Wednesday, May 20, 2015

HEH. Sorry about that.

I knew I hadn't posted here in a long time, but I didn't know that my last post promised my chiffon cake report. I'm sorry! Creepy also, since my last post mentioned being positive about the future. Heh.

I don't really want to post my report anymore since people are annoying and might steal my information and stuff if their teachers for some reason want them to write about chiffon cakes. Uhg. Hey, maybe I should make a NEW blog that contains my accomplishments (which are none loool). Whaddya think? Another blog would be quite some work for me, but it's fun work.

And yes I did make some stuff in the two months of my absence. If y'all have been reading Progression you'd know what was happening.

Okay, that's all I wanted to say.... I think once I get myself a camera or something like that I'll get this blog active again (cuz people are too busy for me).

Thanks, N

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Keep Y'alls Eyes Out

By keeping y'alls eyes out I do not mean gouge them out. I don't think any of you would do that anyhow, because why listen to a blogger that you aren't really a fan of? Ah heh huh. Right.

Now what was I going to talk about?? I ffo.... DON'T forget that I made some brownies on Friday!! ^_^ Yeah! And...... today I tried to do a chiffon cake all by myself! Ugh I just reminded myself of the dishes in the sink. Who cares. But yeah, I just wanted y'all to keep your eyes out for the chiffon cake report post which will be posted.... soon. Just soon. I dislike being positive about the future, lol. Anyway, that's all I need to say!!

-N

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Pasta Cake

I made pasta cake today!!! Wanted to pretend to make weird things like they do on Cupcake Wars, so I mixed savory with sweet! Turned out great!!!

Just jooookinnnnggggomgdidyouguysreallybelievethathahahasrslythisislonganduseless

I did make cake tho, and I did make pasta. Well, I didn't MAKE pasta, I just cooked it. 'Cause, like, pasta makers cost as much as heaven. And it wasn't just pasta! 'Twas pasta salad. With homemade 'pesto' or veggie sauce or dressing or whatever. I just jammed about a cup of kale leaves in the blender with some moisture and the product was produced.

Just jooookinnnnggggagainlolyougulliblehumans

Appetizing, right?! OMG, IKR!!

#fangirlstatements #freakingoutaboutnothing #thatswhatido #lolsrsly #demhashtagsdoe

I kinda made up the recipe moiself so here you go if'n you're interested... ~

How to Make N's Nourishin' Pasta Salad ~

1. Set about 4 cups of water to a boil. Pour in the crusty and hard uncooked pasta things. I used gluten free ...tortellini?? Rotini? Yeah, it was rotini. I used gluten free so that Little bro with allergies could eat it too. #youcanthaveallergiesandeatthingstoo
2. Stir until al dente or until they're as soft as you want LEL. Mine wasn't al dente because a certain girl told me to take it off the heat. T_T #sisters
3. Strain the pasta and set it aside to cool whilst you prepare the ... we'll call it dressing.

To make the dressing, you'll need:
About two handfuls of baby kale leaves
About 1/4 cup of soymilk
Half a lemon
1/3 of an onion, chopped
Three stalks of cilantro
A tablespoon of apple cider vinegar
A tablespoon of salt
About two tablespoons of orange juice

Dump everything into a blender except the lemon half, the vinegar, and orange juice. After smooth, squeeze the lemon half into the mixture, ensuring no lemon seeds enter the mixture.

Now, you dump the cooked pasta into a dish of your choice. Then pour the dressing over it and mix everything together. Pour the vinegar and orange juice into a measuring cup or tiny bowl and mix it together. Pour over the pasta and stir together.

VARIATIONS: That's all I did, and since Little brother has allergies, I cut little cubes of cheese and put them in a separate tiny bowl. However, if you're making this for people with no allergies, you can dump the cheese cubes right in. Also, if I'd had tomatoes, I'd add them. And tiny cubes of peppers. Also -- okay, that's all for now. A different version of my pasta salad may appear on this blog in the future. We'll see though, as pasta isn't really baking.

~♥~

Now, as for the cake... I used a buttermilk pound cake II recipe (look that up). Instead of vanilla and lemon flavoring, I used orange juice. I'm guessing the taste wasn't very obvious because it was orange juice. Freshly squeezed would make more of an impact. Eh, I was rushin' and lazy. Process was chill. I greased the pans like crazy with butter. Then, yeah. Baked them for almost 100 minutes. One side stuck to the pan. It was okay though, because I took the cakes to Sister's Cake Hospital and, after a short operation, the cakes were brand-new. Ish. I made a simple icing out of 1/4 cup butter and 1 cup powdered sugar, which Sister dressed the bottom layer cake with. Then she spread four-fruit jam on top of that, and then dangerous things happened. I watched her dangerously put the top cake layer on, and we squealed like little girls. Then we pigged out on huge slices.




