Chocolate Sponge Cake with Chocolate and Strawberries..

Happy New Year to all. I had a great time catching up with friends, bbq session at the park, the crazy boxing day sale and next, I went to visit Tassie and had a blast there. Anyway here's a mini chocolate cake that I've baked for the christmas season. Remember that I've mentioned before that I had made the Masterchef's black forest cake? Well I definately needed to practise on more sponge cake and hence, I've made chocolate sponge cake with chocolate and strawberries.

I've googled for the recipe and found it at Best Recipes and I've actually halved the portion to half as I was making a mini version. The cake was soft and fluffy, love it with the melting chocolate and strawberries. Yum!

Ingredients:

2 eggs, separated

1/4 cup of caster sugar which I further reduced that to around 60g

1 teaspoon of maple syrup

1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate soda

1/4 cup of cornflour

1/2 tablespoon of plain flour

1 tablespoon of cocoa powder

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees fan forced
2. Grease 2 mini cake tins
3. Place egg whites in electric mixer bowl and beat until soft peak form
4. Combine caster sugar and bicarbonate soda and gradually add it into the egg whites while still mixing
5. Add egg yolks and beat together
6. Add maple syrup and briefly combined
7. Stir the dry ingredients and add them into the wet mixture, fold in gently
8. Pour the mixture into the cake tins and bake for 20-25 minutes
9. After getting out from the oven, let it cool for at least 5 minutes before taking the cake out of the tin
10. Lightly whip around 60g of thickened cream and place it in the middle of two cakes with some strawberries. Double boiled 100g of chocolate with some butter and pour it on top of the cake. Decorate it as you wish. For presentation purposes, I've dusted some icing sugar on top. Pretty right? :)

Happy New Year..

Welcome 2011! I have to say that I've been through alot in 2010, it was an exciting year with lots of new things and hope that there's many more this year. I've been writing here for a year with a total of 106 posts, time really flies. Hope that I'll get to try more food this year and you'll get to read more. Enjoy life and have a great year. Take care and thanks for all the supports from my readers, fellow bloggers and my dearest friends. Love you all and happy new year! A sneak peak of my Tassie trip. xoxo

Merry Xmas..

Look at our own christmas present that we've got for ourselves in the kitchen. Weee.. it's KitchenAid mixer and we've also bought the ice-cream mixer for it as well! Lots of heavy duty baking and ice-cream making is coming up! Stay tuned! :D

A Lego advertisement that I saw in Town Hall station. How cute is that? Have you done your last minute christmas shopping? Last few hours more to catch up. Merry Christmas everyone!

Puff pastry..

I had a party at my house the other day. and i made some puffs to serve as entree. it's very easy to make and i'm going to show you how easy it was. i'm always a fan of puff pastry. love it! and the fun part is that you can always change the ingredients to suit your taste and preferences.

the ingredients are a few packs of pre-made puff cases and honey leg ham depending on how many puffs that you want to make. i've used the lazy way to do this. alternatively, you can make your own pastry cases from scratch.

then pasta sauce, corn and button mushrooms. maybe you can go for the fresh mushrooms which might be nicer. and instead of tomato sauce, you can go for cream based sauce.

then you need to cut the mushrooms and the ham thinly. and also some onions too.

heat up the pan and start with the onions first. when it's golden bown, then simply put in the ham, after that add in the mushroom and pasta sauce together with the corn.

it's done! just leave it there for a while to cool it down before putting into the cases.

next just put in some of the sauce and also equally split the ingredients into it. sprinkle some cheddar cheese on top. don't put too much cause the cheese would be melted out of the cases. while doing this, remember to heat up your oven.

after around 15-20 minutes in the oven, depending on how burnt you want the pastry to be, it's ready to be served.

hot and crispy puff pastry with a can of root beer. a nice way to start my dinner. yum!

Chinese new year..

happy chinese new year everyone! it's the time when everyone gather to catch up and have some authentic chinese food for good beginning of the year. i've been out for dinners, gatherings and lucky enough to taste some awesome food. here's some homemade food that i had lately.

i had fried egg with clams/mussels, pan fried bun with stew pork belly with taro at my friend's place. that was superb. absolutely love that one. thanks for the awesome meal.

i had a small pre-cny pot luck party at my office. look at all the yummy food with desserts.

i went over to my friend's palce for dinner on the second day of cny. and look at all the food he cooked. this is the fried fish with sambal paste and anchovies and fried piggy fat. totally can't find this anywhere else. special recipe!

i had an awesome meal and thanks to the chef! hope i'm not putting on too much weight. haha! anyway hope everyone is enjoying themselves and have a great year ahead..