Halloween Coconut Buns

Happy Halloween folks!

Halloween Coconut Buns

Mango Coconut Loaf

Loaf cakes are one of the easiest things to bake. The most common loaf-type of cake would probably be banana cake (although it's normally called banana bread - I prefer calling it banana cake because it is not really a bread). When I chanced upon a recipe for a mango loaf cake, I was intrigued because I have yet to encounter a fruit-type loaf recipe which was not banana-based.

Mango Coconut Loaf

Coconut Meyer Lemon Cake

I made this cake last May for my good friend's birthday. Wow, it's almost her birthday again (soon). Time flies indeed...

Coconut Meyer Lemon Cake

Blueberry Coconut Lime Brown Butter Muffins

Okay...It's a new year, I'm slowly (but surely) plodding my way through the mountain of backlog I had accumulated. I've at least edited photos for three other posts! See? Baby steps. It seems too soon to start talking about New Year reflections (given that my reflections post for the previous year was like what, a half year ago?), so I'll skip that bit first and jump straight to the goodies.

Blueberry Coconut Lime Brown Butter Muffins

Berry Mousse Toasted Coconut Charlotte

There was a short period a few months back where I would just bake a cake every weekend. Just because. No special reason. Well, one merit of being single is that I have plenty of spare time on hand when I'm not out brunch-ing (for once!) and when all my (attached) friends are hanging out with their other halves. I get to indulge in my favourite self-activity. Baking.

 Berry Mousse Toasted Coconut Charlotte

Tres Leches Coconut Cake

There was leftover coconut milk at home. So I thought about what I could make with it.

You know what? I reckon my bakes almost always start from these two reasons - either there was something that I really wanted to get (in season produce), or there was something lying around (leftovers). I wonder if it's the same with you guys.

 Tres Leches Coconut Cake

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Coconut Brown Butter Muffins

I've previously made these muffins before, but decided to revisit this recipe again to see if they were as yummy as I remembered.

Dark chocolate, raspberries and toasted coconut

Chocolate cherry coconut almond granola

As I mentioned in my last granola post, I like having granola for breakfast. I mean, it's oats, and oats are supposedly good for the body isn't it?

What I have here today, is admittedly, not a healthy granola, but heck, we should all ease up a little bit, enjoy a little treat now and then (okay, almost all the time...) and just hit the gym more often to make up for the sinful stuff we consume...

Anyway, the granola I'm talking about is no other than this chocolate cherry coconut almond granola. Yeps, that's certainly a mouthful to say. You can always refer to it as the chocolate granola, ah then again, who cares what you call it, when everyone is more concerned with other pressing issues - such as fighting for the last bowl of it.

Chocolate cherry coconut almond granola

Cherry coconut bakewell tarts

I had leftover cherry compote from here, and wanted to finish it up. I decided to use it in a tart crust recipe that I wanted to try out. The Sister (and I) has always been in love with Delifrance's fruit tarts crusty crusts. And everytime I bake fruit tarts, she's bound to compare it to the Delifrance's version. So I decided to Google for "Delifrance tart crust recipe". While I didn't found the exact version, I found one that the blogger said tasted similar to Delifrance.

Cherry coconut bakewell tarts

French buttercream for macarons and cupcakes

Oh wow, and it's now the last day of 2010. Thank gosh. I must say that it hasn't been a very good year for me...but oh well, as long as I'm well-fed (too well-fed in fact), healthy, alive, I really shouldn't be mumbling or grousing much...

2010 has been a tremendously busy year for my oven, and sadly, it finally gave up on me (or was it the other way round hmmmm...), so we replaced it with a new one! I must say that I'm falling more and more in love with the new one day by day. It takes only 10 minutes pre heating time (compared to 20-30 minutes for the ol' one!), the temperature is reasonably correct (the ol' wonky one was off by 10 degrees higher!), oh oh oh, new things always seem so much better, shinier and prettier, don't you think so? (:

Coconut mango passionfruit macarons

A girlfriend's birthday cake

I bought two new cooking books recently. What's surprising is that:

1) I rarely ever buy cooking books, most of the time I borrow books from the library and scan the recipes I like to keep as jpeg files in my laptop.