Some mysterious soul finished it. Which means I must go to work and make another one.

Thanks for eating, keep on reading!!

N

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

My Break Haha No Not Really

I have the best news a baker could provide her fans with!

(I have fans?)
(Be quiet, brain.)

Anywho, I don't know who reads my life blog and who doesn't. However, if any of you do not read my life blog, you may not know of the fact that my oven was fixed yesterday!! Yup! I heard a professional knock at the door, and I peeked through the peephole and saw one of the maintenance guys. "Hold on," I said loudly, and rushed to pull on my presentable attire not really. Then I let him in and said hello. My brain screamed in happiness when I saw a brand new element in his hands. He said he was gonna turn off the power. Since I had literature class at the time, I couldn't really pay attention to him, but he didn't need my expert assistance anyway. Before he left he was like, "It's fixed now," or summin' like that. Outside I was like, "Okay, thank you." But inside I was like YAAAASSS MY LIFE IS COMPLETE!!!
Internet you are awesome
And then I continued literature class. And biology class. And history class.

Due to this wonderful morsel of news, I am now able to construct a chiffon cake, composing a post about it, which will contain my chiffon cake report. Stay tuned for that!! ;)

As for now, I'm going to tell you a sort-of-story in which I took a little break from baking from scratch.

This may or may not lower my rep that may or may not exist.

Heh. Well.

I couldn't wait any longer for the oven to get fixed, so... I went out and bought cupcakes from a store called Kbar's.

#youdontseethatducttape

Kidding. I made these using a box mix that my friend named Kbar bought at the store for me to make because she invited me to her house to chillax with food. It was a strawberry super moist Betty Crocker's mix.

Kidding, again. It was a white super moist Betty Crocker's cake mix.
Kbar has a very nice kitchen. (Any other day my sis would've killed me for getting my hands in the picture but I guess she was being nice that day.)
Yes, it WAS a white cake mix, but she provided me with neon food colorings!! (OMG! I rarely get to use those!!!) I chose pink out of purple, green, orange, and pink. I was like yaassss, Imma have fun here!
looks like imma use u a lot today, bebby
'Xcuse that one down there, it did NOT get pierced by a fork ;)
Also, Kbar said she could make cream cheese frosting, and again, I was like YESSS!!! Cream cheese frosting is the best kind of frosting ever, 'cause buttercream is too silky and sikly (lel deliberate misspelling of the word sickly).
Using the purple and green from the remaining neon food colorings, we frosted rather fabuloso cupcakes, which kind of resembled Patrick from Spongebob because of the colors. Don'tcha think so??
'Durrable, right?

I decorated the, uhh... the purple one on the most far right under the star one. And, well, that was my first one. The rest I did are the ugliest ones. ;)

We ate the non-frosted ones with chocolate ice cream and raspberry sorbet. It was heavenly.

Fortunately, Kbar had some boxes in which we could take home our creations. Kbar is a wonderful person. She didn't even keep any for herself. ;_; (Amma pay her back now that the oven works :D ;))

That is my story of my break from scratch baking. Thanks for reading, and remember to stay tuned for the chiffon post!! (Yeah right N.)

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Welcome to DunkNDonuts

 Let's not have that debate between Donut and Doughnut....

Chocolate raspberry and raspberry... only 50 cents each... ;P
My First Attempt at Donuts! And Also a Type of Bread

These are not the first donuts to be constructed by this family, but they are the first donuts to be produced by me! I have never tried to make bread on my own before, mainly because it requires patience and kneading and I'd most likely overknead something. Oh gosh. Overknead isn't a word.

So I was browsing G+ and I came across a donut recipe that I linked for later. The day was rainy and dark, depressing and lazying me. My patience with a malfunctioning oven had diminished, and I HAD to make something. Donuts were a great choice in these hard times, since they only required use of the stove. However, our inventory lacked yeast, and good donuts required yeast. So while my sister was beating up punching bags, Daddy went to Wal-Mart to restock our inventory. He came back home with... GROCERIES!! But I didn't make the donuts right away, because I still felt lazy and it was too late, anyhow. So the next day, I browsed the Net for good donut recipes, and by 9am I'd found one and began to mix stuff up.

