New toys for the baker wanna-be

I've been in hiatus for too long!

It has been a crazy past few weeks at work that when I get home, all I do is sleep. I also have been MIA in our kitchen the past few weeks, but not for long!!! especially with my NEW BAKING TOYS!!! :D

Remember the entry when my boyfriend and I baked cookies for the first time? How his muscles were put to test because I used him as my manual mixer? So, for my birthday, he gave me a mixer!!!

I was ecstatic. Excited. Beyond the clouds happy. I LOVE IT. I did not enjoy baking then to the fullest because of the manual mixing part. But now, here it is, I have my own mixer!!! FINALLY! It was totally unexpected.

A few days before my birthday he teased me that he got me a Minnie Mouse shoes and a pedal-type mixer. I did not know if there really is a pedal-type one. But true enough, he wrapped the mixer in Minnie Mouse wrapper, and I was laughing so hard thinking "so he did buy me a Minnie Mouse shoe?!" I was readying myself for the shoes and the pedal mixer, and instead, it's a legit mixer! He chose the Oster hand and stand mixer because I was raving about it and as he said "it's practical"! And then it was there! :)  (My KitchenAid Artisan mixer dreams will have to wait, I have to "perfect" baking first in this mixer, before I step up and spend a lot on a mixer I might not even use when baking decides I'm not for her. HAHA.)

My siblings also had the same idea. They wanted to buy me a mixer, but to their relief, my boyfriend gave me the gift first so they were spared from the trouble and "expense" haha!

Nevertheless, they bought wonderful baking goodies. ;)

When I saw the card, Gourdo's,  I immediately know what is inside. It could only be baking materials! And they were! It's Wilton's beginnner's cake decoration set. I swoon.

I'm particularly excited about these tips!!! I can just imagine the decors to do!!! GAAAH.

HAPPY BAKING TO ME!!! <3

Hershey's ultimate brownie

Love.

Finding love..




Accepting love..
 


Staying in love...
 

Oh, what a great feeling....
To love and be loved.
To cherish and be cherished.
 To admire and to be admired.


I came home to an extraordinary amount of flowers in the house. They were so many that it felt like my dreams of "lying on fields of flowers". But no, it was no dream. It was real. And they weren't for me. ('Duh). It's for my sister. *winkwink.


My older sister finally has a boyfriend! 

I am so happy. And thrilled. And ecstatic. And overjoyed for her. HAHA. She has been this girl who "loved and lost" before, and finally, she learned to open her heart again. YAY!

I think every girl who is in love tends to develop an inner liking to the kitchen. And my sister was no exemption. This guy she is with is into sweets --- a lot.I tease her that her boyfriend might be a girl disguised in a guy's clothing, 'cause hey, only a few guys are into the whole cakes, chocolates and ice cream thing that girls are notoriously known for. Right?

So anyway, she approached me one night to ask for a go-to recipe of a brownie for his boyfriend. Of course, I immediately recommended Hershey's. It's real easy AND it REALLY is GOOD. So here are the products of her (with some assistance from me) baking-for-boyfriend experience:

These are the second and third pans that we made. In the first one (no photos, sadly), we followed the buttercream frosting, but for these next two, we let the frosting go, and instead, drizzed the brownie with Hershey's chocolate syrup, and topped them with chocolate chips.

Also, we added 1/3 cup of cashew into the mixture before baking. CHUNKY NUTS inside a CHOCOLATE BROWNIE with drizzle of CHOCOLATE SYRUP on top is HEAVEN ON EARTH.

Kudos to my sister, for her new relationship and the interest in kitchen hits and misses :*

Mangoes with vanilla cream

The Philippines is widely known for its freshest and sweetest mangoes! And once again, it is the time of the year again when mangoes are aplenty, harvests seems endless. ;) Here in our home, we actually have a lot of mango trees. It's exciting when I get to pick fruits, and eat them. They feel and taste so fresh! It really is different when they are grown from your own backyard. Speaking of which, we have a lot of vegetables thriving in our backyard soil, I love it except for the bitter gourd, I pray for its demise. But that is another story! ;)

Now, going back to the mangoes...... 
Pardon the very low-res photos. They were taken through my iPad. :(

My officemate, Ara, learned a vanilla cream recipe when she tasted a dessert offering from one of the fast food restaurants here in Manila. She mentioned that they had this dessert with suman (rice cake?) topped with mangoes, and has this yummy sauce. 

