Tag: cake

Red is the New Colour

A belated happy Chinese New Year from me! 🎉🎉🎉🎊🎊 Work has been very busy since the new year (leading to me neglecting the blog 😅😅) and time really flew in the past weeks. Today though, unlike most of my Asian family that were celebrating Chinese New Year, I was instead away at a friend’s birthday party and playing mini golf.🏌️‍♂️ Well, it turns out I definitely suck at playing golf but at least I got free complimentary drinks! 😂🍷🍸

It won’t be me without baking a birthday cake for my friend 🎂 and the cake of the choice today was a strawberry red velvet cake covered with the classic cream cheese frosting and desiccated coconut (and a pair of white chocolate wings dusted with edible gold glitters. 😉) It was my first time making red velvet cake, so I guess it wasn’t a bad first attempt (though I did wing the recipe a bit so I guess it may not be totally traditional lol! 😂)

The place didn’t allow us to eat brought in food, though we still ended up sneakily tucking it away underneath the table… 🤫 (‘What’s the worst they could do? Throw us out?’ 🤣🤣 Blame one’s poor judgement after a few drinks haha!) Hence, the awful quality of the pic below! 😛 I swear the waitresses did see us but said nothing, or maybe it was the lucky red colour? 🔴😉

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend! 👍

It’s Mango Day Every Day! 💛

Still getting used to being back to work after the long holiday. 😛 Right now the dark winter sky in the UK is really not giving me enough drive to work in the evening. 😴 (Where has all the motivation in the new year gone lol!?) Does anybody else feel the same?

At this point, I will be dreaming about a tropical island 🏝 in a far land and wishing I am there instead. 😝 However, for now, a mango lover like me can survive with a mango and cream cake. At least, I can taste the tropic right now! 😋😂 I realise it has been a while since I posted a recipe, so I hope you all will enjoy this cake as much as I did! 💛

Mango and Cream Cake

Quantity: 1 cake

Ingredients:

5 eggs, separated

80g caster sugar

60g flavourless oil

70g warm water

1 tsp vanilla extract

100g self raising flour

250ml double cream

1 mango, diced

Mango pulp

White Chocolate, tempered (optional)

Pistachio, chopped finely (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas 4.

2. Whisk the egg white with half the sugar until stiff.

3. Mix the remaining sugar, egg yolks, oil water and vanilla together until well-combined.

4. Sieve in the flour and stir until well-combined.

5. Fold in half of the whisked egg white into the flour mixture. Then, pour the mixture back into the remaining egg white and fold until evenly combined.

6. Grease the cake tin, then transfer the cake mixture into it.

7. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

8. Let the cake cool briefly in the cake tin, then remove the cake from the tin. Leave the cake on a wire rack until completely cooled.

9. Whisk the double cream until whipped and smooth.

10. Slice the cake evenly across to create two layers. Sandwich the sponge layers with whipped cream, mangoes and mango pulp.

11. Cover the sides and the top of the cake with the remaining whipped cream. Drizzle more mango pulp at the top of the cake. Decorate with more mangoes, pistachio and tempered white chocolates to finish.

Happy New Year! 🎉🎊

Just want to say a big Happy New Year from the UK! 🎉🎉🎊🎊👏👏👏 Wishing everyone the best and may all your wishes come true in 2020!! ❤️❤️ Don’t forget to be happy 😃 and treasure every moments to come! 🤗

Meanwhile… let me tuck into my bonfire cake to welcome the new year while watching the fireworks 🎆 🎇 from my window! 😂

The Night Before Christmas

Happy Christmas Eve, everyone! 🎄❄️💫❤️❤️ It’s so nice to be back home in the holiday, isn’t it? (I certainly am, since I am posting this whilst setting up a bath lol! 🛀)

Hope you all are enjoying your holiday, and I am sorry if this post dampens the festive mood for you but I have thought long and hard before writing this… My break didn’t start off well when I found out three days ago that my family home was broken into. Losing valuables was one thing but I am just glad that no-one was hurt. However, I am upset by the fact that someone feels they have the rights to violate the place that holds so much happy memories to me. Here I am, a few days later, taking a picture of this cake at the exact same spot where it was broken into… I still feel a little uneasy around the house, but hopefully over time it will heal. ❤️ Though I am not going to let this stops me celebrating Christmas with a smile on my face! 😊

So happy with how this cake turns out ‘cause I’ve never done something like this before! The cake is just a simple vanilla sponge covered with a smooth whipped cream, and topped with flakes of chocolate. However, the iced biscuits are actually shortbreads as my family and I are not particularly fond of gingerbread, so I made a break away from the tradition lol. 😛 (A tip: Make sure to always rest the shaped biscuits in the fridge or freezer before baking. This is to prevent the butter from melting too fast during baking so that the biscuits don’t lose the shapes you probably spent some time painstakingly trying to cut out! 😂)

Can’t wait to be binge-watching Christmas TV all day tomorrow! Merry Christmas and best wishes to you all! 🎅🎄❄️💫🎉🎉🎊🎊👏👏👏

It’s Almost Christmas! 🎊🎊

Three more days and counting! Time really does fly before you know it! 😆 And at last I am so happy that my holiday has begun!

