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!

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

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? :)