Almond Biscotti

I did not really have a good experience with biscotti as the first piece that I tried almost broke my teeth. Later then I found out that it is meant to be dunk into the coffee. But I still cannot appreciate this cookie until I tried the thinly sliced version. It is so addictive. Nutty and eggy.

I decided to make it at home as this type of cookie comes with a huge price tag. I tried this recipe from Food-4Tots since I have all the ingredients on hand.

The steps are easy, only thing to take note of is to flour your work surface generously. After the first bake, we have to slice the log into 0.3cm slices. Apart from a few breakages at the ends, most of them stayed intact. :p This thickness produced very crispy cookies. Love this recipe to the max. Just to take note, one recipe only yield 52 slices, quite a small batch, insufficient to satisfy my appetite.

Pandan Melting Moments

I saw this recipe in the June 2011 Good Food Magazine. I love this magazine. The photos in it are so beautiful and well-taken. The recipes will make me want to jump out of my bed and start cooking. Hee hee. This is one of the recipes that I have tried. This cookie is actually accompanied with a coconut cream. Since I am not a fan of cream and these cookies are meant to last for at least a week, filling them with cream is not a wise option. 

This is a relatively simple recipe to put together. I used a zip top bag instead of a piping bag. Not a good choice. The zip top bag spilt along the seam after I piped half of the cookies and I was in a big mess when it split. To save myself from more agony, I just used a teaspoon and drop the remaining dough on the sheet pan and baked them. The rosettes held their shapes well after baking and the dropped cookies looked like the Danish butter cookies, just that they are in green. 

No one can detect the pandan flavour in my cookies. I think I need to put in more pandan paste. Nonetheless it has beautiful butter flavour. My husband and I renamed them as Green Butter Cookies. :p But my parents feel that it is too sweet. They still prefer my Chocolate Chips and Almond Cookies. Opps. I have not blog that yet. Hee hee.

Ingredients:
200g unsalted butter, softened
100g icing sugar ( I will reduced to 80g the next time)
4 tbsp pandan juice ( I replaced with 1 tsp pandan paste and top up with water till i get 4 tbsp)
225g plain flour
4 tbsp cornflour

Methods:
1. Preheat oven to 160 degree Celsius.
2. Beat the butter, icing sugar and pandan juice until light and fluffy.
3. Sift in the plain flour and corn flour, and mix thoroughly until all the ingredients are well combined.
4. Place the dough in pipping bag fixed with a star nozzle and pipe the mixture into 1.5 cm rosettes or 3 cm
    long fingers.
5. Bake for 10-12 min until the cookies are firm and lightly golden. Set aside to cool on a wire tray.

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.

Crispy Almond Flakes Cookies

As mentioned in the previous post, I had 10 egg whites left after making Kueh Lapis. So I went online to search for recipes that calls for many egg whites and found many variation of this crispy almond flakes cookies. After looking through the ingredients required and the steps, I decided to use this recipe. I would like to apologize to the owner of this recipe. I forgot to note down your website. If this is your recipe, do drop me a note and I will acknowledge you here.

I made this straight after the Kueh Lapis, which is 13th February, a day before Valentine's Day, I decide to make it into heart shape and gave it to my hubby as Valentine's present, together with the card. The bouquet of roses that served as the backdrop of my Kueh Lapis is from him. Haha. He just gave me the bouquet and nothing else. Typical of him. Unromantic. Haha. Come to think of it, at least I got something from him, though I would prefer something more practical. : )

Crispy Almond Flakes Cookies (makes 15 pcs)

Ingrdients:
2 egg whites
60g castor sugar
50g plain flour
100g almond flakes
25g melted butter

Method:
1. Lightly beat the egg white and sugar till sugar dissolved.
2. Add in flour, almond flakes and melted butter. Mix well.
3. Spoon the mixture on a non-stick baking sheet, and use the bake of spoon to spread the mixture into a heart shape (make as thin as possible)
4. Bake at pre-heated oven for 13-15 minutes at 160oC or until golden brown.


Quite easily done. I think I over beat my egg white which made my batter very thick and hard to spread it out thinly. The cookie is not as crispy as I thought to be. A point to note. Anyway, the taste is good and I love the fragrance of the almond.

Back To 2010 Valentine's Day

Let's rewind back to 13th Feb 2010, Chinese New Year's Eve. I woke up at 5am even though I do not need to work that day. I wanted to make my first Kueh Lapis. I even went to Jia Lei Training Centre to learn how to make Kueh Lapis.

I had everything ready. Once I finish washing up, I started to bake at about 6am. I referred to the recipe closely and measured every ingredient as if I am doing some chemistry experiment. This is because I scared I might fail. I promised my mum to give her Kueh Lapis that evening. Still, there were hiccups here and there. The biggest one is when I first switched to the grilling mode, I burnt the entire layer as the temperature is too high. As I could not adjust the grilling temperature, I reduced the baking time from 3 minutes per layer to 1 minute. Then everything went smoothly till I finished the last layer. I waited it to cool before I unmould it. I was so nervous. I wondered if the layers will be distinct. Finally, the moment arrived. I did it carefully and slowly. I had to trim off the edges before I see the layers. I was quite happy with result as this is my first attempt. The taste is good. Not too sweet and I like the texture. All the edges went into my stomach. Haha. The only thing I am not satisfied is the height of the cake. Cake tin too big so my Kueh Lapis is a bit short. Nonetheless, I was delighted with my creation.

