Jaded July

July has mostly been.....  Well I don't really know how to put it.  A mixed bag of sorts...   I started the month by accompanying my staff from Batam for a fair in Jurong Point.  It's been ages since I last visited Jurong Point for sure.  It didn't really bring back memories since the new Jurong Point is an almost completely different maze from the one I remembered during my NTU days. 

A Remarkedly Different Jurong Point - Galaxy S23+

Pandan Butter Cake

Since I had quite a fair bit of pandan and coconut milk with a block of butter left, I thought I'd try making a pandan butter cake.  And instead of following Gracious Treatz's recipe, I tried Diana's recipe again, but of course with some tweak of my own.  Diana's recipe (which is an adaptation of another famous recipe) uses pandan paste (which I really don't like) and requires separating the egg whites from the yolks before finally combining them together again.  I thought this should be worth a good try.

I'm strongly against pandan paste and such because if you'd take a look at the ingredients section, you'll notice that they are made up mainly of propylene glycol and glycerine.  If you've taken up chemistry before, you'll know that both propylene glycol & glycerine are essentially a type of sugar alcohol.  To further drive my point across, I should also mention that food grade propylene glycol is mainly produced from propylene oxide which is a probable human carcinogen.  I know the end product is purported to be "food grade", but the point of baking my own cake is to avoid ingesting unnatural substances as much as possible, especially if they could probably cause cancer, as such I insist on making my own pandan extract naturally.  

I didn't take any photos, but I started by blendering 3 pandan leaves with 65 ml of coconut milk.  That was quite a disaster because there was too little liquid and the pandan leaves didn't blend in perfectly.  I should have used either a slow juicer and then mix the pandan extract with the coconut milk or used a bullet blender with finely cut pandan leaves for better result.  Will keep this in mind next time.  

As soon as the pandan extract was ready, I started creaming the butter and sugar.  This time I took out my 6 year old 1000 watt Kenwood Chef Premier to do the beating.  

Creaming Butter & Sugar - Galaxy Note 9

Marvellous Meringue May

This is my 1^st entry for May.  It’s been a rather busy month with Lincoln’s exams which took place on 2^nd & 3^rd week of the month.  He didn’t do to well this time around, which I found rather frustrating since I’d been accompanying him each night, studying for his exams.  I know he can do the problems, but he just can’t focus long enough to do them during exams.  I’ll find out more about his issues from his teachers next week during the parent teacher meeting. 

I also had time to bake more than usual, although these were more out of curiosity rather than consuming the baked goods fast.  So far I have baked muffins, pies, chiffon cake & cheesecake, so this time I tried my hands at baking butter cake.

In total, I made 3 failed attempts.  Each time I ended up with a cake that was dense instead of fluffy.  I was rather pissed off to be defeated by a recipe on my first attempt and tried again twice.  However, both efforts yielded the same results.  In the end I figured that I haven’t mastered the technique of creaming butter & sugar yet… my egg beating technique is quite sound as demonstrated by my successful attempt at baking a chocolate chiffon cake.  I guess I will need to find more reliable information regarding creaming butter.  

The butter cake I was trying to make was a marble cake, in particular.  So called due to the chocolate swirls emulating the patterns found on a marble slab.  I followed the recipe from a youtuber by the handle Gracious Treatz.  She's a very talented baker with good tutorial videos. 

The ingredients for a marble cake are quite basic: butter, sugar, flour, eggs, milk, melted chocolate and the usual baking powder & baking soda.  

Ingredients For Marble Cake - Galaxy Note 9