Almond Pandan Cookies

Every Chinese New Year, I will bake pineapple tarts only due to demand and time constraint. This year, I managed to squeeze out some time to try another cookie recipe that I have bookmarked. It is from My Kitchen Snippets - Almond Pandan Cookies. Alot of local desserts in Singapore use Pandan leaves in them as it imparts a nice fragrance to the desserts. I love the smell of these plain looking leaves. So when I saw this recipe, I kept it in my sleeves and pray hard that I have time to try it out.

I cleared my off in lieu on a Friday and managed to reach home early. So I rolled up my sleeves and out the recipe. The cookies smells great. Very buttery and not too sweet. I guessed I slightly overbaked them as mine looked more brown. But the pandan smell is not prominent. I think it is due to the pandan paste that I used. I offered them to my mum and she loves it. She had them with coffee in the afternoon while watching TV. She even offered to pound some pandan leaves for me to make my own pandan essence as she believes that it will taste even better with the pandan smell.

Chinese New Year Bakes

It is Chinese New Year again. This is my favourite time of the year. Somehow or rather I got very busy during this period every year. Be it at work or at home. Time is always not enough. However, I will still set aside one day to make my dad's favourite pineapple tarts. Ever since my auntie stopped making hers, my dad could not find the type of tarts that he adores until November 2008. Haha. I found a recipe in the internet and decided to try out. He fell in love with them and ever since, he will ask me to make it every CNY. I am sorry to the owner of this recipe because I could not recall where I took it from and thus could not acknowledge it in my post. I am thankful that you shared this recipe and I have been very loyal to this recipe. Making it every year. :)

This year, I made 352 open faced tarts with the help of my mummy. I prepared the tarts and she rolled the pineapple paste into little balls. I used store bought one as my family like the taste. Not too sweet and it goes well with the tarts. This recipe yields melt-in-your-mouth tarts. The downside of this recipe is that it is hard to pack them into the containers. Very delicate. But who cares. It is for our own consumption. ;)


Pineapple Tarts (make about 70 tarts)

300g plain flour
half tsp of salt
4 tbsp corn flour
200g butter
2 egg yolk

Instructions:
1) Sieve flour, corn flour and salt into a mixing bowl.
2) Rub in cold butter and add in the egg yolk to form a dough.
3) Roll our the pastry into 0.5 cm thick and stamp out.
4) Place the little pineapple paste balls on top and bake in preheated oven at 150 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes or till the bottom is light brown.
5) Cool them on racks and store in air tight container.

I am submitting this post to Aspiring Bakers #3: My Favourite CNY Cookie. Hopefully I am not too late.

I am Back!!! (Again)

Ever since I started this blog in 2008, I have not been updating it as regularly as what it should be. I am really guilty of that. Sigh... Never place my blog under my to-do list and I began to forget about it. I still visit my own blog very often as this is the door to my food blog-o-sphere. I hoped from one blog to another during my lunch time but could not leave any comments. I suppose the computer at my workplace barred us from doing that. Sad. :(

Though I was not actively blogging, I am actively cooking and baking as and when I have the time to spare. Now that I have a kitchen of my own, I stock up with equipment and ingredients that I used to dream of having in the past. I was very happy with my house until this morning when I discovered that I was invaded by ants. I kept all my things clean and tidy but where do they come from. The worse thing was I could not find the source of these invaders. Anyone has any solutions to get rid of these ants asap? I could not stand the sight of them and not to say cohabit with them.

Back to my food blog. One of my New Year resolution is to update my blog every fortnightly and leave comments in the blogs that I visit. I even set alarm in my handphone to remind me of that. Really serious this time. (Hope so :p) Another reason is because I bought a toy that I was dreaming of every day. Kitchen Aid. Haha.

This is my most treasured toy. Most expensive too. I chose the gray one because of the Matt finish. And the first recipe that I tried out with this toy is kuih balu. I made this once last year but failed terribly. All my kuih got stuck in the mould. To make the matter worse, I used a recipe that called for 6 eggs. Crazy mess. How come I never thought of halving it at all. Never mind. Lesson learnt.

This time round, I did my homework before hand and I decided to use the recipe from Elinluv's Tidbits Corner. The sweetness is just nice for me. However the texture did not pass my mark. It looks like sponge inside, big holes. I believed that I should have used a lower speed to beat the eggs instead of the highest one. And my folding skills as well, need more practise. Lesson learnt - even though you have a good piece of equipment, you still need skills to produce good results. I will definitely try again.