As the recipe was given by the training centre, it wouldn't be nice for me to publish it here. If you are really interested, do keep a look out for the course in their website. The recipe calls for so many egg yolks. What am I going to do with the egg whites? Do keep a look out for the next post.

Puppy's Creation 005 - Walnut Butter Cookies

Haha. Since Puppy has time to update her blog today, so might as well post two entries. Puppy has found an interesting site. Video Jug, is a site full of videos. As pictures worth a thousand words, Puppy has learned a couple of useful techniques over there, from tying of hair knot to kneading bread. She also saw this simple butter cookie recipe there. She decided to experiment again. And poor me, I have to be her guinea pig again. But I love being one. Hee hee.

During the process, Puppy has a bad feeling as the dough doesn't look like a cookie dough. It is extremely creamy and soft. After baking the first batch, to her horror, all her cookies melted in the oven and got burnt. She dare not to bake the second batch so she kept the dough in the fridge for the time being while she was thinking of ways to salvage the situation.

She went back to the website and read through the comments. She discovered that others also encountered the same situation. Then an experienced baker thought that the author might have typed the recipe wrongly, instead of 25g of flour, it should be 250g of flour. After reading through this, the next morning, Puppy added 125g to the remaining dough and kneaded it until well combined. This time, it looked like a cookie dough and her confidence came back again. She baked it and the kitchen was filled with the aroma of the butter. Yeah. This cookie is not those sweet kind as the recipe requires you to sprinkle icing sugar after baking it. But we prefer it just like this. Nice twist to this baking attempt. : )

Puppy's Creation 004 - Chewy Rolled Oats Raisin Cookies

It's Oats again. Haha. Puppy got too much oats in the kitchen. Will be expired in a couple of months time. After searching among her favourite blogs and websites, she located this recipe. She can find all the ingredients in her mini kitchen so she started making it straight away. Haha.

The product tasted good but it is not chewy at all. Haha. How come?? Puppy suspected that the cookies are overbaked as all the cookies have charred bottom. But she followed the oven temperature stated in the recipe leh... Maybe the oven temperature is not calibrated properly? So many maybes... New bird, opps, I mean new baker is like this one. I told her she is at her exploring stage. She will mature as a baker as time passes. Haha. Do I sound like a wise old man? Of course not. I am a wise old bear. : )

Puppy's Creation 003 - Oatmeal Cookies

Puppy was into baking since September 2008. It has been more than 6 months since she started to bake. Most of the time, the results were not what we see in the recipe book. There must be some techniques that were not mentioned in the book. Puppy does not have any baking experiences (unless you count Home Economics lesson in Sec 1 and 2) and her mum doesn't know baking either. She depends solely on the recipe book. Maybe that can account for the differences in the products.

Other than recipe books that she bought or borrowed from library, her favourite source of recipes will be from blogs. She loves to read them. From there, she can learn from others and get tips in baking and cooking. There are several sites that she visits frequently, namely Happy Home Baking, Just Bento, Elinluv's Tibits Corner and many more. Got addicted to them.

There is also another thing about Puppy's website that readers should take note. Puppy will not publish the recipes that she tried in this blog as she took them wholesale from books and blogs. And she is still not up to the standard to modify the recipes and publish here. Actually she can acknowledge the source lah but she forgot where she took them from already. A puppy with the memory of a goldfish. Haha. Nonetheless, she is more than happy to share with everyone. So if you are interested, do drop her a message in the comments and she will send you the recipe.

This oatmeal cookies is her second creation. Not really that succesful even though they looked quite nice from the photos. The cookies could not get golden brown without the bottom getting burnt. Not sure of the reason. Puppy suspects maybe her microwave oven's temperature is too high. Anyway, after scraping off the burnt part, the cookies are still edible and quite nice actually. Hee hee. Can add more almonds. Kym kym loves almonds.

Puppy's Creation 002 - Chocolate Chips Cookies

This blog is not dead. Puppy was just too busy to update it. After two months, finally she has the time to update it. Hee hee. This blog is about Puppy's first baking creation - Chocolate Chips Cookies. This recipe is obtained from Sharp's instruction manual. Puppy's first attempt MUST be a successful one in order to boost her morale or else she won't have the courage to bake again. Then the microwave oven will become a white elephant.

The advantage of using the Sharp's recipe is that you can follow everything in it and no need to modify the recipe to cater to the oven because this recipe is written with this oven in mind. Hee Hee. The results is great. Everyone in the family loves it. The only comment is that more walnut can be added in.

I was eyeing on the cookies when they are just freshly out of the oven. Smell soooo nice. Hahah. I am going to chop a few for myself by stamping my foot print on them. Haha.