Summaries
Baking cookies is not difficult because most recipes do not need moulds or cookie cutters. You just need to spoon the cookie dough into the baking tray and bake. Though you may follow the recipe 100%, sometimes, you may not get crispy cookies but soft ones. So, what are the factors that cause your cookies to be not crispy but limp and soft?
Here are some of the things I learned after some trial and errors, and I learned well after batches of cookies I baked are dumped into the dustbin :
1) Not all ovens are built the same. So, you need to ‘get to know your oven well’ before you can get it right. Though the recipe may specified a certain temperature and baking time, you need to adjust too.
- If the cookies are burnt too quickly, reduce the temperature.
- If the cookies seem pale even after baking, crank up the temperature by 10 deg or 20 deg.
- If the cookies are still soft, leave them in the oven for another 5-10 minutes at a lower temperature.
The cookies will normally harden after they are leave to cool.
2) Usually, crispy cookies recipe do not ask for both egg yolk and egg white. However, there are some which do and I notice the cookies usually come out ‘cakey’ or like a hard cake, with the middle soft.
- If you want your cookies to be crispy, find recipes that uses either egg yolk only, egg white only or those that do not use eggs.
3) There are thousands of recipes out there and not every recipe works. So, sometimes you can only curse the person who gave you the recipe. Once you find one that works, keep that recipe well and use it often.
4) There are things sold by baking specialist shops that can make cookies crispier. Cooking Island Erina introduced me to emulder which is a whitish powder. I am not sure what it is made of but I guess it is still safer than eating store bought melamine biscuits. Hehehe.
5) Your baking tray. Today, I finally realised why my recent batch of cookies turned out soft. You must either heat up your cookie tray and only use it when it is hot;
or
use an aluminium baking tray and put it on the wire rack. (aluminium transfer heat faster)
I had used my oven baking tray which is made of stainless steel and coated (thick and heavy) and I used them when it is cold. No wonder all my cookies in the previous batch turned out soft because the temperature of the baking tray is low and hence, messed up all my cookies.
I baked a batch of cornflakes and chocolate chip cookies today and though they taste good, they are too ugly to be shown as I didn’t expect them to expand so much after baking. What I got was a batch of ‘hold hands together’ cookies. Hehehe.
Are you frustrated with recipes calling for 1 cup of butter? I do. I cannot fill up a cup with butter because it will be a messy job. So, I have found the mystery of the weight of a cup of butter.
A cup of butter weighs 227 grams.
In Malaysia, most brands of butter are sold in 250 gram blocks. So, to get 227 gram, just cut off a tiny cube from the 250 grams.
However, Anchor brand of butter comes in 225 grams instead of the normal 250 grams. So, if you are baking a cake that calls for 250 grams, do not ignore the missing 25 grams because it can change the texture of your cake.
If that’s the case, then reduce the quantity of your sugar and flour. I normally bake pound cake using the same weight of sugar, flour and butter. I reduce the quantity of sugar by 20 grams to make the cake less sweeter.
So, now you know…..1 cup of butter is equivalent to 227 grams or 1/2 pound butter. 1/2 pound is 8 ozs. Ahh…don’t you just hate the US and Metric measurements? So many numbers, so confusing.
I forgot that I didn’t make a mandatory post to show off the heavenly, yummy, exotic, traditional, international (add more good descriptions) foods we had during the 3rd food bloggers gathering. I posted on my personal blog but I think this is the most appropriate place to do so.
(Photo credit : Ken of Food POI)
It is not just any food gathering but one that showcased all the best foods from some of the best Penang food bloggers. Hehehe, ‘go in basket, carry self’.
The host Gill and Jason has graciously let us hungry food bloggers to converge at their parents’ home. Their hospitality is beyond words. They provided us a barbeque stove, electric oven to roast a whole chicken contributed by Ken, a cheese fondue with ‘imported from Europe’ cheese sauce, salads, drinks and warm hospitality.