So she ended up calling the restaurant, asking what the sauce was, and they obliged to mention that it was vanilla cream sauce.

So we did our very own version, minus the suman of course! 

I'm telling you, it IS yummy. It's perfect for desserts or even snacks! 

Sharing the recipe with you guys:

-----

 Sooo, this was what we came up with. Ara did her own research and experimented on the recipes online, and she shared this recipe with me:

1 and 1/2 cup of whipping cream

1 cup of sugar

2 tablespoons of flour

1/2 of butter

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Instructions:

Over medium heat, beat the whipping cream, sugar and flour until smooth, add the butter and continue mixing until it starts to boil. Remove from the heat source then stir in the vanilla extract. Serve chilled or warm. 

Enjoy!!!

Happy summer!

 That's me and Ara , in matching outfits! :} 'Til then!

Nutella-filled chocolate cake with melted marshmallow frosting

Hello guys!


How was your Mother's day? I was never the affectionate daughter (or person for that matter). But last Sunday was supposed to be a "special day". Soooo, my sister and I ended up doing our own chocolate cake for our Mom! ;)

Ina Garten's chocolate cake is now definitely my go-to recipe when baking a chocolate cake! My sister was not ssatisfied with the sweetness level though of my first cake, so we added more cocoa powder into the batter. The recipe calls for only 3/4 cocoa powder, we ended up putting 1 1/4 cup of cocoa powder. TRUE ENOUGH, the fudge was deliciously chocolate-y!!!

We did the double layer this time, and while debating what to put inside as the filling, we ended up deciding on a melted marshmallow frosting  on top and sides.

After several browsing through the net, I decided on this recipe -- it's simple and very much easy to understand. The only problem we encountered was when to know and decide that the egg whites have been beated until "thick".

Also, note to self: this frosting is VERY hard to accomplish without a hand nor a stand mixer. As I previously mentioned in my other posts, I have yet to own a mixer, THIS MARSHMALLOW RECIPE banged my head to the door and urged me to buy one asap! Egg beating is hard, I must say.

Our frosting was a mess.

Our frosting did not turn out quite as expected. :( Somebody help me!

I believe we were not able to "mix until thick" the egg whites before adding the syrup and everything else, but our arms could just do so much. Still yummy though! Oh, and we used brown sugar instead of the white sugar (due to health reasons of our parents), but I am not quite sure if this change merited a change also in the composition.


We topped it with chocolate chip cookies....

And voila! A Nutella-filled chocolate cake with melted marshmallow frosting! :)

 Well, again.... EVERYTHING is BETTER with NUTELLA.

Til next time!

N

Nutty chocolate cake

Hi everyone! Last Monday was the first "monthsary" of me and my blog. :) So I decided to celebrate it with nothing less, and the most famous recipe of all time (I think), a chocolate cake!

(It was a tag team effort, my mom wanted to try decorating my baked goodies so she did the cake decoration here! Ain't it awesome? :)

I used the recipe of Ina Garten's Double Chocolate Layer Cake, only I did not make it into two layers. This is my FIRST TIME baking a cake, so please look away from all the "ugly" and "wrong" things I did. Haha! :p

The batter ---mixing the dry with the wet. Manual mixing IS TOUGH.

My favorite part -- the recipe called out for melting the chocolate! YUMMY!

See it riseee!!!! (A still very wet batter)

I left the cake and the frosting chilled overnight (unintentionally because I accidentally slept). But it was a good think because it made the frosting more thick! :)

Now to the fun part....

Spreading the frosting (which looks like Nutella)

 Grinding and spreading over the cashew nuts and garnishing with the bread sticks..

 Voila! A CHOCOLATE SINFUL CREATION!

Let's move on to THE most favorite part of all time!

 Slicing the cake

 And dunking it to the mouth!

It tasted heavenly! The cake was so moist. It's definitely worth seconds and thirds of recipe reuse. Thanks to technology, this yummy recipe was made to be shared for everyone!