I took this Sunday to fulfil a promise I made with a friend. Last week, I was supposed to bring her a mojito cake for a viewing party of the Strictly final, but I was down with a cold and was pretty much bed-bound for the weekend. 🤒 But never too late to make up for lost time, right? 😁 So today I brought her a mojito snow angel cake to make up for it haha! 😇 The cake was composed a lime sponge soaked with a mojito syrup and covered with a lime and mint icing with some shots of rum! 🍸 (Try not to get drunk lol) It was then finished with a white fondant and some tempered chocolate work plus a few small touches for decorations. ❤️

Are you naughty or nice this Christmas? 😉

Last Christmas 🦌❄️🎄

Christmas baking truly marks for me the beginning of the seasonal festival. There are so many things I love about Christmas, from the beautiful lights in the streets of London to a crazy time in the Winter Wonderland whilst listening to the best Christmas tunes. It’s truly the best time of the year! ❤️💚❤️💚 What are your favourite things about Christmas? 😊

Last year, I decided to make a Yule Log after seeing it done in the Great Christmas Bake Off the year before, and I was so happy with how it turned out in the end! 😁👏👏 Swiss roll was the first ever bake I learnt to make so it does bring back a sense of nostalgia to be making that back at my family home. ❤️

(P.S. A couple of days after that, I also made a Christmas croquembouche! 😆)

Now, what should I make this Christmas? 🤔😗

This Might Sound Cheesy… 🧀 🧀

Last day of my holiday today, and I am testing my new mixer (which I bought after breaking my electric whisk… 😖😖) Sometimes, you really do just feel an urge to bake something you’ve been craving, and today, cheesecake was my choice.

I opted for a Japanese soufflé cheesecake, which is a very light baked cheesecake that has a fluffy texture of a soufflé. It is traditionally baked in a bain-marie. When I visited Japan many years ago, this was one of those sweet treats I would actively look for, and I once had what I thought was the best cheesecake of my lifetime lol. 😋

I chose to top mine with fruits to add some acidity and freshness to the cake, but it’s just as good to eat as a plain cake! 👍

Japanese Soufflé Cheesecake

Quantity: 1 cake

Ingredients:

200g cream cheese

3 eggs, separated

90g caster sugar

30g cornflour

50g milk

2 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp salt

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas 4.

2. Beat the cream cheese until light and creamy.

3. Add the yolks, half of the sugar, cornflour, milk, lemon juice and salt to the cream cheese. Fold gently until well combined.

4. Use an electric whisk to whisk the egg white. Add the remaining sugar a little a time as you are whisking. Whisk until white egg is stiff.

5. Fold the egg white gently into the cream cheese mixture until well combined.

6. Line your cake tin with baking parchment and secure with paper clips. Pour your cake mixture into the tin.

7. Place the cake on a tray filled with hot water and bake for about 25 minutes, or until golden and well-risen.

8. Cool and remove baking parchment before serving.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Another year, another chapter of my life begins. They said that ‘the older you get, the wiser you are.’ Though I don’t think this phrase applies entirely to me, life can only go upwards and onwards! 👍👍 It was so much fun celebrating with some of my closest friends. And for the other special people in my life that weren’t able to make it today, I am always grateful for your constant presence around me. Sometimes, I do feel like I am not thankfully enough for what I have right now and just constantly want more. But, truly simplicity is the best, and what I have right now is really enough for me.

As for the birthday cake, I was very inspired to make a Devil’s food cake after stumbling across a video by Nigella Lawson one night. (You can see the link here👉 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tcZSTF4L0bw) Gooey, moist and rich. It is definitely one for any chocolate lovers. (And even better when served with a glass of Sangria! 🍷 You must excuse me as I was still quite tipsy whilst typing this post… 😂😂)

I added some wafer paper feathers, desiccated coconut and white chocolate stars to play along the light and dark theme of the cake, but you can have it just as simple as Nigella would and it would taste just as ‘heavenly’ as she described. ❤️❤️

Here is to another year! 😊💪