I have a prior engagement at College General, a thanksgiving mass with appreciation dinner but I kept an empty stomach for the food bloggers’ gathering. I brought smoked salmon, homemade focaccia and cream cheese. Initially, I wanted to throw in more exotic cheese and caviar but the price increases told me to ‘ubah gaya hidup’ (change of lifestyle). So, it was just smoked salmon and focaccia. I bought about one kilogram of smoke salmon for about RM75 but I didn’t bring all to the gathering. The thing with foods like this is to prepare just enough or too much will make one sick of the taste. Hehehe, also can save costs, right?
This is how we do it! We snap the photos of the foods from every angles, every sides, every corner. If camera flash light can cook, those foods would be burnt to charcoal.
This is the host, Jason. He introduced us to roasted pork (siew bak) with cheese fondue. It is like the most heavenly thing on earth. His wife, Gill also prepared fresh lemonade with pomegranate. The foods on that night is almost an international dish with Swiss cheese fondue, Norwegian salmon, Korean kimchi fried rice, Malaysian kerabu, China Hakka abacus, Japanese sushi, arrgh…I get hungry just thinking of those foods we had. I will not post photos of the foods here because I had done that in my personal blog and moreover, I didn’t take many pictures because I was more eager to eat.
For more photos and write ups on the gathering, hop on over to these sites:
Other floggers who attended the gathering:
and of course our hosts!! Gill & Jason
I copied the above links from Lingzie who organised this gathering. I am now looking forward to the next food bloggers gathering. Things can only get better, huh?
I better go on a diet soon because my godma said I am fat. I told her, “Never mind, Lent is coming, I will go on a vegetarian fast for 40 days.” Wrong reason to go on a vegetarian fast!
It was raining heavily just now and suddenly, the family is in the mood to eat seafood. So, I did a bit of Googling and read several Penang Bloggers’ blogs to find a new place to go. I stumbled upon Criz’s recommendation for Hock Lye Seafood. Then, New Kid on the Blog and Andrew of PenangFoodGalore also mentioned this place.
(drunken, live tiger prawns, RM35 for 500 grams - nice….)
So, we set off to hunt for this place, after I had jotted down what we are going to order and how to get there, based on the three blogs I linked above. Can you believe that throughout our meals, from around 5.30 pm till about 6.30 pm, we were the only table there? Times must be bad huh? It is only towards the end that three other tables were filled up.
Getting there is an experience because we hardly drive to this part of the island. Hock Lye is hidden amongst local cost flats and the Jelutong Expressway. You get scenic views of the mangrove area, see some nice new esplanade with new houses that costs above RM1 million and at the same time, stumbled on cheap low cost flats that look like pigeon holes. It is one big rojak of new housing areas, old, broken housing areas and lots of cheap low cost flats.
From the look of the area, you know this place enjoys brisk business because everything is big. Lots of tables, lots of parkings, lots of dishes, lots of fresh live fishes, prawns, shellfish, crabs in the tank and they serve drinks in jars.
We started the meal with Emperor Noodle which is thin, egg noodles fried with seafoods.
The marmite chicken is good too because there is no overpowering taste of Marmite.
We actually ate this horrible looking fish call ‘loong tan’ (dragon egg?). It is a very big fish and we had a 400 gram slice for RM32. The flesh is sweet and I love the fish skin. Since it is a big fish, it doesn’t have the ‘fish texture’ but taste like chicken. None of us like fish texture and only a few of my kids eat fish.
No, they didn’t kill the big fish to steam for us. The big one is for display only. The one we ate is reared in the sea off the island.
With so many kids, each of them have their own favourite dish. Mine of course is the drunken prawns on the first photo. The tiger prawns, caught alive from the tank is so sweet when dunk into boiling wine soup. Too bad they didn’t prepare the live prawns on our table or you will get a video of prawns burning in hell. Hehehe.
Meanwhile, the above fried dish is the mantis prawns with cereal. We find the cereal too sweet and had told the owner. But my younger kids like the sweetish taste.