2) The books are in Chinese! (Okay, one is fully in Chinese, the other is English/Chinese). Although I scored A1s for my O AND A levels (don't ask how I did it, I really have no idea), my Chinese is actually pretty sub-par and it's been so long since I last wrote any Chinese characters that most of the time, I find myself forgetting how to write even the most basic characters...(I'm always fearful that I'll forget how to write my own name in Chinese. Haha). I mean, I can read Chinese pretty okay, just don't ask me to write, so to buy the Chinese cookbooks is really a rarity indeed. It's just that I love layered cakes desserts and most of the pretty intricate looking entremets cookbooks are all in Chinese (or Japanese or French, which sadly I know neither). Thus, it can also be that reading the books I buy will allow me to brush up on my Chinese reading? :)

Anyway, exactly a month ago, it was one of my best girlfriend's birthday. Since I've been baking a cake for most of my besties this year for their birthdays, this was no exception. She, who doesn't like sweets stuff muchos, will probably suit a fruity cake yeah? And looking through one of my new books, I decided to make a grapefruit mousse cake.

Leftover miniature cakes...

Blueberry coconut and chocolate hazelnut financiers

Around the same time I made the icecreams (yes, plural, I still have images of vanilla bean icecream to upload, that's for another post), I had lots and lots of leftover egg whites. I didn't feel like making macarons, but I was meeting some friends that week, so I decided to make some financiers to share. I used the same recipe for the raspberry financiers I made previously, tweaked it around a little, and came up with two new flavours - chocolate hazelnut and blueberry coconut.

Family weekend. And small tea cakes and financiers.

It's been a great and unusual weekend. Family weekend. Went shopping at Ion with Sista on Saturday. We didn't manage to walk alot cos it was nearing lunch time and we were starving. Yet, in that short span of time we were walking around, I got a pair of shoes from Rubi (Sis got 2 pairs!) and she also got 2 dresses. Bah.

The original plan was to lunch at Ion, but the queues during lunch time at the dining places were atrocious, so we walked over to Wheelock for good ole Sun & Moon. Since it's the weekend, everyone in Singapore must have been in town, cos everywhere was crowded. Gah. Our wait for a table took twenty minutes. Over lunch, Daddy and I made a date to watch Overheard together later on at night (Sis had plans), just the two of us. haha. So rare can. Anyway, the dessert we ordered was really interesting, I like - some Japanese sweet potato cream cream atop a bed of almond cream tart? Japanese food love.

Overheard was not bad I suppose, I mean, there's eyecandy - Daniel Wu, whose mere presence makes any movie a more enjoyable experience. ;) Interesting plot, which literally relates back to the movie's title.

Popo came over to teach me how to bake pandan cake today, and I must say it was seriously a hilarious affair. Popo, being popo, was being her typical amusing popo self. If you get what I mean. (: And, I must say, I used to read about food bloggers who spoke about it - getting hand-me-down recipes, but never understood the real meaning, until I actually experienced it first hand. When you are used to measuring everything out clearly down to the very gram required, learning baking from your elders can be exasperating when they actually do not use a measuring scale! Haha. It was really an eye opening experience to see Popo teaching me how to make a pandan chiffon using a traditional chinese bowl (the blue kind with little designs around it) as a measuring "cup". Amazing. The end result was a little sinky chiffon (but still yummy), I think I underbeat the egg whites :( It's okay, I can try again another day. (:

Then I went Ion again with Sis to continue part 2 of our shopping trip there. I got myself really nice shoes from Mitju (in fact I wished I could buy half the shop back with me, they have this series of shoes that scream "GIRLY", "FEMININE" and "CUTE".) and a pair of formal knee shorts. Happy.

After dinner, Dad, Sis and I went to NTUC for groceries shopping. I am one happy happy girl. Blueberries have been on sale for $3.95 for 2 punnets for the past few days. We had 2 and a half packets at home. We bought another 4 punnets. I may snap a photo of the 7 punnets of blueberries currently waiting to be eaten in our fridge tomorrow just for the sake of it. I mean, who knows when else can you find so many punnets of these babies in my fridge again? And I found black sesame paste in the Japanese section of the NTUC! (WOONLI!!!!!!!!!!!! Smiles.)

I think this has been a great weekend. Although we don't normally spend a lot of time together as a family. I reckon within this short three days period, we probably used up a month's worth of family time together or something. snigger.

Anyway, I made apricot tea cakes and raspberry brown butter coconut financiers for our last picnic, and here they are. I must say I rather prefer the raspberry financiers more to the apricot tea cakes. They were much moister and softer to nibble on than the tea cakes. ;)














I love the new camera Canon EOS 500D I'm using now. I have the normal lens and a macro lens and I just love using the macro for my food photos. It is so fun playing around with the focus. Love the comparisons between the two in the shot above. (: And the macro is superb for taking textures upclose. Flours, fruits and what nots, you can totally see everything clearly. Have I already mentioned how much I love the macro lens? ;)