Mmkay, so the dough was easy to prepare despite a few things I did wrong, and it rose properly as well. Everyone became included once I rolled the dough out. Brother H cut out a star shaped donut, but it resulted as 'tiny' and 'lame' in his words, so that was the only star donut ever made in donut history. The majority of the donut shapes were the typical circle with a hole in the center, but then with the scrap dough, H wanted to make some blobs with air inside. After finally cutting all the donuts out, I let them rise for 19 minutes, and then Mum came along and told me the dough would need space if it was going to rise, so I had to transfer some donuts to another sheet and add 11 minutes to the timer. Later, H fried them, and put together a glaze made of confectioners' sugar, butter, and raspberries.
Why go to Dunkin' Donuts when you can make your own?
...because homemade donuts are terrible.
Special thanks to Mum, for her random assistance. H, for making blobs and a star and frying the donuts while also making a glaze that I didn't plan to do until they were all fried. S, for taking pictures. And Daddy, for eating the last piece.

Annnnd I may try these another time.

N

Friday, February 20, 2015

Elements

Have any of you been checking my life blog? Did you find out what happened to the oven?? I won't say what happened in this post, because I've already kindly inserted the link there for you, but in case you feel lazy, I'll give you a brief overview of the incident.

About two weeks ago, I tried to make my first chiffon cake for my Report Writing class. Nothing bad happened in the process of stirring the batter up, okay? However, after my shower, I checked on the oven and saw sparks running along the element. And I was like UMG. Fast forward - weturnedofftheovenandlefthtecakeinthereandbasically - okay, sorry. BASICALLY, the cake was dense because it hadn't been cooked properly because of the dang oven, and so a few days after, a maintenance guy came over to check the oven out. He took out the element. from then on, we haven't been able to use the oven. It leaves me bored every day because I LUV BAKING (I need an apron with those words on it XD) and not baking for nearly three weeks now is becoming unbearable. Anyway, I went off-tangent. I meant to say that I ended up NOT using that cake as a cover picture for my report, and I used a picture of a chiffon cake that my mum made about seven years ago (yeah, ikr). I cropped it out on Microsoft Paint and voila.

I crossed out my fab name there because y'all don't deserve to know who I am (most of you, anyway)
Yeah, it's pretty bad. But better than the other ones I've done..... *cringe* I would display them here, but the first one has moi on it and the second one has moi name on it. Additionally, I'm too lazy to get them out and cross my name out. ;3

Yeah, that's all I wanted to say... if the oven ain't fixed by next week, bruh, I'm gettin' outta here. And moving to baking school. [to teach ;)]

I also wanted to mention that when the oven is fixed, I will make a chiffon cake (alone this time) and paste my report here. Stay tuned! :) <3

N

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Updates and Upcoming: Chiffon!!

Heeeyyy, look what happened! It's February!! Goodness.

So, sometime in January, I made a hot milk cake for a party we had at Quran class. I gave myself a bad burn that still hasn't healed completely (okay, maybe it has, but I can't tell yet if what's left is going to be a scar). I wish I could have taken a picture of it. All my friends were horrified by it. Well, one of them wasn't. I was just like, "Look at this!" and shoved my arm in her face. And she shoved HER arm in my face and showed me HER injury and was like, "Look at THIS!" Then she went crazy showing me all her scars. Lol. Anyway... oh yes. So, I didn't get to take a picture of that hot milk cake because my sister accidentally washed her phone while doing laundry. That was a huge P.I.T.Y. because that was one of the BEST hot milk cakes I've ever made!! However, Dad bought Sister a new phone by the Motorola company. And it takes really good pictures.

I've been wanting to make a Chiffon cake since I began my English Report Writing class. But since I've never made Chiffon cake before, I need my mom's aid and experience. Which I can't achieve during the weekdays from Sunday to Friday. The best time to bake, according to me, is in the morning. My mom comes home in the afternoon, around 4. Now, why do I want to make Chiffon? Because in my English class, I'm writing a report about the history and science of Chiffon cake. When polishing up our report near the end of class, we have to make a cover picture, and I want my cover to be of a Chiffon cake that I made. In the two previous times I've been in this Report Writing class, I've written about Malaysia's food and culture, and the characteristics of cats and a specific breed: the Abyssinian. (That was a fun report.) For the Malaysia report, I edited a picture my siblings and I in Gramps' front yard. It was pretty cringey. For the cat report, I put together an oil pastel painting of an Abyssinian cat. The lesson for class says we can take pictures from the Net, but I don't really like doing that. I like to customize everything. So that's why I have to work hard to make a Chiffon cake before this class ends. (Which will be February 9th.)

While researching for my report, I discovered that March 29th is National Lemon Chiffon Cake day!! You know now what I'm going to do here on that day!! >:D

That is all I wanted to say. Stay tuned!!