Our initial plan was to go out and eat crabs. However, after taking so many of the dishes, we were too full to finish our crabs. The crab is recommended by the lady boss. It is salted duck egg yolk with curry leaves and maybe some butter flavour. We tapau the crabs home and I shall savour it later.
After all the seafoods, there is no more space for vegetables. The total bill comes up to only RM166 which is rather cheap. I like Hock Lye because their cooking is rather ‘mild’ and you do not get jelak from all the seafoods. They also don’t give us those peanuts or cold towel, hence save us from paying for useless things we do not need.
Please head over to either one of the blogs mentioned to get the directions. Hubby took us for a ride to see the RM1 million homes by IJM so I totally have no recollection on how to get there.
Hock Lye phone is 2627524
Service is good too because we broke a glass and they didn’t make a fuss or charge us. Or maybe they did but we can’t read Mandarin so we wouldn’t know if it is billed to us. Well, service should be good because we were the only patron and I brought my DSLR there to ’scare’ them to give us fresher seafoods. Hehehe. It works all the time. The DSLR trick to intimidate restaurants to give better services and fresher foods.
The joy of baking cookies lies not only in the eating but the baking process. I enjoy doing it because it means a good opportunity for me to bond with my children. This afternoon, a lazy Sunday, my little boy and I baked a batch of cornflakes cookies. Just the two of us doing it because my older children were sleeping. It is their last day of waking up late (and sleeping late too) because school, college and kindie start tomorrow, Monday 5th January, 2009.
I recently bought a cookies recipe book by Alan Ooi. It is found in Popular Bookshop at RM20. It has some cute and easy to bake cookies and since my little boy love the photos of the various cookies, we bought it and start sampling with the recipe.
The cornflakes cookie I baked is adapted from the book call Y3K series. I do not have some of the ingredients mentioned in the recipe and I added some extra stuffs. So, the below cornflake cups cookies is based on the adapted recipe :
RECIPE FOR CORN FLAKES COOKIES
Preheat oven at 170 deg. celcius. Prepare about 90 tiny paper cups (like the cupcakes cup but tiny ones)
PART A - 100 gram butter
80 grams caster sugar
Cream the above till white and fluffy.
PART B - 1 egg
1/2 tsp of vanilla essence
Beat egg with a fork and add vanilla. Add to the Part A above and mix well.
PART C -
150 grams soft flour (soft flour is normal wheat flour but it is better for cookies)
15 grams custard powder (custard powder will give cookies more crunch and yellowish tinge)
30 grams Nestum cereal
50 grams ground almond
1/2 tsp of emulder (it is supposed to give cookies its crunchiness)
CORN FLAKES - About 50 grams, gently mash the bigger pieces
(corn flakes for coating the cookies)
Mix all the above well. Add to the batter of Part A+ Part B. Use your hands to mix well and form a ball. If the batter is too wet and cannot form balls, add a bit of flour. If it is too dry, add a bit of water.
Form into tiny marble sizes and put into the cornflakes to coat the cookie. Put each ball into the individual paper cups. Bake for about 20 to 25 minutes.
Little hands love to help setting out the paper cups on the baking tray. My little boy also enjoyed rolling the cookie dough in the corn flakes and putting them into the paper cups.
He also helped to count the number of cookies (though not accurate because the cups are all over the tray). We counted about 90 cookies.
This is the crunchy, really scrumptious corn flakes cookies we baked. I use red paper cups as red is a much favoured colour for Chinese New Year. My boy said he is going to bring the cornflake cookies to kindie tomorrow. We bought him a lunch box and he is so excited about bringing foods to kindie. This will be the first time he is going to kindie so I am keeping my fingers crossed that he will enjoy school as much as he anticipated. Pray there is no tears or separation anxiety because he is such a baby to us, being the youngest in the family. From past experiences, excitement before going to school does not equal the same kind of excitement when they are really in school.
