The next baking will probably be brownies as I still have a pack of instant mix brownie flour from ages ago and the expiring date is getting close.

Have a great day people!

Recipe resource: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5578602f01016adb.html

A Sweet Mistake - Chocolate Muffin/Cupcake

Anyone suffering from monday blue today? Hope everyone's alright =)

Anyway, I'm so excited to talk about my baking session last week! Well, i found a chocolate muffin recipe and thought i could bake some to finish up the paper cups i left from the hokkaido chiffon cake session.

As usual, i thought i will just use half amount of each ingredients as i only have 3 or 4 paper cups left. However, things happen. After i finish mixing the flour and baking powder to create 130g of self-raising flour, i forgot to halve the rest of the ingredients =.= So ya, i use the original amount of ingredients with only 130g of self-raising flour. Forgot to put more baking powder too yey. Milk was substituted with the chocolate milk and no vanilla extract was used as i was too lazy to cut the vanilla stick.

So it turn out to have super runny mixture which i still use it anyway.

I've got my WHISK finally =) Ya, it looks like extra-chocolate chocolate milk. And the chocolate cubes i've thrown in all sink to the bottom, thanks to gravity. Anyway, everything happens for a reason so i'm still gonna bake it. Tried a small amount in the paper cups i used in the hokkaido chiffon cake session but the mixture leaked out so i change to a smaller cupcake's cup. The baking time was exactly 10 minutes.

Doesn't look too bad right? Except that the surface is like moon surface, i guess i didn't whisk too well haha. Used a chopstick to confirm that inside was cooked yey!

Due to my mistake of putting too little flour, the cake is very moist and soft which is actually v nice. Very light and fluffy too. After baking the samples, i decide to just throw in the mixture into the cake mould for convenience and laziness haha. Because the chocolate cubes are too heavy for the mixture, i filter out the chocolate and put half of the mixture in the cake mould and baked for 10 minutes first. Then i take out the half-cooked cake and pour in the mixture with chocolate cubes. By doing this, the chocolates will not sink to the bottom as the cooked layer will hold the weight of the chocolates. Then, i put the cake back into the oven for another 10 minutes.

This is how it looks like when it came out from the oven. The chocolate was melted and it actually looks like those chocolate lava cake haha.

This is the best baking session to date. Stupid goes lucky haha.

Recipe reference: http://www.mumsnet.com/Recipes/i/1376-Chocolate-muffins

Hokkaido Chiffon Cake

Did my almost-routine baking last Thursday with a recipe i grabbed online for Hokkaido Chiffon Cake. Now this cake is like selling everywhere in bakeries. Fell in love with the one sold near my place with very rich and milky whipped cream.  However, it's not very affordable to eat everyday so i thought i can try baking it myself and see how the it goes.

Bought everything i need from tesco except cake flour. Couldnt find it so i decide to make my own cake flour instead as apparently it is very easy to substitute different kind of flours with all-purpose flour and some other baking ingredients. So cake flour's equation is " 140g cake flour = 100g flour + 40g corn starch". I'm not a big fan of the CUP, TEASPOON, TABLESPOON measurement as they can be really inaccurate. So i prefer to do everything based on weighing scale =) Simple and accurate!

Will share with you the recipe later. Now just to share with you some changes i made to the recipe when i baking the Hokkaido chiffon cake. As usual, i cut half the portion and made only 4 cakes (or should i rather say cupcakes lol). Then i used only 2 egg whites instead of 3 as i really think my house's eggs are really GIGANTIC. and i whisk my egg white and sugar with a spoon, which is totally wrong but i dun have any choices because i dun have a whisk or blender. As a result, didnt manage to get the sponge feel inside the cake. Another thing is i substitute the milk with chocolate milk haha. Just to make use of the chocolate milk that nobody is actually drinking. Other than all that, I comply with the recipe i found =)

Result was not bad. Except the sponge cake texture wasn't achieved due to my poor whisking tool and technique. Inspite of that, everything went well actually, which was kinda surprising as i haven't successfully bake something for quite some time haha. The whipped cream is made of the heavy cream leftover from the cream puff baking session. Still taste amazing!

This is how it looks like when it came out fresh from the oven. The middle one was like a tasting sample so i finish it before i put in the whipped cream. 

Anyway, good experience this time and guess i'll try it again next time when i bought my whisk!

Recipe link: http://hearty-bakes.blogspot.sg/2012/08/the-comeback.html