N

Friday, January 16, 2015

Orange Bars... Or Sponges

I always wanted to have a go at lemon bars. From seeing many photos and videos of them, my curiosity grew. How did they taste? Did the crust really have to be baked before the lemon part? Would the crust burn since it had to be baked again? All my questions were answered in one day; the day I decided to make lemon bars. My sister advised me to use oranges instead of lemons, since my mother used lemons for tea and health drinks to ward off illness, it being flu season. Our fruit basket was overflowing with oranges anyway, so why not?

I used this recipe. Here's a spoiler statement: Ironic how the recipe is called "The Best Lemon Bars."

;)

I was doing fine while mixing up the crust. Then, as I pressed it into a 9" x 13" pan, I worried. Why?

1. The pan was too big
2. The crust batter was too little
3. I couldn't switch to a tinier pan because I'd already pressed the crust into it, AND the pan wasn't greased or lined. (Hey, it was part of the instructions.)

That wasn't the biggest problem, however. Eventually I'd managed to distribute the dough evenly, and I baked it for twenty minutes. It came out fabulously, and I left it on the stove while I set to making the lemon filling, or orange filling, rather.

A jug of orange juice sat in the fridge, but I decided to get all 'natural' and used orange juice freshly squeezed. When I'd finished making the lemon filling, I poured it over the crust, which was still hot. And squishy. Another B.I.G. mistake!! :(!! I couldn't take it back, though, so I poured the whole thing in and slid the pan into the oven. The orange filling, like the crust, didn't fill the top completely.  Arghhh!! Next time, I'm totally using a square pan. Or a better recipe. No offense, allrecipes.

Did you acknowledge the fact that I highlighted 'left it on the stove'? That was a B.I.G. mistake, 'cause the oven was still hot, which meant it was heating up the stove too, so the crust didn't really get to cool, which it should have been doing whilst I made the filling. Arghhh!!

The results? Shortbread with a yellow concoction bubbling on the top. It was good, but it was wrong. When they cooled, though, they looked like sponges. 'Twas cool.

I'm glad I didn't take any photos.

Thanks for reading!!

N

Thursday, January 15, 2015

HMC x 3

I used to go on a consistent craze for lemon cake. Now, it seems that hot milk cake has taken its place. I made it three times last week, once as you saw in the previous post. It was only on the second time that I totally succeeded with no mistakes. On my third attempt, my mom pushed me to color it green with pandan. After I took the heated milk & butter off the stove, I beat some pandan into it, which was a B.I.G. mistake!! :(!! I should have added it when I had to mix the wet with the dry. Beating the pandan gave off air into the butter and milk, slowly cooling it, and possibly ruining its structure. The recipe said to heat the butter and milk JUST until the butter melted. What did I do? I added an extra ingredient and extra air. What was the outcome?? Sunken, unpuffy cake. I'll show you what I mean.

The second attempt... the one that really worked. Compare it to the photo below.

See how flat it is? (The green sets off a morbid theme here.)
As for the cuts...

Rising proudly

Whereas here, it sunk about an inch.
I might've liked the green cake more if it hadn't been green. Want to know the worst part? I gave some to Mom to give to her classmates.




Soz, we don't have the best backgrounds or lighting


Gasp, chocolate chips
I really want to make more, but I made orange/lemon bars recently (which'll go into another post), and my mom told me "Don't make dessert every day."

Anyway, thanks for reading!!

N

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Hot Milk Cake is Life. ♥

This is supposed to be hot milk cake. Lovely, isn't it?

Yesterday I made a new blog about my life, called Progression. Everything in the the process of attaining success and making progress every day, and I thought that would be a good name. Hence... Progression.

I wanted to finish the milk up because its sell-by date was January 7. So I looked up 'baking recipe using milk.' And I came upon a great recipe which I have already linked above.

The cake was so easy! 'Xcept for the part when I had to melt the butter and heat the milk. When I turned off the heat, the mixture bubbled up and over the sides of the pan. It leaked into the stove and the burner sizzled, and I felt both agitated and frightened to death. Any moment now a fire would flare up. Was I right? Usually I'm not. This time, I'm glad I wasn't. I put the pan aside and grabbed a rag, wet it, and placed it over the hot burner. It sizzled, and quieted down. Then I took the rag off and grabbed another rag, a dry one, and carefully cleaned up the mess under there. I took out the burner and its bowl thingy and washed them, then I fixed them back on the stove. Story of near-death, over.

I poured the batter into the prepared pan and put the pan into the oven for 25 minutes. After testing it, I put it in for another ten minutes. and then.............. VOILAAAHAHAHA.