The only thing I adjusted in this recipe was the amount of butter in the frosting. It can be noted that it said 2 sticks, but I only used 1 stick, for I prefer a lesser butter-y taste. I turned out just as I hoped. :)

Yay for the chocolate cake! <3

Corn muffin overload

Hi everyone!  It's a busy day in the house today. My sister is getting married tomorrow, and preparations are on the way! I'll post photos soon of the wedding and the personal details I helped them out with to make their day special. (My sister just sometimes takes it a little bit overboard.)

In the meantime, here's my new kitchen adventure! Corn muffins! And just a little bit of everything, actually WITH corn.

Last Friday at work, I had the chance to "live" in our kitchen systems. Oh, the joys of a wonderful, well-equiped, well-stocked kitchen. My officemates and I concocted a simple lunch for our group. We decided on a Kenny Roger's style of meal (complete with the chicken, mashed potatoes, corn and carrots, and of course, corn muffins!)

We followed the recipe from Gisslen's Professional baking book, which my officemate handily had, but there are also a lot of corn muffin over the net, which may be equally delectable! We were not able to buy cornmeal, so instead, we used caned corn. We added the canned corn to the mixture, but junked up a portion in the blender before mixing it in the batter to achieve a smoother corn taste.

Hand mixed corn muffin batter

Note: The corn muffin mixture needs to be baked immediately after combining all the ingredients, so the pans must be greased and ready before even starting to put anything to the mixing bowl.

Our excitement led to not noticing the YIELD part of the recipe. I know, total bummer. What we failed to see was that the recipe yielded around 30 muffins! For the lack of more muffin pans, we even used those small pans for what I guess, macaroons, and even the big 8" diameter pan for cakes! 

Little corn macaroons (or cupcakes) which we toasted a little to see if which level of "done-ness" is yummier! (I preferred the not burnt one though, but a couple of my officemates liked this toasted one)

Here's what we ended up with: corn macaroon, corn muffin and corn cake. 

In all fairness, they were good. :) My officemate sprinkled some confectioner's sugar on top of the muffins to give a little more sweet kick.

A simple, tasty treat!
 My next kitchen adventure: Chocolate cake! Can you give me some handy tips with my next one? :)

My baby blobs

Hi! Happy April!!!
 Let me share to you my current obsession: these little fur blobs.

They love to kiss each other and bite each other's tails.

Last February 28, my shih-tzu dog Hersheys (whom I fondly call "Taba" or fat)  gave birth to five cute blob. It's funny how I always relate the giving birth of a dog to that of a human giving birth. In both occasions, I daresay, the males are always the lucky one --- they are totally free from the process. Partner dogs are sometimes even oblivious to the fact that their partner is in labor already. Weirdly. Bittersweet facts of life.

Here's the photo of their parents (pardon their messy look, they are yet to be trimmed *puppy cut* for summer!) :

Mom, Hersheys

Dad, Mallows

That dad dog was sleeping during the whole labor process. Supportive partner, eh? (But hey, I guess, different standards are practiced by dogs. Heh. :P

Anyway, I call them "blobs" because they actually looked like such when they were born until they had the courage to actually stand up. A little over a month now, they are already nomads wandering around the house with the danger of someone stepping on them accidentally anytime.

What I find weird about them is that they are all of the same color. Well, their tones and shades vary, but you get what I mean, they are all in one hue! BROWN. Well, it's still tri-color, brown, black and white. Brown body, black face and ears and a white chest (or necktie) to be exact.
 
Why do I find it weird? Because it is the first time I've seen my any of my shih-tzu dog breed five puppies with the same color. The matriarch of the family (or rather our original female dog) had given birth to two batches of puppies each having a different color. There's usually a majority white dog, brown, blonde, and black dog in one batch! But in this case, it was different. In a chocolate-y kind of way. ;)

Here's my favorite of the pack: Muffin.

SEE HOW CUTE SHE IS? She looks a lot like a mouse (Haha!), because of her really tiny size. They have this princess breed, which makes them supposedly smaller than other shih tzus. But still, Muffin is extra small, she is half the size of her siblings. (Case in point: her and the iPad). Tragic.

But she is the smartest of them all. The most responsive. She even knows her name already! Small but terrible. Can she stay as small as this? She is so cute as it is, I don't want her to grow bigger! Haha. Silly me.

These blobs are a definite fun. The house haunted by the constant squeals and tiny wagging tails, always for the look out for their mom's breastmilk. Can they stay puppies forever? :)